Lieutenant Richard Bong’s P-38. Lightning shuddered violently as 20 millimeter cannon rounds tore through its left engine cowling. It was August of 1943 at 18,000ft above the Solomon Islands. He was in that terrible moment, completely alone. His wingman. His protection was already gone. A spiraling trail of black smoke plunging into the vast Pacific Ocean below the sun blazed through his canopy as he threw the twin boomed fighter into another desperate banking turn.

But it was no use. The Japanese zero behind him was a ghost, a predator. It matched the maneuver effortlessly, closing the distance with a casual, terrifying precision. Bong was not a rookie. He had been trained at the best fighter schools in America. He knew every defensive tactic in the manual barrel rolls, the split ass Chandel scissors maneuvers.

He had tried them all in the last second and the zero pilot had countered each one not just with skill, but with what felt like contempt. The American planes, he realized, were simply outmatched. Now the enemy fighter was less than 200 yards behind him, positioned perfectly in his vulnerable sixth cock. His guns were lined up for the killing shot.

Bong’s instrument panel was a chaos of warning lights. Oil pressure was dropping on the damaged engine. His airspeed was bleeding off as he fought just to keep the nose up. The altimeter was winding down. Gravity and battle damage. Conspiring to pull him from the sky. Many of us who served or had family who did remember hearing stories just like this.

Moments where American ingenuity was born from sheer desperation. If these stories of courage and quick thinking still mattered to you, let us know by simply hitting that like button. For Richard Bong, time was up in perhaps ten more seconds. He would become another statistic in the brutal arithmetic of the Pacific Air War.

Then, with death staring him in the face and no options left in the pilot’s playbook, Bong did the one thing that every instructor he ever had, every manual he had ever read, had warned him would kill him instantly. He rolled the P-38 lightning completely inverted wheels pointing at the sky, and shoved the control stick violently forward. It was an act of pure desperation, a maneuver that defied all training.

The lightnings nose dropped toward the ocean in a screaming vertical dive. But Bong wasn’t diving normally. He was plunging toward the Pacific upside down. The physical punishment was immediate and brutal. Blood rushed into his skull so fast that his vision turned crimson, and the instrument panel disappeared into a red blur for two seconds. That felt like an eternity.

Richard Bong flew blind, enduring negative G-forces that no training manual said his aircraft or his body could survive, lose equipment and spent shell casings which had been on the cockpit floor suddenly floated up, slamming into the canopy above his head. His oxygen mask felt like it was trying to tear itself off his face. Every blood vessel in his eyes felt ready to burst under the agonizing pressure.

When he finally rolled the aircraft right side up at 12,000ft, having dropped 6000ft in those two terrifying seconds. He was gasping, his head pounding. He wiped the blur from his eyes, and looked back. The zero was gone. Not just behind him or diving away. It was gone.

Completely vanished from the sky as if it had never existed. Bong circled cautiously, scanning every quadrant of the blue empty sky. But there was nothing. The Japanese fighter that had been seconds away from killing him had simply disappeared. What Richard Bong didn’t know in that moment, gasping for breath and tasting copper, was that he had just accidentally discovered a secret that would change the entire Pacific Air War.

He had found a desperate, impossible, suicidal looking trick that would finally break the Japanese Zero’s reign of terror over Allied pilots. This is the story of how American pilots learn to fly upside down to survive. It’s the story of how that one accidental discovery born from terror exposed a single fatal flaw in the Zero’s design.

And it’s the story of how that discovery transformed the deadliest aircraft in the Pacific theater from an unstoppable killing machine into a target that our pilots could finally, definitively beat. To understand how this was possible, you first have to understand just how completely the Japanese zero dominated the skies in 1942.

You have to understand what our boys were truly up against. To understand what Bong had stumbled upon, we have to go back. Back to the very beginning. For most Americans, the war in the Pacific started on December 7th, 1941, a day of infamy.

But in the weeks and months that followed, as our nation reeled, our pilots in the Philippines and at Wake Island faced a second terrifying shock. This new Japanese fighter, the Mitsubishi A-6. M0, wasn’t just good. It was impossible. It completely shattered every assumption our military intelligence had made. Our experts had assured the top brass that the Japanese were incapable of building a world class fighter. They were tragically, disastrously wrong.

