January 17th, 1945.
14,000 ft above the frozen patchwork of Bavaria.
The air is thin, brittle with cold that seeps through leather and steel alike.
Inside the cockpit of a lone P-51 Mustang, Second Lieutenant Charles Chuck Swanson can see his breath crystallizing against the gunsite glass.
Below him, the earth is a study in whites and grays, snow-covered fields stitched together by black threads of leafless forest.
The engine hum is steady, rhythmic, almost meditative.
He has been flying escort for a returning bomber formation, shephering the wounded B7’s home like a sheep dog guiding exhausted sheep.
But now the bombers are gone.
Specs disappearing westward toward England.
And he is alone in a sky that feels too quiet, too vast, too empty.
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The radio crackles, static, then silence, then static again.
This is the silence that precedes violence.
What Swanson does not yet know, what he cannot possibly know is that nine gray shapes are descending from the sun behind him.
Nine Messid BF1 distas flown by pilots of Yag Gashv 27, the desert wing veterans who had cut their teeth in North Africa before being rotated back to defend the Reich itself.
These are not noviceses.
These are men who have survived the meat grinder of the eastern front who have learned to hunt in packs who understand that a lone American fighter separated from its formation is prey.
Their leader overlit Hinrich Miller has 17 confirmed kills painted beneath his canopy.
He has trained his pilots in the old Africa core method.
Approach from the sun, strike fast, break away before the target can react.
Nine aircraft against one.
The mathematics of aerial combat are simple.
This should be over in seconds.
But mathematics do not account for human will.
Mathematics do not account for the irrational decision that Swanson is about to make.
A decision so counterintuitive, so seemingly suicidal that it will be debated in fighter tactic schools for generations afterward.
To understand this moment, we must first understand what brought these men to this particular patch of sky, to this particular convergence of metal and intent.
The winter of 1945 was the winter of Germany’s final agony.
The Arden’s offensive, the desperate gamble Hitler called Vakt Amrin, had spent itself in the snows of Belgium.
The Luftvafa had thrown everything it had into Operation Bowden Plata on New Year’s Day.
A massive strike against Allied airfields that cost Germany nearly 300 irreplaceable aircraft and pilots.
The skies over the Reich were no longer German.
American P-51 Mustangs, P-47 Thunderbolts, and British Spitfires roamed at will, hunting anything that bore a swastika.
German pilots flew fewer sordies, conserved fuel, waited for moments of advantage.
When they found one, they struck with everything they had left.
The P-51 Mustang was the instrument of this dominance with a combat radius exceeding 1,000 m when fitted with drop tanks.
It could escort bombers all the way to Berlin and back, fighting the entire way.
Its Packardbuilt Rolls-Royce Merlin V1650 engine gave it speed.
437 mph at 25,000 ft.
Its 650 caliber M2 Browning machine guns, three in each wing, could tear a Messormid apart in a 2se secondond burst.
But more than its specifications, the Mustang represented something the Luftvafa could not match.
Industrial abundance.
American factories were producing 1,500 P-51s per month by late 1944.
When one was lost, two more replaced it.
When a pilot was killed, the training pipeline sent forward three more, each with hundreds of hours of flight time, each with ammunition to waste on practice, each with fuel enough to learn from mistakes.
German pilots in early 1945 were flying on fumes, literally and metaphorically.
Fuel shortages meant that replacement pilots often had fewer than 50 hours of total flight time before being thrown into combat.
Experienced pilots hoarded their knowledge like misers because they knew that every sorty might be their last and there was no one left to teach.
The BF109 Gustav, the Gustav or G model, was still a formidable machine in the hands of an expert.
It could outclimb a Mustang, could turn tighter in certain configurations, but it required expertise.
It required fuel.
It required time.
And time had run out.
When Oberllo Mueller spots the lone Mustang below him, he feels a surge of something between relief and hunger.
Here, finally, is an achievable objective.
The radio discipline is perfect.
As he signals his formation, they drop in a staggered descent.
Sunlight blazing on their wings, using the oldest trick in the book.
Miller’s plan is textbook.
The first two aircraft will bracket the Mustang from above, forcing it into a defensive turn.
The next three will be waiting in that turn, guns ready.
The remaining four will cover the exits, cutting off any escape route.
It is the tactical distillation of four years of aerial warfare executed by men who have survived when thousands have not.
