Military Aces
Most of these are from the two World Wars, for obvious reasons. Some, however, are from the
Arab–Israeli Conflict, the
Korean War and
The Vietnam War. We have yet to get an ace from the current century, as most current conflicts don't involve air combat. And the few that do involve air combat have been
Curb Stomp Battles, where the winning side massively outnumbers the loser, leaving too few kills to go around for anybody to become an ace.
- The Trope Namer was Frenchman Céléstin Adolphe Pégoud, the second pilot to perform a loop before World War 1. After he shot down his fifth German plane he was lauded in the French papers as an "ace", which at the time was a general term for someone who had done something heroic or noteworthy. British and American journalists then generalized that a pilot qualified as an "ace" if he shot down five planes. Pégoud himself racked up another air victory before being shot down himself in 1915.
- The most famous Real Life ace would be Rittmeister Baron Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron. He is the ace. In fact, he is usually referred to as the ace of aces, since ace simply wasn't enough (Richthofen was officially credited with 80 aircraft shot down, though he may have downed over 100). Richthofen was killed in 1918 (it's not definitively known who fired the kill shot, as it almost certainly came from the ground rather than from another plane). Considered a Worthy Opponent, the Allies gave him a full military funeral.
Richthofen was a real-life example of the Sniper/Bushwhacker. According to his wingmen, his flying skills were not vastly superior, and he considered his aircraft merely a means to bring his guns to bear. At that point he would deploy his real skills: superb marksmanship and a gift for selecting targets which were not aware of him. At least, not until bullet holes appeared on their planes...
He is perhaps best known for having taken the flamboyant step of painting his aircraft red, sacrificing the element of surprise for instant recognition from wing mates. Despite camouflage being the official rule for aircraft, it was permitted soon enough for other squadrons to have their machines painted with their own unique squadron colors. - Manfred's younger brother, Lothar von Richthofen was also an ace pilot with 40 kills. He survived the war, became a commercial pilot and died in a crash in 1922.
- Du bist Schläger, kein Jäger! (You are a brawler, not hunter!) — Manfred's ("brain" pilot) opinion of his little brother Lothar ("muscle" pilot)
- Their cousin Wolfram von Richthofen also gained the Ace title with "only" 8 kills (having joined the Air Service much later than his cousins, the war ended only 7 months after Wolfram's first combat flight) and later served in the Spanish Civil War and World War II, where he raised to the rank of Field Marshal and the command of an entire air fleet.
- A very notable earlier one, of whom Richthofen was a pupil, was Oswald Boelcke.note Richthofen, at the time an observer/gunner in a reconnaissance plane, met Boelcke by chance and was recruited by him for pilot training. Boelcke's biggest claim to fame is the Dicta Boelcke, the first manual of air-to-air combat and still relevant today. He was a mixture of a Steamroller and a Bushwhacker, the Dicta holds that a pilot should first seek to achieve surprise or attack from a superior position, then get into combat and stick with it until the other guy is flaming wreckage on the ground. Boelcke was killed in action in 1916.
- Ditto for Max Immelman, who was a contemporary of Boelcke, was the first pilot to be awarded the Pour le Mérite, Germany's highest medal, (which was nicknamed the "Blue Max" in his honor during WWI) and was an inspiration to Richthofen. And having an aerobatic maneuver (in fact one of the basic ones) named after you doesn't hurt opinions, either. Immelman too was killed in action in 1916.
- The real life ace with the highest kill count was German Erich Hartmann ("Bubi" to his friends, "The Black Devil" to his enemies), with 352 victories credited. He felt his biggest achievement was never losing a wingman. Hartmann was the classic Bushwacker. He once described his own flying style as "Dive — Attack — Run Away — Coffee Break". He also stated that only damage his plane ever suffered in air combat was from destroyed enemy planes' debris. This was in large part because of his style of fighting: He would fly as close as possible before firing. He was known to have said "If you wait until the other plane fills the entire window of the cockpit, you don't waste a single round."
There is a theory that he was able to achieve such a killcount only due to amphetamines — which were invented by Germans specially for the military pilots — due to him being on the front only for a relatively short time, but having a very tight schedule. His logs show as many as eight sorties on a certain day. While each sortie in WWII rarely lasted longer than a couple of hours, those planes didn't really have "power steering", and air combat is one of the most tiring activities known to man. Two sorties per day was the par for the course, three were somewhat tiring, four were a chore, five a burden and six nigh impossible. Eight sorties are widely considered achievable only by using stimulants.
Hartmann fought on the Eastern Front, and attributed his number of victories to the fact that he was often tasked with interception of air-to-ground assault planes flown by novice pilots who were taught to stay in close formations and rarely if ever took evasive actions. See also the Japanese training philosophy explained below as Soviets shared this attitide. However, he also shot down seven U.S.A.A.F. planes engaged in bombing raids on the Romanian oil fields of Ploesti. - Roald Dahl, better known as a bestselling author, was officially credited with 5 kills for England during World War II, but possibly scored more. One incident on his autobiography Going Solo describes an incident where he was cornered alone in his plane against six German bombers, with three crew each, making the encounter 1 vs. 18. With only three minutes before his engine overheated, Dahl managed to shoot down one of them and escape.
