How A US Pilot Invented A Tactic That Made Japanese Aces Helpless
August 7, 1942. The Solomon Islands. A few minutes after 1:00 in the afternoon, somewhere between Rabaul and the cha0s of an amphibious landing nobody on the Japanese side had been w4rned about, 18 Mitsubishi Zeros from the Tainan Air Group reached the airspace over the southern coast of Guadalcanal and looked down on a site that was supposed to be impossible.
American transport ships. American destr0yers. American Marines on the beach. The first opposed amphibious landing the United States had ever conducted in the Pacific W4r, and it had taken the Imperial Navy completely by surprise. Among the 18 pilots in those Zeros was a wiry, soft spoken man with a samurai bl00dline a thousand years old named Saburo Sakai.
He held the rank of petty officer first cla.ss, which meant in the rigidly stratified world of the Imperial Japanese Navy that he was a senior enlisted aviator with no commission, no academy ring, and a flight log thick enough to make most of the academy officers in his unit look like beginners. He had been flying combat since the w4r in China.
He had k1lled pilots over Clark Field, over Java, over Port Moresby. He flew his Zero with a tail code V107 and later V173 that Allied recognition officers had beg.un circling on debrief charts because the man flying it never seemed to lose. Above him in the formation flew Lieutenant Commander Tadashi Nakajima, the Tainan Air Group’s flying officer, the senior airborne combat leader of one of the most decorated f1ghter units in the Imperial Navy.
He was not the unit’s commanding officer. That was Captain Masahisa Saito, who stayed with the ground echelon at Rabaul. Nakajima was the man who actually led the squadron in the air, the Hikotaicho, the one his pilots looked to in the seconds before contact. What happened in the next 48 hours over the Solomons would change something in the Imperial Japanese Navy that would never be put right again.
It started slowly. The first American f1ghters Nakajima’s pilots tangled with on the 7th, the F4F Wildcats off the carrier Saratoga, fought the way the Japanese expected American pilots to f1ght. They came in fast, took a snapsh0t, dove away. Sakai himself sh0t down a Wildcat that morning, an aircraft flown by a United States Navy pilot named Lieutenant James Puck Sutherland of Fighting Squadron 5, in a long, tumbling, 20 minute dogf1ght that has been one of the most carefully reconstructed individual air engagements
of the entire Pacific W4r. Sutherland was a Naval Academy graduate, cla.ss of 1936, and would end the w4r as a five victory ace himself. He had already sh0t down two Japanese b0mbers that morning when his Wildcat’s g.uns jammed, probably from damage taken on the b0mber @ttacks. He kept f1ghting anyway.
He could not fire, but he could fly, and he kept turning inside the zeros that came at him. Sakai, watching from above, dove in to join the dogf1ght, not realizing that Sutherland’s g.uns were no longer working. The two pilots traded turns and dives for what Sakai later described in his memoir as the longest, hardest dogf1ght of his career, neither man able to gain a clean firing solution.
Sakai was astonished at how much punishment the Wildcat could absorb. He fired more than 200 rounds into Sutherland’s aircraft before he finally landed a 20 mm cannon sh3ll below the left wing root and brought the airplane down. Sutherland bailed out of his blazing Wildcat into the jungle below, suffering 11 wounds.
He was found by Solomon Islanders, who hid him from Japanese patrols, treated him, and helped him reach the coast. He was evacuated from Henderson Field on the 20th of August. Sakai went home with another tally on his canopy and the uneasy feeling that he had just met a different kind of American pilot than the ones he had been k1lling in the Philippines and the Dutch East Ind1es.
But somewhere in those skies on the 7th and the days that followed, the Wildcats started doing something different. Something Sakai’s commander had never seen before. Nakajima saw it first. He came home from one mission and walked across the dusty coral str.i.p at Rabaul and he could not for some minutes find the words for what he wanted to say.
He had been the h.unter. He had picked his target, slid into firing position behind a Wildcat, and a second Wildcat that had no business being where it was had come at him from the side, head on, g.uns lit. He had never seen it coming until it was almost too late to break off. He dove, ran, and survived. Sakai watched him land, watched him climb down off the wing, watched the way his hand sh00k on the cockpit ladder, and understood that something fundamental had just changed.
