The day after Chuck Yeager was shot down over France, the Eighth Air Force returned to Berlin and fought the greatest air battle ever. “A 15-mile-long parade of American bombers thundered across the heart of Berlin for 30 minutes today and set great fires in the stricken Nazi capital after smashing through a huge German fighter screen,” the United Press reported. The New York Times estimated that a strike of this scale engaged nearly 600,000 men and women on both sides.
