October 14th, 1944.
Petro Pavlovskhatsky, Soviet Union.
The American ferry pilot from Minnesota stood on the frozen tarmac, watching his breath cloud in the minus 20° air, wondering how the hell he’d ended up 5,000 m from home, about to hand over a P63 King Cobra to a Soviet pilot who spoke no English.
The aircraft sat there like a predator waiting, its massive 37 mm cannon protruding from the nose spinner like a steel finger pointing at death itself.
Captain James Mitchell had flown fighters for 3 years, but this route from Great Falls, Montana through Alaska and across the Bearing Straight into Siberia made him feel like he was delivering weapons to another planet.
The Red Air Force needed these planes desperately, and the Americans were sending them over by the thousands through the most dangerous ferry route ever attempted.
The Soviet pilot, a major with ice blue eyes and scars across his left cheek, walked around the P63, running his hands along its aluminum skin like a man appraising a horse.
Mitchell knew what those scars meant.
This wasn’t some rookie.
This was a man who’d been fighting the Germans since 1941, probably been shot down multiple times, probably killed more enemy pilots than Mitchell had ever seen.
The major stopped at the nose, tapped the cannon barrel, and said something in Russian that sounded like approval.
Through the interpreter, a tired-looking lieutenant from Vladivosto, Mitchell learned the major had been flying the P39 Araco Cobra, the P63’s older brother, for 18 months.
He’d shot down 23 German aircraft with its nose cannon.
Now he wanted to know everything about this new bird.
They climbed into the cockpit together.
Mitchell squeezed behind the pilot seat in a space meant for ammunition boxes.
The instrument panel was already labeled in cerillic characters, part of the lend lease agreement.
Mitchell pointed at gauges, switches, levers using hand signals, and the few Russian words he’d picked up.
Oil pressure, fuel mixture, propeller pitch.
The major nodded, understanding through the universal language of aviation.
When Mitchell showed him the cannon’s ammunition counter, 58 rounds of high explosive shells, the major smiled for the first time.
It was the smile of a man who’d just been handed a better tool for his trade.
The demonstration flight lasted 20 minutes.
Mitchell took off first in another P63 with the major following in close formation.
At 8,000 ft, they went through basic maneuvers, rolls, loops, high-speed dives.
The King Cobra could do 390 mph at sea level, 410 at 25,000 ft.
Not the fastest fighter in the sky, but stable as a rock and tough as a sledgehammer.
The major pushed it harder than Mitchell expected, pulling seven G’s in a climbing turn that made Mitchell’s vision tunnel.
These Soviet pilots flew like men who expected to die anyway.
Might as well push the envelope until it tore.
Back on the ground, the major shook Mitchell’s hand with a grip that could crack walnuts.
Through the interpreter, he said the Americans built good planes, but flew them like accountants.
The Russians flew them like cas.
Mitchell wanted to argue, but knew it was probably true.
The Soviets had been using American P39s in ways Bell aircraft never intended.
Flying them at treetop level, using the nose cannon like a sniper rifle, getting in close enough to smell German exhaust before firing.
They’d turned a plane American pilots considered mediocre into one of the most successful fighters on the Eastern Front.
Mitchell watched the major taxi away toward the staging area where dozens of other P63s waited for their journey west to the German front.
He’d never see that pilot again.
Never know if he survived the war.
That was the nature of this operation.
Deliver the planes, watch them disappear into the Soviet war machine, go back for more.
In the mess hall that night, eating borched and black bread with the other ferry pilots, Mitchell heard stories from the Eastern Front that made his blood run cold.
Tank battles with 3,000 vehicles.
Cities under siege for 900 days.
Pilots ramming enemy bombers when they ran out of ammunition.
The Russians weren’t fighting the same war as the Americans.
They were fighting for survival.
Three weeks later, different pilot, same route.
Lieutenant Robert Chen from San Francisco had just landed at Gnome, Alaska after the worst flight of his life.
Ice had built up on the wings so thick he could barely see past it.
The decing boots failed 50 m out, and he’d had to dive repeatedly to lower altitude, trading altitude for temperature, hoping the ice would melt before he hit the ocean.
The P63 handled like a drunk elephant with all that extra weight, but it kept flying.
That was the thing about these bell fighters.
They might not win beauty contests, but they’d get you home with half the tail shot off and an engine running on prayer.
The weather briefing for the next leg to Siberia looked like something from a nightmare.
A massive low pressure system was spinning up in the Bearing Sea, winds gusting to 70 mph, visibility down to 50 yards in blowing snow.
Normal pilots would wait.
Ferry pilots on the Alaska Siberia route didn’t have that luxury.
The Soviets needed these planes yesterday.
Every day of delay meant Soviet pilots flying inferior aircraft against the Luftwaffa.
Chen had met some of those Soviet pilots at the transfer points, seen the desperation in their eyes.
They’d lost so many comrades, were so tired of being outgunned by German fighters.
Chen took off at 0400, climbing through clouds so thick it felt like flying through cotton.
The P63’s instruments were his only connection to reality.
Altitude, climbing through 3,000 ft, heading 285° magnetic, outside temperature minus 35° F.
The controls felt sluggish.
Early signs of icing despite the functioning boots this time.
He pushed the throttle forward, climbing faster, hoping to get above the weather.
At 15,000 ft, he broke through into brilliant sunshine.
Below the cloud deck stretched to every horizon like an ocean of white foam.
Somewhere under those clouds was the bearing straight, 60 m of the most dangerous water on Earth.
Navigation was by dead reckoning and radio beacon when you could find one.
The Russians had set up beacon stations along the route, but they worked about half the time.
When they did work, you still had to factor in wind drift, magnetic variation near the pole, and the fact that your compass would start acting drunk this far north.
Chen had worked out his time, and heading on the ground, written it on his kneeboard.
If his calculations were right, he should hit the Siberian coast in 90 minutes.
