On October 9th, 1942, 20,000 ft above a jungle island called Guadal Canal, a 22-year-old American pilot named Marian Carl was fighting for his life. He was flying a Grumman F4F Wildcat, a stubby, heavy carrierbased fighter, and he was being hunted. His enemy was a Mitsubishi A6M0, a plane so light, so agile, it felt like it was from the future.
It could turn inside the wild cat’s radius twice over. It could climb like a rocket. For the past year, the Zero had been a ghost, a phantom that owned the skies from Pearl Harbor to the Philippines. Marian Carl was an ace, but right now he was just meat. The Zero was on his tail. He pushed his Wildcat into a dive.
The heavy American plane gained speed, but the Zero stayed with him. He rolled hard, right? The Wildcat responded, but slowly, like the P38, it felt mushy. The Zero was already there, anticipating his move, its cannons winking. Carl’s cockpit exploded. Shrapnel tore through his leg. His controls went dead. He was going down.
He managed to bail out, landing in the sharkinfested waters, saved only by a miracle. This was the reality of the air war in the Pacific. This was Guadal Canal. But just weeks later, another farm boy from South Dakota would climb into the same sky and change everything. It wasn’t a war. It was a meat grinder. a place where American pilots were being fed one by one into the teeth of the Japanese war machine.
The American press called the pilots there the Cactus Air Force. The pilots themselves called their base Henderson Field the graveyard. The problem wasn’t just the zero. It was the doctrine. The experts back in America, the engineers had a simple solution. Never turn with a zero. It was the same doctrine as the P38 pilots. Use your speed, use your armor, dive, shoot, and run.
But in the chaotic, swirling dog fights over Guadal Canal, that doctrine was getting men killed every single day. The Japanese pilots were veterans. They had fought over China, over Pearl Harbor. They knew their aircraft. They baited the Americans into turns. They knew the Wildcat was slow to respond. They knew exactly where to shoot. The Americans were losing desperately.
What the Cactus Air Force didn’t know, what the veteran Japanese pilots couldn’t possibly know was that the solution was on its way. But it wasn’t a new plane. It wasn’t a new doctrine from Washington. It was a 27-year-old farmer. A man so unassuming he had been told he was too old to fly in combat. a man who had learned to shoot not from a military manual but by hunting jack rabbits on the frozen plains of South Dakota.
This is the story of Joseph J. Foss and the simple forgotten farmer’s trick that made him America’s ace of aces. To understand how a single farmer could terrorize the Japanese air force, you first have to understand the farm. Joe Foss was not a career soldier. He was born in 1915 on a remote unelectrified farm near Sou Falls, South Dakota. His childhood wasn’t spent in classrooms.
It was spent in the dirt, in the cold, and in the wind. This was the David versus Goliath story, just like Simo Hea. But Foss’s Goliath wasn’t just the enemy. It was life itself. The Great Depression hit South Dakota like an artillery barrage. The land dried up. The crops failed. The family had nothing.
Foss’s cisu, that finished grit, was built from necessity. He and his father would hunt to put food on the table. And this is where the secret modification begins. When a 12-year-old Joe Foss hunted jack rabbits, he didn’t have a scope. He had an old shotgun. And one rule from his father. Don’t waste shells. A jack rabbit doesn’t run in a straight line.
It weaves. It darts. It reverses. To hit it, you couldn’t aim at it. You had to aim where it was going to be. It’s called deflection shooting. While other kids were learning math, Foss was calculating lead, windage, and speed in his head in a fraction of a second. He wasn’t just a good shot. He was a predator. He understood the science of hitting a moving target.
This was his iron sight. This was his piano wire. It was a farmer’s eye that military manuals couldn’t teach. But Foss didn’t want to hunt rabbits. He wanted to fly. In 1933, his father took him to an air show. He saw a Marine Corps squadron flying biplanes. He was 18 and he was hooked. He told his father, “That’s what I’m going to do.” The path was impossible.
He was a poor farm kid. He had no education. When his father was tragically killed by a downed power line, Joe at 19 had to drop out of school to run the farm. He was trapped, but he had that cisu. He worked the farm by day and took night classes. It took him six years to get enough credits to enter college.
He worked his way through washing dishes to get a pilot’s license. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, Joe Foss was 26 years old. He raced to enlist in the Navy to be a pilot. He was rejected. He was too old. In 1941, the cuto off age for a fighter pilot was 25. They told him he could be a flight instructor. Teach other kids how to fly. It was a devastating blow.
