Original subtitles

On the morning of December 27th, 1942,

in the sky over the beachhead at Buna on

the northern coast of New Guinea,

a 22-year-old American second lieutenant

named Richard Bong

pushed his fighter over into a dive he

had been taught never to attempt.

Below him was a swarm of Japanese

aircraft, the same kind that had ruled

the Pacific sky for more than a year.

Bong was not even supposed to be there.

He belonged to another squadron

entirely,

one still waiting for its aircraft to

arrive,

and he was flying that day only because

he had talked his way into someone

else's fight. He came down through the

enemy formation at a speed no Japanese

fighter could match, fired, and pulled

back up into the sky before they could

turn on him.

In the next few minutes, he shot down

two of them,

a nimble fighter and a dive bomber, the

first two victories of what would become

the highest-scoring career in the

history of American combat aviation.

He did not yet know any of that.

What mattered that morning was both

simpler and far larger. The aircraft he

was flying had just done the one thing

the enemy believed impossible.

Within a little over 2 years, the

Japanese air power that had swept from

Pearl Harbor across half the world would

lie broken over New Guinea, its finest

pilots dead, and its mastery of the sky

gone for good.

The cause was an American machine and an

American idea behind it, built for a

single purpose.

It was built to deny the enemy the only

kind of fight he knew how to win. For 13

months, the Japanese had owned the air.

Their naval fighter, the Mitsubishi that

the Allies simply called the zero

was the finest close in dog fighter in

the world.

It could turn inside anything the

Americans flew. It could climb like a

startled bird.

And it was flown by superbly trained

veterans who had honed their skills over

China and then carried them across the

Pacific from Hawaii to the Dutch East

Indies. In the opening months of the

war, those pilots and their zeros had

seemed unstoppable.

They had covered the strike on Pearl

Harbor,

wrecked American air power in the

Philippines,

humbled the British over Malaya,

and ranged as far as the coast of

Australia and the shores of Ceylon.

Allied airmen came to speak of the zero

with something close to superstition,

a fighter that could not be beaten in a

fair fight, flown by men who never

seemed to make a mistake. The reputation

was not entirely earned, but in 1942,

very few men on the Allied side knew how

to prove that.

American pilots had learned the price of

fighting it on its own terms, and they

had learned it in blood.

In their Bell and Curtis fighters, the

P-39 and the P-40,

they had gone into turning fights with

the zero and died in them.

The lesson was written in the loss of

friend after friend.

Turn with a zero and a zero will settle

onto your tail and kill you. There

seemed to be no answer to it at all.

Only survival by luck and by weight of

numbers.

The result was a kind of moral defeat

that ran deeper than any single battle.

Allied pilots went up expecting to lose,

and expecting to lose bred a caution

that was itself a handicap.

As long as the only way to fight was the

zero's way, no amount of courage could

fix the problem.

Because courage flown into a turning

fight against a better turning aircraft

simply produced brave dead men. The

thing that had to change was not the

spirit of the pilots.

It was the nature of the fight itself.

A few men had already begun to work out

how.

In China, an American named Claire

Chennault had trained his volunteer

pilots never to dogfight the Japanese at

all,

but to dive on them from above, fire

once, and dive away,

trading agility for speed and height.

It was the same idea the Lightning would

later carry to its fullest, but

Chennault's men flew P-40s,

aircraft that could dive well enough,

yet could not climb back to altitude

quickly.

So, they could strike once, and then had

to run.

What the Americans still lacked was a

machine that could strike from above,

and then climb straight back to its

perch to strike again. The Navy had

reached toward the same truth by a

different road.

Its pilots worked out a maneuver, a

weaving pattern flown by a pair of

fighters covering each other, that let

even a slower American aircraft survive

against the nimble Zero by never leaving

a wingman alone and exposed.

The lesson kept turning up in the same

shape.

The Zero could not be beaten by matching

it turn for turn.

It had to be beaten by teamwork, by

tactics,

and above all, by a machine that fought

on terms the Zero could not answer.

The Lightning was going to be that

machine. The Japanese pilots flying

toward Buna that December morning had no

reason to expect anything different.

They had noticed a strange new

twin-tailed aircraft over New Guinea in

the past few weeks,

and had not thought much about it.

Some of them took it for a

reconnaissance plane.

The possibility that the Americans had

built a fighter designed specifically to

take the Zero's single greatest strength

and turn it into a weakness had occurred

to no one on their side of the war. But

the fighter that broke the Zero was not

born over New Guinea.

It began years earlier on a drawing

board in Burbank, California

where a young engineer out to build

something that had never flown before.

And it began in the hard lessons of

pilots who had already learned at a

bitter price

the only way to beat the Zero.

You do not fight it the way it wants to

be fought. To understand what the

Lightning did you have to understand how

completely the Zero had ruled.