Sakai wrote about it later in a memoir his American interviewer Martin Caidin would translate for the world. The pilots in the barracks at Rabaul that week, he said, asked the same question of each other in different ways. Who had taught the Americans to f1ght like this? The Americans, the elite of the Imperial Naval Air Service, all agreed were not naturally gifted dog f1ghters.
They flew an inferior airplane. They were not particularly aggress1ve in close. And now, suddenly, in the late summer of 1942, two of them together could defeat one of the best pilots in the Imperial Navy every single time, no matter how good he was. Nobody in the barracks at Rabaul had an answer for that question.
By the time the Imperial Navy understood the answer, the men who could have done something about it would already be de@d in the waters off Guadalcanal, off Santa Cruz, off the Philippine Sea. The question would no longer matter. There would be no one left who could fly a reply. The answer to the question was a man Nakajima had never heard of who had built the thing that was k1lling his pilots on the kitchen table of a rented house in Coronado, California, 9 months before the Tainan Air Group ever set up shop at Rabaul. His name was John Smith
Thach. His friends called him Jimmy, and the story of what he did with a box of matchsticks in the summer of 1941 is one of the strangest and most consequential acts of pre w4r military thinking the United States Navy ever produced. Before we get to him, we have to understand what he was working against.
By every conventional measure of the early 1940s, the Japanese were the better f1ghter pilots in the Pacific. They had been the better f1ghter pilots since the air w4r over China in the late 1930s. They were flying a better airplane. They were the apex predators of carrier aviation, and in the first 6 months of the Pacific W4r, they proved it from Hawaii to Ceylon.
The Imperial Navy had built this advantage on a deliberate choice made in the late 1920s, quality over quantity. Beginning in 1930, the Navy launched the Yokaren program, the flight reserve trainee program, which took young Japanese boys aged 15 to 17 and put them through one of the most rigorous flight training pipelines in the world.
The selection was s4vage. In 1937, when 1,500 sailors applied for the equivalent program for non commissioned officers, 70 were accepted and 25 graduated. Sakai himself was one of those 25. He had earned a silver watch presented to him by Emperor Hirohito for graduating first in his cla.ss at Tsuchiura. He had been one of the top f1ghter pilots in the Empire by the time he was 23 years old.
Men like Sakai trained constantly. They drilled in deflection shooting until they could put a burst into a target the size of a dinner plate from 300 m. They learned to land on a pitching carrier deck in heavy weather, to read the surface wind off the ocean from 5,000 ft up, to fly at night without instruments. The doctrine they were taught held that the dog f1ght was at heart a duel between samurai.
The pilot who flew best, who saw first, who sh0t truest, won. The pilot who did not, lost. There was no other category. The aircraft they were given matched the doctrine. The Mitsubishi A6M Type Zero, designed under chief engineer Jiro Horikoshi and entering service in 1940, was a machine built around a single principle.
It would out turn anything in the sky. To achieve this, the Mitsubishi designers str.i.pped weight from the airframe with a fanaticism that bordered on religious. They removed the armor plate behind the pilot’s seat. They removed the self sealing rubber lining from the fuel tanks. They thinned the wing skin.
They used a magnesium aluminum alloy so light so brittle that a Zero could be p.unched into pieces by hits that a heavier American f1ghter would absorb without complaint. In exchange for this fragility, they got an aircraft that could climb at over 3,000 ft per minute, turn inside any Allied f1ghter then in service, and engage at ranges no other carrier f1ghter in the world could match.
The Zero could fly a combat radius of more than 500 nautical miles, a figure that made Allied planners refuse to believe their own intelligence reports when they first saw it. The result, when this aircraft and these men met the Allied air forces in December of 1941, was carnage. The Pearl Harbor strike force comprised roughly 770 air crew, of whom a small fraction were lost.
In the Philippines, in Malaya, in the Dutch East Ind1es, in the great Indian Ocean raid that drove the Royal Navy out of Southeast Asia, zeros tore through Brewster Buffaloes and Curtiss W4rhawks and Hawker Hurricanes with a k1ll ratio that approached 12 to 1. By April of 1942, an Allied pilot who attempted to dogf1ght a Zero was understood in every air force flying against the Japanese to be a de@d man.