Swanson sees them when they are perhaps 2,000 ft above and behind him.
It is the glint that gives them away.
Sunlight flashing on a canopy at just the wrong angle.
His stomach drops.
He shoves the throttle forward instinctively.
Feels the Merlin engine roar to full power.
But even as he does, his combat mathematics are running.
Nine against one.
Altitude advantage, theirs, initiative, theirs, surprise, theirs.
Every tactical manual, every training instructor, every combat veteran has drilled the same lesson into him.
When outnumbered and ambushed, run.
Use the Mustang speed in level flight or a shallow dive.
Extend away.
Break contact.
Live to fight another day.
The P-51 is faster than the BF 109 in level flight above 20,000 ft and can run down an opponent in a straight chase, but Swanson is at 14,000 ft.
And nine aircraft are diving on him, building speed in their descent, closing the gap faster than he can open it.
If he runs, they will catch him within 30 seconds, and they will tear him apart from behind while he presents his entire fuselage as a target.
What he does instead violates every instinct of self-preservation.
He pulls back on the stick.
He reverses directly into the attack.
The maneuver has no official name in 1945.
Later, test pilots and tacticians will call it a displacement roll or a high G reversal or simply backing up the dive.
But in the moment, Müller and his pilots have no frame of reference for what they are seeing.
The Mustang, instead of fleeing, is pulling up toward them, into them, climbing steeply, and then snapping over into a rolling reversal that brings its nose to bear on the lead attacking aircraft.
The geometry of the ambush collapses instantly.
Mueller, expecting to fire on a fleeing target, suddenly finds himself flying directly toward 650 caliber machine guns.
The shock of it, the sheer audacity, cost him half a second of reaction time.
Half a second is an eternity in aerial combat.
Swanson opens fire.
The Browning’s hammer.
Each gun cycling at 800 rounds per minute.
The combined weight of fire nearly 200 rounds per second.
Tracer rounds arc out in visible streams.
Phosphorescent fingers reaching across the sky.
Miller breaks hard left.
Too hard.
His Gustaf shuttering on the edge of a stall.
The rounds miss him by inches, but the psychological damage is done.
The ambush has become a dog fight.
The German formation scatters.
This is not cowardice.
It is instinct.
When a coordinated attack disintegrates, pilots revert to individual survival.
Some break high, some break low.
Some try to extend and reset.
But Swanson is not giving them time to reset.
He rolls inverted and pulls through, staying in the vertical plane, using the Mustang’s superior powertoweight ratio to maintain energy.
A second BF 109 flashes across his canopy and he snaps a deflection shot, leading the target, firing where it will be, not where it is.
Metal tears.
The Gustav’s wing route erupts in white smoke.
Fuel or coolant, and it peels away in a descending spiral.
The radios on the German frequency erupt.
Voices shouting, overlapping, the careful discipline dissolving into chaos.
He’s reversing.
Where is he? I’ve lost him.
Break right.
Break right.
But Swanson is already inside their turning circle, exploiting the one advantage a lighter, more agile aircraft has in close combat.
The ability to change directions faster.
He is not trying to outturn them.
He is trying to stay unpredictable, to deny them a firing solution, to make them react instead of act.
And then abruptly, the radios go silent.
Miller will later tell his interrogators after he is captured 3 weeks later when his airfield is overrun by American armor that the silence was the most terrifying part.
In the chaos of a dog fight, radio chatter is a lifeline.
It tells you where your wingman is, where the threats are, whether to press or retreat.
But when the radios went dead, each pilot was alone in a private nightmare, watching a lone Mustang doing things that should not be possible.
One pilot will claim that Swanson performed a flat spin reversal, stopping his aircraft midair and rotating on its axis like a weather vein.
This is physically impossible, but in the chaos, perceptions become unreliable.
What is certain is that Swanson is flying at the edge of the Mustang’s flight envelope, pulling G-forces that gray out his vision, feeling the airframe groan and shudder, trusting that American engineering has overbuilt this machine enough to handle abuse that would snap a European fighter in half.
And in a sense, he is right.
The P-51 is overengineered because American industry can afford to be wasteful.
Where a German aircraft is designed to shave every ounce of unnecessary weight to maximize performance at the cost of durability, the Mustang is built with redundancy, with safety margins, with the assumption that a pilot might do something stupid and the aircraft should save him anyway.
