Aviation History

The Curtiss P-40 was the fighter nobody wanted. Flown by American mercenaries on fake passports, wearing a shark mouth borrowed from an RAF squadron in Egypt, it produced one of the most lopsided combat records of WWII.

A field guide to WWII nose art — American and Allied. What the pin-ups, Disney cartoons, lucky cats, shark mouths, RAF colour-coded bombs, and Soviet dedications actually meant.

Subsonic, gunless, and honestly kind of ugly — and for thirty years, the best all-weather attack airplane in the world. If you’ve ever read Stephen Coonts’ novel Flight of the Intruder, you already know the feeling — the one the book gets so right and the movie only half-captured: two men wedged shoulder to shoulder

Its first combat mission was a massacre. Its torpedoes barely worked. And by the end of the war it was sinking the biggest battleships ever built. On June 4, 1942, six brand-new Grumman TBF Avengers took off from Midway to attack the Japanese fleet. Five never came back. The one that did was so shot

It couldn’t dogfight. It could barely defend itself. And it may have done more to win the Pacific than any fighter that gets the glory. Every airplane we’ve covered so far — the Corsair, the Hellcat, the Dauntless — was built to fight. The Consolidated PBY Catalina was built to look. It was a slow,

It shot down more enemy planes than any American carrier fighter of the war — and the story everyone tells about how it was built is wrong. The Grumman F6F Hellcat has the best résumé of any U.S. carrier fighter in history: 5,216 enemy aircraft shot down, a kill ratio of roughly 19 to 1,

It didn’t roar. It whistled — and on a dozen Pacific islands, that whistle meant it was already too late. By late 1943, Japanese soldiers dug in across the Solomon Islands had learned a particular sound. Not the flat drone of a bomber or the snarl of a fighter in a dive, but a high,

It was slow, homely, and already considered obsolete when the war began. It also sank more Japanese ships than any other Allied aircraft — and helped turn the entire Pacific war in about six minutes. By Ben Mathews • July 20, 2026 • 11 min read There’s a strange thing about the Douglas SBD Dauntless.

The English Channel was still dark when the first engines lit off. June 5th, 1944, somewhere after midnight — and already the most complex air operation in history was underway. Before a single American or British boot touched the beaches of Normandy, thousands of aircraft had been flying for days, weeks, months. Bombing railroads. Photographing