Standing orders in some American squadrons specifically forbade pilots from turning with a Zero under any circumstances. The recommended counter was to dive, run, and hope for clouds. This was the world that John Smith Thach was looking at in the spring of 1941 when, 6 months before Pearl Harbor, he was given command of Fighting Squadron 3 at Naval Air Station North Island in San Diego.
He had just turned 36. He went by Jimmy because an older brother named James had been at the Naval Academy ahead of him, and the uppercla.ssmen had hung the nickname on him before he could shake it. He was tall, lanky, soft spoken with a slow Arkansas drawl. He was not, by the standards of the pre w4r Navy, a brilliant officer in the way the term was usually meant.
He had not topped his cla.ss at Annapolis. He had not made his name with daring stunts. What he had was a quality that was quieter and harder to see. He thought about problems all the way down until they came apart in his hands. In September of 1941, a document landed on his desk that would change everything.
The Fleet Air Tactical Unit Intelligence Bulletin of September 22nd contained a descr.i.ption of the Mitsubishi Zero pieced together from observations by the American Volunteer Group, the Flying Tigers, who were already flying combat against Japanese aircraft over China. The bull3tin reported a f1ghter that climbed at more than 5,000 feet per minute, turned inside any American f1ghter known to exist, and operated at ranges the Wildcat could not match.
The actual climb rate of the Zero was closer to 3,100 ft per minute, but the bull3tin overstated it. Either way, the picture it painted was bleak. Thach read the numbers and understood what they meant. The airplane he and his pilots were flying was about to be sent against an enemy aircraft they could not turn with, could not climb with, and could not run from.
He took the bull3tin home with him to the rented house in Coronado, where he and his wife Madelaine were living. He read it again. He read it a third time. The Wildcat was tougher, yes. It had armor and self sealing tanks and a punishing armament of six .50 caliber Browning machine g.uns, but none of that mattered if the Zero could choose when and where to f1ght.
According to his own oral history given years later to the United States Naval Institute, Thach sat down at his kitchen table that night with a box of ordinary matchsticks and began to play. The matchsticks were aircraft. The patterns on the wood grain were dogf1ghts. He moved them across the table, watching how each formation could and could not respond to @ttack from each angle.
He did this every night for weeks. Tactic at midnight, flight test the next morning over San Diego Bay, debrief that evening, rearrange the matchsticks, try again. The first thing he discovered was that the standard American three plane formation, two wingmen flanking a leader, was hopeless against a faster opponent.
The wingmen spent so much energy maintaining position that they could not look behind them. They were pr1soners of their own geometry. He decided the basic tactical unit had to be a pair, two aircraft side by side, watching each other’s tails rather than each other’s wings. The United States Navy formally adopted the two plane section as its basic f1ghter element in July of 1941, partly on his recommendation.
That change alone would have improved American f1ghter performance even without anything else, but the pair alone was not enough. Two Wildcats, no matter how alert, could not survive an engagement with a faster, more maneuverable enemy who could choose his moment, @ttack, miss, and disengage upw4rd at will. Thach kept moving the matchsticks. The answer was two pairs.
Four aircraft flying abreast, separated by a distance roughly equal to the turning radius of a Wildcat, the Zero @ttacks one pair, the other pair watching, immediately turns tow4rd the pair under @ttack. The pair under @ttack turns tow4rd the rescuers. The two pairs cross paths. The Zero, focused on the bait, suddenly finds itself looking down the g.un barrels of the second pair, which is now flying straight at it head on.
If the Zero presses its @ttack, it d1es. If it breaks off, the rescuers swing around onto its tail. There is no third option. The trap was geometric. It did not depend on individual brilliance, on superior g.unnery, on the airplane being equal to the Zero. It depended only on two pairs of pilots executing a simple turn at the right moment.
Anyone could be trained to do it. That was the genius of it. Thach called the maneuver the beam defense position because the second pair came in from the side, from the beam of the @ttacker. He used that name in his official correspondence. The pilots in his squadron called it something simpler within weeks. They called it the weave because that was what it looked like from the air.
Two pairs of f1ghters weaving in and out across each other’s flight paths like threads in a loom. The name that would stick, the Thach weave, was given to it the following year by his close friend Lieutenant Commander James Flatley. He knew, before he tested it in the air, that something this strange had to be proven.
