They Mocked His “Caveman” Dive Trick — Until He Shredded 9 Fighters in One Sky Duel

Nine German fighters circle below him. His engine is already coughing. His wingmen are scattered or dead. Standard doctrine says, “Climb, regroup, retreat.” Instead, he pushes the stick forward and dives straight into the center of the enemy formation at a speed that should rip his wings off. What happens in the next four minutes will rewrite fighter tactics for the rest of the war. Spring 1942.
The skies over northern France belong to the Luftwafa. British fighters patrol in neat formations following doctrines written in peace time by men who never faced a messmitt at 400 mph. The tactics are elegant on paper, disciplined, predictable, and they are killing young pilots faster than the training schools can replace them.
Fighter command is bleeding. Every sorty over occupied Europe is a calculated risk. The Spitfires are magnificent machines, but the men flying them are being taught to fight the last war. They climb into a turning dog fight. They engage honorably. They die methodically. The Germans know this. They have learned to read the patterns.
When a British squadron appears on the horizon, the 109s climb, bait the Spitfires into a turning fight, and then the Faulk Wolves drop from above like stones. It is geometry. It is predictable. It is lethal. The loss rates are unsustainable. Command knows it. The squadrons know it. But doctrine is doctrine, and improvisation is discouraged.
There is a rhythm to the slaughter and it has become routine. Then a South African pilot starts doing something no one taught him. He does not turn with the enemy. He does not climb to gain altitude advantage. He dives straight down past the merge through the danger zone faster than physics should allow.
He uses gravity like a weapon and speed like armor and he comes back alive. The first time he does it, his squadron leader writes him up for reckless flying. The second time, he is pulled aside and lectured on the fundamentals of air combat. The third time, he ignores the lecture entirely and goes back up. His name is Squadron Leader Marmaduke Thomas St. John Pat.
Everyone calls him Pat. He has a quiet voice, a farmer’s build, and a mechanical intuition that borders on clairvoyance. He does not argue with his superiors. He simply keeps diving. If this history matters to you, tap like and subscribe. He was born in the orange free state in 1914 in a landscape of dust and endless sky.
His father was a mining engineer. His mother raised him with discipline and silence. There was no money for drama, no room for excess. You worked. You solved problems. You moved on. Pat learned to fly in Johannesburg on worn out biplanes held together with wire and hope. He soloed after seven hours.
The instructors noted his hands were steady and his decisions were fast. He did not overthink. He did not freeze. He flew the way other men drove trucks. In 1936, he joined the Royal Air Force on a short service commission. He was sent to England, then Egypt, then Greece. He flew gladiators, then hurricanes, then Spitfires. He adapted to each machine the way a craftsman adapts to a new tool.
No ceremony, no complaint. His log book from those years is unremarkable. Clean entries, routine patrols, no flourishes. But his ground crew noticed something. After every sorty, he would walk the aircraft slowly, running his hand along the fuselage, checking the control surfaces, asking questions, not about damage, about response.
How did the ailerons feel at high speed? Did the rudder flutter in a dive? Was there play in the elevator trim? He was not inspecting, he was learning. The crew chief later said Pat talked to the aircraft like a man talks to a horse, not with words, with attention. By 1941, he was flying combat missions over the Mediterranean.
His kill tally grew quietly. No grand claims, no theatrical victory roles. He fired short bursts, close range, and did not waste ammunition. He returned with bullet holes in his wings and said nothing about them. Other pilots admired his composure. He never bragged. He never hesitated. He had the kind of calm that comes from solving problems in three dimensions while someone is trying to kill you.
But it was his unorthodox diving attacks that set him apart. While others climbed into swirling dog fights, Pat would position himself high, pick a target, and then drop like a falcon. He would blow through the furball at terminal velocity, fire a two-cond burst, and zoom back up on pure momentum before the enemy could react. It looked reckless.
It looked like suicide. It worked. The older pilots called it the caveman approach. No finesse, no grace, just speed and violence. They mocked it in the officer’s mess. They said it violated the principles of energy management, of situational awareness, of teamwork. Pat listened, nodded, and kept diving.
He understood something they did not. In a dog fight, time compresses. The pilot who completes the decision loop faster wins. Turning fights stretch that loop. They become contests of endurance, of fuel, of patience. But a dive collapses the loop entirely. You see, you commit, you execute. There is no second-guing and there is no defense. A fighter climbing into a turn is predictable.
A fighter diving at maximum speed is a problem without a solution. You cannot outturn gravity. You cannot outclimb momentum. Pat was not a theorist. He did not write tactical papers. But he had discovered through instinct and repetition a principle that would later become doctrine. Speed is life. Altitude is insurance. And the initiative belongs to the man who strikes first and vanishes before the enemy can respond. March 1942.
