The Forgotten Fighter That Outclassed the Zero — The Slow Plane That Won the Pacific”

 

January 1942. The Pacific was burning. The Imperial Japanese Navy ruled the sky with the terrifying Mitsubishi A6M Zero, a machine so agile and deadly that American pilots called it “death with wings.” From Pearl Harbor to the Philippines, the Zero tore through Allied squadrons like a blade through silk. Its range was unmatched. Its pilots were elite. Its kill ratio was obscene. Every Allied airfield that rose to challenge it became a graveyard.

In the first months after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy’s pilots faced the truth no one wanted to say aloud — they were being hunted. Dogfights turned to massacres. The Zero could out-turn, out-climb, and out-dive anything the Americans had. The Wildcat and Buffalo, the only carrier fighters available, were slow, underpowered, and outdated before they even reached the front. Commanders called them “flying coffins.”

Yet, among those so-called failures, one ungainly fighter would rise to rewrite the story of the Pacific air war. It was ugly, boxy, and slow — the Grumman F4F Wildcat. A plane so ordinary that even its designers didn’t believe it would survive a month in combat. But it would become the underdog that outclassed the Zero, not through speed or beauty, but through stubborn durability, cunning, and the desperate brilliance of the men who flew it.

The Zero was a legend — a masterpiece of Japanese design. Its airframe was a featherweight of aluminum and cloth, built for pure performance. It could loop tighter, climb steeper, and cruise farther than any Western fighter in 1941. But the price of perfection was fragility. It had no armor plating. No self-sealing fuel tanks. No protection for the pilot. The same qualities that made it graceful also made it a torch waiting to ignite.

The Wildcat was the opposite. Grumman’s engineers built it like a battleship with wings. Heavy armor behind the cockpit. Bullet-resistant glass. Self-sealing fuel tanks that oozed and hardened when hit. Thick steel frames instead of lightweight alloys. Its landing gear folded into the fuselage with a hand crank instead of hydraulics — slow, but impossible to jam. On paper, it was inferior in every way. In the air, it was a survivor.

Early in 1942, the Zero dominated the Coral Sea, the Philippines, and the Dutch East Indies. The Wildcat squadrons suffered horrifying losses, but they learned. Slowly. Painfully. They learned that to fight the Zero on its own terms was suicide. Turning duels ended in death. Climbs ended in fireballs. But one pilot — Lieutenant Commander John S. “Jimmy” Thach — refused to accept defeat.

Thach was no daredevil. He was a tactician, a quiet genius who studied every scrap of data about the Zero. He pored over combat reports, sketched diagrams on coffee-stained napkins, and one night, in the mess hall of USS Lexington, he came up with an idea so simple it seemed absurd: two Wildcats flying side by side, crossing paths in a synchronized turn whenever attacked. The enemy would be forced to overshoot, flying straight into the second Wildcat’s guns.

He called it the “Thach Weave.”

In the spring of 1942, Thach tested it in the air. His own pilots played the role of Zeros, diving on him again and again. Every time, the weave worked. The “slow” Wildcats covered each other perfectly. No Zero could hold a firing angle long enough to score a kill.

Then came the real test — June 4th, 1942 — the Battle of Midway.

At dawn, Wildcats from VF-3 Squadron launched from the decks of USS Yorktown and USS Enterprise. They climbed to escort slow-moving TBD Devastator torpedo bombers — easy prey for the swarm of Zeros rising from the Japanese carriers Akagi, Kaga, and Sōryū. The Americans were outnumbered three to one.

Thach led the formation. Over the radio, his calm voice cut through the static: “Weave. Weave. Now.”

The Wildcats crossed paths in midair, banking so close they nearly scraped wings. The Zero pilots dove in, confident as always — and flew straight into a trap. One Zero overshot, its silver fuselage flashing in the sun. Thach squeezed the trigger. His .50-caliber guns barked, and the Japanese fighter exploded in a white bloom of flame.

Another Zero tried to climb above the weave. Thach’s wingman rolled upward, firing bursts that shredded its tail. Within minutes, three Zeros were falling in smoke. For the first time, the unstoppable hunters of the Pacific were being outflown — not by faster machines, but by smarter men.

By the end of Midway, the Wildcat’s reputation was transformed. What began as desperation became doctrine. The “Thach Weave” spread through every carrier group in the Pacific. American pilots stopped trying to out-turn the Zero. They started to outthink it.