Our boys were sent up in planes like the P-40 Warhawk and the F-4 Wildcat. Good, rugged American planes built to take a punch. But against the zero, they were flying coffins. So what made this plane so special? The answer was a masterpiece of lightweight engineering. The Zero’s designer, Jiro Horikoshi, had made a radical choice. He sacrificed everything for performance.

The zero had no armor plating to protect the pilot. Its fuel tanks weren’t self-sealing like ours. A few well-placed shots could turn it into a fireball. The airframe itself was built to bare minimum stress tolerances. But these sacrifices, which many Allied engineers at the time would have called reckless, resulted in an aircraft that weighed just 3,700 pounds empty.

To put that in perspective, our rugged P-40 Warhawk was over 5,000 pounds. That’s a difference of more than one 300 pounds. It was like a heavyweight boxer stepping into the ring with a lightning fast, lightweight and in the sky, especially in 1942, that difference in weight was everything. This incredible lack of weight gave the zero two advantages that at the time, seemed insurmountable.

First, it could climb like a rocket. It could get above our pilots into the sun and choose when and where to attack. Our pilots often never even saw them coming. But second, and far more deadly was its turning ability. A Mitsubishi Zero at combat speeds could complete a full 360 degree turn in just under 16 seconds.

The American P-40, it needed 23 seconds, Now, seven seconds might not sound like much down here on the ground, but in a dogfight at 300 miles an hour, seven seconds is an eternity. It was a death sentence. It meant that every single time an American pilot tried to get into a classic turning fight, the kind of dogfight you see in all the old movies, the result was almost always the same.

By the time the American pilot was just halfway through his turn, the zero had already completed its circle and was sitting right on his tail. Guns lined up for an easy kill. You could not, under any circumstances, turn with a zero. Trying to do so was suicide.

And our pilots learned that lesson the hard, brutal way. This is why the kill ratios in the early days of the war were so horrifying. In the battles for the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, Japanese pilots, many of them seasoned veterans from the war in China, were achieving kill ratios that seemed impossible for every three Japanese aircraft shot down. The allies were losing nine.

In some engagements, the ratio was even worse. We were losing a generation of trained pilots. These weren’t bad pilots. These were good men, brave men who had been trained in a doctrine that was suddenly obsolete. Their training was a death sentence. The old ways of World War One of biplanes and scarf in the wind.

Dogfighting were getting them killed by an enemy that fought by a different set of rules. The situation was so dire that the Navy’s best tacticians were in a state of near panic. One of them, Lieutenant Commander John Thatch, became obsessed. He famously used matchsticks on his kitchen table. Night after night, moving them around, trying to figure out how to counter a plane that could turn inside his own.

He knew that if he couldn’t find an answer, he would be sending his men to their deaths. And he finally found a solution. It became known as the thatch weave. It was a brilliant, counterintuitive tactic. Instead of flying alone, two American fighters would fly in coordination, weaving back and forth.

When a zero got on one pilot’s tail, his wingman flying abreast would turn across him. This forced the zero to either break off the attack or fly right into the wing man’s guns. It worked. It saved lives. The thatch weave was the first piece of good news in a war that had been, until then, a string of unmitigated disasters. It was American ingenuity at its finest. But. And this is the crucial part. The thatch. We’ve had a fundamental flaw. It was purely defensive.

It was a way to survive an encounter, a way to hopefully get home in one piece. It didn’t give our pilots a way to win. It didn’t provide an offensive edge. The pilots were still on the back foot. They were reacting, not attacking. We’re going to be covering more of these incredible stories of tactical innovation, stories that are often forgotten.

If that’s the kind of history you appreciate, taking a moment to subscribe to the channel ensures you won’t miss them. It’s the best way to tell us to keep digging these stories up. The thatch weave could get you out of trouble, but it didn’t create trouble for the enemy. The zero was still the master of the skies. To actually turn the tide. To go on the offensive and clear the skies for our bombers and our ships.

America needed something else. They needed a true counter. A way to make the hunter the hunted. And that discovery wouldn’t come from a planning room. It would come from a pilot in his final desperate seconds, doing the one thing he was told he must never, ever do. Richard Bong’s story, the one we opened with, is a perfect, terrifying example of a new tactic in action.

His desperate inverted dive in August of 1943 saved his life, but he wasn’t the first to do it. The story of how this move went from a 1 in 1,000,000 accident to a deliberate, repeatable, life saving strategy. That story belongs to another man, a man who faced the same impossible odds and made a calculated, insane looking choice. His name was Major Thomas Tommy Lynch.