If they were wrong, he’d run out of fuel over the Arctic Ocean.
The P63 carried enough gas for about 800 miles.
The route was 750.
No margin for error.
An hour in, the clouds below started breaking up.
Chen could see water through the gaps.
Gray, angry, covered with white caps.
No ships, no land.
Nothing but ocean that would kill you in 3 minutes if you went down in it.
The survival gear included a rubber raft, but that was more psychological comfort than practical tool.
Nobody survived ditching in the Bearing Straight in October.
The water temperature was 34°.
Your body would shut down before you could even inflate the raft.
The fuel gauge read half tanks when Chen spotted the Siberian coast.
Relief flooded through him like warm whiskey.
The landscape below looked like Mars, all tundra and rock, not a tree for a thousand miles.
But it was land, solid ground where a man could survive if he had to bail out.
He found the beacon at Providenia Bay, adjusted his heading for the final leg to Marovo.
The weather was clearing, visibility improving to maybe 5 miles.
He could see other P63s ahead and behind, strung out along the route like beads on a string.
Everyone flying alone but together.
Each pilot in his aluminum cocoon, burning dinosaurs to deliver democracy’s arsenal to Stalin’s Air Force.
The landing at Marovo was rough.
The runway was packed snow over perafrost, slicker than ice, and about as forgiving as concrete.
Chen’s P63 slid sideways for a hundred yards before the tires bit.
Ground crew rushed out.
Russians bundled in so many layers they looked like walking hay stacks.
They guided him to a revetment where his plane would be refueled and checked before a Soviet pilot flew it west.
Chen climbed out on legs that felt like jelly.
He’d been flying for 4 hours in constant tension, every muscle clenched against turbulence and fear.
In the operation shack, a wood stove glowed red hot, and Chen stood as close as he could without catching fire.
A Soviet captain brought him tea in a glass with a metal holder, so strong it could strip paint, sweet with enough sugar to make his teeth ache.
They communicated in gestures and broken English.
The captain had been flying P39s against the Germans, was transitioning to P63s.
He wanted to know about the plane’s quirks, its personality.
Every aircraft had one.
Chen told him about the P63’s tendency to yaw left in a steep climb.
The way the cannon recoil would throw off your aim if you fired in a turn.
The captain nodded, filing it away.
These details could mean the difference between victory and a fiery death.
Meanwhile, 5,000 m away in the Kural Islands, Lieutenant Kazuo Yamada of the Imperial Japanese Navy was reading intelligence reports about these new American fighters appearing in Soviet colors.
The P63 King Cobra looked similar to the P39 Araco Cobra they’d faced in the Pacific, but the report suggested it was faster, climbed better, and carried a heavier cannon.
Yamada and his fellow pilots weren’t particularly concerned.
They flew the Mitsubishi A6M0, finest carrier fighter ever built.
Light, agile, with incredible range.
They’d been shooting down American planes since Pearl Harbor.
The Japanese pilots had a saying, “The Americans build fighters like they build cars.
Heavy, powerful, no soul.” The Zero was the opposite.
It was a sword, not a hammer.
In the hands of a skilled pilot, it could dance around those clumsy American crates.
Yamada had 17 confirmed kills, including three P40s and two F4F Wildcats.
He’d seen American pilots try to dogfight Zeros and watched them die.
The Americans were brave, but predictable.
They flew by the book, used tactics that worked in training, but fell apart in real combat.
The nose cannon on the P63 might be bigger, but you still had to hit your target.
Good luck doing that when a zero was dancing on your tail.
What Yamada didn’t know was that American and Soviet pilots had been sharing information about Japanese tactics for months.
The Soviets had fought the Japanese in 1939 at Kulken Gaul, learned hard lessons about the Zero’s capabilities.
They knew you never tried to turn with a zero.
You used speed and altitude, slashed through their formations, climbed away before they could react.
The P63’s nose cannon was perfect for this.
One hit from a 37 mm shell would tear a zero in half.
The Zero’s weakness was its light construction.
No armor, no self-sealing fuel tanks.
It was built for offense, not survival.
Soviet Major Victor Klov had been chosen to lead the first P63 squadron into potential combat against the Japanese.
He’d survived three years fighting the Germans, been shot down twice, had burn scars covering 30% of his body.
He’d transitioned from P39s to P63s, and immediately recognized the new plane’s advantages.
The P63 climbed 2,000 ft per minute faster than the P39, crucial for energy tactics.
The improved cannon had a higher muzzle velocity, better accuracy at longer range.
Most importantly, the P63 had better armor around the pilot and engine.
It could take hits that would destroy a P39.
Klov trained his pilots relentlessly through the winter of 1944.
They practiced deflection shooting at high angles, boom and zoom attacks, coordinated slashing attacks from multiple directions.
He hammered into them the cardinal rule.
Never get slow against Japanese fighters.
Speed was life.
The P63 could outdive anything the Japanese had.
Could zoom climb away from trouble.
Use those advantages.
Forget everything about dog fighting.
This was assassination, not a duel.
Get in fast, shoot, get out.
Let the cannon do the work.
The first real test came in April 1945.
The Soviet Union, preparing to enter the war against Japan, had moved several P63 squadrons to the Far East.
Tensions were high along the Manurion border.
Both sides conducted reconnaissance flights that were really probing attacks.
On April 15th, Klov’s squadron intercepted a flight of six Japanese aircraft near the Amir River.
Four zeros and two Kai 43 Hayabusa fighters.
The Japanese pilots led by Lieutenant Commander Hiroshi Tanaka expected another easy victory against Soviet pilots flying American castoffs.
The engagement lasted less than three minutes.
Klov’s 8 P63s came out of the sun at 400 mph, 1,000 ft above the Japanese formation.
Tanaka saw them at the last second, started to bank his zero into a climbing turn, the classic Japanese defensive move that had saved him dozens of times.
But the P63s didn’t follow.
