March 15th, 1944, 25,000 ft above Berlin, the temperature outside the cockpit glass read 65° below 0 Fahrenheit, cold enough to freeze exposed skin in 30 seconds.
Captain William Overreet from North Carolina felt his P-51 Mustang shudder as another burst of cannon fire tore past his right wing, missing by maybe 3 ft.
The German pilot in the Messmitt 109 behind him was good.
Maybe the best he’d faced in eight months of combat flying.
But Over Street had something the German didn’t know about yet.
A full load of armor-piercing incendiary rounds that would change everything about this war.
6 months earlier, American bomber crews were dying at a rate that made the brass in Washington sick to their stomachs.
30% losses on some missions.
The mathematics teacher from Ohio who ran the statistics at ETH Air Force headquarters had calculated they’d run out of trained crews before they ran out of Germans to bomb.
The B17 flying fortresses would lumber into German airspace at 160 mph.
Sitting ducks for the Luftvafa fighters that could do 300 mph in a climb.
The German pilots had developed a technique.
Come in from high, pump cannon shells into the cockpit, watch the 11-tonon bomber spiral down with 10 boys from places like Kansas and Brooklyn trapped inside.
The Luftwaffa pilots had gotten cocky by late 1943.
They’d gather at their airfields in France and Holland, drinking real coffee while American pilots made do with the powdered stuff that tasted like burnt dirt.
They’d laugh about the American fighters, the P47 Thunderbolts that could only escort bombers 300 m into Europe before their fuel ran low and they had to turn back.
That left 600 miles of German airspace where the Messers and Faka Wolfs could feast on bomber formations.
The killboards at German fighter bases looked like scoreboards from a rigged game.
Major Hans Kersner from Munich had 43 bomber kills painted on his Messid’s fuselage.
He’d developed his own method.
Ignore the bombers’s defensive guns, come straight in, aim for the pilot’s position, fire everything at once.
The 50 caliber rounds from the B7’s defensive guns might punch holes in his fighter’s skin, but his 20 mm cannon shells would blow basketball-sized holes in the bomber.
It wasn’t even a fair trade.
He’d told his wingman over schnaps one night that fighting Americans was like hunting cattle.
Big, slow, predictable cattle that flew in straight lines and died by the dozens.
That changed when the first P-51 Mustangs arrived in England in December 1943.
The mechanic from Detroit who serviced them at Lyon Airfield couldn’t believe what he was looking at.
This wasn’t just another fighter.
It was a thoroughbred with teeth.
The Merlin engine, same one the British used in their Spitfires, could push the Mustang to 400 and 37 mph.
More importantly, with drop tanks, it could fly to Berlin and back 1,400 m round trip.
For the first time, American bombers would have protection all the way to target and home.
But it was the ammunition that would really change the game.
The standard round was already deadly.
A 50 caliber bullet traveling at 2800 ft pers would punch through aluminum like it was paper.
But the new armor-piercing incendiary rounds were something else.
The chemist from New Jersey who’d helped develop them explained it simply.
Imagine a bullet that could pierce armor then burn at 3,000° F for about 2 seconds.
Hit a fuel tank with that, even a self-sealing one, and you’d have fire.
Hit an ammunition store, and you’d have an explosion.
Hit a German bomber carrying 8,000 lb of bombs to London, and you’d have a fireball visible from 20 m away.
The German pilots found out about these rounds the hard way.
February 20th, 1944 kicked off what the Americans called Big Week, a massive assault on German aircraft factories.
Lieutenant James Morrison from Texas was escorting bombers over Leipig when he spotted them.
A formation of 30 Yunkers, 88 bombers heading for the American formation.
The Germans had started using their own bombers as bomber killers, loading them with rockets to fire into the tight American formations.
Morrison led his flight of four Mustangs in from above and behind, the sun at their backs.
The first burst of API rounds caught the lead junkers in the left engine.
Morrison watched the tracers.
One in five rounds was a tracer glowing bright red punch into the engine cowling.
For a second, nothing happened.
Then orange flame erupted from the engine, spreading along the wing faster than seemed possible.
Aviation fuel burned at about 1,400° F.
But the incendiary compounds in the rounds burned at twice that temperature, hot enough to melt aluminum, hot enough to turn fuel lines into fuses.
The junkers rolled over and started down, trailing fire like a comet.
Morrison saw two parachutes.
The other eight crew members never made it out.
The temperature at 25,000 ft that day was 58 below zero.
Morrison’s oxygen mask had ice crystals forming on the inside from his breath.
His fingers were numb despite the fleece lined gloves, but he kept firing, walking his rudder pedals to spray rounds across the German formation.
Another junkers exploded, probably hit the bomb bay.
The concussion knocked Morrison’s Mustang sideways, nearly into his wingman.
The farm boy from Nebraska flying on his wing managed to pull away just in time, missing a collision by maybe 10 ft.
What happened next would be talked about in every officer’s club from England to Italy.
The remaining German bombers scattered like quail, diving for the deck, jettisoning their rocket pods, their bombs, everything that might slow them down.
These were veteran pilots who’d flown against Spitfires, against Russian yaks, against everything the Allies had thrown at them.
But they’d never faced anything like the P-51’s combination of speed, range, and those burning bullets that turned aircraft into crematoriums.
Kersner heard about Leipzig while sitting in the ready room at his base outside Munich.
His crew chief, an old sergeant who’d been fixing fighters since the Spanish Civil War, brought him the report.
15ers lost in 12 minutes.
Most burned rather than shot down.
There was a difference.
A plane shot down might crash land might give the crew a chance to bail out.
A burning plane at altitude was a death trap.
