Young Ones: American Airmen of WW II

The stories are narrated by the airmen or submitted by relatives, and recount missions over enemy territory, encounters with enemy fighters, struggles to control battle damaged planes, crash landings, and bail out from exploding planes, often leaving behind dead and wounded buddies.

Many airmen who survived these experiences were captured and spent the rest of the war as POWs. They were often brutally treated by their captors.

However, some airmen managed to evade captivity and escaped. Some were on the run for months throughout Europe, some hiding for almost a year until war's end.

Thousands of POWs in Germany were on the forced marches in the beginning of 1945, the Death Marches. Their suffering on these marches is painfully retold on some of these pages.

These are the stories of some American airmen who served in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II, most of them only 19 or 20 years of age. These are the stories of The Young Ones.