It was the engineering officer telling McKenna the cables were within spec. It was the experts telling Simo Heiha to use a scope. The doctrine said he was unfit for combat. So Foss did what McKenna did. He broke the rules. He found a loophole. He joined the Marine Corps Reserve. He became an instructor.
And for nine long months, he watched as 20-year-old kids he had trained were sent off to war. Foss was enraged. He hounded his superiors. He demanded combat. He wrote letters. He made noise. He was, in his own words, the loudest, most annoying instructor in the Navy. Finally, just to shut him up, they gave in.
They sent him to advanced fighter training. He was assigned to a new squadron, VMF 121. And in October 1942, as Marian Carl was being shot out of the sky, 27-year-old Grandpa Joe Foss, the too old farmer from South Dakota, was put on a transport ship. His destination, Henderson Field, Guadal Canal. The place he arrived at was not a military base. It was hell.
The moment he stepped off the plane, the smell hit him. a thick humid mix of engine oil, rotting jungle, and death. The runway was a pockmarked strip of dirt and gravel carved out of the palm trees. The operation center was a wooden shack named the Pagota. The pilot’s quarters were mudfloored tents, and everywhere were the wrecks.
Dozens of F4F Wildcats, P39s, shoved to the side of the runway, their wings torn off, their engines shattered, their cockpits stained. This was the graveyard of the Cactus Air Force. Foss was assigned to his tent. He met the men he would be flying with. They weren’t the fresh-faced kids he had trained. They were ghosts. Their faces were yellow with Atabrain, the anti-malaria drug.
Their eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep. Their flight suits were stained with sweat and grease. They were veterans, but they were also hunted. Foss, the old man, the farmer, walked in. They looked at him. He was new meat. He was another body to replace the one they lost yesterday. Foss looked at his assigned plane, a Grumman F4F Wildcat.
It was the same plane Marian Carl was shot down in. It was heavy. It was slow. It was, by all accounts, a flying coffin against the Zero. The squadron’s executive officer, a man named Duke, gave Foss the standard briefing, the one that was getting them all killed. Never
turn with a zero. Never. Joe Foss listened. He nodded. He understood the words, but he also understood something the doctrine had missed. He understood Jack Rabbits. The next morning, Foss would fly his first mission. He was heading straight into the kill zone.
He was a farmer in a flying coffin, about to fight the most advanced fighter plane on Earth. And he was about to use a trick that wasn’t in any manual. Joe Foss’s first flight over Guadal Canal was not a training run. It was a trial by fire. He climbed to 15,000 ft, his eyes scanning the empty blue. The ghosts in his squadron had warned him. They come out of the sun. You never see them until they’re shooting at you.
Foss was leading his first patrol and he felt blind. Then the radio crackled. Bandits 11:00 high. Foss looked up. He saw them. A formation of Mitsubishi zeros diving. They were fast, faster than anything he had ever seen. He remembered his orders. Never turn. Dive and run.
Foss shoved his stick forward, put his Wildcat into a screaming dive. His heavy plane accelerated. The Zeros followed. One of them opened fire. Tracers zipped past Fauc’s canopy, close enough to make him flinch. He kept diving all the way to the jungle canopy, shaking the zeros off his tail.
He returned to Henderson Field, his hands shaking, not from fear, but from anger. The doctrine was wrong. He knew it. You couldn’t win by running away. You could only survive. And Joe Foss hadn’t come here to survive. He had come here to hunt. On October 13th, just days after his arrival, Foss was leading another patrol.
This time they ran into a group of Japanese bombers protected by Zeros. The dog fight began. It was chaos. Wildats and Zeros twisting in the sky. Foss saw a zero lock onto his wingman’s tail. The Japanese pilot was closing in for the kill. The doctrine said Foss should dive away. Find an easier target. The farmer’s eye said something different.
Foss rolled his wild cat hard. He wasn’t aiming at the zero. He was aiming where the jack rabbit was going to be. He pulled the trigger. His six 50 caliber machine guns roared to life. He fired a long 3-second burst, not at the enemy plane, but at a patch of empty blue sky 200 ft in front of it.
It looked like a mistake, a wasted shot, but the Japanese pilot focused on his own kill, didn’t see Foss. He executed a perfect tight turn and flew directly into the stream of 50 caliber rounds. The Zero’s wing simply came off. The plane vanished in a cloud of metal and fire. It was Foss’s first kill. He had not outturned the Zero. He had not outrun it. He had outthought it.
