10 Pilots Who Flew Suicide Missions Against SS Positions and Somehow Survived

Some pilots flew a single mission and never came home. Others flew thousands and somehow walked away. This countdown explores the staggering true stories of ten of the most extraordinary aviators of the Second World War — fighter aces, bomber commanders, night raiders, and test pilots — who climbed into the cockpit knowing the odds, defied them mission after mission, and rewrote what one person in a machine could do to the course of a war. Discover the survival of James "Stocky" Edwards, the Canadian farm boy who hunted Luftwaffe aces over the burning sands of North Africa in a P-40 Kittyhawk and walked away from 373 combat missions when nearly every man he started with did not. Uncover the final, total act of defiance of Soviet bomber pilot Nikolai Gastello, the first man of the Great Patriotic War to deliberately fly his burning aircraft into a German column — the man whose name became a verb. The list also delves into the daring of Guy Gibson, who led the Dam Busters raid sixty feet above a German reservoir at night and earned the Victoria Cross, and the staggering endurance of Nadezhda Popova, the "Night Witch" who flew 852 missions in a plywood-and-canvas biplane and once landed with forty-two bullet holes in her aircraft. From Alexei Maresyev, who crawled through frozen Russian forests for eighteen days with two shattered legs and returned to shoot down German aircraft on artificial legs, to Kenneth Taylor and George Welch tearing into the skies over Pearl Harbor straight from an all-night poker game, to Hans-Ulrich Rudel and his unmatched 2,530 combat missions, these are the narratives of the men and women who climbed into the dark, faced impossible odds, and changed the war from the air. Video Chapters: 00:00 - #10 James "Stocky" Edwards 09:35 - #9 Nikolai Gastello 19:06 - #8 Pierre Clostermann 28:38 - #7 Nadezhda Popova 38:26 - #6 Hanna Reitsch 49:05 - #5 Guy Gibson 59:32 - #4 Leonard Cheshire 01:09:07 - #3 Alexei Maresyev 01:20:07 - #2 Kenneth Taylor & George Welch 01:31:40 - #1 Hans-Ulrich Rudel #WW2 #FighterPilots #AerialCombat #TrueStory #MilitaryHistory #Aviation Disclaimer: The narratives presented in this channel are based on historical records and period accounts, which can be searched in the war memorial websites. Some passages may contain slight dramatic adaptations for the sake of narrative fluidity. This content is strictly documentary and educational in nature and does not necessarily reflect the personal opinions or beliefs of the channel creators.