F4U Corsair vs Luftwaffe Fighters: Which WWII Fighter Truly Ruled the Sky ?

On the 14th of October 1943, 291 American bombers crossed into southern Germany. 60 of them never came back. The men inside them died because there was no fighter in the United States Army Air Forces that could fly that far and still fight when it got there. That same autumn, an ocean away, the United States Navy was sitting on the fastest single engine fighter America had ever built.

414 m an hour, 2,000 horsepower, six heavy machine guns, and the Navy would not send it to Europe. Not one squadron, not one mission. Here is the part that has kept old men arguing in hangers and barrooms for 80 years. The Navy did not just guess. It ran the tests. It put the Corsair and the Hellcat up against a captured German fighter on the same day in the same air, and it wrote down what happened.

Then it did it again the Mustang, the airplane that eventually did go to Berlin. The results are not what most people think. Neither is what happened on the one morning when a squadron of Corsaires finally did climb over occupied Europe with their guns loaded, circling at 7,000 ft, waiting for the Luftvafa to come up and settle it. T ready? Great.

Now take one quick look at the clock. What time is it where you’re watching from? Tell us below. Then let’s begin tonight’s story. The men who flew the bombers called it Black Thursday. 291 flying fortresses lifted out of the mud of eastern England that morning and turned southeast toward a cluster of factories at Schweinfort that made ball bearings.

Ball bearings went into every engine, every gun turret, every truck axle in the German war machine. Break the bearings and you break the machine. That was the theory. The theory did not account for what waited over Germany. The escort fighters turned back near the German border because they had nothing left in the tanks.

They wagged their wings and went home, and the bomber crews watched them go, and then the sky filled up. Single engine fighters came head-on through the formations at closing speeds no gunner could track. Twin engine fighters stood off at a distance and fired rockets into the boxes. It went on for hours. When the survivors came back across the English coast that evening, 60 bombers were missing. 600 men.

The problem was not courage. The problem was fuel and distance. The American fighters of 1943 simply could not carry enough gasoline to go where the bombers went. Everyone in the Eighth Air Force understood that. What almost nobody talked about then or since was that the United States already had an airplane with the speed and the guns and the reach to do the job.

It was sitting in the wrong ocean wearing the wrong uniform and its own service had just thrown it off the ships it was built for. The story of that airplane starts with a stubborn engineer and a propeller that was too big. His name was Rex Bisel and he was the chief engineer at Chance VA in Stratford, Connecticut.

In the winter of 1938, the Navy asked for a carrier fighter and Bisel made a decision most of his competitors would not make. He went to Pratt and Whitney and asked for the biggest engine anyone was building. He got the R2800 double Wasp, 18 cylinders in two rows, 2,000 horsepower.

Then he wrapped the smallest airframe he could draw around it. 2,000 horsepower needs a big propeller to turn it into thrust. The propeller Bicil needed measured just over 13 ft from tip to tip. That was the problem that shaped everything else. A blade circle that size on landing gear long enough to keep it clear of the deck would put the pilot up on stilts, and stilts break.

They break especially hard when an airplane slams onto a moving steel deck. So, Bicil bent the wing. He dropped it out of the fuselage at a downward angle, ran it out a short distance, then kicked it back up toward the tips. The lowest point of that bend was where the landing gear went, which meant the legs could be short and stout.

It also meant the wing met the fuselage at almost a perfect right angle, which is the cleanest way for air to move around a joint. He was solving one problem, and he happened to solve a second one at the same time. Everything else about the design pointed the same direction. Flush rivets on nearly every exterior surface. The oil cooler and the intercooler inlets buried in the leading edges of the wing roots instead of hung under the nose so the fuselage could stay narrow.

A supercharging system that a great many engineers of the period would have called extravagant. A first stage blower spinning with the engine and a second stage with two speeds behind it. three levels of boost so the airplane would still have power where the air went thin. Lyman Bullard took the prototype up for the first time on the 29th of May 1940. It flew.

