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.

On Palm Sunday morning April 18 1943, 18 American P-38 Lightning fighters took off from Guadalcanal at dawn.

16 of them would continue on a 1,000 mile round trip mission across open ocean.

Their target was a single Mitsubishi G4M Betty bomber.

Inside that bomber was the Japanese admiral who had planned the attack on Pearl Harbor.

American codebreakers had handed his flight itinerary to the Navy 4 days earlier.

This is the story of Operation Vengeance..🧵1/6 🧵 2/6

The intercepted message was decrypted on April 14 1943 by United States Navy codebreakers working under a program codenamed Magic. The Americans had been quietly reading the Japanese naval cipher JN-25D for over a year. The Japanese did not know.

The decoded message contained the complete inspection itinerary of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander in Chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet. It listed his departure time from Rabaul. It listed his arrival time at the airstrip on the island of Ballale, just off the southern coast of Bougainville. It identified the aircraft he would be flying in. It identified his fighter escort.

The information went straight to Admiral Chester Nimitz at Pacific Fleet headquarters in Pearl Harbor. From there it went to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox in Washington. From there it went to the White House.

President Franklin Roosevelt is reported to have given Knox a short instruction. Get Yamamoto. There is no surviving official record of those exact words but the order was passed down. On April 17 1943 Knox transmitted an authorization to Admiral Nimitz that read: "Squadron 339 P-38 must at all costs reach and destroy. President attaches extreme importance to mission."

Yamamoto was the man Americans blamed more than any other for Pearl Harbor. He had planned the attack. He had ordered it. He was now flying himself directly into range of American fighters operating from Guadalcanal.

The Americans had one chance to kill him.

The first man to fly the prototype of America's heaviest single-engine fighter took off into a cockpit slowly filling with smoke.

He could not see. He considered bailing out.

He landed safely and shouted: "I think we've hit the jackpot."

The aircraft was designed by two refugees from the Russian Revolution.

More than 15,000 of them were eventually built.

This is the story of the P-47 Thunderbolt...🧵1/5 🧵 2/5

The story begins in the city of Tiflis in the Russian Empire in the 1890s. Two boys were born within two years of each other. Their names were Alexander de Seversky and Alexander Kartveli.

Seversky was born in 1894 to a Russian aristocratic family. He joined the Imperial Russian Navy as a young man and was trained as a naval aviator. In the First World War he flew combat missions against the Germans. He was shot down. He lost a leg.

He recovered. He learned to fly again with a wooden prosthetic. He returned to combat and was credited in some accounts with 13 aerial victories.

Kartveli was Georgian. He was born in Tiflis in 1896 and went on to study aviation engineering in Paris in the 1920s.

By 1917 the Bolsheviks had overthrown the Tsar. The Red Army was sweeping across the former empire. Seversky had been sent to the United States in 1918 as part of a Russian military mission. He decided to stay. Kartveli could not return to Georgia after his Paris studies because the country had fallen to the Red Army in the Soviet-Georgian War of 1921.

The two engineers eventually met in New York.

In 1931 Seversky founded an aircraft company called the Seversky Aircraft Corporation on Long Island. He hired Kartveli as chief engineer. By 1939 the company had been renamed Republic Aviation and Kartveli was its Chief of Design.

He was working on something new.

In 1940 Britain desperately needed a new fighter aircraft to fight the Germans.

An American company nobody had heard of promised they could design and build an entirely new fighter in 120 days.

They delivered it in 117.

The aircraft they built became one of the most important fighters of the entire Second World War.

This is the story of the P-51 Mustang..🧵1/5 🧵 2/5

By the spring of 1940 Britain was in serious trouble.

The German army was pouring across France. Britain feared it would soon lose fighter aircraft faster than its factories could replace them. The Luftwaffe was massing in occupied airfields just across the English Channel. Within months the Battle of Britain would begin.

The British Purchasing Commission was sent to the United States to buy as many fighter aircraft as American factories could produce. They wanted Curtiss P-40 Warhawks. Curtiss could not build them fast enough.