So, in the autumn of 1941, he set up an experiment that has become legendary in the history of American naval aviation. He called on his second section leader, a young Irish American Ensign named Edw4rd Henry Butch O’Hare, who would within months become the Navy’s first ace of the Pacific W4r and the first naval aviator to receive the Medal of Honor in World W4r II.
O’Hare was 27 years old, the son of a Chicago lawyer with a complicated past, a graduate of Annapolis cla.ss of 1937, and one of the most naturally gifted pilots VF 3 had. Thach picked him a second section leader because he wanted his sharpest aviator playing the @ttacker. The point was to see whether the weave could survive against the best.
Thach explained what he wanted. O’Hare would lead a flight of Wildcats playing the role of @ttackers flying at full power. Thach himself would lead a flight playing the role of defenders flying the beam defense position with their throttles wired down to half power simulating the performance handicap of f1ghting a faster Japanese opponent.
The throttle wires were a small detail with large consequences. They locked the defenders’ engines at half their available output, which meant the defenders could not simply outrun their problems. They had to solve them with geometry alone. They went up over San Diego Bay. O’Hare @ttacked from above. He @ttacked from astern.
He @ttacked from every angle and altitude he could think of. Every single time, with their throttles wired to half their available power, Thach’s defenders either ru1ned his @ttack or maneuvered into position to shoot back. After they landed and taxied back to the line, O’Hare climbed out of his cockpit, walked over to Thach with his flight helmet still on, and said the words that became the founding scr.i.pture of American carrier f1ghter doctrine.
“Skipper,” he said, “it really worked. I couldn’t make any @ttack without seeing the nose of one of your airplanes pointed at me.” Thach had done it on a kitchen table, with matchsticks, months before he would ever see a Zero in the air. The question now was whether the maneuver would survive contact with the actual aircraft and the actual men he had designed it to defeat.
The answer would come in June of 1942, in the deepest and most consequential carrier engagement of the Pacific W4r, Midway. The morning of June 4th, 1942, the American carrier Yorktown launched its strike group around 8:40 in the morning. Six F4F Wildcats of Fighting Squadron 3, led by Jimmy Thach himself, were the only f1ghter escort for 12 Douglas Devastator torpedo b0mbers of Torpedo 3, with Dauntless dive b0mbers of Bombing 3 following.
Six f1ghters to cover an entire torpedo squadron and an entire dive b0mber squadron against the most d4ngerous f1ghter air arm in the world. Thach had to revise his formation in the air because six aircraft was not divisible into two pairs of two pairs. He took Ensign Robert Allen Murray Dib, called Ram by everyone in the squadron, as his wingman.
Dib had only joined VF 3 a few weeks earlier. He was 21 years old, a recent graduate, untested in combat, and his familiarity with the weave consisted of one rushed practice session with Thach a few days before. Thach paired Lieutenant Junior Grade Brainard Tucker Macomber, on loan from VF 42, with Ensign Edgar Ba.ssett, also from 42.
Macomber’s radio was out, and he had never been formally trained in the weave, a fact that would matter in the next half hour. The remaining two Wildcats, flown by Machinist Tom Cheek and Ensign Daniel Sheedy, were detached as low cover for the slow torpedo planes. Approaching the Japanese fleet, the small American formation was bounced by zeros of the Japanese carrier combat air patrol.
Ba.ssett’s Wildcat was hit on the first pa.ss, slanted tow4rd the water, and burst into flames. He was k1lled. Macomber’s Wildcat was stitched by fire as well, but stayed in the air. Thach found himself with three serviceable f1ghters against a Zero combat air patrol that the official Naval Aviation Museum count puts at between 15 and 20 aircraft over his immediate engagement.
Macomber’s silent radio meant Thach could not coordinate with him by voice. He had a few seconds to decide what to do. What he did is one of the most remarkable acts of small unit leadership in the history of f1ghter combat. He waved Dib out wide to the right. He instructed Dib by hand signals across the cockpit gap to act as a section leader.
Then he ordered Macomber to follow Dib. The Zeros pounced on Dib almost immediately, exactly as Thach had wanted. Dib radioed for help and turned hard back tow4rd Thach. Thach turned into him. Macomber, not knowing what was happening, but doing what he was told, followed. Thach pulled his Wildcat under his wingman, lined up the underside of the pursuing Zero in his sights, and squeezed. The .