It flew well enough that within a few months the airplane became the first single engine fighter in American history to pass 400 m an hour in level flight at a time when a great many frontline fighters in the world could not reach 350. Six weeks after that first flight, the whole program nearly ended on a golf course in Connecticut.

Boon Gaitton, another VA test pilot, was flying the prototype when the weather closed in on him and the fuel ran low. He picked the only flat ground he could see, a golf course near Norwich, and put the airplane down on wet grass. Wet grass does not stop an airplane. It slid the length of the fairway and went into the trees at the far end.

Gayton climbed out alive. The prototype was badly damaged but repable and VA rebuilt it and kept flying. Think about how close that came. One man, one cockpit, one bad weather afternoon. If Gton had come out of those trees on a stretcher instead of on his own feet, the schedule slips. The Navy loses patience.

And the airplane that would go on to fly from more carrier decks and more jungle strips than almost any other American fighter of the war might never have reached a squadron at all. The Corsair reached the squadrons, and then the squadrons found out what Bicil had traded away. That narrow fuselage he was so proud of could not hold enough fuel underneath the pilot.

So the main tank, 237 gall of it, went in front of the cockpit. that pushed the pilot backward a long way backward until he sat behind an enormous cowling and an enormous wing center section. In level flight, it hardly mattered. Coming down toward a carrier deck at low speed with the nose up, it mattered enormously because at the exact moment the pilot needed to see the ship, the ship was gone.

There was nothing in front of him but blue metal. There was worse. As the airplane slowed toward the stall, the left wing let go before the right one did. The nose would still be flying and one wing would simply quit and the machine would roll. At 3,000 ft, a pilot corrects that and swears about it afterward. At 60 ft, on final approach behind a moving carrier, he does not correct it.

And when a Corsair did touch down cleanly, the stiff landing gear often bounced it back into the air like a rubber ball straight over the arresting wires. The fleet gave it a name, the Enson Eliminator. The new pilots, the ones with the fewest hours and the least judgment, were the ones it killed. In 1943, the United States Navy made its decision.

The fastest fighter in America was ruled unsuitable for carrier operations and taken off the ships. It went to the Marine Corps to coral air strips scraped out of jungle islands in the South Pacific to fly from ground that at least had the decency to hold still. While that was happening on Long Island, Grumman was building the opposite airplane.

The Hellcat used the same engine, the same 2000 horsepower double Wasp, the same basic two-stage supercharger. Empty, the two airplanes weighed within a few hundred lb of each other, somewhere around 9,000 lb. Loaded for combat, they both came in near 12,200. On paper, they were siblings. In the air, they were nothing alike because Grumman had asked a different question.

VA asked how fast an airplane could be made to go. Grman asked how much performance it could afford to give away and still hand a young man with 300 hours a machine he could bring home to a pitching deck in bad light. So the Hellcat got fat. The fuselage swelled out to swallow the oil cooler and the intercooler inlets up near the chin of the cowling, and it swelled further to fit 250 gallons of fuel more or less directly underneath the pilot.

which put the weight where the balance wanted it and let the cockpit sit forward and high, looking out over a nose that sloped away. It got a bigger wing. It got a mix of flush and raised rivets instead of the near-perfect skin of the Corsair. All of that cost speed. 314 mph at sea level against 350 for the Corsair.

377 up at 23,400 ft against 414. Call it 30 to 40 mph slower nearly everywhere you looked. And all of it bought one number that mattered more to Grumman than any other. Clean with the flaps up. The Hellcat stalled at 87 m an hour. The Corsair stalled at 98. 12 m an hour does not sound like a great deal until you are flying an approach in a crosswind at dusk in a shot up airplane toward a deck that is rising and falling 20 ft.

There is one more thing about the Hellcat that usually gets forgotten. It was the only American fighter to see combat in the Second World War that was designed primarily after the United States entered that war. Every other one, the Corsair included, was drawn up by men working from peacetime assumptions. Grumman drew the Hellcat from combat reports that were only weeks old.

