Dajora Airfield, New Guinea.
November 1943.
The air in New Guinea does not act like air.
It acts like soup.
It is heavy, saturated with 98% humidity, and smells of rotting vegetation, aviation gas, and mildew.
It clings to the aluminum skin of the Lockheed P38 Lightning sitting on the perforated steel planking PSB of the runway.
Inside the cockpit of Pudgy, Captain Thomas Tommy Maguire, a man who will eventually become the second highest scoring ace in American history, is sweating.
He is 23 years old, brash, abrasive, and technically brilliant.
But right now, he is just hot.
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The P38 is an anomaly.
In a war of single engine dog fighters, it is a twin engine monster.
It has twin booms, a central gondola for the pilot, and a nose packed with 450 caliber, machine guns, and a 20 cannon.
It doesn’t rely on wing-mounted guns that require convergence.
It fires a laser beam of lathe straight down the center line.
It is fast.
It climbs like a rocket, but it has a fatal reputation in the Pacific.
It cannot turn.
The Japanese A6M0, the adversary waiting above the jungle canopy, is a kite made of magnesium and paper.
It can turn on a dime.
It dances.
The P38, weighing 17,000 lb, fully loaded, lumbers in a turn like a bus.
The laws of physics are clear.
Highwing loading plus heavy weight equals wide turn radius.
If a P38 tries to turn with a zero, the P38 dies, the Zero simply cuts inside the ark and shreds the American plane.
Every briefing emphasizes this.
Slash and run, boom and zoom.
Never, ever turn.
But combat is not a briefing room.
Combat is chaos.
The manual tells you how to fly the plane, but it doesn’t tell you how to survive when the manual fails.
We are about to uncover the moment a desperate pilot threw out the rule book and discovered a quirk of physics that changed the war in the Pacific.
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Now, let’s get back to the cockpit.
Maguire takes off.
The two Allison V1 1710 liquid cooled engines scream.
These engines are temperamental.
They are turbocharged complex beasts that hate the tropical heat, but they produce 1,475 horsepower each.
He climbs to 20,000 ft over the Huan Gulf.
He is leading a flight of four.
The sky is a blinding white glare.
Bandits three low.
Maguire looks down.
He sees them.
A flight of zeros painted in the dark green of the Imperial Japanese Navy cruising just above the cloud tops at 10,000 safety.
They are bait.
Maguire nos is over.
Drop tanks.
The heavy external fuel tanks tumble away.
The P38s pick up speed.
300 may thrift grade 50 400.
The wind noise builds to a shriek.
The plan is standard.
Dive, fire, and use the momentum to zoom, climb back up before the zeros can react.
Maguire picks his target, a zero.
Trailing on the left, he lines up the reflector sight, but the Japanese pilot is an ace.
He sees the lightning diving.
He waits.
He waits until Maguire is committed to the dive, moving too fast to adjust.
At the last second, the Zero flicks into a violent climbing turn to the left.
Maguire hauls back on the yolk.
The heavy P38 groans under the G load.
He tries to follow the turn.
The hydraulics hiss.
The rudders fight the slipstream.
He misses.
The P38’s momentum carries it past the zero.
Maguire is now slow at the bottom of his dive and he has bled his energy trying to pull lead.
He looks in his mirror.
The zero pilot has completed his tight turn and is now slotting in perfectly on Maggie 6.
This is the nightmare scenario.
The P38 is low and slow.
It cannot out accelerate the lightweight Zero initially.
It definitely cannot outturn it.
Maguire pushes the throttle to the wall.
The Allison’s roar, but the Zero is firing.
Tracers zip past the twin tails.
Thump, thump.
7.7 rounds hit.
The armor plate behind Maggie’s seat.
Panic is a cold chemical.
It floods the brain.
Maguire knows the doctrine dive to the deck.
Run, but he is already near the deck and the zero is cutting the corner.
Maggie’s hands are flying across the cockpit controls.
He needs to turn.
He needs to turn sharper than the plane is aerodynamically capable of turning.
He pushes the yolk left.
He stomps on the left rudder.
The plane banks, but it’s a sluggish wide arc.
The Zero is inside the turn, pulling lead, getting ready to fire the 20 cannons that will blow the P38’s wing off.