50 caliber rounds opened a line of holes from the engine cowling back along the fuselage. The Zero shed pieces of its cowling and burst into flame. Then he did it again. And again. The Zero pilots, trained from their first day at Suchiura to think of the dog f1ght as a one against one duel, kept committing to the bait. Each time, the second Wildcat was already pointed at them by the time they understood what was happening.
A few Zeros tried to follow Dib through the weave instead of breaking off, and were sh0t down by Thach as they pa.ssed in front of him. One Zero pilot, @ttacking Macomber, made the mistake of failing to follow his target through the turn, slowed up to correct his aim, and was k1lled by Thach in pa.ssing. By the time the Japanese broke contact and the surv1ving Wildcats turned for the Yorktown, VF 3 had been credited with multiple confirmed Zero k1lls for the loss of Ba.ssett.
Thach personally claimed three, Dib claimed one. Macomber, frustrated and breaking formation in the heat of it, claimed a probable. Cheek and Shady in the lower section, f1ghting their own separate engagement, accounted for at least one more Zero between them. Six Wildcats. Outnumbered, outcla.ssed, going up against the most feared f1ghter pilots in the Pacific, with one of their pilots de@d in the first 30 seconds and another of their radios out, they had bl00d1ed the Japanese carrier combat air patrol and walked away with five of their six
surv1ving aircraft. Thach himself, when he sat down in the Yorktown’s ready room that evening to write his report, was modest to the point of self deprecation. The truth, he wrote, was that any success against the Japanese Zero f1ghter was not due to the performance of the Wildcat, but to the comparatively poor marksmanship of the Japanese, the stupid mistakes made by a few of their pilots, and the superior marksmanship and teamwork of some of his own.
He was understating it. The men around him had ex3cuted, on a hand signal, with one of them having never trained in the maneuver, the tactic he had spent six months building on a kitchen table eight months earlier. If the story stopped at Midway, the weave would be a curiosity in the memoirs of one squadron. What makes it a tactical revolution is what happened next.
Within weeks, the maneuver had spread across the United States Navy and Marine Corps f1ghter community. Lieutenant Commander James Flatley, who had been ex3cutive officer of VF 42 at Coral Sea and was now forming Fighting Squadron 10 on the carrier Enterprise, the Grim Reapers, picked it up and began drilling his pilots in it.
He sent Thach a personal note. I am calling it the Thach weave, for your information. Flatley used it himself at the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands in October of 1942, when his division of four Wildcats was engaged by zeros from the Japanese carrier Junyo. One of the Japanese pilots, Lieutenant Yoshio Shiga, made several @ttack runs against Flatley’s section, found himself looking down the g.uns of a second Wildcat each time, and finally gave up.
Marine pilots flying off the rough coral airstr.i.p at Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, men who slept in tents and drank water out of cut down oil drums, and lived through the nightly b0mbardments of the Tokyo Express, started using the weave against the Tainan Kokutai zeros from Rabaul. Henderson Field had been a Japanese airstr.i.p until the Marines took it in the first days of the campaign, and named it after Major Lofton Henderson, the Marine dive b0mber leader k1lled at Midway.
The pilots who flew the worn out Wildcats of Henderson called themselves the Cactus Air Force, after the radio code name for the airfield. They were chronically short of spare parts, fuel, and pilots. They were chronically outnumbered. By late 1942, every Wildcat squadron in the South Pacific had some version of the weave in its tactical playbook.
Joe Foss, the Marine ace who had end the Guadalcanal campaign with 26 confirmed k1lls and a Medal of Honor, used variants of it. Even Dauntless dive b0mber crews adopted it on their return runs from carrier strikes, because two of them flying the weave gave their rear g.unners clean sh0ts at any zero pursuing the other. The maneuver scaled.
It worked between f1ghters. It worked between b0mbers. It worked between mixed flights. As long as two aircraft would commit to watching each other’s tails, the geometry of the trap held. Which brings us back to Saburo Sakai, back to the barracks at Rabaul, back to the question nobody could answer. The day after his commander, Tadashi Nakajima, first encountered the weave, Sakai himself encountered the limit of what a single Zero could do against American teamwork.