- Hans-Ulrich Rudel
, possibly the most deadly man in an aircraft. He got the Knight's Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds (an award ranked second only to the Grand Cross of the Iron Cross), the only man who got that. As the quote on the main page shows, he destroyed a total of 2,000 targets; including 800 vehicles, 519 tanks, 150 artillery pieces, 70 landing craft, nine aircraft, four armored trains, several bridges, a destroyer, a cruiser, and severely damaging the Soviet battleship Marat. - Hermann Göring was an ace in World War I, with 22 victories. By the end of the war, he was commander of Jagdgeschwader 1, the famous "Flying Circus" created by the Red Baron (Göring was apparently an unpopular commander, due to being rather arrogant even by fighter pilot standards), and mustered out as a Captain with a number of medals, including the famous Pour le Mérite award. Had his career ended there, opinions of him today would undoubtedly be infinitely more positive. Instead Göring joined the Nazi Party and became a major political and military figure, often considered the second most powerful man in the entire regime after Hitler himself. He was also a morphine addict, a General Failure when it came to war strategy, and a collector of plundered art and treasure from the Nazi's victims. Needless to say, the flying ace stuff isn't so important in most history lessons.
- René Paul Fonck, Allied ace of aces in both World Wars. His 75 confirmed victories (just short of von Richthofen's count) exceeds the tallies of any allied WWI and WWII pilot, though he claimed up to 140. He was a combination Sniper/Bushwhacker, known to stalk a target before taking it down with a single short machine gun burst. In his own words: "I put my bullets into the target as if I placed them there by hand."
- The Soviet Union had the only real life female aces: Olga Yamshchikova (17 confirmed kills), Lidia Litvyak (12 confirmed, up to 20 rumored) and Katya Budanova (11 confirmed, up to 14 rumored). Litvyak and Budanova were killed in action, while Yamshchikova went to become the USSR's first female jet test pilot.
- Ilmari Juutilainen, 94 kills, the top Finnish Air Force ace, as well as the highest scoring non-German fighter pilot in WWII. 2 kills in a Fokker D.XXI, 36 kills in a Brewster Buffalo and 56 kills in a Messerschmitt Bf 109G. The first two were highly obsolete when he flew them, and the Brewster Buffalo was never known to be a good airplane at all...though the Finns managed to make them work. He served as an airplane mechanic as a conscript, and went to flight school only after his mandatory military service. He had extremely good both theoretical and practical knowledge on how airplanes behaved and what various plane models could and couldn't do. This was an asset in air combat as he could force the enemy to fight on his own terms. His best day was 30 June 1944 when he shot down six Soviet fighters on one flight. He flew actively after the war as well, and flew for the last time in the age of 83 (Finnish Air Force F-18 Hornet).
- Douglas Bader. 22 aircraft, with two false legs. Badass is an understatement..
- Alexei Maresyev, with 11 victories, also with two stump legs. Died on the day of a big memorial service in his honour just for spite.
- One British Hurricane pilot, James MacLachan made ace, then lost an arm to enemy fire. With a false arm, he did it again.
- Pekka Kokko, Finnish Air Force ace with 12 kills. Lost a leg in air combat and considered to be unfit for combat. What did the Finnish Air Force do? They made him a test pilot!
- There are many cases, mostly from World War II, of pilots making "ace in a day" (5 or more on a single sortie). That, for the Americans, usually meant a Medal of Honor. The recordholder was David McCampbell, a USN pilot at Leyte Gulf; nine confirmed and three probable kills in single sortie, a record that remains unequaled. He, however, was already an ace twice over. His wingman, Lt. Roy Rushing, scored 7 victories during the same sortie.
One explanation of this comes from a flaw in the Japanese training system: they used The Spartan Way to produce a small supply of excellent pilots while the Americans used Bigger Is Better to produce ten times as many ''good' pilots. The Americans also rotated their experienced pilots home to act as Veteran Instructors to new pilots to give them the benefit of their experience while the Japanese pilots remained in combat to be killed off or become shell shocked veterans. Thus when the second crop of Japanese pilots came out after Midway they were less trained than their American adversaries, and there were very few skilled veterans still alive to mentor them. When the third crop came out during the attrition-heavy Solomon Islands campaigns, they were almost completely untrained in comparison to the Americans they were facing. - Second highest scoring Finnish Air Force ace of WWII, Hans Wind (78 kills), scored "ace in a day" on five separate ocassions — and all within one month! The wingman of Captain Wind was SSgt Nils Katajainen (36 kills). On their last air battle 28 June 1944, they attacked twosome a Soviet air formation of 70+ aircraft and managed it to abandon the bombs. Amazingly, they both survived the feat.
- Randy "Duke" Cunningham was an American ace during The Vietnam War (the "hitting the brakes" maneuver from Top Gun was based on one of his tactics), being involved in some of the most known dogfights of that war. He was elected to Congress in 1991. In 2005, he was found guilty of corruption and served eight years in jail.
- Michael Wittmann was a German World War II tank ace, known as "The Black Baron". He got 138 tanks and 132 anti-tank guns, before being killed by the
British Canadians either the British or the Canadians (it's disputed) in 1944.- It's important to note that German aces, especially Wittmann, had hilariously overinflated kill counts, as the Germans marked joint kills as full kills for all involved, marked probable kills as full kills, had a much lower barrier to recognize a kill (resulting in many German aces scoring more kills than there existed in the area according to Allied documents), and were typically assigned the kills for their entire unit in action.
- Kurt Knispel, another German, holds the World War II record, with 168 confirmed tank kills.
- Otto Carius, yet another German, who scored 202 vehicle kills (including some 60 softskins) on Tiger I, Tiger II and Jagdtiger. He was an pharmacist by his civilian profession. What did he do after WWII? Returned to home and set up a pharmacy store named Tiger-Apotheke!
- LaFayette G. Poole, nicknamed "Wardaddy" by his crew, an American tanker serving in France, accounted for over a thousand Germans KIA and a further 250 POW, and 258 German AFV kills, 12 of them being tanks. Al this took place in a time period of 81 days in 3 different tanks during 1944. And these aren't just kills claimed. These are the kills confirmed by German operational archives.
