Mechanics Mocked His Paddle Propeller — Then He Killed 6 Zeros
Boats & Watercraft
At 0900 hours on October 11th, 1943, Colonel Neil Kirby sat in the cockpit of his P47 Thunderbolt, sweating through his flight suit. He was 5 miles above the jungles of New Guinea, a place where the air was so hot and wet it felt like breathing soup. Kirby was a fighter pilot’s pilot, aggressive, smart, and absolutely fearless.
But right now, he was also frustrated. He was gripping the stick of a plane that weighed 15,000 lb. To put that in perspective, that is the weight of three pickup trucks welded together, [music] and he was trying to chase a Japanese Zero that weighed less than a single minivan. Kirby watched the enemy plane through his gunsite.
Engineering & Technology
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The Zero was a beautiful, deadly little kite. It was fragile, made of lightweight aluminum that could be punched through with a screwdriver. But that lightness gave it a superpower. It defied gravity. The Japanese pilot spotted Kirby coming. He didn’t turn. He didn’t dive. He just pulled back on his stick and went up.
The Zero pointed its nose at the sun and climbed like an elevator. Kirby slammed his throttle forward. The massive Pratt and Whitney engine in front of him roared. 2,000 horsepower screamed, trying to drag the massive American fighter upward, but physics is a cruel law. The P47 was heavy. It was built like a tank, not a gymnast.
Pickup Trucks
As Kirby tried to follow the zero into the vertical climb, he felt the plane shutter. The airspeed indicator dropped 200 mph, 150, 120. The controls went mushy. The heavy nose wanted to drop back toward the earth. The Zero kept going, shrinking into a dot against the blue sky. The Japanese pilot was probably laughing. He knew the American plane was a brick with wings.
He knew he could just float up there, wait for the heavy beast to stall and fall away, and then drop down on its tail to finish it off. Kirby had to break off. He shoved the nose down, picking up speed to escape, cursing the metal tub he was flying. This was the reality for the Army Air Force in the Pacific.
Engine & Transmission
They were flying the P-47 Thunderbolt, a plane that the pilots affectionately and sometimes angrily called the Jug. It was short for juggernaut, but it also looked like a milk jug. It was massive. It had a cockpit as big as a recliner chair. It had 850 caliber machine guns that could saw a house in half. It could take a beating that would disintegrate any other plane.
Pilots told stories of flying home with whole cylinders blown off the engine, with holes in the wings big enough to crawl through. It was safe. It was tough. But in a dog fight, it was a pig. The mockery started the moment the P-47 arrived in the Pacific. The pilots looked at it and shook their heads.
They were used to the sleek, shark-like P40 Warhawk or the P38 Lightning. This thing looked like a beer keg on its side. The mechanics hated it because it was huge. The pilots hated it because it couldn’t turn. If you tried to turn with a zero, the Japanese plane would fly circles around you before you got halfway through the bank.
But the biggest insult was the climb. In air combat, altitude is like money in the bank. If you are higher than the other guy, you choose when to fight. You can dive on him, hit him, and zoom back up. If you are lower, you are just a target. The Japanese zeros own the altitude. They could scramble up to 20,000 ft while the Americans were still wheezing at 15.
The Japanese pilots called the P-47 the Groundhog because it seemed to love the dirt so much. Back at the base in Port Morsby, the mood was grim. The pilots knew they had a powerful engine. [music] The R2800 double Wasp was a monster. It produced 2,000 horsepower. It should have been enough to launch them to the moon.
But the problem wasn’t the engine. It was the propeller. The standard propeller on the P47 was a piece of engineering called the Toothpick. It had narrow, tapered blades. It was designed for high-speed cruising at 30,000 ft over Germany, where the air was thin. It worked great if you were escorting bombers over Berlin.
But in the thick, humid air of the Pacific, down at low altitudes, where the dog fights happened, the toothpick was useless. It was like trying to paddle a canoe with a butter knife. You could spin it as fast as you wanted, but it just sliced through the air without grabbing it. The engine was screaming, burning gas, but the energy wasn’t turning into thrust.
Engineering & Technology
It was just noise. Kirby knew this. He was the commander of the 348th fighter group. He was tired of watching Zeros loop over his head. He was tired of his men coming back with [music] bullet holes in their tails because they couldn’t climb away from a fight. He sent reports. He yelled at the supply officers.