When Japan went to war at the end of

1941

its naval fighter was a genuine marvel

of design.

It was light almost to the point of

fragility and that lightness bought it

an agility no Allied fighter could

match. It could turn inside a tighter

circle climb at a steeper angle and hang

in the air at low speed in a way that

let a skilled pilot slide onto an

enemy's tail

and simply stay there until the kill was

made. Against that the doctrine the

Americans had carried into the war was

worse than useless.

It told pilots to close with the enemy

and to maneuver.

To fight the turning fight that airmen

had fought since the First World War.

Flown against the Zero that doctrine was

a recipe for death.

The Japanese pilot would out turn the

American, slide in behind him, and

finish it in seconds. The early Pacific

was full of brave, well-trained American

pilots who did everything their

instruction told them to do and were

shot down for doing it. Then, in the

summer of 1942,

the Americans had an extraordinary piece

of luck.

In the Aleutian Islands, far to the

north, a Zero made a forced landing and

flipped over in soft ground.

Its pilot killed, but the aircraft

almost intact.

It was recovered, shipped south,

repaired, and flown by American test

pilots.

And for the first time, the enemy's

wonder fighter gave up its secrets.

The tests confirmed what a few pilots

had already guessed. The Zero was deadly

in a slow turning fight and nearly

helpless outside of one.

Its controls grew stiff and heavy at

high speed,

so that above a certain velocity, it

could barely roll or maneuver at all.

And it could not safely follow another

aircraft into a fast dive.

The way to kill it was now written down

in hard numbers.

Keep the speed high, keep the fight

vertical, and never slow down to turn

with it. The answer, when it finally

came,

did not try to beat the Zero at its own

game.

It changed the game completely.

The aircraft was the Lockheed P-38

Lightning, designed by a team under a

young engineer named Clarence Johnson,

a man the whole aviation industry would

later know simply as Kelly.

It looked like nothing else in the sky.

A fighter with two engines and two long

tail booms, and the pilot seated in a

small central pod between them. The

Lightning had been born from an army

requirement written back in 1937,

a call for a high-altitude interceptor

faster than anything then flying.

To meet it, Kelly Johnson had done

something radical,

putting two engines in a fighter at a

time when fighters carried one, and

splitting the airframe into twin booms

to hold them and their turbo

superchargers. The prototype had been

fast enough to dash across the United

States in a matter of hours in 1939,

announcing that something genuinely new

had arrived.

Over the vast distances of the Pacific,

the two engines meant something else

besides speed.

A pilot who lost one over hundreds of

miles of ocean could still come home on

the other, and a great many of them did

exactly that. That strange shape carried

a set of advantages the Zero could not

answer.

It had two powerful engines, each fed by

a turbo supercharger that kept its full

strength at heights where an ordinary

engine gasped and lost half its power.

It had a top speed near 414 mph, far

beyond anything the Zero could reach.

It had a ceiling above 40,000 ft, and in

its nose, grouped tightly together,

it carried one 20-mm cannon and four

heavy machine guns,

all firing straight ahead in a single

concentrated hammer of fire

that did not depend on the enemy

drifting into the exact point where

wing-mounted guns crossed. That last

point mattered more than it might seem.

On most fighters, the guns were spread

through the wings and had to be angled

inward to meet at a single spot some

distance ahead,

so their fire was truly concentrated

only at one range and scattered

everywhere else.

The Lightning's guns were packed into

the nose, right in front of the pilot,

and fired in a straight parallel stream

that stayed lethal from close up to far

beyond the reach of the Zero's lighter

weapons. A P-38 pilot could open fire

while still well outside the enemy's

range.

And with drop tanks slung beneath its

wings, the Lightning could carry the

fight for hundreds of miles,

far beyond the reach of any

single-engine fighter in the theater.

There were other virtues the pilots came

to love.

The Lightning was solidly built and

could soak up battle damage that would

have downed a lighter aircraft.

Its cockpit, set high in the central

pod, gave a superb view all around.

And in a fight, it could roll and dive

and climb with a violence that let a

disciplined pilot dictate every

exchange. It was not a perfect aircraft,

and it had its own quirks and dangers at

the far edges of its performance,

but in the hands of a trained pilot

fighting the way he had been taught,

it was very close to untouchable over

New Guinea. The pilots gave it their

trust, which is the highest thing airmen

give a machine.

Over hundreds of miles of jungle and

shark-filled sea,

two engines were worth more than any

single-engine fighter's grace,

because a Lightning that took a hit in

one engine could still carry its pilot

home.

Men who flew it came to believe, with

good reason,

that they had the best fighter in the

Pacific under them.

And that belief was itself a kind of

weapon. Confidence made them aggressive,

and aggression flown with discipline

made them deadly.

