Why German Troops Feared The P-47 Thunderbolt 

Why German Troops Feared The P-47 Thunderbolt 

In the summer of 1944, German soldiers in Normandy learned a new kind of fear. A Vemached infantryman later described in his memoirs the terror that descended from Norman skies. His unit was moving forward to reinforce beach defenses, marching along a narrow road lined with the distinctive hedgeros that made the landscape so treacherous.

The morning was overcast, the kind of weather that usually kept aircraft grounded. But not these aircraft. The thunderbolts came out of the clouds without warning. There was no time to scatter, no time to take cover, no time to do anything but dive for the nearest ditch and prey. The roar of engines, the hammering of machine guns, and the world around him erupted into fire and chaos.

 German soldiers who survived such attacks described the experience in terms that bordered on trauma. Many had faced Soviet tanks at Kursk, endured artillery barges that turned Earth into moonscapes, and watched friends die in ways they could never describe to anyone back home. But nothing in four years of the most brutal combat in human history had prepared them for what the Americans called the P47 Thunderbolt.

 What happened in those terrifying seconds would convince thousands of German soldiers that the war in the West was already lost. The lead aircraft rolled inverted, pulled into a steep dive, and the ground erupted into fire and noise and death. The massive radial engine cowling seemed to swallow the sky as it descended.

 The elliptical wings laden with bombs and rockets. Every German soldier in France knew what they were. They called them jabos, short for jagged bomber, fighter bomber. But this particular jabo had another name that would become synonymous with terror. The strange thing was nobody expected the thunderbolt to become a terror weapon. When German pilots first encountered it over Western Europe in April 1943, they laughed.

 Luftvafer pilots saw the American fighters approaching their formations at 25,000 ft and radioed their wingmen with barely concealed amusement. The Americans, they said, were flying barrels. It was a joke that would soon turn to ash in their mouths. Compared to the sleek messes BF-109 or the deadly agile Faulk Wolf FW190, the P47 looked absurd.

 It was enormous, weighing nearly 10,000 lb empty, almost twice as heavy as any other single engine fighter in the sky. Its fuselage was so wide and deep that pilots joked it looked like a milk jug, which gave the aircraft its nickname, the jug. German pilots started calling it the Razerback because of the angular shape of its canopy.

 American pilots themselves wondered what their commanders were thinking, strapping them into a beast that seemed designed by committee rather than aeronautical engineers. The mockery seemed justified. In early aerial engagements, the Thunderbolts performance appeared mediocre at best. It could not turn with the nimble German fighters.

 Its rate of climb was nothing special. It seemed too big, too heavy, too ungainainely to survive in the Darwinian environment of aerial combat where speed and maneuverability meant the difference between life and death. The man who designed this apparent monstrosity was Alexander Kartilli, born Alexandre Kartishvi in Tibilisi, Georgia in 1896.

He had left Georgia in 1919 on a government scholarship to study aeronautical engineering at the prestigious Echola Superior Aeronautique in Paris. When Soviet forces occupied his homeland in 1921, he could not return. He made his way first to France, then to America, eventually finding his way to the Republic Aviation Corporation on Long Island, New York.

 Cartile was a brilliant engineer who understood something that his critics did not. He was not building a dog fighter to outmaneuver enemy aircraft in graceful aerial ballet. He was building a weapon of industrial war designed to survive punishment that would destroy any other aircraft and return its pilot safely home.

 Where other designers sought elegance and agility, Cartelli chose brutality and endurance. Cartelli wrapped his design around the massive Pratt and Whitney R2800 double Wasp engine, an 18cylinder radial that was the most powerful aircraft engine available, producing over 2,000 horsepower. The engine alone weighed over 2500 lb.

 To make that engine perform at high altitude where American bombers would need protection, he installed an innovative turbo supercharger system in the rear fuselage connected by a complex series of ducts that ran the length of the aircraft. The arrangement added considerable weight and complexity, but it gave the Thunderbolt extraordinary performance above 20,000 ft where other fighters struggled to breathe.