The fire consumed oxygen, filled the fuselage with smoke, melted control cables.
Men had to choose between burning alive or jumping from 20,000 ft without a parachute.
By March 1944, the Luftwaffa had changed tactics completely.
No more straightin attacks on bomber formations.
The new orders were to avoid the Mustang escorts at all costs.
Wait for gaps and coverage.
Hit and run.
But Over Street and the other Mustang pilots had gotten smart, too.
They’d learned to fly fuel conservation profiles throttling back to stretch their range even further.
Some pilots could make Berlin and still have 45 minutes of combat time overt target.
The algebra teacher from Chicago, who’d become a fighter pilot, calculated that at maximum conservation, a Mustang could stay airborne for 8 hours and 30 minutes.
That was longer than most German pilots could stay alert.
The real test came on March 6th, 1944.
The first American raid on Berlin itself.
660 bombers escorted by 800 fighters, including 174 Mustangs.
Over street was flying yellow three in the 357th fighter group, weaving above a formation of B17s at 27,000 ft.
The temperature gauge read 62 below.
Ice was forming on his wings despite the deicing boots.
He’d already been airborne for three hours, his back aching from the parachute harness, his bladder screaming from the coffee he’d drunk at the a.m.
briefing.
That’s when he saw them.
A full staffle of Messersmidt 109’s climbing from the south trying to get above the bombers for a diving attack.
12 German fighters probably from Yagashwad 27, one of the Luftwaffa’s elite units.
Over street called them out to his flight leader, then pushed his throttle forward, feeling the Merlin engine respond instantly.
The Mustang accelerated like nothing else in the sky, climbing at 3,000 ft per minute.
The merge happened at 29,000 ft.
contrails streaming from every aircraft like white ribbons against the deep blue sky.
Over streetet picked a 109 that was lining up on a straggling B17 and pulled lead, estimating the deflection angle the way he’d learned to lead ducks back home in North Carolina.
He squeezed the trigger, feeling the Mustang shake as all six 50 caliber guns fired at once.
The convergence was set for 300 yd.
That’s where all six streams of bullets would meet at a single point.
The API rounds found their mark.
The first ones punched through the 109’s fuselage just behind the cockpit where the fuel tank sat.
German fighters had self-sealing tanks, rubber layers that would swell when hit by regular bullets, closing the holes.
But the incendiary rounds burned through the rubber, through the aluminum, into the high octane fuel.
Over streetet watched the German fighter transform from a sleek killing machine into a torch in less than two seconds.
The pilot bailed out immediately, his parachute opening dangerously close to the burning fighter.
The silk canopy had scorch marks from the heat.
Another 109 came in from over streets .
cannon rounds flashing past his canopy.
He broke hard left, pulling seven G’s.
His vision tunneling as blood drained from his brain.
The pressure suit helped, squeezing his legs and abdomen to keep blood in his upper body, but he still grayed out for a second.
When his vision cleared, he was behind the German who’d overshot in the turn.
Over streetet fired a 3-second burst, watching the tracers walk up the Germans fuselage.
The 109’s engine exploded, pieces of cowling flying back past Over Street’s windscreen.
The prop windmilled to a stop, and the German fighter nosed over into a steep dive.
The fight spread across 50 cubic miles of sky.
At that altitude, the horizon curved visibly, the earth spreading out like a map.
over street could see the smoke from Berlin rising 40 miles away.
Could see the bomber stream stretching back toward England like a aluminum river, but he couldn’t watch the view.
Another 109 was coming in from high, the classic German attack angle.
This pilot was good, probably an expert 10 with 50 or more kills.
He didn’t come straight in, but jinked left and right, making himself a hard target.
Over Street fired short bursts trying to get him to break off.
The Germans cannon rounds flashed past, one punching through Over Street’s left wing, leaving a hole big enough to put his fist through.
Another round hit his drop tank, which thankfully was already empty.
The tank tumbled away, and his Mustang suddenly felt lighter, more responsive.
The two fighters passed each other at a combined speed of 800 mph.
So close Over Street could see the other pilot’s face.
Oxygen mask, goggles, a glimpse of blonde hair.
They both pulled into vertical turns, each trying to get on the other’s tail.
This was energy fighting at its purest, trading speed for altitude, altitude for angle, angle for a shot.
Over street had been a good shot back home, hunting squirrels with a 22 rifle.
His father had taught him to lead a target, to squeeze, not pull the trigger, to follow through.
The same principles applied at 25,000 ft and 400 mph.
The German made a mistake, pulling too hard and stalling his fighter for just a second.
over street rolled inverted and pulled through, lining up a 90deree deflection shot, one of the hardest in aerial combat.
He fired everything, all six guns roaring, burning through ammunition at a rate of 80 rounds per second per gun.
The API rounds drew bright lines across the sky, converging on the 109’s cockpit area.
The incendiary compound ignited on impact, creating small flashes of intense white light.
The hits walked across the German fighter from nose to tail.
The engine cowling flew apart.
Fire erupted from the fuel tanks.
The cockpit glass shattered.
The 109 rolled over on its back and fell, burning, spinning, leaving a corkcrew trail of black smoke.
Over street didn’t see a parachute.
He was down to 30 seconds of ammunition and had maybe 90 minutes of fuel to get home.
His left hand was cramping from gripping the throttle, and his oxygen mask was so frozen he had to break the ice off with his gloved fingers.
But the bombers were still flying toward Berlin, and there were more German fighters climbing to meet them.
The teacher from Massachusetts flying lead called out another group of bandits, Faka Wolf 190s, this time coming in from low.
These were different from the 109s, radial engineed brutes that could take tremendous punishment.
