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.
If you enjoyed the story of the babyfaced ace who outsmarted the Luftwaffa, please hit the like button.
It helps us share this history with the world.
And we have a question for you.
What is the most brilliant tactical move you’ve ever heard of in military history? Was it Gobble’s rolling scissors? Hannibal at Cana? Let us know in the comments below.
If stories like this remind you why we preserve history, hit that like button.
Subscribe for more forgotten heroes and turn on that notification bell so you never miss these stories.
Drop a comment and tell us where you’re watching from and whether anyone in your family served in it.
October 1944.
The skies over Belgium are a gray freezing canvas where men die in variables of seconds and inches.
A lone P-51D Mustang painted with the distinct blue nose of the 352nd Fighter Group rolls inverted at 28,000 ft.
To the pilots watching from the bomber formation below, it looks like a mistake, a mechanical failure, a pilot passing out from hypoxia.
The Mustang doesn’t just dive, it tumbles.
It drops its nose past vertical, spiraling downward in a violent, corkcrewing descent that shreds the air and screams with the sound of a tearing canvas.
Standard Army Air Force doctrine is clear.
Altitude is life.
Energy is insurance.
To voluntarily surrender 10,000 ft of altitude in seconds is not tactics.
It is suicide.
It violates the fundamental equation of aerial combat that says he who is highest wins.
But the pilot in the cockpit, Major George Prey, isn’t thinking about doctrine.
He is thinking about vectors.
He watches the German BF 1000s climbing below him.
They expect him to stay high.
They expect him to dive, fire, and zoom climb back up.
They are calculating their defensive turns based on the textbook behavior of an American pilot.
Prey pulls the stick back into his gut.
The Mustang shutters, groaning under 7GS.
He doesn’t pull out to climb.
He pulls out to level off below the enemy.
He has traded potential energy for kinetic ferocity.
He is now screaming upward from the blind spot beneath the German formation.
His speed touching 450 mph.
Before the German Rotten Fura even checks his mirror, PR’s 650 caliber machine guns are already converging on his fuel tank.
The physics don’t make sense to the observer.
Prey has violated the rules of energy management.
Yet, he scores the kill.
But back at the base in Bodney, England, the mood is not one of celebration.
It is one of concern.
The briefing room at Bodney smells of damp wool, stale cigarette smoke, and high octane anxiety.
The Nissen huts rattle in the English wind.
It is a place of grim arithmetic.
Pilots count missions like prisoners count days.
25 used to be the magic number.
Now it’s just until the war ends.
Prey walks through the mud with a gate that is deceptively relaxed.
He is 25 years old, a former barntormer from North Carolina.
He doesn’t have the swagger of the other aces.
He speaks softly.
He drinks little.
He spends his evenings not at the pub, but on the flight line, staring at the leading edges of his wings, talking to his crew chief about drag coefficients and gun harmonization.
To the new replacements, fresh from flight schools in Texas and California, Prey is a god.
To the veterans, he is a terrifying anomaly.
He flies like he’s trying to tear the wings off, a captain mutters over coffee.
That spiral dive, it’s a death wish.
One of these days, he’s going to misjudge the pull out and bury himself in a French turnup field.
The maneuver has no official name in the manual.
The pilots call it the preddy corkcrew.
It involves entering a negative G pushover, transitioning into a poweron spiral, and using the P-51’s superior aerodynamics to plummet faster than a falling stone.
It is designed to trap enemy fighters who try to dive away.
The problem is the P-51D isn’t designed for it.
The airframe limits are strict.
The compressibility issues where the air turns to concrete at high speeds are wellnown.
Prey is flying on the Razor’s edge of structural failure.
George, the group commander says during a debrief, tapping the chalkboard.
You’re bleeding too much energy on the initial merge.
If you miss that first shot, you’re sitting duck at low altitude.
Prey looks at the diagram.
He sees the lines, the arcs, the standard engagement curves.
Sir, he says quietly.
If I miss, I’m dead anyway, but I don’t plan on missing.
It sounds arrogant, but Prey isn’t bragging.
He is stating a mathematical probability.
He has spent hundreds of hours analyzing the deflection angles of the German fighters.