There is a philosophy embedded in the rivets and welds.
Human life is valuable and metal is cheap.
This is the abundance that German pilots cannot comprehend.
They have flown aircraft held together with fabric patches and wood substitutes.
Have burned synthetic fuel that corrods engines.
Have rationed ammunition so strictly that some fighters carry only 60 rounds per gun.
Swanson’s Mustang has 1,800 rounds of ammunition, enough to fire for nearly 20 seconds continuously.
An unimaginable luxury.
When he fires, he does not count bullets.
When he maneuvers, he does not worry about fuel reserves for the flight home.
His drop tanks are long gone, but he still has 880 gall of internal fuel.
Enough for another hour of combat.
The third BF 109 dies in a head-on pass.
This is the most dangerous geometry in aerial combat.
Two aircraft flying directly at each other at a combined closing speed of 700 mph.
Both firing, both gambling that the other will flinch first.
The German pilot flinches.
He breaks down and left, exposing his entire top surface.
Swanson’s rounds walk up the fuselage from tail to engine.
And the Gustav disintegrates, the pilot ejecting in a tumble of limbs and silk.
What the Germans expected when they volunteered or were conscripted into the Luftvafa was glory.
The propaganda posters showed knights of the air, modern samurai dueling in clean blue skies, the ultimate expression of Aryan marshall prowess.
The reality by 1945 was industrial slaughter.
It was flying obsolete aircraft against numerically superior enemies.
It was watching friends burn.
It was landing at an airfield in the morning and finding it cratered by bombers by afternoon.
It was the slow realization that no amount of individual skill could overcome systemic collapse.
That the thousand-year Reich was dying and they were dying with it.
Miller had joined the Luftvafa in 1940 when victory seemed inevitable when France fell in 6 weeks and England seemed next.
He had flown BF-1 nominees over the Channel, had fought in the Battle of Britain, had learned that British Spitfire pilots were not subhuman, but were in fact lethally competent.
He had survived, been promoted, sent to North Africa, where he learned new lessons, that American P40s were rugged and well flown.
That logistics mattered more than tactics when you could not get fuel or spare parts.
He had returned to Germany in 1943 as a veteran, an instructor, a man who knew the truth, but could not speak it openly, that Germany was losing, that the Luftvafa was being ground down, that the only question was how many of them would die before the end.
When he watches the lone Mustang reverse into his attack, some part of him recognizes what he is seeing.
Not just a skilled pilot, but a pilot unburdened by desperation.
American pilots fly aggressively because they can afford to.
If they are shot down over Germany, they become prisoners.
And prisoners eat better than German civilians.
If they bail out over Allied territory, they are back in the air within a week.
They have parachutes that work, survival kits with chocolate and morphine, rescue services that launch within minutes.
German pilots bail out over their own territory, and often cannot find transport back to their units because the rail system is bombed to rubble.
They fly because refusing to fly is cowardice, and cowardice is treason, and treason is a noose.
They fly because their families are hostages to the regime, because the Gestapo is watching.
Because the alternative is worse.
The fight is lasting longer than any of the Germans anticipated.
By the 2-minute mark, Swanson has downed three aircraft.
Two confirmed, destroyed, one smoking and descending.
The remaining six are no longer attacking.
They are trying to escape.
This is the moment when morale shatters.
When a formation realizes collectively that the predator has become prey.
Swanson chases one BF109 down through 8,000 ft, firing short bursts, watching pieces fly off the enemy aircraft, an aileron, a panel of fuselage skin.
The Gustav pilot jettison his canopy and rolls inverted, falling out of the cockpit and deploying his parachute.
Swanson does not shoot him.
This is not mercy.
It is calculation.
A pilot in a parachute is out of the fight and cost Germany time and resources to recover.
A corpse is cheaper.
The doctrine that governs this decision was written by men who have studied efficiency the way others study art.
The United States Army Air Forces have calculated the mathematics of attrition warfare with actuarial precision.
Every German pilot killed is one less threat, but every German pilot captured is a source of intelligence and a burden on German logistics.
Every aircraft destroyed on the ground is worth three destroyed in the air because airfield attacks also crater runways and destroy fuel depots.
The strategy is not to defeat the Luftvafa in glorious combat.
