March 14th, 1943.
Rabal, New Britain.
The Japanese pilot from Nagoya laughed when he spotted the American bomber through his canopy glass.
Another A20 Havoc lumbering along at 8,000 ft like a fat goose waiting to be plucked.
He’d shot down two of them last month.
Easy kills.
The Americans called them attack bombers, but Lieutenant Yamamoto called them target practice.
He waggled his wings to signal his wingman and pushed the stick forward, diving from 12,000 ft with the sun at his back.
The A20 hadn’t seen him yet.
They never did until it was too late.
The pilot from Texas in the A20’s nose knew they were coming before anyone else.
Sergeant Jim Baker had that feeling again, the one that saved his life over Buna two weeks ago, like someone walking over his grave.
He scanned the sky through the plexiglass nose cone, squinting against the morning sun.
Nothing, but the feeling got stronger.
His grandmother back in Houston always said he had the sight.
In Texas, that meant knowing when storms were coming.
Over a ball, it meant knowing when death was diving at 400 mph.
Then he saw them.
Two specks falling out of the sun, growing larger every second.
Zeros.
His throat went dry as sand.
He keyed the intercom.
Bandits high.
Coming fast.
The pilot, Captain Steve Morrison from Ohio, didn’t hesitate.
Full throttle, nose down, trying to build speed.
The A20 wasn’t built for dog fighting.
It was built to deliver 4,000 lb of bombs and get home.
But first, they had to survive the next 60 seconds.
Yamamoto smiled as the A20 dove.
They always ran.
It only delayed the inevitable by a few seconds.
He lined up the bomber in his sights, waiting for the range to close to 400 yardds.
His 20 mm cannons would tear through the American plane like paper.
He’d seen it happen dozens of times.
The aluminum skin would peel back, the engines would catch fire, and the crew would either burn or jump.
Most burned.
At 300 yd, he squeezed the trigger.
Nothing happened.
The cannons had jammed, both of them.
Yamamoto cursed and switched to his 7.7 machine guns, but he was closing too fast now, overtaking the diving bomber.
As he flashed past, something incredible happened.
The A20’s nose lit up like the 4th of July.
Eight 50 caliber machine guns opened up simultaneously, joined by the twin 50s in the dorsal turret.
10 heavy machine guns firing at once, each pumping out 800 rounds per minute.
The math was simple and terrifying.
Over 2,000 rounds filled the air in the space where Yamamoto had been a second earlier.
His wingman wasn’t as lucky.
Lieutenant Tanaka from Osaka flew straight into the wall of lead.
The concentrated fire from 10 guns hit his zero almost simultaneously.
The engine exploded first, then the fuel tank.
The plane didn’t break apart so much as disintegrate.
Transformed from aircraft to debris cloud in less than 2 seconds.
Tanaka never had time to scream.
One moment he was alive, the next he was vapor and burning aluminum, falling toward the Solomon Sea 5,000 ft below.
Baker kept firing even after the Zero exploded.
His eight nose-mounted 50s chewed through ammunition at an incredible rate.
Each gun cycled through 13 rounds per second.
The noise was beyond deafening.
It was a physical force that hammered through his chest and rattled his teeth.
Spent brass cascaded around his feet like hot rain.
The entire nose of the aircraft vibrated so violently he could barely see through his gun sight.
But he kept firing, walking the tracers toward Yamamoto Zero as it tried to climb away.
The bullets found their mark.
50 caliber rounds punched through the Zero’s tail section, each one leaving a hole the size of a baseball.
Japanese fighters were built for speed and maneuverability, not durability.
They had no armor, no self-sealing fuel tanks.
Every ounce of weight saved meant more speed, more climb, more range.
It also meant that when the heavy American guns connected, the damage was catastrophic.
Yamamoto felt his rudder go slack.
Then his elevator, the control stick turned to mush in his hands.
Morrison pulled the A20 out of its dive at 3,000 ft.
The airframe groaning under the stress.
Four G’s pressed them into their seats.
He could feel the plane shuttering from the recoil of its own guns.
They’d fired over 2,000 rounds in less than a minute.
The ammunition would be nearly gone, but it had done its job.
Through his side window, he watched Yamamoto’s zero trailing smoke descending in an uncontrolled spiral.
The Japanese pilot was fighting to control his dying aircraft, but it was a losing battle.
The laws of physics didn’t care about his emperor or his honor code.
Yamamoto knew he was finished.
The American guns had destroyed his control surfaces.
He was flying a 12,000lb brick.
The engine was still running, but without a working rudder or elevator, he might as well be a passenger.
The ocean rushed up to meet him.
He thought about his wife in Nagoya, pregnant with their first child, a child who would grow up without a father.
He’d always imagined dying in a blaze of glory, taking Americans with him.
Instead, he was going to crash into the sea because he’d underestimated a bombers’s defensive firepower.
The irony tasted bitter as seawater.
The zero hit the water at 200 mph.
The impact was like hitting concrete.
The plane cartwheelled twice, shedding wings and engine before what was left of the fuselage sank in seconds.
Yamamoto was probably dead before the water closed over him.
If not, he had perhaps 10 seconds of consciousness as the Pacific Ocean forced its way into his lungs.