The air war over France has become a killing floor. Fighter command is losing experienced pilots faster than they can be replaced. The Germans have refined their tactics into a brutal efficiency. They fly in pairs in staggered altitudes with discipline and patience. When the British arrive, they wait.
They let the Spitfires commit. Then they pounce. The British squadrons are still flying the old formations. Vicks of three. Tight parade ground spacing. Beautiful to watch. Fatal in combat. The wingmen spend more time avoiding collision with their own leader than watching for threats. The Germans have learned to ignore the formation and simply pick off the outermost aircraft one at a time like wolves culling a herd.
Command knows the tactics are failing. Reports come back from every squadron. The same story, the same losses. But changing doctrine requires consensus, testing, approval, and time is a luxury no one has. Meanwhile, pilots are dying in predictable ways. Pat watches this from the cockpit and the debriefing room. He sees the pattern, the hesitation, the adherence to rules that no longer match reality.
He sees young pilots frozen by doctrine, waiting for permission to survive. He tries to explain his method to his squadron leader. He describes the dive attack, the energy advantage, the psychological shock of a high-speed pass, the impossibility of retaliation. He sketches it on a chalkboard in the ready room.
He uses physics, geometry, common sense. The squadron leader listens politely. Then he reminds Pat that fighter combat is not a solo endeavor. It requires coordination, mutual support, discipline. Diving away from your wingman leaves him exposed. Diving into an enemy formation without backup is not tactics. It is gambling. Pat does not argue.
He has learned that some men trust experience and some men trust process. He has also learned that when the two conflict process wins the meeting and experience wins the fight. So he stops trying to convince anyone, he just keeps flying his way and his kill count keeps rising. By April, he has more confirmed victories than anyone in his squadron.
By May, he is one of the highest scoring Allied pilots in the theater. The numbers are impossible to ignore, but the method remains controversial. Other pilots begin to imitate him. A few of the younger ones, the ones who have seen too many friends spin into the channel, start experimenting with diving attacks. Some of them come back. Some of them do not.
The technique requires judgment, nerve, and an intimate understanding of the aircraft’s limits. It is not a tactic you can teach in a classroom. The old guard remains skeptical. They point to the failures and ignore the successes. They say Pat is lucky. They say his approach works only because he is exceptionally skilled and that average pilots attempting the same maneuver will simply kill themselves faster.
There is truth in this. Pat is not average. But the critique misses the larger point. The old tactics are not working for average pilots either. They are simply dying in a more doctrinally acceptable fashion. The crisis comes to a head in late May. Intelligence reports indicate a major Luftwafa operation forming over the Padala.
A large fighter sweep designed to draw out the RAF and bleed it dry. Command decides to meet the threat headon. Every available squadron is scrambled. Pat’s unit is part of the response. They take off in the early afternoon, climbing into a sky already crowded with contrails and radio chatter. The mission brief is simple. Engage the enemy. Protect the bombers.
Survive if you can. But the Germans are waiting and they have brought everyone. The merge happens at 22,000 ft. Pat sees them first. A swarm of 109s staggered in altitude, weaving lazily, waiting for the British to commit. Below them, a second layer of Faka Wolf 190s, faster and heavier, holding in reserve.
It is a trap disguised as an opportunity. His squadron leader orders the standard attack. Climb. Engage the high fighters. Maintain formation. Pat knows what will happen next. The 109s will turn. The 1 to90s will dive. His squadron will be shredded in the crossfire. He makes a decision. He does not ask for permission.
He breaks formation, pushes the stick forward, and dives. The Spitfire accelerates like a stone. The airframe shutters. The engine screams. The altimeter unwinds in a blur. He is doing things to the aircraft that the manual says will cause structural failure. The wings flex, the controls stiffen. He keeps the dive. Behind him, his squadron leader is shouting on the radio, ordering him to return to formation, threatening disciplinary action.
Pat does not respond. He is too busy calculating angles. He is diving toward the lower group of 190s. They do not see him yet. They are focused upward, waiting for the bomber escort to descend into range. Pat is coming from above and behind outside their field of vision faster than they expect. He closes to 300 yd, 200, 100.
He selects a target, a 190 on the left edge of the formation, slightly separated. He centers the gun site, fires. The burst is two seconds. Cannon and machine gun. The 190 shudders, rolls inverted, and falls away, trailing smoke. No explosion, just sudden catastrophic damage. The other Germans react, but they are already behind the curve.