It is to strangle it to make every sorty more costly than the last, to force Germany to choose between defending its cities and defending its armies, knowing that it cannot do both.
By the time Swanson pulls out of his dive, he has lost track of the other five Messorm.
His altimeter reads 6,000 ft.
His fuel gauge is below half.
His ammunition counters show less than 400 rounds remaining.
For the first time since the attack began, he has a moment to think.
And what he thinks is, “I should be dead.
The logic is inescapable.
Nine against one, ambushed from above.
Every advantage theirs.” He should be a smoking hole in a Bavarian field right now.
Another name on a casualty list.
Another telegram to a family in Iowa, but he is not dead.
The Mustang is still flying, still responding to his touch on the stick.
The engine is still purring, still producing 1,490 horsepower, still burning fuel with the proflegate ease of an economy that produces more oil than the rest of the world combined.
He turns west toward home and keys his radio.
The silence breaks.
Voices flood in.
other pilots, the bomber crews he was escorting earlier, the controller at the forward airfield.
Blue four, do you copy? Blue four, we lost you on radar.
Blue 4, what is your status? He keys the mic.
His voice is steady, almost casual.
Blue 4, I’m good.
Had a little trouble.
Heading home.
A little trouble.
The interrogation reports from the captured German pilots, the ones who survived the parachute descent and are not lynched by enraged civilians, reveal a pattern.
They describe the engagement not in tactical terms, but in psychological ones.
He should have run.
He didn’t follow doctrine.
It was like he was angry.
This last observation is particularly telling.
American pilots in 1945 are not fighting for ideology in the same way their enemies are.
They are not defending the fatherland or the emperor.
Most of them are drafties or volunteers motivated by a mix of adventure, patriotism, and peer pressure.
But by this stage of the war, they have seen enough.
They have flown escort over Ashvitz, over Dau, over the smoldering ruins of cities that resisted.
They have seen the news reels from the liberated camps.
They know what they are fighting, and it has curdled their mercy.
Swanson will never be asked if he was angry.
In his debriefing, he will describe the engagement in flat technical language.
Executed a high G reversal to deny the enemy a tail position.
Engaged targets of opportunity in a turning fight.
Expended approximately 500 rounds.
Observed three enemy aircraft destroyed, one probable, one damaged.
The debriefer will press him on the decision to reverse into the attack, and Swanson will shrug.
They expected me to run, so I didn’t.
This is the essence of the thing.
The Luftwafa in 1945 is fighting a defensive war mentally and tactically.
Every decision is about conservation, of fuel, of aircraft, of pilots, of time.
The USAAF is fighting an offensive war mentally and tactically.
Every decision is about aggression, about pressing the advantage, about making the enemy react.
When a German pilot attacks, he is thinking about the safest way to kill.
When an American pilot attacks, he is thinking about the fastest way to kill.
The difference is subtle but decisive.
The symbolism of the Mustang itself is not lost on German intelligence officers who study these engagements.
Here is an aircraft powered by a British engine built in American factories, flown by pilots trained in Canada, armed with guns designed in 1918, navigating with radios and instruments produced by a dozen subcontractors painted with insignia that include a British roundell variant and an American star.
fueled by oil from Texas and Venezuela and maintained by ground crews who include black Americans, Mexicanameans, Native Americans, a flying embodiment of the coalition that is destroying the Reich.
When a Luftwafa pilot sees a Mustang, he is not seeing a machine.
He is seeing the collective industrial and demographic weight of half the planet arranged against him.
And the Mustang performs.
By war’s end, P-51s will be credited with 4,50 enemy aircraft destroyed in the air, more than any other allied fighter.
The kill ratio against BF1 musaines in the final months of the war exceeds 51.
These numbers are not the result of superior individual pilots.
German aces like Eric Hartman and Ghard Barhorn have kill counts that dwarf any Americans.
The numbers are the result of systematic application of resources.
Better training, better logistics, better intelligence, better coordination, and above all, the luxury of making mistakes and surviving them.
When Swanson lands at his forward base, 3 hours later, the ground crew counts 37 holes in his aircraft.
Most are small caliber, probably 7.92 mito rounds from BF1 size.
Two are larger, possibly 20 mil cannon shells that pass through non-critical areas.
The Mustang will be repaired and flying again in 48 hours.
Swanson will be flying again the next morning.
This is the abundance that wins wars.
