German Aces Mocked the Clumsy ‘Flying Bathtub’ P-47 as Useless — Until One Stubborn Pilot Turned His Jug into a 39-Kill Nightmare That Changed Everything in a Single Brutal Month Over Europe

The first time Lieutenant Eddie “Brick” Carter heard a German pilot laugh at the P-47, he was sitting in a cramped briefing hut in East Anglia, boots on an ammo crate, hands wrapped around a cup of coffee that tasted faintly of tin.

Outside, February rain whipped across the field in sideways sheets. Inside, the room smelled of damp wool, cigarette smoke, and chalk dust. A scratchy radio on the table hissed and popped, picking up fragments of Luftwaffe chatter that the intelligence boys liked to record.

“Turn it up,” someone said.

Sergeant Mooney, their intel NCO, nudged the dial. A clipped German voice came through clearer.

“…diese amerikanische fliegende Badewanne…” the pilot said, and then there was laughter—easy, confident, the kind that said more than the words themselves.

Mooney smirked.

“‘Fliegende Badewanne,’” he translated. “Flying bathtub. He’s talking about the P-47s.”

The room erupted in a low rumble of annoyance. A few pilots laughed it off. Others scowled.

Across from Eddie, Captain Jack “Tex” Harlan—P-51 driver, visiting from the nearby Mustang outfit—let out a chuckle.

“You gotta admit,” Tex said, nudging Eddie’s boot with his own, “they’re not wrong. That big radial of yours looks like it fell off a tractor.”

Eddie’s jaw tightened.

“Funny thing about bathtubs,” he said. “They keep people from drowning.”

Tex grinned. “Sure. Long as you don’t try to race in one.”

The banter rippled outward. Someone in the back muttered, “Here we go,” and someone else said, “Just let ’em have it, Brick.”

But Eddie wasn’t in the mood to let anything go.

“You think your pretty little Mustang would have brought you home last week with half a wing shot off?” he asked. “Mary Ann took twelve hits from those 190s and still hauled me back across the Channel. Your kite would have folded like a cheap lawn chair.”

Tex’s smile thinned.

“At least my ‘pretty little Mustang’ can actually climb above the bombers,” he shot back. “You Jugs waste half your fuel just trying to get up to twenty-five thousand, and by the time you get there, we’ve already chased the bandits off.”

The argument that followed had started countless times in different huts, different fields, but this time it didn’t stay playful. Lines hardened. Voices rose. The argument was suddenly serious and tense, and the room quieted around it.

“You think we’re useless?” Eddie demanded. “Ask the 8th Air Force how useless we were before you boys showed up. Ask the Germans around Rouen what they think of a P-47 coming down on them at five hundred miles an hour spitting eight fifties.”

Tex stood, shrugging into his leather jacket, eyes narrowed.

“I think you’re heavy, slow to climb, and not exactly a ballet dancer,” he said. “I also think the brass will be phasing you out in six months. So maybe enjoy your bathtub while it lasts.”

He swung the door open, and cold wind knifed into the hut.

“See you in the air, Brick,” he said, and stepped out into the rain.

Eddie stared at the door for a moment, then turned his glare on the map board. Colored strings traced routes from their East Anglia field deep into France and Germany.

“Bathtub, huh,” he murmured.

Sergeant Mooney cleared his throat.

“Hey, Lieutenant,” he said carefully. “Those German boys also said something else before the part you heard.”

Eddie looked up. “What?”

Mooney flipped open his notebook.

“They said, ‘Watch the big American fighters in a dive. They come down fast. Don’t follow them too long or you won’t pull out.’”

He shrugged.

“Even when they laugh,” he added, “they’re still afraid of something.”

Eddie drained his coffee, set the cup down with a hard clack, and thought of his Jug, parked outside in the rain with her nose pointed toward a gray sky.

“All right, then,” he said softly. “Let’s give them something real to laugh about.”

---

The aircraft sheet on the wall listed his mount as “P-47D-15, s/n 42-75291.” To everyone else, she was just another Thunderbolt.