When American engineers finally got a nearly intact Japanese Zero into the air to fly it and measure it, in the autumn of 1942, the Hellcat prototype had already been flying for 3 months. The Zero did not shape that airplane. It confirmed the choices Grumman had already made. Two fighters, one engine, two philosophies, and both of them were about to spend the next two years fighting the Japanese Empire across 4,000 mi of open ocean.

Meanwhile, the war that would decide the fate of the world was being fought in the other hemisphere over Germany, where the bombers were burning and where neither of these airplanes would ever be sent. The question is why? And the strange part, the part that keeps this argument alive 80 years later is that the United States Navy went to the trouble of finding out the answer.

It ran the tests. It wrote the answer down and then it put the report in a filing cabinet. Before we put these airplanes against each other, we have to be honest about which airplanes we mean. That is where most of these arguments go wrong. A man will take the fastest Corsair ever built, the late war version with water injection and a paddleblade propeller, and set it against a Messor Schmidt from 1942, and declare a winner.

That proves nothing. So, here are the rules, and they are the only fair ones. If the United States Army Air Forces had ever seriously moved to put naval fighters over Germany, the decision would have been made in the middle of 1943 because that is when the escort crisis was at its worst and that is when a decision would still have had time to matter.

So, we use the airplanes that existed in the middle of 1943. The Corsair without water injection running 52 in of manifold pressure. The Hellcat, same deal. the early model with no water injection. Against them, the two fighters that carried the Luftvafa that year, the Messers 109G model and the Faula Wolf 190A model. Neither German airplane is the finest of its line. That is the point.

They are the ones that were actually standing on the grass at fighter fields across France and Germany in the summer of 1943. And they are what the American planners would have been looking at. Start with the Messersmidt because the Messormidt has a reputation that needs correcting in both directions.

People say it was an old design. It first flew in 1935, which is true and which is also almost meaningless. The airplane was torn down and rebuilt twice. The E- model of 1938, the one that fought the Battle of Britain, was a new engine, a new wing, fuel injection, and a long list of changes. The F model that followed, was newer still.

New wing with less area and rounded tips. New slats, new ailerons, the tail bracing struts gone, a semi- retractable tail wheel, different engine. By the time you finish listing what changed, you are not looking at the airplane from 1935 in any sense that matters except the number painted on the paperwork. That F model was probably the high point of the whole line, measured against what everyone else had at the time when it appeared it was better than the Spitfire Mark 5, better than the P40, better than anything the Soviets could put up. Then

came the G model, and the German pilots must have been sick with disappointment. They had every reason to expect another leap. They got a heavier airframe with more armor, more clutter hanging in the airirstream, and a bigger engine that did not work properly. The new DB 605 had serious development problems, and the fix was the fix engineers always reach for when they are out of time.

They limited the boost. For nearly a year, that engine was held down to about 1.3 atmospheres, which gave something in the neighborhood of 1,310 horsepower. Read that again. The German pilots of 1943 were flying an airplane that was heavier than the F, draggier than the F, and made slightly less power than the best F.

The 109G was not the peak of the breed. It was the trough. Try to sit in that cockpit for a moment. You are 22 years old. You came out of a training program that gave you fewer flying hours than the man ahead of you got because there is not enough aviation fuel in Germany to give you more. You have been told your whole life that German engineering does not lose.

You climb into the newest model, the one you waited for, and you find that it feels heavier on the controls than the one you learned on, and that the throttle stops short of where the gauge says it ought to go, and that the crew chief shrugs and tells you not to push it past the mark, or the engine will let go.

Then somebody tells you the Americans are coming over in daylight, in hundreds, at 25,000 ft. The airplane in the propaganda film is not the airplane on the grass in front of you. Every man who flew a G model in 1943 knew that, and none of them could say it out loud. The fwolf was a different animal entirely. Radial engine, wide track landing gear, a cockpit laid out by somebody who had actually thought about a tired man in the dark. Pilots loved it.