He demanded a fix. Then a transport plane landed. The cargo doors opened and the crew kicked out a few long wooden crates marked Curtis Electric. The mechanics pried them open with crowbars. They pulled back the oil paper [music] and then they started laughing. Inside the crate was a propeller, but it didn’t look like any propeller they had ever seen.
Boats & Watercraft
The blades were huge. Instead of tapering to a sharp point, the tips were wide and flat. They flared out at the end. [music] One mechanic held it up. It looked ridiculous. It looked like a giant canoe paddle. It looked like something a kid would draw if he didn’t know what a plane looked like. The ground crews stood around the crate making jokes.
They said the engineers must have been drunk. They said if they put this thing on the nose of the jug, the wind resistance would be so bad the plane would fly backward. They said it looked like a ceiling fan. Hey, Colonel. One of the crew chiefs yelled. You want to go fishing? We found your ores. Kirby walked over.
He looked at the wide, ugly blades. He didn’t laugh. [music] He knelt down and ran his hand over the aluminum. He wasn’t an engineer, but he understood the basic rule of grip. If you want to dig a hole, you use a wide shovel, not a needle. If you want to drive a car up a steep hill, you put it in first gear to get torque. That was what this propeller was.
It was a low gear for the sky. The wide tips meant there was more metal hitting the air at the fastest [music] part of the spin. It meant that every time the engine turned, the propeller would grab a massive chunk of air and throw it backward. It wouldn’t slice, it would shove, it would claw at the atmosphere.
The toothpick blade was aerodynamic, sleek, and polite. This new blade was brute force. It was ugly, but war is ugly. Kirby stood up. He [music] looked at his plain, fiery ginger. It was sitting on the perforated steel matting of the runway, looking heavy and tired. He looked at the laughing mechanics. “Take the old prop off,” Kirby ordered.
The laughter stopped. The crew chief looked at him. Sir, you want to test this [music] thing? It might shake the engine off the mounts. The balance looks all wrong. I said, “Take it off.” Kirby said, “Bolt this one on. I want it ready in an hour.” The mechanics went to work. They [music] grumbled.
Canoes
They cursed the engineers back in the States who sat in air conditioned offices designing canoe paddles while they sweated in the jungle. They hoisted the massive 13- ft propeller onto the nose of the fighter. It looked out of proportion. The blades were so wide they almost touched the ground.
It made the sleek nose of the fighter look blunt and clumsy. When they finished, the plane looked even more like a bathtub than before. It had lost whatever grace it had. It looked like a farm tractor with wings. Kirby climbed into the cockpit. He strapped in. He signaled the ground crew to clear the prop. He hit the starter switch.
Engine & Transmission
The flywheel wind and then the massive engine caught. Smoke puffed from the exhaust. The new propeller turned. At idle, it looked like a spinning disc of solid metal. Kirby pushed the throttle forward to taxi. The plane lurched. He could feel the difference immediately. Even on the ground, the bite was ferocious.
The plane wanted to jump forward. It felt like he had just unhooked a trailer he had been towing for months. He lined up on the runway. He held the brakes. He ran the engine up to full power. The noise was different. The old prop had a high-pitched wine. This one had a deep thumping roar. It sounded like it was beating the air into submission.
The tropical trees behind the plane bent over double from the prop wash. Kirby released the brakes. Usually, the P-47 needed nearly the whole runway to get off the ground with a full fuel load. [music] It would lumber along, gathering speed slowly, lifting off at the very end like a tired goose. Not today. The paddle bit into the humid air.
The acceleration pinned Kirby back in his seat. The tail came up instantly. The runway markers flashed by in a blur. He hadn’t even used half the strip when the wheels left the ground. The plane didn’t float up. It leaped. Kirby pulled the gear handle. The wheels tucked into the wings. He looked at his altimeter.
Engineering & Technology
The needle wasn’t creeping up. It was winding like a clock. He pulled the stick back. He pointed the nose up at a 30° angle. The old jug would have stalled and shuttered. The new jug just kept pulling. He was climbing at 3,000 [music] ft per minute. He passed the cloud layer before he even had time to adjust his trim tabs. He was screaming upward, [music] riding a column of air that the paddle blades were stacking underneath him.