 Then Cartelli armed it with a ferocity that bordered on excess. 850 caliber Browning M2 machine guns, four in each wing, with 425 rounds per gun, totaling 3,400 rounds of ammunition. When all eight guns fired together, they could put 100 rounds per second into a target zone 6 ft wide. One 3-second burst could cut a German fighter in half or reduce a truck to burning wreckage.

 No other fighter in the world carried such devastating firepower. When Cartvey showed his design to skeptics who questioned whether such a massive aircraft could perform as a fighter, he reportedly smiled and said it would be a dinosaur. But it would be a dinosaur with good proportions. The prototype designated XP47B first flew on May 6th, 1941, piloted by Republic test pilot Lowry Brabbom.

Despite an engine fire during the flight that forced an emergency landing, Brabom declared they had hit the jackpot. The aircraft handled beautifully despite its size, and its speed in a dive was nothing short of spectacular. The first Thunderbolts arrived in England in January 1943 with the 56th Fighter Group, eventually known as ZMK’s Wolfpack, after their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Hubert ZK.

 The pilots who transferred from nimble Spitfires were not impressed. The Thunderbolt lost so consistently to the British fighter in mock dog fights that commanders eventually banned the practice entirely. It was destroying pilot confidence and morale. Some pilots openly questioned whether they had been given a death sentence rather than a fighter plane.

The problem was that everyone was thinking about the aircraft wrong. They were trying to make it fight like a Spitfire, turning and twisting in classic aerial combat. The P47 was not designed for that. It was designed for something else entirely, something that would take months of trial and error to discover. Zena understood this.

 He was a methodical commander who had served as a military observer with the Royal Air Force in 1940, watching the Battle of Britain unfold from British airfields. He had seen what German tactics could do to pilots who did not adapt. He had watched squadrons of brave young men climb into their hurricanes and spitfires never to return because they fought the way tradition demanded rather than the way survival required.

 Now he developed tactics specifically designed to exploit the Thunderbolts unique advantages, its devastating dive speed that could exceed 450 mph, and its ability to absorb punishment that would destroy any other fighter. The approach was simple. Stay high. Do not get into turning fights. Use the Thunderbolts superior performance above 20,000 ft to gain altitude advantage over German fighters.

 Then dive on them from above with tremendous speed. Fire a burst with those eight machine guns and zoom back up to altitude before the enemy could react. Hit and run. Boom and zoom. Never let the Germans dictate the terms of the fight. If they turned, do not follow. Climb back up and set up another diving attack.

 On April 8th, 1943, the Thunderbolt flew its first combat mission, a fighter sweep over the coast of France. The results were unspectacular. Radio malfunctions forced an abort before any contact with the enemy. It seemed to confirm what the critics believed. The P47 was too big, too heavy, too complicated to succeed in combat.

 The pilots returned to their base, frustrated and demoralized. Then something changed that would alter the course of the air war over Europe. Second Lieutenant Robert Samuel Johnson was 23 years old when he arrived in England with the 56th Fighter Group. He was a farm kid from Lorton, Oklahoma, who had dreamed of flying since watching an Army Airore demonstration team perform when he was 8 years old.

 His father had taken him to an air show at Postfield. And young Bob had sat on his father’s shoulders watching biplanes perform arerabatics in the Oklahoma sky. From that moment, he knew he wanted to fly. Nothing else would do. Johnson worked at a cabinet shop for $4 a week to pay for flying lessons, logging 35 hours by his 16th birthday.

 He enrolled in the civilian pilot training program while attending Cameron Junior College. And when war came, he enlisted immediately. But his path to becoming one of the greatest fighter aces of the war was not smooth. He was initially trained as a bomber pilot and had to request transfer to fighters. His gunnery scores in training were so poor, achieving only 4 and a half% accuracy against towed targets when 5% was the minimum requirement that he technically should never have been allowed in combat at all. But the army needed pilots and

Johnson was determined. On June 26th, 1943, Johnson was flying escort for B17 bombers returning from a raid on targets in northern France when his flight was ambushed by Fauler Wolf 190s from Jagashueda 26, one of the most experienced German fighter units in the West. The Germans came out of the sun exactly as doctrine prescribed, invisible until the last moment.