To Eddie, she was “Gracie’s Bathtub.”

The crew chief, Corporal Jenkins, claimed he hated the name.

“You’re tempting fate,” Jenkins grumbled, running a rag over the big Pratt & Whitney radial. “Might as well paint a bull’s-eye on her hull and send an engraved invitation to every Jerry in the Luftwaffe.”

“Relax,” Eddie said, sitting on the wing with his flight jacket zipped to the chin. “We’ll paint a bathtub on the nose and confuse everybody. They’ll be too busy laughing to shoot straight.”

Jenkins snorted but couldn’t hide a quick grin.

They’d been together since North Africa, before the group moved to England. Eddie had learned what his Jug could and couldn’t do the hard way: over dusty fields, over the Med, over occupied France. He knew that at altitude she was sluggish compared to a 109 or a 190. He also knew that if he had height and room to dive, almost nothing on two wings could escape her.

The trouble was, lately, they weren’t getting to use those strengths.

The new tactics coming from the top emphasized close escort: staying welded to the bomber formations, barely two hundred yards out, matching speed, turning when they turned. It made sense on paper; it reassured the bomber crews to see fighters right beside them.

It also made for ugly fights.

German pilots learned to come in high and fast, diving through the escort screen, taking shots at the bombers, then climbing away before the heavy P-47s could chase effectively. The Mustangs, with their better climb, started picking up more intercept missions. The whispers grew louder.

“Let the P-47s play ground attack,” someone had said in the mess. “They’re big enough to carry a barn on each wing. Leave the real air fighting to the P-51s.”

Eddie remembered the comment every time he climbed into Gracie’s cockpit.

On March 1st, 1944, the target board read: BERLIN – INDUSTRIAL SECTOR – PRIORITY. The 8th Air Force was about to attempt something it had dreamed about for months: a deep daylight strike on the heart of the Reich.

“Gentlemen,” the group CO, Colonel Brennan, said at the briefing, “this is the big one. The boys in the heavies are going all the way. Our job is to get as many of them there and back as we can. That means sticking close. No cowboy stuff.”

He shot Eddie a look that might as well have had his callsign on it.

Eddie raised his hand.

“Sir,” he said, “respectfully, if we stay glued to the bombers, the 109s are just going to take turns diving through us. We’ll be playing catch-up the whole time.”

Brennan frowned.

“What are you suggesting, Lieutenant?” he asked.

“Loosen the rope,” Eddie said. “Give a couple of flights freedom to roam a thousand, two thousand feet above the formation. Let the Jerries see some Jugs where they don’t expect them.”

The operations officer, a thin major named Collins, shook his head.

“Last time we let you off the leash, Carter,” he said, “you came home with two 190s and a tongue-lashing from a bomber skipper who said you left his tail exposed.”

“And how many of his boys made it home because those 190s didn’t get a second pass?” Eddie snapped back.

He realized too late how sharp his tone had gotten. A hush fell over the table. Eyes darted between him and the major.

Collins’ face went cold.

“This is not about your personal scorecard,” he said. “It’s about discipline.”

“Discipline without flexibility is a good way to get everyone killed,” Eddie replied, before he could stop himself.

There it was again—that hard edge, that line crossed. The room tightened like a drawn bow. The CO’s voice cut in before the argument could slide further.

“Enough,” Colonel Brennan said. “Collins, you’ll keep the main body close. Carter…”

He sighed.

“Take Blue Flight high,” Brennan said finally. “Two, maybe three thousand feet above the lead box. You see a chance to bounce a formation before they hit the bombers, you take it. But you do not chase anything halfway to Russia. Understood?”

Eddie nodded, a jolt of adrenaline firing through him.

“Understood, sir.”

He knew the colonel had just stuck his neck out for him. Now he had to deliver.

---

They crossed the Dutch coast in ragged layers of cloud, the bomber stream stretching out ahead like an endless silver highway.

“Blue Flight, check in,” Eddie said over the radio.