He knows that a Foxwolf 190 rolls faster than a Mustang, but it bleeds speed in a sustained turn.
He knows that a Messersmid climbs well, but its control surfaces stiffen at high speeds.
Prey isn’t flying on instinct.
He is flying on data.
He treats Kripes a mighty, his P-51, not as a chariot, but as a sniper rifle.
He has his ground crew harmonize his guns differently than everyone else.
Standard convergence is set at 300 yd.
Prey sets his closer.
He wants to be so close he can see the rivets on the enemy’s cowling.
He wants the kinetic energy of the bullets to shatter the engine block, not just puncture the skin.
November 2nd, 1944.
A training mission over the channel.
Prey leads a flight of four rookies.
They are green boys who have more hours in a classroom than in a cloud.
He is teaching them the dive.
Follow me down.
Pretty radios.
Smooth inputs.
Watch your manifold pressure.
He rolls inverted and drops.
The rookies try to follow.
The first one pulls too hard, entering a high-speed stall.
The second one panics at the airspeed indicator, reading 500 mph, and pulls out early.
The third one stays with him, but blacks out from the G-force.
Prey levels off at 1,000 ft above the white caps, perfectly controlled, he waits for his flight to reform.
They are scattered, shaken, and terrified.
Back on the ground, the grumbling grows louder.
They say PR’s tactics are unteachable.
They say he is a freak of nature, a natural, and that trying to emulate him will get good men killed.
The doctrine says stay high.
The doctrine says play it safe.
Prey says the doctrine is why the war is dragging on.
He sits in his quarters that night sketching in a notebook.
He draws cones of fire.
He calculates lead angles for a target moving at 400 m at a 30° deflection.
He is obsessed with the concept of total energy.
Most pilots think energy is just altitude plus air speed.
Prey believes energy includes position and surprise.
By diving past the enemy, he argues, you confuse their situational awareness.
You become a ghost.
A plane that was above them is suddenly below them.
The German pilot looks up to check his six, but death is coming from the floor.
It is a theory that relies on absolute precision.
One slip, one moment of hesitation, and the ground wins.
December arrives.
The battle of the bulge begins.
The Vermach launches a massive, desperate counteroffensive through the Arden’s forest.
The weather is atrocious.
Fog grounds the Allied air forces.
For days, the pilots sit in the Nissen huts, listening to the rain, playing poker, and watching the fog press against the windows like a physical weight.
The frustration builds.
They know American boys are dying in the snow below, hammered by German tanks, and the greatest air force in the world is stuck in the mud.
Prey paces the flight line.
He checks his plane three times a day.
He polishes the canopy himself.
He wants zero distortion.
He wants the machine ready the instant the sky clears.
On December 23rd, the high pressure front moves in.
The sky breaks.
A piercing, brilliant blue winter sky opens up over Europe.
The order comes down.
Maximum effort.
Every serviceable fighter is to launch.
The Luftwaffa is up in force trying to support their panzers.
Prey straps into Kripes.
A mighty.
The Merlin engine coughs, catches, and roars to life.
The vibration hums through his bones.
It is a familiar, comforting lethality.
He taxis out.
His wingman, a lieutenant named Gordon, gives him a thumbs up.
Gordon is a good pilot.
Steady, a by the book flyer.
He worries about Prey.
He has told the others, “Flying with George is like holding onto the tail of a tiger.
You just hope he doesn’t turn around and bite you.
They take off, climbing through the last wisps of ground fog.
They form up at 26,000 ft.
The cold is brutal.
The heaters in the P-51 struggle to keep the canopy from frosting over.
Prey scans the horizon.
He is looking for the contrills, the white vapor trails that mark high-flying aircraft.
Blue flight check switches.
Prety’s voice is calm over the radio.
Music on.
Music is the term for arming the guns.
10 minutes later, radar control crackles.
Vector 120.
Large gaggle of bandits reported near Cobblence.
Angels 25.
Prey turns the flight.
He spots them.
It isn’t a gaggle.
It is a swarm.
More than 60 German fighters, BF9s and FW90s, are formed up in a massive defensive box.
They are escorting bombers, but they are also hunting.