 In seconds, Johnson’s P47 was shot to pieces. 21 20 mm cannon shells tore through his aircraft. The explosive rounds ripped holes in his fuselage, shattered his canopy, and sent shrapnel into his face and leg. Fire erupted in the cockpit. Hydraulic fluid sprayed across what remained of his windscreen. His controls went mushy, barely responsive.

The engine began trailing smoke. Blood ran down his face from the shrapnel wounds. Johnson tried to bail out, but the damaged canopy would not open. He pushed. He pulled. He hammered at it with his fists until his hands were bloody. Nothing worked. He was trapped in a burning, crippled aircraft 20,000 ft above enemy territory with no way out and no hope of rescue.

 Then a lone FW190 appeared alongside. The German pilot, whose identity remains unknown to this day, had exhausted his cannon ammunition in the initial attack. But he was not finished. He began methodically pumping machine gun rounds into Johnson’s aircraft, making pass after pass after pass, determined to finish what he had started.

 Johnson huddled behind the inch thick armor plate behind his seat and watched the tracers flash past. He could do nothing. His controls were barely responsive. His engine was dying. His guns were out of ammunition. By every measure, by every rule of aerial combat, he should have been dead. The laws of physics and the mathematics of warfare said he could not survive.

 The German pilot made three more passes. Each time his bullets slammed into the P47. Each time Johnson felt the impacts shudder through his airframe. Each time the Thunderbolt kept flying. The big radial engine coughed and sputtered but refused to quit. The controls responded just enough to keep the aircraft level. Finally, the German pilot pulled alongside one last time.

 Johnson could see him clearly through the shattered canopy just a few dozen feet away. The Luftvafa pilot was shaking his head in what appeared to be disbelief. He looked at the wreckage of an aircraft that was somehow still in the air, an aircraft that should have been scattered in pieces across the French countryside, and he seemed unable to comprehend what he was seeing.

 How was this possible? The German rocked his wings in salute and turned away. He had run out of ammunition. He had done everything right. Had hit his target with cannon and machine gun fire until he had nothing left to shoot. And still the American aircraft flew on. Johnson nursed his shattered Thunderbolt back across the English Channel.

 Every minute he expected the engine to seize, the controls to fail, the aircraft to fall apart around him, but the big jug kept flying. When he finally landed at the emergency field at Manston on the Kent coast, the ground crew gathered around in stunned silence. They counted over 200 bullet holes in his aircraft.

 20 mm cannon rounds had torn through the engine, cowling, the fuselage, the wings, the tail. Machine gun bullets had shredded control surfaces and punched through the skin in dozens of places. The hydraulic system was destroyed. The electrical system was wrecked. The propeller had been damaged. The cockpit was scorched from fire.

 Several cylinders had been shot off the engine. The P47 was a complete writeoff. It would never fly again. But Bob Johnson walked away with wounds that would heal. He would later say that he owed his life to Alexander Cartvelli’s dinosaur, to the Georgian immigrant who had built an aircraft so tough that it could take everything the Luftvafer could throw at it and keep flying.

 German ace Hinesbar, who would end the war with 220 victories. later said that the P-47 could absorb an astounding amount of lead and had to be handled very carefully. Other German pilots shared similar accounts. Pilots returned with cylinders shot off their engines. They came back with control surfaces shredded by cannon fire.

 They landed with holes in their wings large enough to crawl through. One pilot returned with 5 ft of his wing tip missing after colliding with a telephone pole during a strafing run. The air cooled radial engine kept running even when damaged in ways that would have destroyed the liquid cooled engines of other fighters. A single bullet through a coolant line would bring down a messmitt or a Mustang.

 The Thunderbolt just kept going. Johnson returned to combat after recovering from his wounds and became one of the greatest aces in the European theater. By the time he finished his tour in May 1944, he had shot down 27 German aircraft, all in P47s, becoming the first American pilot to surpass the legendary Eddie Rickenbacher’s World War I record of 26 victories.

 He flew 91 combat missions without ever losing faith in the aircraft that had saved his life over France. But the Thunderbolt’s true transformation, the change that would make it feared by every German soldier in Europe, was yet to come. The aircraft that had proven itself in aerial combat was about to discover an entirely new mission, one that would make it the most effective ground attack aircraft of the war.

