June 1944.
The skies over Italy are a graveyard for the inexperienced.
The 15th Air Force is bleeding.
Every day, bombers lift off from dusty airfields in FOA to strike the oil refineries at Pliy and the factories of Vienna.
And every day, the Luftwaffer rises to meet them.
These aren’t the rookie German pilots of the late war.
These are the survivors, the expert men with 50, 80, or 100 kills painted on their rudders.
They fly the Messersmid BF 109G and the Faulwolf 190.
Fast, lethal, and flown by men who have been killing since the Battle of Britain.
Into this meat grinder steps Second Lieutenant Robert Bob Goel.
He is 19 years old.
He looks 16.
Back home in Rine, Wisconsin, he isn’t even old enough to buy a beer legally.
He has a baby face, a quiet demeanor, and a uniform that looks slightly too big for his skinny frame.
When he walks into the officer’s club, the veteran pilots stop drinking and stare.
They don’t see a reinforcement.
They see a dead man walking.
They see a kid who shouldn’t be trusting a 2000 horsepower P-51 Mustang.
They place bets on how long he will last.
The smart money says 2 weeks.
But Bob Goel has a secret.
He isn’t flying on adrenaline.
He isn’t flying on patriotism.
He is flying on physics.
While other cadets were out drinking during flight school, Gobble was studying.
He memorized the turn rates of the German fighters.
He calculated energy bleed in a 3G turn versus a 6G turn.
He treated aerial combat not as a duel of honor, but as a geometry problem with life or death consequences.
On his first few missions, he stays quiet.
He flies wingman protecting the leader’s tail.
He watches.
He learns.
He sees how the German aces bait the Americans.
The split test trap, the sunblind ambush, the fainten drag.
He cataloges their tricks like a student studying for a final exam.
Then comes July 18th, 1944.
The target is the Memanen airfield in southern Germany.
It is a deep penetration mission.
The 31st fighter group is escorting B flying fortresses.
The Alps are a jagged wall of white peaks below them.
Gobble is flying the Flying Dutchman, his P-51D Mustang.
It is the finest fighter plane of the war.
fast, long-legged, and armed with 650 caliber machine guns.
But a plane is only as good as the pilot, and Gobble is still a green rookie in the eyes of the enemy.
Over the target, the radio explodes with chatter.
Bandits high, 40 plus.
A massive formation of German fighters divies on the bombers.
It is Jag Schwader 3 JG3, the famous Udit wing.
These are the elite.
They paint their spinners with a white spiral.
They are led by Wilhelm Bats, a man with over 200 kills.
The sky turns into a swirling chaotic furball of aluminum and tracers.
Gobel’s flight leader divies into the fray.
Gobble sticks to him like glue.
They bounce a flight of BF 1000s.
The leader fires, misses, and breaks left.
Gobble follows.
Suddenly, a yellow-nosed BF 10009 cuts across their path.
The German pilot is good.
He executes a perfect high-side yo-yo, trading altitude for position, dropping right onto the tail of Gobble’s leader.
The leader screams for help.
Break.
Break.
I’ve got one on my six.
Gobble has a split second to react.
Standard doctrine says, “Turn hard into the attack.
Cut off the angle.
force the enemy to overshoot.
But goal sees the geometry differently.
If he turns hard, he bleeds energy.
The German is already faster.
The German will simply pull up, loop over, and kill him in the stall.
Goal does the opposite of what a panicked rookie should do.
He pushes the stick forward.
He unloads the G-forces.
The P-51 accelerates instantly as the drag of the wings disappears.
Gobble dives not away from the fight but under it.
The German ace sees the rookie dive.
He ignores him.
Another coward running away.
He thinks he stays focused on the flight leader.
This is the mistake.
Gobble isn’t running.
He is building energy.
He dives 2,000 ft.
His airspeed indicator touching 450 m.
Then with gentle hands, he pulls back.
He uses the massive momentum of the Mustang to zoom climb.
He rockets upward in a nearvertical spiral.
The German pilot is lining up his shot on the flight leader.
He is focused on his gun sight.
He doesn’t look down.
Gobble erupts from the depths like a shark breaching the water.
