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 4:00.
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.
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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.
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