 In March 1944, Major Glenn Duncan of the 353rd Fighter Group approached his commanders with an unusual and dangerous request. Duncan was a Texan from the small town of Beering. Rangy and aggressive. Already an ace with a growing reputation for unconventional tactics. He wanted permission to test whether the P47 could be used as a ground attack aircraft, taking the fight directly to German troops and equipment on the ground.

 The idea seemed counterintuitive, even reckless. The Thunderbolt had been designed as a high alitude fighter built to protect bombers at 25,000 ft where the air was thin and the turbo supercharger could work its magic taking it down to treetop level where it would be vulnerable to every rifle, machine gun, and anti-aircraft position on the ground where it would be unable to use its altitude advantages.

Appeared suicidal. Ground attack was a job for light bombers and attack aircraft, not expensive fighters with highly trained pilots. Duncan found 16 volunteers who shared his belief that the jug could do more than escort bombers. He developed attack strategies, studying how best to approach ground targets, what angles to use for strafing runs, how to avoid the flack that would certainly reach up to meet them.

 Then they took their Thunderbolts down to ground level and tested their theories against live targets in German occupied territory. One of Duncan’s fellow pilots, Norman Budforier, later recalled that Duncan was one of those colorful characters who inspire the rest of us to exceed our perceived limitations.

 Never expecting others to take risks he did not take himself, Duncan led every mission from the front, demonstrating the techniques he had developed and proving they could work. After five successful missions, Duncan’s volunteers returned to their original units to teach what they had learned. What they discovered would transform the air war over Europe and change the role of fighter aircraft forever.

 The Thunderbolt size and weight, the very qualities that made it seem ungainainely in a dog fight, made it devastatingly effective at ground attack. Its massive Pratt and Whitney engine could absorb tremendous damage from ground fire and keep running. The air cooled radial had no vulnerable coolant system to be punctured by a lucky rifle shot.

Its self-sealing fuel tanks resisted fire even when hit by incendiary ammunition. Its armor protected the pilot from the small arms fire that brought down lighter, more agile fighters. And those 850 caliber machine guns proved equally lethal against ground targets. The armor-piercing incendiary ammunition could penetrate thin skinned vehicles, ignite fuel tanks, and shred infantry positions.

 A two- second burst from a diving thunderbolt could destroy a truck or kill the crew of an artillery piece. The effect was like driving a 5-tonon truck straight at a wall at 60 mph. The Thunderbolt could also carry bombs. Early versions hung a 500lb bomb beneath the belly. Later variants could carry a,000lb bomb under each wing or 10 5-in high velocity aircraft rockets that the pilots called Holy Moses because of their devastating impact.

 These rockets hit with the force of artillery shells. A flight of four P47s could deliver more firepower than a battery of field artillery, and they could put it exactly where it was needed, when it was needed, with far greater accuracy than any gun on the ground. By the time Allied forces landed in Normandy on June 6th, 1944, the 9inth Air Force had 13 fighter groups equipped with P47D models tailored specifically for ground attack.

They were the flying artillery of the Allied advance, and they were about to make the German army’s life a living hell. The 365th Fighter Group, known as the Hellhawks, became one of the most effective ground attack units in the war. On D-Day, their pilots flew from bases in England to support the invasion, diving through clouds and anti-aircraft fire to attack German positions just inland from the beaches.

Lieutenant Colonel Ray Ster led the group, which was composed of three squadrons flying P47D Thunderbolts loaded with bombs and ammunition. First Lieutenant John Fetszer flying a thunderbolt named the Madam after his wife Helen remembered taking off in darkness from their English airfield and finding murky daylight over the channel.

Their orders were simple and brutal. Strafe or bomb anything German they found, halftracks, tanks or infantry. Over Omaha Beach, he looked down and saw vehicles and people everywhere. Bodies lying all over the sand and in the surf. The scale of the invasion was beyond anything he had imagined.

 The formation continued inland at near treetop level. Visible everywhere was the aftermath of the airborne assault that had kicked off the invasion hours earlier. Fetszer saw an American paratrooper dangling from a tree, head down, motionless. He saw gliders strewn across fields and hedgeros, some intact, others reduced to wreckage.