- Eddie Rickenbacker was the American Ace of Aces (most kills) in World War I. His autobiography is one long string of achievements, all told with a humble, "just the facts", style. Before the war, he had already gained fame as a race car driver. He spent the first part of his time in the Army as an airplane mechanic before managing to get a transfer into the Air Service.
- Richard Bong got that title for World War II, getting 40 confirmed kills before it was decided to pull him from the front line. He went into flying test aircraft and died on 6 August 1945. The following day, he shared some front pages with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Bong acknowledged that he was a poor shot, and compensated by aggressively charging in at full speed to shoot his targets up close. This resulted in frequently getting hit by debris from the fighters he destroyed, and one of his probable kills was a plane he collided with. His P-38 Lightning, being far more durable than any Japanese fighter, came out of this accidental ramming just fine.
- It's generally accepted that Bong and his rival, Major Thomas Buchanan McGuire (38 confirmed kills), both shot down well over 40 aircraft, and that it's impossible to say who really had the higher score. McGuire died because he was so impatient to catch up with Bong that he took a significant risk during his last battle. About to be pulled from active service too (Bong had already returned to the States), he wanted to make the most of his final mission, so he didn't drop his external tanks before attacking a lone Japanese Nakajima Ki-43 Hayabusa fighter; this would enable him to continue on the flight and find more enemies to shoot down. Unfortunately, the Japanese pilot, Akira Sugimoto, was an ace himself with some 3,000 flight hours on Hayabusa, and McGuire, too low and encumbered by his drop tanks, crashed into the jungle.
- Billy Bishop was the highest-scorer for the entire British Empire in World War I. Started out as a Steamroller, then changed to a Bushwacker, which he found to be more effective. The Red Baron considered him the most skilled opponent he ever faced and the Germans called him the Hell's Handmaiden for his lethal effectiveness. He was a crack shot, having been a great marksman as a boy in rural Ontario, and was renowned for his keen eyesight. On the other hand, he was a sub-average pilot, crash-landing numerous planes. His official count is 72 victories, just behind the Red Baron and René Fonck for the entire war, yet there has been lingering controversy about whether he simply made up the details of a solo raid that won him the Victoria Cross, the British Commonwealth's highest military award.
- William Barker, another Canadian, is the most decorated serviceman in the history of the entire British Empire. Also won the Victoria Cross, after he was ambushed by 15 German planes, and fought them to a standstill, bringing down three of them before multiple wounds forced him to crash land directly behind Allied lines.
- Raymond Collishaw, another Canadian, (must be something in the water, eh?) credited with shooting down 60 aircraft in the First World War, mostly flying triplanes. He supposedly gave away even more kills to bolster the confidence of new pilots. The new pilot would shakily fire a few rounds at a German aircraft, Collishaw would sweep in and fire a quick, efficient burst, and down goes the German. Back on the ground, Collishaw claps the newbie on the back and congratulates him on his first kill.
- The second-highest scorer in the British Empire and the highest native-born son of the British Isles, Edward "Mick" Mannock (61 kills), was also known for helping his wingmen in this way. He was said to have been blind in one eye, and is believed to have cheated on his pilot's exam. He was also known for his visceral hatred of Germans, and he vocally preferred to machine-gun downed pilots on the ground. He was killed in action in 1918. Older accounts credited him with 73 kills originating from a list tallied in a biography by Ira Jones, a frequent wingman of Mannock's, which would have put him exactly one kill over Billy Bishop and made him the top-scoring ace of the Empire. More recent scholarly scrutiny has settled on 61 reliably confirmed kills, though the number of "assists" credited to other pilots by Mannock himself could well put that total higher.
- One of the most dangerous roles in WWI air-fighting was to shoot down observation balloons. These were protected by antiaircraft batteries and fighter patrols, and were also explosive as they were filled with hydrogen. Several pilots on both sides, however, gained reputations as balloon-busters. The most famous were Willy Coppens of Belgium (37 kills, including 34 balloons) and Frank Luke of the United States (18 kills, including 14 balloons). All Luke's kills were scored in a mere eight days of flying. Sadly, Luke's very aggressive solo style of flying likely contributed to his death after he attempted to down three balloons in a single sortie before being shot down. His chain of command had been preparing to officially reprimand him for his hotheadedness and lack of team player mindset (pilots who fought alone usually died alone at the hands of pilots who fought together), but instead decided to recommend him for the Medal of Honor after his death.
- Chuck Yeager — who was also the first man to break the sound barrier. Before he did that, his claim to fame was becoming an Ace in one day, and being among the first American pilots to shoot down a jet. He also scored two of his 11.5 official kills (he actually scored at least one more) by maneuvering two German pilots into a collision. Appropriately enough, his name is an Anglicized version of the German Jaeger ("Hunter"). As far as his style, he was a "steamroller" and a "sniper"; he could and did mix it up with the best of them, but also had almost superhuman eyesight that allowed him to hit at longer range with machine guns than most pilots could with cannons. The latter skill was how he took down a jet in his prop-driven P-51.
- Like Ilmari Juutilainen did, Charles Yeager actively flew the P-51 Mustang in air shows into his 90s, as his WWII squadronmate Clarence "Bud" Anderson, a 16 victory ace, still does. They often flew together in formation.