Either way, his war was over.
His last thought, if he had one, was probably surprise.
Surprised that the fat American bomber had teeth.
Sharp teeth that fired 2400 rounds per minute.
Morrison turned the A20 toward home, nursing the damaged bomber through thick clouds.
They’d lost hydraulic fluid and the left engine was running rough, but they were alive.
Baker was checking his guns, counting ammunition.
They had maybe 300 rounds left total.
One more zero would have finished them, but there were no more zeros.
Not today.
The Japanese pilots at Rabal would think twice before laughing at A20s again.
Word would spread through their ready rooms.
The American bombers weren’t helpless targets.
They were flying gun platforms that could turn a fighter into confetti in seconds.
6 months later and 3,000 m away, the lesson would be learned again.
This time in the skies over North Africa, where German pilots were making the same fatal mistake about American fighters.
The P40 Warhawk was considered obsolete by 1943.
Too slow to catch the Messmmet BF 109.
Couldn’t climb with the Fakaolf 190.
turned like a truck compared to the nimble German fighters.
The Luftwaffa pilots called them 40 killers because they were so easy to shoot down.
At least that’s what they told each other in the officer’s mess at Tunis.
September 3rd, 1943, Tunisia.
Captain Hinrich Müller from Hamburg was leading a flight of four BF 109s on a sweep south of Tunis.
They were hunting for American supply convoys, but Müller secretly hoped to find P40s.
He needed two more kills to reach 30, which meant the Knight’s Cross.
His girlfriend in Berlin had promised to marry him when he got it.
The medal would mean a promotion, better assignments, maybe even a transfer back to Germany as an instructor.
All he needed was two more American planes.
When his wingman spotted six P40s below them, Mueller felt like it was Christmas morning.
The American flight leader was Lieutenant Tom Rodriguez from Los Angeles.
He’d been flying P40s for 8 months and had three German planes to his credit.
Not an ace yet, but getting there.
He knew the Warhawk’s limitations better than anyone.
It couldn’t climb with a messmitt.
It couldn’t turn with one either.
But it could do two things better than any German fighter.
dive and shoot.
The P40 was heavy, which made it slow to climb, but fast as hell going down.
And those 650 caliber machine guns in the wings could saw through anything the Germans flew.
Rodriguez saw the Germans first.
Four BF 109s, diving from 15,000 ft.
Perfect.
Let them come.
He waggled his wings to alert his flight, then pulled into a shallow climb, making it look like they were trying to escape.
The Germans would see scared Americans running for home.
What they wouldn’t see was the trap.
Rodriguez had learned this trick from the flying tigers in China.
Let the enemy think they have you.
Let them commit to their attack.
Then show them what 650s could do to aluminum and flesh.
Mueller took the bait.
The Americans were climbing, trying to run.
Typical.
They always ran when they saw German fighters.
He pushed his throttle forward, diving at 400 mph.
His BF 109 had two 13 mm machine guns in the nose and a 20 mm cannon firing through the propeller hub.
More than enough to destroy a P40.
He’d done it eight times before.
The American planes were tough.
He’d give them that.
They could absorb punishment that would destroy a Japanese Zero.
But they couldn’t absorb what he was about to deliver.
At 800 yards, Rodriguez rolled inverted and pulled hard, diving straight down.
His flight followed.
The maneuver was violent, pulling five G’s, forcing blood from their brains.
Rodriguez’s vision tunnled, going gray at the edges, but he held it, counting seconds.
The P40 built speed quickly in a dive, 400 mph, 450.
The airspeed indicator needle bounced against its stop at 500.
The entire aircraft shook like it was coming apart, but it held together.
Curtis built these planes like flying tanks.
Müller cursed.
The Americans had flipped and dove straight down.
No German pilot would try that maneuver.
It was suicide.
But the Americans were crazy.
Everyone knew that.
He rolled to follow, but the BF 109 wasn’t built for that kind of dive.
The wings started to flutter.
The controls got mushy.
At 450 mph, he had to level out or risk structural failure.
The P40s kept diving, pulling away.
Then, at the bottom of their dive, something impossible happened.
The American planes pulled out sharply and zoom climbed straight back up at the German fighters.
Rodriguez had timed it perfectly.
The P40s used their dive speed to rocket back up, passing through the German formation at a combined closure rate of 800 m hour.
As they passed, all six American fighters opened fire simultaneously.
36 50 caliber machine guns firing at once.
The sky filled with tracer fire, a solid wall of lead and light.
The Germans flew straight into it.
There was nowhere to go, no room to maneuver, just physics and bullets and the terrible reality that they’d been suckered.
Mueller’s wingmen took the brunt of it.
Lieutenant Fritz Bower from Munich flew into the convergence point of three P40s fire.
18 heavy machine guns focused on a single point in space.
His BF 109 didn’t stand a chance.
The engine block shattered.
The propeller separated and spun away like a thrown discus.
The wings folded backwards.
The cockpit disappeared in a spray of aluminum and glass and red mist.
Bower was dead before his brain could register what was happening.
The wreckage that had been his fighter fell toward the desert in a thousand pieces.
The second German fighter lost its left wing, just gone, sawed off by concentrated 50 caliber fire like a surgeon’s scalpel.