 He saw men scattered on the ground. The scene was horrible. a landscape of destruction and death that stretched as far as he could see. Then he saw German Tiger tanks moving toward the beaches. Captain Arlo Henry, the flight leader, was a stocky, laid-back pilot who smoked cigars on takeoff against regulations. He was also one of the boldest and most skilled fighter pilots in the group.

Henry led the flight down to attack. If those panzas reached the beaches, if they got among the landing craft and the supplies being unloaded, the invasion could fail. Everything depended on stopping them. The Hellhawks destroyed the tanks. The invasion continued. By June 26th, just 3 weeks after D-Day, the 365th had moved to a forward air strip at Azavville, France, continuing to fly ground attack missions in support of American troops fighting through the hedgeros. The pace was relentless.

Pilots flew multiple missions per day, returning to rearm and refuel before taking off again to hit the next target. They ate their meals in cockpits, slept when they could, and flew until exhaustion made it dangerous to continue. For German soldiers on the ground, the transformation was immediate and horrifying.

A tank destroyer soldier from an American unit near Santa Glee later described watching an attack from his side. His unit was threatened by a German armored counterattack when they heard the distinctive sound of P47 engines overhead. He wrote that they were getting scared and nervous when suddenly they heard those engines.

 They picked up radio transmissions from the pilots telling them to stand firm that they saw the targets. There were 12 Thunderbolts in formation and they began the deadliest strafing attack he ever saw in the war. The first plane went in strafing and if the pilot saw a good target, he would lose a 500 lb bomb.

 The second plane was coming right behind then the third and fourth and so on. By the time the 12th plane finished its run, the first one was starting over again. The attack seemed endless, a continuous rain of fire and explosives. The P47 had plastered the whole area. The counterattack never materialized. The panzas that had threatened to push the Americans back into the sea were burning hulks scattered across the Norman countryside.

 German soldiers developed a grim joke to cope with the constant air attacks. They said they had a system for identifying airplanes overhead. If it was camouflaged, it was British. If it was silver, it was American. And if you could not see it at all, it was German. By the summer of 1944, the Luftvafer had been swept from the skies over France.

 German ground forces were left almost completely without air cover, exposed to attacks from above at any moment of any day. Death from the sky became so common that German soldiers coined a new term for it. They called it jabo Todd, death by fighter bomber. It was not a small caliber round and the results were usually not pretty.

 Men were torn apart by 50 caliber bullets incinerated by napalm or crushed beneath the wreckage of vehicles destroyed around them. There was no warning, no time to react, no defense that could protect them. The casualty lists among German leadership in the first weeks of the Normandy campaign were staggering. Allied air and naval power killed or wounded multiple German generals in the first two weeks alone.

 General Eric Marx, commander of the 84th Corps, died on June 12th when his vehicle was strafed by fighter bombers as he traveled to the front. General Odinant Hines Helmich of the 243rd Infantry Division was killed on June 17th by aircraft attack. General Major Rudolph Stegman of the 77th Infantry Division died the following day in a similar attack.

 General Otinant Wilhelm Fi was killed by American paratroopers on D-Day itself when his staff car was ambushed. Brigade Furer Fritz Wit of the 12th SS Panza Division Hitler Jugund was killed on June 14th by Royal Navy gunfire at his command post. The psychological impact on German forces was devastating. Field marshal Ger von Runstet, commander of all German forces in the west, later told his allied captives that air attacks made it impossible to bring one single railroad train across the Rine in daylight.

 While that was an overstatement, it captured the desperation felt by German commanders who could not move men or equipment during daylight hours without inviting destruction from above. Every road became a potential killing ground. Every convoy became a target. July 29th, 1944. Operation Cobra, the American breakout from Normandy was underway.

 Near the village of Roni, elements of the German army were trapped between the American second and third armored divisions and had nowhere to run. The 405th Fighter Group found them. The Thunderbolts attacked the German column from 3 10 in the afternoon until 9:40 that evening. More than 6 hours of continuous assault.

Wave after wave of P47s dove on the trapped Germans, releasing bombs, firing rockets, strafing with eight machine guns blazing. The Germans had no air cover, no effective anti-aircraft defense, no way to escape. They were caught in a killing ground from which there was no exit. When ground investigators examined the wreckage afterward, they found 66 tanks destroyed, 204 other vehicles wrecked, and 11 artillery pieces demolished.