- While we are on the subject of test pilots, Royal Navy Captain Eric "Winkle" Brown, is considered by many to be the greatest test pilot who ever lived. The first man to intentionally land a jet on an aircraft carrier, he logged 2,407 arrested carrier landings and flew 487 different types of aircraft, both records unlikely to ever be exceeded. He is one of the few pilots to fly every significant combat aircraft fielded by all combatants in WWII, Axis and Allied, including all of the operational German jets, and was the only allied test pilot to fly the practically suicidal Messerschmitt Me 163 rocket fighter under power. He even taught himself how to fly a helicopter with nothing more than a pilot's manual and a stiff drink when he was ordered to ferry one of the the Royal Aircraft Establishment's first Sikorsky R 4 B Hoverflys to Farborough. And to top it all off he wrote it all up in several books and dozens of magazine articles.
- Hanna Reitsch, "Die Hanna", could also qualify. She was the official test pilot of the Third Reich, and after the WWII she was very active on soaring, setting many world records. It is claimed only her gender prevented her becoming a "real" WWII fighter ace. Hanna Reitsch and Eric Brown knew each other well — they both had been introduced to aviation by WWI ace Ernst Udet.
- James Jabara, the first man to become a "jet ace", getting a total of fifteen kills in the Korean War to add to his one-and-a-half from World War II. Numbers five and six, of two MiG-15s were done with one drop tank stuck on his aircraft. He signed up for a tour in Vietnam in 1966, but was killed in a car crash before deploying.
- Saburo Sakai, the highest-scoring surviving ace of the Japanese Navy, had a career filled with moments that make him worthy of this trope. One was his 800-mile flight, in a damaged plane, a bullet hole through his head note He later underwent surgery on the affected eye to restore his vision...without anesthesia., which blinded one eye and paralyzed half of his body. Another was surviving a dogfight with sixteen American planes, better than his own, without a single bullet in his aircraft. And a third was the time a terrified enemy pilot bailed out before Sakai had even fired a shot. During that famed flight of survival, he was near to passing out several times, so he took to intentionally aggravating the pain in his wounds to jolt himself wider awake. Upon arriving at his base, he insisted on reporting to his superior officer before getting medical attention. After the war, Sakai became a devout pacifist, swearing that he would never kill anything again, not even an insect. In his autobiography he claimed his greatest achievement was not shooting down a Dutch airliner, even though it would have been an easy kill, because he saw women and children on board.
- Otto Kretschmer was a German WWII U-boat ace who sank 47 ships for a total of 274,333 tons before being captured by the British in March 1941 in an engagement that led to the death of Joachim Schepke, another ace. This was the most tonnage sunk by any U-Boat commander even though Kretchmer missed out on a significant portion of the Battle of the Atlantic. He survived the war.
- Günther Prien, another U-Boat ace, who was killed in 1941 attacking a convoy a week before Kretschmer's capture. Before that in 1939, he managed to get publicly praised by Winston Churchill after sneaking into the Royal Navy base at Scapa Flow, sinking a battleship and getting back out before the British worked out what was going on. His closest counterpart in Royal Navy would have been Lieutenant Max Horton, who navigated his submarine to Constantinople harbour to sink a Ottoman Turkish battleship anchored there in WWI. He was promoted to Admiral in WWII.
- Otto Hersing commanded U 21, which on 5 September 1914 became the first German submarine to sink an enemy warship (the cruiser HMS Pathfinder). He went on to sink two British battleships, HMS Triumph and HMS Majestic, in the Dardanelles in 1916.
- Otto Weddigen, captain of U 9, sank three British armoured cruisers in 75 minutes on 22 September 1914. He went on to sink another one on 24 October, but died on 18 March 1915 when U 29 was sunk by being rammed by the battleship HMS Dreadnought.
- The submarine captain credited with sinking the largest enemy tonnage ever was Lothar von Arnauld de la Périère, scion of a Huguenot noble family driven from France by Louis XIV. During World War 1 he sank 194 allied ships totalling 454,000 tons. He was known for taking care to do his best to stop ships before sinking them in order to allow the crews to get into their lifeboats. The highest number of ships sunk was credited to Otto Steinbrink, but his 202 sinkings "only" totalled 232,000 tons.
- David Wanklyn of HM Submarine Upholder won the VC in the Mediterranean. Credited with 140,000 tons, he was the highest (confirmed) scorer on the Allied side.
- In the Pacific, USS Wahoo was commanded by "Mush" Morton. Known for his incredible aggression, he was the first sub commander to successfully sink a destroyer with a "down-the-throat" shot. Three of his officers went on to become successful skippers of their own, including Dick O'Kane.
- Dick O'Kane of USS Tang won the Medal of Honor for his last patrol — by ripping apart a Japanese convoy in a surface night attack, long after even Japanese escorts started carrying radar and making surface attacks incredibly hazardous. While Tang went down in that attack, she was sunk by her own torpedo — otherwise she would have escaped scot-free.
- Commander Jimmy Launders of the HMS Venturer holds the honorable distinction of being the first and only man ever to sink an enemy submarine while both his and the enemy's ship were submerged. Off the course of Norway on February 9th 1945, the Venturer detected U-864, which was known to have jet engines and V-2 parts destined for Japan onboard. A new vessel, U-864 was equipped with a snorkel allowing it to run submerged — a new feat for a submarine of the period. Realizing that the enemy would not surface and thus present him an easy target, Launders and his crew proceeded to do what was thought to be impossible: Mentally calculate a firing solution in four dimensions. Even with their almost impossible math skills, they still had to estimate the submarine's depth and make a Batman Gambit about its evasive maneuvres. This they did, firing half their torpedoes at the German sub. U-864 managed to evade three, but the fourth punctured its pressure hull and imploded it. Had she reached Japan, WWII may have been significantly longer.
