Parents' Guide to The Bloody Hundredth

As THE BLOODY HUNDREDTH begins, Hitler's Nazis had marched into Poland, Belgium, and Holland. France fell and eventually Great Britain was the only country in Europe that hadn't fallen to what Winston Churchill referred to as the "monstrous tyranny" of the Third Reich. Eventually, President Roosevelt persuaded America to join the fight and the Allied mission was to dominate Germany in the air in a way that would make a European land attack possible on D-Day. Footage shot during the war as well as more current interviews with some of the airmen who fought back then make it clear that American participation in World War II was supported almost universally by Americans as the right thing to do.. Even airmen who had fulfilled their quotas for flights re-upped to fly more, to continue to fight the Nazis until the war was over. They flew at cockpit temperatures of 50 and 60 below Fahrenheit, with holes in the planes' fuselages, with cockpits on fire, with three out of four engines blown, with shards of shrapnel flying. Yet they continued on their runs, refusing to return to base until they'd dropped their allotted bombs on the assigned targets. One former pilot described the way he and his crew would fly through four hours of pure terror, then land and go to a pub, then back for the terror the next day.