He had used the farmer’s logic that the experts in Washington had forgotten. He landed at Henderson Field a different man. The ghosts gathered around him. He had his first kill. He told his crew chief, “This plane, it’s a truck, but it’s a tough truck and it shoots straight.” He told his fellow pilots, “Forget what they told you. Don’t chase them. Lead them.
Lead them until you think you’re going to miss. Then lead them some more. They will fly right into it.” This was the piano wire modification. This was the iron sight logic. It wasn’t a physical change to the plane. It was a mental change. It was a farmer’s confidence. The pilots listened. They were desperate. Their ace, Mary and Carl, was still recovering. They needed a leader.
And this 27-year-old farmer was the only one talking about hunting, not running. Foss took command of his fleet of eight wild cats. They were a band of misfits, the castoffs, the new arrivals. They didn’t have a cool nickname. So the press watching this old man lead his chaotic squadron gave them one.
They called them Foss’s flying circus. And on October 16th, the circus went to work. Foss led his eight planes straight into a formation of 32 Japanese aircraft. 322 to8. It was suicide. But Foss had a plan. He wasn’t going to dogfight. He was going to use his farmer’s logic. He ordered his flight to use the thatch weave, a new tactic where pilots flew in pairs, covering each other’s tails.
Foss dove in. He saw a zero. He didn’t turn. He pulled lead. Fired. The zero exploded. Another zero dove on him. Foss’s wingman, who was weaving with him, saw it. The wingman rolled over and shot the zero off FS’s tail. The circus was a machine.
In 10 minutes of brutal, swirling combat, Foss’s flight of eight shot down five Japanese planes. Foss himself got two. The circus returned to base. With all eight planes, the graveyard was suddenly winning. The numbers started to climb and they climbed at a rate that nobody could believe. It was Simo Hea’s kill count all over again. October 18th, Foss shoots down two more. October 20th, he downs another.
By October 23rd, just 10 days after his first kill, Joe Foss was an ace with five victories. October 25th. He shoots down three zeros in a single day. The old man, the farmer, was now the deadliest pilot on the island. He wasn’t just a pilot. He was a leader. His flying circus was dominating the sky. But like Simo Heiha, this kind of success comes at a cost.
The Japanese were now furious. They were losing planes at an impossible rate. Their veteran pilots were being shot down by wild cats. It didn’t make sense. And the name they kept hearing in their radio intercepts was Foss. The Japanese high command began to notice. Just like Stavka noticed Simo, just like Saburo Sakai noticed the P38s.
The enemy was adapting. They weren’t just fighting wildcats anymore. They were hunting fosses flying circus. The war became personal. On November 7th, Foss was leading his flight when they were jumped by an elite group of Japanese aces. The sky was filled with planes. Foss shot down two zeros.
He was lining up a third when his plane was ripped apart by cannon fire from behind. His engine exploded, his cockpit filled with smoke. He was going down. He managed to bail out, his plane crashing into the jungle. He was rescued, shaken, but unharmed. Just 2 days later, he was back in the air. This time, he was chasing a Japanese float plane. He was so focused on the kill.
He didn’t see the Jake float plane’s rear gunner. The gunner opened fire. The bullets shattered Foss’s engine. For the second time in 3 days, his plane was dead. But this time he wasn’t over the jungle. He was over the ocean. He ditched his wildcat in the water. The plane hit the waves hard and sank in less than 30 seconds.
Foss was alone in the middle of the Pacific, 10 mi from land. He was in the slot, one of the most sharkinfested waters on Earth. He floated in his life vest, the water turning cold. He had that cisu. He was a farmer. He was used to waiting. He was used to surviving. But then he saw them fins. Dozens of them. Sharks. They circled him.
They bumped him. Foss, the man who hunted zeros, was now being hunted by something far older. He treaded water. He waited. He watched the fins get closer. He had no weapon, no radio, just his farmer’s grit. For 4 hours he floated, surrounded. Just as the sun was setting, a canoe appeared. It was manned by native islanders sent by an Australian coast watcher who had by sheer luck seen the plane go down.
They paddled toward him, beating the water with their oars to scare the sharks away. They dragged the exhausted hypothermic pilot from the water. When they got him back to Henderson Field, he was a wreck. He was suffering from exposure. He had malaria. The doctors ordered him grounded. Joe Foss, the ace of aces, was put in a hospital bed. His flying circus had to fly without him.