- Luigi Rizzo, also known as The Sinker, was the closest thing Italian MAS (a speedboat with two torpedoes strapped on) Ace. Closest thing because he only sank two ships... Who just happened to be the coastal defence ship SMS Wien, that was being hunted down by the Italian Navy due the damage she was wrecking and was sank while in the supposed safety of Trieste's harbour, and the Austro-Hungarian flagship SMS Szent István, single-handedly ruining the Austro-Hungarian Navy final sortie. And the latter wasn't even on purpose: he was returning to his base after an uneventful patrol when he stumbled on the Szent István and her squadron (consisting of another battleship, a destroyer and six torpedo boats) sailing to join the rest of the Austro-Hungarian battleship fleet for a desperate attack on the Otranto Barrage, so he decided to fire torpedoes before running home to warn about the impending attack, sinking the flagship without the squadron realizing what had hit them and convincing the commander-in-chief Horty (with flag on the other flagship Viribus Unitis leading another squadron) the Italians were waiting for him. Rizzo also took part in the Bakar Mockery, a raid in a supposedly impenetrable harbor 80 km in a sheltered waterway named for the raiders leaving behind bottles containing mocking messages of challenge (to try and lure the Austro-Hungarians into an ambush), and the only reason he didn't sink anything is that, after the Wien, the admiralty had deployed torpedo nets against the protests of the ship captains, resulting in his torpedoes being blocked.
- Though it's not often remembered in the West (due to certain political disagreements in the intervening time) the highest-scoring Allied ace of World War II was in fact the Russian Ivan Kozhedub with 62 kills. In Soviet times there was a (officially suppressed, as the party line was that Soviet advisors didn't actually take part in combat) rumor that Kozhedub, despite the official orders to the contrary, actually flew combat missions in the Korean War, where he was a military advisor, and had another five victories there, becoming one of the very few two-war aces. It couldn't really be confirmed, though.
- It's widely believed that Kozhedub and the second best Allied ace of WWII, Alexander Pokryshkin (59 kills), have much higher real kill counts due to the way Soviet scoring system worked. Soviet pilots, ironically for a socialist country, received significant money bonuses for their victories, so to fight overclaiming and thus overspending, the confirmation rules were intentionally very strict, requiring, for example, the confirmation by the ground team, which automatically excluded any kills made behind the enemy lines, even if witnessed by other pilots. Pokryshkin also reportedly had many of his early kills not registered due to his bad relations with his superior officer.note Bad enough that at one point his commander stripped him of his Communist Party membership card, effectively grounding him permanently, until his squadron-mates, with the help of their Political Officer, appealed to have the decision overturned. Pokryshkin also had the habit of "giving out" his victories to his wingmen and other younger pilots in his regiment in later years of WWII, as attested in their memoirs. It's thought that his real kill count is somewhere in the vicinity of ~120 victories. It should also be taken into account that unlike Hartmann with his "noob farming" tactics, the Soviets concentrated on fulfilling objectives and going for the head, that is, for the most skilled pilots, and Pokryshkin was widely described to be excellent at both.
- Giora Epstein. With a meager (compared to WWII aces) 17 confirmed kills holds the record for shot down jet planes and is the top ranking post-WWII ace. There is an old story about Giora being a part of the group escorting a certain United States senator / former fighter pilot around Israel. After a tour of the IAF museum the senator spent some time describing every single one of his 5 confirmed kills in detail before asking Giora himself whether he had anything to boast.
- John Thach is more a thinking ace pilot as a tactician, with only 8 air-combat kills, but who in World War II invented The "Thach Weave" which allowed US pilots to fight the technically superior Japanese Zeroes, even frustrating Saburo Sakai, and later the Big Blue Blanket that was an effective defense against the feared Kamikaze suicide attacks.
- Frank G. Tallman, the legendary Hollywood stunt pilot. He may have never flown in combat but no one can deny that he was one of the greatest ace pilots who ever lived. Amongst other things he flew a Beechcraft 18 through a steel framed billboard at 200 MPH with less than 24 inches of clearance for It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and landed a Standard J1 biplane on two-inch caster wheels for The Great Waldo Pepper. Tallman did things with real airplanes that no one would dare do outside of CGI nowadays and his book Flying The Old Planes is considered a classic of aviation literature. Ironically, he died in a preventable accident, flying at low altitude in bad weather.
- Robin Olds wins the award for professional longevity first gaining 12 victories in World War 2 flying P-38s and P-51's in the European Theatre and then 20 years later he downed an additional 4 MiG's over Vietnam flying the F-4 Phantom. He retired in 1972 as a Badass General and during his Vietnam years he was known for an extravagantly waxed (and decidedly non-regulation) handlebar mustache. Indeed, to this day, American airmen honor General Olds' epic badassery by growing mustaches during Mustache March. Also, he has a fighter wing named in his honor: The 8th Fighter Wing, aka "The Wolfpack", from a Rousing Speech he gave before the battlenote In fact his calling them his "Wolfpack" was a callback to another unit in World War II that one of his commanding officers used to fly for where the wing, under his command, ambushed a dozen of the NVAF's newest MiG-21s and shot down seven of them... nearly half of North Vietnam's entire inventory of the advanced fighters. With no American casualties.
