One of the finest fighters of the war was built in three different factories. A famous aircraft company, a tyre company, and a firm so badly run that the US Navy sent officers in to physically seize the building.

The Navy eventually decided that aircraft from that third factory would never serve with American front-line combat squadrons.

This is the story of how America built the Corsair..🧵1/5 🧵 2/5

The F4U Corsair was designed by Rex Beisel at Chance Vought, in Stratford, Connecticut, and the first thing anybody notices about it is the wing.

It bends. The inner section angles sharply down and then back up again, which looks like a styling choice and is not. Vought had built the aircraft around the biggest, most powerful engine they could get, which needed an enormous propeller, which needed ground clearance. Bending the wing downwards meant they could keep the landing gear short and strong instead of long and fragile.

It worked. The prototype first flew in May 1940, and that October it became the first single-engined American fighter to fly faster than 400 miles an hour.

The Navy wanted it immediately, and in very large numbers. That turned out to be the hard part.

He landed a slow, vulnerable flying boat inside an enemy harbour four separate times, under fire from one of the most heavily defended Japanese bases in the South Pacific.

He was not there to fight. He was there to pick up men who had been shot down.

He brought fifteen of them home.

This is the story of Nathan Gordon..🧵1/5 🧵 2/5

Nathan Green Gordon was a country lawyer from Arkansas. He had a practice, a quiet life, and no particular reason to end up in the Pacific. When the war came he took a Navy commission in 1941 and learned to fly the PBY Catalina.

The Catalina was not a glamorous aircraft. It was a big, slow, twin-engined flying boat, and in a sky full of fast fighters it was one of the most vulnerable things in the air. But it could do one thing nothing else could. It could land on open water.

That made it the aircraft they sent to pick up the men who had been shot down.

Gordon joined Patrol Squadron 34, the Black Cats, flying from an advanced seaplane base in New Guinea. He was 27, a lieutenant junior grade, and he named his Catalina the Arkansas Traveler.

On the morning of 15 February 1944, he was flying a rescue patrol off the Vitu Islands, waiting.

His fighter had been struck by twenty-one cannon shells. He was burned, wounded and almost blinded by hydraulic fluid. His canopy was jammed, leaving him unable to escape.

Then another German fighter found him over the Channel and attacked again and again, until its guns finally fell silent.

The American flew home anyway.

This is the story of Robert Johnson..🧵1/7 🧵 2/7

Nothing about Robert Samuel Johnson suggested he would become one of the deadliest fighter pilots America ever produced.

He arrived in England in January 1943 with the 56th Fighter Group, sailing over on the Queen Elizabeth, crammed into a two-man cabin shared with thirteen other officers.

He had originally been classified as a bomber pilot, and had never completed the gunnery qualification required of a fighter pilot. He had never fired the Thunderbolt's guns at all. So he was packed off to a gunnery course in Wales to put that right.

Bad weather grounded the training flights, and he came back to his squadron still officially unqualified.

In his memoir, Thunderbolt!, Johnson recalled that he was regarded as one of the pilots in the outfit most likely to get himself shot down.

Japanese records credit him with just over 80 kills.

But what he wrote in his own diary tells a completely different story.

This is the story of Tetsuzo Iwamoto..🧵1/7 🧵 2/7

Iwamoto lied to his parents about sitting college entrance exams. He secretly enlisted in the Imperial Japanese Navy instead. By 1936 he had earned his wings. By 1938 he was over China in his first real dogfight, outnumbered, untested and completely alone in the chaos.

He shot down three enemy fighters on that first day.

His commanding officer scolded him for being too aggressive.

He didn't care.

By Christmas 1941, model Spitfires carrying a green shamrock on the nose had become one of the most sought after toys for British schoolboys.

They belonged to an Irish pilot who had become one of the most famous men in Britain, and who, at 21, was the youngest Wing Commander the RAF has ever had.

Seven months later he was gone.

This is the story of Paddy Finucane..🧵1/7 🧵 2/7

Brendan Finucane was born in Dublin in 1920, into a family with a complicated history where Britain was concerned.

His father had fought in the Easter Rising of 1916, taking up arms against British rule in Ireland. Paddy grew up in the turbulent years that followed, a childhood shaped by the Irish War of Independence and the civil war that came after it.