Kirby started to grin behind his oxygen mask. The canoe paddle wasn’t a joke. It was a revelation. It turned the heavy, clumsy bathtub into a rocket ship. He leveled off at 20,000 ft. He looked down at the jungle. He looked at the vast blue ocean where the Japanese pilots were patrolling, confident in their nimble little zeros.
They thought they own the vertical. They thought the Americans were stuck in the mud. Kby banked the plane. The wide prop even helped with the turn, pulling the nose around with authority. He felt the raw power vibrating through the airframe. He wasn’t driving a dump truck anymore. He was driving a muscle car. He keyed his radio and called the tower ground.
This is Kirby. Tell the boys to open the rest of those crates. We’re going hunting. The transformation of the 348th fighter group didn’t happen in a sterile laboratory. It happened in the mud and heat of Port Morsby. Once Colonel Kirby landed, Fiery Ginger and confirmed that the canoe paddle propeller was a gamecher.
Boats & Watercraft
The order went out to retrofit the entire squadron. The ground crews worked around the clock. They stripped the sleek toothpick propellers off the noses of the P-47s and tossed them into scrap piles. In their place, they bolted on the wide, ugly Curtis electric paddle blades. To a casual observer, it looked like they were ruining the aerodynamics of the planes.
The new propellers looked heavy and clumsy, like oversized boots on a ballerina. But the pilots weren’t looking for beauty. They were looking for survival. They watched the mechanics torque the bolts, wiping grease from their hands, [music] hoping that this ugly stick would stop the Zeros from dancing on their graves. Kirby didn’t just give them a new propeller.
He gave them a new rule book. He gathered his pilots in the briefing tent, a canvas oven baking under the [music] tropical sun. He stood in front of a chalkboard and drew a diagram. For 2 years, American pilots had been told to never ever try to climb with a zero. It was suicide. The zero was a kite. The P47 was an anvil.
If you tried to go vertical, the Zero would loop over you and put 20 mm cannon shells into your cockpit while you hung helpless in a stall. Kirby wiped the chalkboard clean. He told them that rule was dead. He explained the new physics. With the paddle blade, the P-47 wasn’t just relying on the engine to [music] pull it up.
Canoes
The propeller was physically grabbing the air like a gear tooth. It meant they could trade speed for altitude at a rate that defied logic. He told them to stop fighting like boxers and start fighting like falcons. Don’t turn. dive, hit, and then use the paddle to rocket straight back up into the sun. The pilots were skeptical.
Unlearning fear is harder than learning a new tactic. They had seen too many friends die trying to chase a climbing Japanese plane. But they trusted Kirby. They strapped into their refitted tubs, taxied past the palm trees, and roared into the sky. The first test came on October 16th, 1943. Kirby led a flight of four P47s on a patrol near Wiiwac, a major Japanese air base on the northern coast of New Guinea.
The mission was a fighter sweep, which is military code [music] for go look for a fight. They cruised at 25,000 ft. The new propellers churned the thin air. The pilots noticed the difference immediately. Usually at this altitude, the jug felt sluggish, like it was balancing on a needle. With the paddle blades, it felt solid.
The wide tips were biting into the atmosphere, keeping the plane stable and responsive. Below them, against the green carpet of the jungle, they spotted specks. It was a flight of Japanese fighters, Oscars and Zeros, escorting a group of bombers. The Japanese pilots were flying at 15,000 ft. They were comfortable.
Engine & Transmission
They looked up and saw the P-47s way above them. In the past, the Japanese reaction would have been aggressive. They would have turned their noses up and climbed to meet the Americans, knowing they could win the race to the top. They saw the jugs and assumed the usual routine. The Americans would dive, take a pot shot, and then keep diving to run away.
The Japanese pilots prepared to dodge the dive and then chase the fleeing Americans. Kirby signaled the attack, dropped tanks. The four P47s jettisoned their external fuel tanks. The silver pods tumbled away. Kirby pushed his nose over. The jug loved to dive. It felt like a safe filled with lead. The airspeed indicator wound past 300, past [music] 400, touching 450 mph.