Its supercharger was primitive next to what the Americans were running, a single stage with two speeds, and that is why it ran out of breath high up. But down where most of the fighting happened, it was superb, and it rolled better than almost anything in the sky. That word supercharger is doing an enormous amount of work in this story, and it deserves a plain explanation.

An engine does not burn gasoline. It burns gasoline mixed with air. And the higher you climb, the less air there is to mix. At 20,000 ft, the air is roughly half as thick as it is at the beach. An engine that makes 2,000 horsepower on the runway will make a fraction of that up there unless somebody forces the air into it. A supercharger is the pump that does the forcing.

The Americans built theirs in layers. One blower always turning with the engine, a second blower behind it with two speeds of its own. so that as the airplane climbed, the pilot could reach down and hand the engine another lung full of air. The Germans on the Faka Wolf had one blower with two speeds and nothing behind it.

On the ground and in the middle altitudes, that was plenty. Above 20,000 ft, it was a man breathing through a straw. Now, put all four on the same chart. Speed first, because a fighter cannot shoot down what it cannot catch. The Corsair is faster than the 109G at every altitude. Not close. Faster on the deck, faster in the middle, faster up high.

What that means in practice is that the German pilot cannot use the oldest trick in the book. He cannot firewall the throttle and simply leave against the Faulk Wolf. It is tighter. Down at sea level, the two are close to even with the German airplane maybe a hair ahead. As they climb, they stay close. The Corsair is not running away from a 190, and a 190 is not running away from a Corsair.

The Hellcat is the slowest airplane in this comparison. There is no honest way around that. It is roughly level with the 109G at sea level and falls behind as they climb. The FWolf can outrun it at any altitude above the water. If the Hellcat is going to win a fight against either German airplane, it has to win it by turning, not by chasing. Now, diving.

This is where the assumptions collapse. Over Germany, dive performance was not a nice extra. It was the whole tactical problem. The bombers cruised at 25,000 ft. German fighters attacked from above, went through the formation, and kept going down. An escort that could not follow them down was not an escort.

It was decoration. Most people assumed the naval fighters were poor in a dive. They were designed for a war of low and medium altitude fighting over water. And nobody in the Pacific had much reason to care what happened above 25,000 ft. So the assumption sounds reasonable. It is also wrong.

The Hellcat, the fat one, the slow one, could dive at 496 mph down low, and its limiting mock number worked out to about 0.79. That is the highest number of the four. The Faulwolf came out at the same mock limit, 0.79, but with a lower indicated speed limit of about 478 mph. The Messersmidt G was limited to 466 mph and about 0.76 Mach.

The Corsair had the lowest mock limit of the group, 0.75, but the highest lowaltitude speed limit after the Hellcat, 481 mph. Sort that out and it comes to this. The Hellcat could outdive every airplane here at every altitude. The Corsair could outdive both German fighters below roughly 11 or 12,000 ft.

And both German fighters had a small edge on it above that small one or two hundredths of a mock number. In the case of the Messmitt, the Corsair also had one trick nobody else at this table could match. Its landing gear had a dive brake position. The main wheels could be dropped without the tail wheel coming down with them.

And in that configuration, the airplane had no air speed limit for the gear. A Corsair pilot could point the nose almost straight at the ground, hang out that gear, and ride the dive down at a controlled speed without oversp speeding the airframe. For holding a steep dive angle without running away from yourself, nothing else here came close.

So dive performance was never the reason to keep these airplanes out of Europe. They were in the fight. Roll rate next. And here the picture is very clean at the top and very argued at the bottom. The Faul Wolf and the Corsair rolled about the same and both of them rolled better than almost everything else flying in 1943.

American test reports comparing the two say plainly that they were about equal to one another and that both were superior to the Hellcat. That is not a small gap. In a fight, the airplane that can change its bank angle first is the airplane that gets to decide where the fight goes next. The Hellcat was the worst roller of the four.

Big wing and a big wing takes time to lift one side and drop the other. The Messor Schmidt sits in the middle and it is the one everybody gets wrong. There is a widespread belief that the 109 had a terrible roll rate. Look at the airplane and there is not much reason to think so. The ailerons are a decent size and in a sensible place.