But the machine was only half of the

answer.

The other half was a decision about how

to fight,

and that decision was the true heart of

the whole thing.

American pilots would stop trying to

turn with the Zero.

They would use the Lightning's speed and

power to fight in the vertical instead

of the horizontal. They would climb

above the enemy,

dive on him out of a height he could not

reach,

fire in one slashing pass,

and use their momentum to zoom back up

to altitude before he could react.

Strike from above,

then climb away.

Never stay to turn.

It was the reverse of everything a

fighter pilot had ever been taught,

and against the Zero, it was murderous.

The logic underneath was simple and

unforgiving.

A Zero could out-turn a Lightning every

single time,

but it could not follow one down.

Pushed into a high-speed dive, the light

Japanese fighter shuddered and

threatened to tear itself apart,

while the heavier Lightning only

gathered speed.

A Zero could not climb after a Lightning

that had traded its speed for height,

and it could never catch a Lightning

whose pilot simply chose to leave. The

American, so long as he kept his

discipline and refused the turning

fight, held every card in the deck.

He chose when to attack, and he chose

when to break it off,

and there was nothing the finest dog

fighter in the world could do about it.

Pilots came to think of it in terms of

energy.

Height was energy stored up, waiting to

be spent, and speed was energy in

motion.

And the Lightning was a machine for

turning one into the other and back

again.

A pilot who kept his energy high always

held the choice of when to fight.

A pilot who bled it away in turns,

chasing a Zero around the sky,

handed that choice to the enemy, and

usually did not live to regret it.

The hardest part was never the flying.

It was the discipline,

the constant refusal of the instinct to

turn and chase,

the patience to break off a promising

attack and climb away rather than be

dragged down into the fight the Zero

wanted. The very qualities that made the

Zero supreme in a dogfight were the ones

that doomed it against these new

tactics.

To be so nimble, it had been built

impossibly light,

which meant it carried almost no armor

to shield its pilot and no self-sealing

tanks to survive a hit.

A single good burst from the Lightning's

concentrated guns could rip it open.

Its own guns were light and its airframe

could not bear the stress of a fast

dive. The Zero was a duelist's blade,

elegant and lethal at close range and

all but useless against an enemy who

would never close.

There was a human cost hidden in that

lightness as well.

With no armor and no protection for its

fuel, the Zero tended to burn when it

was hit and its pilot rarely got out.

The same design choices that had made

the fighter so agile turned it into a

death trap once an enemy could reliably

bring guns to bear

and the Lightning could. Each Japanese

fighter a P-38 caught in a diving pass

was likely not just an aircraft

destroyed but a trained pilot killed.

And trained pilots were exactly what

Japan could least afford to lose. The

Japanese High Command made the danger

worse by misreading it.

Twin-engine aircraft in all of their

experience were bombers or clumsy heavy

fighters,

too large for real air-to-air combat.

So, they filed the P-38 away as

something other than a true fighter

and they built no answer to it because

they did not yet believe they needed

one. By the time they finally understood

over New Guinea that the Americans had

put into the sky a fighter their Zero

simply could not fight.

The killing had already begun in

earnest. There was a deeper wound

beneath the tactical one.

The superb Japanese pilots of 1941 had

been the product of years of hard

selective training,

and there had never been very many of

them.

The battles of 1942 at the Coral Sea and

Midway and over Guadalcanal had already

killed a great many of the best,

and Japan's training system could not

turn out their equals fast enough to

replace them. Every veteran lost to a

diving lightning was a man who could not

truly be replaced,

while the pilot who had killed him was

one of thousands coming off American

training fields.

The Zero's weakness in the vertical

fight was serious on its own.

Combined with that slow bleeding away of

irreplaceable skill,

it was fatal. The man who brought the

lightning to New Guinea was General

George Kenney,

the commander of the Fifth Air Force.

Kenney had seen a young pilot named

Richard Bong back in California

throwing a P-38 around the sky over San

Francisco with a wild natural skill that

bordered on recklessness,

and he had marked the young man and

taken him along to the Pacific. Bong was

a farm boy from Poplar, Wisconsin, the

son of a Swedish immigrant,

quiet and plain-spoken on the ground and

completely without fear in the air.

Bong's road to that cockpit had been an

unlikely one.

He had grown up on a farm in the far

north of Wisconsin, one of nine

children,

and he had learned to fly through a

civilian training program while at

teachers college.

He was a natural, gifted with an eye and

a touch that could not be taught,

and he was also, in the way of gifted

young pilots, reckless. In training over

California, he had looped his fighter

around the towers of the Golden Gate

Bridge and buzzed the streets of San

Francisco.

And he had been grounded and dressed

down for it.

The general who did the dressing down

was George Kenney.