The date was April 7th, 1940, three months before Bong’s famous fight. Lynch was leading the 39th Fighter Squadron over the Russell Islands deep in the Solomons. The air was thick with enemy fighters. Lynch found himself in that same recurring nightmare that had claimed so many of his friends. The sky was swarming.

Eight Japanese Zeros had bounced his flight from above, diving out of the sun in the absolute chaos of the initial merge, with planes screaming past each other at hundreds of miles an hour. Lynch was cut off. He was separated from his wingmen. He was alone. Now, Lynch was no greenhorn. He was a pre-war veteran, a true pilot’s pilot.

He had flown almost daily since Pearl Harbor. He understood the grim mathematics of his situation. He was at 20,000ft with multiple enemy fighters, all trying to get on his tail. He knew the rules. Rule one do not try to turn with a zero. Rule two do not try to climb with a zero. But the zeros were above him, blocking the climb.

And they were all around him, making a simple run for it. Impossible. If he tried to fly straight and level, they would dive, build up speed and catch him. If he turned, they would cut inside his circle and shred him. He was in tactical terms, boxed in a sitting duck. In that moment, with multiple zeros closing in. Lynch made a decision that seemed to defy all logic, all training.

But it was the only decision he had left. He rolled his P-38 lightning completely inverted canopy facing the ocean, and pushed the stick hard forward. The world flipped. The ocean, which had been a mile below, was now a terrifying ceiling just above his head.

The blue sky was the floor, and the P-38 built like a tank compared to the paper thin zero plunged straight down, upside down. The physical punishment was immediate, just as it had been for Bong. The world inverted blood rushed to his head. His vision flared red. The negative G-forces were brutal, trying to lift him right out of his seat, pinning him against his harness.

What happened next? Stunned Lynch as much as it would later stun the Japanese, the zeros, the planes that had been stuck to him like glue, could not follow when they tried to roll inverted and pushed their own noses down to stay with him. Their lightweight airframes began to shudder and warp.

Worse, their engines, designed for elegant turns and climbs, sputtered, coughed and starved of fuel. The Japanese pilots were forced to break off, scattering and confusion, watching their target do the one thing that should have killed him. But Lynch didn’t just escape. This is the part of the story that changed the war. At 12,000ft, he rolled right side up. The blood slamming back down into his body.

He pulled back on the stick and used the massive speed he had built up in that vertical dive to execute a zoom climb. His P-38, with its powerful twin engines, rocketed back up to altitude, trading that speed for height in less than 30s. The entire tactical situation had been reversed.

The zeros, now scattered and confused below him, were no longer the hunters. The hunter had just become the hunted. Lynch drove on two of them from above, using his superior speed and the element of surprise. His six guns, 450 caliber machine guns, and a 20 millimeter cannon all converged on a zero that never even saw him coming.

The Japanese fighter disintegrated under the hail of bullets. He had turned an impossible to survive situation into a victory. When Major Lynch landed back at base, he was more than a hero. He was a medical curiosity. His ground crew was shocked. His face was covered in hundreds of tiny red dots. Burst blood vessels from the negative G’s.

His eyes were bloodshot red. He had a splitting headache that he later said would last for three days. But he was alive and he had a kill. That evening, in the pilot’s tent, he described exactly what he had done. The younger pilots, fresh from stateside training, listened with a mix of disbelief and fascination.

Flying inverted was dangerous. Pushing into a dive while inverted was suicidal. That’s what the manual said. But Tommy Lynch was standing right there, living proof that the manuals were wrong. He insisted they can’t follow you. He hadn’t just gotten lucky. He had found a systemic, fatal flaw. This wasn’t just a story. It was a tactic. It was the first real answer to the zero problem.

The question that buzzed through that tent and would soon spread across every airfield in the Pacific, was simple. Why? Why did this insane, painful, forbidden maneuver work every single time? The answer wasn’t in the pilots, but in the machines themselves. It was a secret, hidden of all places in the plumbing.

So what was the secret? What had Major Tommy Lynch and later Lieutenant Richard Bong stumbled upon? It was a mystery that had to be solved and fast. When Lynch told his story, the initial reaction was disbelief. The maneuver sounded like a magic trick, a 1 in 1,000,000 fluke. But it kept working. Other pilots tried it. They came back shaken and with blood red eyes. But they came back alive.