The Wildcat’s heavy frame gave it another hidden gift — speed in the dive. When it nosed down, gravity became its ally. It could plunge from altitude faster than any Zero could safely follow. Pilots called this maneuver “boom and zoom”: dive fast, fire, and climb away before the enemy could respond. The Zero’s light frame couldn’t handle that kind of velocity; its wings warped under pressure.

For the Zero, the war had changed. Its pilots, trained to fight face-to-face, now found themselves chasing ghosts.

The Wildcat’s reputation grew in the humid jungles and coral skies of the Solomon Islands. Nowhere was it tested harder than Guadalcanal. Henderson Field — a muddy, mosquito-ridden airstrip hacked from the jungle — became the frontline of survival. Zeros came daily, sometimes twice a day. Wildcats scrambled, engines coughing, wings patched with tin and tape. The pilots slept in foxholes. They ate cold rations, fought fever, and launched anyway.

One Marine pilot, Lieutenant Marion Carl, described those days in his journal: “You learned to fly wounded. You learned to land with holes in your wings. You learned that your plane would keep you alive — if you treated her right.”

The Zero could turn tighter. The Wildcat could take punishment that defied belief. Holes the size of fists in its fuselage. Bullet scars across the canopy. Fuel leaks sealed mid-flight. And still, it came home.

At night, Japanese bombers pounded the airfield. By day, Zeros tried to wipe the Wildcats from the sky. They never succeeded. The Wildcat was slow, yes. But it was relentless.

The numbers told the story. By the end of 1942, Wildcat pilots achieved a near 1:1 kill ratio against the Zero. It didn’t sound like much — until you realized the imbalance. The Japanese lost irreplaceable veterans. The Americans replaced losses with more planes, more pilots, more tactics.

One squadron leader summed it up: “The Zero wins the first ten seconds. The Wildcat wins everything after.”

By then, Japan’s high command had begun to panic. They ordered improvements — thicker armor, faster engines — but every modification made the Zero heavier, slower, and less agile. Its design, once revolutionary, was now a trap. The Wildcat had exposed the fatal flaw in Japan’s flying masterpiece.

But for all its new victories, the Wildcat’s fight was far from over. The Japanese still held Rabaul, Truk, and the Mariana Islands. Zeros still owned the dawn skies. The Wildcat, now battle-hardened and bloodstained, would be asked to do the impossible once again.

And deep in the Pacific night, under the drone of insects and the distant thunder of naval guns, the men of Guadalcanal waited for the next raid — the next swarm of silver wings rising from the east.

The forgotten fighter had survived its first trial. Now it would have to win a war.

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The plane nobody expected. They called it slow. They called it obsolete. Some even said it was a flying coffin that would never survive the Pacific. And yet, it became the forgotten fighter that outclassed the legendary Japanese Zero, rewrote the rules of air combat, and changed the course of the Pacific War forever.

 This is the unbelievable story of the plane that nobody believed in, but the one the war could not be won without. A fighter that should never have existed. In early 1942, the United States was in shock. Pearl Harbor had been attacked. The Philippines were collapsing. The Japanese Zero roamed the sky like a ghost. Fast, agile, and unstoppable.

Every American pilot returning from combat said the same thing. You can’t fight the Zero. It turns inside anything. It climbs like lightning. You dive, it follows. You pull away. It’s already there. American commanders needed a miracle. Instead, they received the Brewster Buffalo and the Wildcat. Planes so slow, so outdated that some squadrons refused to even use them.

 But among these forgotten machines, another aircraft quietly arrived. It didn’t look impressive. It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t sleek. It was bulky, rugged, thick-skinned, and painfully slower than every Zero in the Pacific. Yet, this ugly duckling would soon become the one fighter the Japanese never saw coming.

The Legend of the Zero. To understand the miracle, you must understand the monster it was fighting. The Mitsubishi A6M0 wasn’t just good. It was the best carrierbased fighter in the world in 1941. It could outturn almost everything. It climbed at terrifying angles. It cruised farther than any Allied fighter.

 Its pilots were among the most highly trained warriors in history. It was so dominant that one American pilot famously radioed, “I can’t shake him. I don’t think I’m flying a fighter. I’m flying a target. Against this, the US Navy sent a plane that seemed hopelessly outclassed. But war has a strange way of turning weaknesses into strengths.