He comes up directly beneath the German fighter.
It is a blind spot attack.
Most pilots would spray bullets and prey.
Goal waits.
He watches the range close.
400 yd, 300 yard, 200 y.
He calculates the deflection.
The German is in a shallow bank.
Gobble needs to lead him by two plain lengths.
He squeezes the trigger.
A 2cond burst.
The 650 calibers converge on the German’s wing route.
The fuel tank explodes.
The BF 109 disintegrates in a ball of orange fire.
Gobble doesn’t celebrate.
He doesn’t yell on the radio.
He immediately rolls inverted and dives again.
Energy management.
Speed is life.
He has just killed a veteran ace.
And he did it without breaking a sweat.
Back at the base, the gun camera footage confirms the kill.
The veteran pilots watch the film in silence.
They see the dive.
They see the energy management.
They see the surgical precision of the shot.
Who flew that? The squadron commander asks.
The kid, someone says, gobo.
The commander nods.
He flies like an old man.
It is the highest compliment a fighter pilot can receive.
But the war isn’t over, and the Germans are about to introduce a new threat.
Something that defies the laws of physics Gobble has mastered.
By August 1944, the dead man walking had become a legend.
Robert Goel had achieved the title of ace, five confirmed aerial victories in less than a month.
The veterans in the officers club stopped betting against him.
They started buying him drinks.
But they still didn’t understand how he did it.
Gobble didn’t fly like the others.
Most American pilots were aggressive brawlers.
They used the P-51 speed to slash through formations, spraying lead, relying on the sheer durability of the Mustang to get them home.
They were hammer throwers.
Gobble was a fencer.
He treated every engagement as a math equation.
He knew that a BF19G could turn tighter than a P-51 at low speeds below 250 m because of its leading edge slats.
He knew that the Faulwolf 190 had a phenomenal roll rate, meaning it could change direction instantly.
So Gobble never played their game.
He forced them to play his.
He flew the P-51 by the book, but it was a book he seemed to be writing himself.
He kept his energy high.
He refused to turn with a German unless he had the speed advantage.
He was disciplined, cold, and terrifyingly efficient.
His crew chief, Sergeant George Pop Rotor, noticed something strange about Gobel’s plane, the Flying Dutchman.
It almost never came back with bullet holes.
Lieutenant Roder asked one day, wiping oil from the cowling.
Do the Jerry’s even shoot at you? Gobble smiled that shy 19-year-old smile.
They shoot pop.
They just shoot where I was, not where I am.
But the Luftwaffa was adapting.
The German commanders realized that the P-51s were bleeding them dry.
They ordered their best pilots, the Xurn, to specifically hunt the Mustang leaders.
They wanted to cut the head off the snake.
On August 18th, 1944, over the oil fields of Ploi, Romania, Gobble found himself alone.
The 15th Air Force was pounding the refineries.
The flack was so thick it looked like a carpet of black wool.
Gobble had been separated from his wingman during a chaotic dive.
He was at 24,000 ft scanning the sky.
He saw a single dot at high.
Most rookies would have turned toward it to investigate.
Gobble didn’t.
He checked the sun.
The dot was positioning itself directly up sun, hiding in the glare.
He’s hunting me.
Gobble realized it was a trap.
The German pilot was waiting for Gobel to turn, which would bleed his speed.
Then the German would dive, using the sun to blind goal until the last second.
Gobble checked his gauges.
Manifold pressure 61 in, RPM 30,000.
He didn’t run.
He leveled his wings.
He pretended he hadn’t seen the hunter.
He was the bait.
The German pilot took the bait.
It was a Messormid BF-1009K4, the fastest, most lethal version of the German fighter.
The pilot was good.
He waited until he was 400 yd away before he fired.
Crack thumb.
A 20 cannon shell exploded near Gobble’s tail.
Shrapnel peppered the rudder.
Gobble didn’t panic.
He didn’t break left or right.
He pulled the nose up 30° and chopped the throttle to idle.
It was a suicidal move.
By climbing and cutting power, he was killing his air speed.
In a dog fight, speed is life.