They slashed through the formation like scythes, nose cannons thundering.
Clov’s first burst caught a zero at 300 yd.
The 37mm shells didn’t just damage the fighter, they deleted it from existence.
The Zero’s fuel tanks exploded, wings folded, the aircraft disintegrating into burning confetti.
Another P63 pilot, Senior Lieutenant Pavl Deitriv from Stalingrad, lined up a deflection shot on a K43 trying to dive away.
The Japanese pilot was good, jinking hard, making himself a difficult target.
But the P63’s computing gun site, an American innovation, calculated the lead automatically.
Demetria fired a three round burst.
The first shell missed.
The second clipped the K43’s tail.
The third entered just behind the cockpit.
The explosion was so violent that pieces of the Japanese fighter damaged another Kai 43 flying alongside.
Tanaka, stunned by the violence and speed of the attack, tried to reorganize his remaining fighters.
But the P63s were already climbing away, using their superior speed to open the distance.
He ordered his pilots to pursue, but it was hopeless.
The Zeros, magnificent at low speed, couldn’t match the P63s in a high-speed climb.
Tanaka watched them disappear into the sun, reformed his decimated flight, and headed home.
In his afteraction report, he wrote that the Soviet tactics were entirely different from previous encounters and the nose cannon’s effectiveness was beyond our expectations.
The Japanese quickly developed new tactics to counter the P63 threat.
They tried flying in loose formations to avoid multiple losses from single attack runs.
They posted high alitude scouts to spot incoming attacks.
They even tried night interceptions, hoping to negate the P63 speed advantage.
Nothing really worked.
The P63 in Soviet hands had become exactly what it was designed to be, a high alitude interceptor that could destroy enemy aircraft before they knew they were under attack.
Captain Ichiro Sasaki learned this lesson the hard way on May 3rd, 1945, leading a reconnaissance flight over Soviet positions in Sakalene.
His flight of four zeros was bounced by P63s from 12,000 ft.
Sasaki, a veteran with over 2,000 combat hours, never even saw the attackers until his wingman exploded.
The P63’s cannon shell had hit the Zero’s cockpit directly, vaporizing the pilot instantly.
The aircraft flew on for several seconds, a ghost ship, before rolling inverted and diving into the forest below.
Sasaki broke hard left, pulling 8 G’s, graying out from the acceleration.
His Zero could turn inside anything the Americans built.
He was sure of it.
But these Soviet pilots weren’t trying to turn with him.
They extended away, climbing, setting up another attack run.
Sasaki saw the game now.
They were using the P63 like a cavalry saber, slashing attacks from superior energy.
He ordered his remaining pilots to dive for the deck, get into the terrain where the P63s couldn’t use their speed advantage.
It almost worked.
The Zeros made it down to treetop level, weaving between hills, using the terrain as cover, but Senior Lieutenant Mikuel Vulov, flying his P63 like a man possessed, followed them down.
At 350 mph, 50 ft off the ground, he lined up on Sasaki’s number three.
The Japanese pilot saw him coming, tried to break into him, force an overshoot.
Vulov fired at maximum deflection, walking his cannon shells across the Zero’s flight path.
One shell was enough.
It hit the Zero’s wing route, and the entire wing separated.
The aircraft cartw wheeled into the forest, disappearing in a ball of fire and pine trees.
Sasaki and his remaining wingmen escaped by flying into a valley too narrow for the P63s to follow safely.
But the message was clear.
The days of Japanese air superiority were over.
The Zero, which had dominated Pacific skies for four years, was now prey.
The Hunter had become the hunted.
Sasaki’s report to headquarters was blunt.
The enemy’s new fighter possesses a cannon of unprecedented destructive power.
Our aircraft cannot survive even glancing hits.
recommend avoiding engagement unless possessing overwhelming numerical superiority.
The Soviet pilots, meanwhile, were developing an almost mystical respect for the P63’s nose cannon.
They called it Stalin’s hammer, or sometimes just the eraser for its ability to literally erase enemy aircraft from the sky.
Captain Boris Federov, who’d flown everything from I16s to Yak 9, said the P63 gave him something he’d never had before.
The ability to kill a distance with certainty.
With machine guns, you had to get close, spray, and prey.
With the 37, you aimed, fired, and watched your enemy cease to exist.
The cannon wasn’t without its drawbacks.
The recoil was tremendous, strong enough to slow the aircraft by 5 mph with each shot.
Pilots had to be ready for it.
Had to aim with the recoil in mind.
The ammunition was limited, just 58 rounds, which meant trigger discipline was essential.
Some pilots would return from missions having fired only three or four rounds, but with three or four confirmed kills.
It was precision work, sniper flying, completely different from the spray and prey tactics of machine gun fighters.
Lieutenant Vladimir Petrov discovered another aspect of the cannon’s power during a ground attack mission in Manuria.
Ordered to strafe a Japanese supply column, he approached at 200 ft, lined up on a truck carrying ammunition.
One 37 mm shell hit the truck’s bed.
The explosion was visible from 5 miles away, a pillar of fire and smoke that rose 1,000 ft.
The truck simply ceased to exist along with the trucks immediately ahead and behind it.
Secondary explosions continued for 10 minutes.
Petrov realized he wasn’t just flying a fighter, he was flying artillery with wings.
The psychological effect on Japanese pilots was profound.
Word spread quickly through their squadrons about the new Soviet fighters that could kill from ranges previously considered safe.
Pilots who’d been flying aggressively for years became cautious, tentative.
They started avoiding combat when possible, no longer confident in their aircraft’s ability to survive even brief engagements.
The Zero’s advantages, agility, range, visibility, meant nothing if you exploded before getting close enough to use them.
Lieutenant Tekashi Nakamura, stationed in northern Korea, wrote in his diary, “We laugh no more at American aircraft,” “The Russians fly them like demons, and their cannon speaks death from afar.” Suzuki was hit today from at least 400 meters.