Pat is past them, diving through their formation, gone before they can bring guns to bear. He pulls out of the dive at 12,000 ft, hemorrhaging speed, but alive. He looks up. The sky is full of turning fighters. The squadron is engaged, scattered. The fight has dissolved into chaos. And he is alone, exactly where he wants to be. He begins to climb, not straight up, at an angle, regaining energy, watching.
The Germans above are focused on the main fight. They do not see the lone Spitfire clawing back up through the furball. Pat spots a 109 chasing one of his squadron mates. The Spitfire is turning hard, trying to shake the pursuer. It will not work. The 109 is patient, closing the radius, waiting for the shot. Pat dives again, shallower this time.
A slashing attack from the flank. He fires from long range, walking the tracers into the 109’s fuselage. The German breaks off, rolls away. Pat does not follow. He is already looking for the next target. What happens over the next four minutes defies the statistical probability of survival. Pat does not dog fight. He does not turn.
He climbs, dives, climbs again. He uses the vertical plane like a ladder, trading altitude for speed, speed for position, position for kills. Every attack is a lightning stroke. In fire, out, no lingering, no second chances. He is flying faster than the aircraft was designed to fly. The wings are bending. The rivets are straining. The control surfaces are on the edge of flutter. He feels it through the stick.
A faint vibration, a warning. He ignores it. He sees a pair of 109 scissoring with a lone hurricane. The hurricane is out of options. Pat dives onto the trailing 109, fires, and blows its tail off. The second 109 breaks upward. Pat follows the break, fires inverted, and stitches the cockpit.
The German fighter snaps into a spin. Three kills, three dives. He is beginning to attract attention. The Germans realize there is a lone Spitfire hunting them from above. They start looking up, but looking up costs them focus on the main engagement. Pat is disrupting the rhythm of the entire battle. He climbs again.
His fuel is low. His ammunition is half gone. His engine temperature is climbing into the red. The logical choice is to disengage, to dive for home, to survive. He stays. He sees a 190 lining up on a crippled Spitfire trailing smoke. The Spitfire is barely flying. One more burst will finish it. Pat dives.
The angle is impossible. The closure rate is suicidal. He fires anyway. The 1 to 90 explodes. The crippled Spitfire limps away. Four kills. He pulls up. The G-forces crush him into the seat. His vision tunnels. Gray edges creep in. He eases the stick, lets the blood return to his brain and keeps climbing. Another 109. Another dive.
Another two second burst. The 109 rolls onto its back and falls away. Engine dead. Five kills. The sky is thinning. The surviving Germans are breaking off. They have lost cohesion. lost the initiative. They are no longer hunting. They are defending. Pat sees a 190 trying to escape. Diving for the deck. He follows full throttle.
The Spitfire is shaking itself apart. The wings are screaming. He closes to point blank range and fires. The 190 disintegrates. Six kills. He pulls up at 3,000 ft. His vision is blurred from the G forces. His arms are leen. His fuel gauge is bouncing on empty. He should leave now. But he sees two more 109s reforming, trying to regroup.
He turns toward them. They see him coming. They split. One goes high, one goes low. Classic defensive split. It should divide his attention, force him to commit to one and concede the other. Pat does not commit. He dives between them, fires at the lower 109 on the way down, hits. The 109 rolls away, trailing coolant.
He pulls up hard, meets the higher 109 headon, and fires in a closing pass. The 109 breaks left, smoking. Seven kills, confirmed or damaged. The line is blurring. He is out of altitude, out of speed, out of tactical options. His engine is overheating. The oil pressure gauge is flickering. He smells burning metal. And then he sees them.
Two 190s close, closing. They have spotted him. They know he is vulnerable. They are coming for him. Pat does the only thing he can. He dives again. The Spitfire is past its limit. The airframe groans. The wings flex visibly. The dive is nearly vertical. The airspeed indicator goes off the scale. He is falling faster than controlled flight, faster than the 190s can follow. He pulls out at 500 ft.
The G-forces are crushing. His vision goes black. The stick feels like it is made of stone. The Spitfire shuddters, groans, and levels out. The wings stay on barely. He looks back. The 190s are gone. They broke off. They either lost sight of him in the dive or assumed he crashed. He is alone, low, slow, and alive. He turns for home.
On the way back, he sees a lone 109 limping toward France. Engine smoking, probably out of ammunition. An easy kill. Pat has three rounds left in one gun. He closes, fires. The 109 shutters and noses over into the channel. Eight kills. He crosses the coast. His fuel gauge reads zero. His engine is coughing. He glides the last five miles to base, lands on fumes, and taxis to the hard stand.