On the 7th of August, late in the afternoon over the channel between Guadalcanal and Tulagi, he spotted a flight of eight aircraft below him at about 7,800 ft. He took them for Wildcats. He dove. He picked the lead aircraft and lined up a deflection sh0t. He was wrong about what he was looking at. They were not Wildcats.
They were Douglas Dauntless dive b0mbers from a mixed flight of b0mbing five and b0mbing six off the carrier Enterprise. Each of them had a rear g.unner with a fixed machine g.un mount aimed straight back over the tail. The aircraft Sakai had picked was flown by Ensign Robert C. Shaw of b0mbing six. Its rear g.unner was aviation ordnanceman second cla.ss Harold L. Jones.
Sakai opened fire. Jones returned it. A burst from the backseat shattered Sakai’s canopy. A .30 caliber bull3t creased his skull, bl1nded him in the right eye, and paralyzed the left side of his body. The Zero rolled inverted and started down tow4rd the ocean. Sakai, with one eye, partial paralysis, bl00d pooling in the cockpit, and no canopy, pulled out of the dive.
The cold air at altitude woke him up enough to think. He was 400 mi from home with a head wound, and he chose not to d1e. He flew his Zero 560 nautical miles back to Rabaul, navigating by the volcanic peaks he had memorized from earlier missions in a 4 hour and 47 minute flight that has no equal in the history of single seat aviation.
He nearly crashed into a line of parked Zeros on his approach. He circled the field four times with the fuel gauge reading empty. He landed on his second attempt and insisted on making his mission report to his superior officer before he would let the medics put him in a stretcher. His friend, Hiroyoshi Nishizawa, the Tainan’s top ace, physically removed the waiting driver, and drove Sakai to the unit surgeon himself. Sakai survived.
He lost most of the vision in his right eye permanently. He spent 5 months in Yokosuka Naval Hospital, and then a year as a flight instructor, watching teenage pilots wreck themselves on the takeoff roll, because the Japanese pipeline had been shortened to keep up with combat losses.
Then, against medical advice, he talked his way back into combat in 1944, and flew zeros over Iwo Jima and the home islands until the w4r ended. He had been a petty officer first cla.ss on the day he was sh0t. He was promoted to w4rrant officer in November of 1943. He would not see the rank of ensign until late in the w4r. He was Japan’s most famous ace, in part because he was one of the very few experienced naval f1ghter pilots from the early Pacific w4r who lived to tell the story.
Most of them did not. And here we have to look closely at why the Imperial Japanese Navy never produced its own answer to the weave. The reason lies in two decisions made before the w4r began. The first was the decision to keep the pilot training program small, selective, and elite. In 1940, when the Imperial Navy was asked whether to expand pilot training in anticipation of a long conflict, the proposal was rejected.
Japan, the planners reasoned, could not win a long w4r against the United States, and therefore did not need to plan for one. The training pipeline would remain what it had always been. The men already in the cockpits would carry the w4r. The second was the decision, when the w4r turned, to keep the surv1ving veteran pilots on the front line until they d1ed there.
The United States Navy, by contrast, started rotating its experienced combat aviators home in 1942 and 1943 to instruct the next cla.ss of trainees. The Imperial Navy did not. Sakai’s training cohort, the elite Yokaren and Soran graduates of the late 1930s, kept flying combat missions until they were sh0t down.
By the end of the Guadalcanal campaign in February of 1943, the great majority of the experienced naval aviators who had @ttacked Pearl Harbor had been k1lled in action. The men who could read a f1ght, who knew when to commit and when to break off, who could spot the bait Wildcat offering itself, were de@d in the water off Henderson Field, off Santa Cruz, off the Eastern Solomons.
Their replacements, products of a compressed training program that had to push pilots through faster as losses mounted, did not have the experience to recognize a trap that a man like Nakajima had only recognized too late. Sakai himself, when he was finally pulled off operational duty after his head wound and a.ssigned to train new pilots, wrote about the experience in 1943 with something close to despair.
“We could not watch for individual errors,” he said, “and take the long hours necessary to weed the faults out of a trainee. Hardly a day pa.ssed when fire engines and ambulances did not race down the runways, sirens shrieking, to dig one or more pilots out of the plane he had wrecked on a clumsy takeoff or landing.