I was flying beside him, saw the shell coming like a black dot growing larger.
It hit his cockpit directly.
There was no Suzuki anymore, just red mist and falling metal.
We used to mock the heavy American planes.
Now we fear them.
The fear was justified.
By late July 1945, Soviet P63 squadrons were claiming kill ratios of 6:1 against Japanese fighters.
The combination of energy tactics, superior firepower, and pilot experience was devastating.
Many Soviet pilots flying P63s were veterans with hundreds of combat missions against the Luftvafa.
They knew how to use every advantage their aircraft gave them.
They knew how to survive, how to kill efficiently, how to work as a team.
Major Klov, now commanding a regiment of P63s, refined tactics even further.
He developed what he called the carousel of death.
P63s attacking in sequence from altitude.
Each aircraft making a single firing pass before climbing back to altitude while the next attacked.
The Japanese fighters trying to respond to one attack would be hit by the next.
It was relentless, mechanical, utterly without mercy.
In one engagement near Kabarovsk, his regiment destroyed 11 Japanese aircraft without loss.
The Japanese tried everything to counter the P63 threat.
They reinforced cockpit armor which added weight and reduced performance without providing real protection against 37 mm shells.
They tried new formations, new tactics, even kamicazi attacks against P63 airfields.
Nothing stopped the slaughter.
By August 1945, Japanese pilots in Manuria and Korea were refusing combat missions, claiming mechanical problems rather than face the flying coffin makers, as they’d started calling the P63s.
Captain Yamamoto, one of the few surviving Japanese aces in Manuria, made a desperate attempt on August 8th, 1945, the day the Soviet Union officially entered the war against Japan.
Leading 12 Kai 84 fighters, the best aircraft Japan had, he attempted to intercept a formation of P63s escorting bombers.
The plan was to ignore the bombers, concentrate everything on destroying the escort fighters, then deal with the bombers at leisure.
The attack started well.
Yamamoto’s fighters came in from below and behind the P63’s blind spot.
They achieved surprise, shooting down two P63s with concentrated machine gun fire before the Soviets reacted.
But then the remaining P63s did something unexpected.
They turned into the attack, accepting the turning battle the Japanese wanted, but at high speed.
Major Alexander Klub, leading the escort, had trained his pilots for exactly this scenario.
They kept their speed above 300 mph, used rolling scissors and high yo-yos, never getting slow, never playing the zero’s game.
The fight turned into a brutal melee at 10,000 ft.
Yamamoto trying to line up on a P63 was shocked when his target suddenly flipped inverted, pulled through and snapped off a cannon shot in passing.
The shell missed by inches.
Close enough that Yamamoto felt the shock wave.
Another Kai 84 wasn’t so lucky.
The P63 shell hit its engine and the entire front of the aircraft disintegrated.
The pilot, Lieutenant Tanaka, tried to bail out, but his canopy was jammed by the explosion.
He rode the burning wreck down, screaming over the radio until impact.
Yamamoto shot down one P63, pouring machine gun fire into it until the pilot bailed out.
But his victory was pirick.
Looking around, he realized he’d lost seven of his 12 fighters.
The remaining P63s were forming up for another attack run.
His ammunition was nearly exhausted, his fuel running low.
He ordered the survivors to disengage, diving away toward their base.
Of the 12 KI 84s that had taken off that morning, only four made it home.
The P63s lost three aircraft, but completed their escort mission.
The bombers reached their target unmolested.
The Soviet pilots had a saying, “The 37 speaks once, the enemy listens forever.” It was more than just bravado.
The psychological impact of the P63’s cannon went beyond its physical destruction.
Japanese pilots who survived encounters with P63s often reported nightmares, inability to fly, physical trembling when they heard aircraft engines.
The sudden violent death delivered by the cannon was unlike anything they’d experienced.
Machine gun damage, you might survive.
The 37 left nothing to survive.
Private Hiroshi Tada, a mechanic at a Japanese airfield in Korea, witnessed the effect firsthand.
A damaged Zero landed after encountering P63s.
The pilot was physically unharmed, but catatonic, unable to speak, just staring.
When they examined his aircraft, they found a 37mm shell had passed through his cockpit, missing him by less than 6 in, exploding behind his seat.
The blast had destroyed his radio and oxygen system, but miraculously left him alive.
He never flew again, spending the rest of the war in a hospital, unable to speak about what he’d seen.
The technical superiority of the P63 wasn’t just about the cannon.
The aircraft’s rugged construction, product of American industrial engineering, meant it could absorb tremendous damage and keep flying.
Lieutenant Pavl Sakalov’s P63 was hit by over a 100 machine gun rounds during a low-level attack on a Japanese airfield.
The aircraft looked like Swiss cheese with holes throughout the wings and fuselage, but the engine kept running.
The controls responded and Sakalof made it home.
A zero hit by that much gunfire would have disintegrated.
Soviet ground crews love the P63 for its reliability.
The Allison V1710 engine could run on terrible fuel in temperatures from minus50 to plus 100° F with minimal maintenance.
The tricycle landing gear, initially mocked by Soviet pilots used to tail draggers, proved invaluable on rough forward airfields.
The aircraft’s wide stance and robust gear could handle runways that would break other fighters.
Ground crews could turn a P63 around.
Refuel, rearm, basic maintenance in 12 minutes.
In combat conditions, that speed mattered.
Major Even Chznikov, a squadron commander who’d flown British Hurricanes and American P39s before transitioning to P63s, considered it the perfect fighter for Soviet tactics.
We don’t dance in the sky like ballet.
We kill like butchers.
Quick and efficient.
The P63 understands this.
It’s not pretty, not elegant, but it does what we need.
Climb fast, dive fast, hit hard, survive to fight again.
The aircraft’s range was another advantage.
With external tanks, a P63 could fly over 1500 miles, allowing deep penetration raids into Japanese-held territory.