 It was one of the most devastating single-day tallies of any fighter bomber attack in the entire war. The roads were choked with burning metal and the bodies of men and horses. Worse was to come for the Germans. In August, Adolf Hitler ordered a counterattack at Morta, throwing his remaining panser divisions against the American lines in a desperate attempt to cut off the Allied breakout.

 The attack was cenamed Operation Lutic, and for a few hours it seemed to threaten success. German tanks pushed forward, threatening to reach the sea and trap the American forces that had broken out from the Normandy beach head. But the Allies had been forewarned by ultra intelligence intercepts. And they had the thunderbolts.

 When the skies cleared on August 7th, waves of P47s descended on the German columns. The panzas concentrated for the attack became targets that the pilots could not miss. Within 24 hours, the threat of operation lutic had been ended. The Germans had pushed forward only to find themselves trapped in an even worse position than before.

 Now the German 7th army and fifth panzer army found themselves encircled near the town of Fales. Between 50,000 and 100,000 German soldiers were trapped in a pocket that shrank daily under Allied ground and air attacks. The roads leading out of the pocket became killing grounds that the survivors would never forget. German soldiers called them the quarter of death.

 German accounts described the area around files as a jabo renst a fighter bomber racecourse because of the circling thunderbolts always overhead. One German corporal later wrote that the jabos were a burden on their souls. There was no escape from them, no moment of safety. Any movement drew fire from above.

 Men went mad from the constant attacks, from the knowledge that death could come at any second from the sky. Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower visited the battlefield after it was secured. He later wrote that the battlefield at Files was unquestionably one of the greatest killing fields of any of the war areas. 48 hours after the closing of the gap, he was conducted through it on foot to encounter scenes that could only be described by Dante.

It was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh. Royal Air Force liaison officer group Captain Desmond Scott noted that the roads were choked with wreckage and the swollen bodies of men and horses. Bits of uniform were plastered to shattered tanks and trucks, and human remains hung in grotesque shapes on the blackened hedgeros.

 The stench was overwhelming, carried for miles by the summer wind. The German army lost an estimated 60,000 men at files, 10,000 dead and 50,000 captured. Hundreds of tanks and assault guns were destroyed or abandoned. The survivors fled east toward the Sen, but they left nearly all their heavy equipment behind. The German army in the west had been gutted.

 It would never recover. In September 1944, nine squadrons of P47s were dispatched to destroy a major German force, threatening the right flank of the American army as it advanced across France. The air attacks were so devastating, so unrelenting that the Germans surrendered purely as a result of the aerial assault without significant ground combat.

 It was one of the few times in military history that an army surrendered to air power alone. The Thunderbolt had proven that tactical air power could be decisive, not through strategic bombing alone, but through tactical application at the point of contact. December 1944 brought the German Arden’s offensive, their last major counterattack in the West.

 Hitler had deliberately planned the assault for winter, believing that bad weather would ground Allied aircraft and allow his panzas to break through American lines. His generals protested that they lacked the resources for such an operation. Hitler overruled them. For the first few days, Hitler was right about the weather.

 Low clouds, snow, and fog kept the thunderbolts on the ground while German tanks poured through the Arden forest. American troops fell back in confusion, creating the bulge that gave the battle its name. For a brief moment, it seemed the Germans might achieve a significant victory. Then, the weather cleared. On December 23rd, 1944, American fighter bombers finally took to the skies.

 Major John Mottzenbecker led flights of P47s along the winding roads near Mono, searching for German activity among the snow-covered fields and dark green pine forests. What they found left them gaping in disbelief. A massive German column stretched for miles along the narrow roads. tanks, trucks, artillery pieces, horsedrawn wagons, and thousands of soldiers crammed together in traffic jams created by the inadequate road network.

 The Thunderbolts attacked. By the time the dayong fight was over, Mozenbeck’s squadron and the rest of the Hellhawks had destroyed more than 115 German vehicles and artillery pieces with another 65 wrecked or damaged. The roads became impassible, clogged with burning wrecks that blocked any movement forward or back.