They see the American Mustangs approaching.
The odds are 60 to4.
Standard doctrine says, “Call for reinforcements.
Shadow the formation, pick off stragglers.” Prey doesn’t touch the radio.
He touches the throttle.
He pushes it past the gate into war emergency power.
The engine howls as the supercharger kicks into high gear.
He looks at the massive German formation.
It is a wall of guns, a meat grinder.
Most pilots would climb to get above them.
Prey looks down.
He sees the gap beneath the formation, the blind spot.
He looks at Gordon.
Stay with me.
Prey rolls inverted.
He initiates the crazy dive.
He drops toward the earth, aimed not at the sky above the Germans, but at the hard deck below them.
He is going to fly up into the belly of the beast.
The pilots in the mess hall mocked it.
The manual forbids it.
But in the next 5 minutes, George Prey is about to rewrite the history of aerial combat with a display of violence so precise, so rapid, and so devastating that it will look less like a dog fight and more like an execution.
Bottom of the ark, 9,000 ft.
Prey hauls the stick back.
The guit squeezes his legs, fighting the blood trying to rush to his feet.
The Mustang groans, the airframe vibrating under the stress of a 450 m pull out.
He hasn’t just dived, he has built a reservoir of kinetic energy.
While the German BF 1000s at 25,000 ft are cruising at 300 m, Prey is rocketing upward at nearly 500 m.
He is no longer a pilot.
He is a projectile.
He spots his entry point.
Two BF-1009s flying tight formation on the left flank of the German box.
They are looking level and high, scanning for the classic American dive attack from the sun.
They are completely blind to the threat screaming up from the hard deck.
Gordon, break right and cover me.
Prey snaps.
I’m going through.
Prey doesn’t slow down.
He keeps the throttle pinned.
He closes the distance in seconds.
1,000 yd, 800 yd.
The lead German pilot is just a silhouette against the sun.
Prey adjusts his trim.
He doesn’t need to pull much lead.
He is coming from below, reducing the deflection angle.
It’s a belly shot, the most vulnerable part of an aircraft where the fuel lines and coolant pipes are exposed.
He waits.
Most rookies fire at 600 yards.
They spray and prey.
Prey waits until 300.
He waits until the wings of the 109 spill over the edges of his K14 gun site.
He taps the trigger for less than a second.
The 650 caliber machine guns harmonized to converge at this exact distance act like a saw.
The stream of incendiary rounds slices through the 109’s wing route.
The German plane doesn’t just smoke, it disintegrates.
The wing folds up, snaps off, and the fuselage whips into a violent, unreoverable spin.
Prey doesn’t watch it fall.
He is already moving.
He uses his massive excess speed to zoom climb past the wreckage.
The second German pilot, the wingman, is stunned.
He sees his leader vanish in a fireball, but he can’t see the attacker.
Prey has already shot past him, rocketing vertically into the sun.
The wingman banks left, panic setting in.
He exposes his canopy.
Prey kicks the rudder.
The Mustang, stalling at the top of its zoom, pivots on a dime.
He drops the nose.
Now he is above the second German.
Gravity works both ways.
He dives.
A short burst.
The cockpit of the second 109 shatters.
The pilot slumps forward.
Two kills in 20 seconds.
The German formation begins to fragment.
The defensive box, a tactic where fighters fly in protective layers, relies on discipline.
But discipline collapses when the enemy is moving twice as fast as you, striking from angles that shouldn’t exist.
The radio channel is chaos.
Amariker Unur Americans below us.
Break.
Break.
Pretty is in the zone.
Athletes talk about the zone where the game slows down.
For a fighter pilot, it is a state of hyper awareness where the conscious mind shuts off and the training takes over.
He doesn’t see airplanes.
He sees vectors.
He sees energy states.
He spots a fwolf 190 trying to dive away.
A classic mistake.
The FW90 is fast, but diving extends the fight.
Prey rolls his Mustang and cuts inside the Germans turn.
He checks his manifold pressure.
67 in.
The Rolls-Royce Merlin engine is screaming, pushing out 1,700 horsepower.
The vibration is so intense, PR’s teeth chatter, but his hands on the stick are surgical.
