Takali airfield, Malta.
July 1942.
The island of Malta is not an island anymore.
It is a target.
Sitting in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, it is the most bombed place on Earth.
The dust from the limestone buildings hangs in the air like a permanent fog.
The airfield at Tacali is a cratered wasteland of dirt and crushed rock.
Standing on the flight line is a boy who looks like he should be delivering newspapers, not fighting a war.
Pilot Officer Claude Red Weaver 3 is 19 years old.
He is from Oklahoma.
He has bright red hair, a face full of freckles, and a grin that looks entirely too innocent for a place known as the hell of the Mediterranean.
He is an American, but he wears the blue uniform of the Royal Canadian Air Force RCAF.
Like many young Americans who couldn’t wait for the US to join the fight, he went north, lied about his age, or at least glossed over it, and crossed the ocean to fly Spitfires.
To the British veterans of number 185 Squadron, he is a curiosity.
They call him the kid.
They look at his unlined face and shake their heads.
In Malta, the life expectancy of a new pilot is measured in days, sometimes hours.
The Luftwaffa Ace Hans join Marseilles is patrolling these skies.
The veteran pilots of Jagish waiter 53, JG53, the Ace of Spades are circling above.
These German pilots are killers.
They have hundreds of kills between them.
They fly the Messormidt BF19F4, a plane that can outclimb and outdive the older Spitfire MKVB that Weaver is strapping into.
The Spitfire MKVB is a beautiful machine, but it is struggling.
It has a Rolls-Royce Merlin 45 engine, but the dusty air of Malta chokes the filters.
The cannons often jam.
It is slower than the German 109s.
But Claude Weaver has something the Germans don’t account for.
He is a natural.
He doesn’t fly by the numbers.
He flies by feel.
He has eyesight that is almost supernatural.
He spots the enemy long before anyone else.
And he has a reckless teenage aggression that the calculated German veterans aren’t expecting.
The siege of Malta was the pivotal air battle of the Mediterranean where a handful of teenage pilots stood between the Axis powers and total victory.
We are about to witness the moment the youngest American ace proved that age is just a number.
Drop a comment and tell us where you’re watching from and whether anyone in your family served in the Mediterranean theater.
I read every story.
Now check your magnetos.
The scramble bell is ringing.
The bell rings.
It is a rusty clanging sound that sends adrenaline spiking through the veins.
Scramble scramble.
Bandits over Grand Harbor.
Weaver runs to his Spitfire.
The ground crew helps him strap in.
He looks small in the cockpit.
The helmet strap hangs loose.
He presses the starter button.
The Merlin engine coughs, spins, and roars to life.
He taxis out.
The dust is blinding.
He has to weave his nose back and forth to see the runway.
He pushes the throttle forward.
The Spitfire leaps into the air.
He climbs.
This is the hardest part.
The Germans are already high.
They sit at 20,000 ft waiting in the sun.
The Spitfire struggles to get up there.
Weaver fights the stick, urging the plane upward, watching his temperature gauges.
At 15,000 ft, he spots them.
Below him, Junker’s Jew 888 bombers are diving on the harbor.
Above them, the escorting BF 109s are waiting to bounce the British defenders.
The squadron leader calls the break.
Tally ho, go get them, boys.
Most pilots would go for the bombers.
They are the slow, easy targets.
Weaver ignores the bombers.
He looks up.
He sees a flight of four BF-1009s diving on his wingman.
These are the experts.
They fly the swarm formation, loose, flexible, deadly.
They expect the Spitfires to break to turn defensively to scatter.
Weaver doesn’t scatter.
He pulls the stick back into his gut.
The Spitfire shutters as it enters a steep climbing turn.
He is flying directly into the face of the German attack.
The physics of the deflection.
Aerial gunnery is a math problem solved at 400 mph.
You don’t shoot where the enemy is.
You shoot where he is going to be.
Weaver has a gift for this math.
He picks the lead 109.
The German pilot is diving fast, confident.
He sees the lone Spitfire climbing at him and thinks, “Easy kill.” The German corrects his aim to shoot Weaver in the face.
Weaver waits.
He waits until he can see the oil streaks on the Germans cowling.
Then he kicks the rudder.
The Spitfire skids.
It sides slips just enough to spoil the Germans aim.
The cannon shells zip past Weaver’s canopy.
Now Weaver is inside the Germans turn.
He fires.
The Spitfire MKVB carries two 20 Hispano cannons and 4303 machine guns.
Weaver fires a short 2C burst.
He doesn’t spray, he paints.
The shells arc through the air and intersect perfectly with the flight path of the 109.