 The German offensive stalled in the snow. First Lieutenant Leslie Bose of the 365th Fighter Squadron had survived a gash in his skull from a canopy shattered by small arms fire over breast. Near Sarukan, his P47 took a direct hit from an 88 mm flack projectile that shredded his left wing route, fuselage, and flaps. By the end of the war, he would walk away from four wrecked Thunderbolts, all named Blonde Trouble.

 He flew 107 combat missions and was credited with two aerial victories. He later said the P47 deserved greater recognition for its contribution to victory. The Germans tried one last desperate counterstroke. On January 1st, 1945, the Luftvafa launched Operation Bowden Plat, a surprise attack against Allied airfields using nearly 1,000 aircraft, the largest German air operation since the Battle of Britain.

They caught many P-47s on the ground at their bases in France and Belgium and destroyed over 200 Allied aircraft. But the victory was hollow. The Luftvafa lost nearly 300 aircraft of its own and hundreds of irreplaceable experienced pilots. American factories could replace destroyed Thunderbolts within weeks.

Germany could not replace its losses. Bowden Platter marked the Luftvafer’s final significant offensive operation in the west. After the Battle of the Bulge, German resistance crumbled. The thunderbolts ranged ahead of advancing Allied armies, destroying anything that moved on German roads and railways.

 The statistics from the final months of the European War are almost incomprehensible in their scale of destruction. From D-Day until Victory in Europe Day on May 8th, 1945, P47 pilots claimed to have destroyed 86,000 railroad cars, 9,000 locomotives, 6,000 armored fighting vehicles, and 68,000 trucks in nearly 550,000 combat sorties flown throughout the war.

Thunderbolts destroyed approximately 7,000 enemy aircraft in the air and on the ground. The aircraft that German pilots had mocked as a flying barrel ended the war with an aerial kill ratio of 4.6 to1. For every P47 lost in combat, more than four enemy aircraft went down, and that ratio does not begin to account for the devastation wrought on ground targets.

 The 56th fighter group, ZMK’s Wolfpack, was the only eighth Air Force unit that flew P-47s for the entire war. When other groups transitioned to the longer ranged P-51 Mustang, the 56th refused. Their pilots loved the jug and knew how to use it. By war’s end, they had claimed 677 and a half aerial victories and 311 ground kills, more than any other fighter group in the Eighth Air Force at the cost of 128 aircraft lost.

 The Republic Aviation Corporation, which had nearly gone bankrupt before the war, became one of the most successful aircraft manufacturers in American history on the strength of the Thunderbolt. The company went on to produce jet fighters for the Cold War and contributed to some of the most advanced military aircraft ever built.

 But it was the P47 that made Republic’s reputation that proved an immigrant engineers vision and a team of American workers could create something extraordinary. Francis Gabreski of the 56th scored 28 aerial victories before being shot down and captured in July 1944, making him the leading American ace in the European theater. Robert Johnson finished with 27.

 Hubs MK added nearly 18 before he too was shot down and captured. all flew Thunderbolts. Glenn Duncan, the Texan who pioneered ground attack tactics, was shot down on July 7th, 1944 while leading a strafing mission against Wesondorf airfield in Germany. His aircraft was hit by 88 mm flack and he belly landed near Nandberg.

 Before leaving the wreck, he tossed an incendiary grenade into it to deny the Germans their prize. Then he escaped on foot, walking toward the Netherlands. He spent 10 months with the Dutch resistance before being liberated by Allied forces in April 1945. He returned to command the 353rd Fighter Group and retired from the United States Air Force as a colonel.

 Alexander Cartilli, the Georgian immigrant who designed the Thunderbolt, never received the recognition he deserved during his lifetime. He went on to design the F84 Thunderjet and F-105 Thunder Chief Jet fighters and contributed to the design of the A-10 Thunderbolt 2, which still serves in the United States Air Force today and still bears his original aircraft’s name.

 He died in 1974 at age 78, having shaped American air power for three decades. More than 15,600 P47s were built during the war, more than any other American fighter. They served in every theater of operations from the hedgeross of Normandy to the jungles of New Guinea. Republic Aviation’s factory on Long Island became one of the most productive aircraft plants in history.