Olds is on the record that once he scored his 4th kill in Vietnam, he deliberately avoided taking a 5th MiG because he was informed they'd drag him out of combat and put him on publicity tours once he became a two-war ace. He also missed out on the Korean War despite constant lobbying for a transfer to a combat squadron (any combat squadron)note He learned years later that his wife, a well-connected socialite, had pulled strings to ensure he was nowhere near the dangers of combat.. So if things had gone a little differently, it's very possible that Olds could have become the only three-war ace. - Though not an aerial ace, scoring no recorded kills on aircraft, Major Charles Carpenter is still regarded as both a highly skilled pilot of the ultralight L-4 Grasshopper scout plane and a complete lunatic known as "The Mad Major." The reason for this was due to his frustration at not being able to fight the Germans directly... whereupon he had bazooka tubes mounted to his normally unarmed scout plane and began hunting German armored vehicles. And succeeding. Major Carpenter is officially credited with at least six armored car and Panzer kills, though unofficially his unit believed he'd knocked out several times that amount, included at least one operational kill against The Dreaded Tiger tank. Bazookas had an effective range of about 250 yards and Carpenter had no means by which to aim them, meaning that he had to get dangerously close to take a shot, eyeball most of his shots without even the courtesy of iron sights, then pull up and away before he embedded himself in the ground at high speed, making him one of the most unconventional and terrifying tankbusters known to man. And he did this all in 1944 in Europe, meaning he didn't even have a year to make a name for himself committing this mayhem. He lived to survive the war and return to being a history teacher.
- Nguyen Van Coc, highest scoring ace of The Vietnam War (counting both sides), had 9 kills under his belt. There were sixteen Vietnamese aces and two American onesnote This was due in large part to the ridiculously unrealistic Rules of Engagement imposed on American fighter pilots by their government, of which the NVAF were well aware and only too happy to exploit.
- Before the production of You Only Live Twice, the James Bond producers, as well as the film's director and some crew members visited Japan to scout for locations. Director Lewis Gilbert got terrified when the helicopter pilot said "Me kamikaze pilot!". But the man's flying was good enough for him to be hired by the film's production. And when two helicopters had a small on-air collision (which severed the foot of a cameraman), the kamikaze managed to land the damaged chopper on a really irregular terrain! (the film also features a lesser example in K.H. Wallis, the inventor of Little Nellie who did some truly risky landing-takeoffs piloting it)
- Richard Candelaria, an American World War II pilot who happened to fly a P-51D Mustang on April 7, 1945. He gets separated from his squadron and forms up on the bombers they were to be escorting ahead of the rest of his squadron just in time to fight off 15 Luftwaffe in Bf 109 fighters, including one German ace, and two more in Me 262 jet fighters alone. This man defeated the jets, possibly shooting down one, shot down the German ace in a one-on-one dogfight, and took out three other planes before the rest of his squadron arrived on scene, at which point the rest of the Germans bugged out. And you, too, can witness his feat thanks to modern science and an interview with the man himself. [1] His tale starts at 8:00 and continues into part 4 and 5. This sounds very like the final mission of the flight simulator Blazing Angels, suggesting they took his tale and made it into a video game.
- Louis E. Curdes was one of the few pilots (see below) to shoot down planes from four powers in World War II. In the Mediterranean, he shot down seven German planes and one Italian plane before being shot down and taken prisoner. He escaped and evaded capture for eight months before making it to Allied lines. He was later transferred to the Pacific where he shot down a Japanese plane (One of only three pilots to shoot down planes from all three Axis powers.). THEN he shot down an American plane which was about to land in Japanese territory, forcing it to ditch. He is the only American pilot to earn a medal for shooting down an American plane. To top it off, his future wife was on that plane. [2]
Saburo Sakai and probably a few other Japanese pilots shot down planes from five different powers — Chinese, British, Dutch, Australian and American. This probably also goes for quite a few German pilots (some of whom had already shot down enemy aircraft in the Spanish Civil War), since Germany was engaged in war against several smaller powers in succession and simultaneously. For instance, in the North African theatre of operations the Luftwaffe faced not just the British, but also the Australian, South African, Free French and U.S. air forces. Meanwhile on the Eastern front, the Soviets were facing the air forces of Germany, Italy and various smaller powers allied to the Axis. - Hans-Joachim "Jochen" Marseille aka the "Star of Africa", while not exactly the most famous German ace of World War II, was exactly what you'd expect an ace pilot to be — a total womanizer and party guy with not much respect for authority. He was transfered to the North African theater in order to get him away from French women. While in the Battle of Britain he had not been notably successful, in North Africa he became virtually unstoppable. He would charge his plane straight into large British formations, then use high deflection shots to shoot the cockpit of his foes (at such an angle, you can't even see the plane your shooting at due to the engine). He racked up 158 confirmed kills, which all were against Western Allies, all but seven in North Africa. On 1 September 1942 he shot down 10 fighters that can be verified on RAF records. Erich Hartmann said that he thought Marseille was the best shot of any fighter pilot. He was killed when he tried to bail out of his Bf 109G after the engine failed and he hit the vertical stabilizer.
- Second-highest on the list of top-scoring German "Experten" against Western Allies with 102 credited air victories was Adolf Galland, known to R.A.F. pilots as "the Fighting Fob". Like Marseille, he came from a French Huguenot family. He started flying in the Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War and finished the Second World War as commanding officer of the major German jet-fighter unit, the JV 44. Known for his love of cigars (there was a special holder in the cockpit) and for the Mickey Mouse emblem on his planes.