In 1936 the family moved to England, and Paddy took a job as an accountant. He hated it. When he saw the chance to fly, he seized it, and in 1938, aged just 17, he applied to join the Royal Air Force.

The son of an Irish rebel was about to become one of the greatest heroes in the history of the RAF.

In a single mission, he shot down six enemy fighters. Some say he did it with a hangover.

He became the top-scoring Mustang ace of the entire war, and his own commander called him the greatest fighter pilot who ever squinted through a gunsight.

Then, on Christmas Day, his own side killed him by mistake.

This is the story of George Preddy..🧵1/7 🧵 2/7

George Preddy was not who you would picture as the deadliest American fighter pilot in Europe.

He was a slight, quiet young man from Greensboro, North Carolina, who had fallen in love with flying as a barnstormer before the war. When he tried to become a Navy pilot, they rejected him. He tried again. They rejected him again. In all, the Navy turned him down three times over concerns about his health.

The Army Air Corps finally took a chance on him, and he earned his wings at the end of 1941. But his path to greatness nearly ended before it began. During training over Australia in 1942, another fighter dived into his aircraft in a mid-air collision. The other pilot was killed. Preddy bailed out badly injured and spent three months recovering.

The man the Navy did not want was just getting started.

When he died in 2022, at the age of 98, America lost the last living Medal of Honor recipient of World War Two.

He earned it as a 21-year-old, alone, with a flamethrower, over four hours of hell on Iwo Jima, on the very day the flag went up on Mount Suribachi.

This is the story of Woody Williams..🧵1/7 🧵 2/7

Hershel Woodrow Williams, known as Woody, was born in 1923 on a dairy farm in West Virginia, the youngest of eleven children. He weighed just three and a half pounds at birth and was not expected to live. He did, growing up hard on the farm, losing his father when he was only eleven.

When the war came, Woody tried to join the Marines. They turned him down. At around five and a half feet tall, he was told he was too short.

But Woody would not take no for an answer. He kept at it until the Marines finally accepted him in 1943. They trained him for one of the most dangerous jobs a man could be given in the Pacific. He would carry a flamethrower.

The last generation that fought World War Two is disappearing.

But something else may be disappearing with them. The understanding of what they actually fought for.

Recent surveys suggest many young adults already struggle to place some of the most basic events of the war.

This is what's quietly happening to these memories..🧵1/7 🧵 2/7

There were once more than 16 million American veterans of World War Two.

They filled the factories and the parades, coached the baseball teams, taught in the schools, and ran for office.

For most of the last eighty years, if you wanted to know what the war was truly like, you could simply ask one. They were everywhere.

Today, the Department of Veterans Affairs projects that only around 31,000 are still alive. Fewer than one in 500 of those who served.

Soon, there will be nobody left who remembers the landing craft lowering their ramps toward the beaches, the bombers forming up by the hundreds in the cold morning sky, or the telegram arriving at the front door that a family had prayed would never come.

And we are not ready for what happens when the last of those voices falls silent.

In this photo, an old Japanese man laughs with a US Navy fighter squadron aboard an American aircraft carrier, the two of them clutching their heads and joking that they are going bald together.

The other guests had no idea who he was.

He was Saburo Sakai, one of the deadliest fighter pilots Japan ever produced.

This is his story..🧵1/7 🧵 2/7

Saburo Sakai was born in 1916 into a family with samurai ancestry, though by his time they were poor farmers. His father died when he was young, and Sakai struggled in school. At sixteen, looking for a way out, he enlisted in the Imperial Japanese Navy.

He found his calling in the air. Accepted into naval pilot training, he graduated at the very top of his class and was presented with a silver watch by the Emperor himself.

By the time the Pacific war began, Sakai was flying the legendary Mitsubishi Zero, and he was extraordinarily good at it.

Over China, the Philippines, and the islands of the South Pacific, he became one of Japan's deadliest fighter pilots, later claiming around 64 aerial victories, and remembered as one of the greatest aces his country ever produced.

But it was a single day in 1942 that would make him a legend.

In a windowless basement at Pearl Harbor, a man in a bathrobe and slippers and his team broke into a code the Japanese believed was unbreakable.