He closes on the FW90.
The German pilot jinks left, then right, trying to throw off the aim.
Prey doesn’t chase the reticle.
He anticipates.
He puts the Pipper in empty space, waiting for the German to fly into it.
Short burst.
The FW90’s canopy blows off.
The pilot bails out.
Three.
Prey pulls up again, trading his speed for altitude.
He checks his mirror.
His wingman, Gordon, is struggling to stay with him.
Gordon is a good pilot, but he is flying by the book.
Prey is flying by feel.
George, you’ve got two on your six, Gordon yells.
High .
Pretty looks.
Two BF-1009 have latched onto him.
They are diving.
Tracers reaching out.
This is the moment the critics warned about.
This is where the crazy dive supposedly leaves you vulnerable, low on energy, trapped by superior numbers.
But Prey hasn’t bled his energy.
He has hoarded it.
Instead of turning away from the attackers, which would expose his tail, or diving, which would put him on the deck, Prey does the unthinkable.
He chops the throttle to idle and drops his combat flaps.
It is an air brake maneuver.
The Mustang decelerates violently like it hit a wall of water.
The two German pilots diving at 400 m overshoot.
They flash past Freddy’s nose so close he can see the oil streaks on their bellas.
As soon as they pass, Prey slams the throttle forward and retracts the flaps.
The Merlin roars.
He is now behind the men who were hunting him.
It is the aerial equivalent of a judo throw.
He used their own momentum against them.
He lines up the trailing 109.
The engine block explodes.
White coolant sprays the windshield.
Four.
The lead 109 pulls hard vertical trying to loop.
Pretty follows.
The P-51D is heavier than the 109, but it has more inertia.
It carries its speed better in the vertical.
Prey hangs on his prop, inching closer as gravity claws at both planes.
The German stalls first.
His nose drops.
Prey is there.
Five.
Five kills in under four minutes.
The sky is emptying.
The surviving German planes are scattering, diving for the clouds, running for the deck.
The bombers they were escorting have turned back, jettisoning their loads harmlessly in the fields.
Prey scans the horizon.
He is alone.
Gordon has lost him in the melee.
He sees one last shape.
A BF-1009 damaged, trailing smoke, limping toward the cloud layer.
It would be easy to let him go.
Prey is low on ammo.
He is tired.
He has done enough.
But the math of war is cruel.
A damaged plane can be fixed.
A surviving pilot can fly tomorrow.
Prey pushes the nose down.
He closes on the straggler.
The German pilot sees him.
He doesn’t maneuver.
He is resigned.
He flies straight and level.
Pretty checks his ammo.
The counters show less than 200 rounds per gun.
That’s about 3 seconds of fire.
He closes to 100 yards.
He wants to be certain.
He presses the trigger, clicking.
The guns fire a short burst, then fall silent.
The vibration stops, but it is enough.
The rounds walk through the Germans fuselage.
The plane rolls over and drops into the clouds.
Zigza Prey takes his finger off the trigger.
He flexes his cramped hand.
Blue flight.
This is lead.
He breathes into the mask.
Splash six.
Ammo depleted RTB.
There is silence on the radio, then Gordon’s voice sounding stunned.
Copy lead splash six.
Did you say six? Affirmative.
Let’s go home, Gordon.
I need a drink.
The landing is uneventful.
Pretty taxis cre mighty to its hardstand.
The engine shuts down with a metallic tink tink of cooling alloy.
The crew chief jumps onto the wing before the prop has even stopped spinning.
Major, we heard the radio chatter.
Is it true? Pretty slides the canopy back.
He pulls off his helmet.
His hair is matted with sweat.
He looks exhausted, drained of adrenaline.
Reload her, chief.
Prey says quietly.
Check the gun heaters.
The outboard left froze up on me.
He climbs out.
He walks around the plane.
The crew chief looks at the gun ports.
They are black with powder burns.
He looks at the gun camera aperture.
Major the chief asks, “How many?” Pretty holds up six fingers.
The ground crew stops working.
A mechanic drops a wrench.
Six.
In one mission, most pilots pray for one kill in a tour.