Captain Dimmitri Vulov led a mission in late August 1945 that flew 800 m into Manuria, destroyed a Japanese supply depot, and returned without refueling.
The Japanese had no fighters with comparable range.
They couldn’t respond to these deep raids, could only absorb the punishment.
The final major air battle between P63s and Japanese fighters occurred on August 14th, 1945, one day before Japan’s surrender.
A mixed formation of 20 Japanese fighters, Zeros, Kai 84s, and even some older Kai 43s attempted to attack Soviet ground forces advancing through Korea.
They were intercepted by 16 P63s from the 888th Fighter Regiment led by Major Nikolai Garasimov, a triple ace with 41 victories.
The battle was less a fight than an execution.
The P63s with altitude and speed advantage conducted perfectly coordinated attacks.
They split into four ship flights, each targeting a section of the Japanese formation.
The first pass destroyed six Japanese fighters, 37mm shells, finding cockpits, engines, fuel tanks with surgical precision.
The Japanese formation dissolved into chaos.
Every pilot trying to save himself.
Lieutenant Junior Grade Masawo Yamada, flying a zero for only his 10th combat mission, described the experience in a letter found after the war.
They came from above like hawks on pigeons.
Itto’s plane simply exploded next to me, so close I flew through the debris.
I pulled hard right, then left, diving, climbing, everything they taught us.
But the enemy wouldn’t engage in our fight.
They climbed away, turned, came again.
I saw the muzzle flash from one aircraft’s nose.
The shell pass so close I heard it, a sound like ripping canvas.
Then Yamamoto’s plane lost its tail, just gone, like cut with a sword.
Yamada survived by diving into clouds at 2,000 ft, staying hidden until the P63s left.
Of the 20 Japanese fighters, only six escaped.
The P63s lost one aircraft to ground fire while strafing the retreat.
It was the last major air combat of World War II, a fitting demonstration of how completely the balance of power had shifted.
The Japanese pilots who had once owned Asian skies were now hiding in clouds, praying to avoid the American fighters with the terrible cannons.
The surrender came the next day, but Soviet P63 operations continued for several more weeks as Japanese forces in Manuria and Korea either hadn’t received word or refused to accept it.
Captain Vladimir Mikailoff shot down a Kai 43 on August 20th, 5 days after the official surrender.
The Japanese pilot had attacked a Soviet transport aircraft, perhaps unaware the war was over, perhaps unwilling to accept it.
Mkyov’s single cannon shell removed the Kai 43’s entire engine section.
The pilot bailed out and was captured, insisting he’d never received orders to stop fighting.
The P63’s combat record with Soviet forces was remarkable.
542 confirmed air-to-air victories against 87 losses.
A ratio that would have seemed impossible before the war.
But numbers don’t tell the whole story.
The psychological impact, the complete shift in air superiority, the fear it instilled.
These were the P63’s true victories.
Japanese pilots who had laughed at American aircraft, who had considered themselves warriors of the air, ended the war, hiding from Americanbilu fighters flown by Soviet pilots who treated air combat like their country treated war, without mercy, without hesitation, with terrible efficiency.
Lieutenant Colonel Gregori Juba, reflecting on his experience flying P63s against the Japanese, said it best.
The Japanese were artists of the air.
We were workers.
They had tradition, spirit, beautiful aircraft that danced.
We had American engineering and a cannon that could destroy anything it touched.
In war, the worker beats the artist.
The P63 was our hammer, and we used it to smash their dreams of the divine wind.
The stories of individual pilots reveal the human cost behind the statistics.
Captain Hiroshi Sato, one of Japan’s most experienced fighter pilots with over 3,000 hours of flight time, encountered P63s for the first and last time on August 9th, 1945.
Leading six zeros on a patrol mission, he spotted eight P63s climbing toward them from the southwest.
Sato had survived five years of war, shot down 18 enemy aircraft, been shot down twice himself.
He knew within seconds this was different.
The P63s had at least 3,000 ft of altitude advantage and were climbing still.
Sato ordered his flight to turn northwest toward clouds that might offer cover.
But the Soviet pilots had seen them.
The P63s rolled over into a diving attack, picking up speed, their nose cannons winking like deadly stars.
Sato watched his wingman, Lieutenant Ono, take a direct hit.
The Zero didn’t just fall.
It disassembled in midair, wings folding, fuselage breaking apart, the pilot’s body tumbling free amid the debris.
Sto pulled into a vertical climb, trying to force an overshoot.
The P63 pilot didn’t take the bait, zoom climbing away instead, preserving his energy advantage.
Another zero exploded to S’s left, hit by a different P63.
Then another.
In less than 30 seconds, half his flight was gone.
The remaining zeros scattered, every man for himself.
Sato dove for the deck, pushing his zero past its limits, the airframe groaning.
He made it to the clouds, stayed in them for 20 minutes, emerging only when his fuel forced him to navigate home.
At the debriefing, Sato told his commander the truth.
They couldn’t fight these new Soviet fighters with current tactics or aircraft.
The commander, Colonel Watanabe, accused him of cowardice.
Sto, exhausted beyond caring, replied that the colonel was welcome to lead the next patrol himself.
He never flew combat again.
The war ended six days later.
Of his squadron’s original 36 pilots, only seven survived the war.
The Soviet pilots flying those P63s were themselves survivors of the most brutal air war in history.
Major Pavl Koutakov had been flying fighters since 1942, started in I-16s against the German invasion, graduated to P39s, now commanded P63s.
He’d been shot down three times, burned twice, had shrapnel in his left shoulder that hurt whenever it rained.
For him, the P63 wasn’t just another fighter.
It was vindication of everything he’d learned about air combat.
The Germans taught us that air combat is about energy, not acrobatics, Koutakov explained to new pilots.
Speed is life, altitude is life.
The P63 gives us both.
The cannon means we don’t need to get close, don’t need to dance with the enemy.
We execute them from distance like judges passing sentence.