 Enter the Wildcat, the underdog fighter. This forgotten hero was the Grumman F4F Wildcat. A fighter mocked for being slow, heavy, clumsy in turns, poor at climbing, inferior on paper to the zero in every possible way. Pilots joked that the Wildcat climbed like an elevator with a broken cable. The Zero could literally fly circles around it.

 So, how did this slow, outdated fighter become the key to beating Japan’s deadliest aircraft? The answer lies not in its speed, but in its design, its durability, and the new American tactics that turn the Zer’s strengths into fatal weaknesses, tougher than steel. The Zero was a masterpiece of engineering.

 But it had a deadly flaw. It was fragile. To make it fast and maneuverable, the Japanese used almost no armor, no cockpit protection, no self-sealing fuel tanks, thin aluminum skin that burned like paper. A single bullet in the wrong place could turn a zero into a fireball. The Wildcat, on the other hand, was built like a tank, armor plate behind the cockpit, bullet resistant glass, thick wings, self-sealing fuel tanks, enormous rugged landing gear, and Grumman’s famous iron works durability.

 Japanese pilots fired hundreds of rounds. The Wildcat kept flying. Zero pilots learned a terrifying truth. We hit them. They do not fall. What the Wildcat lacked in elegance. It made up for in pure stubborn survival the discovery that changed everything. Early in the war, Wildcat pilots kept dying. Turn with the zero, you lose.

 Climb with the zero, you lose. Something had to change. Then Lieutenant Commander John Jimmy Thatch had an idea. One of the simplest ideas in aviation history. One that would break the zero’s dominance forever. He called it the thatchwave. Two wildcats flying side by side. One becomes the bait, the other the shooter. Whenever a zero tried to get behind one fighter, both would turn toward each other, crossing paths, switching roles, and trapping the zero in the middle.

 It was a deadly dance, a moving ambush. And it worked. For the first time, zero pilots found themselves being hunted instead of hunting. Thatch tested the maneuver in training. It worked even when his pilots pretended to be zeros. Then came its first real test, the Battle of Midway. Midway, the day the underdog fought back.

 On June 4th, 1942, a group of wild cats escorting torpedo bombers encountered a swarm of zeros. The sky turned into chaos. Zeros attacked from above, diving down with blistering speed. Wildcats rolled. Zeros followed. Wildcats turned. Zeros closed the distance instantly. Then the American leader gave the call. Weave, weave. The Wildcats crossed paths.

 Zeros overshot. Suddenly, the hunters became the hunted. Explosions rippled across the sky. Japanese pilots were stunned. This slow, heavy American plane, the one they considered inferior, was suddenly matching them blow forblow. Some Zeros burst into flames. Others spiraled into the ocean.

 A tactic invented on paper had become the turning point of the air war. Why the Zero never adapted. After Midway, Japanese commanders demanded a solution, but there was none. The Zero was designed for one thing, winning dog fights through speed and agility. But now, the Wildcat refused to dog fight. The Wildcat refused to turn.

 The Wildcat refused to play by Japanese rules. Instead, it dived. It weaved. It used gravity instead of agility. The Wildcat’s rugged design allowed it to dive faster than a Zero could follow. The Japanese could not redesign the Zero in time. They had no armor to add, no protection to strengthen, no new tactics that could keep up.

 The Zero’s era of dominance was ending. Guadal Canal, the forgotten battlefield. In 1942, the battleground shifted to a small island the world had barely heard of. Guadal Canal. Here, the forgotten Wildcat became a lifesaver. Every day, waves of zeros attacked the newly captured American airfield. Every day, wildcats scrambled to intercept.

 The island became a brutal testing ground. Muddy runways, night attacks, ammunition shortages, exhausted pilots, engines overheating, dog fights just meters above the jungle canopy. But the wild cats endured. They didn’t need perfection. They just needed to survive long enough to protect the Marines on the ground. And survive they did.

 One pilot later said, “The Wildcat wasn’t pretty, but it brought us home. The numbers don’t lie. By late 1942, something astonishing emerged. Despite fighting a supposedly superior aircraft, Wildcat pilots achieved nearly a 1.1 kill ratio against the Zero. That meant for every Wildcat shot down. A zero went with it.