Their pilots had learned to make slashing attacks and dive away, using their superior roll rate to escape, but they hadn’t counted on the P-51’s ability to follow them down.
Over street rolled inverted and pulled through into a split S following a 190 that was diving away from a failed attack on a B17.
The German fighter could dive at nearly 600 mph, fast enough that the control surfaces would start to lock up from the air pressure.
But the Mustang was in its element in a high-speed dive.
Over street watched his airspeed indicator wind past 400, 450, approaching 500 mph.
The ground was coming up fast.
They’d started at 27,000 ft and were passing through 15,000.
At 10,000 ft, the German pilot tried to pull out, but he’d waited too long.
The 190s elevators couldn’t overcome the dive’s momentum.
Over street, lighter, and with better control authority, began his pull out at 12,000 ft.
Feeling his guit inflate as the acceleration hit 9 G’s.
His vision went completely black for two seconds, but he kept pulling, trusting his training.
When he could see again, he was level at 8,000 ft.
Below him, a pillar of smoke marked where the 190 had hit the ground at nearly 500 mph.
The radio crackled with voices, pilots calling out targets, wingmen checking in, bomber gunners reporting attacks.
The sky was full of aircraft contrails and smoke.
A B7 exploded off to over street’s right, hit in the Bombay by cannon fire.
The 11ton bomber simply came apart, wings folding, fuselage breaking in half.
He counted three parachutes.
Seven men didn’t make it out.
They never did.
When a fort took a direct hit in the bombs, Over Street climbed back toward the bomber stream, his engine running rough from the strain of combat.
The Merlin had been pushed hard and the cylinder head temperature was edging into the red.
He throttled back, letting the engine cool, watching his fuel gauges.
600 m to get home, maybe 650 lb of fuel remaining.
It would be close.
That’s when he saw the struggling B17 about 1,000 ft below the main formation.
One engine feathered, another streaming smoke, a sitting duck.
Sure enough, two 109s were setting up for an attack from low, the bomber’s weakest defensive position.
Over streetet had maybe 20 seconds of ammunition left, but he pushed over into a dive anyway.
The first German never saw him coming.
Over Street put a two-cond burst into the 109’s engine, watching the API rounds flash and spark.
The incendiary compounds did their work.
White flames erupted from the engine compartment, spreading to the fuel lines.
The 109 pulled up sharply, stalled, and fell off on one wing.
The pilot bailed out, his parachute opening perfectly, drifting down toward the patchwork of German farms 15,000 ft below.
The second 109 broke off his attack and turned into Over Street, cannon blazing.
A 20 mm round hit Over Street’s instrument panel, showering him with glass and metal fragments.
His artificial horizon tumbled and died.
The airspeed indicator froze at 300 mph.
Another round punched through the floor, missing his left foot by inches, leaving a hole that let in a stream of freezing air.
Over street fired his last rounds, watching the tracers arc toward the German fighter, but fall short.
The guns clicked empty.
He was out of ammunition, wounded.
He could feel blood running down his neck from where fragments had cut him and still 400 miles from England.
The German pilot must have realized he was out of ammo because he pulled alongside maybe 50 ft away.
For a moment, the two pilots looked at each other through their canopies.
The German pilot raised his hand to his oxygen mask in what might have been a salute, then rolled away and dove toward his base.
The wounded B7 made it home, landing at an emergency field on the English coast with two dead engines and over 300 holes in its fuselage.
Over street made it too, landing at Lon with his fuel gauges reading empty, blood frozen to his face, his Mustang riddled with holes.
The crew chief counted 32 hits from cannon and machine gun fire.
The doctor pulled 14 metal fragments from Over Street’s neck and shoulder, but the mission had succeeded.
Berlin had been bombed and the Luftvafa had lost 43 fighters, most to the Mustangs and their API rounds.
The German pilots who survived would spread the word the Americans had a fighter that could go anywhere and bullets that turned aircraft into funeral pers.
Major Kersner learned about the Berlin raid that evening.
His squadron had lost six pilots, including his wingman, a 20-year-old from Hamburg who’d been with him for 8 months.
They’d been burned alive when API rounds hit their fuel tanks.
Kersner sat in his quarters writing letters to their families, trying to find words that made sense.
How did you tell a mother her son had burned to death at 20,000 ft? How did you explain that the war in the air had changed, that the hunters had become the hunted? The next morning, Kersner attended a briefing where a technical officer explained the American incendiary ammunition.
The compounds included white phosphorus, which burned at 5,000° F and couldn’t be extinguished.
It would even burn underwater.
There was also thermite, a mixture of aluminum powder and iron oxide that burned at 4,000°.
When these rounds hit, they didn’t just punch holes.
They started fires that consumed everything.
The numbers told the story.
In January 1944, before the Mustangs arrived in force, the Luftwaffa was shooting down five American bombers for every fighter they lost.
By April, with Mustangs escorting all the way to target, the ratio had flipped.
The Americans were shooting down three German fighters for every bomber lost.
The mathematician from H Highleberg on Luftvafa staff calculated that at this rate they’d run out of experienced pilots by August.
The API rounds had a psychological effect beyond their physical destruction.
German pilots who had been fearless now hesitated before attacking bomber formations.
They knew that one hit from those incendiary rounds could mean burning alive, trapped in a cockpit at 400 mph.
Some pilots started wearing their parachutes partially unbuckled, ready to bail out at the first sign of fire.
That split second of hesitation, that moment of self-preservation, often meant the difference between a successful attack and getting shot down.
Lieutenant Charles Anderson from Missouri discovered another advantage of the API rounds during a mission to Frankfurt on March 23rd.