The wind roared over the canopy. The vibration rattled the pilot’s teeth. They screamed down on the Japanese formation. The zeros scattered. The Japanese pilots were good. [music] They broke left and right, spoiling the American aim. Kirby fired a burst, missed, and flashed past the enemy formation. This was the moment of truth.
Usually, this was where the American pilot had to keep diving to save his life. If he tried to pull up, the heavy gravity would drag him down and the Zeros would swarm him, but Kirby didn’t run. He hauled back on the stick. The P-47 groaned under the G-forces, [music] the wings bent. And then the canoe paddle went to work.
Pickup Trucks
The nose pointed straight up. The massive blades clawed at the air. The plane didn’t stall. It rocketed upward like it was being pulled by a giant cable from heaven. The Japanese pilots were stunned. They watched the heavy American planes zoom [music] past them, going vertical. Instinct took over. Two zeros pulled up to follow.
They thought they had the advantage. They thought the American plane would run out of energy in a few seconds. They were wrong. The P-47 kept going up. The Zero, light and underpowered, started to weeze. Its engine screamed, but its thin propeller couldn’t grab enough air to lift the [music] weight against the gravity. The Zeros stalled out.
They hung in the air motionless, their noses bobbing, gravity winning the tugofwar. Kirby looked back. He saw the two zeros frozen in the sky below him, helpless as fish in a barrel. He was now 2,000 ft above them. He kicked his rudder hard to the left. The P-47 performed a hammerhead stall turn. The heavy plane pivoted on its wing tip, hung for a split second, and then nose dived straight back down the same path it had climbed.
It was a maneuver that shouldn’t have been possible for a seven-tonon aircraft. It was like watching a school bus do a backflip. Kirby lined up the stalled zero in his sights. The Japanese pilot was sitting duck, struggling to get his nose down to regain speed. He was effectively parked in the sky. Kirby squeezed the trigger. 850 caliber machine guns opened up.
Engineering & Technology
The stream of light hit the zero from above. It saw the left wing off at the route. The Japanese plane didn’t even burn. It just disintegrated under the impact of the heavy rounds. Kirby shifted his aim to the second zero. He walked the tracers across the fuselage. The canopy shattered. The pilot slumped.
The plane rolled over and fell into the jungle. The rest of the Japanese formation panicked. They had never seen a P47 move like that. It defied the laws of physics they had been taught. They broke formation and dove for the deck, trying to hide in the trees. They ran away from a fight they should have won.
Kirby and his flight returned to base, their gun barrels smoked, their fuel tanks low. They climbed out of the cockpits, soaked in sweat, grinning like school boys who had just gotten away with murder. The mechanics ran out to meet them. They didn’t make jokes about the canoe paddles anymore. [music] They patted the ugly wide blades like they were prize-winning hunting dogs.
The word spread through the Pacific. The jug wasn’t a bathtub anymore. It was a rocket. The tactics changed overnight. The 348th fighter group became [music] the Zooies. They stopped avoiding dog fights. They started hunting. They would prowl high, dive on the enemy, blow through the formation, zoom back up, and repeat the process.
Boats & Watercraft
It was called boom and zoom. And with the paddle blade, it was unstoppable. The Japanese command was confused. Their intelligence reports claimed the Americans had deployed a new aircraft type. They couldn’t believe the clumsy P-47 was capable of these maneuvers. They told their pilots to be careful to watch for a modified fighter, but they didn’t understand the scale of the problem.
It wasn’t just Kirby’s plane. It was every plane. The escalation began. The Japanese moved their best units to the Wiiwac area to counter this new threat. [music] They brought in the Ki61 Tony. This wasn’t the fragile Zero. It was a Japanese attempt to build an Americanstyle fighter. It had armor. It had a [music] liquid cooled engine.
It was fast and it could dive. They thought this would be the answer to the heavy American planes. Kirby welcomed the challenge. [music] He wanted to prove that the paddle blade wasn’t just a gimmick for killing zeros. He wanted to see how it handled a real fight. On March 5th, 1944, the stakes went up.
Kirby led a massive sweep over Weiwack. This time he wasn’t looking for a skirmish. He was looking to break the back of the Japanese air power in New Guinea. He had his wingmen, Major Samuel Blair and Captain William Dunham, flying tight on his flank. They spotted a formation of 15 Japanese aircraft. But as they dove to attack, they realized it wasn’t just a patrol. It was a trap.