To kill your speed is usually to dig your own grave.
But Gobble was initiating a maneuver known as the rolling scissors.
The German pilot screaming in at 450 m suddenly found himself closing on a target that had practically stopped in midair.
He was going too fast.
He couldn’t slow down in time.
If he tried to turn, the G-forces would rip his wings off.
The German shot past Gobble’s canopy, missing him by feet.
Gobble saw the pilot’s helmet.
He saw the iron cross on the fuselage.
Now the tables were turned.
The German was in front, but he was moving fast.
Gobble was behind, but he was slow and stalling.
This is where the physics came in.
The rolling scissors is a contest of who can fly the slowest without crashing.
It is a series of barrel rolls and turns with each pilot trying to force the other out in front.
It requires delicate touch.
You have to ride the edge of the stall, feeling the wings buffer, dancing on the rudder pedals.
Gobble slammed his throttle forward again.
The Merlin engine roared.
He rolled left, dropping his nose to gain speed, cutting inside the Germans turn.
The German pulled up, trying to loop over Gobble.
Gobble anticipated it.
He pulled up too, but he deployed 10° of flaps.
The flaps added drag and lift.
They tightened his loop.
The two planes were spiraling around each other like DNA strands, climbing higher and higher into the thin air.
They were trading energy for position.
The German pilot was aggressive.
He was fighting the controls, trying to force the nose of his 109 around.
Gobble was gentle.
He felt the P-51 shivering.
He knew he was one knot away from a spin.
patience, he told himself.
Wait for him to make the mistake.
And then it happened.
The German pilot got greedy.
He tried to pull his nose up for a snapshot at the top of the loop.
He pulled too hard.
The laminer flow over his wings broke.
The BF 109 stalled.
It snapped violently to the right, tumbling out of control.
Gobble didn’t follow him down immediately.
He rolled upright, regained his energy, and then dove.
The German recovered from the spin at 15,000 ft, but he had lost all his speed.
He was a sitting duck.
Gobble slid in behind him.
Range 200 yd.
He didn’t need a deflection shot this time.
He just lined up the rudder.
The 050 calibers saw the tail off the Messers.
The German pilot blayed out.
Gobble circled the parachute once.
He didn’t shoot the pilot in the shoot.
That was a war crime, though some did it.
He just tipped his wing.
Class dismissed.
By September, Gobel’s reputation had crossed the lines.
American intelligence officers debriefing captured German pilots began to hear a recurring theme.
The Germans were terrified of the 31st fighter group.
They called them the scores of the air.
But specifically, they mentioned a flight leader who refused to dogfight.
He does not turn.
A captured German hawkman said, “He waits, he climbs, he traps you.
It is like fighting a calculator.” Gobble was 19, but he was rewriting the book on high alitude escort tactics.
He taught his flight, mostly men older than him, to ignore the first instinct to turn.
vertical,” Gobel told them in the briefing room, drawing lines on the chalkboard.
“Always take it to the vertical.
The Mustang is heavier.
It holds energy better.
If you turn, you die.
If you climb, you win.” He was teaching energy management before the term was widely used.
But the war wasn’t static.
The Germans were inventing weapons that defied Gobles’s math.
They were building machines that didn’t care about energy management because they created their own energy.
The jet age was coming.
On October 7th, 1944, Gobble saw something that made his blood run cold.
He was leading a flight over Vienna.
The flack was heavy, but the Luftwaffa fighters were absent.
Then he saw a streak of white smoke rising vertically from the ground.
It wasn’t a rocket artillery shell.
It was a plane.
It climbed straight up, passing 30,000 ft in seconds.
It leveled off and accelerated toward the bomber formation.
It was the Messers Mi 163 Comet.
The comet was a rocket powered interceptor.
It was a bat-winged tailless freak of engineering.
It had a rocket engine that burned for only 7 minutes.
But in those 7 minutes, it could reach 600 mph.
Gobble’s Mustang topped out at 440 m.
Band at , moving fast, Gobel shouted.
He pushed his throttle to the wall.
He tried to intercept, but it was like trying to chase a Ferrari on a bicycle.
The Comet blew past him.
