Hun Hunter XVI

The P-47 was not graceful in the way a Spitfire was graceful. It was huge, heavy, turbocharged, and hard to kill. Pilots called it the Jug. It could dive like a dropped anvil, carry punishment home in its cylinders and skin, and throw eight streams of .50-caliber fire into a target with terrifying weight.

Francis Stanley Gabreski understood that airplane. Born in Oil City, Pennsylvania, the son of Polish immigrants, he had gone to Britain, flown briefly with Polish fighter pilots, and come back to the U.S. 56th Fighter Group with a sharpened eye for air combat. By the summer of 1944 he was commanding the 61st Fighter Squadron and carrying 28 confirmed victories, all earned in the European theater.

His reputation had been built in a fighter group that did not fly politely. The 56th was an Eighth Air Force P-47 outfit to the bone: high-altitude escort one day, fighter sweep the next, and, after Normandy, the low work over airfields and rail lines. Gabreski was methodical rather than flashy. He stalked, closed, fired at short range, and broke away before the other pilot could use altitude or surprise against him.

On July 20, 1944, Gabreski was near the end of his combat tour. The 56th Fighter Group was working over German airfields in the Koblenz area. His P-47D, serial 42-26418 and squadron code HV-A, went down west of Koblenz after a strafing run. The Army Air Corps missing-aircrew record lists the aircraft as a P-47D of the 56th Fighter Group, 61st Fighter Squadron, with Gabreski as pilot and POW.

The story remembered by the Air Force is blunt: while strafing a German airfield, the propeller of Gabreski's P-47 struck the ground. He crash-landed, evaded briefly, and was captured. The war's top American ace over Europe would spend the remaining months of the war at Stalag Luft I rather than on a bond tour back home.

That is the hard edge of the story. Gabreski was not shot out of the sky in a clean duel. He was lost doing the dangerous, low, dirty work the Thunderbolt was built to survive: sweeping down over enemy airfields, trucks, parked aircraft, hangars, and flak positions. One more pass was enough.

After liberation in 1945, Gabreski stayed in uniform. He returned to combat in Korea, scored 6.5 more victories in jets, and became one of the rare American aces of two wars. But the P-47 remained the aircraft that made his name: big engine, big guns, red nose, HV-A on the fuselage, and the kind of survivability that could still put a pilot on the ground alive after everything had gone wrong.

Gabreski was born January 28, 1919, in Oil City, Pennsylvania. His parents, Stanley and Josephine, were Polish immigrants who ran a market and expected work before romance. Aviation was not an obvious path. At Notre Dame he struggled academically, but a Civilian Pilot Training Program slot gave him the thing that changed the direction of his life.

He entered the Army Air Corps before Pearl Harbor and did not arrive in Europe as a finished ace. He made himself into one. Because he spoke Polish, he spent time with RAF Polish fighter squadrons and absorbed lessons from pilots who had already survived France, Britain, and years of war. The Polish influence mattered: close range, discipline, patience, and the refusal to waste ammunition at impossible angles.

With the 56th Fighter Group he found the right machine. The P-47 was not a knife fighter at low speed, but above Europe it was fast, rugged, heavily armed, and excellent in the dive. Gabreski's style fit it: climb for position, attack decisively, use the Thunderbolt's weight and speed, and leave before the fight became someone else's fight.

By mid-1944 he had become the leading American ace in the European Theater. The irony is that the airplane did not fail him in the end. He hit the ground with the propeller during a low attack and still lived through the landing. The Thunderbolt's bulk, often mocked by pilots coming from lighter fighters, gave him a second war story instead of a grave.

The P-47 cockpit was a fighter cockpit and an engine room at the same time. The pilot had to fly formation, watch the sky, manage fuel, trim a very heavy airplane, control the big R-2800 radial, and keep the turbo-supercharger working correctly at altitude. It rewarded pilots who could think ahead.

The bubble canopy gave later P-47Ds much better rearward visibility than the earlier razorback versions. That mattered for escort work, but it also mattered in the chaos after a strafing pass, when a pilot had to check the target, the flak, the wingmen, and the escape route in seconds.

For ground attack, the cockpit workload compressed. The pilot rolled in, picked the aim point through the reflector sight, held the big fighter steady as speed built, fired eight wing guns, then pulled away before the aircraft ate up the last few feet of altitude. The Thunderbolt could absorb punishment, but it could not forgive the ground.