Instead of ending the young man's

career,

Kenney remembered his flying, and when

he shipped out to take over the Fifth

Air Force,

he took the reckless farm boy with him.

The war they flew into was going badly.

Through 1942,

the Japanese had pushed across New

Guinea toward Port Moresby, the last

real barrier between them and Australia.

And Allied troops were fighting a

brutal, disease-ridden campaign in the

mountains and the swamps to throw them

back.

Air power was central to all of it, and

for months the Japanese had held the

upper hand overhead.

Kenney had been sent to change that, and

the Lightning was the instrument he

meant to change it with. Bong had been

assigned to one squadron, but flew that

December with another,

borrowing a cockpit while his own unit

still waited for its Lightnings to

arrive. The squadron he attached himself

to was led by a cool, skilled

Pennsylvanian named Thomas Lynch,

one of the first true masters of the

Lightning,

and a man who would finish among the top

aces of the theater before he was

killed.

Under leaders like Lynch, the borrowed

pilots and the new machines were

learning the vertical game by flying it

day after day

against an enemy who did not yet grasp

what was happening to him. The test came

on the 27th of December, 1942, over the

New Guinea coast.

About a dozen P-38s of the squadron Bong

was flying with intercepted a large

Japanese formation, and the fight

unfolded exactly as the new doctrine had

promised it would.

Diving from above, the Americans tore

through the enemy, and the Japanese

could neither climb to reach them, nor

dive to follow them.

The squadron claimed close to a dozen

enemy aircraft destroyed for the loss of

a single lightning. Two of those kills

were the first of Richard Bong's career.

At the Japanese Naval Air Headquarters,

the reaction was disbelief, hardening

into a scramble to understand.

Intelligence officers pulled apart

everything they knew about the

twin-tailed aircraft, and found they had

badly underestimated it.

They had built their whole defense

around the assumption that they would

face the same American fighters they had

always beaten,

flown in the same old way.

Now they had to reckon with a machine

that fought in a dimension their Zero

could not enter,

and they had no quick answer to hand

their pilots beyond a grim instruction.

Do not fight the twin-tailed aircraft on

equal terms.

Engage it only with the advantage of

height and numbers, and if the first

pass fails, break off and run. The

Japanese after-action reports read like

confusion hardening into alarm.

Pilots described an enemy that struck

from impossible heights and impossible

ranges, that could not be caught, and

could not be pinned into a fight.

The comfortable world of turning combat,

the world in which they had never once

met a serious equal, had simply ceased

to exist over New Guinea. In its place

was something they had no training for

and no answer to.

A vertical battlefield where speed and

altitude decided everything, and the

tight turn was worth almost nothing. The

change came quickly once it had begun.

Within a few weeks, Richard Bong was an

ace, and he was only the most visible of

a fast-growing number of them.

New squadrons arrived in theater,

studied the combat reports of the men

who had gone before, and drilled the

same iron discipline into their pilots.

Altitude is life, the training ran.

Speed is life.

Never turn with the enemy.

Hold the height, dive, strike, and climb

away,

and do it again. Commanders drilled it

relentlessly

because the whole system depended on

every pilot holding to it even when his

blood was up.

A single man who forgot himself and

turned to chase a Zero could die in

seconds,

and worse,

could pull his wingman down with him.

So, they trained it until it was

instinct, until the urge to climb away

from a beaten enemy overrode the urge to

finish him with a turn.

The pilots who learned that lesson lived

and scored. The ones who could not learn

it tended not to last long enough to

matter.

The scoreboard climbed all through 1943.

Bong passed 10 victories, then 15, then

20,

and other names climbed with him.

Lynch among them, and a growing roster

of aces who had mastered the diving

attack.

The Fifth Air Force was no longer just

holding on over New Guinea.

It was taking the sky away from the

enemy, mission by mission, and pushing

the Japanese back toward their great

base at Rabaul. Every raid the

Lightnings escorted got through more

easily than the last,

and every attempt the enemy made to

contest them cost him pilots he could

not replace. The proof at the strategic

level came in the first days of March

1943

in the waters off New Guinea.

A Japanese convoy was carrying troops to

reinforce the desperate fighting around

Lae,

and Kenney's Fifth Air Force fell on it.

The Lightnings flew top cover,

and when the Zero escorts climbed to

defend the ships, the P-38s met them in

the vertical and held them off the

bombers below.

The bombers, running in low over the

water, sank the convoy where it steamed.

Eight transports and four destroyers

went to the bottom in what became known

as the Battle of the Bismarck Sea.

And thousands of Japanese soldiers

drowned before they ever reached the

fighting.

The resupply of New Guinea by sea

effectively ended there.

The Zero had failed to protect the one

thing it most needed to protect.

That is where the first half of this

story ends,

with the enemy's grip on the New Guinea

sky beginning at last to come apart and

never again to close.