Maguire screams in frustration.
He is fighting the machine.
He is fighting the two massive gyroscopes spinning on his wings, the propellers.
And then he makes a mistake, or perhaps a desperate experiment born of terror.
In a single engine plane, the throttle controls speed.
In a twin engine plane, the throttles control thrust vectoring, though no one calls it that in 1943.
Maguire grabs the throttle levers.
They are paired together in his left hand.
He doesn’t push them both.
He yanks the left throttle back to idle.
He leaves the right throttle at war emergency power.
He has just cuten 500 horsepower on the inside of the turn while keeping Huazi 500 horsepower screaming on the outside of the turn.
The result is instant and violent physics.
The P38 is a twin boom aircraft.
The engines are mounted far out on the wings away from the center line.
This creates a massive moment arm.
When the left engine dies and the right engine screams, the thrust creates a chaotic yawing force.
The P38 doesn’t just bank, it pivots.
It feels like a car handbrake turning on ice.
The right engine pushes the right wing forward while the drag of the dead left propeller pulls the left wing back.
The aircraft snaps around its vertical axis.
It stands on its wing tip.
The G forces are lateral, throwing magire against the side of the cockpit, bruising his ribs.
The nose of the P-38 swings around the horizon at a rate that defies the turn-in bank indicator.
It is not a smooth aerodynamic turn.
It is a cartwheel.
The Japanese pilot in the Zero is looking through his gun site.
He is tracking a heavy American fighter making a wide, predictable turn.
He is calculating lead.
Suddenly the P38 stops moving forward and swaps ends.
It rotates 90° in a split second, presenting its belly, then its nose.
The Zero pilot cannot react.
His brain expects a curve.
Maguire has given him a right angle.
The Zero overshoots.
It flies right past the nose of the cartwheeling lightning.
Maguire is now pointed at the enemy.
He is slow.
His aerodynamics are a mess and he is flying on one engine, but he is alive.
He slams the left throttle back forward.
The Allison coughs, catches, and roars back to life.
The torque equalizes.
The P38 stabilizes.
Maguire doesn’t fire.
He is too stunned.
He watches the Zero disappear into a cloud bank.
The Japanese pilot likely just as confused as he is.
Maguire levels out.
He checks his instruments.
The engines are running hot.
The airframe is creaking.
He looks at his hands.
They are shaking.
He realizes he just broke every rule in the flight manual.
He risked a flat spin.
He risks snapping the tail booms.
But he also turned a bus like a motorcycle.
Did you see that? His wingman radios.
You almost spun in Tommy.
No.
Maguire whispers, wiping the sweat from his eyes.
I didn’t spin.
I pivoted.
The briefing room at Dajira is a tin shed with a dirt floor.
Major Richard Bong, the leading American ace, is sitting on a crate cleaning his fingernails with a combat knife.
Maguire walks in, still soaked in sweat, looking like a man who has seen a ghost.
The engines, Mag says, pointing at the diagram of the P38 on the chalkboard.
They aren’t just for speed, they’re for steering.
The engineering officer, Captain Wallace, looks up from his clipboard.
Captain Maguire, if you use differential throttle in a high-speed turn, you are inviting a VMC roll.
You’ll flip the plane on its back and go straight into the jungle.
The vertical stabilizers aren’t big enough to handle that much asymmetric thrust.
It didn’t flip, Maguire insists.
It snapped.
It turned square.
Wallace shakes his head.
It’s reckless.
The torque on the wings spars is off the charts.
But Maguire is obsessed.
He spends the next week analyzing the P38’s unique layout.
The P38 has counterrotating propellers.
The left engine spins clockwise.
The right engine spins counterclockwise.
This was designed by Lockheed engineer Kelly Johnson to eliminate the torquy roll on takeoff that killed so many young pilots in single engine planes.
In a normal flight regime, the P38 is perfectly balanced.
But Maguire realizes that this balance is a cage.
By breaking the balance by manipulating the throttles independently, he can unlock maneuverability that the designers tried to engineer out of the plane.
He takes Pudgy up for a test flight.
He climbs to 15,000 ft away from prying eyes.
He sets up a standard left turn.