 Against all odds, the underdog fighter was holding the line. Buying time, saving lives, giving America the breathing room it needed to produce the next generation of fighters. the F6F Hellcat, the F4U Corsair, and the P-38 Lightning. But those legends would come later. In the darkest, earliest days, it was the forgotten Wildcat that carried the war on its shoulders.

The hidden power behind the Wildcat, the pilots who refused to quit. In 1942, every Wildcat pilot flying in the Pacific knew one truth. If a Zero spotted you first, you were already in trouble. But Wildcat pilots learned something even more powerful. You don’t need the best plane if you have the best courage.

 These pilots weren’t just fighting zeros. They were fighting exhaustion, fear, hunger, heat, malaria, and the belief that they were flying inferior machines. Some slept in foxholes. Some ate cold rations in the rain. Some flew five or six missions a day. But every time the sirens screamed across Henderson Field, they ran to their wild cats because they knew that if they weren’t in the sky, the Marines on the ground would die.

 This wasn’t just a war of machines. It was a war of spirit. And the Wildcat pilots had plenty of that. The Zero Secrets cracking the code. American commanders desperately needed to understand the Zero’s weaknesses. Then came a miracle. In July 1942 on Akatan Island in Alaska, a Zero crashed but didn’t explode. The pilot died, but the plane was almost completely intact.

 For the first time, the US had a zero it could test. Engineers inspected every bolt, wire, and panel. What they discovered changed everything. Weakness number one, no armor. Every bullet that hit a Zero went somewhere deadly. The pilot, the fuel tank, the engine. Weakness number two, poor at high speed. Above 300 mount, the Zero lost almost all its maneuverability.

 Weakness number three, weak roll rate. The Wildcat could roll faster, giving it the advantage in defensive moves. Weakness number four, slow dive speed. The Zero simply could not keep up with a diving wildcat. These weaknesses formed a new strategy. Don’t turn with the Zero. Don’t climb with the Zero.

 Stay fast, stay heavy, and strike only when you choose. The Wildcat suddenly had a blueprint for victory. The art of boom and zoom. Wildcat pilots realized something crucial. Their plane’s weight, its biggest weakness, could become its greatest strength. When the Wildcat dove, gravity became its engine. Its thick frame, its rugged wings, its strong construction, all let it withstand speeds the Zero couldn’t safely match. So, a new tactic was born.

Boom and zoom. Boom. Dive from above, fire a burst, make your attack swift and deadly. Zoom. Pull away in a climb or shallow dive before the Zero can chase. Don’t stick around. Don’t dogfight. Don’t give the Zero a second chance. A wildcat pilot described it perfectly. Hit hard. Get out.

 Come back when you’re ready, not when the Zero wants you to. This strategy saved countless lives and flip the air war upside down. Aces rise from the ashes. With new tactics came new heroes. The Pacific began producing American aces, many flying the slow Wildcat. Joeof Foss, a rancher from South Dakota who shot down 26 enemy aircraft, most of them zeros.

 Marian Carl, a calm, brilliant pilot who mastered the boom and zoom style. Butch O’Hare, who single-handedly attacked a formation of Japanese bombers to save his carrier and became the first US Navy ace of the war. These men showed that it wasn’t about the machine. It was about the pilot. It was about the will to survive.

 One pilot joked, “The Wildcat wasn’t fast, but it sure made me fast. Fast at thinking, fast at reacting, fast at using the zero strengths against it. The carrier war begins. Airfields like Guadal Canal were vital, but the real battle for the Pacific would be fought on the decks of carriers. In 1942, four Japanese carriers were sunk at midway.

But Japan still had many more. The US, however, was building a new kind of navy, fast carriers, floating fortresses loaded with Wildcats. The Wildcat became the shield of these carriers. Whenever radar picked up incoming Japanese aircraft, zeros, dive bombers, torpedo planes, the Wildcats were launched first.

 They weren’t always the fastest to climb. They weren’t the most agile, but they absorbed damage. They blocked enemy formations. They disrupted Japanese attacks, and they protected the carriers long enough for American bombers to strike back. If the US Navy had not had the Wildcat, many carriers would have been lost. The war of attrition.

 By 1943, a grim truth emerged. Japan could not replace its pilots. Each zero pilot took years of training. They were elite warriors, the best of the best. But the United States had endless fuel, endless steel, endless factories, and a training program that could produce hundreds of pilots every month.