He was chasing a Messor Schmidt 110 night fighter that the Germans had started using as a day bomber destroyer.
The twin engine fighter was heavily armed but slower than the single engine fighters.
Anderson was out of position for a good shot at the fuselage, so he aimed for the 110’s left engine.
The API rounds tore into the engine necessel and within seconds fire was streaming back along the wing.
But here’s what Anderson noticed.
The fire spread to the hydraulic lines that ran through the wing.
Hydraulic fluid was flammable, and once it caught fire, it carried the flames throughout the aircraft’s systems.
The 110’s landing gear suddenly deployed.
The hydraulics had failed.
The flaps dropped to full extension.
The control surfaces locked up.
The aircraft became unfiable in seconds, all from hitting one engine with incendiary rounds.
Anderson watched the 110’s crew bail out.
pilot, radar operator, gunner.
They were lucky.
The fire hadn’t reached the cabin yet, but their aircraft was finished, transformed from a combat machine into burning wreckage by maybe 20 rounds of API ammunition.
The mechanic from Detroit who worked on the Mustangs understood the technical advantage better than most.
He’d worked at Ford before the war building engines.
He explained it to the new pilots.
Look, you hit a regular bullet into an engine block.
Maybe you crack it, maybe you don’t.
But you hit it with API and that burning compound flows into the crack, melts the aluminum, warps the steel, destroys the tolerances.
That engine’s done, even if it doesn’t explode right away.
He was right.
German fighters that took even minor hits from API rounds often suffered catastrophic failures minutes later.
Pistons seized from the heat, oil lines melted, fuel pumps failed.
Pilots would think they’d escaped, only to have their engines quit 10 minutes later, forcing them to bail out over hostile territory.
By late March 1944, the Luftwaffa had issued new directives.
Avoid combat with Mustangs unless absolutely necessary.
If engaged, don’t try to turn fight.
Use hitand-run tactics only.
If hit by incendiary rounds, bail out immediately.
Don’t try to save the aircraft.
These orders from an air force that had once dominated European skies showed how much had changed.
Captain Over Street flew his 25th mission on April 8th, 1944.
By regulation, that should have been his last.
25 and you went home.
But the squadron was short on experienced pilots and he volunteered to stay for another tour.
His crew chief, the farm boy from Kansas, thought he was crazy.
You’ve used up your luck, Captain.
Those API rounds work both ways.
Germans have them, too.
He was right about the Germans having incendiary ammunition, but their version wasn’t as effective.
The German 20mm cannons fired a mine shell, a thinwalled round filled with explosive that detonated on impact.
Devastating against thin aluminum, but it didn’t have the penetration and burn time of the American 50 caliber API rounds.
A German round might blow a hole in a wing.
An American API round would set the whole wing on fire.
The effectiveness of the combination Mustang range and speed plus API ammunition showed in the statistics.
In February 1944, the eighth air force lost 350 bombers.
By May, with full Mustang escort, losses dropped to 150.
That meant 2,000 American air crew who came home instead of being killed or captured.
Each bomber carried 10 men, kids really, average age 22, from places like Ohio and Tennessee and Oregon.
The API rounds and the Mustangs that fired them saved their lives.
But it wasn’t just about defense.
The EA Mustangs went hunting.
Once the bombers were safely on their way home, Mustang pilots would drop to the deck and strafe German airfields.
The API rounds were devastating against parked aircraft.
One pass could destroy a dozen planes, turning them into torches that burned for hours.
The incendiary compounds would eat through fuel tanks, hydraulic lines, oxygen systems, ammunition stores.
A German mechanic described watching helplessly as an entire line of FWolf 190s burned after a single Mustang strafing run.
The fire jumped from plane to plane like a living thing.
On April 13th, 1944, Lieutenant Robert Johnson from Oklahoma had an experience that showed just how deadly the API rounds could be.
He was strafing an airfield near Munich when his Mustang was hit by flack.
The shell exploded under his right wing, sending fragments through the ammunition bay.
One fragment hit an API round, setting it off.
The incendiary compound started burning inside his wing.
Johnson could see smoke streaming from the gunports.
He could smell the burning chemicals even through his oxygen mask.
The fire was inside his wing, eating through the ammunition, each round cooking off in sequence.
He had maybe seconds before the whole ammunition load exploded.
He rolled inverted and pulled negative G’s, hoping to starve the fire of oxygen.
Then he fired all his guns, emptying the ammunition bays as fast as possible.
The remaining rounds fired out in one long burst, maybe 5 seconds of continuous fire.
When the guns went silent, the fire died.
Johnson made it home with a wing that looked like Swiss cheese, and the paint burned off in a pattern that showed how close he’d come to exploding.
Major Kersner faced these Mustangs for the first time on April 24th, 1944.
over Friedri’s Hoffen.
He was leading eight Messesmmit 109s, trying to intercept a bomber formation.
They’d climb to 30,000 ft, engines straining in the thin air when the Mustangs appeared above them, always above, always with the advantage.
The merge was violent.
Kersner pulled into a vertical climb, trying to use the 109 superior climb rate, but a Mustang followed him up, its pilot patient, waiting.
At the top of the climb, both fighters hanging on their props, Kersner kicked rudder and fell off to the left.
The Mustang pilot anticipated it, firing as Kersner’s 109 presented its belly.
The API rounds punched through the thin aluminum, and Kersner smelled smoke immediately.
Not oil smoke or exhaust, the acurid chemical smell of something burning that shouldn’t burn.
He could hear the rounds hitting, sharp cracks like hammer blows.
One must have hit an oxygen line because suddenly pure oxygen was feeding a fire somewhere behind his seat.