A note must be made here regarding the JV 44. Formed partly as a Uriah Gambit and partly as an Antarctic reassignment for Galland, who was a vocal critic of Goring and the policies and tactics of Luftwaffe high command, this unit became the greatest gathering of airfighting talent ever assembled in any military force on the face of the Earth, with all its pilots easily qualifying as aces — if not triple aces — before they joined the unit. Many pilots recruited into the outfit had more than a hundred planes downed to their credit; the five top scoring pilots of the unit downed more than a thousand planes combined over their flying careers.note Gerhard Barkhorn (301), Heinrich Bär (220), Walter Krupinski (197), Johannes Steinhoff (176), and Günther Lützow (110), totaling into 1004 aircraft downed; Lützow's score includes five kills made in the Spanish Civil War. Of these men, Bär (German for "bear") had the highest score in a jet, downing 16 planes with the Me 262. Steinhoff downed 6, Krupinski and Lützow both downed 2, and Barkhorn, who had trouble adjusting to the jet, downed none. Equipped with the Messerschmitt Me 262, these men mainly participated in defensive missions, attacking Allied bomber formations. Thankfully for the Allies, no more than six of the unit's planes were operational at any given time, and the war ended just two months after the unit's formation. Many of the pilots went on to become high-ranking officers in the postwar West German Air Force, aided by the fact that very few fighter pilots and even fewer aces of the Luftwaffe were ardent Nazis to begin with. Given the nature of modern aerial warfare, no such assembly of aces would likely ever exist again. - Francis "Gabby" Gabreski scored 28 kills in World War II and another 6.5 in Korea, putting him half a kill short of being a septuple ace and making him one of the few two-war aces. He was famous (or infamous) for a flying style that was aggressive to the point of recklessness, often ripping into enemy formations before his wingmen had any chance to join the fight. His hyper-aggressive style made him controversial among his various wingmen; some thought he didn't care about fighting as a team and only wanted more kills for himself, while others loved the way he flew and tried to emulate his fast, hard-hitting tactics. This recklessness very nearly killed him on his final mission of World War II, a flight that wasn't even supposed to happen. He was scheduled to be flown home after having flown the standard maximum number of combat hours, but managed to convince somebody to let him fly "one more mission" escorting bombers into Germany. During a strafing run, he flew too low and clipped his propeller, and after he crashed he spent the rest of the war in a German POW camp.
Gabreski also happens to have been a Polish-American who spoke fluent Polish. Before the United States Army Air Forces were fully up to operational status in Europe, he managed to talk British authorities into letting him fly with the Free Polish Air Force (which was then under British operational control) so that he could gain combat experience before his unit entered operations. - While they don't shoot anyone down or engage in dogfights, bush pilots are by the definition of their job often required to be crazy-skilled aviators. Operating in harsh environments like the Australian Outback and the Canadian wilderness, a single pilot can be expected to do anything from shipping cargo, transporting people and acting as a flying ambulance. They have a reputation on the whole as being slightly touched in the head but great pilots who you can count on to have your back. Famous examples include Clennell "Punch" Dickens Rusty Blakey and the Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia.
- Almost 90 Czechoslovakian pilots flew in the Battle of Britain and served in several RAF units. Karel Kuttelwascher had 18 confirmed kills (plus 2 for fights in France). The top Czech scorer in the Battle of Britain was Sgt. Josef František, flying with Polish Fighter Squadron who claimed 17 confirmed kills, which made him the highest scoring Allied pilot in the Battle of Britain. Other Czechoslovakian flying aces were Alois Vašátko, František Peřina, Otto Smik, Josef Stehlík, Miloslav Mansfeld, Leopold Šrom, Václav Cukr, Otmar Kučera and Tomáš Vybíral. The RAF's 303 Squadron was manned mostly by Polish pilots, plus Josef Frantisek, and despite arriving late they managed to be the top-scoring fighter outfit in the Battle of Britain, making them a squadron of Ace Pilots.
- Bob Hoover, regarded as one of the greatest pilots to have ever lived. Upon receiving the new P-38 Lightning, his first action he took in it was to shut off one of the engines at low altitude, and proceed to perform aerobatics, for which he was barred from flying a P-38 ever again. He was shot down over enemy lines in a Spitfire Mk V, then taken prisoner, only to later break out of prison, and fly a Fw-190 to the Netherlands.
- When flying in target-rich environment or the Last Stand, almost any pilot who can survive long enough, will become an ace. The Battle of Malta produced more RAF aces than any other single campaign, top scorer being George "Screwball" Beurling with 27 kills.note Beurling was a mix of bushwhacker and sniper; while his nearly superhuman eyesight and excellent understanding of trajectories allowed him down enemy fighters by shooting where they're going to be from long enough range that his gun camera wouldn't even catch the kill (since by the time the rounds hit his plane was pointed in a different direction), he preferred getting behind the enemy and downing them point-blank because he felt he could use fewer bullet per kill that way. To aid in the bushwhacking, he had all tracer rounds removed from his ammo so that enemies would have no visual cue that he was shooting at them. Likewise, the top scoring RAF pilot, Marmaduke Thomas Pattle, scored the majority of his 50 kills during the Battle of Crete.
- Pattle was the high scorer of both Gloster Gladiator (15) and Hawker Hurricane (35). Only 6 of his victories cannot be cross-checked on existing Italian or German records. He 25 of his victories in twenty days before his death in air combat over Eleusis Bay.
- John Boyd, father of the F-15 and F-16 and the Energy-Maneuverability Theory, and the man who literally wrote the book on flying fighters, was himself a pretty hot pilot back in the 1950s. Though he never scored a kill (he was too young to enlist in World War II, he flew an F-86 in Korea but didn't serve a full tour of duty, and was assigned as a base commander in Vietnam), he made a name for himself as "Forty-Second Boyd," so named because of a challenge he issued to pilots in training. If a pilot could last forty seconds in a mock dogfight against him, he'd pay the pilot $40. No one ever pulled it off. And let's emphasize that he did this in an F-100, a capable plane but also so unforgiving that it was known for a 25% fatality rate in training.
