It was March 19th, 1945, and First Lieutenant Grant Stout in his P-47 Thunderbolt was returning from a dive bombing mission over Germany. He spotted a train and went down to strafe it. Moments later, his fighter was seen coming apart in the air. His parachute opened before the wreck hit the ground. He was never seen again. The truth would surface only years later, and what came out would haunt his family. The darker part is that he wasn't the only one.
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| First Lieutenant Grant Stout and his P-47 Thunderbolt |
The Biggest Fighter in the War
In the years before World War II, the US was obsessed with long-range bombers and neglected fighter development. While Germany prepared the BF 109, arguably the best fighter in the world when it appeared, American squadrons had P-40 Warhawks and P-39 Airacobras that were obviously behind in performance.
Engineer Alexander Kartveli flipped the lightweight fighter concept upside down. He designed the biggest and heaviest single-engine fighter of the war around a massive 18-cylinder Pratt and Whitney Double Wasp engine with over 2,000 horsepower and a turbo supercharger system tucked in the fuselage. The engine had 46 liters of displacement compared to the Spitfire's Merlin at 27 liters. Fully loaded, the Thunderbolt weighed over 7 tons, more than 50% heavier than a Spitfire.
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| Pratt and Whitney Double Wasp engine |
The supercharger system was ingenious. Air entered through a scoop under the nose large enough for a man to climb inside, traveled through ducts to the rear, was compressed, and fed back to the engine. At 27,000 feet, the engine was still breathing compressed air while other fighters struggled in thin atmosphere. That same system under the cockpit acted as a cushion in crash landings, and the smooth belly kept the plane from flipping over.
Each wing held four Browning .50 caliber machine guns, eight in total with 350 rounds each. All eight firing together put out about 100 rounds per second, with recoil alone slowing the airplane by 30 miles per hour. It could also carry over 2,500 pounds of bombs or rockets, making it the heaviest-hitting single-engine fighter of the war.
Notoriously Hard to Kill
The air-cooled engine couldn't be taken out by a single bullet through the radiator like liquid-cooled engines could. Self-sealing fuel tanks, armored cockpit plates front and rear, and a strong wing structure that stayed intact under heavy fire gave the Thunderbolt a reputation for surviving damage that would destroy any other fighter.
Lieutenant Robert Johnson's Thunderbolt was hit by 20 cannon shells and over 100 machine gun rounds. Shattered canopy, fuselage like Swiss cheese, Johnson himself wounded. He was still flying. The German ace who attacked him was so stunned it wouldn't go down that he pulled alongside after expending all his ammunition, gave a salute, and broke off. Johnson made it back to Allied lines.
Stories like this were common. Thunderbolts returned from missions with half their cylinder heads missing, entire wing sections gone, and holes from 20 and 30mm cannon fire everywhere. Pilots joked that the cockpit was so big you could unstrap your harness and run around dodging bullets.
The Role That Got Them Killed
The P-47's limited fuel range meant the P-51 Mustang eventually took over bomber escort duties. The Thunderbolt shifted to the role that would define both its legacy and the darkest period for its pilots: ground attack.
Its tough constitution and heavy payload made it ideal for strafing and close air support. But this meant flying extremely low where every anti-aircraft weapon could reach them. As 1944 went on, Thunderbolts devastated German ground movement so effectively that the Germans became reluctant to move vehicles in daylight.
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| A P-47 Mustang Low Pass |
But plenty of pilots went down or had to bail out deep in enemy territory. And their success at destroying German infrastructure didn't help their reception on the ground.
Terror Fliers
Under the Geneva Conventions, a pilot who parachuted and surrendered should be treated as a prisoner of war. In many cases, that happened. Regular Wehrmacht soldiers or local police would apprehend them and send them to POW camps. Not ideal conditions, but alive.
But by 1944, something else was happening. German civilians who had suffered terribly from Allied bombing campaigns and ground attacks were taking matters into their own hands. Cities were being pounded by the joint British and American bombing campaign. Fighter bombers like the Thunderbolt attacked everything that moved: trains, convoys, even farms suspected of hiding military equipment.
Nazi propaganda fueled the hatred. Allied airmen were labeled Terrorflieger or Luftgangster, terror fliers or air gangsters, deserving no mercy. There's evidence that Hitler discussed officially executing captured airmen but didn't dare cross the Geneva Conventions that openly. Instead, Nazi officials turned a blind eye and let mobs do as they pleased.
What Happened to Grant Stout
On March 19th, 1945, Lieutenant Stout bailed out near Dortmund and was immediately taken prisoner by Luftwaffe personnel operating a local flak battery. That should have meant captivity and eventually a POW camp.
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| First Lieutenant Grant Stout |
Instead, the battery commander marched Stout into a nearby village, pointed to the captured pilot, and told the crowd something to the effect of "here's one of the murder pilots, do what you will." A mob beat him to death. His body was buried in an unmarked grave outside the village. The truth only came out during postwar investigations. In 1947, four Germans were tried by a US military tribunal. The flak sergeant received a life sentence.
Just weeks later, on April 13th, 1945, Major William "Shorty" Bales crash-landed near the village of Biersdorf after being hit by ground fire during a strafing mission. Earlier that same day, bombs from his group's mission had struck the nearby town of Hainichen, killing at least one civilian. When locals saw an American pilot climb out of a downed Thunderbolt, they didn't see a surrendering soldier. They saw the man who had just helped bomb their homes. He was shot in the stomach at close range, handed over to local police, taken to a hospital, and died the next day. He was 29 years old.
An estimated 1,000 such incidents were recorded. Many were tried at Dachau, the former concentration camp turned US military court. But not all Germans did this. There are many more instances of villagers helping Allied airmen, hiding and protecting them until authorities arrived.
After the War
By the end of the war, over 15,500 P-47s were produced, more than any other US fighter. Its pilots flew over half a million combat sorties and are credited with over 3,700 enemy aircraft shot down, second only to the Mustang. They strafed thousands of trains, tens of thousands of trucks, and hundreds of armored vehicles.
The successor built on the same principles, tough rather than fast and heavily armed, would come decades later: the A-10 Thunderbolt II, with its 30mm rotary cannon and a reputation for being just as hard to kill.
Over 15,500 built. Half a million sorties flown. And for the pilots who went down over Germany in the final year of the war, the most dangerous moment wasn't the flak or the fighters. It was the parachute ride down and whoever was waiting at the bottom.