The Douglas SBD Dauntless embodied the grit and tactical mastery that defined the Battle of Midway. The Battle of Midway in June 1942 was one of the greatest victories of the Allied Forces. It effectively kept the Japanese Imperial Army from pursuing their invasion of the Pacific and placed them on the defensive for the […] More
This Underappreciated Fighter was a Bomber, Support Aircraft, Reconnaissance Plane, and Night Fighter All Rolled Into One Deadly Machine. The Focke Wulf W-190 – together with the Messerschmitt Bf 109 – are inarguably the two German Warbirds that made the Luftwaffe Fighter Force a menacing presence in the skies during the war. The untested war […] More
Also called the Beam Defense Position, we take a look at the aerial tactic that prevented the Japanese from “making any attack without seeing the nose of the American planes pointed at them.” Who thought that matchsticks would play a huge role in devising a tactic to neutralize the A6M Zero’s unprecedented speed and maneuverability? Well, […] More
Upon its introduction in 1935, the TBD Devastator was widely considered the first modern torpedo bomber in the world. Then came the Avenger. It was a huge departure from the traditional bomber design because it was the first monoplane with hydraulic folding wings, and it was the US Navy’s first all-metal aircraft. But the Devastator’s […] More
Major-General Orde Wingate was a brilliant British officer who assembled a ragtag brigade of British and Burmese guerillas that gave Japanese forces pain in the ass. His grand plan was to establish strongholds behind enemy lines. In order to achieve this, he came up with an unconventional way to transport his troops and supplies by […] More
In 1942, the Americans gave the Japanese a ”Mini Pearl Harbor” of their own. The 1942 Lae-Salamua Raid is not as celebrated as the Battles of Midway, Guadalcanal, and Coral Sea, but it was the Pacific conflict that set the stage for the three. The American assault on these small towns of New Guinea was a […] More
Turns out, the secret to improving the odds of returning aircraft was not additional armor on the most damaged parts. During the war, The United States commissioned a select group of mathematicians which came to be known as the Statistical Research Group. They worked around the clock in developing ballistic tables, patterns, and computational devices […] More
There’s nothing sweeter than a marriage between than American design philosophy and British Engineering. We can all agree to this: The Mustang was the finest mass-produced, piston fighter of the Second World War. The Mustang P51 and the Spitfire Mark IX were simultaneously baptized in a disastrous Allied loss during the botched Dieppe raid of […] More
One of the war’s deadliest fighter planes was just too good for its own good. Kaizen is a philosophy that encourages continuous and incremental improvement, which is probably why the Japanese are the most orderly and disciplined people in the world. Unfortunately, Japanese engineering did not catch up with the Kaizen way of life during the fast-paced production […] More
How the scarcity of night fighters led to Wilde Sau – a new tactic that helped in the Luftwaffe defense of Cologne and in the destruction of 30 British Aircraft in a single night. When World War II rolled around, the principles of aerial combat that were first formulated during the First World War proved to be […] More
Where were the legendary A6M Zeros that sank Pearl Harbor? The Fat Man and the Little Boy. Two words that turned the tide of the war and forever changed the fate of the small nation-island with imperial ambitions. On August 6, 1945, Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr. manned the Enola Gay – the modified B-29 bomber – and dropped […] More