- Edward "Butch" O'Hare, the namesake for O'Hare International Airport in Chicago (they even have an F4F Wildcat in front in his honor). He became the American navy's first ace of World War II by shooting down five enemy bombers in a single day (a feat which also earned him the Medal of Honor), and he was the one who proved that the F6F Hellcat marked the end of Japanese fighter superiority at Marcus Island, for which he received the Distinguished Flying Cross. He also helped the navy develop its night defense tactics, and according to a former wingman, always taught his pilots little tips and tricks to improve their flying. Unfortunately, though, he was lost in the navy's first night defense flight — he was caught in the crossfire between a Japanese G4M "Betty" and a TBF Avenger, and his Hellcat dipped out of formation and into the darkness. Neither he nor his fighter were ever found.
- Any reasonably competent pilot with a dash of aggressiveness and enough tactical savvy can score aerial victories in a plane designed for dogfighting. A very talented few (Rudel, Vejtasa) can score victories in a dive bomber. Adrian "Warby" Warburton of the RAF scored five aerial victories while flying a Martin Maryland, a type of MEDIUM BOMBER with forward-firing machine guns.
- Jalil Zandi, an Iranian Air Force F-14 Tomcat (yes, that F-14 Tomcat) pilot was credited with 11 aerial victories during the Iran-Iraq War.
- Maj. Greg "Pappy"note Although he was never actually called that by his pilots. Instead they called him "Gramps." Boyington. Short, tough, pugnacious, possessing of no brain-mouth filter, and ugly. He first saw combat with the famed Flying Tigers in China, where he quickly butted heads with Claire Chennault on tactics. Boyington had a great advantage over many other pilots in his sheer physical strength, allowing himself to haul his plane through blackout-inducing maneuvers by raw force of will that would leave his wingmen and opponents passing out. He was also known to pick the most battered, beat-up, and decrepit-looking aircraft on the flight linenote unlike the Army Air Forces, the Navy and Marines didn't assign aircraft to individual pilots. Instead, pilots would fly whichever plane happened to be available. In fact many Marine squadrons in the South Pacific shared from a pool of aircraft operated by all squadrons at that base. to instill confidence in the pilots under his command. During his time in China he was credited with two aerial victories and 1.5 aircraft destroyed on the ground (Boyington claimed six air victories). After the US entered the war, Boyington returned to the United States Marine Corps. Arriving in the Pacific, he cobbled together a squadron from unassigned pilots under the designation VMF-214. Originally dubbed "Boyington's Bastards," they were eventually immortalized as the legendary (and more media-friendly) Black Sheep.note Contrary to the Black Sheep Squadron series, the name does not come from them being a gang of screw-ups with one foot in the brig. Boyington certainly qualified, but the name simply comes from how they were organized from pilots sitting around with no other assignments. Flying F4U Corsairs in combat against the Japanese, Boyington claimed a total of 28 aerial victories (he's officially credited with 26) by the time he was shot down and captured in 1944, tying Rickenbaker as America's Ace of Aces (eventually surpassed). Throughout his active service, Boyington was in a heated competition with fellow Marine pilot Joe Foss (himself a legend to the Corps for his actions during the grueling Battle of Guadalcanal as part of the Cactus Air Force) to break Rickenbaker's record. The press, looking for a morale boost for Americans growing weary of the slogging war of attrition in the Pacific, ate Boyington's antics up, with such publicity stunts as sending the Black Sheep a St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap for every Japanese plane shot down. This lead to an iconic publicity photo◊ of the squadron standing on the wings of a Corsair with caps and bats. Both Boyington and Foss ultimately ended with 26 credited victories, however Foss is awarded the title of the Marine Corp's Ace of Aces since two of Boyington's victories came with the Flying Tigers. Boyington is almost as famous for his personality and being perhaps the Trope Codifier for the two-fisted, hard-chariging, brash and belligerent Marine as he was for his piloting.
- Royce Williams was a US Navy pilot on patrol during the Korean War when he and his wingman were attacked by seven Soviet — not North Korean or Chinese — MiG-15 fighters. Flying a F9F Panther, a plane not really suited for dogfighting, Williams shot down four of the enemy before the rest were scared off. Williams' own plane was shot up badly during the engagement, but he then made a miraculous landing back on his home carrier despite limited maneuverability and needing to come in at nearly twice the necessary airspeed. Despite how much of a morale booster the story would have been, the US government buried the incident for fear that it would bring escalate the proxy war being fought and bring the US and Soviet Union into direct conflict. It wasn't until 2002 that Williams could start sharing his story and a movement got underway to get him the proper recognition.
- In February 2022, near the start of the most recent Russian invasion of Ukraine, there were widespread stories of a Ukrainian pilot with the nom de guerre of "the Ghost of Kyiv". He allegedly shot down 6 Russian planes in a single day with his MiG 29, and became an instant folk hero for Ukrainians. However, the story is fiction, as said by both the Ukrainian Air Force and a propagandist who claimed to have invented the Ghost.
- Later tales claimed the Ghost to be Major Stepan Tarabalka, a real Ukrainian pilot who was shot down and killed on March 13, 2022, with (likely exaggerated) 40 kills. Even half would make him the first ace of the 21st century and the highest-scoring jet-era ace.
- Ukraine's fighter pilots are facing larger numbers on a regular basisnote In an interview, one pilot mentioned going up with 3 planes to face 24 opposing jets., meaning aces are likely to result eventually, similar to the situation in Malta in World War II.
Civilian Examples
Civilian examples are pilots who, through training, skill, and capability, have saved multiple lives either on their planes or on the ground, or both. As mentioned on the main page,
technically they don't fit the military definition of an ace because they saved lives rather than took them, but that takes nothing away from their skill — in fact, that some of these pilots
accomplished maneuvers that their craft should not be capable of, under conditions like
complete engine failure and
complete hydraulic system failure and power failure makes them even more the trope.