Six is a statistic usually reserved for entire squadrons.
The intelligence officer, Captain Barnes, runs up with a clipboard.
He is out of breath.
Major Prey, we need the report immediately.
Core HQ is asking what the hell happened up there.
The radar screen just cleared.
I engaged a formation near Cobblins, Prey says, lighting a cigarette.
His hands are finally shaking.
I used the vertical entry.
It works, Barnes.
It really works.
The crazy dive, Barnes asks.
Call it whatever you want, Prey says, exhaling smoke.
They never looked down.
They were watching the sun.
I came up from the floorboards.
Later that night, the gun camera footage is developed.
The room is packed.
The same pilots who mocked the suicide dive are standing on chairs to get a better look.
The film plays.
It is a blur of violence.
Kill one.
The belly shot, the wing snapping off.
Kill two, the zoom climb execution.
Kill three, the overshoot trap.
The silence in the room is heavy.
It isn’t the silence of respect.
It is the silence of awe.
They are watching a man dismantle the luftwaffa with the precision of a surgeon and the brutality of a butcher.
When the film ends, no one cheers.
The group commander walks to the front.
He looks at Prey, who is sitting in the back nursing a cup of coffee.
Well, the commander says, I guess we need to rewrite the manual.
Prey doesn’t smile.
He just nods.
He knows that the manual didn’t kill those Germans.
Physics did.
But the war isn’t over.
And in the frozen forests of the Ardens, the German army is pushing back.
The air war is about to get lower, dirtier, and infinitely more dangerous.
Prey has mastered the sky, but the ground is a different enemy.
By late December 1944, George Prey was no longer the maverick with the suicide dive.
He was the highest scoring Mustang ace in the European theater.
The preddy corkscrew, that violent spiraling descent that violated every pre-war safety manual, was now unofficial doctrine in the 352nd fighter group.
New pilots arriving from the states didn’t want to learn the army way.
They wanted to learn the preddy way.
“You have to trust the airframe,” Prey told a group of wideeyed lieutenants.
“The Mustang will talk to you before it stalls.
It will shutter in your hands.
That shutter is the sweet spot.
That’s where you turn tighter than the German.” Prey had become the king of the Mustangs.
With 26 aerial victories and more on the ground, he was closing in on the all-time record.
The press loved him.
They called him the Pied Piper of Bodney.
But the fame sat heavily on his shoulders.
Prey wasn’t a glory hound.
He was an introvert.
He didn’t fly for the headlines.
He flew because he felt a crushing responsibility to the bomber crews.
Every German fighter he shot down was 10 American boys who would make it home to their mothers.
Physically, the war was eating him alive.
The crazy dive took a toll on the human body, pulling 7gs repeatedly bursts capillaries in the eyes and bruises the internal organs.
Prey walked with a stiffness in his back.
He had chronic ulcers from the stress.
His commanding officer, Colonel Joe Mason, saw the fatigue.
George Mason said one evening in the officer’s club, “You’ve done enough.
You’re the top gun.
Take a rotation.
Go home.
Sell some war bonds.” Prey looked into his beer.
The Christmas decorations were up in the club.
Pathetic strings of popcorn and paper stars.
Outside, the fog of the Arden’s offensive was grounding the fleet again.
I can’t go, Colonel,” Prey said softly.
“Not while the bulge is happening.
The Germans are throwing everything they have at our boys on the ground.
If I leave now, who’s going to teach the new kids how to survive?” It was the classic trap of the ace.
He was too valuable to lose, but too effective to ground.
Prey stayed, and he prepared for a different kind of war.
The high alitude duels were ending.
The Luftwaffa was being forced down to the deck to support their tanks.
The war was moving from the clean freezing air of 30,000 ft to the dirty, chaotic mud of the tree line.
The Battle of the Bulge was a nightmare for air power.
The Germans had launched their offensive under the cover of a massive winter storm grounding the Allied air forces.
For weeks, American infantrymen were slaughtered by Tiger tanks without air cover.
But on December 23rd, the Russian high moved in.
The skies cleared.
It was open season.
Pretty led mission after mission.
The targets changed.
