McGovern being interviewed by Gwen Ifil on PBS
>GEORGE McGOVERN: We had ten 500-pound bombs on that mission in our airplane. We dropped them over the target. But as we left the target, the navigator told me that one of the bombs was dangling in the bomb rack-- it hadn't fallen. So I dropped out of formation at that point and I said, "look, you guys either have to get rid of that bomb or we're going to have to ditch this plane and bail out. I'm not going to land a bomber with a live bomb dangling in that bomb rack." So they kept working on it. Finally the bomb broke loose and it fell, to my dismay, on a little farmhouse right on the border of Austria and Italy. I thought, "you know, it was probably a young family." It was at high noon having lunch during that period of the day, and I worried about that for years afterwards. When I got back to the base, I was told there was a cable for me. My wife had just given birth to our first child-- our daughter, Ann-- and I thought, "gosh, you know, here we bring a baby into the world today and I probably snuffed out the lives of some young family that thought they were safely out of the war zone."
I told that story on television in Austria 40 years later. That night, an elderly farmer called the television studio-- a studio somewhat like this one-- and said, "you know, I know from what the American politician said tonight on television that was my farm that got hit. It was right at 12:00. It was in the area where he said it was. I want you to tell him that I got my family out of the house, I got them into a ditch; we're all safe. We hated Adolph Hitler-- no matter what else you can say about my countrymen-- and if ending the life of our farm, destroying that farm, ended that war even one minute earlier, it was worthwhile. So I got redemption after all these years from the most regrettable moment of my flying career.
