Posted on 02/10/2015 9:10:59 AM PST by Timber Rattler
Alex Vraciu, who was just 25 when he reigned as the Navy’s top World War II fighter ace after downing 19 Japanese aircraft and destroying 21 more on the ground in only eight months in 1944, died on Jan. 29 in West Sacramento, Calif. He was 96.
(snip)
Mr. Vraciu (which rhymes with cashew) accomplished his most spectacular feat in the South Pacific when he shot down six dive bombers within eight minutes in what became known as the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot” in the Philippine Sea. He called it “a once-in-a-lifetime fighter pilot’s dream.”
Two of the aircraft carriers he flew from were torpedoed, twice he parachuted to safety, and twice more he was forced to ditch his Grumman F6F Hellcat — brushes with death that earned him the nicknames Grumman’s Best Customer and The Indestructible.
(snip)
Mr. Vraciu achieved his pace-setting six kills under harrowing conditions on June 19, 1944, as Japanese planes attacked a task force of American carriers and battleships. His plane’s folding wings were mistakenly unlocked, and a malfunctioning engine was spewing oil on his windshield and preventing him from climbing above 20,000 feet. Still, he downed the dive bombers firing only 360 of the 2,400 bullets in his arsenal.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
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Our pilots pale in comparison to German Luftwaffe aces who scored hundreds of kills. The max being 352. Of course the Luftwaffe didn’t rotate their pilots out.”
A lot of the Luftwaffe Pilots had such great numbers of kill since they were flying and fighting in the Spanish civil war.
Also they had very little qualified opposition until they fought the Brits,Russian’s and finally the U.S.
No confusion, just admiration for both these warriors! I loved Dogfight on the history channel. great show. Best use of computer graphics. Really helps tell the stories. Too bad we don’t teach this in our schools. Instead we get teletubbie feel good shiite.
Also battleground 360. Excellent Patton episodes.
RIP.
I agree ... TERRIFIC use of CG aligned with historical accounts.
Television occasionally does something really good
DID you see battleground 360? I am not sure this is the right name, but they started to do ancient battles too. God that’s really great entertainment. The pilots would tell their stories and then you would see the real maneuvers. You can still get themon youtube. I wonder if they use it to teach at the Academies.
“O’Hare” - for which that very busy airport in Chicago is named (formerly named Orchard Field).
'Course, this was many years ago and maybe I did see 360 ...
All I know is the dogfights were very realistic CG coupled with the pilot's recorded or live voice (if available) or a voice over from a report / transcript
I must have read hundreds of books on Air Power in WWII between the ages of 14 - 20 years and I barely recall the name Vraciu.
And that interesting bit of trivia is why baggage tags to O’Hare say “ORD.”
The Luftwaffe pilots were never the equals of the USN. That’s a fact. In basically 3 years, they became the most deadly pilots on planet earth, bar none.
They mastered deflection shooting that the USAAF didn’t even try, and the Luftwaffe never did. As far as the Luftwaffe high numbers, they were fighting from the mid 30s till the end of the war. All the extremely high scores were the eastern front guys. They ran up those scores against barely trained pilots in very low quality planes until later in the war.
Even Hartmann called it “infanticide”.
A USN Corsair and Hellcat was the most deadly airman of the war, even exceeding Luftwaffe skills. Read up on the deflection shooting story, nobody else even tried.
Also USN had an advantage in deflection shooting largely absent in the USAAF and Luftwaffe. The Wildcat and Hellcat was the main fighter for most of the war. Its nose was relatively sort and sloped downwards to facilitate carrier landings.
This made deflection easy to learn and do. The long nose 109s, Mustangs, Spits, etc had a much rougher time visibility wise. Those forces largely used a tail chase and head on.
USN was even widely using a technique where from thousands of feet above they would dive at nearly 90 degrees straight down onto bombers.
YES! The pilot would tell his story but the GCI made it so clear. There was a mig episode that was great.
Try to see the battleground series. They did some ancient battles that were great.
Not to disparage but the high scoring ace in the Pacific was Ira “Dick” Bong with 40 confirmed kills
Adolph Galland - from Wiki: "He flew 705 combat missions, and fought on the Western and the Defence of the Reich fronts. On four occasions he survived being shot down, and he was credited with 104 aerial victories, all of them against the Western Allies."
I remember seeing him interviewed on TV where he mentioned that while the allies rotated their air crews, "We flew until we died."
Same here.
The Luftwaffe had 15 aces with 200 or more kills. Of the top ten, two (Erick Rudorffer and Heinz Bar) spent substantial time on the Western Front, with 86 and 124 kills of Western Allied planes respectively. The two of them were shot down a combined 34 times.
“O’Hare” - for which that very busy airport in Chicago is named (formerly named Orchard Field).
Butch was Paul Tibbett’s, (Enola Gay pilot) roommate and football teammate at Western Military Academy, Alton, Illinois
Yes, our Navy was the only air force in the world during WWII that taught the art and science of deflection shooting. Our Navy also used tracers in the PTO whereas the Army Air Corps in the ETO did not. The tracers not only aided in shooting but caused many more fires on the Jap planes aiding in their destruction.
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