“Blue Two, loud and clear,” came Lieutenant Marky’s voice.

“Blue Three, here,” another chimed in.

“Blue Four, slightly terrified but otherwise functional,” a third added, earning a quick chuckle.

Eddie rolled Gracie’s Bathtub a few degrees and eased her upward. The engine’s song deepened; the air thinned. Below, the B-17s and B-24s lumbered onward, escorts tucked in like ducklings.

“Keep your eyes peeled,” he said. “This is where they like to say hello.”

At first, the sky was deceptively empty. Just the contrails of their own formation, white scars against blue. Then, a glint.

“Blue Leader, tally-ho!” Marky shouted. “Three o’clock high, ten plus, looks like 109s.”

Eddie saw them: a loose finger-four of Bf 109s sliding in from above and to the right, nose toward the lead bomber box. They’d come in at a shallow angle, pick up speed, and slash.

Not today, he thought.

“Blue Flight, break right and climb,” he ordered. “We’re going to meet them halfway.”

They cut across the path of the incoming Germans like a hand across a chalkboard. At first, the enemy pilots didn’t seem to notice. Then one of them did; he waggled his wings in what might have been a warning.

Too late.

Eddie rolled Gracie inverted and dropped the nose. Gravity grabbed the big Jug like an old friend. The airspeed needle leaped past 350, then 380. The 109 he’d picked as his target swelled in his windscreen, the cross on its wing clear.

“Easy, easy,” he murmured. “Wait for the whites of his… rivets.”

He squeezed the trigger.

The P-47 shuddered as eight .50-caliber machine guns roared to life, pouring a river of lead across the sky. Tracers reached out and stitched across the 109’s wing root and fuselage. Pieces flew. The German fighter twitched, lost lift, and rolled into a smoking spiral.

“One,” Eddie said, not with triumph, but with grim focus. “Blue Two, take the high man. Three and Four, drag them away from the bombers.”

For the next three minutes, the sky was a whirl of arcs and streaks. Eddie dove, fired, climbed, rolled, always mindful of his energy. Twice, he saw tracers flash past his canopy from behind and broke hard, feeling the G-forces crush him into the seat.

The Jug took hits. A round punched through the right wing, another through the tail. Jenkins would have kittens when he saw the holes.

But she kept flying.

By the time the 109s broke off, leaving a trail of smoke and at least three chutes blooming behind them, the lead bomber box was untouched.

“Blue Flight, status?” Eddie called.

“Blue Two, one confirmed, one probable,” Marky replied, breathing hard.

“Blue Three, clear,” came another voice. “Little scorched, still pretty.”

“Blue Four, I think I need new underwear, but I’m okay,” the last pilot joked weakly.

Eddie looked down at the bomber formation.

“Colonel’s not going to yell at you this time,” Marky said. “Nice work, Brick.”

“Don’t say ‘this time’ yet,” Eddie replied. “We’ve still got to get all the way to Berlin and back.”

They did. Barely.

That day, Eddie was credited with three victories. Combined with the one he’d claimed the week before, it gave him four for the month.

No one yet knew that March would see the number climb to thirty-nine.

---

The brutal rhythm settled in quickly: brief, climb, escort, fight, land, debrief, write letters. The weather improved. The mission tempo increased. The Luftwaffe, stung, began committing more fighters to defensive operations.

For Eddie, it meant opportunity and danger in equal measure.

On March 5th, his flight bounced a cluster of Fw 190s forming up for an attack near Brunswick. Two went down under his guns, their crosses spinning into cloud.

On the 8th, over Kassel, he took advantage of a momentary gap in the escort screen to dive on a gaggle of 109s coming in from the sun. Three bursts, three shadows falling away.

On the 13th, they were tasked with top cover over the Ruhr, and he found himself above a swirling melee where Mustangs and Messerschmitts tangled like angry hornets. A P-51 was on the tail of a 109 when two more Germans dropped in behind the Mustang.