 Every time a zero was shot down, Japan lost. A plane, a pilot, a year of training, a weapon that could never be replaced. Every time a Wildcat was lost, the US replaced it instantly. The forgotten fighter had become Japan’s worst nightmare. Not because it was perfect, but because it refused to die. The turning of the tide. In early 1943, something extraordinary happened.

The Japanese Navy began losing air superiority. Zeros that once dominated the sky were now falling more often. Their pilots wore out. Their resources drained. Their tactics became predictable. Meanwhile, Wildcat pilots grew more skilled. Their teamwork improved. Their strategies evolved. American carriers grew in number.

American radar grew more advanced. Every month, the Wildcat became more deadly. A Japanese commander wrote in his diary. Their fighters have become different. They do not turn. They attack with speed. They escape like lightning. We cannot catch them. The hunter was now the hunted. A new threat arrives. The Zero Model 52.

 Japan tried to fix its problems by upgrading the Zero. The new A6M5 Z model 52 was faster, stronger, and more resilient. But by the time it arrived, it was already too late. The US Navy had a new weapon on the way. One that would completely crush the Zero forever. The F6F Hellcat and the F4U Corsair.

 But even in 1943, before these new giants took over, the Wildcat still held the line, still protecting carriers, still defending islands, still fighting with the power of determination. It had become more than a machine. It had become a symbol, a symbol that America was not going to lose. The day the underdog became a legend.

 On one summer morning, deep in the Pacific, a squadron of wildcats intercepted a massive Japanese raid. Dozens of Zeros, dive bombers, torpedo planes. The American pilots were outnumbered nearly 3 to one. Their leader transmitted calmly. Boys, and we’re not turning today. We hit and run. You miss, you climb. You don’t look back. The battle lasted 17 minutes.

 When it was over, several bombers were down. Zeros floated burning on the waves. Not a single American carrier was hit, and only one Wildcat was lost. That day, a truth echoed across the Pacific. The Zero may be faster, but the Wildcat is tougher. and toughness in war can be more important than beauty.

 The battles that proved everyone wrong. The battle for the slot. In late 1942 and early 1943, the Solomon Islands burned with some of the most intense air battles of the entire war. The narrow strip of sea between the islands was called the slot. Every morning, Japanese zeros roared down the slot toward Guadal Canal.

 Every afternoon they returned, sometimes missing entire formations that had been swallowed by the jungle below. And every day, waiting for them in the humid, mosquito-filled air, were the wild cats. These were not glamorous pilots. They were exhausted, sweaty, hungry, and often flying aircraft patched together with spare metal, tape, and hope.

 But they fought anyway because every Japanese aircraft shot down meant fewer bombs falling on the Marines trying to survive on the island. In the slot, the Wildcat wasn’t just a fighter. It was a guardian, a shield. A reason American soldiers lived to see another sunrise. The defense of Henderson Field. Henderson Field was the beating heart of the Guadal Canal campaign.

 Control the airfield. Control the island. Control the island. Cut off Japan from its supplies. Japan threw everything at Henderson. Night bombardments, kamicazi style dive attacks, waves of zeros, bombers packed tight with explosives, artillery from the sea, snipers hiding in the jungle. But the wild cats refused to break.

 Pilots slept in trenches because Japanese bombers attacked almost every night. Sometimes they got only 2 hours of sleep before sunrise missions. One Marine mechanic said, “We didn’t fix aircraft. We resurrected them.” Even with engines failing, wings patched with tin, and bullets still lodged in their fuselage, wildcats took off again and again.

 The Zero could win dog fights, but the Wildcat won the war of endurance. The Zero’s fear of the roll. By 1943, Wildcat pilots discovered a secret move that Zero pilots feared more than anything, the Wildcat barrel roll. When a Zero approached from behind trying to line up a kill shot, the Wildcat would suddenly roll left or right instantly.

 The Zero tried to follow. It couldn’t. Its wings simply couldn’t handle the high-speed roll. It lost aim. It lost advantage. And often it lost its life. The Wildcat’s heavier frame gave it rotational power that the Zero simply couldn’t match. This turned the Wildcat’s weakness, its weight, into a tactical weapon.