Canoes
Below the 15 planes, hidden against the dark green of the jungle canopy, was a second layer of enemy fighters. And above them, circling in the sun, was a third layer. It was a layer cake ambush designed to lure the Americans in and then crush them from all sides. There were nearly 40 Japanese fighters waiting for them. Kirby saw the trap.
A prudent commander would have pulled up. He would have used his speed to run home, but Kirby was riding the adrenaline of the paddle blade. He felt invincible. He thought about the power in his left hand, the throttle that could drag him out of any hole. He didn’t turn away. He keyed [music] his mic, engaging.
He dove straight into the middle of the hornet’s nest. He wasn’t relying on surprise anymore. [music] He was relying on the brute force of his propeller to fight 40 men at once. He slashed through the first layer, his guns blazing. A Tony fighter exploded in front of him. He pulled up expecting to rocket away, but this time the sky was full of lead.
The Japanese had learned. They didn’t try to climb with him. They had prepositioned fighters at the higher altitude, waiting for the zoom. As Kirby shot upward, three Japanese fighters dove from above to intercept him. He was caught in a vertical pinser. He had enemies below him and enemies above him.
Engine & Transmission
The paddle blade was clawing the air, screaming for altitude, but the laws of probability were catching up. He had the power to go up, but he was running out of sky. Kirby looked at his fuel gauge. He looked at the tracer’s arcing [music] past his canopy. He realized that the Macgyver solution had given him an edge, but it had also given him overconfidence.
He was alone deep in enemy territory, fighting a vertical battle against an entire airwing. And for the first time since he bolted on the canoe paddle, [music] the engine note didn’t sound like a roar of victory. It sounded like a warning. The air over Weiwack turned into a blender. Colonel Neil Kirby was trapped in a vertical coffin.
Above him, three Tony fighters were diving at 400 mph, their cannons spitting fire. Below him, the rest of the Japanese formation was climbing to cut off his escape. He was the meat in the sandwich. In any other plane, this was the moment you blayed [music] out. In a P40 Warhawk or even a Mustang, the wings would have snapped or the engine would have stalled trying to fight gravity and enemy fire at the same time.
But Kirby wasn’t in a Mustang. He was in the jug. and he had the paddle blade. He slammed the throttle past the stop. He broke the safety wire that protected the engine from damage. This was war emergency power. Inside the massive double Wasp engine, a pump sprayed a mixture of water and alcohol directly into the 18 cylinders.
Boats & Watercraft
It was like injecting pure adrenaline into a human heart. The engine temperature dropped instantly, allowing the fuel to burn hotter and harder without exploding the pistons. The horsepower jumped from 2,00 to 2,300 in a split second. The exhaust stacks spit blue flames. [music] The paddle propeller, already spinning at maximum RPM, bit into the air with violence.
The sound changed from a roar to a scream. The P-47 didn’t just climb. It shuddered and clawed its way straight up, defying the laws of momentum. The three Japanese fighters diving from above expected an easy kill. They had the speed. They had the angle. They lined up the fat American plane in their sights.
But then the target did something impossible. Instead of slowing down as it climbed, the P-47 accelerated. It rushed up to meet them like a missile, leaving a silo. Kirby didn’t dodge. He pulled the nose up into a 60° climb, aiming straight for the lead attacker. It was a game of chicken played at a closing speed of 700 mph.
The Japanese pilot flinched. He had never seen a 15,000lb bathtub move like that. At the last second, the Japanese pilot broke right to avoid a collision. That was his mistake. Kirby kicked his left rudder. The wide [music] paddle blades grabbed the air and twisted the heavy fighter around. He didn’t bank gracefully. He pivoted.
Engineering & Technology
The nose of the jug swung onto the belly of the turning Japanese plane. Kirby held the trigger down. The 850 caliber guns roared. This wasn’t precision shooting. It was a shotgun blast. The stream of tracers smashed into the exposed fuel tank of the Tony. The Japanese plane didn’t just catch fire, it vaporized. A fireball of orange gas and aluminum confetti filled the sky.
Kirby flew right through the smoke of his kill. He was now above the first wave. He leveled off for a split second to check his tail. His two wingmen, Blair and Dunham, were fighting for their lives below him. They were tangling with a swarm of zeros, using the same zoom tactics to stay alive. Kirby could have kept climbing. He could have run for home. He had his kill.