The plane snap rolled violently, pulling 12 G’s, crushing the pilot against his seat.
His spine snapped in three places.
He was dead, but his hand stayed on the stick, holding the plane in its death spiral all the way to the ground.
It hit the desert floor at Yah 300 m hour, leaving a crater 20 ft deep and 60 ft wide.
Mueller somehow flew through the curtain of fire with only minor damage.
Holes appeared in his wings and fuselage, but nothing vital was hit.
The third German pilot wasn’t as fortunate.
American bullets found his fuel tank.
The BF 109 had self-sealing tanks, but 50 caliber rounds were bigger than the system was designed to handle.
Aviation fuels sprayed into the cockpit.
The pilot, a 20-year-old from Dresden named Eric Hoffman, had two seconds to realize he was soaked in gasoline before the first tracer round found the vapor.
The explosion was instant and total.
The fighter transformed into a fireball, burning at 2,000°.
Hoffman never had time to scream.
The fire consumed him before nerve signals could reach his brain.
Rodriguez pulled his P40 through the top of the climb, inverted again, looking for targets.
Three German fighters were falling toward the desert.
The fourth was running, diving away at full throttle.
He considered pursuing, but decided against it.
Let him go.
Let him tell the story back at base.
Let him explain how six obsolete American fighters had destroyed three of Germany’s best in less than 10 seconds.
let the fear spread through the Luftwafa pilots ready rooms.
Müller made it back to Tunis with 43 bullet holes in his aircraft.
The mechanics counted them twice, not believing a plane could fly with that much damage.
Mueller never flew combat again, not because he was wounded.
He hadn’t been scratched, but something inside him had broken.
The absolute certainty that German pilots and German planes were superior.
He’d seen three friends die in seconds, torn apart by American guns he’d been told were inferior.
He started drinking.
Within a month, he was transferred back to Germany.
A training command, they said, but everyone knew the truth.
He’d lost his nerve.
The Americans and their P40s had broken him.
The P40’s reputation changed after that day.
Word spread from both sides.
The American pilots started calling their planes flying destroyers.
The Germans stopped laughing and started respecting.
Orders came down from Luftvafa command.
Engage P40s only with altitude advantage and numerical superiority.
Never follow them into a dive.
Never assume they’re running.
The 650 caliber guns could melt through a Messormid’s wings in seconds.
Physics didn’t care about racial superiority or political ideology.
Bullets were bullets, and the Americans had a lot of them.
Through late 1943 and into 1944, the lesson kept being learned in blood.
In Italy, German pilots discovered that American B-25 Mitchell bombers carried 1450 caliber machine guns.
14.
A Faula Wolf pilot from Stogart named Vilhelm Kron attacked one over Anio.
The Mitchell’s gunners put 800 rounds into his fighter in 4 seconds.
The engines separated from the fuselage.
Both wings folded backwards.
Crayons managed to bail out, but his parachute was shredded by the same guns that had destroyed his plane.
He fell 6,000 ft, conscious all the way down, knowing exactly how many seconds he had left.
By early 1944, even the vaunted Messor Schmidt BF 109 was struggling to survive.
The fighter that had dominated European skies since 1939 was being hunted by American P-51 Mustangs and P-47 Thunderbolts.
The Germans kept improving it, adding bigger engines, heavier armament, more armor, but each modification made it heavier, slower, less maneuverable.
The BF- 109K model could barely outclimb the American fighters it was supposed to destroy.
German pilots started calling it the flying brick.
The truth was simple and brutal.
The war had moved past the BF 109.
It was designed in 1935 when fighters had two machine guns and combat happened at 200 mph.
By 1944, American fighters carried 850 caliber guns and fought at 400 mph.
The BF 109’s narrow landing gear, designed for grass fields, collapsed on bomb damaged runways.
Its range, adequate for fighting over France, couldn’t protect bombers over Germany.
Its armament, deadly against Polish biplanes, bounced off American armor plate.
April 14th, 1944 over Bavaria.
Major Curt Steinberg from Frankfurt was leading the last operational squadron of BF 109 G6 models.
24 planes had taken off to intercept American bombers.
Six made it back.
Steinberg watched his pilots die one by one, overwhelmed by the sheer firepower of American escorts.
A P47 Thunderbolt caught his wingman in a dive.
850 caliber guns firing at once.
The BF 109 disintegrated.
Not crashed, not exploded, disintegrated.
One second it was an aircraft, the next it was confetti.
Steinberg survived that day by running.
Simply running, diving away from combat, using every trick he’d learned in five years of war to avoid American gunfire.
He’d started the war as a knight of the air, fighting honorable duels in the sky.
He ended it hiding in clouds, praying American radar wouldn’t find him.
His BF- 109, once the pride of the Luftwaffa, was reduced to skullking around the edges of battles, looking for wounded bombers to pick off.
Even that was dangerous.
American bombers flew in boxes, covering each other with overlapping fields of fire, attack one, and faced dozens of 50 caliber guns.
The mechanic from Ohio who maintained Steinberg’s plane knew the truth even if the major wouldn’t admit it.
The BF 109 was finished.
Not just this particular aircraft, but the entire concept.