In April 1940 the Commission walked into the offices of a small American aircraft company in Los Angeles called North American Aviation. The company had never built a successful fighter. They had built training aircraft and a few bombers. The British asked them to build Curtiss P-40s under license for the Royal Air Force.

The president of North American was James Henry Kindelberger. The men who knew him called him Dutch. He looked at the British and gave them a different answer.

He told them North American could design and build a brand new fighter from scratch that would be faster, better, and more capable than the P-40. He told them North American could deliver a prototype in 120 days.

The British thought he was lying. He insisted.

They signed the contract anyway. The date was May 4 1940.

The chief engineer Dutch handed the project to was a 40 year old German immigrant named Edgar Schmued.

There is a cemetery on the island of Guam where 24 Marine war dogs are buried.

They were Doberman Pinschers and German Shepherds who fought alongside the Marines in the Pacific.

This is the story of the Marine Devil Dogs..🧵1/5 🧵 2/5

By early 1942 the United States Marine Corps had a problem in the Pacific.

The Japanese were dug into the dense jungles of every island the Marines tried to take. They were masters of concealment. They moved silently through the undergrowth. They set ambushes at night. They infiltrated American positions while the Marines slept. Marine patrols were being cut to pieces by an enemy they could not see, hear, or smell.

The Marines needed an answer. They found one in a civilian organization called Dogs for Defense.

In late 1942 the Marine Corps established its first War Dog Platoon at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. American families donated their family pets. Breeders donated trained working dogs. The most common donations were Doberman Pinschers and German Shepherds.

The Marines wanted dogs that were 25 inches tall at the shoulder and weighed about 60 pounds. Big enough to be intimidating. Small enough that a Marine could carry one out of combat if it was wounded.

The training course ran 14 weeks. The dogs learned to obey hand signals so handlers could direct them silently in combat. They learned to alert without barking when they detected the enemy. They learned to crawl, swim, climb cargo nets, ride in landing craft, and ignore the sound of gunfire and explosions. They learned to track a man by scent through dense jungle.

They were assigned roles. Scout dogs walked at the head of patrols and alerted to enemy positions ahead. Messenger dogs ran communications between units across battlefields where radios had failed. Sentry dogs guarded camps at night.

Over 1,000 dogs completed the Marine training program during the war. The Marines called them Devil Dogs, borrowing the famous Marine Corps nickname from the First World War.

In 1944 the United States turned old bombers into giant flying bombs controlled by television cameras.

Pilots had to arm 21,000 pounds of explosives in midair and parachute out before the aircraft flew itself into German targets.

One of those pilots was Joseph Kennedy Jr.

This is the story of Operation Aphrodite..🧵1/5 🧵 2/5

By the summer of 1944 the Allies had a problem.

Hitler's V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets were launching from heavily fortified concrete sites along the French coast. The sites were buried under tons of reinforced concrete. Conventional bombing was barely scratching them.

The British had developed massive 12,000 pound Tallboy bombs to penetrate the bunkers. The Americans wanted their own solution.

In June 1944 the United States Strategic Air Forces in Europe authorized a top secret experiment.

They called it Operation Aphrodite.

The plan was simple in concept and almost impossible in execution.

The Americans had thousands of war weary B-17 Flying Fortress bombers that were too damaged to keep flying conventional missions.

Engineers stripped out much of the aircraft to reduce weight. The guns. The armor. The seats. The bomb bay doors. Most of the wiring.

Then they filled the hollow fuselage with 21,000 pounds of a British explosive called Torpex. Torpex was 50 percent more powerful than TNT.

They installed a single television camera in the cockpit. They installed radio control receivers connected to the flight controls.

The aircraft became known as the BQ-7.

It was one of the first large scale American combat drone programs ever attempted.

American bombardiers said they could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from 20,000 feet.

The device they used to do it cost America $1.1 billion to build.

90,000 of them were manufactured during WW2.