What they found in it helped hand America the intelligence advantage that turned the entire Pacific war.

Then the Navy buried him for it.

This is the story of Joe Rochefort and the codebreakers..🧵1/7 🧵 2/7

When the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941, Commander Joe Rochefort took it personally. He ran the Navy's code and intelligence unit in Hawaii, and he had not seen the attack coming. He would carry the guilt of that for the rest of his life.

So he threw himself into making sure it never happened again.

Rochefort ran a unit called Station HYPO, hidden in a windowless basement beneath Pearl Harbor. It was a strange, brilliant place. Rochefort himself often worked in a red smoking jacket and carpet slippers pulled over his uniform, went days without leaving the basement or bathing, and slept in a cot in the corner between shifts.

His team was just as unusual. To fill it out, he recruited the entire band from the battleship USS California, which had been knocked out at Pearl Harbor. He believed that musicians, with their gift for spotting patterns, would make superb codebreakers. He was right.

Every American fighter in this photo was a patchwork.

A single P-47 Thunderbolt was stitched together from parts made by around 100 different companies, coast to coast, from the aluminum giant ALCOA to a dental drill company.

They built nearly 16,000 of them.

This is the story of how America built the P-47 Thunderbolt..🧵1/6 🧵 2/6

The P-47 was a monster. It was the biggest, heaviest, and most expensive single-engine fighter the United States built in the entire war. Empty, it weighed around five tons. Fully loaded for combat, closer to eight.

And it was staggeringly complex. A single Thunderbolt was made up of roughly 36,000 separate parts, held together by around 25,000 rivets. To put that in perspective, a typical American car before the war had about 5,000 parts. Every P-47 was like building seven cars at once, and then making it fly and fight at 40,000 feet.

No single factory could make all of that on its own. So America didn't try.

He was the most daring submarine captain America had. He snuck into an enemy harbor with nothing but a child's school atlas for a map, and crippled a warship inside it.

His own crew would have followed him into hell.

But one terrible decision on the surface of the Pacific would shadow his name forever.

This is the story of Mush Morton and the USS Wahoo..🧵1/7 🧵 2/7

Dudley Walker Morton was from Kentucky, a Naval Academy graduate with a wide jaw and a booming personality. At the academy he had picked up the nickname Mushmouth, soon shortened to Mush, and it stuck for life.

By late 1942 the American submarine force was struggling. Many captains were being too cautious, firing from long range and breaking off at the first sign of danger, and they were sinking very few enemy ships.

Morton was the opposite of cautious. When he took command of the USS Wahoo at the end of 1942, he gathered his crew and gave them a speech that became legendary. He told them that the Wahoo was now an expendable ship, that he intended to take her right into the enemy and sink everything he could, and that any man who did not want to come on those terms had thirty minutes to leave, with no shame and no questions asked.

Not a single man left.

In October 1944, more than 200 American soldiers from Texas were trapped in a French forest, surrounded by German troops, with no way out.

The unit sent to save them suffered more than 800 casualties doing it.

Those rescuers were Japanese American soldiers, whose own families were imprisoned back home in US internment camps.

This is the story of the 442nd..🧵1/6 🧵 2/6

In the fear and chaos after Pearl Harbor, the United States made a decision that many Americans would later come to regret. Around 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast, most of them American citizens, were moved from their homes into internment camps for the duration of the war.

Among them were thousands of young Nisei, American-born sons of Japanese immigrants. They had grown up in the United States. They thought of themselves as Americans, and they wanted the chance to prove it.

In 1943 they got that chance. The Army called for volunteers to form a new all-Nisei combat unit. The response was overwhelming. More than ten thousand men stepped forward, many of them volunteering from inside the very camps where their families were being held.

They became the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. They chose a motto that said everything about them.

Go for Broke.

Bet everything.

He wanted to fight so badly that he lied his way into the Marines at 14, and when they tried to keep him out of combat, he stowed away on a ship to Iwo Jima.

Six days after his 17th birthday, he threw himself onto two grenades to save three other men.

And then he survived.