It took 8 hours to get every name and

number in this story right,

because the version that circulates

online turns a whole air campaign into a

single wonder weapon, and even gets the

names of the aces wrong.

If this is the history you want more of,

hit like.

One like.

Nothing more.

Thank you. By the middle of 1943,

the Lightning was no longer an

experiment.

It had become the spearhead of American

air power over New Guinea, and around it

grew a whole generation of pilots who

had learned to fight the new way from

their very first mission.

In August, the Fifth Air Force stood up

the 475th Fighter Group, the first unit

built entirely around the P-38.

And before the war was over, that single

group would hold the three highest

scoring American aces in the Pacific.

One of them arrived in that same month.

First Lieutenant Thomas McGuire was

aggressive, brilliant, and difficult.

A New Jersey man who flew the vertical

tactics with a ferocity that put him on

the road to becoming the second highest

scoring American ace of the entire war.

He was everything Bong was not in

temperament.

Talkative and sharp-edged where Bong was

quiet.

Hungry for the record where Bong seemed

almost indifferent to it. He would later

write down what he had learned into a

set of combat notes that were passed

around the whole theater.

A hard, practical guide to staying alive

and killing in a Lightning. The two of

them would spend the next year and a

half locked in a strange, unspoken race.

Two young Americans climbing a

scoreboard that the whole Pacific was

watching.

And that the newspapers back home

followed like a sporting event.

General Kenney had to manage the rivalry

as carefully as any operation. Pulling

one man out of combat to protect a

record and letting another fly on.

But the Lightning's most important work

was never really measured in personal

scores.

It was measured in reach. Hit subscribe

right now.

Because coming up is the single most

daring fighter mission of the whole war.

A 500-mile ambush over open ocean to

kill the man who planned the attack on

Pearl Harbor.

Do not go anywhere. In April of 1943,

American code breakers handed the war a

rare and perishable gift.

They had decrypted the travel schedule

of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the

commander of the Japanese Combined

Fleet, and the architect of the attack

on Pearl Harbor.

Yamamoto was about to fly an inspection

tour of bases in the Solomon Islands.

And for a few hours on the 18th of

April, the exact time and place of his

aircraft would be known to his enemies.

The chance was almost too good to use.

Some officers worried that shooting down

Yamamoto would tell the Japanese their

most secret codes had been broken.

A secret worth more than any single

admiral.

In the end, the decision went the other

way.

Up through the highest levels of the

American command,

and the order came down to attempt the

interception.

But there was a second problem.

And it was one only a particular

aircraft could solve.

Distance. Yamamoto's route lay far

beyond the reach of any ordinary

fighter.

More than 400 miles of open water out

from the American field on Guadalcanal.

Only one aircraft in the theater had the

range, the speed, and the navigation to

even attempt it.

And that was the Lightning.

The mission fell to a force of 16 P-38s

drawn from several squadrons and led by

a gifted navigator, Major John Mitchell.

Mitchell planned the flight like a

mathematical problem.

He worked out a dogleg course of several

separate legs that would swing wide

around the islands and come up on the

interception point from the seaward

side, where no one would be watching for

it.

He calculated the headings and the

speeds and the timings down to the

minute for a 2-hour flight over open

water with no way to correct along the

way. He had one chance to put 16

fighters at a single point in the sky at

the exact moment a particular aircraft

passed through it, hundreds of miles

from home.

It was the kind of navigation that

bordered on prophecy. What they flew

that morning was a feat of navigation as

much as of combat.

To slip under the enemy's radar, they

went the entire way at wave-top height,

only a few dozen feet above the sea in

total radio silence,

holding their heading by dead reckoning

across more than 2 hours of featureless

ocean.

There were no landmarks to check

against, and no room for error. If

Mitchell's timing or his course were off

by even a little,

the whole effort would come to nothing,

and the admiral would fly on untouched

while 16 fighters searched an empty sky.

Mitchell's navigation proved very nearly

perfect.

At almost the exact minute he had

predicted, the Japanese aircraft

appeared ahead of them, two bombers

carrying the admiral and his staff,

screened by six zero escorts.

While most of the American formation

climbed to hold off the escorts, a small

attack element bored straight in.

Lieutenant Rex Barber pressed his fire

into the lead bomber and sent it down

burning into the jungle.

And the man who had planned the strike

on Pearl Harbor died in the wreckage.

A second bomber carrying Yamamoto's

chief of staff was hammered down into

the sea,

though that officer survived.

One Lightning did not come home.

The exact credit for the admiral's

aircraft was argued over for decades

afterward,

but the modern verdict gives that kill

to Barber. Then the Lightnings turned

for home.

They had already been in the air for

hours, and they still faced the long low

run back across the ocean to

Guadalcanal,

some of them nursing damaged aircraft

and dwindling fuel.