Kchner didn’t hesitate.
He’d seen too many pilots die trying to save burning aircraft.
He jettisoned the canopy, the slipstream hitting him like a frozen sledgehammer.
Unstrapped, rolled inverted and fell out.
His parachute opened with a sharp crack, and he watched his 109 spiral down, trailing fire and smoke.
The Mustang circled him once, the pilot probably confirming the kill, then rejoined the fight.
Hanging in his parachute at 25,000 ft, Kersner had time to think.
The temperature was 60 below, and his flight suit provided little insulation.
His fingers went numb in seconds.
Ice formed on his goggles.
It would take 20 minutes to reach the ground.
20 minutes of freezing, watching the air battle continue above him.
He saw another 109 explode, hit in the fuel tank, no parachute.
He saw a Mustang diving away, smoking, but still flying.
He saw the bomber formation, inexurable, continuing toward their target.
This was April 1944.
The invasion of France was 6 weeks away, though Kersner didn’t know that.
What he did know was that the Luftvafa was dying.
They were losing pilots faster than they could train them.
New replacements arrived with maybe a 100 hours of flight time, barely able to form up, let alone fight Mustangs flown by pilots with three times their experience.
The API rounds accelerated this attrition.
A regular bullet might damage an aircraft, but leave it repairable.
An incendiary round destroyed aircraft completely.
Kchner’s squadron had started March with 16 109s.
By the end of April, they were down to six and only three were flyable.
The others were burned wrecks, victims of strafing attacks and air combat where API rounds had turned minor hits into total losses.
Over street’s war almost ended on May 12th, 1944 over Frankfurt.
He was leading a flight of four Mustangs escorting B24 Liberators at 23,000 ft.
The bombers were hitting an oil refinery, and the flack was the worst he’d ever seen.
Black puffs filling the sky so thick it looked solid.
A Faka Wolf 190 came through the flack, seemingly immune to the explosions around it.
The pilot was either very brave or very desperate.
He lined up on a straggling B-24 that had lost an engine and was falling behind the formation.
Over Street turned to intercept, but another 190 dropped on him from above.
They were working in pairs.
The second 190s cannon rounds hit Over Street’s tail, blowing chunks off his rudder.
The Mustang yawed violently to the left, and Over Street fought to regain control.
He could feel the aircraft wanting to spin.
Every control input had to be countered with opposite rudder, like driving a car with two flat tires.
But he still had his guns.
and the first 190 was committed to its attack on the bomber.
Over street fired from 800 yards, too far for most pilots, but he’d learned to trust the flat trajectory of the 50 caliber rounds.
The API tracers arked across the sky, looking like they’d miss, then curved down slightly from gravity and caught the 190 in the tail.
The incendiary rounds did their work.
Fire erupted from the 190s fuselage, spreading forward toward the cockpit.
The pilot broke off his attack and rolled inverted, bailing out immediately.
His parachute deployed, but he was descending into the inferno of Frankfurt, where Allied bombing had created a firestorm.
The city was burning at temperatures approaching 2,000° F.
Over street didn’t want to think about what happened to that pilot when he landed.
The second 190 made another pass and Over Street could barely evade with his damaged rudder.
He was down to 300 rounds of ammunition.
His aircraft was crippled and he was still 400 m from home.
But the B24 he’d saved joined up with him.
The gunners training their 50 calibers on the German fighter.
The 190 pilot, faced with the combined firepower of a B-24 and a Mustang, decided discretion was the better part of Valor and dove away.
The trip home was the longest of Over Street’s life.
The Mustang wanted to roll left constantly.
His right leg was cramping from holding constant rudder pressure.
He was flying at reduced speed to maintain control, burning fuel he couldn’t spare.
The math didn’t work.
He’d run dry 50 miles short of England.
Then he saw them.
A flight of three Mustangs from another squadron heading home with battle damage.
They formed up on him, one on each wing, one behind.
If he had to bail out over the channel, they’d mark his position.
The solidarity of it, the unspoken brotherhood, made his throat tight.
His father had talked about this from the Great War, how men who’d never met would die for each other without question.
They made it to the English coast on fumes.
Over street’s engine quit on final approach.
The Merlin coughing once and dying.
He deadsticked the landing, touching down at 120 mph with no flaps.
The hydraulics were shot.
The Mustang rolled for nearly a mile before stopping and Over Street sat in the cockpit for 5 minutes before his hand stopped shaking enough to unbuckle his harness.
The crew chief counted 43 holes in the aircraft.
The rudder was held on by two attachment points.
One more hit would have torn it completely off.
There were API rounds embedded in the armor plate behind over street seat.
Their incendiary compounds expended trying to burn through steel.
If they’d been a few inches higher, they’d have hit the fuel tank.
May turned to June, and the rumors of invasion grew stronger.
The Mustang pilots were flying two missions a day, sometimes escorting bombers deep into Germany, then coming back to strafe anything that moved.
Trains, trucks, barges, anything that might reinforce the Atlantic Wall when the invasion came.
The API rounds were perfect for this work.
A locomotive hit by incendiary rounds wouldn’t just stop, it would burn, blocking the tracks for hours.
Fuel trucks became funeral ps.
Ammunition trucks simply disappeared in massive explosions.
The French resistance reported that German units were afraid to move during daylight.
They’d seen too many convoys turned into strings of burning vehicles by a single Mustang making one pass.
Lieutenant Paul Thompson from Georgia had a unique perspective on the API rounds effectiveness.
Before joining the Airore, he’d been a volunteer firefighter.
He understood fire, how it behaved, how it spread.