This is the story of Jack Lucas..🧵1/6 🧵 2/6

Jacklyn Harrell Lucas was born in 1928 in Plymouth, North Carolina. Everyone called him Jack.

He was big for his age, broad and muscular, and after the attack on Pearl Harbor he became desperate to fight. There was just one problem. He was 14 years old.

So he forged his mother's signature, lied about his age, and in August 1942, at the age of 14, he talked his way into the Marine Corps Reserve. His size let him pass for 17. He went off to boot camp at Parris Island while boys his real age were still in school.

About a year later, the Marine Corps figured out how young he actually was. But instead of throwing him out, they posted him to Hawaii, far from the front, driving a truck and handling supplies. They were keeping the underage Marine safely away from combat.

Jack Lucas had no intention of sitting out the war.

Stories spread through Bataan about a captain who seemed to appear and disappear in the jungle.

Something was crawling behind Japanese lines at night, ambushing patrols, hitting their positions, and vanishing before they could react.

It was one American officer, often alone, with a Thompson and a handful of grenades.

American troops began calling him the Ghost of Bataan.

This is the story of Arthur Wermuth..🧵1/6 🧵 2/6

Arthur Wermuth was a captain in the 57th Infantry Regiment, one of only a handful of American officers in a unit made up mostly of Philippine Scouts, the tough, highly trained Filipino soldiers who fought alongside the United States Army.

Just hours after Pearl Harbor, Japan invaded the Philippines. The American and Filipino defenders were pushed back onto the Bataan Peninsula, outnumbered, low on supplies, and slowly being starved of food, medicine, and ammunition. There would be no reinforcements coming. They were on their own.

Most men in that position would have hunkered down and tried to survive.

Wermuth did the opposite.

He went hunting.

A 25-year-old American bombardier was given the order to bail out of his dying aircraft over Romania.

He had a parachute. He could have jumped and lived.

Instead, he took it off, strapped it onto a wounded gunner who had lost his own, and helped the man jump to safety.

The last anyone saw of him, he was standing on the bomb bay catwalk of the doomed bomber.

This is the story of David Kingsley..🧵1/6 🧵 2/6

David Richard Kingsley was a firefighter from Portland, Oregon. He joined the Army Air Forces in 1942, trained as a bombardier, and by the summer of 1944 was a second lieutenant flying B-17 Flying Fortresses with the 97th Bombardment Group out of the Mediterranean.

A bombardier's job was to aim and release the bombs. In the final seconds of the bomb run, he effectively flew the aircraft straight and level through the flak so the bombs could hit the target. It took nerve to sit in the glass nose of a bomber and hold steady while the sky around you filled with exploding steel.

On June 23 1944, Kingsley flew a mission against the oil refineries at Ploesti in Romania, the great fuel source feeding the German war machine, and one of the most heavily defended targets in all of Europe.

It was his 20th combat mission, and four days before his 26th birthday.

In 1938, the World Cup was held in a Europe sliding toward war.

One team had been swallowed by Nazi Germany.

Another walked onto the pitch in black shirts and gave the fascist salute.

A dictator wanted the trophy as proof his regime was superior.

Within a year, the continent would be at war.

This is the story of the World Cup before the war..🧵1/7 🧵 2/7

The tournament was held in France in June 1938, and the shadow of fascism hung over all of it.

Spain could not take part. It was tearing itself apart in a civil war that was a rehearsal for the larger war to come.

Austria had qualified as an independent nation. But in March 1938, just months before the tournament, Nazi Germany marched in and annexed the country in the event known as the Anschluss. Austria ceased to exist, and with it, its national team. The players were to be absorbed into the German squad.

Before that happened, the Nazis staged one last match in Vienna, a so-called reconciliation game between Austria and Germany to celebrate the union. The Austrian players were quietly told it would be wise to let the game end in a friendly draw.

Austria's greatest star, Matthias Sindelar, one of the finest footballers in the world, had other ideas.

Already shot in the side, he climbed a 100-foot cliff on D-Day, hunted down five enemy guns the Germans had hidden inland, and destroyed them almost single-handedly with grenades and the butt of his rifle.

Those guns could have killed thousands on the beaches.

A historian called him the most important American on D-Day after Eisenhower.