When they landed and the count was made,

the cost was one P-38 and its pilot, set

against the life of the man who had

conceived the attack on Pearl Harbor.

By any measure a commander could name,

it was among the most efficient single

strikes of the entire war. The Japanese

never learned while the war lasted that

their codes had betrayed them.

They put the loss down to bad luck and a

chance encounter,

and the secret that had guided 16

fighters to the right patch of empty sky

held.

It was a small masterpiece of

intelligence and airmanship together,

and only the Lightning's reach had made

it possible even to attempt. The effect

of it was as much moral as military.

Yamamoto was the most admired officer in

the Japanese Navy,

and the Americans had reached out across

hundreds of miles of empty ocean and

plucked him out of the sky with a

precision that seemed impossible to the

men who suffered it.

If the enemy could do that, then no one

anywhere was truly safe. The myth of

Japanese command of the Pacific, already

cracked by Midway and by Guadalcanal,

took another deep and public blow.

And the aircraft that had made the whole

thing possible was the very same

twin-tailed fighter that was emptying

the sky over New Guinea. For the

Japanese pilots who had to face the

Lightning day after day,

the effect was corrosive in a way that

went past mere losses.

They had begun the war as the finest

fighter pilots in the world,

sure of their skill and their machine.

Now they flew against an enemy they

could not reach, could not catch, and

could not escape.

And death came at them out of heights

they could not climb to. Captured

letters and post-war accounts spoke of

exhaustion and dread,

of men who scanned the sun above them

without rest,

waiting for the twin-tailed shapes to

fall out of it.

The confidence that had carried them

across the Pacific drained slowly away.

Japan tried to build its way out of the

problem.

New fighters appeared over the last 2

years of the war.

Faster machines meant to climb higher

and dive harder and finally meet the

Lightning on its own ground.

Some of them were genuinely dangerous

aircraft.

But they came in numbers far too small,

flown too often by pilots too green to

use them well, and they never arrived in

time to change the outcome. The window

in which Japan might have answered the

P-38 had closed while its leaders were

still arguing over whether it needed

answering.

Through all of it, Richard Bong simply

kept scoring.

His method almost never changed.

He would climb above the enemy, choose

his target, dive and fire from very

close range.

So close that on more than one occasion,

he flew through the debris of the

aircraft he had just destroyed. He

always insisted that his own

marksmanship was poor and made up for it

by getting near enough that he could not

miss.

It was a strange humility in a man doing

something so lethal and the pilots

around him noticed it.

He did not boast. He did not seem to

hate the enemy.

And he went about the deadliest work in

the theater with the manner of a man

doing a job. That calm confidence spread

through the American squadrons as the

Zero's reputation collapsed.

Where Allied pilots had once gone up

expecting to lose, they now went up

holding every advantage and knowing it.

They picked the fights, they picked the

moment, and they broke off when it

suited them.

The psychological ground had shifted all

the way over. The men who had once been

the hunted were now the hunters.

And the enemy who had been the hunter

now spent his missions watching the sky

above him in fear. There was something

about Bong in particular that caught

people,

and it was not swagger.

He was, by every account, a modest and

decent young man,

uneasy with the fame that had landed on

him,

who wrote plain letters home, and seemed

genuinely puzzled that his country had

made him a hero.

When they sent him on tours to sell war

bonds, he hated it, and said he would

sooner have a zero on his tail than face

another crowd. He was the finest killer

of enemy pilots the country produced,

and he carried it more lightly and more

uneasily than almost anyone around him.

In April of 1944,

he shot down his 26th and 27th aircraft,

and passed the old American record of 26

that Eddie Rickenbacker had set in the

First World War.

He went on flying even after that, sent

home, celebrated, and sent back again.

He was made a gunnery instructor with

orders only to defend himself, and not

to go looking for combat,

an order he chose to read very loosely.

Over the Philippines in the last months

of 1944,

he kept adding to his total until it

stood at 40 enemy aircraft, every last

one of them shot down in a P-38,

a number no American had ever reached,

and none would ever pass. 40 victories

is a figure that is hard to hold in the

mind.

It meant 40 separate times that Richard

Bong had found an enemy aircraft, closed

with it, and destroyed it.

And 40 times that he had flown home when

the man he fought did not.

No American in any war before or since

has matched it.

And every one of those 40 had been won

in the same machine, the twin-tailed

lightning, flying the same patient,

disciplined, vertical fight that the

whole campaign had been built upon. Bong

and McGuire never did settle their race

the way the newspapers wanted them to.

Both were dead within a year of each

other.

The one killed at home in a jet, and the

other in a jungle dogfight he should

have refused.

And the scoreboard simply stopped where

it stopped, at 40 and at 38.