Instead of massive bomber formations, they were hunting targets of opportunity, strafing columns of trucks, chasing flockwolves through the valleys.
This was dangerous work.
At 30,000 ft, you have time.
At 500 ft, you have luck.
On December 24th, Christmas Eve, the chaos reached its peak.
The sky was so crowded with planes, American P47s, British Typhoons, German BF 10009s that mid-air collisions were a real threat.
But the biggest threat wasn’t the enemy.
It was confusion.
The American troops on the ground were terrified.
They had been pounded by the Luftwaffa for weeks.
They were jumpy.
They shot at anything with wings.
Friendly fire wasn’t a term used lightly.
It was a daily reality.
During a briefing, the intelligence officer warned the pilots, “Stay away from the American lines near Lege.
The anti-aircraft batteries are nervous.
They are shooting first and identifying later.” Prey nodded.
He knew the risk.
He painted bold black and white invasion stripes under his wings to help identification.
But at 400 m, stripes are just a blur.
That night, Christmas Eve, the 352nd fighter group held a dinner.
It was a surreal attempt at normaly.
They had turkey canned, cranberry sauce, and cheap wine.
Prey sat at the head of the table.
He looked around at the faces of his squadron.
Many were teenagers.
They looked at him with absolute trust.
They believed that as long as they flew on PR’s wing, they were invincible.
Prey raised a glass to a free Christmas.
He said he didn’t drink the wine.
He went back to his bunk early.
He had a bad feeling about the next day.
He wrote a letter to his fiance back in North Carolina.
The fighting is hard right now.
The Germans are desperate, but I think we have them on the run.
I hope to be home soon.
He left the letter on his desk.
December 25th, 1944.
Most of the world was praying for peace.
George Prey was strapping into a killing machine.
His plane Kes mighty third was a masterpiece of maintenance.
The wax on the wings was polished to a mirror shine to reduce drag.
The guns were harmonized perfectly.
Pretty climbed onto the wing.
His crew chief, Art Snyder, handed him his helmet.
“Merry Christmas, Major,” Snyder said.
“Same to you, Art.
Keep the turkey warm for me.
I’ll be back by noon.” It was a standard patrol mission.
“Pretty was leading a flight of 10 mustangs.
Their job was to sweep the area near Cobblins and protect the bombers hitting the German supply lines.
They took off into the blinding winter sun.
The air was crisp and smooth.
For the first two hours, it was quiet.
The radio was filled with the chatter of other squadrons, but PRY’s sector was empty.
Then the radar controller broke the silence.
Blue leader be advised.
Bandits reported strafing American positions near the Quad City area.
Vector 190.
Prey checked his map.
The Quad City area was a dense industrial zone.
It was messy terrain.
Smoke stacks, rivers, forests.
Roger control.
Blue flight drop tanks.
Let’s go hunting.
The 10 mustangs jettisoned their external fuel tanks.
They fluttered down like silver leaves.
Prey pushed the nose over.
He didn’t do the crazy dive this time.
He did a shallow hunting descent.
He was looking for movement against the snow.
He spotted them at 10,000 ft.
Two Messers BF 10009s and two Faulwolf 190s.
They were harassing a straggling B24 Liberator.
Taliho, Prey said calmly.
I’ll take the two on the left.
Gordon, take the right.
It should have been a routine bounce.
Prey had the altitude.
He had the speed.
He had the surprise.
But the Germans didn’t fight.
As soon as they saw the mustangs, they broke.
They didn’t climb.
They didn’t turn.
They dove.
They ran for the deck.
This was the new Luftwafa tactic.
They knew they couldn’t beat the Mustang at altitude, so they dragged the fight down to the treetops where the flack lived.
They were luring the Americans into the weeds.
Prddy knew it was a trap.
He knew the doctrine said, “Let them go.” But he also saw the bee smoking.
He saw the black crosses on the wings of the enemy.
The predator instinct took over.
They’re running.
Prey said, “Follow me down.” He pushed the stick forward.
The chase was on.
The chase led them right over the front lines.
Prey locked onto a FW 190.
The German pilot was good.
He used the terrain, banking around hills, skimming over church steeples.
Pretty stuck to him like a shadow.
