Wonder. Wander. Repeat.

Three hundred and fifty-two. That is how many aircraft Erich Hartmann shot down, more than any fighter pilot in the history of the world, a record that has stood for eighty years and will never be broken.

Hartmann was a slim, boyish German pilot, so young looking his comrades nicknamed him Bubi, the kid. He flew almost entirely on the Eastern Front, and the Soviets came to fear the black tulip painted on the nose of his fighter so much that they put a bounty on his head and would break off and run when they saw it. They called him the Black Devil of the South.

The way he did it was not what you would expect. Hartmann was not a swashbuckling dogfighter. He thought the swirling duels people romanticize were a good way to get killed. His method was cold and patient. Get in as close as he possibly could, so close the enemy aircraft filled his entire windscreen and he could not miss, fire one short devastating burst, then instantly break away and dive out before anyone could react. See, decide, attack, break away. He said eighty percent of the pilots he shot down never even knew he was there. He was forced down many times himself, sometimes by flying debris from planes he had just destroyed at point blank range, and he walked away every time. He flew 1,404 combat missions in about 30 months.

They gave him the Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds, the highest German decoration, and he was the most famous fighter pilot in the world at 22.

Then the war ended and his real ordeal began. Handed to the Soviets, who wanted the Black Devil badly, he was convicted on fabricated charges and sentenced to 25 years of hard labor. He spent ten years in the gulag and would not break. He refused to confess to crimes he had not committed, refused to spy, refused to help build a Soviet-controlled German air force, and at one point led a prisoners' protest against the conditions. What kept him alive, he said, was the thought of getting back to Ursula, the girl he had married during the war and barely seen since.

He came home in 1955, one of the last released. He rejoined the West German air force, helped rebuild it, flew jets into the Cold War, and lived a long life. Decades later the Soviet charges against him were formally annulled. The greatest fighter ace who ever lived, and the record dies with him.

The Japanese Navy sent its specification to two companies. One read it, decided it was impossible, and withdrew from the competition.

The other said it could be done, but only if he was allowed to take almost everything out of the aircraft.

He left out the armour.

This is the story of the Zero..🧵1/5

🧵 2/5

In October 1937, the Imperial Japanese Navy issued its requirements for a new carrier fighter, and they read like a wish list rather than a design brief.

It had to fly faster than 310 miles an hour. It had to climb to around 10,000 feet in three and a half minutes. It had to carry two cannon and two machine guns. It had to be at least as manoeuvrable as the fighter it was replacing, which was itself famously nimble. Its wingspan had to be under twelve metres so it would fit on a carrier deck. And it had to fly farther than almost anything else in the world, because the Navy wanted a fighter that could reach targets hundreds of miles from its ship and come back.

Those requirements fight each other. Speed and climb want a powerful engine, which is heavy. Range wants a lot of fuel, which is heavy. Firepower is heavy. And every pound you add makes the aircraft less agile.

The specification went to Nakajima and to Mitsubishi. In January, Nakajima's team concluded it could not be done and withdrew.

🧵 3/5

At Mitsubishi, the chief designer was a 34-year-old engineer named Jiro Horikoshi, and he thought it was possible. But only one way.

If he could not add power, he would remove weight. All of it. Everywhere. Every part of the aircraft would be fought over gram by gram.

He built most of the airframe from a new top-secret aluminium alloy developed by Sumitomo, extra super duralumin, one of the lightest and strongest available anywhere at the time, though brittle and prone to corrosion, so it had to be coated to protect it. He designed an exceptionally light wing structure, running the main spar through the fuselage to avoid the heavy fittings that would normally join wing to body. He thinned the structure. He used flush rivets. He gave it a very large wing for its size, so it would float through turns that would stall other fighters.

And then he made the decision the aircraft is remembered for.

He left out the armour plate. There was nothing protecting the pilot. He also left out self-sealing fuel tanks, which were becoming standard on other nations' fighters, because rubber lining weighs something.

Empty, the finished aircraft weighed around 3,700 pounds.

🧵 4/5

It worked. Completely.

The A6M Zero could out-turn virtually every operational fighter in the world. It could climb with anything. It carried two 20mm cannon. And it had range that Allied intelligence initially refused to believe, turning up over targets that were supposed to be far beyond the reach of any carrier aircraft.

For the first year of the Pacific war it was close to untouchable. Allied pilots were given a standing instruction that told you everything about the situation. Never dogfight a Zero. Do not try to turn with it. Use your speed, use your dive, and do not, under any circumstances, get into a turning fight.

🧵 5/5

Then, on 4 June 1942, an almost intact Zero came down on Akutan Island in the Aleutians.

The Americans recovered it, repaired it and flew it. And everything Horikoshi had taken out was now written down in a test report. The controls went heavy and unresponsive at high speed. It could not follow a fast dive. There was nothing protecting the pilot or the fuel. Those tests confirmed what American engineers had suspected, validated the design philosophy behind the new fighters coming through, and shaped the tactics used to beat it.

The same choices that made the Zero a masterpiece now made it a death trap. A burst of fire that a Hellcat or a Thunderbolt would absorb and fly home with could easily ignite a Zero's unprotected tanks. As Allied fighters became faster and tougher, its pilots were left in an aircraft that could not take a hit, flown increasingly by men with almost no training. By the last year of the war, many were being expended in kamikaze attacks.

Jiro Horikoshi later wrote that he had never wanted the war, and that he was deeply troubled by what his aircraft had been used for.

He had been asked to build something impossible, and he had done it, by leaving out the one thing that might have brought more of his countrymen home.

This was the story of the Zero.

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