There is no fuel and no gun weight far out along the wing. From the F model on, it had a good aileron design. The wartime tests bear that out. An American evaluation of a captured 109 described the aileron forces as light and said the airplane gave the impression of a very high rate of roll at cruising speeds. A British test compared a 109G against a Mustang and reported that the rate of roll of the two was almost identical.

The catch is what happens when the speed comes up. At around 500 km an hour indicated roughly 310 mph. The stick loads went heavy and stayed heavy. That is where the bad reputation comes from. And it is a real limitation, but it is a limitation in a dive and in a high-speed escape, not in an ordinary turning fight.

Turning then to understand turning, you start with the stall speed because a fighter reaches its best turn at the lowest speed at which it can still pull its maximum load. The Hellcat stalls at 87 m an hour, the Corsair at 98, the Messersmidt G at about 99. Although the German manuals do not publish the number, and that figure comes from secondary sources, the Faula Wolf has the highest stall speed of the four, somewhere near 114 m an hour.

So in the tightest, slowest, most desperate kind of turning fight, the order runs Hellcat first, then the Corsair and the Messersmidt within a whisker of each other, and the Faka Wolf last. The airplane the Germans loved best was the one least able to stay in a knife fight. Set the charts aside for a second, and think about what those numbers actually meant to a man wearing an oxygen mask.

None of this was decided in long, elegant, circling duels. Air combat in 1943 lasted seconds. Somebody saw somebody first, dove out of the sun, fired for two or three seconds at a range he had to guess, and kept going. The numbers we have been reading only ever mattered in that narrow window. 100 feet a minute of climb advantage meant you were the one coming down out of the sun instead of the one being shot at.

12 miles an hour of stall speed meant you could pull the nose around inside him before he could pull it around inside you. A quicker roll meant your guns arrived on target half a second sooner. And half a second is a lifetime. And every one of those numbers was worthless if the man in the seat had 80 hours instead of 300.

or if he had been flying combat for two years without a rotation home or if there was no fuel to fly training sorties that month. Hold that thought. We come back to it at the end. All of that is arithmetic. Now, here is what happened when somebody actually flew it. At the Naval Air Test Center at Puxent River in Maryland, the United States Navy got its hands on a captured fwolf and flew it against a Hellcat and a Corsair. Same air, same day.

Real pilots with combat time, not engineers with slide rules. Picture that flight line. Flat Maryland country. The Chesapeake lying gray off the end of the runway. Humidity thick enough to chew. Two American fighters sitting in navy blue and parked beside them a stubby German machine wearing American stars where the crosses used to be with mechanics standing around it the way men stand around something dangerous and fascinating.

Everything about it was strange to them. The placards were in a language they could not read. The engine was theirs to keep running with parts nobody stocked. The cockpit was laid out by somebody with different ideas about where a man’s hands should fall. And every American who climbed into it came out saying the same thing, which was that it was the easiest fighter he had ever flown.

They took all three up together. The airplanes were flown against each other in the sky, not compared on paper. And that is why this report has never lost its authority. Somebody actually did it. The report is not the American victory lap that people expect. The German airplane outclimbed both of them. Both its best climbing speed was higher than theirs and its advantage was greatest at around 15,000 ft, which is a genuinely uncomfortable place to be losing a climb contest.

In level speed, the Corsair was fastest below 10,000 ft. The two were about even at 15,000. and above 20,000 the German airplane was several knots faster than the Corsair where the Americans won was in the turn and they won it decisively. Both the Corsair and the Hellcat could follow the Faulkwolf around a turn without difficulty.

The Fwolf could not follow either of them. The pilots who flew the comparison agreed that the German fighter was an extremely simple airplane to fly laid out for the convenience of the man in the seat and that it was not equal to either American fighter in a dog fight. That is the finding and for 80 years it has been quoted as the last word on the subject.