But he saw a zero latching onto Blair’s tail. The Japanese pilot was good. He was anticipating the American climb and waiting for the stall. Kirby rolled the jug over on its back. He pulled the nose down. Now gravity was his friend. The heavy P47 fell like a meteor. The paddle blades, which acted like air brakes when the throttle was cut, kept the dive steady.
He dropped 3,000 ft in 10 seconds. The Japanese pilot on Blair’s tail never saw him. He was too focused on his target. Kirby lined up the shot. He didn’t fire a long burst. He fired a squirt. A 1second tap. The sheer mass of lead from eight guns was enough. The bullets hit the Zero’s engine block. The propeller flew off the Japanese plane.
Canoes
The cowling shredded. The Zero flipped over and entered a flat spin, falling toward the jungle like a dead leaf. Two kills. The fight was now a chaotic furball. The Japanese formation had [music] lost its discipline. They were angry. They saw this single silver plane tearing through their ranks, ignoring gravity, ignoring [music] their numbers.
They swarmed him. 40’s turned to engage Kirby. This was where the Jug earned its reputation as a flying tank. As Kirby pulled up from his dive, he took hits. A 20mm cannon shell slammed into his right wing. In a zero, that would have blown the wing off. In the P47, [music] it just punched a hole the size of a dinner plate.
The internal structure held. Another bullet hit the armor plate behind his seat with a sound like a sledgehammer hitting a church bell. The armor held the jug shook, absorbed the punishment, and kept flying. Kirby ignored the damage. He focused on the energy. He hauled the stick back again. The paddle blades bit. He went vertical.
The zeros tried to follow, but they made the same mistake as before. [music] They burned their energy in the turn while Kirby used his straight line power. He dragged them up into the thin air at 20,000 ft. One of the zeros stalled. The pilot hung there, his nose dropping, his controls useless.
Engine & Transmission
He was a statue in the sky. Kirby performed his signature move. He cut the throttle, kicked the rudder, and cartwheelled the heavy plane over the top of its ark, the hammerhead. He was now diving straight down on the stalled Zero. It was execution style. He waited until the enemy filled his windscreen. He fired.
The Zero exploded into pieces so small they looked like glitter. Three kills. The battle had been going on for 5 minutes, but it felt like hours. Kirby’s arms were aching from wrestling the heavy controls. His flight suit was soaked. His oxygen mask was pinching his face. But he wasn’t done. He spotted a group of Tony fighters trying to reform in the distance. They were [music] smart.
They were staying level, trying to lure him into a turning fight. Kirby checked his ammo. He had plenty. The P-47 carried nearly 4,000 rounds of ammunition, enough to fight a small war. He signaled his wingmen. Form up. We’re going back in. They climbed for altitude again. The paddle props chewed the air. They positioned themselves up, sun, hiding in the glare.
They looked down at the Japanese formation. This time, Kirby picked the leader. He dove. The wind screamed over the gunports. The vibration was intense, rattling the instrument panel so hard the dials were blurry. He closed the distance. The Japanese leader saw him coming and broke left. Kirby anticipated the move. He didn’t follow the turn.
Boats & Watercraft
He pulled lead, aiming at the empty air where the Japanese plane was going to be. He sprayed a wall of laid. The Japanese plane flew right into it. The wing route sheared off. The plane snapped violently, tumbling and overend. [music] Four kills. But as he pulled out of the attack, another Japanese fighter crossed his nose, trying to get a deflection shot. It was a snap decision.
Kirby reefed the stick back and turned inside the enemy. The P-47 shouldn’t have been able to [music] do it. It was too heavy, but the massive airflow from the paddle blades over the wings kept the air attached. The plane shuttered on the edge of a high-speed stall, buffering like a car driving over railroad tracks, but it held the turn.
Kirby caught the enemy plane in his sights for a fraction of a second. He held the trigger. The bullets walked along the fuselage of the Japanese fighter, stitching it from tail to nose. The cockpit canopy shattered. The pilot slumped forward. The plane rolled inverted and dove into the ocean. Five kills.