The German pilot fired his 30 cannons at a B24.
Boom.
The bomber lost a wing and spiraled down.
The comet zoomed up, turning its rocket motor off and vanished into the sun.
Gobble sat in his cockpit, stunned.
He had spent months mastering the physics of propeller combat.
He knew every turn rate, every climb speed.
He was the master of his domain.
But how do you fight a ghost? How do you outsmart something that is 200 m faster than you? Gobble realized that his math was obsolete.
The game had changed.
If he wanted to survive the next month, he would have to throw out the rule book completely.
He keyed his mic.
Flight stay close.
We can’t chase that thing.
We have to trap it.
The 19-year-old was about to face the technology of the future with the weapons of the past.
And he had an idea.
By October 1944, the air war had shifted from a contest of skill to a contest of technology.
The Germans were desperate.
They were deploying weapons that were years ahead of anything the Allies had.
The Mi 163 Comet rocket plane and the Mi262 Schwab jet fighter were terrorizing the bomber streams.
A P-51 Mustang pilot could not catch an MI262.
The jet flew at 540 m.
The Mustang struggled to hit 440 m.
In a straight line, the German jet pilot could simply hit the throttle and disappear.
The morale in the 31st fighter group began to crack.
Pilots were coming back with stories of invincible silver streaks that slashed through formations before anyone could turn a turret.
But Robert Goel wasn’t afraid.
He was analytical.
He spent his nights in the intelligence tent reading the reports on the new German weapons.
He looked for the flaws.
He knew that every machine, no matter how advanced, had a weakness.
He found it in the fuel logs.
The Mi 163 comet had a rocket engine that burned for only 7.5 minutes.
After that, it was a heavy, unpowered glider that had to land immediately.
The Mi262 jet had primitive Juma 4 engines.
They were powerful, but temperamental.
If the pilot slammed the throttle forward too fast, the engines would flame out or explode.
This meant the German jets had slow acceleration.
They were fast at top speed, but sluggish getting there.
Gobble realized he couldn’t hunt them in the air.
He had to hunt them where they lived.
“We don’t chase them,” Gobble told his flight.
“We wait for them to come home.” It was a tactic known as rat catching.
“Most American commanders considered it dangerous.
Litering over enemy airfields meant flying through the deadliest flack corridors in Europe.
It meant exposing yourself to every ground gun in Germany.
But Gobel argued his case.
Sir, they are invulnerable at 30,000 ft, but at 500 ft on final approach, they are just slow, heavy airplanes with no gas.
The 19-year-old was proposing a radical shift.
Stop protecting the bombers directly and start hunting the predators in their dens.
On October 22nd, Gobble led a flight of four Mustangs deep into enemy territory.
Their target was not a bomber formation, but a specific airfield near Lintz, Austria.
Gobble flew at 15,000 ft loitering in the sun.
He watched the contrails of the German jets high above attacking the bombers.
He didn’t intervene.
He waited.
10 minutes passed, then 15.
There, Gobble whispered.
He saw two Mi262s diving from the stratosphere.
They were out of ammo or low on fuel.
They were heading for the runway.
The jets entered the landing pattern.
They dropped their landing gear.
They extended their flaps.
Their speed dropped from 500 m to 150 m.
“Drop tanks,” Gobel ordered.
The four Mustangs shed their external fuel tanks and dove.
This was the energy trap in reverse.
Usually, Gobble used altitude to gain speed.
Now, he was using gravity to turn his Mustang into a missile.
He closed on the trailing jet.
The German pilot, focused on landing, likely checking his instruments, never saw the P-51 diving out of the sun.
Gobble waited until he was 300 yd away.
The jet’s right engine exploded.
The Juma 4 turbine shattered, sending turbine blades slicing through the fuselage.
The MI262 flipped over and crashed into the forest just short of the runway.
The lead jet pilot saw the explosion.
He panicked.
He slammed his throttles forward to go around.
This was the fatal mistake Gobel had predicted.
The German jet engines choked on the sudden influx of fuel.
A tongue of flame shot out of the exhaust.
The plane didn’t accelerate.
It stalled.
