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.

In March 2025, the last surviving pilot of the Battle of Britain died at the age of 105.

He had been shot down four times. He survived a burning cockpit, the sea, a parachute that snagged in a tree, and a fall behind enemy lines.

When he died, the last of Churchill's "Few" was gone forever.

This is the story of Paddy Hemingway..🧵1/6 ⠀🧵 2/6

John Allman Hemingway was born in Dublin in 1919. Everyone knew him as Paddy. He joined the Royal Air Force in 1938, and by the time the Second World War broke out he was a fighter pilot with No. 85 Squadron, flying the Hawker Hurricane.

His war began before the Battle of Britain. In May 1940, as the German army smashed through France and the Low Countries, Hemingway flew over the retreating British army as it fell back toward the beaches of Dunkirk. He shot down a German bomber and shared in destroying another, before his own Hurricane was hit by anti-aircraft fire and he was forced down near Maastricht.

His squadron was mauled in the fighting over France. They came home to Britain with only a handful of working aircraft and many of their pilots dead, wounded, or missing.

There was no time to rest. The Germans were already turning their attention across the Channel. Hitler intended to destroy the RAF, win control of the skies, and then invade Britain.

The only thing standing in his way was a few hundred young fighter pilots. Paddy Hemingway was one of them.

He named nearly every fighter he ever flew "Old Crow."

In it he flew 116 missions over Germany, shot down more than 16 enemy aircraft, and was never hit by enemy aircraft fire, while half the men he flew with were killed or captured.

Eighty years later, two P-51 Mustangs bearing that same name flew over his grave.

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

Clarence Emil Anderson was born in 1922 and grew up on a farm near Sacramento, California. Everyone called him Bud.

As a boy he watched aircraft fly over his father's fields and fell in love with flying. He earned his pilot's license while he was still a teenager. Then, just after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he joined the Army Air Corps as an aviation cadet and won his wings before the end of 1942.

He was assigned to a brand new unit, the 357th Fighter Group, which would become known as the Yoxford Boys. They were the first group in the Eighth Air Force to fly the new P-51 Mustang, and their job was one of the most dangerous in the air war. They escorted American bombers deep into Germany and back, fighting the Luftwaffe the entire way.

Anderson named his Mustang Old Crow. He liked to say it was partly after the bourbon, and partly because the crow is one of the smartest birds in the sky.

In 1942 a Black mess attendant saved 15 shipmates by towing them through shark-infested water for eight hours.

The Navy gave him a letter, and the country forgot him.

He died at 37, worn down by a war that never let go of him.

Eighty years later, the Navy named a warship after him.

This is the story of Charles Jackson French..🧵1/6 🧵 2/6

Charles Jackson French was born in 1919 in Foreman, Arkansas. His parents died when he was young, and he was raised by his older sister Viola in Omaha, Nebraska.

As a boy in the segregated South, he was barred from the whites-only swimming pools. So he learned to swim in the Red River. It was a skill that would one day save 15 lives.

At 18 he enlisted in the United States Navy. It was 1937, and the Navy, like almost everything else in America at the time, was segregated. At the time, the Navy severely restricted Black sailors to the Steward's Branch and related service roles. French served as a mess attendant, cooking, cleaning, and serving meals to white officers.

He finished his first enlistment and left the Navy in late 1941. Then, just days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Charles French walked into a recruiting office and signed up again.

He was sent to the Pacific.

He died in 2016 at the age of 100, the last surviving Midway dive-bomber pilot.

Seventy-four years earlier he had done something no other American pilot at Midway managed. He scored direct hits on three enemy ships over three days, and all three sank.

He never wanted the credit. The title of his memoir was a plea. Never Call Me a Hero.

This is the story of Dusty Kleiss..🧵1/7 🧵 2/7

Norman Jack Kleiss was born in 1916 in Coffeyville, Kansas, and grew up through the Great Depression. Everyone called him Dusty. He worked with tools as a boy, joined the Naval Academy, and graduated in 1938. He earned his wings as a naval aviator and was assigned to Scouting Squadron Six aboard the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise.

His aircraft was the Douglas SBD Dauntless, a two-man dive bomber. The pilot flew and aimed the aircraft. A gunner sat behind him facing backward, defending the tail.

The way a Dauntless attacked a ship was terrifying. The pilot would roll the aircraft over at high altitude and drop into a near-vertical dive, plunging straight down toward the target through anti-aircraft fire, holding the dive until the last possible second before releasing the bomb and hauling back on the controls to pull out.

By the spring of 1942 the United States had been losing to Japan for six months. Pearl Harbor. The Philippines. Wake Island. The Japanese Navy had not lost a major battle.

That was about to change at a tiny atoll called Midway.

They refused to bathe. They refused to salute. They poached deer from an English lord's estate and used their washing water ration to cook it.

The night before D-Day they shaved mohawks and painted their faces like warriors.

Then they jumped into Normandy on one of the deadliest missions of the invasion.

This is the story of the Filthy Thirteen..🧵1/7 🧵 2/7

Officially they were the 1st Demolition Section of the Regimental Headquarters Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division.

Nobody called them that.

They earned the name the Filthy Thirteen while stationed in England before the invasion. The story goes that they refused to waste their weekly water ration on bathing or shaving. Instead they used it to cook the game they poached from the land around their base, including deer taken from a nearby estate. They went around filthy, unshaven, and unbothered by what anyone thought of them.

They drank hard. They fought. They went absent without leave. They ignored almost every rule the Army had except the ones that kept them alive in combat. Their officers were driven to despair trying to discipline them.

But there was a reason the Army put up with them. When it came to the actual job of blowing things up and fighting behind enemy lines, there was no better squad in the regiment.