The German plane shutters.
A 20 Michelle smashes into the cockpit.
Another hits the engine.
The 109 rolls over, streaming black smoke and falls toward the sea.
Splash one, weaver yells, but he has no time to celebrate.
He has just kicked the Hornet’s nest.
The other three German aces see their leader go down.
They are furious.
They turn on the young American.
Weaver is alone.
He is at 15,000 ft.
He has three angry meers on his tail and he is 19 years old.
Most men would dive for the airfield.
Most men would run.
Claude Weaver tightens his grip on the stick.
He checks his mirror.
He grins.
“Come on,” he whispers.
He pulls the Spitfire into a vertical loop.
He is going to fight them all over Grand Harbor, Malta.
T plus 30 seconds.
The dog fight has dissolved into geometry.
Claude Weaver is alone in a sky full of enemies.
He has just shot down the leader of the German formation.
Now the remaining three Messersmid BF 109 F4s are seeking revenge.
The German pilots are veterans of the Eastern Front and the channel.
They know the strengths of their machine.
The BF-1009 is an energy fighter.
It climbs like a rocket and dives like a stone.
It has fuel injection which means the engine keeps running even under negative g forces when the pilot pushes the nose down.
Weaver Spitfire MKVB is a turn fighter.
It is agile, graceful, and turns on a dime.
But it has a fatal flaw, the float carburetor.
If Weaver pushes the stick forward too hard, creating negative GS, the fuel in the carburetor floats up, starving the engine.
The Merlin engine will cough, sputter, and die.
The Germans know this.
They have a standard tactic to kill Spitfires, the bunt.
They dive on the Spitfire.
If the Spitfire tries to turn, they zoom climb back up.
If the Spitfire tries to follow them down, its engine cuts out.
They have Weaver trapped in a vertical box.
The Scissors.
The second German pilot dives on Weaver from the sun.
He is fast, 400 mph.
Weaver sees the flash of the yellow nose.
He waits.
He knows he can’t outdive the German.
He can’t outclimb him.
He has to outturn him.
Weaver hauls the Spitfire into a tight left turn.
The Gforces hit him.
4GS 5gs.
The blood drains from his head.
His vision narrows to a tunnel.
The German pilot tries to follow the turn, but at 400 m, the 109’s control surfaces stiffen.
It can’t turn tightly.
It flies a wide arc.
Weaver pulls tighter.
The Spitfire groans.
The wings shutter near the stall point.
The German overshoots.
He flies right past Weaver’s nose.
Unable to bring his guns to bear.
Weaver reverses his turn instantly.
He snaps the Spitfire from left to right.
He is now behind the German.
He presses the trigger.
Only two machine guns fire.
The 20 cannons are jammed.
The dust of Malta has clogged the feed mechanisms.
Weaver curses.
He is down to his303 Brownings, rifle caliber machine guns against the armored seat of a BF 10009.
They are like throwing pebbles.
But Weaver doesn’t stop.
He closes the distance.
He gets so close he can see the rivets on the German’s tail.
He aims for the radiator, the soft spot under the wing.
He fires a long burst.
The 303 rounds stitch the glycol coolant lines.
White smoke erupts from the German plane.
The engine overheats instantly.
The pilot bails out.
Splash two.
The vertical stall.
Two down, two left.
The remaining two Germans are cautious now.
They realize this isn’t a normal rookie.
This kid flies like a madman.
They decide to use their vertical superiority.
They climb.
They zoom up to 20,000 ft, leaving Weaver at 15,000.
They plan to boom and zoom, dive, fire, climb, repeat.
They will peck him to death from above.
Weaver watches them climb.
He knows he is a sitting duck if he stays low.
He does the unthinkable.
He climbs after them.
He points the nose of the Spitfire straight up.
The air speed drops.
200 m 150 m 100 mph.
He is hanging on the prop.
The Spitfire is shuttering on the verge of a stall.
The Germans see him hanging there slow and helpless.
They think he has made a fatal error.
The third German pilot rolls over and dives.
He plans to blast the slowmoving Spitfire out of the sky.
But Weaver isn’t helpless.
He is baiting them.
As the German commits to the head-on pass, Weaver waits until the last second.
He kicks the rudder and cuts the throttle.
The Spitfire performs a hammerhead stall.
It pivots on its wing tip, swapping ends in midair.
Suddenly, Weaver isn’t climbing.
He is diving and he is facing the German.
It is a game of chicken.
Two planes hurtling toward each other at a combined speed of 600 m.
The German pilot flinches.
He expects the American to break off.
Weaver doesn’t break.
He holds the line.
He fires his machine guns.