“If that pretty little bird buys it,” Eddie muttered, “Tex will never let me hear the end of it.”

He rolled in, cut across the fight, and sent one of the trailing 109s trailing smoke instead. The Mustang pilot—call sign “Texaco,” but Eddie knew who it really was—pulled up and away.

Later, in the mess, Tex flopped into the chair across from him, tray clattering.

“Heard I owe my skin to a flying bathtub today,” he said.

Eddie shrugged, poking at his powdered eggs.

“I figured if anyone’s allowed to shoot you down, it ought to be me,” he said.

Tex laughed, for real this time.

“Fair enough,” he said. “For what it’s worth, those Jerries aren’t laughing anymore. Especially the ones who see you coming from above.”

The number on the board grew.

Eight. Fourteen. Twenty-one.

The crew chiefs joked about needing a bigger side panel to paint the little victory symbols. Jenkins scrounged yellow paint from somewhere and started making tidy rows of small crosses beneath Gracie’s canopy.

“Gonna run out of fuselage,” he grumbled, even as he carefully added another.

Not everyone was pleased.

In the ops tent, Major Collins grew more sour with each claim.

“He’s reckless,” Collins told Colonel Brennan one evening, after a particularly costly mission. “He gets results, sure. But men are starting to think they have to match him. That’s how you lose control of a squadron.”

Brennan rubbed his temples.

“I’d rather lose control of a scoreboard than of the air over my bombers,” the colonel said. “Carter’s aggressive, but he’s not stupid.”

“Not yet,” Collins said. “But the higher his score gets, the more he thinks he’s untouchable.”

Brennan thought of Eddie’s face—young, lined with exhaustion, eyes older than his twenty-three years.

“No one is untouchable up there,” the colonel said quietly.

He was right.

On March 18th, returning from a mission over Munich, Eddie tangled with a formation of mixed 109s and 190s near Frankfurt. He downed one, then another, then found himself low on ammo and fuel with two bandits still trying to chew his tail.

A burst from a 190 walked up his right wing, shredding a flap and punching holes in a fuel line. Gasoline sprayed; a trail of vapor streamed behind him.

“Gracie, you hold together for me,” he muttered, nursing the Jug toward the Channel, hand light on the stick.

She did.

Jenkins counted a dozen new holes in the skin that night.

“You keep bringing her back like this,” the crew chief warned, “and one of these days she’s going to decide she’s had enough of you.”

Eddie patted the cowl.

“She loves me,” he said. “We have a complicated relationship.”

He didn’t say that he’d sat awake in his bunk that night, staring at the slats above him, seeing over and over the tracers coming past his canopy. The chute that hadn’t opened for one of his squadron-mates. The panic that clawed at the edges of his mind whenever he thought about not hearing his crew chief’s grumbling voice again.

Thirty.

The word hung around the field like a ghost.

Thirty enemy fighters destroyed in one month.

It was the kind of number that used to belong in newspapers about aces over the Pacific or in stories from another war. And yet, each mark on Gracie’s fuselage had a date, a film reel, a witness.

The laugh in the hut that day—“flying bathtub”—seemed very far away now.

---

They called March 23rd “Black Thursday” in the group for reasons that had nothing to do with Eddie’s score.

The weather was bad. The target—an aircraft factory near Brunswick—was heavily defended. Flak pounded the bomber stream. The Luftwaffe threw up everything it could scramble.

Eddie’s flight took off into a low, gray ceiling that felt like the inside of a coffin. They climbed through it, emerging above the clouds into thin, cold sunlight.

“All right, boys,” he said. “Keep it tight until we see how ugly this gets.”

It got ugly fast.

A swarm of 190s hit the lead bomber boxes just as they reached IP. Then, as the Jugs and ’Stangs dove to intercept, another wave of 109s dropped in from above.

“Blue Leader, we’ve got bandits everywhere!” Marky shouted. “What’s the play?”

Eddie saw it all in a flash: the tracers, the scattered formation, the opportunity and the risk.

“We go high,” he said. “We always go high.”