He had tied the record, but the sky was still full of targets. His wingmen were calling out bandits everywhere. The zooies were fighting a battle against odds that should have been suicidal. Three Americans against 40 [music] Japanese, but the psychology of the fight had flipped. The Japanese were terrified. They were fighting ghosts that could vanish upward whenever they were threatened.
Engineering & Technology
[music] The bathtub had become the shark. Kirby spotted a straggler, a Zero trying to flee back toward the [music] Wiiwick airirstrip. The pilot was hugging the treetops, thinking the heavy American plane wouldn’t follow him down into the thick air. Kirby rolled over and Dove. He chased the Zero down to deck level. The jungle canopy flashed by underneath them at 400 mph.
The Japanese pilot zigzagged, banking hard around the massive trees. He was flying for his life, using every ounce of the Zero’s agility. Kirby couldn’t turn as tight, but he didn’t have to. He used the boom and zoom in reverse. He stayed high, cut the corners, and used his speed to close the gap. He waited for the Japanese pilot to straighten out for just a second to cross a ridge.
That was the window. Kirby fired a long burst. The tracers set the trees on fire behind the Zero. Then they found the range. The Zero’s fuel tank exploded. A ball of fire rolled through the jungle, leaving a black scar on the green landscape. Six kills. In one mission, Colonel Neil Kirby in his paddle-bladed tub had shot down six enemy fighters.
“It was a feat that defied every statistic in the book. He checked his fuel. The needles were bouncing on empty. He checked his ammo. The guns were mostly dry. “Let’s go home, boys!” he rasped over [music] the radio. The three P-47s turned south. They climbed back to 20,000 ft, leaving the smoking wreckage of the Japanese airwing behind them.
The Japanese didn’t chase them. They couldn’t. They were too busy trying to understand what had just happened. Their best pilots in their best planes had been slaughtered by a trio of heavy, ugly American fighters that moved like rockets. As they flew back toward New Guinea, the adrenaline began to fade, replaced by the deep bone weariness of combat.
Kirby looked out at his right wing. He saw the jagged hole where the cannon shell had hit. He saw the rips in the aluminum skin. The plane [music] looked beaten. It looked like a piece of junkyard scrap. But then he looked at the nose. He saw the wide black disc of the propeller spinning smoothly.
[music] It pulled the damaged plane through the air without a single vibration. It was the ugly stick that had saved his life. He patted the dashboard. The jug was a beast. [music] It was a lead sled. But with that canoe paddle on the front, it was the king of the sky. When Colonel Neil Kirby taxied Fiery Ginger back to the Hardston at the air base, the plane looked like it had gone 10 rounds with a heavyweight boxer and lost.There were holes in the wings you could put your fist through. The fuselage was peppered with shrapnel marks. Oil was streaking down the side of the cowling from a severed line to the ground crew running out to meet him. It looked like a flying wreck. They had seen planes come back in this condition before, but usually the pilots were shaking, pale, [music] and terrified.
Kirby wasn’t shaking. He climbed out of the cockpit with a grin that split his face. He walked around to the front of the plane and patted the massive, ugly propeller blade. It was untouched. The canoe paddle had dragged the smashed up fighter home. He told the crew chief, “Paint six flags on the side and get me some more ammo.
” The report of that mission traveled up the chain of command faster than a radio wave. Six confirmed kills in a single sorty. It was unheard of. But the most important part of the report wasn’t the kill [music] count. It was the method. Kirby detailed exactly how the paddle blade had allowed him to fight vertically against 40 enemy planes.
Canoes
He explained that the wide tips acted like a shovel in soft dirt, digging into the air and refusing to let go even when the plane was hanging on its tail. The debate was over. The experts who had laughed at the ugly propeller shut their mouths. The order went out to equip every P4U in the Pacific with the paddle blade crates of the wide propellers arrived by the shipload.
The mechanics who had joked about going fishing were now working double shifts to bolt them on. The effect on the war was immediate. The Japanese pilots who had spent two years enjoying air superiority whenever they climbed suddenly found the sky closed to them. They would pull their familiar trick, climbing away from a fight, only to look back and see a 7-tonon American bathtub rocketing up right behind them, its four-bladed fans screaming like a banshee. The safe zone was gone.