The Japanese haven’t learned this lesson.
They still think air combat is a duel between samurai.
We know it’s murder and were very good at murder.
His philosophy proved itself on August 11th, 1945 when Koutakov’s squadron intercepted a mixed formation of Japanese bombers and fighters attempting to attack Soviet shipping at Vlatavostto.
The Japanese had 20 aircraft, eight G4M bombers and 12 fighters.
Koutakov had nine P63s.
By any conventional calculation, the Soviets were outnumbered.
Should have been cautious.
Instead, Koutakov ordered an immediate maximum effort attack.
The P63s climbed to 18,000 ft, positioning themselves up sun from the Japanese formation.
Koutakov assigned specific targets to each pilot.
No confusion, no overlap, maximum efficiency.
They dove as one.
Nine fighters in perfect echelon, nose cannons charging.
The Japanese fighters, caught looking the wrong way, tried to respond, but were too late.
The first pass destroyed four bombers and three fighters.
37 mm shells turned the G4M bombers into flying torches.
Their lack of armor and self-sealing tanks made them death traps.
The surviving Japanese scattered.
The bombers tried to run for home.
The fighters tried to protect them.
Cutout’s pilots, maintaining discipline, climbed back to altitude, reformed, attacked again.
This time they focused on the fighters, clearing the sky for a final attack on the remaining bombers.
Lieutenant Sergey Kromareno, flying his first combat mission in a P63, lined up on a Kai 43, trying to escape at low altitude.
His first shell missed.
His second hit the fighter’s tail, cutting it in half.
The Kai 43 pitched straight down, hitting the water at over 300 mph.
By the time it was over, all 20 Japanese aircraft were destroyed.
Koutakov’s squadron hadn’t lost a single plane, though two had minor damage from debris.
The entire engagement lasted less than 8 minutes.
It was clinical, professional, utterly one-sided.
The Japanese naval headquarters, receiving the report, initially refused to believe it.
20 aircraft lost to nine fighters seemed impossible, but the empty bunks in the barracks testified to the truth.
The human reality behind these battles was grinding, exhausting, terrifying.
Pilots on both sides pushed themselves beyond physical and mental limits.
Lieutenant Victor Boleno flying P63s with the Pacific Fleet Air Force flew six missions in one day during the August offensive.
Each time landing with barely enough fuel for another circuit of the field.
By the sixth mission, he was hallucinating from exhaustion, seeing enemy fighters that weren’t there.
Had to be physically lifted from his cockpit.
His crew chief, Sergeant Volkov, kept the P63 flying through mechanical sympathy and pure will.
The cannon mechanism jammed on the fourth mission.
Volkov fixed it with a hammer and aviation wire.
The landing gear warning light failed.
Volkov bypassed it with a paperclip.
The engine was running rough from bad fuel.
Volkov adjusted the mixture by ear, listening to the engine like a doctor with a stethoscope.
The American planes are tough, he said, but they still need Russian maintenance to fight a Russian war.
The Japanese pilots facing this onslaught were experiencing something unprecedented in their military culture, helplessness.
The Imperial Japanese military had built its identity on spiritual superiority, overcoming material disadvantage.
The warrior spirit would triumph over western materialism, but the P63’s 37mm cannon cared nothing for spirit.
Captain Yoshio Suzuki, one of the few surviving aces by August 1945, wrote in his final letter, “We are dragon flies fighting sledgehammers.
Our will is strong, but our wings are tissue paper.
The enemy’s new fighters kill without honor from distance with no possibility of response.
This is not war as we understood it.
The technical difference between aircraft told only part of the story.
Soviet pilots flying P63s had years of combat experience, had learned through bitter trial what worked and what got you killed.
They’d faced the Luftvafa’s best, survived, adapted, evolved.
The Japanese pilots of 1945 were mostly new.
Their experienced pilots dead.
Their training programs rushed.
They were flying on spirit and tradition against pilots who’d learned to treat air combat as a science.
Lieutenant Anati Yakimeo demonstrated this experience gap during a reconnaissance mission on August 12th.
Flying alone at 20,000 ft, he spotted a formation of eight Japanese fighters below, climbing to intercept.
The old Yakimeno, the one who’d started the war flying I 153 biplanes, might have run.
The veteran Yakimeo saw opportunity.
He let them climb, watched them burn fuel, and lose speed in the climb.
When they reached 18,000 ft, laboring in the thin air, he rolled inverted and dove through their formation.
His first cannon shot exploded a Zero’s wing tank.
The burning fuel enveloped another Zero flying alongside.
Both aircraft fell.
Yakimeno pulled up hard, using the P63’s superior power to zoom climb back above the surviving fighters.
They tried to follow but stalled out, falling away like leaves.
He dove again, this time from their , fired two shots.
One missed, the other deleted a Kai 43’s cockpit.
The pilot never knew what hit him.
The remaining Japanese fighters dove away, seeking the safety of lower altitude.
Yakimeno let them go.
He’d expended five cannon shells, destroyed three enemy aircraft, completed his reconnaissance mission.
It was just another day’s work, barely worth mentioning in his log book.
That casual efficiency, that workmanlike approach to aerial murder was what the P63 enabled.
It turned air combat from a contest into a harvest.
The ground attack capabilities of the P63 proved equally devastating.
Major Boris Saponov led a strike against a Japanese airfield in northern Korea on August 13th.
16 P63s, each carrying two 500-lb bombs and full cannon ammunition, approached at 50 ft altitude below radar coverage.
The first wave dropped their bombs on the packed aircraft, destroying dozens of planes caught on the ground.
The second wave used their cannons on fuel dumps and maintenance facilities.
Sergeant Kenji Watanabi, a mechanic who survived the attack, described the 37mm shells hitting aircraft on the ground.
They didn’t just damage planes, they erased them.
A zero hit in the fuselage would separate into two pieces, thrown apart like a broken toy.