There is a problem with it. Nobody today can say with certainty which airplane the Navy actually flew that day. The serial number written in the report does not match the serial number visible in the photographs of the airplane, and neither of those numbers matches anything in the surviving Faka Wolf production records.

Researchers have offered explanations. One is that it was a captured fighter bomber variant taken off an airfield in Italy in the autumn of 1943, an airplane carrying extra weight and extra fittings that a pure fighter would not have. The report itself notes that the machine had been converted, that it ran rough in a way the testers blamed on fouled plugs, and that for reasons nobody could work out, it would suddenly lose all power at 33,000 ft.

That is not a healthy airplane. That is a war prize that had been shot at, abandoned, fied, patched, and fed on American fuel. So, the most famous head-to-head comparison in this entire argument may have been run against a machine that was not what the paperwork said it was and was certainly not in the condition a Luftwafa squadron would have kept it in.

That does not make the result worthless. It makes it a data point instead of a verdict, and anyone who quotes it as proof should say so out loud. There was a second test, and this one had no such doubts about it. In late January and early February of 1944 at that same field in Maryland, the Navy flew Corsa’s against a P-51B Mustang, the early Merlin powered Mustang.

Seven pilots flew the comparison, and every one of them had combat experience in fighters. The Corsair climbed better, between 750 and 1,000 ft a minute better, all the way up to 20,000 ft. That is not an edge. That is a chasm. In a climbing fight, the Corsair would simply go up and away and come back down whenever it liked.

On maneuverability, the report used language that leaves nothing to interpret. The Corsair, it said, was everywhere superior in maneuverability and response. On firepower, the Corsair came out far ahead because six heavy machine guns with deep ammunition boxes will beat four guns with shallow ones every time the fight lasts more than a few seconds.

The Mustang won in two places. It accelerated much better in a dive, and above 25,000 ft, it was superior in speed. Hold on to that last sentence because that single line is the closest thing to an answer this whole story has. 25,000 ft is not a random number. 25,000 ft is the altitude the American heavy bombers flew at over Germany.

The entire escort problem, the whole reason 600 men died on Black Thursday, existed in that band of air. And that band of air was the one place, the only place where the naval fighter lost to the Mustang. That is not the whole reason. It is one of four, and the other three are less glamorous and more decisive.

The second is arithmetic on a factory floor. Every Corsair and every Hellcat coming off the line was allocated to the Navy and the Marine Corps, and the Navy and the Marine Corps were building toward the biggest carrier offensive in human history. The ships were being launched. The air groupoups were being formed. Nobody in that chain of command was going to hand those airplanes to another service for a different ocean.

And underneath that arithmetic sat something nobody wrote down in a report, which was pride. The Army Air Forces had spent 20 years arguing that it deserved to exist as its own service. And the argument it used was strategic bombing. its own bombers, its own doctrine, its own fighters.

To stand up in the autumn of 1943 and say that the answer to the crisis over Germany was to borrow airplanes from the Navy would have been to say something no general in that building was willing to say. Institutions do not think the way engineers think. An engineer looks at a climb chart. An institution looks at what the chart will cost it in the next appropriations hearing.

Both of those forces were in the room and only one of them left a paper trail. The third is logistics, which wins more arguments than performance ever has. A Mustang and a Thunderbolt shared a supply system, a training pipeline, a maintenance manual culture, a spares chain. Dropping two naval airframes into the eighth air force would have meant a separate everything in England in wartime while the shooting was going on.

And the fourth is the one that ended the debate before it properly started. The escort problem was not solved with a new airframe. It was solved with fuel. Drop tanks under the wings of the airplanes the army already owned pushed the Thunderbolt deeper and then pushed the Mustang all the way. By March of 1944, Mustangs were over Berlin.

And by the time the water injected Corsaires and Hellcats came along in the spring of that year, faster and stronger and finally ready for exactly this fight, the air war over Germany had already been decided. The Navy fighters were not rejected because they lost. They were never asked because by the time the question got serious, somebody had already answered it with a fuel tank.