He closed the distance.
500 yd, 400 yd.
They were doing 350 m at 200 ft AGL above ground level.
Prey checked his gun site.
The German was weaving, desperate to throw off the aim.
Steady, Prey whispered.
He fired a short burst.
The tracers zipped past the FW90s canopy.
The German broke hard left, turning directly over a clearing in the forest.
Prey followed.
What Prddy didn’t know, what he couldn’t know was that the clearing was occupied.
It was occupied by the US Army’s 12th anti-aircraft group.
They were manning a battery of quad 50 meat choppers, 450 caliber machine guns mounted on a halftrack.
These gunners had been strafed by the Luftwaffa all morning.
They were cold.
They were terrified.
They were looking at the sky with hatred.
They heard the engines screaming.
They saw two planes pop over the tree line, flying low and fast.
One plane had black crosses.
The plane right behind it had blue American markings.
But at 350 m, head-on silhouettes blur.
The gunners didn’t look for stars and bars.
They didn’t look for the distinctive scoop of the Mustang.
They just saw airplanes.
And in the Battle of the Bulge, airplanes meant death.
Target.
A sergeant screamed on the ground.
Open fire.
The Quad 50 spun around.
The barrels lowered.
Prey was focused entirely on the Faulk Wolf.
He was seconds away from his 27th kill.
He was lining up the shot that would make him the ace of aces.
He didn’t see the muzzle flashes on the ground.
He didn’t see his own countrymen leveling their guns at his belly.
The tragedy of war is rarely about villains.
It is often about good men making split-second mistakes in the fog of fear.
As Prey banked to follow the German, he exposed the full underside of Kripes a mighty to the battery below.
The air filled with American tracers.
It happened in less than two seconds.
George Prey was focused on the Faul Wolf 190.
He was 50 ft above the treetops doing 350 mph.
At that speed and at that altitude, the margin for survival is non-existent.
The American anti-aircraft battery, battery A of the 430th AAA, opened up with everything they had.
Four quad 50 mounts unleashed a storm of50 caliber rounds.
Prey didn’t He didn’t know they were there.
The bullets struck Kripes a mighty third from below.
Clang clang.
RIP.
The sounds of impact were sickeningly loud in the cockpit.
The armor-piercing rounds punched through the aluminum belly of the Mustang.
They shredded the coolant lines.
They smashed into the engine block.
But the fatal hit wasn’t to the engine.
One round, or perhaps a cluster, punched through the cockpit floor.
Freddy’s wingman, Lieutenant Gordon, watched in horror from behind.
He saw the red tracers.
He realized instantly what was happening.
Hold fire.
Friendly.
Friendly.
Gordon screamed into the radio, but the ground troops weren’t on the aviation frequency.
They couldn’t hear him.
Gordon watched pieces of Freddy’s plane fly off.
He saw the canopy jettison, a desperate reflexive action by Freddy to bail out, but the physics were against him.
When a P-51 loses its coolant, the engine seizes within seconds.
But Prey didn’t have seconds.
He was at treetop level.
The Mustang pitched up violently for a split second, likely Prey pulling back on the stick in agony or a reflex to gain altitude.
Then it rolled inverted.
It was the start of the crazy dive one last time, but there was no altitude to recover.
No sky to work with.
The plane cartwheelled.
The right wing tip clipped the frozen ground.
The aircraft disintegrated in a blinding flash of fuel and metal.
tumbling across the snow-covered field near the village of Langerwat.
Gordon circled overhead, screaming into his mask, tears streaming down his face.
The German flockwolf escaped.
The guns on the ground fell silent, the crews cheering, thinking they had just splashed a Nazi attacker.
It was 1200 p.m.
Christmas Day.
On the ground, the gun crews sprinted toward the burning wreck.
They were pumped full of adrenaline.
They high-fived each other.
We got him.
We got the bastard.
The first soldier reached the tail section which had snapped off and landed in a snowbank.
He stopped.
He dropped his rifle.
He stared at the insignia painted on the vertical stabilizer.
It wasn’t a swastika.
It was a white star in a blue circle.
The star in bars.
Oh god, the soldier whispered.
Oh god, no.
