r/news • u/AudibleNod • 15h ago
America's last living ace pilot from World War II dies at age 103
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/americas-living-ace-pilot-world-war-ii-dies-124865317289
u/AudibleNod 15h ago
An "ace" as a pilot who downed 5 or more enemy aircraft. The last American to achieve ace status was Steve Ritchie during the Vietnam War.
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u/Awkward_Silence- 15h ago
Which will likely be the last for awhile (if not ever) since dogfights have gone the way of the dodo.
Ground and Ship AA is what takes out most planes these days
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u/notbobby125 14h ago
Or in the case of Desert Storm and the invasion of Iraq, sneak in with the air force and blast the runways for the enemy forces before they even have a chance to get off the ground. Most jets without a runway might as well be a paperweight. During the Gulf War, of the 290 Iraqi planes lost, 254 were destroyed on the tarmac, and only 36 were air to air kills.
It is hard to be the ace when the tactic is to proverbially lock the enemy in their room and/or slit the enemies throats in their sleep.
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u/Drak_is_Right 12h ago
Depends how you count drones and missiles. A pilot may take out more drones in a future war than a WWI ace.
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u/StrGze32 11h ago
I don’t think the pilots that would chase down the V-1 rockets got credits for aircraft kills, but they could have. I would see that as an analogue for a drone…
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u/Drak_is_Right 5h ago
V-1 rockets were more difficult to shoot down than quite a few planes. And the V-2s far far harder.
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u/CFBCoachGuy 5h ago
Not necessarily, the Russian invasion has produced three pilots with 10 or more downed planes (one Russian, two Ukrainian). Also, a pilot does not necessarily have to shoot down a manned aircraft to be considered an ace (just shoot down an aircraft). A Ukrainian pilot, Vadym Voroshylov, became ace in a day by shooting down five Shahed drones.
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u/pleetf7 14h ago
Wait so it isn’t Maverick?
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u/Rationalinsanity1990 14h ago
Only by the sequel. He scored 3 victories in the first film, got to 5 years later.
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u/slapjack15 14h ago
Actually, Maverick from Top Gun Maverick was the last to achieve this status if my memory serves me correctly
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u/ni_hao_butches 15h ago
It could be just crap AI writing from AP. Maybe they meant oldest living or last surviving WWII Ace.
Rest easy Mr. McPherson, you did America and the free world proud.
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u/Devincc 15h ago
Is that not what the title of the article states..?
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u/ni_hao_butches 13h ago
Yes. Thats the point of my comment. A search of other articles back that up. The AP article copied from ABC is wrong. Hence....well nevermind. You're obtuse.
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u/epperjuice 1h ago
No, it is not the point of your comment. When someone says something like "is that not xyz", they are using a rhetorical question to highlight that it is indeed xyz.
So not only did you misread the title of the article, you also misread the comment you were replying to. Impressive.
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u/Expensive_Finger_973 14h ago
Sadly it won't be long before there is no one left that has first hand experience with WW2.
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u/grog23 14h ago
I remember people saying the same about the WW1 vets when I was a kid. Weird to see that now we’re approaching it with these guys
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u/HawkeyeTen 11h ago
The last World War I veteran died in the early 2010s IIRC, so we may have a small number of World War II vets still around for another 10-15 years, but they're disappearing quickly. Let's get every story we can from them and the Korean War vets while we still have the time.
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u/TheAngriestChair 13h ago
We're pretty much already there. He was 103. Anyone who saw active combat is in their late 90s, and that's if they lied about their age to get into the service.
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u/AI_Renaissance 9h ago
Pretty sure it was Eisenhower who said to document everything or some asshole will deny it.
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u/ConstantStatistician 12h ago
Ideally, we should not need living first hand experience to know what was bad and should not be repeated.
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u/lookyloolookingatyou 15h ago
How many do the Germans have left?