On a mission to Hamburg on May 25th, he used that knowledge to maximum effect.
He caught a formation of German transport planes, Yunker’s 52s, on the ground at a forward airfield.
Instead of making multiple passes, exposing himself to ground fire repeatedly, Thompson made one run, but concentrated his fire on the upwind aircraft.
The API round set three transports ablaze and the wind did the rest.
The burning fuel and debris spread to the downwind aircraft.
By the time Thompson was climbing away, 12 transports were burning.
The entire flight line was an inferno that would burn for 6 hours.
The German response was increasingly desperate.
They tried parking aircraft in revetments, earthn walls that would contain fires.
But the API rounds would ricochet off the earth, tumbling through the air, still burning, finding their way into cockpits and engine compartments.
They tried dispersing aircraft across multiple fields, but that just meant the Mustangs had more targets.
They tried camouflage, but burning aircraft marked by API rounds created smoke columns visible for 20 m.
Major Kersner, who’d survived being shot down in April, was back in combat by June with a new 109.
But it wasn’t the same.
Half his squadron were replacements, kids with maybe 50 hours in type.
They couldn’t hold formation in bad weather, much less fight Mustangs.
He watched one 19-year-old pilot panic during his first combat, pulling so hard he snapped his 109’s wings off.
The boy didn’t even have time to scream.
On June 5th, 1944, Kersner was leading six 109s on a bomber interception when they were bounced by Mustangs near Bremen.
The Americans had a height advantage of 5,000 ft and came down like hawks on pigeons.
Kersner broke right, pulling seven G’s, his vision graying.
A stream of API rounds passed where he’d been a second before, close enough that he could feel the heat.
His wingman, a veteran named Mueller, wasn’t so lucky.
The OPI rounds caught him in a turn, stitching across his fuselage from tail to cockpit.
The incendiary compounds found the oxygen system, creating a blowtorrch inside the cockpit.
Kchner saw Miller’s canopy come off, saw him trying to climb out, his flight suit on fire.
But at 400 mph, the slipstream pinned him in the cockpit.
The 109 rolled over and went straight down, burning like a meteor.
Another replacement pilot simply froze, flying straight and level, while a Mustang saddled up behind him.
The API rounds blew his tail off and the 109 tumbled out of control.
The pilot never even tried to bail out, probably killed by the first rounds.
A third pilot, panicking, collided with his wingmen, trying to evade.
Both 109s exploded.
No survivors.
In 90 seconds, Kersner had lost four aircraft and four pilots.
He and one other pilot managed to dive away into clouds, running for their lives.
The Luftvafa that had once ruled European skies was reduced to this, running from American fighters they couldn’t match.
armed with ammunition that turned aircraft into crerematoriums.
The next morning, June 6th, 1944, Kchner woke to air raid sirens.
But this was different.
Every siren in northern France was going off.
He ran to the ready room to find chaos.
The invasion had begun.
Thousands of Allied aircraft were overhead.
Every German airfield within 200 m of Normandy was under attack.
Kersner’s squadron was ordered to attack the invasion fleet.
Six 109s against 5,000 ships.
It was madness, but orders were orders.
They took off into a sky full of Allied fighters.
Mustangs, thunderbolts, lightning, spitfires, typhoons.
Everything the Allies had was over Normandy.
They never even saw the coast.
20 m out, a flight of Mustangs found them.
Kersner watched API rounds sparkle past his canopy, pretty in a lethal way.
His instrument panel exploded, hit by an incendiary round that kept burning, filling the cockpit with toxic smoke.
The metal itself was burning, something he hadn’t thought possible.
He jettisoned the canopy and tried to see through the smoke.
Another burst of API rounds hit his engine, and immediately he had fire.
The incendiary compounds ate through oil lines, fuel lines, coolant hoses.
The engine seized with a grinding shriek.
Kersner had maybe 5 seconds before the fuel tank exploded.
He didn’t remember bailing out.
One moment he was in a burning cockpit.
The next he was falling through space, fumbling for his parachute handle.
It opened with a jerk that felt like it separated every joint in his spine.
Above him, his 109 exploded.
raining, burning debris.
A piece of wing fluttered past.
The paint burned off.
The aluminum melted and twisted.
He landed in a French wheat field and was immediately captured by Canadian paratroopers who’ dropped the night before.
One of them, a sergeant from Toronto, looked at the smoke pillars rising across the horizon and said something Kersner would never forget.
Your Air Force is finished, Fritz.
Those burning planes, that’s your whole damn Luftwaffa going up in smoke.
He wasn’t far wrong.
By noon on D-Day, the Luftwaffa had lost 319 aircraft, most to fighters armed with API rounds.
Pilots who’d survived years of combat were burned alive in their cockpits.
Entire squadrons ceased to exist.
The ammunition that had seemed like just another technical improvement had become the executioner of German air power.
Captain Overreet flew three missions on D-Day, 12 hours in the cockpit, escorting transport planes, strafing German positions, hunting for German fighters that never came.
His back felt like someone had beaten it with a baseball bat.
His eyes burned from staring through the gunsite.
But the invasion forces got through and the German air response was practically non-existent.
On his second mission, he caught a German ammunition train trying to reach the front.
The API rounds found the ammunition cars and the explosion was visible from 10,000 ft.
The train didn’t just stop, it ceased to exist along with a/4 mile of track.
The secondary explosions continued for 20 minutes, each one marking tons of ammunition that wouldn’t reach German defenders.
By late June 1944, the Mustang pilots were having trouble finding German fighters.
The Luftwaffa was pulling back, conserving what few experienced pilots remained.
When they did fight, it was hit and run, slash attacks, where they’d fire once and dive away.