Pilots took an oath to destroy it before letting it fall into enemy hands.

The Nazis had already stolen the plans in 1938.

This is the story of the Norden bombsight..🧵1/5 🧵 2/5

By the late 1920s a Dutch born American engineer named Carl Norden was working on a problem that no air force in the world had solved.

How to drop a bomb from 20,000 feet in the air, traveling at hundreds of miles per hour, into something the size of a small building.

The math was punishing.

The bomb had to be released early enough to fall through wind and air resistance to a target the bombardier could no longer see.

Speed, altitude, drift, temperature, the curvature of the earth — all of it had to be calculated in real time by a man looking through a small telescope in a moving aircraft.

Carl Norden built a machine that did it for him.

The Norden bombsight was a 50 pound electromechanical analog computer containing approximately 2,000 precision parts.

Gyroscopes. Motors. Gears. Mirrors. A telescopic sight. A rotating directional indicator.

An autopilot link that allowed the bombsight to actually fly the aircraft during the final minutes of the bomb run, holding the bomber rock steady on its approach to the target.

The bombardier set the variables.

The Norden calculated the release point.

The Norden flew the aircraft.

The Norden dropped the bombs.

In controlled tests it seemed astonishingly accurate.

Bombs were placed inside areas the size of football fields from four miles up.

What you are seeing here is a 10 year old American boy wearing the Medal of Honor around his neck.

The medal had been awarded to his father.

His father gave the order that saved his crew and sealed his own fate in 1943.

His three final words became one of the most legendary phrases in US Navy history.

This is the story of Howard Gilmore..🧵1/5 🧵 2/5
Howard Walter Gilmore was born on September 29 1902 in Selma, Alabama. His father worked in dry goods. His mother's maiden name was Howard. He grew up in the small towns of the Deep South.

He enlisted in the United States Navy on November 15 1920. He was 18 years old. Two years later he sat for the competitive entrance examination for the United States Naval Academy. He scored high enough to be admitted. He graduated from Annapolis in 1926, ranked 34th of 436.

His classmates included Wade McClusky, who would lead the dive bomber attack at Midway, and Lofton Henderson, the namesake of Henderson Field on Guadalcanal.

He served four years on the battleship USS Mississippi. Then he volunteered for the submarine force.

In 1932 Gilmore returned to New Orleans and married Hilda Jane St. Raymond. They had two children. A son named Howard Jr. and a daughter named Vernon Jeanne.

While serving as the executive officer of the submarine USS Shark in the Panama Canal Zone, Gilmore was attacked by a gang of thugs on shore leave. They cut his throat and left him for dead. He survived.

The day after Pearl Harbor he was given his first major command. The brand new submarine USS Growler, still being built in Connecticut.

Yes, what you are seeing here is a tiny unarmed observation plane with six bazookas strapped to its wings.

The pilot was a 32 year old history teacher from Illinois.

He destroyed at least six German tanks.

This is the story of Bazooka Charlie..🧵1/5 🧵 2/5
Charles M. Carpenter was born on August 29 1912 in Edgington, Illinois. He grew up in the small farming towns of the Mississippi River valley. He became a high school teacher in Moline, Illinois. He taught history. He coached the football team.
He was 30 years old when the United States entered World War II. He did not have to enlist. He had a stable career and a wife and a young daughter named Carol. He volunteered anyway.

The Army sent him to flight school. They saw his quiet steady personality and decided he had the temperament for one of the most dangerous jobs in the military. Observation pilot.

By the spring of 1944 he had been promoted to Major and assigned to the 4th Armored Division of General George Patton's Third Army. He was given a fabric covered Piper L-4H Grasshopper. The military version of the J-3 Cub. The aircraft weighed 1,220 pounds at gross weight. It cruised at 80 miles per hour. It had no armor. It had no weapons.

His job was to fly low and slow over the front line, find German positions, and call in artillery on them.

He decided that was not enough.

In June 1944 an American pilot held his crippled B-24 in the air long enough for 7 men to parachute to safety.