It became clear this wasn’t luck. This was a fundamental weakness in the enemy. But what was it? It wasn’t just that the zero was fragile, though. It absolutely was. And it certainly wasn’t that our pilots were braver. The Japanese pilots were fanatically brave, willing to fight to the last. No, the answer was something far more basic.

Something hidden deep inside the machine itself. The answer was a simple, brutal matter of physics. It came down to gravity and gasoline. To understand this, we have to talk for a moment about G-forces or the force of gravity. Now, most of us are familiar with the term, but in air combat there are two kinds, and they are not created equal. First, you have a positive G-Force.

This is what pilots train for. When you pull back on the stick to climb or bank into a hard, fast turn, the force pushes you down into your seat. It’s the same feeling you get when you are pushed back in your seat as a powerful car accelerates. Our bodies can handle this reasonably well. The main risk is that the blood is forced away from your head and down to your feet, which can cause you to blackout.

Pilots learn to counter this by tensing their leg and stomach muscles, and by grunting to keep the blood in their heads and stay conscious. But what Lynch and Bong did was the opposite. It was a violent, painful maneuver that subjected them to negative G-Force. This is that awful stomach in your throat feeling you get at the very top of a roller coaster hill. That brief moment of weightlessness.

But in a fighter diving at 300 miles an hour, it’s 100 times worse. The force lifts you out of your seat, straining you against your safety harness. Instead of blood being forced away from your head, it’s forced into it. Pilots called this a red out. It’s excruciatingly painful. The pressure builds behind your eyes until you feel they might pop. Your vision turns crimson as the tiny blood vessels in your eyes.

The ones that aren’t built for this burst under the strain. This is what Lynch and Bong felt. They were enduring this agony, this disorientation, but they were surviving. It. And here is the crucial part. They discovered that while they could survive it, the Zero’s engine could not. This brings us to the fatal flaw. The secret that changed the war. It was all about the carburetor.

The Mitsubishi Zero, for all its revolutionary performance, was a marvel of 1930s engineering to save weight and keep the design simple. It used a device called a float type carburetor. Now that’s a technical term, but the principle is one many of us grew up with. Think of the water tank on an old fashioned toilet. Image of a float carburetor diagram. Inside that tank, there’s a float.

When the water, or in this case, fuel is at the right level. The float sits on top and shuts a valve. When the fuel is used, the float drops, opens the valve and lets more fuel in from the tank. It’s simple. It’s reliable and it works perfectly. All thanks to gravity. Gravity pulls the fuel down from this little ball into the engine’s intake.

As long as the plane was flying right side up or in a normal turn, it worked beautifully. But what happens when you flip that plane upside down? What happens when you shove the stick forward into a negative g dive? You flip the toilet tank over in that instant gravity, which had been the carburetors, friend becomes its worst enemy.

The fuel in that little bowl is pulled up away from the engine’s intake pipe. The float mechanism is useless. The engine suddenly and catastrophically starves of fuel. In that split second, the Zero’s engine would sputter, cough, and quit cold. The Japanese pilot, who moments before had been a supreme predator lining up a kill, was instantly neutered.

He was no longer flying a fighter. He was flying a glider, desperately fumbling to restart his engine while his American target vanished in a high speed dive. This is where American Engineering, which had until then seemed like a disadvantage, became the ultimate trump card. Our planes, like the P-38 lightning, were heavy.

Yes, but they were also packed with more advanced, more rugged technology. The P-38s twin Allison engines didn’t use a float type carburetor. They used a newer, far superior system fuel injection image of a fuel injection system diagram. To use our earlier analogy.

If the Zero’s carburetor was a gravity fed toilet tank, the P-38s fuel injection was a high pressure hose. It didn’t gently offer the fuel to the engine. It actively forced the fuel air mixture directly into the engine’s cylinders under pressure. It didn’t care about gravity. It didn’t care if it was upside down, right side up, or sideways.

As long as that engine was turning, it was getting fuel. This meant an American pilot in a P-38 or a Corsair could roll inverted and dive his engines, screaming at full power and accelerate to speeds the zero could only dream of. The Japanese pilot who tried to follow him was left with nothing but a dead stick, a silent engine and a sickening feeling of helplessness.

This single technical difference a piece of plumbing buried deep in the engine, was the secret. It was the key to survival. It was the discovery that would finally allow our boys to stop running. Turn the tables and take the fight to the enemy. The secret was out.