The war had evolved past it.
American factories were producing P-51 Mustangs that could fly to Berlin and back, fighting all the way.
They carried enough ammunition to engage for 20 minutes.
They had bubble canopies for perfect visibility.
They had comfortable cockpits with heating.
Meanwhile, German pilots sat in cramped BF 109 cockpits, freezing at altitude, watching their fuel gauges and ammunition counters, knowing they had maybe 60 seconds of combat before they had to run for home.
By December 1944, the Luftwaffa was conscripting children.
16-year-olds with 20 hours of flight training were being strapped into BF- 109s and told to ram American bombers.
Suicide attacks because they didn’t have enough fuel for real combat.
The greatest fighter of the 1930s had been reduced to a guided missile with a teenager inside.
The boy from Dresden, who climbed into a BF 109 on Christmas Eve 1944, had never fired its guns in training.
There wasn’t enough ammunition.
He took off with orders to ram a B17.
He never found one.
P-51 Mustangs found him first.
The American pilots reported it wasn’t even a fight.
The German boy flew straight and level, either frozen with fear or simply not knowing what else to do.
They put 200 rounds into his plane out of mercy.
Quick and clean.
Better than burning alive after a ramming attack.
When the war ended in May 1945, thousands of BF 109 sat abandoned on airfields across Europe.
The greatest fighter plane of its generation, reduced to scrap metal.
Some were buried in mass graves, bulldozed into pits, and covered with earth.
Others were melted down, their aluminum turned into pots and pans.
The Americans and British took a few hundred for evaluation.
The Soviets grabbed more, but most were simply abandoned, left to rust in fields where farmers eventually turned them into chicken coups and storage sheds.
The story should have ended there.
The BF 109 was a relic as obsolete as a biplane.
Jets were the future.
The Americans had their F80 Shooting Star.
The British had the Clauster Meteor.
Even the Germans had managed to field the Mi262 jet fighter in the war’s final months.
Propeller fighters were history, museums pieces.
Except history has a sense of irony, and the BF 109 wasn’t quite finished yet.
Spain had received BF 109s during their civil war and kept building them under license.
When Germany fell, Spain kept the production lines running.
They couldn’t get German engines anymore, so they tried something insane.
They fitted British Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, the same engines that powered the Spitfire and P-51 Mustang.
The irony was thick enough to cut.
The BF 109, designed to destroy British planes, now flew with a British heart.
They called it the Hispano Aviaton H112.
It looked like a Messersmidt but roared like a Spitfire.
The Spanish pilots who flew these hybrid fighters reported they were actually better than the original.
The Merlin engine was more reliable than the German Dameler Benz.
It had better fuel injection, smoother power delivery, and didn’t catch fire as often.
Spanish mechanics joke that the British had finally fixed the BF 109.
German engineers who heard about it were reportedly furious.
Their masterpiece had been improved by their enemies.
But the Spanish didn’t care about hurt feelings.
They had a fighter that worked, even if it was a mongrel.
In 1948, something even stranger happened.
The new state of Israel, desperate for military aircraft, bought 25 BF-1009 from Czechoslovakia.
The checks had been building them under license during the war and kept the production lines running afterwards.
They called them Avia S199s, and they were terrible.
The checks had run out of German engines and fitted inferior Czech ones instead.
The planes were noseheavy, prone to ground loops, and killed more Israeli pilots in training than Arab pilots did in combat.
But Israel had no choice.
They were fighting for survival against five Arab armies.
Egyptian Spitfires were strafing Tel Aviv.
Syrian aircraft were bombing Kibbutum.
The Israelis would have flown crop dusters with machine guns if that’s all they had.
The Czech Mess were dangerous, unreliable death traps, but they were better than nothing.
Israeli pilots called them, Hebrew for mule, because they were stubborn and hard to handle.
May 29th, 1948.
The skies over Tel Aviv.
Modia Alon, an Israeli pilot who had flown for the RAF during the war, took off in an Avia S199 to intercept two Egyptian Spitfires attacking the city.
Think about that for a moment.
A Jewish pilot flying a German-designed fighter built in Czechoslovakia, defending the Jewish state against British-built fighters flown by Egyptians.
If he wrote it as fiction, no one would believe it.
But it happened.
Alan shot down both Spitfires, becoming the first fighter pilot in Israeli history to score victories.
The BF 109, designed in Nazi Germany to establish racial superiority, had just defended the Jewish homeland.
The Israeli pilots learned to manage the S199’s vicious tendencies through brutal experience.
Take off with full right rudder or the torque would flip you into the ground.
Land at exactly 95 mph, too fast, and you’d ground loop too slow and you’d stall.
Never trust the engine in a dive.
It would quit without warning.
The plane killed seven Israeli pilots in accidents, but it also gave Israel air superiority in the crucial early months of the war.
Egyptian and Syrian pilots learned to fear the distinctive silhouette.
They didn’t know the Israeli planes were held together with wire and prayer.
By 1950, Israel had acquired better fighters, P-51 Mustangs and Spitfires.
Ironically enough, the Czech Mess were retired, sold for scrap.
Most were melted down, but the Israeli Air Force kept one as a memorial.