The ground crew rushes over. They see the empty ammunition bays, the heatstressed engine. The wings bent slightly upward from the G-forces. They ask how many he got. He holds up eight fingers, then pauses, corrects himself. Nine. He forgot the first one. Nine kills in one sort.
A single pilot, a single aircraft, four minutes of continuous combat at the edge of physical and mechanical destruction. It is the highest single sorty tally of the war for the RAF at that point and it is accomplished using a tactic that was officially discouraged. The squadron leader does not reprimand him. He does not congratulate him either.
He just stares and then he asks Pat to explain step by step exactly what he did. The ripple begins quietly. No announcements, no fanfare, just conversations. Pat’s method is dissected in ready rooms across fighter command. Pilots who survived the same engagement describe what they saw. A lone spitfire diving again and again, appearing and vanishing, shredding the German formation from within.
It was not recklessness. It was surgical. Within weeks, instructors at the training schools begin teaching energy tactics, not as doctrine, not yet, but as an option, a tool. The dive attack, the zoom climb, the boom and zoom philosophy that will define jet combat 20 years later. It starts with the veterans, the ones who have seen enough death to recognize a better way.
They teach the younger pilots. They demonstrate. They normalize the idea that speed is a weapon, that altitude is potential energy, that the vertical dimension is not just space to maneuver, but a place to dictate the terms of engagement. The Germans notice. Their intelligence officers review the gun camera footage and the loss reports. They see a shift.
British pilots are no longer playing the turning game. They are hitting fast, disengaging, and refusing to be baited into protracted dog fights. The kill ratios begin to even out. By the summer of 1942, boom and zoom tactics are being integrated into squadron level training. Not because of a top- down mandate, but because they work.
Because pilots who fly that way come home more often. Pat himself continues flying. He does not tour. He does not lecture. He leads by example. His total kill count will eventually exceed 40, though the exact number is disputed. Recordeping in combat is imperfect. Kills are shared, obscured, lost in the chaos. What is not disputed is his impact.
He changes the way an entire generation of pilots thinks about energy management. He proves that unorthodox does not mean undisiplined and that innovation often comes from the cockpit, not the briefing room. He does not live to see the full legacy. In April 1941 over Greece, his aircraft is hit during a low-level strafing run. He crashes. He is 26 years old.
His death is barely noted outside his squadron. The war is too vast. The losses too constant. But his tactics outlive him. They are refined, codified, taught to American pilots, taught to Soviet pilots. By 1943, boom and zoom is the default for every major air force. The swirling dog fights of 1940 are obsolete.
The nine kill sorty becomes legend. It is studied at staff colleges, analyzed in tactical journals, used as proof that individual initiative when grounded in sound principles can alter the course of battle. Fighter pilots in Korea will use his method. Pilots in Vietnam will use it. The F-15, the F-16, the modern air superiority doctrine, it all traces back to the same principle.
speed, altitude, initiative, strike first, disengage, survive. And it all started with a South African farmer’s son who refused to turn when everyone else did. There is a photograph of him, faded now. He is standing beside a Spitfire, hands on his hips, looking at something off camera. He is not smiling. He looks tired.
He looks like a man who has seen too much and said too little. His name is remembered today mostly by historians and aviation enthusiasts. There is no grand monument, no museum wing. He is one of thousands of young men who flew, fought, and died in a war that consumed a generation. But his influence is everywhere. Every fighter pilot who climbs into a cockpit inherits a piece of his logic.
The idea that rules are tools, not scripture. that survival requires adaptation, that courage is not the absence of fear, but the willingness to act despite it. The nine kill sorty was not a fluke. It was the result of hundreds of hours spent learning his machine, questioning assumptions, and trusting his instincts over doctrine.
It was the culmination of a philosophy that the enemy’s expectation is a vulnerability and that surprise is a force multiplier. In the decades after the war, tacticians would formalize what Pat understood instinctively. Energy maneuverability theory, the UDA loop, Boyd’s doctrine of fast transients, all of it echoes the same truth.
The pilot who controls the tempo of the fight controls the outcome. Pat never wrote a manual. He never theorized. He simply flew the way logic and physics told him to fly. And in doing so, he gave others permission to think. There is a lesson in that. Not just for pilots, for anyone facing a system that demands conformity in the face of evidence.
for anyone told that survival requires adherence to rules that no longer match reality. Pat’s legacy is not the nine kills. It is the idea that one person thinking clearly under pressure can change the way everyone else fights. He did not wait for permission. He did not wait for consensus. He saw a better way. He tested it. He proved it.
And he gave it away. The sky over northern France is quiet now. The contrails have faded. The guns are silent. But the lesson remains. Speed is life. Altitude is opportunity. And the initiative belongs to those who dare to dive when everyone else climbs.