What they had proven together mattered

far more than which of them finished

ahead. In December, on the airfield at

Tacloban in the Philippines, General

Douglas MacArthur pinned the Medal of

Honor to Bong's chest.

Throwing away his prepared remarks,

MacArthur called him, in a phrase that

stuck to him for good,

"The man who had ruled the air from New

Guinea to the Philippines." The citation

honored not a single mission, but a

stretch of weeks in which Bong, an

instructor who was neither required nor

expected to fight, had gone into combat

again and again and shot down eight more

enemy aircraft. And then, with the

record safely won,

General Kenney pulled him out of the war

for good.

Bong went home in January of 1945,

married his sweetheart Marjorie,

the woman whose name he had painted on

the nose of his lightning, and took a

new job as a test pilot for Lockheed. On

the 6th of August, 1945,

the same morning that a single bomb

destroyed Hiroshima half a world away,

Richard Bong took off from the Lockheed

field in California in one of the new

P-80 jet fighters.

The engine failed just after he left the

ground.

He tried to bail out, but he was too low

for his parachute to open, and America's

ace of aces was killed at the age of 24

in the kind of aircraft that was about

to replace the one that had made him a

legend. Thomas McGuire did not live to

see the war's end, either.

In January of 1945, over the

Philippines, he broke his own hardest

rule.

Trying to help a wingman in a

low-altitude turning fight, the exact

kind of fight the lightning was never

meant to accept,

he hung onto his heavy drop tanks too

long, stalled at low speed, and spun

into the ground.

He died with 38 victories, second only

to Bong,

killed at last by the one thing he had

always warned his own pilots never to

do. The great air force base in his home

state of New Jersey carries his name to

this day.

McGuire had earned the nation's highest

award before he died.

Over Luzon in the last days of 1944,

across two days of savage fighting,

he had shot down a string of enemy

aircraft while shielding the bombers he

was escorting,

pressing his attacks through heavy fire,

and for that, he received the Medal of

Honor. More than almost anything, he had

wanted to pass Bong's 40 and become the

ace of aces himself.

He died still chasing it,

four victories short,

brought down not by a better pilot, but

by his own refusal to break off a fight

he never should have entered. They were

not the only ones.

The commander of their group, Charles

MacDonald, ran up a score that made him

the third highest-scoring American ace

of the Pacific,

and the 405th as a whole compiled a

record that few fighter groups anywhere

could rival.

It had been formed barely more than a

year before the war ended,

Equipped from the first with lightnings

and manned by pilots schooled in the

vertical fight.

And in that short life, it became the

deadliest American fighter group in the

theater.

The machine and the method put together

simply worked.

The lightnings work in the Pacific went

far beyond the famous names.

Stripped of its guns and fitted with

cameras, a reconnaissance version of the

P-38 ranged over the whole theater.

Flying so high and so fast that it was

nearly impossible to intercept.

And it mapped the Japanese island bases

so that others could hit them. In

squadron after squadron, pilots the

newspapers never mentioned flew the same

disciplined vertical tactics and ground

the enemy down.

The aces were the visible edge of

something much larger.

A whole system of machines and men and

methods that the Japanese could not

match. By 1944,

the Fifth Air Force was not merely

winning dog fights, but destroying the

enemy's air power wholesale on the

ground and in the air alike.

In great raids on the Japanese base

complex at Wewak and later at Hollandia,

American aircraft caught the enemy's

planes and pilots and wrecked them by

the hundred

until whole stretches of the New Guinea

coast were emptied of Japanese air power

altogether. The lightnings ranged out

ahead and above, clearing the sky so the

bombers could do their work.

And the enemy who had once owned this

coast could no longer even contest it.

When the Americans returned to the

Philippines at the end of 1944,

the lightnings went with them and the

pattern held.

Over Leyte and Luzon, they seized the

air within days of the landings. And

Japanese attempts to reinforce the

islands by air were met and slaughtered.

The enemy still fought and fought hard

and the fanatical suicide attacks of the

war's last year took their own grim toll

on American ships. But in the plain

business of fighter against fighter

the contest had long since been settled.

Air superiority was never an end in

itself.

It was the thing that made everything

else possible.

With the Lightnings holding the sky, the

bombers could reach their targets, the

transports could carry men and supplies.

The ships could move by day and the

great leapfrogging advance across the

Pacific could roll forward. Every mile

the Allied forces gained on the long

road back to the Philippines was gained

under an umbrella of American air power.

And over New Guinea that umbrella was,

more than anything else, the P-38.

Here is how it unfolded in order.

December the 27th, 1942.

The P-38 proves itself over New Guinea

and Richard Bong scores his first two

victories.

March 1943.

Lightnings cover the destruction of a

Japanese convoy in the Battle of the

Bismarck Sea. April 18th, 1943.