Speed 300 men, he pulls 3GS.
The turn is wide, lumbering.
Okay, he mutters.
Let’s break it.
He slams the left throttle shut.
He keeps the right throttle pinned.
Wham! The sensation is violent.
The nose jerks left.
The tail slides right.
The aircraft shutters as the air flow over the left wing separates.
It feels like the plane is disintegrating.
The slip ball on the turn coordinator slams to the side of the glass, but the nose comes around fast.
Maguire jams the throttle back forward before the speed bleeds off too much.
The plane catches itself.
He tries it to the right, chops the right engine, powers the left.
the P38 cartwheels, right? He learns the nuance.
You can’t just chop it to idle.
You have to finesse it.
If you cut it too hard, you spin.
If you cut it just enough, you pivot.
It requires a dancer’s touch on the heavy quadrant levers.
He calls it the clover leaf.
He realizes this is the P38 secret weapon.
The Zero turns using its elevators and ailerons.
Aerodynamic surfaces acting on the air.
The P38 can turn using brute force thrust.
It is the 1943 equivalent of thrust vectoring.
Maguire starts teaching it quietly.
He grabs the new pilots, the kids fresh from flight school who were terrified of the zeros.
“Listen to me,” Maggie tells them, standing under the wing of his plane.
“The book says, don’t turn.
” “The book is right.
If you fly both engines together, but you have two hands, you have two engines.
Use them.” “But sir,” a young lieutenant stammers.
The instructor said asymmetric thrust causes spins.
It does.
Maguire grins a predatory look in his eyes, but if you control the spin, it’s not a spin, it’s a turn.
December 26th, 1943.
Battle of Cape Gloucester.
The sky is filled with Japanese aircraft, Val dive bombers, Betty bombers, and the inevitable swarm of Zer’s flying escort.
Maguire leads his flight into the furball.
It is a chaotic mess.
The clouds are low, forcing the fight down to 5,000 of Tyra territory.
Azero latches onto the tail of Maguire’s wingman.
The American pilot is screaming on the radio.
Get him off me.
I can’t shake him.
Maguire is too fast.
He is booming through the fight at 400 M.
If he tries to turn back to help, his wide radius will take him miles out of the fight.
He will be too late.
He needs to turn now instantly.
Maguire is doing 380 ME.
He is heavy with ammo.
He yanks the left throttle back.
He stomps the rudder.
The P38 shutters violently.
To the observers on the ground, it looks like the plane has exploded or been hit by flack.
It tumbles sideways, shedding speed rapidly, pivoting on a dime.
The airframe screams.
The rivets groan, but the nose swings 180° in seconds.
Maguire slams the throttle forward.
The engines sink up.
He is now facing the opposite direction.
Speed bled down to 250 in front, but pointing directly at the zero, chasing his wingman.
Fox 2, he whispers anacronistically, but the sentiment is there.
He presses the trigger button on the yolk.
The 450 cals and the 20 cannon in the nose erupt.
The stream of fire is steady, concentrated.
There is no convergence to worry about.
The bullets strike the Zair’s wing route.
The Japanese plane shears in half.
Fire blooms.
A magnesium white flower in the gray sky.
Clear magire radios form up.
Back at base, the crew chief, Sergeant Kowalsski, inspects Maggie’s plane.
He finds wrinkles in the aluminum skin of the tail booms.
He finds stress fractures in the engine mounts.
Major Kowalsski says, wiping grease from his forehead.
You’re twisting this bird like a dish rag.
The mounts aren’t designed for this torque.
Fix it.
Ski, Maguire says, lighting a cigarette.
Reinforce them.
Weld them.
I don’t care.
Just make sure they stay on.
You keep flying like this, the wings are going to fall off.
If I don’t fly like this, Maguire says, looking at the jungle, I won’t be coming back to worry about the wings.
The secret is out.
The 475th fighter group begins to change its tactics.
They stop running.
They start turning.
And the Japanese pilots who relied on the certainty of their superior agility begin to realize that the rules of the game have changed.
The clumsy American bus has learned to dance.
By 1944, the differential throttle turn has become an unofficial doctrine among the P38 aces.
It is not written in any manual.
It is passed down in the Nissen huts and the officer’s clubs, drawn on napkins with coffee stains.