The bullets smash into the German’s canopy.
The glass shatters.
The German pilot yanks his stick back in panic.
The high-speed pull out stresses his airframe.
His wing snaps.
The 109 disintegrates in midair.
Splash three.
The ace moment.
Weaver is alone with the last German.
He is sweating.
His hands are cramping.
His engine temperature is in the red.
He has three kills in 10 minutes.
He is now officially an ace.
He had two previous confirmed kills from earlier in the week.
But the last German is the leader of the schwarm.
He is good.
He doesn’t panic.
He uses his energy.
He stays high.
He circles.
Weaver is low on ammo.
He is low on fuel.
He knows he can’t chase the German.
He has to trick him.
Weaver fains damage.
He drops his landing gear.
He lowers his flaps.
He starts to wobble his wings, acting like a wounded bird trying to land.
It is a dangerous gamble.
If the German shoots now, Weaver is dead.
The German pilot sees the gear down.
He thinks the Spitfire is finished.
He thinks the pilot is surrendering or crashing.
The German drops his guard.
He throttles back.
He glides in behind Weaver, looking to finish him off with an easy shot.
He closes to 200 yards, 100 yards.
Weaver watches him in the mirror.
Wait for it, Weaver whispers.
When the German is point blank, Weaver retracts the gear and slams the throttle to emergency power.
The Merlin engine screams.
The Spitfire leaps forward, shedding the drag.
Weaver pulls a hard IMLman turn.
He loops up and over the surprised German.
The German tries to follow, but he is too slow.
He stalls.
Weaver comes down on top of him.
He presses the trigger.
His guns are empty.
Damn it, Weaver yells.
He has outsmarted the German.
He has him dead to rights, but he has no bullets.
The German pilot, realizing he has been tricked, dives away in terror.
He runs for Sicily.
He doesn’t know Weaver is empty.
He just knows that this American demon has killed three of his wingmen and nearly killed him.
Weaver watches him go.
He banks the Spitfire toward Takali.
He is shaking.
He is exhausted.
He taxis in.
The ground crew runs out.
They see the gun ports.
The fabric patches are blown off.
The barrels are white with heat.
They help Weaver out of the cockpit.
He slides down the wing and sits in the dust.
A British mechanic hands him a cigarette.
“How many, sir?” the mechanic asks.
Weaver takes a drag.
His hand is trembling.
“Three?” Weaver says.
“I think I got three.” The mechanic looks at the sky.
He looks at the boy who looks like he should be in high school.
Bloody hell.
The mechanic says, “You’re an ace, lad.” The legend begins.
That afternoon, the news spread across the island.
The kid from Oklahoma has taken on a German swarm single-handedly and wiped them out.
He is the youngest Allied ace of the war at that moment.
But the war isn’t over for Claude Weaver.
The Germans know his name now.
They know the markings on his plane.
And in the skies over Malta, fame is a target.
Takali airfield, August 1942.
Fame in the Royal Air Force is usually a quiet thing.
A pilot might get a good show, old boy, from his commanding officer, or perhaps a free pint at the pub.
But Claude readaver is an American teenager in the Mediterranean, and his fame is loud.
He is the boy ace.
The newspapers back in Oklahoma run headlines.
19-year-old Oki downing Nazis in Malta.
In the mess hall at Taci, the British pilots toast him.
They marvel at his eyesight.
They marvel at the way he handles the Spitfire MKVB, tossing it around the sky like a toy.
Weaver racks up 12.5 confirmed kills, some shared in just a few months.
He destroys messers, junkers, and Machi fighters.
He becomes a terror to the Axis air forces.
But the mathematics of war are cruel.
In 1942, the average lifespan of a Spitfire pilot on Malta was 10 weeks.
Weaver has been flying for 12.
He is living on borrowed time.
September 9, 1942.
The luck runs out.
The mission is a standard intercept.
A flight of BF1009 is escorting bombers over Sicily.
Weaver Dies.
He is aggressive as always.
He picks a target.
He fires, but this time the Germans are ready for him.
He is bounced from above.
A single 109 flown by an expert drops out of the sun.
Weaver breaks hard.
He pulls the Spitfire into a tight turn.
Bang! A 20 cannon shell hits his engine.
Merlin screams and dies.
Oil covers his windscreen.
Smoke fills the cockpit.
Weaver is going down.
He is over enemy territory, Sicily.
He can’t limp back to Malta.
He has to crash land.
He spots a beach.
He drops the flaps.
He fights the controls as the hydraulic pressure bleeds away.
The Spitfire hits the sand at 100 m.