 The Zero had claws, but the Wildcat had armor and tricks, and tricks win wars. The birth of fighter coordination. One of the most underrated reasons the Wildcat became deadly was something Japan didn’t expect, American teamwork. While Japan relied on lonewolf aces, American pilots trained in coordinated formations. They used shared radio frequencies, planned intercept paths, coordinated weaves, mutual defense tactics, radar guided launch timing.

The Thatche was just the beginning. By mid 1943, entire squadrons used variations of it. Lubbury circles, high-side attacks, loose deuce tactics. Japanese pilots began noticing that wildcat groups acted like a single organism. One Japanese pilot wrote, “They fight together. They cover each other.

 When you chase one, three more chase you.” This was the beginning of modern American air combat, a system that valued teamwork over individual heroics. The Wildcat became the foundation of that system. Fire in the sky. The day the Zero failed. There was a day in the Solomons known among pilots simply as the Great Chase, a squadron of zeros, fresh, confident, and led by one of Japan’s best aces dived on a group of wildcats escorting American bombers.

 The Zero leader believed he had the advantage of speed, position, and numbers. He was wrong. As soon as the Zeros closed in, the Wildcats broke into pairs, each pair weaving, rolling, and covering each other in perfect harmony. Every time the zero leader tried to isolate one fighter, the second wildat forced him off.

 Every time he tried to climb, the wildat stove. Every time he tried to dive, they climbed. He was being outthought. Outmaneuvered not by speed or agility, but by strategy. By the end of the battle, five zeros were shot down. Two more were badly damaged. Every American bomber survived. Only one Wildcat returned with heavy damage, and even that one made it back to base.

 It was a humiliation Japan never forgot. The Dawn Raider. One of the most dramatic Wildcat missions happened in early 1943 when American intelligence discovered that a Japanese supply convoy would pass through the slot at dawn. These convoys were heavily guarded by zeros. But the Americans had a plan. At first light, a group of wildcats attacked from the sun, diving with the blinding glare behind them.

 The Zeros never saw them coming. For the first time, the wildats had the high ground. The first strike shattered the Japanese formation. Bombers began exploding. Supply ships turned in panic. Zeros scrambled, but the Wildcats were already gone. Climbing back into the glare, they dove again and again and again. The Japanese convoy was destroyed.

 It was one of the biggest blows Japan suffered in the Solomons. The Wildcat wasn’t supposed to be capable of dawn ambush attacks, but it was because American pilots learned how to use light, speed, and surprise to their advantage. The Zero had agility, but the Wildcat had brains. The underdog’s revenge. By the time 1943 reached its midpoint, the Wildcat, a fighter that experts once dismissed as hopeless, had accomplished the impossible.

 It forced Japan to change tactics. It protected the first American offensives. It held the line in the darkest months of the war. And it helped destroy the myth of the invincible zero. Wherever the Zero went, the Wildcat followed. Not to match it, but to outlast it. A pilot named James Sweat once said, “The Zero always won the first 10 seconds.

 The Wildcat won everything after. Those after seconds were what mattered.” Because wars aren’t decided by beauty or speed. They’re decided by survival. and the Wildcat survived everything. The Wildcat leaves its mark. By late 1943, the US Navy slowly began phasing out the Wildcat and replacing it with the F-6F Hellcat, the F4U Corsair.

 But even then, the Wildcat refused to retire quietly. It kept flying from tiny escort carriers where newer heavier fighters couldn’t operate. It supported landings across the Pacific. It patrolled supply lines. It hunted submarines. It protected convoys. Wherever the war went, the Wildcat was there. Reliable as ever, tough as ever.

 Even when newer fighters arrived, many pilots quietly admitted there was something about the Wildcat. It always brought you home. And sometimes that’s the most important thing a fighter can do. In the end, history remembers the fast, the powerful, the glamorous. But victory, victory often belongs to the forgotten. The Wildcat was never meant to win.

 It wasn’t the fastest. It wasn’t the most beautiful. It wasn’t even the most advanced, but it endured. It protected the carriers, the convoys, the islands, and the men who fought on them. It held the skies when the world was at its darkest. And it proved one timeless truth. You don’t need the best machine to win a war.

 You need the strongest heart. This was the slow fighter that beat the unbeatable zero. This was the underdog that changed the Pacific. This was the forgotten hero of World War II.