Then his plane went into a power dive and crashed into an English farm.

His body lay 20 feet underground for 79 years.

In 2023 they found him. They buried him at Arlington.

This is the story of William Montgomery..🧵1/5 🧵 2/5
William Baily Montgomery was born in 1919 in Ford City, Pennsylvania. A small steel town along the Allegheny River.

He was a football star at Washington and Jefferson College where he captained both the football and track teams. He pledged Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. He stood almost six feet tall and weighed around 190 pounds.

After graduation in 1942 he enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces. He earned his pilot wings and his lieutenant's bars. He was assigned to fly the B-24 Liberator, one of the main American heavy bombers of the war.

By the spring of 1944 he had crossed the Atlantic and was stationed at RAF Halesworth in Suffolk, England.

He flew with the 844th Bombardment Squadron of the 489th Bombardment Group. Eighth Air Force.

He was 24 years old.

Yes, what you are seeing here is a captured Japanese Zero with American markings.

In 1942 a Japanese pilot crashed it in Alaska.

The Americans rebuilt it and flew it across California for the next two years.

What they discovered changed the Pacific war.

This is the story of the Akutan Zero..🧵1/4 🧵 2/4
By 1942 the Mitsubishi A6M Zero had become the most feared fighter in the Pacific. It could outturn every Allied fighter it faced early in the war and had astonishing range. It had decimated Allied air forces from Pearl Harbor to the Philippines to Singapore.

American pilots called it the mystery plane. Nobody had captured one intact. Nobody fully understood what made it so deadly. Some American pilots refused to engage Zeros at all unless they had massive numerical superiority.

Then on June 4 1942 a 19 year old Japanese pilot named Tadayoshi Koga lifted off the deck of the carrier Ryujo. He was part of a diversionary raid on Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, designed to distract American attention from Midway.

Koga's three plane section attacked Dutch Harbor and shot down a PBY Catalina. Then American ground fire severed his oil line.

He had minutes before his engine seized. He turned for the designated emergency landing field on nearby Akutan Island.

Before America entered WW2, hundreds of American pilots crossed the Atlantic to fight Hitler.

They lost their American citizenship for it.

They flew Spitfires for Britain.

77 of them never came home.

This is the story of the Eagle Squadrons..🧵1/5 🧵 2/5
Summer 1940. France had fallen. The Luftwaffe was bombing London. Britain was fighting alone.

Across the Atlantic the United States was officially neutral. American law made it a federal crime for any citizen to serve in the armed forces of a foreign country. The penalty was a thousand dollar fine and prison time. Anyone who took an oath to a foreign king or government risked losing his American citizenship.

Hundreds of young American pilots did not care.

They drove themselves to the Canadian border in their own cars. They were met by recruiters working for an underground organization called the Clayton Knight Committee, run by the World War One Canadian ace Billy Bishop. The recruiters smuggled them across into Canada. From there they were trained as RAF pilots and shipped to Britain.

A wealthy American named Charles Sweeny was paying for much of it out of his own pocket. He was being chased by the FBI for breaking American neutrality laws.

By November 1940 around 244 American pilots had made the crossing.

American soldiers brought hundreds of thousands of Japanese swords home from WW2.

Some were mass produced military weapons.

Some were 700 year old family heirlooms.

Most are still in American basements today.

This is what happened to the swords of Japan..🧵1/4 🧵 2/4
For centuries the sword was the soul of the Japanese warrior. The katana was forged by hand over weeks of folding and quenching steel.

Master swordsmiths spent their entire lives learning the craft. The greatest blades were considered National Treasures and were passed from father to son across generations.

When Japan went to war in 1937 every Japanese officer was required to carry a sword. Most carried mass produced military blades called gunto.

But many carried something far more valuable. They carried their families' real swords. Heirlooms hundreds of years old. Some had been forged in the age of the samurai.

In August 1945 the Emperor surrendered. Allied forces ordered the Japanese military to give up every weapon they had. Including their swords.