Gobble’s wingman, LT Bob Shorty Verlockas, swept in and finished it off.
Two wonder weapons destroyed in 30 seconds, not by speed, but by tactics.
By November 1944, Gobble was promoted to captain.
He was barely 20 years old, and he was commanding a flight of men who were old enough to be his older brothers.
The stress of command began to weigh on him.
He wasn’t just responsible for his own life anymore.
He was responsible for theirs.
He started to develop a sixth sense about survival.
He became even more conservative, even more mathematical.
He enforced strict radio discipline.
“If you talk, you die,” he told the rookies.
“Eyes out of the cockpit, check six every 30 seconds.
If you fly straight for more than a minute, you are a target.
” Some of the newer, younger pilots thought he was too rigid.
They wanted to be cowboys.
They wanted to chase Germans into the clouds.
One such pilot was second LT, John Jack Sublet.
He was eager.
He had just arrived from the States on a mission over Hungary.
Sublet broke formation to chase a damaged BF- 109.
Sublet get back in formation.
Gobble barked over the radio.
It’s a trap.
I got him.
Cap.
He’s smoking.
Sublet dove after the German.
Gobble watched from above.
He saw the second German fighter, the wingman, slide out of the clouds behind Sublet.
Gobble rolled his Mustang over in Dove.
He pushed the engine to 70 in of manifold pressure.
War emergency power.
The engine screamed in protest.
He was racing death.
Sublet was fixated on his kill.
The German wingman lined up his shot.
Gobble fired a deflection burst from 600 yards extreme range.
The tracers arked over Sublett’s canopy and frightened the German.
The enemy pilot broke right.
Sublet pulled up shaken.
“You’re welcome,” Gobble said dryly.
“Now get back on my wing.” That night in the officer’s club, Sublet tried to buy Gobble a drink.
Gobble refused.
“I don’t want your drink, Jack,” Gobble said quietly.
“I want you to listen to me.
The German you see is the bait.
The German you don’t see is the killer.
If you break formation again, I’ll ground you myself.” It was harsh.
It was uncharacteristic of the quiet kid from Wisconsin.
But Gobble knew that in the skies over Europe, being nice got people killed.
The war was grinding to a halt, but the Luftwaffa was dying hard.
The pilots left in the sky were the fanatics and the aces who refused to surrender.
On March 24th, 1945, Gobble flew his final significant combat engagement.
He spotted a Faulwolf 190D9 Dora.
This was the ultimate piston engine fighter of the Luftwaffa.
It was fast, high altitude capable, and deadly.
The pilot was clearly an expert.
He initiated the fight.
He dove on Gobble from above.
Gobble turned into the attack.
A classic defensive break.
The two planes merged at a closure rate of 800 m, passing within feet of each other.
Then the dog fight began.
It wasn’t a turning fight.
It was a vertical fight.
The Dora had immense climbing power.
The German pilot pulled straight up trying to stall Gobble out.
Gobble knew his P-51 couldn’t climb with the Dora.
If he tried to follow, he would run out of speed first, slide backward, and become a target.
So, Gobel improvised.
As the German climbed, Gobble didn’t follow.
He spiraled down, building speed.
The German pilot, seeing Gobble drop, thought he had won.
He leveled off at the top of his climb and rolled over to dive for the kill.
But Gobel had used the dive to build massive kinetic energy.
As the German rolled over, goal pulled back on the stick.
He rocketed upward, trading that speed for altitude.
He shot up like an elevator.
The German pilot was descending.
Gobble was ascending.
They met in the middle.
It was a deflection shot of impossible difficulty.
Gobble was climbing at a 60° angle.
The German was diving at a 40° angle.
Gobble had a fraction of a second.
He had to lead the target by four plain lengths.
He was shooting at a spot in empty space where the German would be.
He squeezed the trigger.
The stream of incendiary rounds walked right into the path of the FW90.
The engine cowling shattered.
The canopy blew off.
The German plane didn’t explode.
It just ceased to fly.
It rolled slowly onto its back and fell into a flat spin.
Gobble watched it go down.
He checked his fuel.
He checked his ammo.
Splash number 11, he whispered.
