Of the Thunderbolt pilots themselves, 5,222 were killed, wounded, or captured in all theaters.

a casualty rate that reflects the ferocity of the combat they flew and particularly the savage losses of the lowaltitude ground attack missions that the Thunderbolt undertook in 1944 and 1945.

These were not statistics to their families.

They were young men, almost impossibly young by any modern standard, who had crossed an ocean to fight a war that was not geographically their own, flying over countries most of them had never seen, dying over railways and bridges and fields that history has forgotten.

Colonel Francis Gabreski was captured in July 1944 and spent the rest of the war in a German prisoner of war camp.

He returned to the United States having shot down more enemy aircraft than any American pilot in the European theater.

He was 25 years old.

He later described his feelings on returning home as confused.

You were supposed to feel victorious, but when you have been in it, when you know the men who did not come back, victory is a quieter feeling than people expect.

More like relief and grief.

and relief that you can feel grief.

In the decades since the war ended, the P-47 Thunderbolt has occupied a curious place in popular memory.

It is overshadowed by the P-51 Mustang, which was faster, more elegant, and more storied as a longrange escort fighter.

It is overshadowed by the Spitfire, which has become perhaps the most beloved fighter aircraft ever built.

It is overshadowed in the Pacific narrative by the Hellcat and the Corsair.

The Thunderbolt gets the footnote, the obligatory mention, the also important status in the histories that rightly celebrate its more glamorous contemporaries.

This is upon honest examination a small injustice.

The P47 did something no other aircraft in the American arsenal was capable of doing.

It absorbed the worst the Luftwaffa could throw at it and kept flying.

It flew at altitudes where other fighters suffocated.

It delivered a weight of firepower that could dismember an aircraft with a half-second burst.

And then when the strategic situation demanded something entirely different, it flew at 50 ft over European countryside and systematically dismantled the infrastructure that kept the German military functioning.

It did this in numbers.

15,683 aircraft built that reflected the fundamental principle of American industrial warfare.

Overwhelming quantity of genuinely highquality weapons produced faster than any enemy could respond.

The men who flew it were the best generation of fighters America ever produced.

Not because they were better than men who came before or after, but because history asked everything of them when they were barely old enough to understand what they were being asked, and they gave it.

Today, perhaps 20 complete P-47 Thunderbolts survive worldwide in museums and private collections.

A handful are airworthy.

When one of them flies, that massive radial engine pulling all 19,000 lb of airframe into the sky, that distinctive Boso roar filling the airfield, something of that generation’s spirit is briefly present again.

It is impossible watching a P-47 fly not to think about the young men who took this machine into the worst skies in history and came home when they came home as different people than they had left.

Francis Gabreski, Robert Johnson, Neil Kirby, HubSki, and the hundreds who never got the chance to become famous.

The pilot on his seventh mission who never made it to his eighth.

The crew chief who kept an aircraft flying with bailing wire in prayer.

The airfield radio operator in England who logged a call sign departing on a gray morning and never logged it returning.

The Thunderbolt was their aircraft.

They were its story.

And the Germans who laughed at it, who saw this enormous, barrel-chested, ungainainely American machine and dismissed it as no fighter at all, they learned the truth.

the hardest possible way at 400 mph in the dive from out of the sun with eight machine guns firing and nothing in the world capable of stopping

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