The days of swirling dog fights were over.
The API rounds had made staying in combat too dangerous.
One hit could mean burning alive.
Over street’s 51st mission on July 7th nearly illustrated this perfectly.
He was strafing an airfield near Paris when a German flack gun found him.
The 37mm shell exploded under his left wing, sending fragments through the ammunition bay.
One fragment hit an API round, setting it off.
Just like Lieutenant Johnson’s experience, the incendiary compound started burning inside the wing.
But Over Street had learned from Johnson’s report.
He immediately went inverted and fired all his guns, emptying the ammunition bays in one long burst.
The burning stopped, but his left wing looked like someone had taken a blowtorrch to it from the inside.
Paint blistered and peeled.
aluminum skin warped from heat.
He made it home, but the Mustang was written off.
The heat had weakened the wing structure beyond repair.
The crew chief, examining the damage, found something sobering.
Five API rounds had cooked off inside the wing.
If Over Street had waited another two seconds to fire his guns, the entire ammunition load would have exploded.
400 rounds per gun, 2400 rounds total, each one containing incendiary compounds that burned at 3,000 degrees.
The explosion would have turned the Mustang into confetti.
July turned to August, and the Allied armies broke out of Normandy.
The Mustangs ranged ahead of the ground forces, shooting up everything German that moved.
Railroad yards burned from API strikes.
Vehicle depots became infernos.
An entire German armored division was caught in daylight near files and systematically destroyed by fighter bombers.
Many using API rounds to set fuel trucks ablaze, creating roadblocks of burning vehicles.
Major Kersner, now a prisoner in England, watched new American pilots arrive for training.
They were so young, some still had acne, but they had hundreds of hours of flight training, instrument rating, formation flying, gunnery practice.
The Luftwaffa was sending up pilots with 40 hours total time, barely able to take off and land.
It wasn’t combat anymore.
It was execution.
One of the American pilots, a kid from Arkansas, told Kchner about his training with API rounds.
They’d practiced on old car bodies in the desert, watching how the incendiary compound spread, learning where to aim for maximum effect.
Fuel tanks, obviously, but also hydraulic reservoirs, oil coolers, oxygen systems, anywhere flammable liquids might be.
The kid talked about it like a science project, which in a way it was the science of destruction perfected.
By September 1944, Over Street had flown 73 missions, almost three times the original tour length.
His luck finally ran out on September 10th over Cologne.
He was attacking a German radar station when the flack caught him perfectly.
The first shell blew off his right aileron.
The second went through his engine, which immediately started burning.
The Germans were using incendiary rounds, too.
The temperature gauge pegged at maximum.
Then the needle melted.
The oil pressure dropped to zero.
The engine seized with a sound like grinding metal in a blender.
Fire spread along the cowling, eating through firewall toward the cockpit.
The aluminum was actually burning, fed by the incendiary compounds in the German shells.
Over street had maybe 10 seconds.
He jettisoned the canopy, rolled inverted, and dropped out at 2,000 ft low for a parachute jump.
The chute opened 500 ft from the ground, barely slowing him before he hit.
He landed hard, breaking his left ankle, and looked up to see his Mustang impact a hillside, exploding in a fireball that set trees ablaze for a hundred yards around.
German soldiers captured him within minutes.
An officer looking at the burning wreckage said in accented English, “Your API rounds, yes, we know them well.
They burn our aircraft.
We burn yours.
Everyone burns.” This is what air war has become, not fighting, but burning.
Over street spent the rest of the war in Stalog Luft Third.
He watched the contrails of bomber formations passing overhead daily, each one escorted by mustangs.
He watched the guards grow hungrier, thinner, more defeated.
He watched new prisoners arrive with stories of German cities burning, of the Luftvafa reduced to throwing untrained boys in obsolete aircraft against thousand plane raids.
The war in Europe ended May 8th, 1945.
Over street was liberated by British troops and flown home on a C47.
Looking down at Germany from 10,000 ft, he saw a destroyed nation.
Every city had burned scars from incendiary bombing.
Every airfield had the geometric patterns of burned aircraft, victims of API rounds.
The technology that had seemed so revolutionary in 1943 had helped burn a nation to the ground.
Back in North Carolina, Overreet tried to return to normal life.
He married his high school sweetheart, had three kids, ran a hardware store.
But sometimes, usually at night, he’d remember the smell of aircraft burning, the sight of men trying to escape flaming cockpits, the feel of API rounds cooking off in his own wing.
The incendiary.
Ammunition had helped win the war, no question.
But the cost, in human terms, was something he carried forever.
Major Hans Kersner survived the war and returned to Munich, or what was left of it.
His apartment building was gone, destroyed in a firestorm caused by incendiary bombing.
His squadron’s airfield was a moonscape of craters and burned aircraft.
Of the 60 pilots he’d flown with, eight survived the war.
Most of the others had burned in their aircraft, in their parachutes, in hospitals from burns that wouldn’t heal.
At a reunion in 1960, Kersner met William Overreet at an aviation conference in London.
They talked about the air war over whiskey, two old enemies who’d survived when so many hadn’t.
Over street asked about the API rounds, whether the Germans had understood their impact.
Kchner was quiet for a moment, then said, “We knew immediately.
The first time I saw a Yunker’s burn from your incendiary rounds, I knew the war had changed.
It wasn’t about better flying or tactics anymore.
It was about who could burn the other faster.
You Americans had better ammunition and more of it.
Simple as that.
They talked about specific missions, realizing they’d probably fought each other at least twice.
They talked about friends who didn’t make it, boys from small towns in Germany and America who’d burned to death at 20,000 ft.