We were told to rush men through, to forget the fine points, just teach them how to fly and shoot.” The man who had once flown combat from China to New Guinea was now watching teenagers k1ll themselves on the takeoff roll and being ordered to send the surv1vors to the front anyway. While this was happening to the Japanese, the United States Navy was doing the opposite.
In 1942 alone, the American naval aviation training program graduated almost 10,900 pilots, nearly twice as many as had completed the program in the entire previous 8 years combined. By 1943, the figure was almost 20,800. Each of these new aviators reached the fleet with around 500 hours of flight time. Replacement air groups were est4blished starting in April of 1944 to put a final polish on pilots before they joined operational units.
By contrast, by 1945, Japanese pilots were being certified for combat duty with less than 4 months of training and well under 100 hours in the air. The result was visible in the k1ll ratios. The F4F Wildcat, the aircraft Thatcher designed the weave to keep alive, ended the w4r with an air to air k1ll ratio of approximately 6.9:1.
Its successor, the F6F Hellcat, flying with the weave already baked into its squadron’s standard tactics, achieved a k1ll ratio against the Mitsubishi Zero of better than 13:1. By the time of the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June of 1944, an engagement that the American pilots themselves nicknamed the Marianas Turkey Shoot, the Japanese were sending up barely trained teenagers in obsolete aircraft against American pilots who had memorized every weakness of the Zero from intelligence reports and captured airframes. The slaughter was so
one sided that some American pilots in their after action reports expressed something close to embarra.ssment. The men who had built the most elite pilot training program in the world had been undone by their own perfectionism. They had refused to compromise on quality. The result was that they could not make enough of what they had.
The Americans, who had compromised on individual virtuosity in favor of teamwork, ma.ss production, and replaceability, had built a system that could absorb losses and keep generating pilots indefinitely. The weave was the first crack in the dam. Everything else flowed through it. What Thach had really done in his kitchen in Coronado, beyond inventing one specific tactic, was to prove a deeper proposition.
He had proved that two airmen working together could defeat one ace working alone every time, no matter how good the ace was, no matter how superior his airplane, no matter how many years of training he had. He had taken an old principle, mutual support, and turned it into a piece of geometry that any reasonably competent f1ghter pilot could ex3cute after one demonstration.
He had made teamwork transferable. He had made it a thing you could teach a green ensign in a single afternoon and trust him to perform in combat the next morning. That was what the matchsticks on the kitchen table had actually accomplished. The Imperial Japanese Navy never produced an equivalent piece of doctrine, partly because to do so would have required them to accept something about their own institution they could not bring themselves to accept.
The Zero was built around the individual ace. The Yokaren program was built around the individual ace. Japanese f1ghter doctrine, drilled into pilots from their first day at Tsuchiura, was built around the individual ace. To beat the weave, the Imperial Navy would have had to teach its pilots that no individual, no matter how sk1lled, could defeat two coordinated opponents, and that surv1val required flying as a team rather than as a cluster of duelists.
They could not bring themselves to do it. They kept sending men up to d1e one at a time against opponents who had already decided to d1e in pairs. The verdict on the Pacific air w4r, the honest one, is not that the Americans were better individual pilots than the Japanese. They were not. Pilot for pilot, in 1942, the Imperial Naval Air Service was probably the best f1ghter community in the world.
The verdict is that the Americans had stumbled into a better system, a doctrine that did not depend on the exceptional individual married to a training pipeline that did not depend on the exceptional individual married to an industrial base that did not depend on the exceptional individual. The weave was the moment when that system first proved its superiority over Japanese individual brilliance, and the Japanese never recovered the ground they lost in the months after Midway.
The men who designed and first flew the weave did not know they were rewriting how air combat would be fought for the next 80 years. They were trying to keep American pilots alive against an enemy whose airplane could out turn them and out climb them and out range them. They solved that immediate problem, and in solving it they accidentally solved a much larger one.
The principles they had worked out, two aircraft watching each other’s tails, the bait and the h00k, the geometric trap for an @ttacker who commits to the wrong target, are still taught today in every Western air combat training course. United States Navy F 4 Phantom crews used variations of the weave against the MiG 17 over North Vietnam in the 1960s.