But this wasn’t the kind of secret that gets published in a training manual or sent out in a memo from Washington. This was a different kind of knowledge, the kind that’s earned in blood and spread in whispers. It didn’t come from the top down. It came from the bottom up. It spread through the most reliable information network known to man veterans sharing hard won wisdom with the new men on the line.

It happened in the smoky, humid briefing tents on Guadalcanal. It happened over a precious warm beer at a makeshift officer’s club. It happened on the flight line, where a grizzled veteran would put a hand on the shoulder of a new rookie, a kid just 20 years old and fresh from stateside training. And the veteran would tell him, forget what they taught you in flight school.

Forget about turning. If a zero gets on your six, you will not outearn him. If you try, you’ll die. Then he’d lean in and give him the new gospel. Here’s what you do. You roll inverted. You push that stick forward until you see red and you dive. He can’t follow you. He physically cannot follow you. This was the kind of hard won knowledge that only comes from the front line.

We’re dedicated to finding these hidden stories, the ones that really made the difference. If that’s the kind of history you value, taking a moment to subscribe is the best way to tell us to keep digging. It truly helps. This new unofficial tactic began to spread like wildfire. And as more and more pilots tried it, they came back shaken with splitting headaches and blood red eyes.

But they came back alive. Captain Robert de de Haven of the seventh Fighter Squadron was one of them. In July 1943, he was on a bomber escort mission near New Georgia. It was the classic setup. A lone zero slipped through the escort screen and latched onto his tail. The Haven, remembering the tent talk, didn’t panic. He didn’t try to turn.

He simply rolled his P-38 inverted, pushed the stick and dived. He watched in his rearview mirror, just as the veterans had promised. The pilot tried to follow the Haven, saw the plane’s nose dip, and then its engine sputtered, choked on its own fuel and quit the zero. Suddenly, a helpless glider broke off the attack.

The haven recovered at 8000ft. His P-38 engines screaming with power. He climbed back up, found the same zero, still struggling to restart its engine, and destroyed it. He would use that exact same tactic to score 13 more victories before the war ended. The tactic worked. It was no longer a theory. It was a lifeline.

But as pilots got more comfortable with it, they began to realize something else. This wasn’t just an escape move. It was a weapon. Captain Thomas McGuire, who would eventually become America’s second highest scoring ace with 38 victories, perfected the maneuver. He turned it from an escape into a lethal trap over the Philippines in 1944.

McGuire would deliberately date enemy fighters. He’d slow his P-38. Yawing the nose slightly, making it look like a wounded duck. An easy kill for a rookie Japanese pilot. And when a pilot took the bait, closing in for what he thought was an easy victory, McGuire would spring the trap.

The moment the zero committed, McGuire rolled, inverted and dived. The Japanese pilot, desperate not to lose his easy kill, would make the fatal mistake. He’d roll and dive right after him. But the zero, with its lightweight frame, was never built to handle those kinds of negative G-forces. In one famous engagement, McGuire baited a zero dived and the Japanese pilot who followed him simply disintegrated.

The negative stress was so violent that the zero’s wings folded straight up, ripping themselves from the fuselage. The plane came apart in mid-air and tumbled into the ocean in pieces. McGuire had and fired a single shot. He had killed his enemy with physics. This brings us to the most profound impact of the inverted dive. The psychological one. Imagine for a moment you are a Japanese zero pilot. For two years, you have been the undisputed master of the sky.

You are flying the most agile fighter in the world. You know with absolute certainty that no American plane can outrun you. Your confidence is total. Then one day, everything changes. The celebrated Japanese ace Saburo Sakai wrote about this in his memoirs. He described his profound, maddening confusion.

He would masterfully maneuver onto the tail of a P-38, lining up a perfect by the book shot. And then in the blink of an eye, the American plane would do the impossible. It would flip upside down and simply disappear, vanish in a vertical dive, and then seconds later, the ultimate terror that same P-38 would reappear.

But now it was above him, screaming down from the sun with all the speed, all the altitude and all the advantage. The Americans had changed the rules of the fight. The confidence that had made the Japanese pilots so deadly, so invincible, was shattered. They were now the prey. This discovery didn’t just change a tactic.