16 P-38s

fly more than 400 miles to intercept and

kill Admiral Yamamoto.

April 1944.

Bong passes Rickenbacker's old record

with his 27th victory.

December 1944.

Bong receives the Medal of Honor and

reaches 40 victories while McGuire

closes on his own total.

1945.

Both aces die. One in a jet at home, one

in a dog fight he should never have

joined. The factors behind the reversal

are worth naming plainly.

The first factor was the machine.

The P-38 gave American pilots speed,

altitude, firepower, and range in a

single airframe.

And every one of those advantages was

one the Zero could not match. The second

factor was the doctrine.

Vertical combat, the discipline of

striking from above and refusing the

turning fight, was what let the

machine's advantages actually be used.

Without it, even a Lightning could be

thrown away by a pilot who reverted to

instinct and tried to turn. The third

factor was reach.

The Lightning's long range turned it

from a mere fighter into a strategic

weapon,

one that could cover the sinking of a

fleet in the Bismarck Sea, or fly 500

miles to kill an admiral over the

Solomons. The fourth factor was the

system standing behind it all.

American industry could build Lightnings

faster than they were lost, and American

schools could turn out skilled pilots by

the thousand,

while Japan could replace neither its

aircraft nor its veteran airmen.

Attrition did the rest, and attrition

never sleeps. The numbers behind that

attrition were merciless.

American factories built the P-38 in the

thousands, close to 10,000 of them

before the lines finally shut down,

and replaced every combat loss and then

some.

American schools turned out fresh pilots

with hundreds of hours in the air before

they ever saw a shot fired in anger.

Japan could do neither. Its aircraft

production could not keep the pace,

and its pilot training, once the most

demanding in the world,

was cut shorter and shorter until it was

feeding half-trained boys into a fight

against seasoned men in superior

machines.

The outcome of that arithmetic was never

really in doubt. Strip away the maps and

the casualty counts,

and the fall of the Zero comes down to a

single reversal worth stating plainly.

The enemy owned a sky of tight turns and

close dogfights,

and the Americans simply refused to

fight in it.

They built a machine and a method that

lifted the whole battle into the

vertical, into altitude and speed and

the diving pass.

And up there, the Zero's genius for the

turn was worth nothing at all. And there

is an honest footnote that the loudest

version of this story likes to leave

out.

The Lightning did not win the Pacific

air war by itself.

Out over the ocean and the island

fleets, the Navy and Marine fighters,

the Corsair and the Hellcat, actually

shot down more Japanese aircraft than

the P-38 ever did.

What the Lightning did, better than any

other aircraft in the war,

was rule the land-based air war over New

Guinea, and give America the two

greatest aces it ever produced. The

whole truth is more crowded than the

legend, and it is still a triumph.

The men who flew it mostly did not

outlive their fame.

Richard Bong lies today in a small

cemetery in Poplar, Wisconsin,

the farm town he came from.

And in 2024, a search team found the

wreck of his Lightning, the Marge, in a

jungle ravine in New Guinea.

The red paint still visible on the

wingtips.

Thomas McGuire has that Air Force base

named in his honor. Thomas Lynch, the

captain who led the squadron Bong first

flew with, was killed by

with around 20 victories of his own. The

ones who did outlive the war carried the

lightning with them for the rest of

their days.

American veterans remembered the

confidence it had given them,

the sense of always holding the high

ground over the enemy.

Japanese veterans, interviewed long

after, remembered it very differently

as the aircraft that had taken their sky

away,

the twin-tailed shape that dove out of

the sun and could not be answered.

Both sides agreed on the one thing that

mattered. The P-38 had changed what was

possible in the air,

and nothing that came after it was ever

quite the same.

And the idea outlived every one of them.

The vertical combat the lightning

pioneered, the doctrine of altitude and

speed over the turning fight,

became the very foundation of jet age

air fighting, taught from the first jet

fighters straight down to the ones

flying today. Kelly Johnson, the

engineer who had drawn that odd

twin-tailed shape,

went on to run the secret workshop that

built the spy planes of the Cold War.

The strange machine that Japanese pilots

had once dismissed as too big to be a

fighter had done more than break the

Zero.

It had written the rules that fighter

pilots still live by. The lightning

fought almost everywhere before the war

ended.

Not only in the Pacific, but over North

Africa and Europe,

where German pilots gave it a grim

nickname of their own,

the fork-tailed devil.

But it was in the Pacific, against the

Zero, that it did its most decisive

work,

and it was there that it changed the

shape of air combat for good. The man

who had designed it went on to build the

U-2 and the Blackbird,

aircraft that flew higher and faster

than anything before them.

Carrying forward the same conviction

that had shaped the P-38.

Reach the fight from a place the enemy

cannot follow, and the fight is half won

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