Chop the inside engine.
Boot the rudder.
Ride the stall.
It is dangerous.
Several new pilots kill themselves trying it.
They chop the throttle too abruptly at low speed.
The P38 flips onto its back and they augur into the jungle canopy before they can recover.
It requires a specific feel for the energy state of the aircraft.
You have to be fast enough to carry the momentum, but slow enough not to rip the tail off.
Maguire masters it.
He uses it not just to defend, but to attack.
He develops a technique of approaching a fight fast, inducing a cartwheel to slash at a target, then using the P38 superior power to accelerate away.
But the Japanese are adapting, too.
They are fielding new planes, the Kai 84 Frank, the N1K George.
These planes are faster, tougher, and can dive with the Americans.
October 1944, the invasion of the Philippines.
Maguire is now the second leading ace, chasing Richard Bong’s record.
The rivalry is friendly but intense.
Bong flies smoothly, using speed and surprise.
Maguire flies violently, wrestling the plane, using every trick in the book and several that aren’t.
Over Tacklon airfield, the sky is black with flack and fighters.
A massive Japanese counterattack is underway.
Maguire is leading a sweep.
He spots a lone Kai Oscar, a nimble older fighter flown by a master.
Maggie dives.
The Oscar pilot sees him.
He waits.
He breaks hard right.
Maguire expects this.
He chops his right throttle.
The P38 pivots right, matching the turn.
But the Oscar pilot does something unexpected.
He pulls up into a vertical spiral.
He is using his light weight to climb inside Maggie’s turn.
Maguire is heavy.
He can’t climb vertically while turning.
He will stall.
The Oscar comes over the top.
He is now looking down at Maggie.
He drops onto the P38’s tail.
Maguire is in trouble.
He has bled his energy in the turn.
He is slow, 180 mini.
He has a maneuverable fighter on his six and he doesn’t have the speed to run.
The Oscar opens fire.
12.7 rounds spark off the P38’s left engine.
Nell.
Maguire realizes he has one card left.
a card that relies entirely on the P38’s bizarre aerodynamics.
He decides to stop flying.
He chops both throttles to idle.
He drops the combat flaps.
He kicks full rudder.
The P38, essentially a glider with the aerodynamics of a brick, enters a flat skid.
It doesn’t fly forward.
It slides sideways through the air.
The Oscar pilot is coming down fast, expecting a moving target.
He sees the P38 suddenly decelerate and yaw 45° to the slipstream.
The Japanese pilot overshoots.
He has to pull up violently to avoid a collision.
He zooms past Meuire feet away.
As soon as the Oscar passes, Maggie slams the throttles forward.
This is the danger zone.
The P38’s engines are turbocharged.
There is a turbo lag.
If you slam the throttles, the engines can surge or detonate.
Maguire prays to the engineers at Allison.
Bang! Roar! The engines catch.
Flames spit from the exhaust stacks.
The propellers bite.
Maguire pulls the nose up.
The Oscar is in front of him, climbing away, exposing its belly.
Maguire fires.
The 20 cannon shells tear the Oscar apart.
Splash one.
Magi gasp.
He is shaking.
That was too close.
He lands at Tacloin.
His crew chief runs up.
Major, the left engine is smoking.
Magi jumps out.
The cowling is hot.
Oil is dripping.
I pushed it too hard.
Maggie says, “Turbo seal blew and the rudder.” The chief points.
Look at the fabric.
The fabric covering on the rudder is torn.
The stress of the skid ripped it open.
Maguire looks at the plane.
It is beaten, battered, leaking, but it brought him home.
He realizes that the P38 is not just a machine of metal and gas.
It is a partner.
It tolerates his abuse.
It allows him to break the laws of physics because it has the brute strength to survive the punishment.
But there is a limit.
Every machine has a breaking point and every pilot has a number of withdrawals they can make from the luck bank before the account runs dry.
January 7th, 1945.
Lowe’s Negro Island.
The day the trick fails.
Maguire is flying a P38 L, a newer model with hydraulic boosted ailerons.
It rolls faster.
It is more powerful.
He is chasing a Kai 43 Oscar flown by warrant officer Akira Sujimoto, an instructor pilot.
