#9, B-17 Flying Fortress: Bled the Third Reich Dry
Boeing's B-17 Flying Fortress dropped 42.6% of all bombs on Nazi Germany during World War II, 640,036 tons across more than 300,000 individual sorties. The Eighth Air Force's daylight precision bombing campaign was built around the B-17, and despite catastrophic losses in 1943, the bomber offensive ground down Germany's industrial capacity and forced the Luftwaffe to defend the homeland rather than support frontline troops.
The B-17 earned its name the hard way. Bristling with thirteen .50-caliber machine guns and capable of absorbing extraordinary battle damage, Flying Fortresses routinely returned to base with entire sections of fuselage blown away, engines shot out, and control surfaces shredded. Over 12,700 were built, and 4,735 were lost in combat, each carrying a crew of ten. The B-17 campaign cost 47,000 American aircrew killed or captured, but it broke the Luftwaffe's fighter force and made the D-Day invasion possible. Military history remembers few aircraft that paid a higher price or delivered a greater strategic result.