This is the story of Bud Lomell..🧵1/6 🧵 2/6

Leonard Lomell, known as Bud, was a 24-year-old First Sergeant in Company D of the 2nd Ranger Battalion. He had grown up in New Jersey, worked as a freight train brakeman, and volunteered for the Rangers, the toughest and most demanding unit the Army had.

His battalion was handed one of the most dangerous assignments of the entire invasion.

A few miles west of Omaha Beach stood a cliff called Pointe du Hoc. On top of it, the Germans had built a battery of five massive 155 millimeter coastal guns. From that height, those guns could reach both Omaha and Utah beaches, and the fleet of ships in the Channel between them. If they opened fire on the morning of June 6, they could slaughter thousands of American soldiers as they came ashore.

The Rangers were given a simple, almost suicidal task. Climb the 100-foot cliff, and destroy the guns.

Before he was an astronaut. Before he orbited the Earth. Before he was a senator.

He was a Marine fighter pilot so aggressive, so willing to dive into enemy fire to hit his target, that he kept coming home with hundreds of holes in his jet.

His squadron joked he must have a magnet in his backside.

They called him Magnet Ass.

This is the story of John Glenn..🧵1/4 🧵 2/4

John Glenn left college after Pearl Harbor and became a Marine aviator, earning his wings in 1943. He flew 59 combat missions in the Pacific during the Second World War, attacking Japanese positions across the islands.

But it was Korea where his reputation as a pilot was made.

In February 1953 he joined Marine Fighter Squadron 311, flying the F9F Panther jet on low-level close air support missions, diving down to hammer enemy positions while every gun on the ground fired back at him. He flew so low and pressed his attacks so hard that he kept coming home with his aircraft riddled by bullets and shrapnel.

His squadron mates joked that he must have a magnet in his rear end, the way he attracted enemy fire. The nickname stuck. Magnet Ass Glenn.

One of his aircraft was later photographed with more than 700 holes torn in it from shrapnel. He flew 63 missions in Korea this way, and kept going back up.

In 1942, an American shipyard built a 441-foot cargo ship in 4 days, 15 hours, and 29 minutes.

Not started. Not assembled from a kit. Built, from the laying of the keel to sliding into the water.

At the time, German U-boats were sinking Allied ships faster than Britain could replace them.

So America responded by building ships on a scale the enemy could never match.

This is the story of the Liberty ships..🧵1/6 🧵 2/6

In 1941 Britain was being strangled.

German U-boats prowled the Atlantic in packs, sinking the merchant ships that carried the food, fuel, and weapons keeping Britain alive. By 1942 they were sinking ships at a rate that threatened to outpace Allied replacement. If the losses continued, Britain could be starved into surrender.

The United States, even before it entered the war, came up with an answer. It would mass-produce a single, simple, standardized cargo ship in numbers the enemy could never hope to match. The design, based on a British emergency cargo ship, was deliberately basic and cheap, an ungainly, slow vessel that President Roosevelt himself called a dreadful-looking object.

They named the first one the Patrick Henry, after the American revolutionary who said "give me liberty, or give me death." The whole class took its name from that. The Liberty ships.

The first one took 244 days to build. That was about to change dramatically.

In 1984, two friends went looking for rumored wrecks at the bottom of a lake near Seattle. They found a forgotten World War Two dive bomber sitting in 150 feet of water.

They raised it themselves. Then the US Navy tried to take it back.

They fought the Navy in court and won.

Forty years later, that aircraft flew again.

This is the story of the Lake Washington Helldiver..🧵1/6 🧵 2/6

The aircraft was a Curtiss SB2C Helldiver, a United States Navy dive bomber.

It was not a beloved machine. The early Helldivers were so troubled by handling and performance problems that the crews who flew them gave it a bitter nickname. The Beast. Pilots joked that the letters SB2C stood for things far less polite than dive bomber. It was difficult to fly and difficult to land.

This particular Helldiver entered service in the summer of 1944 and was sent to the Seattle area, to Naval Air Station Puget Sound, on the site of what is now a city park.

In January 1945 it was badly damaged in a ground accident. The Navy decided it was not worth the cost to repair. The early model was already being phased out, so the aircraft was simply written off.

What happened to it next is the strange part.