Not just the ability to build machines, but the ability to rebuild them, to waste them, to treat them as consumable commodities.
The Luftvafa cannot replace its losses.
The USAAF can.
What changed in the minds of the German pilots who survived that engagement? The five who broke off and fled, who landed at scattered airfields with tales of the lone Mustang that reversed on them, was not their skill or their courage.
It was their hope.
There is a difference between knowing intellectually that you are losing a war and feeling it in your bones in the moment when you ambush a lone enemy and he destroys you anyway.
Several of the pilots involved in this engagement will fly again, but none will fly aggressively.
They will become conservative, defensive, risk averse.
They will prioritize survival over victory, which is rational but tactically useless.
An air force that stops taking risks stops winning engagements.
An air force that stops winning engagements stops existing.
Miller, in his interrogation, will be asked what he thinks the war’s outcome will be.
He will smile tiredly and say, “It’s already over.
We’re just waiting for someone to tell us it’s acceptable to stop dying.” This is February 1945.
The war will continue for another 3 months and 300,000 more people will die in those 3 months.
But Mueller is not wrong.
The outcome is determined.
What remains is the formality of surrender and the accounting of corpses.
There is an object that recurs in Swanson’s postwar interviews, though he never quite explains its significance.
In his flight suit pocket, he carries a Hershey’s Tropical Chocolate Bar, the heatresistant variant developed for the Pacific Theater, but issued to all pilots as part of their survival kits.
He never eats it.
It sits in his pocket through every mission.
A brick of sugar and cocoa and palm oil that weighs 4 o and contains 600 calories.
After the war, a journalist will ask him why he kept it, and he will turn it over in his hands and say, “It reminded me that I was going home.” The chocolate bar is mundane, but its mundanity is the point.
It represents a logistical chain that spans oceans.
Cacao from South America, sugar from Caribbean plantations, milk powder from Wisconsin dairies, wrapped in wax paper and foil shipped to England, distributed to air bases, placed in survival kits on the assumption that pilots might be shot down in jungles or deserts or enemy territory and would need concentrated calories to survive.
The German equivalent survival ration is a hard biscuit and a packet of dextrose tablets.
The Japanese equivalent is rice balls and dried fish, if there is anything at all.
This is the material reality of the war in 1945.
One side is provisioning its soldiers with chocolate, with cigarettes, with coffee, with butter, with white bread, with steak, with ice cream.
The other side is rationing bread, mixing sawdust into sausages, brewing ears coffee from roasted acorns, and telling its soldiers that hardship builds character.
One side’s pilots carry survival kits with fishing line, waterproof matches, morphine curettes, and signal mirrors.
The other side’s pilots carry a sidearm with one magazine on the assumption that if they are shot down, the weapon is for suicide, not survival.
The chocolate bar in Swanson’s pocket is a talisman, but it is also a statement.
We have so much that we can afford to give our soldiers candy.
When German soldiers capture American positions, they are stunned by the abundance of supplies.
the cases of rations, the jerry cans of fuel, the stacks of ammunition.
There are documented cases of Vermach soldiers spending hours simply cataloging what they find, unable to comprehend how an army can function with such material wealth.
Some conclude that the Americans must be strip mining their entire continent to support the war effort, unaware that the American economy is simultaneously producing enough consumer goods, that rationing at home is mild compared to the starvation in Europe.
The epilogue to Swanson’s story is quiet.
He will fly 27 more missions before the war ends.
He will down two more aircraft, bringing his total to six confirmed, making him an ace.
He will be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, the citation reading in part, for extraordinary achievement while participating in aerial flight, demonstrating superior airmanship and aggressive determination in the face of overwhelming odds.
He will return to Iowa in August 1945, attend college on the GI Bill, become a teacher, marry, raise three children, and almost never speak about the war.
But in in 1978, a historian researching Luftvafa records will find Miller’s interrogation transcript and track down Swanson through veteran registries.
They will meet in a hotel in Chicago, two old men drinking coffee, and Miller will ask the question that has haunted him for 33 years.
Why did you reverse? You should have run.
You could have escaped.
Swanson will be silent for a long time.
Stirring his coffee, watching the steam rise.
Finally, he will say, “If I ran, you would have killed me.
If I fought, I might die, but I might take some of you with me.
And maybe the next guy wouldn’t have to face nine.