He was 21 years old.
He was one of the youngest aces in the theater, and he had just beaten the best piston fighter Germany ever built.
But the war had one last surprise for him.
By April 1945, Robert Goel had flown 61 combat missions.
He had 11 confirmed kills.
He had earned the distinguished flying cross and the silver star.
He was 21 years old.
The war in Europe was ending.
The Luftwaffa had effectively ceased to exist as a fighting force.
The skies over Germany were empty, save for the endless streams of Allied bombers turning cities into rubble.
Gobble received his orders to go home.
Most pilots celebrated.
They threw parties.
They shot flares.
But for Gobble, the news brought a strange, hollow feeling.
He had spent the most formative years of his life in a cockpit.
He had learned to kill before he had learned to vote.
The adrenaline of the dog fight, the mathematical precision of survival, it had been his entire world.
On his final flight, fing his P-51, the Flying Dutchman, to a depot for decommissioning, Gobble took the scenic route.
He flew over the Alps one last time.
He looked down at the jagged peaks where he had fought the BF 1000s.
He looked at the Briner Pass, the Flack Alley, where he had lost friends.
He realized he was leaving the only place where he truly understood the rules.
Down there in the civilian world, things were messy.
Up here, it was just physics.
He landed the plane.
He patted the aluminum skin of the fuselage.
Good girl, he whispered.
He signed the log book one last time, then he walked away, not looking back.
Robert Goel returned to Rine, Wisconsin in the summer of 1945.
The transition was jarring.
One week he was commanding a flight of high performance fighters, deciding who lived and who died.
The next week, he was sitting in his parents’ kitchen, eating meatloaf, listening to the radio.
He enrolled in the University of Wisconsin to study physics.
It made sense.
Physics had saved his life.
But Gobble was different from the other students.
He sat in the back of the lecture halls.
When the professors talked about velocity and vectors, Gobel didn’t just see numbers on a chalkboard.
He saw Fwolf stalling.
He saw tracers arcing through the sky.
He saw the face of the German pilot he had shot down over Pliy.
He rarely spoke about the war.
To his classmates, he was just Bob, the quiet guy who was good at math.
They didn’t know he was one of the top Mustang aces of the 15th Air Force.
Years later, at a reunion, a fellow pilot asked him why he never bragged.
“What is there to brag about?” Gobble said.
“We did a job.
The Germans were good pilots.
We just had better gas and better planes.
and maybe maybe we were a little luckier.
It was the classic humility of the greatest generation, but it also hid a deep respect for the enemy he had outsmarted.
Gobble knew that the difference between being an ace and being a casualty was often a matter of inches.
A single decision to push the stick forward instead of pulling it back.
Robert Goel eventually wrote a book Mustang Ace.
It is considered one of the best memoirs of aerial combat ever written.
Unlike other books that focus on the glory or the kills, Goble’s book focused on the thinking.
He broke down the geometry of his fights.
He explained the rolling scissors and the high-side yo-yo with the precision of a professor.
His tactics became part of the curriculum at the newly formed United States Air Force Fighter weapons school, Top Gun for the Air Force.
The principles he mastered at 19 years old are still taught today.
Energy management, the idea that speed and altitude are currency to be spent wisely.
The vertical fight, the knowledge that turning bleeds energy while climbing preserves it.
Situational awareness, the discipline of always checking your six.
When modern F-22 Raptor pilots talk about energy maneuverability theory, they are using the mathematical language that Bob goel was speaking intuitively in 1944.
Gobble passed away in 2011.
He was 88 years old.
But his legacy lives on in every young pilot who climbs into a cockpit.
He proved that you don’t have to be the oldest, the strongest, or the most aggressive pilot to win.
You just have to be the smartest.
He proved that a 19-year-old kid from Wisconsin could outthink the veterans of the Luftwaffa simply by refusing to play their game.
Robert Goel wasn’t born a hero.
He made himself one through study, discipline, and a refusal to panic.
in a war of machines.
He proved that the most dangerous weapon is the human mind.
We believe that these stories, the stories of the thinkers, the strategists, the quiet professionals are the ones that teach us the most.
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