It sits in a museum now.
this German fighter that helped create Israel.
Elderly survivors sometimes stand in front of it and cry.
Though whether from memories of the Holocaust or the War of Independence, no one asks.
Meanwhile, in a twist that would have made Gerbles choke on his cyanide, Finland was still flying BF 109s as frontline fighters.
They’d received them from Germany during the war and maintained them brilliantly.
Finnish mechanics used to keeping equipment running through Arctic winters turned maintenance into an art form.
They modified the engines for cold weather, improved the heating systems, and somehow kept 60-year-old aircraft flying well into the 1950s.
Finnish pilots loved them.
After flying Soviet aircraft during their alliance with the USSR, the German fighters felt like sports cars.
The Finnish pilot from Helsinki who flew the last operational BF-109 sorty in March 1954 probably didn’t think about the history he was ending.
He was just flying a routine patrol along the Soviet border watching for incursions.
The BF 109 G6 beneath him was 18 years old, had been rebuilt four times, and had parts from 12 different aircraft, but it still flew.
The engines still roared.
The guns, never fired in anger since 1944, were still loaded and ready.
He landed after 90 minutes, logged the flight, and walked away.
No ceremony, no recognition that an era had ended.
The age of the BF- 109 as a military aircraft was over.
But the story still wasn’t finished.
In the 1960s, something bizarre happened.
A British film company making the Battle of Britain needed German fighters for the movie.
Real BF 109s were almost extinct.
The few in museums were too valuable to fly.
Then someone remembered Spain.
The Spanish Air Force still had those Merlin engine messes in storage.
Would they sell them? For the right price, Spain would sell anything.
The film company bought 50 Hispano Avietion HA112s.
BF 109s with British engines were going to play German fighters attacking Britain.
The irony was lost on no one.
The British pilots hired to fly these Messersmid Spitfire hybrids for the film reported they handled beautifully, better than either original aircraft in some ways.
The Merlin engine gave them Spitfire reliability with Messersmmit agility.
One pilot, a former RAF squadron leader, said it was like flying what the war could have been if everyone had shared their best technology.
Instead of trying to kill each other, they could have built the perfect fighter together.
But that’s not how history works.
During filming, one of the Spanish Messids crashed in Ireland.
The pilot survived, but the plane was destroyed.
Local farmers gathered pieces as souvenirs.
A German fighter with a British engine owned by Spain, flown by an Irishman, crashed while pretending to attack Britain.
Pieces of it ended up decorating Irish pubs.
If you drink at Flanigans in County Wikllo, you’re sitting under a piece of BF- 109 propeller.
The farmers who found it don’t know its history.
They just know it’s from that war movie filmed in 1968.
The real twist came in the 1970s.
Wealthy collectors started buying surplus military aircraft, not for museums, but to fly.
They wanted to own history, to sit where Luftwaffa aces sat to feel what combat pilots felt.
But real BF109s were almost impossible to find.
The few remaining examples were in museums or had been destroyed.
Then someone had an idea.
Why not build new ones? Not replicas, but real BF109’s using original blueprints and specifications.
It was insane.
It was also brilliant.
A company in Germany started the project in 1982.
They tracked down original blueprints hidden in an attic in Munich.
They found machine tools from the Messmmet factory in a warehouse in Augsburg.
They even located former Messmmet workers, men in their 70s who remembered how to shape aluminum the old way.
The first new BF-109 flew in 1991.
It used a modern American engine because original Dameler Benz engines were extinct.
But everything else was authentic, right down to the narrow landing gear that had killed so many German pilots.
The test pilot for that first flight was a former Luftwaffa pilot who had flown BF-1019s in combat.
He was 73 years old, hadn’t flown in 20 years.
But when he climbed into that cockpit, muscle memory took over.
He started the engine, felt the familiar vibration, smelled the oil and aviation fuel.
For a moment he was 20 again, taking off from a grass field in France.
Then reality returned.
This wasn’t 1943.
The war was long over.
His friends were long dead.
He was an old man flying an old design for rich collectors who would never know what it really meant.
He flew for 30 minutes, gentle turns, nothing aggressive.
When he landed, reporters asked how it felt.
He stared at them for a long moment, then said something in German that translated roughly to like dancing with a ghost.
He never flew again.
The company found younger pilots, men who hadn’t been there, who could fly the BF 109 without memories getting in the way.
Today, in 2024, there are more flyable BF 109s than at any time since 1955, collectors have spent millions restoring crashed examples pulled from Norwegian fjords and Russian swamps.
Spain sold its remaining HA112s to collectors who converted them back to German specifications.
The Czech Republic found a warehouse full of S199 parts and sold them to restorers.
There are probably 30 flying BF 109s worldwide owned by millionaires who display them at air shows.
The crowds love them.
They line up to see the German fighter, to hear its engine, to watch it fly.
They take photos, buy souvenirs, tell their children about the war, but they don’t really understand.
They see a beautiful machine, elegant in its lethality.
They don’t see the 18-year-old from Hamburg who burned alive in his cockpit.
They don’t see the Jewish pilot using one to defend Tel Aviv.
They don’t see the Finnish mechanic keeping one flying through an Arctic winter with salvaged parts and determination.