Maybe it would be eight or seven.
and maybe he’d live because I made that choice.
This is the calculus of attrition warfare expressed not in staff college lectures but in the split-second decision of a 23-year-old pilot over Bavaria.
It is the mathematics of freedom, the understanding that individual survival is less important than collective victory.
That a democracy asks its citizens to risk death but does not demand that they embrace it.
That there is a difference between sacrifice and martyrdom.
The Axis powers built their ideologies on the glorification of death, on the idea that dying for the state was the highest expression of human value.
The Allied powers, for all their flaws, built their ideologies on the promise of life, on the idea that the war was a necessary evil to be ended as quickly as possible so that people could go home and live.
When Swanson reversed into the attack, he was not acting out of ideology.
He was acting out of calculation, training, and perhaps some measure of anger or stubbornness.
But the fact that he could make that calculation, that he had the training and the aircraft and the fuel and the ammunition to execute it was itself ideological.
It was the product of a system that valued him enough to prepare him thoroughly, to equip him lavishly, to support him logistically, and to welcome him home if he survived.
The recording of the German radio frequencies from that engagement, preserved in fragmentaryary form in Allied intelligence archives, captures the moment when the ambush fails.
There is shouting, overlapping voices, and then a burst of static.
And then for 11 seconds, absolute silence.
No calls for assistance, no tactical updates, no coordination, just the hiss of empty airwaves.
It is the sound of a formation disintegrating, of plans collapsing, of nine men simultaneously realizing that they have made a fatal mistake, and then faintly a single voice, young and tight with fear.
He’s doing the impossible.
But it was not impossible.
It was simply the product of abundance meeting determination, of industrial capacity meeting human will, of a system that built not just weapons, but the infrastructure to use them effectively.
The P-51 Mustang was not a miracle.
It was the logical outcome of a society that could afford to design, test, refine, and mass-produce excellence.
That could train pilots for 2 years before sending them to war.
That could lose 500 aircraft in a month and replace them with 600 the next month.
That could feed its soldiers steak and chocolate and coffee while asking them to risk their lives.
The German pilots expected to face an enemy constrained by the same limitations they faced.
limited fuel, limited ammunition, limited training, limited support.
What they encountered instead was an enemy unburdened by scarcity.
An enemy who could afford to be aggressive because the cost of aggression was borne by an economy so vast that it could absorb losses that would any other nation.
This was the ultimate advantage, the one that no amount of tactical brilliance or individual courage could overcome.
When Swanson climbed out of his Mustang that evening, he did not feel triumphant.
He felt exhausted, shaky, vaguely nauseous from the sustained G forces.
He had cheated death through a combination of skill, luck, and engineering.
He knew on some level that he had done something extraordinary, but he also knew that tomorrow he would fly again and the day after and the day after that until either the war ended or his luck ran out.
The chocolate bar was still in his pocket.
He would carry it through 26 more missions.
He would bring it home to Iowa.
And 33 years later, meeting Mueller in Chicago, he would place it on the table between them.
The wrapper faded and creased, the chocolate long since inedible.
Mueller would look at it for a long time.
And then he would nod slowly, understanding without words represented.
Not just survival, but the promise that there was something worth surviving for.
That beyond the killing and the dying, there was a world where men could meet as equals and share coffee and remember without hatred.
the day when they tried to kill each other in a sky over Bavaria.
This is the paradox at the heart of that engagement.
The violence was real, the danger absolute, the consequences lethal.
But it was violence in service of a vision, imperfect, hypocritical, often failing to live up to its own ideals that nevertheless insisted on the value of human life and human freedom.
The Mustang, with its chocolate carrying pilot, was not just a weapon.
It was an argument made in metal and blood and burning fuel that abundance in democracy and the refusal to accept tyranny were worth the cost.
And on January 17th, 1945, in the cold thin air above Bavaria, that argument was proven in the only way that mattered.
It survived and its enemies did not.
The radios went silent, the attackers scattered, and one pilot reversing into impossible odds proved that even nine against one is not insurmountable when one side fights with the weight of free nations behind it.
The mathematics of that moment are simple in the end.
Nine aircraft against one.
Three destroyed, one probable, one damaged, five fled, and the one flew home carrying a chocolate bar and the knowledge that freedom for all its messiness is the only ideology worth dying for because it is the only ideology that insists you should live.
Thank you for watching.
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