And yet there was one morning in one fjord at the top of the world when the question very nearly got asked for real. The Americans had decided the Corsair could not operate from a carrier deck. Nobody had told the British. In July of 1943 at a naval air station in Rhode Island, a Royal Navy squadron was formed on the American fighter under the command of Lieutenant Commander AM Triton.

A second squadron followed a month later. They took delivery of the same airplane with the same blind approach and the same wing that let go early, flown by young men out of a training system that was, if anything, thinner than the American one. And they made it work, not by fixing the airplane, by changing the way a man flew it.

The Royal Navy approach was a long curving turn. Instead of squaring off behind the ship and coming straight up the wake, where the nose blanked out everything, the British pilot flew a continuous arc all the way to the deck, banked over, looking out the side of the canopy at the ship the entire way. He only straightened out in the last heartbeat when the airplane was already so low and slow that a glance was enough. It was harder to fly.

It was also survivable, and the men who invented it had the enormous advantage of not being able to say no. They made one physical change, and it had nothing to do with landing. British hanger decks were lower than American ones, so about 8 in came off each wing tip, so the airplane would fit below. That was it. The clipped wing became the signature of the British Corsair, and it existed because of a ceiling.

By March of 1944, those squadrons were aboard the carrier Victorious, steaming north into the Arctic, and they were going to do something no Corsair had ever done. They were going to fly a combat mission against Germany. The target was the battleship Turpets, the last great ship of the German Navy, hiding in a fjord in northern Norway called Caford.

As long as she floated, the Royal Navy had to hold a fleet in the north to answer her. Vice Admiral Sir Henry Moore planned the strike. The Barracuda bombers would go in low and dive. The fighters would go in ahead of them and kill the anti-aircraft gunners, and the Corsaires, the fastest airplanes in the force, were given the one job they had been designed and argued about and fought over for four years. Top cover.

Climb above everything. Watch the sky and if the Luftwafa comes up, stop them. At quarter 4 in the morning on the 3rd of April 1944, in the halflight of an arctic spring, the first wave began rolling off the deck. 21 barracudas, 30 wildats and hellcats and 10 corsairs from the two squadrons that had learned to land on a curve.

An hour and 10 minutes later, a second wave went with 10 more corsaires above it. Lieutenant Commander Roy Baker Falner led both attacks. The weather was extraordinary. Anyone who has flown the Norwegian Sea in early spring will tell you it is normally a gray misery of low cloud and ice.

That morning it was clear and still and the visibility went on forever. They flew in at 50 ft above the water, 50 ft in formation in the dark over an ocean because at 50 ft German radar cannot see you. Then the coast came up out of the sea, black mountains still holding their winter snow, and the whole formation climbed hard to 7,000 ft, and turned inland down the fjord.

Below them, at the head of the water, sat the largest warship in Europe. The fighters went down first. Hellcats and wildcats dropped onto the anti-aircraft batteries on the shore, onto the flagships, onto the gun positions along the deck of the battleship herself and opened up with heavy machine guns from very close range.

That is what killed people that morning, not the bombs, the strafing. The gunners of the tpets were standing at open mounts, and a stream of half-in bullets came through them at 400 m an hour before most of them had their gloves on. The battleship’s main anti-aircraft control center was knocked out in the first seconds. Guns were damaged.

Crews were destroyed where they stood. Then the barracudas came down through the smoke and put bomb after bomb into her. Seven of them inside a single minute. 10 hits in the first attack alone. An hour later, the second wave came back and did it again. When it was over, 122 German sailors were dead and 316 were wounded, close to 15% of her entire crew. The ship did not sink.

She was not going anywhere for 3 months. And 7,000 ft above all of it, 10 Corsaires flew in a slow circle with their guns armed and their heads on swivels, watching a sky that stayed completely empty. An hour later, 10 more of them came back and flew the same empty circle over the same empty sky. It is worth sitting up there with them for a moment.