The Japanese believed he was dead. The ghost of Guadal Canal was finally gone. They were wrong. Joe Foss lay in that bed for two weeks, shaking with fever, thinking about only one thing. The jack rabbits were getting away. He recovered. He walked out of the hospital, climbed back into a new wild cat, and on November 30th, he went hunting again. He shot down another zero.
The ghost was back, and he was angry. The Japanese threw everything they had at him. He kept coming. By January 15th, 1943, Joe FS’s tally stood at 23. He was just three kills away from the all-time American record, a record set in World War I by the legendary Eddie Rickenbacher. Rickenbacher’s record was 26 kills. It was a holy number, a number no pilot had ever touched.
And now a 27-year-old farmer from South Dakota in a flying coffin was about to break it. By January 1943, the name Joe Foss was a legend on Guadal Canal. But it was a legend written in exhaustion and fever. The too old farmer, now 27, was a physical wreck. The malaria he contracted had returned with a vengeance. He was flying with a constant raging fever.
His ground crew would watch him land, his wildcat riddled with bullet holes, and he would be shaking so violently from the chills that they would have to lift him drenched in sweat from the cockpit. He was fighting two wars, one in the sky against the Japanese, and one in his own blood against the malaria parasite. And he was winning both.
His tally stood at 23. The all-time American record set by the legendary World War I ace Eddie Rickenbacher was 26. That number, 26, was more than a statistic. It was a mountain. It was the symbol of ultimate American victory in the air. For two decades, no pilot had even come close. And now a half delirious farm boy from South Dakota flying a plane that was supposedly a flying coffin was about to climb that mountain.
January 15th, 1943. This was the day Foss was sick, sicker than he’d ever been. The doctors had forbidden him from flying. He ignored them. He pulled himself into his cockpit, his head pounding. The word was out. A massive Tokyo Express. A huge Japanese naval convoy was heading for the island, protected by a massive screen of fighters. Foss and his flying circus were sent up to intercept.
The sky turned black with planes. It was the largest air battle Foss had ever seen. Zeros and Wildcats mixed in a chaotic swirling melee. Foss, his vision blurred by fever, fell back on his instincts. He fell back on the farm. He saw a zero locking onto a wingman. He didn’t think, he reacted.
He rolled his wild cat, not at the zero, but at the empty space where the jack rabbit was going to be. He fired. His 50 calibers ripped the empty air. The Zero, committing to its turn, flew directly into the wall of lead. The plane disintegrated. That was kill number 24. He scanned the battle. Another Zero was diving on a different group of Wildcats.
Foss shoved his throttle forward, his engine screaming. He cut the Zero off. The Japanese pilot seeing Foss tried to outturn him. The classic zero tactic. Foss didn’t take the bait. He performed a high-side pass, a maneuver he had perfected. He rolled over the top of the Zero, came down from its blind spot, and fired a single perfect burst.
The Zero’s engine exploded. That was kill number 25. He had tied Rick and Backer. He was now officially a living legend. But he wasn’t done. He saw another Japanese plane, a roof float plane fighter, trying to escape the battle. Foss dove. The Ruf pilot saw him coming and pulled into a desperate climbing turn.
This was the ultimate test. The farmer’s eye versus the veteran Japanese pilot. Foss didn’t just follow. He calculated. He saw the roof’s line of escape. He pushed his own plane’s nose up, firing a long arcing deflection shot that seemed to defy physics.
The 50 caliber rounds traveled in a perfect line, meeting the exact point in the sky where the roof was trying to flee. The plane was hit directly in the cockpit. It fell, tumbling end over end into the Pacific. That was kill number 26. In a single afternoon, while shaking with malaria, Joe Foss had shot down three enemy planes. He had tied and then broken. The unbeatable record. He landed his Wildcat at Henderson Field.
The entire base was waiting. The graveyard had become a field of victory. The ghosts of the Cactus Air Force lifted their two old farmer out of his cockpit and carried him on their shoulders. He was without question America’s ace of aces. But what the pilots on Guadal Canal celebrated the Japanese high command in Rabul mourned. This is the Saburo Sakai moment. This is the Pavl’s diary.
The enemy reaction. For months, Japanese pilots had operated with supreme confidence. They were flying the A6M0, a marvel of engineering. They were veterans. They knew the F4F Wildcat was inferior. They had killed dozens of them. Their doctrine was simple. Force the wildat into a turn. Get on it 6:00 and kill it.
Then FS’s flying circus appeared. And suddenly the doctrine stopped working. Veteran Japanese pilots would return to their carriers, their faces pale, their hands shaking. They told their intelligence officers stories that made no sense. They said they would dive on a wildcat, expecting it to run, but it wouldn’t.