At an air show in Wisconsin last year, a restored BF109G6 flew alongside a P-51D Mustang.
The announcer called it a display of former enemies now at peace.
The crowd applauded, but the 98-year-old American veteran in the stands didn’t applaud.
He remembered when that wasn’t a display.
When those two planes meeting meant someone was about to die, he watched the BF 109 do a low pass.
the Merlin engine roaring.
Even the authentic restorations use British engines now.
The irony continues.
His hands shook, not from age, but from memory, from remembered fear.
His grandson asked if he wanted to meet the pilot, get a photo with the plane.
The old man shook his head.
That plane, or one just like it, had killed his best friend over Berlin in 1945.
shot him down, watched him burn.
The German pilot had probably thought he was doing his duty.
The American pilot certainly had.
Both were boys, really.
Scared boys trying to kill each other from machines they barely understood.
Now, one was dead 79 years, and the other was watching his killer’s aircraft fly loops for entertainment.
The restoration industry has created a strange economy around the BF- 109.
Original parts sell for thousands of dollars.
A genuine BF-19 gun site costs more than most cars.
An intact engine, if you can find one, sells for half a million dollars.
There’s a man in New Zealand who makes reproduction BF 109 propellers.
He’s backed up for 3 years.
A company in Texas makes replica instruments.
They ship worldwide to collectors trying to make their war birds authentic.
as if authenticity is possible when the context is gone.
The strangest part is where these restored BF 109s end up.
There is one in Japan owned by a businessman who was born in Hiroshima 3 years after the bomb.
There’s one in Israel flying with the Star of David on its wings.
The ultimate historical irony.
There’s one in Russia owned by an oligarch whose grandfather died fighting the Vermacht.
These planes that once represented Nazi ideology now belong to anyone with enough money.
History has become commodity.
But perhaps the most unusual BF 109 story happened in 2018.
A farmer in Denmark was clearing a field when his plow hit something metal.
It was a BF 109F4 that had crashlanded in 1943.
The pilot had survived, been captured, and lived until 2001.
The farmer contacted aviation archaeologists who carefully excavated the plane.
It was remarkably intact, preserved by Danish Pete bog.
Inside the cockpit, they found the pilot’s lunch, black bread and sausage, still recognizable after 75 years.
They also found a photo.
A young woman smiling, standing in front of a house in Stoutgart.
Researchers tracked down the woman in the photo.
She was 93, living in a nursing home in Munich.
She had married the pilot after the war.
They had four children, 11 grandchildren.
She had thought the photo was lost forever.
When they showed it to her, she cried.
Not sad tears, but something more complex.
That photo was from before.
before the bombs, before her city was destroyed, before her brother died on the Eastern Front, before her husband came back from British prison camp, a different man.
The BF 109 had preserved a moment from a world that no longer existed.
The Danish farmer donated the aircraft to a museum, but not before the restoration team made a discovery.
The plane’s guns were still loaded.
400 rounds of ammunition ready to fire after 3/4 of a century.
The bullets were corroded but intact.
Each one designed to kill Allied airmen.
Now they’re museum pieces displayed in a case next to the aircraft.
School children on field trips ask what they are.
The guide explains they’re bullets, but the children don’t really understand.
How could they? They’ve grown up in a world where Germany and Britain are allies, where Americans have bases in Japan, where Israeli pilots train with Germans.
Last month, the last German BF 109 combat pilot died.
He was 101 years old, had shot down 17 Allied aircraft.
In his final interview recorded a week before his death, he was asked about the BF 109.
He thought for a long moment, then said, “It was a tool, like a hammer or a saw.
We used it to try to stop the bombers that were destroying our cities.
The Americans used their P-51s to protect those bombers.” Both sides thought they were right.
Both sides were just boys trying to survive.
The planes didn’t care about our politics.
They just flew or crashed based on physics and pilot skill.
He paused, then added, “I see them at air shows now.
These restored 109’s, rich men’s toys.
They fly them carefully, gently.
We flew them at the edge of destruction, pushing them until they broke.
We had to.
Our lives depended on finding that edge.
These collectors will never find it.
They don’t want to.
They want to own history without living it.
But you can’t own history.
It owns you.
Every time I close my eyes, I see those American bombers.
I see my friends burning.
I see the fighters that killed them.
The BF 109 wasn’t a beautiful machine to us.
It was life or death with wings.
Today, there’s a company in China making BF-1009 replicas, not restorations, but newbuilt copies for the collector market.
They use modern engines, modern avionics, modern materials.
They’re safer, more reliable, easier to fly than originals.
They look exactly like BF 109’s, but they’re not.
They’re what the BF- 109 would have been if it had been designed in 20 to20 instead of 1935.
The Chinese workers building them have no connection to the history.
They’re just following blueprints meeting specifications.
One worker asked about building German fighters shrugged and said through a translator, “It’s just a job.
Yesterday we built Cessna parts.
Tomorrow, who knows?” The final irony came full circle last year.
At an air show in Britain, a restored BF- 109 with a British Merlin engine was flown by a German pilot for a British crowd escorted by an American P-51 Mustang flown by a Japanese pilot.
After landing, they all had dinner together talking about flying, comparing notes on their aircraft.