7,000 ft over an arctic fjord in April is bitterly cold, and the cockpit heating in a Corsair was never much to speak of. The oxygen mask is clammy against the face. The engine is a wall of noise so constant that after 20 minutes, the mind stops hearing it. Below and ahead, the fjord is filling with smoke and the flashes of the flack, and the radio is full of other men’s voices going up in pitch.

And the pilot’s job is to look away from all of that, to keep his eyes moving across empty blue. Up sun, down, sun, over each shoulder, because the moment he watches the show below is the moment somebody comes down on him from behind. They flew that circle for the length of the attack.

Every man in it had spent a year and a half being told this was what the airplane was for. Nothing came up, not one German fighter. There were fighter units in northern Norway. There were airfields. There were pilots, but the raid had come in under the radar horizon, and the warning arrived far too late. And behind the warning sat the thing that was strangling the entire German war effort by the spring of 1944.

There was not enough fuel. Aviation gasoline in Germany was being rationed like blood plasma and squadrons that had it were being held for the defense of the Reich itself, not for a fjord at the top of the world. The British lost four aircraft that day and nine airmen. One damaged Hellcat went into the sea near a Canadian destroyer and the pilot was pulled out alive.

Every single one of those losses came from flack or from accident. Not one of them came from a German fighter. That is the whole answer to the question in the title and it is not the answer anyone wants. The great matchup, the Corsair against the Messormitt, the American naval fighter against the Luftwafa was set up exactly once on a clear morning in Norway with everything in place. And it did not happen.

It did not happen because by the time the Corsair arrived over Europe, the Luftvafa could no longer afford to send airplanes up to meet it. Think about what that actually means because it is the point of this entire story. For 80 years, men have argued about roll rates and mock limits and critical altitudes as though the war were decided by whichever engineer drew the better wing.

And the numbers are real. The Corsair was faster than the Messersmid at every altitude. The Fwolf outclimbed both American fighters. The Hellcat could outdive all of them. Every one of those facts is true. and every one of them mattered to the man in the cockpit in the two or three seconds he had to use it.

But not one of them decided anything. The Corsair finished the war credited with a kill ratio that sounds almost impossible, something on the order of 11:1. That number is a claim made by the service that owned the airplane. And claims in air combat were honestly and universally inflated by everyone in every air force. But even taken at face value, look at what it was earned against.

By the time the Corsair hit its stride, the Japanese naval airarm had already lost its irreplaceable pre-war pilots at Midway and in the Solomons and was sending up young men with a fraction of the training. The Corsair was superb. It was also fighting an enemy who had been bled white. Meanwhile, the men who flew the Messers Schmidt 109 put up the highest personal scores in the history of aerial warfare.

Hundreds of victories for a single pilot, numbers no American or British pilot ever came close to. And that record is not a monument to German superiority. It is a monument to a system with no rotation home. American pilots flew a tour and went back to teach. German pilots flew until they were killed and most of them were. The scores are high because the careers ended in only one way.

So which fighter truly ruled the sky? None of them. Not the Corsair, not the Hellcat, not the Messersmidt, not the Faulk Wolf. What ruled the sky was the thing behind the airplane. It was 100 octane fuel arriving by the tanker load and training schools that could still afford to burn it and factories that turned out airframes faster than an enemy could shoot them down and a personnel system that sent a tired man home before it killed him.

Germany built magnificent fighters right to the end. By 1944, it could not fuel them, could not train enough boys to fly them, and could not replace the men who died in them. That is why the sky over caf was empty. The airplane is the part we remember because the airplane is beautiful and the logistics are not. But the men who actually flew these machines understood it perfectly well.

Ask any of them what won and they will not say the wing. They will say we had more of everything and we had it for longer. The Corsair never got its fight with the Luftvafa. It is the great unfought battle of the air war and it will be argued about in hangers and garages and comment sections for as long as anyone remembers what these airplanes sounded like.

So let us hear it. If a Corsair and a Messers 109 had met over Germany in 1943, same fuel, same pilots, same day. Who walks away? And if your father or your uncle flew any of these airplanes or worked on them, tell us. Those are the stories that are disappearing fastest. And this is one of the last places they still get