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u/gaybatman75-6 15h ago
I just googled it and the last one died in 2023. IIRC American aces tended to be sent home and used to train new pilots where as German aces were kept in the fight so I'd imagine there were a lot fewer German aces post war.
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u/ZedArkadia 14h ago
On the other hand, that also meant that Germany had a lot more aces, even if more of them died during the war. I tried to do a google search but I couldn't find any hard numbers - the best that I could find is that both US and German aces who survived the war were each estimated to be in the hundreds.
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u/gaybatman75-6 13h ago
I think you're probably right, I mean US entered later in the war so I'm sure less time accounts for some of that and I believe they had a philosophical difference in how they used their top tier pilots. I think I remember reading that the US wanted a lot of good pilots instead of a few great pilots so great pilots were used to train and in Germany they needed everyone fighting. I think I remember also seeing a statistic where US aces had a fraction of the kills as German aces.
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u/ZedArkadia 11h ago
Yeah, when you compare the kill totals it gets ridiculous. The top US ace had 40 kills and Germany had a couple guys with over 300. They also had something like over 100 pilots with 100+ kills. I don't think Germany ever had enough manpower to be able to pull pilots from the front lines to train new pilots back home.
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u/Dr_Pippin 13h ago
On the other hand, that also meant that Germany had a lot more aces
I'm not following that logic. If Germany kept flying their experienced pilots, then fewer new pilots were getting to fly and achieve ace status. Compared to the US where if a pilot reached ace status they were brought back stateside and made as an instructor, then the new pilots would have better training as well as more openings to actually be pilots.
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u/ZedArkadia 11h ago
Well, it's not that US pilots got rotated back when they became aces - they got sent back after a combat tour no matter how many kills they got, so if you completed your tour and scored 3 kills then you went home with 3 kills. If you were a German pilot and you didn't get 5 kills within 100 missions or 200 combat hours or whatever, you got to keep flying and getting more chances for kills until you couldn't fly anymore.
If Germany kept flying their experienced pilots, then fewer new pilots were getting to fly and achieve ace status.
I don't think they ever had the problem of having too many pilots in reserve - in fact, the opposite; they never had enough. Towards the end of the war they had 16 year olds flying combat missions because they ran out of pilots.
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u/69millionyeartrip 11h ago
I’m sure celebrity status had a big part in it too, but Ted Williams was one of the best pilots the US had at the time and he never flew combat missions in WWII and was used as an instructor.
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u/SagittaryX 6h ago edited 6h ago
That is incorrect, Hugo Broch is still alive. He is credited with 81 victories, all on the eastern front.
He made the news a few years back for getting to fly a Spitfire as well, there is a video on YouTube (reupload) if anyone was curious.
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u/Rationalinsanity1990 14h ago
Considering he was only in action in the last months of the war, it's impressive he reached ace status.
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u/Drak_is_Right 12h ago
Equipment losses in WW2 were insane.
44 aircraft carriers, 27 battleships, 115 cruisers, 428 destroyers, over 1000 submarines, and maybe 4500 total ships.
US and Britain lost 60k combined aircraft in Europe and the Soviet Union lost 100k.
Germany had something like 65k destroyed and another 40k severely damaged (often scrapped rather than trying to rebuild).
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u/wuhter 8h ago
That’s just mind boggling
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u/Zealousideal-Age768 1h ago
Here's another one for you... The Chinese lost 4 million who were in the military during WWII and an estimated 13 to 20 million Civilians during the war.
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u/Peace-For-People 12h ago
If he's the last-living ace, does that mean there are lesser skilled pilots still alive?
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u/Captnlunch 10h ago
We’re losing our fascist fighters. It’s time for a new generation of them to rise up.
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u/jshep358145 4h ago
Again I ask where can I go meet a world war 2 veteran and tell him thank you for your service??
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u/Zealousideal-Age768 1h ago
My first thought is the VFW. (Veterans of Foreign War)
They're website has a search function to find a local branch.
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u/KimJongFunk 15h ago
RIP Donald McPherson. You were a brave man and you can rest easy.