It changed the entire philosophy of American air combat. For two years, we had been obsessed with the horizontal fight, the turning, maneuvering, classic dogfight that the zero absolutely dominated. But this new tactic changed the game to a vertical fight, a battle of energy. And in a vertical fight, our heavy, powerful, rugged American planes were kings.

Take the P-47 Thunderbolt, nicknamed the Jug. It was a monster, the heaviest single engine fighter of the war, weighing over 10,000 pounds in a turning fight. It was a bus. It was a death trap, but in a vertical fight when a P-47 pilot rolled, inverted and dived, that weight became his greatest weapon. It accelerated so fast that it approached the speed of sound, a velocity the lightweight zero couldn’t even begin to keep up with. We stopped fighting in their fight, and we force them to fight ours.

And in our fight, they didn’t stand a chance. This new doctrine, combined with America’s industrial might producing better and better planes, created a catastrophic, irreversible problem for Japan. They weren’t just losing planes anymore. They were losing their pilots. This was the pilot chasm.

The experienced aces, the men who had dominated 1942 were being systematically wiped out. They were shot down over the Solomons, over New Guinea and over the Philippines. And the men replacing them. They weren’t veterans. They were terrified kids with minimal training, sometimes fewer than 100 flight hours sent up in a plane whose fatal flaw was now known to every American in the sky.

Imagine that your first day in combat and you’re flying a fragile zero. You’re up against an American veteran who has survived hundreds of these missions. Who knows your plane’s secret weakness, and who is flying a machine that can dive faster and hit harder than anything you’ve ever seen. You never stood a chance. The kill ratios once.

So lopsided in Japan’s favor, didn’t just level out. They inverted. By 1944 for every American fighter lost. We were destroying three, four, sometimes five, Japanese aircraft. The reign of the Mitsubishi Zero was over. The men who made these discoveries were not Superman. They were brave Americans fighting for their lives. And many of them paid the ultimate price for the wisdom they earned.

Richard Bong, the young lieutenant from our opening story. The man who plunged his P-38 into that inverted dive, went on to become America’s ace of aces. He survived the entire brutal war. Mastering the tactic he had stumbled upon and racking up 40 confirmed victories, a record that still stands.

But the sky is an unforgiving place, even in peacetime. Tragically, Richard Bong did not survive the piece. On August 6th, 1945, the very same day the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. A day that sealed the war’s end, Bong was in California test piloting a brand new jet. The petty shooting star. His engine failed on takeoff and he was killed.

He was just 24 years old. Major Thomas Lynch, the man who had first truly understood the tactic and turned it into a weapon, also did not live to see the victory. He helped secure. He was shot down and killed over the Philippines in March of 1944. But he wasn’t bested in a dogfight.

He was hit by anti-aircraft fire while strafing Japanese positions on the ground. He died on the attack just as he had taught his men to do. Their sacrifice was not in vain. The lesson they learned in the skies over the Pacific lived on the tactic. Once the secret passed in, whispers was formalized.

It became a standard part of pilot training known as the split s, a high speed defensive maneuver to disengage from an enemy. Decades later, when the U.S. Navy was facing a new generation of agile, Soviet built MiGs over Vietnam, they created a new school to reteach the hard won lessons of air combat. That school, the Navy Fighter Weapons School, became world famous as Top Gun.

Its curriculum was founded on the very same principle that Lynch and Bong had proven with their lives. Do not fight the enemy’s fight. Fight your fight. Find your own strengths and exploit your enemies hidden weaknesses. The story of the inverted dive is more than just a piece of fascinating aviation history. It’s a powerful lesson in how wars are actually won.

It wasn’t an innovation that came from a planning board in Washington. It was a solution born from the raw terror and desperation of a pilot who had seconds to live. It was refined by men who had to learn fast or die. And it spread not through official manuals, but through the shared wisdom of men who were facing the same deadly problem day after day.

It worked because it exploited a fundamental law of physics, a law that no amount of brilliant Japanese engineering or pilot bravery could overcome. The Mitsubishi Zero was pound for pound. Arguably the greatest dog fighter of the war. But American pilots learned the hard way not to dogfight. They learned to roll, inverted, to dive, and to use the unglamorous, brute force advantages of their heavy, powerful American made engines.

They learned to fight on their terms, not the enemies. These are the kinds of stories that define the Greatest generation. Stories of ingenuity under fire. If you have a story from your own family or one you’d like us to cover, please share it in the comments below. We read them all, and it’s your stories that help us keep this history alive. Thank you for joining us.

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