On November 26, 1943, over the high-altitude battlegrounds of Germany, Major Gabby Gabreski was pushing his Republic P-47 Thunderbolt to its limits. The 56th Fighter Group of the U.S. Army Air Forces had been assigned to cover the retreat of Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses after a raid against the town of Bremen. LWF Leading the 61st Fighter Squadron, Gabreski was flying as fast as possible to save the beleaguered bombers under fierce attack by Nazi fighter planes.
On arrival, he sent his pilots into combat. Targets were everywhere. Gabreski to the full power of his turbocharged engine interwove himself with a Messerschmitt Bf 110 and opened fire with a burst from his eight .50-caliber machine guns. The twin-engine plane erupted in flames, forcing Gabreski to dive to avoid the debris. In minutes he downed another Bf 110, his fourth and fifth kill of World War II, and he became an ace. Gabreski would eventually become America’s top ace in Europe, with 28 enemy aircraft shot down in the P-47 Thunderbolt.
Weighing 10,000 pounds empty, the Thunderbolt was the largest single-engine fighter of its time. Fully loaded, it broke the 17,500-pound barrier but was still capable of 426 mph. According to Jeremy Kinney, curator and aeronautics department chair at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, the P-47 was “one of the most versatile aircraft we had in World War II.” Not as iconic as the P-51 Mustang, the Thunderbolt nevertheless proved to be one of the best ground-attack planes of the war and an exceptional dogfighter.
P-47 pilots received credit for destroying more than 7,000 enemy aircraft in the European Theater, over half in air-to-air combat. Though twice as heavy as the Supermarine Spitfire, the Thunderbolt was agile and fast, a superior diver and climber, important for dogfighting. “As an escort plane for bombers, it more than held its own against the best the Luftwaffe had,” Kinney notes. Thus, the P-47 turned out to be a very dangerous enemy for ground targets armed with eight .50-caliber machine guns and carrying both rockets and bombs.
The toughness of the Thunderbolt bordered on legend. Gabreski found this out personally when his engine quit cold at altitude after being struck by a 20 mm cannon shell. He nursed it home, evading the enemy long enough to make an in-glide restart at a lower altitude. “The Thunderbolt could take a lot of damage,” Kinney says. The brainchild of Alexander Kartveli, chief designer at Republic Aviation, the P-47 featured such innovations as the semi-elliptical wing and turbosupercharged engines.
Through the course of World War II, the Thunderbolt flew more than a half-million missions and dropped 132,000 tons of bombs. It had an extremely low loss rate, an enviable 4.6-to-1 aerial kill ratio. Of the 15,683 P-47s built, only 3,499 were lost in combat. The Thunderbolt on display in the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center is one of the few surviving examples, restored by Republic Aviation for the 20th anniversary of its first flight.
The P-47’s legacy lived on in the Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt otherwise affectionately known as the “Warthog.” Just like its namesake, the A-10 has become tenacious and tough in ground-attack roles. “The A-10 pays homage to the P-47 as a ground-attack aircraft,” Kinney says.
Gabreski’s career was as impressive as the plane he flew. He flew 266 combat missions, survived a crash landing, and was interned in a German POW camp. In addition to his many achievements in World War II, in the Korean War, he shot down six planes to join that very small group of just seven American pilots who had been aces in two wars. Recalling the P-47’s power, Gabreski once said, “It meant that I could do combat with the enemy over his territory at all altitudes and I could break off at will. I had more power than he had and I could corkscrew, go up to altitude and he couldn’t follow me.”
The P-47 Thunderbolt continues to be an example of American air power and stamina-a tribute to the ingenuity and bravery of those who flew the aircraft.