It bounces, sloohs sideways, and grinds to a halt in a cloud of dust.
Weaver climbs out.
He is unheard.
He tries to set fire to his plane to destroy it, but Italian soldiers are already running down the beach.
They are shouting, waving rifles.
Weaver puts his hands up.
He is captured.
The great escape.
He is taken to a prisoner of war camp in Italy.
Most prisoners wait for the war to end.
They play cards.
They starve.
They wait.
Weaver is 19.
He has too much energy to wait.
He organizes an escape committee.
He studies the guards.
He learns Italian.
On September 28, 1943, after a year in captivity, the Italian government collapses.
In the chaos, the guards flee.
Weaver walks out the front gate, but he is hundreds of miles behind enemy lines.
The Germans are flooding into Italy to take control.
He doesn’t hide.
He walks.
He walks south.
He steals a bicycle.
He rides through German checkpoints, smiling his innocent, freckle-faced smile, pretending to be a mute Italian peasant.
He walks for 300 miles.
He meets a British reconnaissance unit near the front lines.
He walks up to a tank commander.
I’m Flight Lieutenant Weaver, he says.
Can I catch a ride? The British officer looks at the ragged, starving kid.
Weaver, the ace from Malta.
That’s me.
The return.
Most men would go home.
They would take a bond tour.
They would kiss girls and drink champagne.
Weaver goes back to England.
He transfers to the US Army Air Forces since America is now fully in the war.
But he finds their rules too strict.
They want him to fly formation.
They want him to salute.
He hates it.
So he transfers back to the Royal Canadian Air Force.
He joined number 4003 squadron.
He is given a new plane, the Spitfire MKIX.
It is a beast.
It has a Merlin 61 engine with a two-stage supercharger.
It is faster than the FW90.
It can climb to 40,000 ft.
Weaver loves it.
He paints his old markings on it.
He starts killing again.
In January 1944, he shot down two fuckwolf 190s in a single day over France.
His score climbs.
He is now one of the top allied aces.
He is a flight commander.
But he is different now.
The boyish grin is gone.
His eyes are hard.
He has seen the inside of a prison camp.
He has walked through a wartorrn country.
He fights with a cold, calculated fury.
January 28, 1944.
The last sorty.
The mission is a ranger patrol over France.
They are hunting targets of opportunity.
trains, convoys, airfields.
Weaver is leading his section near the coast.
He spots a German staff car on a road.
Going down.
Weaver radios.
He rolls the Spitfire over.
He dives.
He is doing 350 m.
He lines up the car.
He fires.
But he is too low.
Or maybe he is just unlucky.
A German soldier with a rifle, a single boltaction mouser looks up.
He sees the Spitfire coming.
He fires a shot.
It is a million to one shot.
The bullet hits the glycol coolant tank under the Spitfire’s nose.
White smoke trails from Weaver’s plane.
The engine temperature spikes.
“I’m hit,” Weaver says.
His voice is calm.
“He pulls up.
He tries to gain altitude.
He tries to turn toward the English Channel, but the engine seizes.
The propeller stops.
He is at 500 ft.
He tries to belly land in a field.
The Spitfire hits the ground.
It catches a wing tip on a hedger.
It cartwheels.
The fuselage snaps in half.
The cockpit is crushed.
Claude Red Weaver 3 is killed instantly.
He was 20 years old.
the legacy.
They buried him in a small churchyard in France.
When the news reached Oklahoma, his mother collapsed.
When it reached Malta, the veterans of 185 Squadron went to the pub and drank in silence.
They remembered the kid who arrived with a suitcase full of comic books and a head full of dreams.
They remembered the day he took on the entire German Air Force and won.
Claude Weaver is often forgotten today.
He isn’t in the movies.
He isn’t in the video games.
But historians know he was a meteor.
He burned bright.
He burned fast.
And he left a trail of fire across the sky that no one who saw it ever forgot.
He proved that in the cockpit of a Spitfire, age doesn’t matter.
Rank doesn’t matter.
The only thing that matters is the eyes, the hands, and the heart.
and the kid had the biggest heart of them all.
The airfield at Taekali is gone now.
It is a park.
The dust has settled.
But if you look closely at the limestone walls of the old barracks, you might see scratch marks, names carved by board pilots waiting for the scramble bell.
And maybe, just maybe, you’ll see a name scratched by a 19-year-old hand.
Red.
He was the boy who outsmarted the aces.
The boy who walked out of prison.
The boy who flew until the very end.
He never grew old.
He never got tired.
He just flew into the sun and never came back down.
This was the true story of Claude Red Weaver, the teenage ace who defied the odds in the siege of Malta.
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