Untold War Stories@UntoldWarFacts · Aug 19, 2026

Look at the nose of this fighter. Seven German kills. One Italian. One Japanese. And an American flag. That last one…

4 tweets1 min read♥ 4.4Koriginal

Summary

Louis Curdes was a WWII pilot who shot down seven German, one Italian, and one Japanese aircraft across the Mediterranean and Pacific theaters. After being shot down and captured in Italy, he escaped and volunteered to fight in the Pacific, where he famously shot down a disabled American C-47 transport to prevent it from landing on a Japanese airfield, saving all twelve people aboard—including a nurse he had dated.

Summarized by ThreadOut AI from the full thread. May miss nuance — read the thread below.

#1
Look at the nose of this fighter. Seven German kills. One Italian. One Japanese. And an American flag. That last one is not a mistake. What he did to earn it got him another Distinguished Flying Cross. This is the story of Louis Curdes..🧵1/4
#2
🧵 2/4 Louis Curdes was from Fort Wayne, Indiana, and enlisted in the Army after Pearl Harbor. By 1943 he was flying P-38s over the Mediterranean, and he was quick. Three German fighters shot down in a single mission over Tunisia on 29 April. Two more three weeks later. He was an ace inside a month of combat, and in June he added an Italian Macchi over Sardinia. On 27 August he shot down two more Germans, taking him to seven. On that same mission his own luck ran out, and he was shot down over Italy and captured. He escaped after the Italian armistice, spent months behind enemy lines, and did not reach Allied territory again until May 1944. He could have stopped there. Instead he asked to go back, and they sent him to the Pacific.
#3
🧵 3/4 Flying a P-51 he called Bad Angel, he shot down a Japanese reconnaissance aircraft southwest of Taiwan on 7 February 1945. That made him one of only three American pilots in the whole war to have shot down German, Italian and Japanese aircraft. Three days later he led four Mustangs to look at a Japanese airstrip on Batan Island. One of his pilots was hit by flak and went into the sea, and Curdes was circling low over the man's dinghy when he saw a twin engined aircraft approaching the island. It was a C-47. An American transport, lining up to land on an airfield held by the Japanese. He tried the radio. Nothing. The aircraft had been lost in bad weather, its radio was dead, it was running out of fuel, and the crew had picked the nearest strip they could see. He flew across its nose. He fired warning bursts in front of it. It kept going.
#4
🧵 4/4 There were twelve people on board, and Curdes knew what could happen to Americans taken prisoner by the Japanese. So he lined up behind the transport, aimed at one engine, and shot it out. The C-47 kept going. He shifted his aim and took out the other. The pilot had no choice but to ditch. Everyone got out. Everyone survived. Curdes flew cover until his fuel ran low, came back before dawn, and circled the rafts until a Catalina arrived and picked up all of them. Then he saw the passenger list. One of the two nurses aboard was a woman he had been out with the night before. After shooting down aircraft from three enemy nations, he had now shot down his own date, and very probably saved her life. General Kenney awarded him a second Distinguished Flying Cross. The C-47 never counted as an official victory, so his score stands at nine, but he painted the American flag on Bad Angel anyway, and there it stayed. This was the story of Louis Curdes. I post a story like this every single day. Most people never see them. Follow so you don't miss the next one.