They ran to the cockpit section.
They found the pilot.
He was still strapped into the seat thrown clear of the fire.
They saw the blue flight suit.
They saw the Mi West life vest.
They saw the American Eagle insignia on his shoulders.
The cheering died instantly.
The soldiers stood in the snow, the silence ringing in their ears louder than the gunfire.
They removed his helmet.
They saw a young man, 25 years old, with a face that looked like their brothers, their cousins.
They checked his dog tags.
Major George Epijr.
The battery commander arrived.
He looked at the wreckage.
He looked at his men who were now weeping openly, sick with the realization of what they had done.
This wasn’t just a pilot.
This was the ace of aces.
The man who had cleared the skies for the bombers.
The man who had saved thousands of American lives and they had killed him on Christmas Day.
The commander took off his helmet.
Cover him up, he choked out.
Cover him up.
Back at Bodney, the sun began to set.
The squadron returned.
One by one, the Mustangs peeled off and landed.
The crew chief, Art Snyder, stood by PR’s hardstand.
He held a thermos of hot coffee.
He waited for the familiar roar of cre mighty.
He counted the planes.
Nine.
He waited.
Gordon taxied in.
He shut down his engine.
He didn’t climb out.
He just sat in the cockpit, head in his hands.
Snider ran over to Gordon’s plane.
Where is he? Where’s the major? Gordon looked up.
His eyes were hollow.
Friendly fire, Gordon whispered.
The flack, it was ours.
The news spread through the base like a virus.
The mess hall was silent.
The Christmas turkey went uneaten.
The decorations looked grotesque in the gloom.
In PR’s room, the letter to his fiance sat on the desk waiting to be mailed.
George Prey was officially credited with 26.
83 aerial victories.
The fraction comes from shared kills.
He was the top P-51 Mustang ace of the war.
Military historians argue that if he had survived the war, he would likely have surpassed Richard Bong 40 kills to become the American ace of aces.
He was flying in a targetric environment at the height of his skill in the best fighter plane ever built.
But numbers don’t measure the man.
Prety’s legacy wasn’t in the tally.
It was in the technique.
The preddy corkcrew, the hygi spiral dive that the veterans mocked, became standard energy management doctrine.
He proved that the P-51 wasn’t just a boom and zoom interceptor.
It was a supreme dog fighter if flown at the edge of its envelope.
He taught a generation of pilots that safety in combat is a myth.
Safety doesn’t come from flying straight and level.
Safety comes from aggression.
It comes from doing the thing the enemy thinks is impossible.
The tragedy of his death highlighted the brutal confusion of the Battle of the Bulge.
It forced the army to overhaul its airto ground coordination.
It led to better training for anti-aircraft crews in aircraft recognition.
But for the men of the 352nd, the lesson was simpler and colder.
War doesn’t care who you are.
You can be the best pilot in the world.
You can master the physics of flight.
You can outsmart the Luftwaffa’s greatest aces.
But you can’t outsmart a bullet with your name on it, especially if that bullet was paid for by your own government.
Prey was buried in Europe alongside the men he died trying to protect.
Years later, his brother, Bill Prey, also a P-51 pilot, was shot down and killed in Czechoslovakia.
They are buried side by side.
Two brothers, two mustangs, two heroes who never came home.
The story of George Prey is a reminder that the line between a hero and a casualty is terrifyingly thin.
He was a mathematician of the sky.
He calculated vectors, energy states, and deflection angles, but he couldn’t calculate the fog of war.
We honor not just the victories, but the tragedies.
We tell the stories of the men who pushed the limits of machines and human endurance.
If you believe George Prey deserves to be remembered as the greatest Mustang pilot of all time, please hit the like button.
It helps us keep his memory alive.
And we want to hear from you.
Check the comments below.
Do you think friendly fire incidents like this are inevitable in war? Or could better communication have saved him? It’s a tough question, but let’s discuss it.
Subscribe and turn on notifications.
If stories like this remind you why we preserve history, hit that like button, subscribe for more forgotten heroes, and turn on that notification bell so you never miss these stories.
Drop a comment and tell us where you’re watching from and whether anyone in your family served in it.