Sujimoto is brilliant.
He is low 200ft above the jungle.
Maggie is heavy.
He has full fuel tanks.
He hasn’t dropped his external tanks because he wants to engage quickly.
Sujimoto turns hard.
Maguire tries to follow.
He is low.
He is slow.
He is heavy.
He reaches for the throttles.
He intends to use the differential thrust to tighten the turn to get the nose on.
The Oscar one last time.
He chops the inside engine.
He pulls back on the stick.
But this time, the physics don’t work.
He is too low.
The air is too thick.
The tanks are too heavy.
The P38 enters the snap maneuver.
But instead of pivoting level, the heavy wing laden with fuel drops.
The nose slices through the horizon.
The plane shutters.
The lift evaporates.
This is the VMC roll velocity minimum control.
The asymmetric thrust flips the plane onto its back.
At 10,000 ft, Magguy could recover.
He could chop the power, neutralize the rudder, and dive out.
At 200 FT, there is no room to dive.
The P38 inverts.
Mag wire.
The master of the twin engine dance realizes the music has stopped.
The plane slams into the jungle canopy, inverted.
A massive fireball erupts.
Thomas Maggie, the man who taught the lightning to dance, dies instantly.
The trick that made him untouchable, eventually claimed him.
He pushed the envelope until the envelope tore.
The death of Tommy Maguire sends a shock wave through the Pacific Theater.
He was invincible.
He was the technician, the man who understood the machine better than the designers.
But his legacy is not the crash.
It is the tactic.
The differential throttle turn becomes a standard, albeit dangerous tool in the P38 pilot’s arsenal for the remainder of the war.
Pilots like Richard Bong, who survives the war only to die in a test flight of a jet, use it sparingly, respecting its lethality.
But the concept using thrust to steer does not die with the propeller age.
Decades later, engineers look back at the P38.
They analyze the flight data.
They realized that Maguire was effectively performing thrust vectoring before the technology existed.
In the 1990s, the F-22 Raptor is unveiled.
It has nozzles on its jet engines that move.
They can direct thrust up or down, allowing the plane to turn tighter than aerodynamics alone would allow.
It is the high-tech computerized version of Maguire’s hand, slamming the throttle back.
The P38 itself remains a legend.
It is remembered as the forktailed devil.
It is remembered for shooting down Admiral Yamamoto, but the pilots remember it for the clover leaf.
Years after the war, a reunion is held for the 475th fighter group.
Old men with hearing aids and walking sticks gather to drink and remember.
A young historian asks one of the veterans, “What was the P38 like to fly? Was it hard?” The veteran smiles.
He holds his hands out, mimicking the twin throttles.
Son, the veteran says it was like wrestling a bear.
It wanted to go straight.
It wanted to go fast.
If you wanted it to turn, you had to make it angry.
Hell, you cut its leg off, the veteran says, making a chopping motion with his left hand.
You killed one engine, and for a few seconds, that big, heavy, beautiful bird would spin like a top.
It felt like magic.
It felt like you were cheating gravity.
Was it planned? The historian asks, “Did Lockheed design it to do that?” The veteran laughs.
A dry rasping sound.
Hell no.
If Lockheed knew we were doing that, they would have grounded us all.
It wasn’t planned.
It was panic.
It was a mistake.
But it was the smartest mistake we ever made.
The veteran looks at a photo of Tommy Maguire on the wall.
Maggie is young, confident, leaning against Pudgy.
Tommy found the edge, the veteran says softly.
He showed us that the plane could do more than the manual said.
He taught us that in a dog fight, the rules don’t matter.
Only the physics matter, and physics doesn’t care if you’re scared.
The legacy of the unplanned trick is this.
Innovation is rarely a clean process in a laboratory.
It is messy.
It is born in the cockpit of a P38 screaming toward the jungle floor at 400 mi stong with a zero on its tail and a pilot who refuses to die.
It is the realization that a machine is just a collection of forces and a human will can bend those forces in ways the engineers never imagined.
The P38 Lightning was built to go fast, but because of a rookie mistake that became a master stroke, it learned to turn.
And that turn saved thousands of American lives in the skies over the Pacific.
Thank you for watching.
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