The fuel dumps exploded so violently that men a 100 yards away were knocked down.
We had no defense against this.
Our anti-aircraft guns couldn’t depress low enough to hit aircraft at 50 feet.
The attack destroyed 43 aircraft on the ground, the airfield’s entire fuel supply, and most of its maintenance equipment.
The Japanese couldn’t launch a single fighter in defense.
The P63s lost one aircraft to ground fire, the pilot successfully bailing out over Soviet territory.
It was another demonstration of the complete reversal in air superiority.
The Japanese, who had started the war with surprise attacks on enemy airfields, were now helpless to prevent the same tactic being used against them.
The last recorded combat between P63s and Japanese fighters occurred on August 18th, 1945, 3 days after the official surrender.
A rogue group of Japanese pilots refusing to accept defeat attempted to attack Soviet occupation forces near Harbin.
Six Kai 84 fighters, Japan’s best, piloted by veterans who chose death over dishonor, took off on what they knew was a one-way mission.
They were intercepted by four P63s on routine patrol.
The engagement was brief and brutal.
The P63s, warned by ground observers, had altitude advantage.
They made one diving pass, destroyed three KI 84s with cannon fire, then zoom climbed away.
The surviving Japanese fighters, rather than flee, turned to engage.
It was brave but feutal.
The P63s made another pass, destroyed two more.
The last KI 84 piloted by Lieutenant Yamada tried to ram a P63 in a final kamicazi attack.
The Soviet pilot, Captain Mikail Baronov, put a 37 mm shell through Yamada’s engine from 400 yd out.
The K84 fell short of its target by 100 yards, crashing into a rice field.
Baronov landed and walked to the crash site.
Yamada had survived, badly injured, but conscious.
Through a translator, Yamada asked why the Soviets didn’t engage in honorable close combat.
Baronov replied that honor was for peace time.
In war, you used whatever gave you advantage.
The P63’s cannon was that advantage.
Yamada died of his injuries that night.
One of the last Japanese pilots to fall in combat in World War II.
The numbers tell the story of the P63’s impact.
In just three weeks of combat against Japan, Soviet P63 squadrons claimed over 300 aerial victories.
They destroyed hundreds more aircraft on the ground, devastated Japanese logistics, and completely eliminated Japanese air power in Manuria and Korea.
The psychological effect was even greater.
Japanese pilots who had started the war believing in their spiritual superiority ended it hiding from Americanbuilt fighters that killed without warning from beyond visual range.
Captain William Thompson, one of the American ferry pilots who’ delivered P63s to the Soviets, visited a Soviet fighter base in September 1945 after the war ended.
He found Major Koff, the pilot he’d trained on the P63 nearly a year earlier.
Kof had survived, had 63 victory marks painted on his aircraft.
44 German, 19 Japanese.
Through an interpreter, Thompson asked what Koff thought of the P63.
“It’s not the best fighter ever built,” Klov said.
“The British Spitfire is more elegant.
The German FW190 is better balanced.
The American P-51 has superior range and speed.
But the P63 has one thing none of them have.
That cannon.
In the hands of a pilot who understands energy and patience, that cannon makes the P63 the deadliest fighter in the sky.
We didn’t need the best fighter.
We needed a flying cannon.
That’s what you Americans gave us.
Thompson watched Soviet ground crews maintaining the P63s.
noticed how they’d modified them.
Extra armor around the cockpit, modified gun sights, field modifications to improve cold weather starting.
The Americans had built the weapon, but the Soviets had learned how to use it in ways Bell aircraft never imagined.
They’d turned an interceptor into a fighter bomber, a bomber destroyer, a ground attack aircraft, and a psychological weapon that broke the enemy’s will to fight.
As he prepared to leave, Thompson asked Klov if he had any message for the American workers who’d built these planes.
Klov thought for a moment, then said, “Tell them their planes helped us teach the fascists and the Japanese a lesson they needed to learn.” The age of the warrior is over.
This is the age of the technician.
The P63 was the perfect teacher for that lesson.
Every time the 37 spoke, another samurai learned that spirit alone doesn’t stop high explosive.
The legacy of the P63 in Soviet hands extended beyond the war.
Many of the tactics developed for the P63, energy fighting, boom and zoom attacks, long range precision shooting became standard doctrine for Soviet fighter pilots in the jet age.
The experience gained flying P63s against the Japanese helped shape Soviet air combat philosophy for decades.
The emphasis on firepower over maneuverability, on patient energy tactics over aggressive dog fighting, all traced back to lessons learned in those desperate weeks of August 1945.
Lieutenant General Ivan Kojadub, the Soviet Union’s top ace with 62 victories, flew P63s briefly at the war’s end.
His assessment was characteristically direct.
The P63 taught us that air combat would never be the same.
The days of getting close, of seeing your enemy’s face were ending.
Future air combat would be about technology, about killing from beyond visual range.
The 37mm cannon was primitive compared to what would come, missiles, guided weapons, but it showed the path forward.
For the Japanese pilots who survived encounters with P63s, the experience left lasting trauma.
Major Saburo Sakai, Japan’s legendary ace who survived the war, met a Soviet P63 pilot at an aviation conference in 1975.
Through interpreters, they discussed their experiences.
The Soviet pilot, now a colonel, demonstrated with his hands how he’d attacked Japanese fighters.
“Dive, shoot, climb away.” Sakai nodded, remembering.
“You turned air combat into mathematics,” he said.
“We were still trying to make it poetry, mathematics one.” The final accounting of the P63’s effectiveness against Japanese aircraft is staggering.
In less than a month of combat, it achieved a kill ratio that exceeded anything seen in the Pacific theater.
The combination of the aircraft’s capabilities and Soviet tactical doctrine created a perfect storm of destruction that Japanese air forces couldn’t counter.
The cannon that Japanese pilots had initially laughed at, considering it too heavy, too slow firing, too American, had become the instrument of their destruction.