American pilots flying F 15s and F 16s train on the same principles now. Most of the men who made it work do not have monuments. Edw4rd Butch O’Hare did not live to see the w4r end. On the night of November 26th, 1943, he was leading a section of three aircraft from the carrier Enterprise. Two F6F Hellcats flown by him and Ensign Andy Skon and a TBF Avenger flown by Lieutenant Commander Phil Phillips on what would have been one of the first nighttime f1ghter intercepts ever attempted from a United States carrier.
They were trying to break up a Japanese torpedo b0mber @ttack on the American task force. In the confusion of the night engagement, O’Hare’s Hellcat went down. His body and aircraft were never recovered. He was 29 years old. The Chicago airport that bears his name was renamed for him in 1949. Most of the people who fly through it every day do not know who he was.
Robert Allen Murray Dibb, the green ensign Thach had pulled into the right hand of his weave at Midway, did not live either. He was k1lled in a flying accident on the 29th of August, 1944, 2 years and 2 months after his combat debut. He had become an ace himself with seven aerial victories. He was 23 years old.
There is no statue of him anywhere. He is a footnote in most accounts of Midway. But on the morning of the 4th of June, 1942, at the moment when the Thach weave was being tested in actual combat for the first time in human history against the most feared f1ghters in the Pacific, with a hand signal across a cockpit gap and a green pilot’s instinct for the right move, he made it work.
Saburo Sakai lived a long life. He d1ed on the 22nd of September, 2000, at the age of 84. He had retired from the Imperial Navy at the rank of lieutenant junior grade. He had become a Buddhist who refused to k1ll any living thing, not even a mosquito. He had become a critic of the w4r Japan had fought and a vocal opponent of the militarism that had sent his generation into the cockpits of those zeros.
He visited the United States more than once after the w4r. In 1983, near Los Angeles, an American historian named Henry Sakaida arranged a meeting between Sakai and Harold L. Jones, the rear g.unner from Bombing Six, whose machine g.un bull3t had nearly taken his life over Tulagi 41 years earlier. They exchanged gifts. They sh00k hands.
Sakai produced the bull3t pierced flying helmet he had been wearing on the 7th of August, 1942, still bearing the the of Jones’s marksmanship. Two old men in a quiet room. Both of them survived something neither one had any business surv1ving. Jimmy Thach himself went on to a 40 year career. He commanded the escort carrier USS Sicily, hull number CVE 118, in the Korean W4r.
He pioneered anti submarine w4rfare doctrine in the late 1950s as commander of Task Group Alpha, flying his flag from the carrier USS Valley Forge. Work that became the template for how the United States Navy h.unted Soviet submarines for the rest of the Cold W4r. He was promoted to four star admiral in 1965. He retired in May of 1967 as commander in chief, United States Naval Forces Europe.
He d1ed in Coronado, California on April 15th, 1981, 4 days before his 76th birthday, in the same town where he had built the weave on his kitchen table 40 years earlier. When he was asked about it in his oral histories, he tended to deflect the credit to his pilots, especially to O’Hare who had tested it for him, and to Flatley who had named it.
If your father or grandfather flew in the Pacific W4r, or worked the carrier flight decks, or served in the air groups that made the long blue ocean campaigns possible, I would be honored to read his story in the comments below. The unit, the carrier, the aircraft, what he saw. Those small specific personal details are the actual record of what happened in those years, and they deserve to be preserved by the people who carry them.
So, here, finally, is the answer to the question Sakai’s pilots could not stop asking each other in the barracks at Rabaul in August of 1942. Who taught the Americans to do that? The answer is a soft spoken Arkansan named Jimmy Thach, who in the summer before Pearl Harbor read an intelligence bull3tin he could not ignore, sat down at his kitchen table with a box of matches and worked through the geometry of how two aircraft could defeat one.
He proved it on a wired throttle test against Butch O’Hare in San Diego. He proved it again in actual combat at Midway with a green wingman, a silent radio, and a hand signal. His friends and pupils proved it again at Guadalcanal, at Santa Cruz, at the Philippine Sea. By the end, the men who had set out to be the best individual f1ghter pilots in the world had been beaten by men who had agreed in advance not to f1ght alone.
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