They said they would bait it into a turn, but it wouldn’t follow. Instead, the American plane would do something strange. It would roll or climb or dive, seemingly at random, fire its guns at empty sky, and then a second later, the zero next to them would explode. They couldn’t understand what was happening.
They were being hunted by a farmer’s logic they couldn’t comprehend. Joe Foss had done exactly what Simo Heiha had done. He had taken away the enemy’s every advantage. Simo made himself invisible by hiding his glint and his breath. Foss made his intentions invisible by never aiming at his target. The Japanese pilots were fighting a ghost.
They were fighting an invisible modification that wasn’t made of piano wire. It was forged in the brain of a South Dakota hunter. Foss had single-handedly broken their confidence. He had proven that the Zero was not in fact unbeatable. He had proven that the inferior wildcat in the hands of a pilot who understood the science of the jack rabbit was the deadliest weapon in the sky. The Japanese aces who used to hunt wild cats for sport were now hesitant.
They were cautious. The cactus air force was no longer the hunted. It was the hunter and it all came down to one man who had been told he was too old to fight. But this victory came at a terrible price. This is the cost. This is the explosive bullet that Simo Heiha faced. Foss’s cost wasn’t a single bullet.
It was a slow, agonizing burnout. Days after breaking the record, Foss was grounded for good. The malaria had finally won. He was now so sick he couldn’t stand. He was suffering recurring, debilitating fevers. He had lost over 30 lbs. The man who had faced down zeros and sharks was being eaten alive from the inside.
He didn’t leave Guadal Canal in a victory parade. He was evacuated on a stretcher, a skeletal yellow skinned ghost, his body broken by the island he had helped save. He was flown to hospitals in the Pacific and then back to the United States. He was a national hero, but he was also an invalid.
But Joe Foss had that cisu, that farmer’s grit. He spent months in a naval hospital in San Diego recovering and it was there that the nation he had served finally recognized him. On May 18th, 1943, Joe Foss, the farmer from South Dakota, stood in the White House. President Franklin D.
Roosevelt placed the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award, around his neck. The citation praised his dauntless courage and his incomparable combat skill. But what was his true legacy? What was the ripple effect of his farmers logic? It was hope. In 1942, America was losing the war. The Zero was a mythic monster. The Japanese were seen as unstoppable.
Joe Foss, with his 26 kills in just 44 days, broke that myth. He proved that an American farm boy in an American plane could beat the best the enemy had. He didn’t just write a new chapter in air combat. He wrote the entire manual on how to defeat the zero. The deflection, shooting, and thatchweave tactics he perfected became the new doctrine for the entire Pacific Fleet.
He had saved Guadal Canal, and in doing so, he had helped turn the tide of the entire war. And what happens to a man who becomes the ace of aces when the war is over? Unlike Sergeant McKenna, whose modification remained a secret, Boss’s heroism was celebrated. But like Simoha the farmer, he never forgot where he came from. He didn’t stay in the military. He went home to South Dakota.
He used his fame not for himself, but for his people. He entered politics. He was elected to the South Dakota legislature. And in 1954, that same farmer who had been told he wasn’t good enough was elected governor of South Dakota. He served his state just as he had served his country.
He went on to become the first commissioner of the American Football League and a beloved national figure. But he was always at his core that man from the farm. The man who understood the simple brutal logic of the hunt. That’s how wars are truly won. Not by experts or engineers who read from a manual, but by the individuals who see the flaw. James McKenna, the mechanic, saw a flaw in a P38’s control cable.
He saw a 3 to 8 in slack that meant death, and he fixed it with a 6-in piece of piano wire. Simo Heiha, the farmer, saw a flaw in the sniper doctrine. He saw that a high-tech scope glinted, and he fixed it by using his old reliable iron sights. And Joe Foss, the farm boy, saw a flaw in his inferior plane. He saw that you couldn’t outturn a zero.
But you could outthink it, and he fixed it, not with a tool, but with the farmer’s eye he had trained his entire life. These are the forgotten pages, the stories of the men who broke the rules. To win the war, Joe Foss died in 2003 at the age of 87. He was buried with full military honors, a hero to his nation, a legend to the Marine Corps, and a testament to the unbeatable CESU of the American farmer.
Each one matters. Each one deserves to be remembered. And we’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment below telling us where you’re watching from.
Our community spans from Texas to Tasmania. From veterans to history enthusiasts, you’re part of something special here. Thank you for watching and thank you for keeping these stories alive.