Private First Class Tommy Morrison from Detroit, who’d worked on the Bell aircraft assembly line before being drafted, would have been amazed to learn what became of the P63s he’d helped build.
He’d installed cannon mechanisms, 12-hour shifts 6 days a week, thinking they’d be used by American pilots.
Instead, they ended up in the hands of Soviet pilots who used them to revolutionize air combat, to destroy an enemy air force that had seemed invincible just years before.
The P63 King Cobra’s story in Soviet hands isn’t just about technology or tactics.
It’s about adaptation, about taking a tool designed for one purpose and using it for another.
It’s about the meeting of American industrial might and Soviet combat experience.
Most of all, it’s about the brutal efficiency of modern war, where a single shell from a nosemounted cannon could end a life from a/4 mile away, where the warrior spirit meant nothing against high explosive and precise aim.
Those Japanese pilots who laughed at the P63, who thought its heavy construction and big cannon made it clumsy and predictable, learned the hardest lesson of modern warfare.
Technology properly employed beats tradition.
The 37mm cannon didn’t care about their years of training, their spiritual preparation, their warrior code.
It only cared about physics, muzzle velocity, trajectory, explosive yield.
When those shells found their targets, when they vaporized cockpits and deleted aircraft from existence, they wrote the final chapter of an era when individual skill and courage could overcome material disadvantage.
Years later, in 1960, a Japanese aviation historian interviewed surviving pilots from the Manurion campaign.
When asked about their most feared opponent, they unanimously mentioned the King Cobra with a terrible cannon.
One veteran, missing his left arm from a P63 attack, said simply, “We learned that war had changed.
The Americans built a flying gun.
The Russians showed us how deadly it could be.
Every time I close my eyes, I still see that muzzle flash.
Still hear the sound of my friends dying.” The P63 didn’t just shoot down our planes.
It shot down everything we believed about air combat.
The Soviet veterans had their own memories.
Captain Alexe Smeirnovv, who scored 11 victories in P63s against Japanese aircraft, kept a piece of a Zero’s wing in his apartment until he died in 1987.
It had a hole through it the size of a basketball, damaged from a single 37mm shell.
That hole represents the difference between old war and new war, he’d tell visitors.
Old war, you needed many bullets.
Much luck.
New war, one shell, one kill.
The P63 brought new war to the Pacific.
The Japanese were still fighting old war.
That’s why they lost.
Bell Aircraft Corporation, which had struggled to sell the P63 to the US Army Air Forces, never fully appreciated what their creation achieved in Soviet hands.
Company records focus on production numbers, technical specifications, delivery schedules.
They don’t capture the moment when a Japanese pilot saw a muzzle flash and knew he had less than a second to live.
They don’t record the sound of a Zero disintegrating under cannon fire or the silence in a Japanese ready room when only half the pilots returned.
The American ferry pilots who delivered these aircraft across the treacherous Alaska Siberia route were links in a chain that ended with Japanese aircraft falling from Manurian skies.
Every successful delivery meant more Soviet pilots equipped with the means to establish air superiority.
Every P63 that survived the ice and weather and mechanical failures of that impossible route became another nail in the coffin of Japanese air power.
As the war ended and the P63s were gradually retired from frontline Soviet service, they left behind a legacy that transcended their mechanical existence.
They had proven that air combat was evolving from a contest of individual skill to a science of energy management and firepower.
They had shown that the right weapon in the right hands could completely overturn established military hierarchies.
Most importantly, they had demonstrated that in modern war, industrial capability and technical innovation mattered more than warrior tradition.
Today, only a handful of P63s survive in museums and private collections.
Visitors often walk past them, drawn to more famous aircraft like the P-51 or the Spitfire.
But those who know the story stop and look at that massive cannon barrel protruding from the spinner.
They imagine the sound it made, the destruction it wrought, the fear it inspired.
They understand that this overlooked fighter, rejected by its country of origin, became in Soviet hands one of the most effective weapons of the Air Wars final chapter.
The Japanese pilots who faced P63s in combat, those few who survived, would want people to remember the lesson they learned so painfully.
Technology changes war in ways that can’t be predicted or prevented.
What seems like an advantage, the Zero’s lightweight and agility, becomes a fatal weakness when the enemy refuses to fight on your terms.
The P63’s cannon, that barbaric weapon that violated every principle of elegant air combat, redefined what air superiority meant.
It turned pilots from knights of the air into technicians of death, from artists into accountants of destruction.
In the end, the story of the P63 in Soviet hands is a reminder that war is not about fair fights or honorable combat.
It’s about winning by whatever means technology provides.
The 37 mm cannon was just a machine, steel and explosive physics and chemistry.
But in the hands of Soviet pilots who’d learned through brutal experience how to use every advantage, it became the instrument that ended Japanese air power in Manuria and Korea.
Those Japanese pilots who laughed at the P63, who thought American planes were crude and unsophisticated, learned too late that in modern war, crude effectiveness beats sophisticated tradition every time.
The last Soviet P63 pilot reunion was held in Moscow in 1995, 50 years after the wars end.
Only 17 pilots attended, all that remained of the hundreds who’d flown the type in combat.
They raised their glasses in a toast to fallen comrades, to the American workers who’d built their planes, and to the weapon that had given them superiority in the sky.
Major General Klov, the senior surviving P63 pilot, offered the final toast to the 37 mm cannon which spoke a language every enemy pilot understood, the language of certain death.
Outside in the Moscow snow, a restored P63 sat on static display.
Its cannon had been deactivated, its ammunition bays empty, its engines silent.
But for those who knew its history, who understood what it had accomplished, it remained a powerful reminder of a moment when American engineering and Soviet combat experience combined to create something neither nation could have achieved alone.
The P63 King Cobra, the fighter America didn’t want, had become in Soviet hands the weapon that ended Japan’s dreams of air superiority, one vaporized cockpit at a time.
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