The P47, the plane that was supposed to be a failure in dog fights, became the energy king of the Pacific. But for Neil Kirby, the story didn’t have a peaceful ending. Men who fly like he did, pushing the edge of physics [music] and luck every single day, rarely die in bed. He had proven his point.
He had changed the tactics. He could have taken a desk job. He could have gone home to sell war bonds and show off his medal. He didn’t. He kept flying. He kept hunting. In March of 1944, just a few months after his record-breaking mission, Kirby led a flight over Wiiwick again. He was chasing a Japanese bomber. He made a mistake that he would have scolded his own students for he got target fixation.
Boats & Watercraft
He focused so hard on the kill that he didn’t check his six. A Japanese fighter sneaked into his blind spot. [music] A burst of machine gun fire hit the cockpit. Fiery Ginger rolled over and went straight into the jungle. They found the wreckage years later. Colonel Neil Kirby was credited with 22 aerial victories.
He was awarded the Medal of Honor. He was one of the deadliest pilots in American history, but his real legacy wasn’t the score. It was the propeller. [music] Because of him, the P47 Thunderbolt finished the war not as a joke, but as a legend. It became the hammer of the Army Air Force. In Europe, [music] they used the paddle-bladed jugs to destroy the German supply lines.
They found that the same brute force that let the plane climb also let it carry an insane amount of bombs and rockets. The P-47 became a flying freight train. It would dive on German tanks, trains, and bunkers, unleash hell, and then use that massive propeller to claw its way back up through the flack.
The toughness of the plane became a myth. There are photos of P47s returning to [music] base with half a wing missing, with cylinders blown off the engine, with the tail control cables severed. One pilot famously flew home after hitting a brick chimney with his wing. The plane didn’t care. It was built like a cast iron stove.
Engineering & Technology
As long as that wide propeller was turning, the jug was flying. The Japanese and German pilots never understood it. Their planes were elegant like samurai swords or fine watches. If you broke a part of them, they stopped working. The American plane was a sledgehammer. It was ugly. It was [music] heavy. It was crude. But you can hit a sledgehammer with a rock all day long and it’s still a sledgehammer.
The paddle blade [music] proved a lesson that engineers often forget. Sometimes the best solution isn’t the most aerodynamic one. Sometimes you just need grip. You need traction. You need to grab the air by the throat and force it to do what you want. After the war, the P47s were eventually scrapped. They were melted down to make aluminum sighting for houses or cans for soda.
The jet age arrived and propellers, fat or thin, became relics of the past. The sleek P-51 Mustang got all the glory in the movies because it was pretty. It looked fast standing still. The P-47 looked like a potato with [music] wings, so it was largely forgotten by the public. But walk into any aviation museum today, find the P47 display.
Don’t look at the guns. Don’t look at the cockpit. Look at the nose. Look at the propeller. If you see the thin needle-like blades, you are looking at the factory version, the one that almost got the pilots killed. But if you see the wide black paddle-shaped blades that flare out at the tips, you are looking at the version that won the war. You’re looking at the canoe paddle.
Engine & Transmission
It looks ridiculous. It looks like it doesn’t belong on a fighter plane. It looks like a mistake, but stand there for a moment and imagine the sound. Imagine 2,000 horsepower turning those [music] massive blades. Imagine the air screaming as it is beaten into submission. Imagine a 15,000lb metal tank going straight up into the vertical, hanging on nothing but the bite of those ugly blades while the enemy stalls and falls away.
We rescue these stories to ensure Colonel Neil Kirby doesn’t disappear into silence. We tell them because it’s easy to look at a black and white photo of a clunky airplane [music] and laugh just like the mechanics did in 1943. We judge things by how they look, not how they work. We forget that sometimes the difference between a death trap and a miracle is just a few inches of extra metal welded onto the tip of a propeller.
We forget that it takes a special kind of courage to look at a perfect engineering design, call it garbage, and bolt a canoe paddle to the nose [music] of your plane because you know it will save your life. Neil Kirby didn’t just fight the Japanese. He fought the status quo. He fought the idea that good enough was acceptable.
And because he won that fight, thousands of American pilots came home to their families instead of ending up as smoking holes in the jungle. So the next time you see a P47 Thunderbolt, give the big guy a nod. It might be ugly. It might be a bathtub, but with the right shoes on, it could dance with the devil and