They took a B-17 that had been left for scrap, rebuilt it by hand, and bolted on so many extra machine guns it became one of the most heavily armed bombers in the Pacific.

Then they volunteered for a solo mission over enemy territory that few crews wanted.

Its tail number was 666.

This is the story of the Eager Beavers..🧵1/7 🧵 2/7

The pilot was a young officer named Jay Zeamer.

By early 1943 the Army Air Forces had more or less given up on him as a pilot. He had never managed to qualify to command his own bomber. He was bounced between units, used as a fill-in copilot, the odd man out who could not seem to get checked out as a first pilot. On paper he looked like a washout.

But Zeamer wanted to fly combat more than anything. So he did something unusual. He started gathering other men who had been passed over, rejected, or labelled as difficult. Misfits no other crew wanted.

Among them was an old friend, a bombardier named Joe Sarnoski.

Together they became known around the airfield as the Eager Beavers, because they volunteered for the missions nobody else would touch.

There was just one problem. A crew needs an aircraft. And nobody was going to give the rejects a good one.

The paintings on the noses of WW2 aircraft were rarely just decoration.

To the men who flew behind them, they were luck. Protection. A charm against death.

The tradition was older and stranger than almost anyone realizes, and it runs from an Italian sea monster in 1913 to the Ferrari logo to Walt Disney.

This is the story of nose art..🧵1/7 🧵 2/7

It began before most people had ever seen an aircraft fly.

One of the earliest recorded pieces of nose art was painted in 1913. An Italian flying boat went up with a sea monster painted across its hull, complete with teeth and eyes. Some accounts say its crew added marks beside it for the damage the aircraft took in combat.

The idea spread fast once the First World War began. German pilots took to painting gaping mouths beneath the propeller spinners of their aircraft. Squadrons painted emblems to tell friend from foe in the chaos of a dogfight.

From the very beginning the art served two purposes at once. It was a practical marking. And it was something more personal, a way for a man to make the machine that carried him into danger feel like his own.

A red-haired messenger boy at an MGM movie studio in Hollywood paid for his own flying lessons in the 1930s.

By 1940 he was flying a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain.

He was one of the first Americans to fight for Britain, more than a year before Pearl Harbor.

He was carrying a secret that could have ended his flying career.

This is the story of Red Tobin..🧵1/6 🧵 2/6

Eugene Quimby Tobin was born on January 4 1917 in Salt Lake City, Utah, and raised in Los Angeles. He was tall, red-haired, and quick with a joke. Everyone called him Red.

In the 1930s he got a job as a guide and messenger at the MGM film studio in Hollywood. He spent his days carrying messages between the soundstages where the biggest movie stars in the world were making films. He used every spare dollar he earned to pay for flying lessons at a small airfield called Mines Field, now the site of Los Angeles International Airport.

By the late 1930s he had earned his private pilot's license. At the airfield he became close friends with two other young American pilots. Andrew Mamedoff, a charming adventurer and fellow pilot, and Vernon Keough, a former professional parachute jumper nicknamed Shorty.

The three of them were inseparable. And when war broke out in Europe in 1939, the three of them decided they were going to be part of it, even though their own country wanted nothing to do with it.

The American sailors who served on her called the USS Laffey the ship that would not die.

Off Okinawa in 1945, 22 Japanese aircraft singled her out over the course of a single attack.

She was hit by six kamikazes and four bombs in 80 minutes.

32 of her crew were killed. She stayed afloat and kept firing.

This is the story of the USS Laffey..🧵1/6 🧵 2/6

The USS Laffey was an Allen M. Sumner class destroyer built at Bath Iron Works in Maine. She was commissioned in February 1944. She was just over 376 feet long and carried a crew of around 336 men.

She was named after Seaman Bartlett Laffey, a Civil War sailor who had earned the Medal of Honor. She was the second ship to carry the name. The first USS Laffey had been sunk in a point blank gun battle with Japanese warships off Guadalcanal in November 1942.

Her captain was Commander Frederick Julian Becton. Becton had been aboard a nearby destroyer the night the first Laffey went down at Guadalcanal. He had watched her die. Now he commanded the ship that carried her name.

The Laffey went to war fast. On June 6 1944 she was off the coast of Normandy supporting the D-Day landings. A German shell struck her but failed to explode. She broke up a German torpedo boat attack and shelled the fortress at Cherbourg.

Then the Navy sent her to the other side of the world.

By early 1945 she was in the Pacific. She supported the landings at Leyte and Lingayen Gulf in the Philippines. She escorted American aircraft carriers during airstrikes against Tokyo itself.

In April 1945 she arrived off the island of Okinawa.

A tiny American destroyer charged first into the path of the Yamato, the largest battleship ever built.

Her five inch shells could not seriously hurt battleship armor.

She charged anyway, leading the way into an entire enemy fleet.

What her crew did saved thousands of American lives.

This is the story of the USS Johnston..🧵1/6 🧵 2/6

The USS Johnston was a Fletcher class destroyer. She was commissioned in Seattle on October 27 1943. She weighed about 2,100 tons and carried five inch guns and torpedoes. She was built to screen larger ships and hunt submarines, not to fight battleships.

Her captain was Lieutenant Commander Ernest E. Evans. He had been born in Pawnee, Oklahoma in 1908, a son of the Creek and Cherokee nations, raised about as far from the open ocean as anyone in America. He had wanted to be a Marine officer. A knee injury ended that hope, so he joined the Navy instead. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1931. He became one of the few Native American officers to command a United States Navy destroyer.

On the day the Johnston was commissioned, Evans stood on the deck and spoke to his new crew. He said words they would all remember.

"This is going to be a fighting ship. I intend to go in harm's way, and anyone who doesn't want to go along had better get off right now."

One year later he would keep that promise.