The German pilot’s grandfather had flown BF 10009s in the war.
The Japanese pilot’s grandfather had flown zeros.
They laughed about it, this cosmic joke of history.
Their grandfathers had been enemies.
They were drinking buddies.
But for the old woman watching from her wheelchair at the edge of the airfield, it wasn’t funny.
She had been a nurse in London during the Blitz.
She had pulled children from bombed buildings.
She had held dying pilots, British and German, both, as they called for their mothers.
Watching that BF- 109 fly over British soil, even with a British engine, even 78 years later, made her hands shake.
Her great grandson standing beside her didn’t understand.
To him, it was just an old airplane.
To her, it was a nightmare that had never quite ended.
The BF 109 story isn’t really about the aircraft.
It’s about how machines outlive their purpose, how weapons become antiques, how enemies become friends, how history becomes entertainment.
The same design that once carried Nazi ideology now carries wealthy collectors on weekend flights.
The same guns that killed Allied airmen now sit silent in museums where school children eat lunch.
The same engines that powered the assault on Britain now power movies about that assault.
In storage facilities around the world, there are still BF- 109 parts waiting.
Propeller blades in Norway, wing sections in Russia, engines in Spain, instruments in Israel.
They’re scattered like bones.
Remnants of an empire that was supposed to last a thousand years but barely managed 12.
Collectors buy these parts, ship them globally, try to reassemble the past.
But you can’t reassemble context.
You can’t restore purpose.
You can rebuild a BF 109 down to the last rivet.
But you can’t rebuild 1943.
The mechanic from Detroit who maintains restored warb birds for a museum in Michigan understands this better than most.
He works on a BF 109 G6 that was pulled from a lake in Russia.
The pilot’s remains were still in the cockpit, 22 years old from Cologne.
They buried him with military honors in 2012, 68 years after he died.
The mechanic thinks about that boy every time he works on the plane.
Wonders what he thought in those last seconds as the lake rushed up.
Wonders if he thought about home, about family, about the girl whose photo they found in his wallet miraculously preserved.
The museum displays that photo now next to the aircraft.
Visitors snap pictures of it with their phones, post it on social media with captions like so sad or war is hell.
Then they move on to the next display.
But the mechanic can’t move on.
Every time he touches that plane, he’s touching a grave.
Every rivet, every wire, every piece of aluminum knew that boy’s last moments.
The aircraft is a tombstone that flies.
When wealthy donors pay to sit in the cockpit for photos, the mechanic wants to tell them, “A boy died in that seat.
His blood was on those controls.
Show some respect.” But he doesn’t.
The museum needs the donations.
There’s one more twist to the BF- 109 story, one that would have seemed impossible in 1945.
The Luftwaffa, rebuilt as part of NATO in the 1950s, considered buying new BF- 109s, not restored ones, but newly manufactured fighters based on the original design, but with modern improvements.
The project got as far as blueprints before someone in the West German government realized the political implications.
Germany buying Messids again.
The headlines wrote themselves.
The project was quietly killed.
The Luftwaffa bought American F-104 star fighters instead, which turned out to be far more dangerous than any BF- 109 ever was.
But the idea wouldn’t die.
In the 1980s, a group of engineers proposed an updated BF 109 for the civilian arerobatic market.
Lighter materials, modern engine, but the same basic design.
They argued the BF- 109’s handling characteristics were perfect for aerobatic competition.
They were probably right.
The narrow landing gear that killed so many wartime pilots made for incredibly precise control in the air.
The design that had been a liability in 1945 would have been an asset in 1985.
But again, politics intervened.
The BF 109 carried too much historical weight.
It couldn’t be separated from what it had been.
So, the BF 109 remains frozen in time, a snapshot of 1935 aeronautical engineering that somehow keeps flying into the 21st century.
Every restored example is a contradiction, a weapon of war transformed into entertainment, a symbol of oppression owned by the descendants of the oppressed.
A machine designed for killing, maintained with loving care by people who pray.
It never kills again.
The American pilot from Colorado who flies a restored BF 109 on the air show circuit tells audiences that flying it helps him understand history.
But does it really? Can you understand the Eastern Front by flying gentle arerobatics over Wisconsin? Can you comprehend the Battle of Britain by doing low passes for photographers? He’s flying the same machine but in a different universe.
His BF 109 has never been shot at, never had to fight for fuel, never carried the weight of a nation’s survival.
It’s a BF 109 in shape only.
The soul, if machines have souls, died with the Third Reich.
There’s something unsettling about seeing a BF 109 flying in 2024.
It’s like seeing a dinosaur in a zoo.
Fascinating, but fundamentally wrong.
These aircraft belong to a specific moment in history.
A moment we claim to have moved beyond.
Yet we keep them alive, spend millions maintaining them, risk lives flying them.
Why? Because they’re beautiful, because they’re historic, or because we need physical reminders of what we’re capable of for good and evil.
The answer might be in that Danish bog where they found the crashed BF 109 preserved in Pete for 75 years.
It was more honest than any restored example.
It showed what these aircraft really were.
Machines that crashed, that failed, that killed their pilots as often as enemy fire did.