 Turning out aircraft at a rate that seemed impossible. Robert Johnson returned to the United States in June 1944 and spent the rest of the war on publicity tours selling war bombs. After the war, he joined Republic Aviation where his first task was redesigning the P47 cockpit based on his combat experience. He worked for the company for 18 years before moving into the insurance business.

 He traveled the country educating young people about World War II until his death in December 1998 at age 78. For the soldiers who faced the thunderbolt from below, the experience left permanent scars. German veterans who served in Normandy often spoke of the Jabos with a mixture of fear and respect that bordered on trauma.

 Many developed an instinctive flinch at the sound of lowflying aircraft that lasted for the rest of their lives. The terror had become part of them. One German officer captured after the Normandy campaign was asked what he thought of American air power. His response was simple and devastating. He said that any movement in daylight was impossible, that supplies could not be brought forward, that even the simplest administrative functions had to be conducted at night or underground.

The Americans had made his army blind, immobile, and helpless. But for American troops on the ground, the thunderbolt was salvation. When German tanks were breaking through, when the situation seemed hopeless, the distinctive shape of the jug appearing overhead meant help had arrived.

 Ground troops learned to love that big, ugly fighter because it protected them, because it destroyed the enemy that was trying to kill them. The bond between American infantry and American tactical air power was forged in Normandy and strengthened through every battle that followed. Major Joseph Priller, the German ace who once derided the Thunderbolt as a joke, changed his assessment by wars end.

 He called it the perfect fighter bomber. Its guns never jammed, never overheated. He said they laughed at the P47 in 1943. But by 1945, nobody was laughing. The dinosaur had teeth, and those teeth tore the German army apart. Today, the legacy of the Thunderbolt lives on. The A10 Thunderbolt two, the famous warthog that provides close air support for American ground forces in conflicts around the world, was deliberately named to honor Cartelli’s original creation.

 When Air Force officers were choosing a name for their new ground attack jet in the 1970s, they looked back at history and found the P47. They recognized that the mission was the same. flying low and slow, supporting the troops on the ground, taking punishment that would destroy other aircraft, and coming back for more.

 Several P47s have been preserved in museums around the world. The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum has a P47D on display, its silver skin gleaming under the lights, exactly as it would have appeared over France in 1944. Other examples survive in private collections and in flying condition, appearing at air shows, where a new generation can hear the distinctive roar of that massive Pratt and Whitney engine and understand just for a moment what it must have been like to see that shape descending from the sky. The pilots who

flew the Thunderbolt formed lasting bonds that survived long after the war ended. The 56th Fighter Group Association held reunions for decades, bringing together men who had shared the most intense experiences of their lives. The Hellhawks Association continued meeting until the last of its members passed away.

 These gatherings were not celebrations of war, but remembrances of sacrifice and service of young men who climbed into their jugs every morning, knowing some of them would not return. Historian Steven Ambrose, who interviewed hundreds of World War II veterans for his books, noted that P47 pilots had a distinctive pride in their aircraft that other fighter pilots did not always share.

 They knew the Jug was not the most elegant aircraft in the sky, not the fastest, not the most agile. But they also knew it would bring them home when nothing else could. That trust earned through countless missions and countless close calls created a bond between pilot and machine that words struggle to capture.

 Tom Glenn, a P47 pilot and later author, recalled that one of his saddest duties was strafing columns of horsedrawn guns and equipment. The horses were not our enemy, he said. But our assignment was to prevent those columns from harming our troops. It was a reminder that even in victory, war demanded terrible choices from those who fought it.

 The lessons learned in those campaigns shaped military doctrine for generations. The integration of air and ground forces, the concept of tactical air power as flying artillery, the importance of air superiority, not just for strategic bombing, but for every aspect of ground operations. All of these ideas were proven in the hedros and fields where the thunderbolts hunted.

 Modern combined arms warfare owes a tremendous debt to the experiences of 1944 and 45. If you found this story compelling, please take a moment to like this video. It helps us share more untold stories from the Second World War that deserve to be remembered. Subscribe to stay connected with these histories. Each one matters. Each one shaped the world we live in today.

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