They talked about the smell of aluminum burning, a smell neither could forget.
The API rounds, Kersner said finally, they made every hit potentially fatal.
Before you might take 20 hits and fly home.
After one hit in the wrong place and you burned.
It made us all more careful, less aggressive.
And in air combat, hesitation is death.
Overreet nodded.
He’d seen it happen.
German pilots who’d once pressed attacks, regardless of risk, becoming cautious, breaking off at the first sign of return fire.
The psychological impact of the incendiary rounds was almost as important as their physical effect.
The numbers supported their memories.
In 1943, before widespread use of API rounds, the average Luftwaffa pilot could expect to survive about 15 combat missions.
By mid 1944, with Mustangs firing API rounds, that number dropped to seven missions.
The rounds didn’t just destroy aircraft, they destroyed the Luftvafa’s ability to train replacements fast enough.
A study after the war found that API rounds increased aircraft kills by 40% compared to standard ammunition.
More importantly, they increased pilot kills by 60%.
Burning aircraft gave crews less time to escape.
This grim mathematics meant that by late 1944, the Luftvafa was losing experienced pilots faster than any air force in history.
The mechanic from Detroit who’d worked on Over Street’s Mustang survived the war, too.
He went back to Ford, helped design the Thunderbird, but he kept a souvenir on his desk, an expended API round, its incendiary compound long since burned away.
When asked about it, he’d say, “That little bullet changed the war, turned the hunters into the hunted, made burning planes fall out of the sky like autumn leaves.” He wasn’t wrong.
The combination of the P-51 Mustang and API ammunition had created a weapon system that dominated European skies.
The Mustang could go anywhere the bombers went.
The API rounds meant that when it got there, anything it hit would likely burn.
Together, they broke the back of the Luftwafa and opened the path for Allied victory.
In 1970, Over Street returned to France for a ceremony honoring the liberation of a small village his squadron had helped defend.
The mayor, who’d been a boy during the war, showed him a field where a German fighter had crashed after being hit by API rounds.
The outline was still visible.
Nothing would grow where the incendiary compounds had burned into the soil.
25 years later, the earth still bore the scars.
Standing in that dead patch of French farmland, Over Street thought about all the aircraft that had burned, all the men who’d died in flames, started by incendiary bullets.
The API rounds had been remarkably effective, maybe too effective.
They’d turned air combat from a duel into an execution, where one hit meant fire, and fire meant death.
His son, born after the war, asked him once if he regretted anything about his service.
Overreet thought for a long time before answering.
I regret that war requires such terrible weapons, he said finally.
Those incendiary rounds saved Allied lives, no question.
But they took lives, too, in the worst possible way.
Young men burning alive at 20,000 ft with nowhere to go but down.
That’s not something you forget.
The last surviving pilot from Over Street Squadron died in 2018 at age 96.
At his funeral, his grandson read from his diary, an entry from June 1944.
The API rounds have made us executioners rather than warriors.
We don’t defeat the enemy anymore.
We incinerate them.
I’ve watched 17 German aircraft burn this month.
That’s 17 crews.
Young men like us dying in the worst way imaginable were winning the war, but at what cost to our souls.
That cost was counted differently by everyone.
To the bomber crews who made it home because Mustangs with API rounds cleared the skies, it was a price worth paying.
To the German pilots who burned in their cockpits, it was a technology that turned warfare into horror.
To the strategists who planned the air war, it was simple mathematics.
API rounds meant fewer bombers lost, faster victory, lives saved overall.
William Overreet died in 2013 at age 92.
His obituary mentioned his 89 combat missions, his distinguished flying cross, his role in the liberation of France.
What it didn’t mention were the nightmares that never quite went away.
the smell of burning aircraft that sometimes came to him out of nowhere.
The faces of German pilots he’d sent to burning deaths.
At his funeral, an old German pilot sent flowers.
The card read simply, “To a worthy opponent, may we all find peace.
” It was signed Hans Kersner, who’d outlived his enemy by three years, dying in 2016 at 94.
He’d spent his last years writing about the air war, trying to help people understand what it had been like when the sky was full of burning aircraft and young men falling in parachutes.
The P-51 Mustang is remembered as one of the finest fighters of World War II.
The API rounds are a footnote in most histories, a technical detail.
But for the men who flew and fought in 1944, who watched aircraft transform into torches, who smelled aluminum burning and heard ammunition cooking off, those incendiary bullets were the difference between victory and defeat, between living and dying, between making it home and burning alive at 25,000 ft.
In the end, the German pilots who laughed at the Mustang in 1943 weren’t laughing by 1944.
They were running or burning or dying.
The API rounds had turned their bombers into flying bombs, their fighters into funeral pers.
The combination of American engineering, the Mustangs range and speed, and American chemistry, the incendiary compounds that burned through anything had created a weapon system that dominated European skies and helped end the war.
But victory came with a cost measured in more than just statistics.
It was measured in burned earth that wouldn’t grow crops, in young men who never came home, and old men who could never forget the smell of aircraft burning.
The API rounds were remarkably effective.
They were also remarkably terrible.
They ended the war faster, saved Allied lives, broke the Luftwaffa’s back.
They also created some of the most horrific deaths imaginable, turning the sky into a crematorium where young men burned alive while falling toward Earth.
This is the complex legacy of warfare technology.
Innovations that save lives by taking lives.
Weapons that bring peace through destruction.
Bullets that burn through metal and memory alike.
The German pilots stopped laughing at the Mustang when the API round started setting their world on fire.
But nobody was really laughing by the end.
They were just trying to survive, to make it home, to forget the smell of aluminum burning at 25,000 ft.
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