The restored BF-1009 at air shows, gleaming with fresh paint and modern safety equipment, tell a lie about the past.
They make it look clean, manageable, safe.
The crashed plane in the bog told the truth.
War is mud and blood and boys dying for reasons.
They barely understand.
But people don’t want truth at air shows.
They want spectacle.
They want to see the bad guys plane do loops and rolls.
They want to take selfies with swastikas, carefully historically accurate, the owners insist.
They want to buy t-shirts with BF 109 silhouettes.
They want history packaged as entertainment, danger transformed into nostalgia.
And maybe that’s not entirely wrong.
Maybe it’s better that BF 109’s carry tourists instead of bombs.
Maybe it’s progress that German engineering serves weekend hobbyists instead of genocidal regimes.
Still, there’s that moment at every air show when the BF 109 flies over and the crowd goes quiet just for a second.
Some genetic memory, some inherited trauma, some whisper from the past that says that’s the enemy.
Then the moment passes.
The crowd cheers.
The pilot waves.
The enemy has become entertainment.
The weapon has become art.
The past has become present, sanitized, and safe.
The restoration business will probably keep BF 109’s flying for another 50 years.
Long after the last person who saw them in combat has died, long after the last person who remembers what they meant has gone.
They’ll become pure machines, then, divorced from context.
Future generations will see them the way we see Viking swords or Roman catapults as artifacts of ancient conflicts that no longer matter.
The emotional weight will be gone.
The fear will be academic.
But right now in 2024, that weight still exists.
There are still people who flinch when they hear a BF-1009’s engine.
Still families who lost everything to bombs dropped by these aircraft.
Still graves marked by their guns.
The restoration industry can rebuild the machines, but it can’t rebuild the world that gave them meaning.
And maybe that’s the real lesson of the BF- 109’s post-war story.
You can preserve the past, but you can’t preserve its context.
You can maintain the weapon, but not the war.
You can keep the aircraft flying, but not the ideology that built it.
The last word belongs to that German pilot who died last month, the one who flew 17 combat missions in BF109s.
In his final interview, he was asked if he was proud of his service.
He thought for a long time, then said, “I was proud of my flying.
I was proud of protecting German cities.
I was proud of my fellow pilots.” But proud of what we were fighting for? No.
Never.
The BF 109 was a beautiful aircraft served by brave men in service of an evil cause.
That’s the tragedy.
All that skill, all that courage, all that sacrifice wasted on the wrong side of history.
When I see restored 109s now, I don’t see beautiful machines.
I see waste.
Magnificent, tragic waste.
He died three days later.
They played Bach at his funeral.
No mention of his war record.
No mention of the BF 109.
Just an old man who had lived too long, seen too much, remembered what everyone else wanted to forget.
His family donated his flight logs to a museum.
17 combat missions documented in Fading, Inc.
Each entry, a story of survival against American guns that fired 2400 rounds per minute.
Each landing a miracle of physics and luck.
each take off a roll of dice with death.
The museum filed the logs away carefully.
They’ll be digitized eventually, preserved forever in ones and zeros.
Future historians will study them, looking for patterns, analyzing tactics, writing dissertations about combat psychology.
But they’ll miss the main point, the thing that old pilot understood in his bones.
The BF 109 wasn’t about technology or tactics.
It was about boys dying in aluminum coffins 5 miles above the Earth.
Everything else, the restoration, the air shows, the museums, is just society’s way of pretending that wasn’t the only thing that mattered.
The A20 Havoc and P40 Warhawk proved that American firepower could destroy anything the Axis flew.
The BF 109 proved that even the best engineering serves the ideology that wields it.
Both lessons matter.
Both are being forgotten.
In 50 years, when the last restored BF 109 makes its final flight, when the engines finally fall silent, when the aluminum finally returns to Earth, perhaps we’ll remember what these machines really were.
Not beautiful artifacts of aviation history, but tools of mass murder that young men turned into angels and demons 5 miles above a burning world.
That’s the real story of these aircraft, not the specifications or the combat records or the restoration efforts.
The real story is the 22-year-old from Cologne at the bottom of a Russian lake.
The Japanese pilot laughing until American guns turned his laughter into screams.
The German pilots who thought the P40 was obsolete until 650s turned their wings into confetti.
the boys on both sides who climbed into aluminum death traps and tried to kill strangers for reasons that made sense to politicians, but not to the mothers who would mourn them.
The guns are silent now.
The engines run on schedule, not desperation.
The pilots fly for fun, not survival.
But somewhere in the metal itself, in the rivets and the aluminum skin, the memory remains of a time when the sky was a battlefield and these machines were the swords.
When American guns fired 2400 rounds per minute and German boys fell like rain.
When the BF 109 ruled European skies until it didn’t.
When engineering brilliance served ideological madness.
when the best and brightest built the best machines to do the worst things.
That’s what we’re really preserving when we restore these aircraft.
Not history, but horror.
Not nostalgia, but nightmare.
Every restored BF 109, every flying P40, every operational A20 is a reminder of industrial killing perfected to art.
We keep them flying because we can’t quite believe we did what we did.
We need the physical proof, the tangible reminder that yes, we built machines specifically to kill each other in the sky and we were very, very good at it.
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