He pulled Gracie’s nose up, feeling the familiar drag as the Jug fought gravity. The 109s above were focused downward. They didn’t see the four P-47s angling into position above and behind them.

They did when Eddie rolled over and dived.

He lined up the trailing pair first, mashing the trigger in three-second bursts. The first 109’s canopy flashed as bullets tore through it; the second broke hard, caught a wingful of tracers, and snapped into a spin.

“Two,” Eddie said. “Blue Two, watch your six!”

Marky jinked left just as a 190 blazed past his tail.

The fight devolved into chaos. At one point, Eddie found himself and a 109 locked in a deadly vertical scissors, each trying to out-climb the other. The Jug wasn’t agile in a flat turn, but she could point her nose up and pour on the coal.

The German blinked first, rolling out. Eddie followed, firing a snapshot that clipped the 109’s tail and sent it wobbling.

“Thirty-five,” he muttered, almost disbelieving. “Come on, Gracie. Just a little more.”

By the time the last bandit disengaged, low on fuel or nerves, Eddie’s ammo counters read near zero. He had marks for four more enemy fighters on his mental tally.

Back on the ground, the gun camera footage confirmed three, with one probable.

Thirty-eight.

“Another day like that,” Tex said that night, shaking his head as they sat on overturned crates outside the huts, “and you’re going to have to start using the tail to paint your little crosses.”

Eddie didn’t laugh.

“These aren’t trophies,” he said quietly. “They’re… moments when I didn’t die. When someone else did.”

Tex looked at him, understanding.

“We don’t get to choose everything about this,” the Mustang pilot said. “But we do get to choose what we believe about it. Me, I believe that every one of those little marks is a bomber crew that got past something instead of into it.”

Eddie stared into the dark.

“Maybe,” he said.

He wasn’t sure if he believed it, or if he needed to.

---

On March 29th, the last mission of the month, the weather was deceptively beautiful. Clear blue from horizon to horizon, a cold sun above, the English countryside green and peaceful below.

The target was again deep: a ball-bearing plant near Schweinfurt, the kind of place the enemy couldn’t afford to lose.

“Blue Flight, same deal,” Colonel Brennan said at the briefing. “You take top cover. The Mustangs and Lightnings will sweep ahead. The rest of us stay close to the boxes. We’re making them fight for every mile.”

Eddie nodded, feeling the familiar thrum of nerves settle into his bones.

In the air, it was almost possible to forget what they were flying into. The sky was so clean it felt wrong.

Until it wasn’t.

They picked up the first bandits near the border. A handful of 190s probed, got chased off.

Then, near the target, it happened: a radio call, urgent and strained.

“Blue Leader, this is Red Flight,” came a voice. “We’ve got a gaggle of bandits forming at one o’clock, high. Looks like twenty plus. Maybe more.”

Eddie craned his neck. There they were: a loose cloud of fighters beyond the nose of the leading bomber box, too far to make out type but definitely not friendly. They were positioning for a head-on pass, the deadliest kind.

“Red Flight, keep them honest,” Eddie said. “Blue Flight, we’re going to fall on them from above. Push it.”

He shoved the throttle forward. Gracie roared, climbing into thinner air. The big Jug shuddered as she approached her limits.

“Come on, girl,” he whispered. “One more time.”

They arced over the top, sun at their backs.

From up here, he could finally see them clearly: mostly Bf 109s with a few 190s sprinkled in, sliding into attack lines.

They never saw the Jugs coming.

“Now,” Eddie said.

Four P-47s dropped like stones.

The attack was short, violent in that strange, detached way air combat could be. Eddie raked across the rear elements first, shooting until his guns ran dry. One German fighter exploded into pieces; another spun away trailing smoke. The formation broke apart as the remaining bandits scattered, their neat lines collapsing into a messy scramble.

By the time they regrouped, the bombers had passed the critical zone. Their head-on shot had been spoiled.

Eddie pulled up, feeling his heart pounding. His ammo counters read zero. His fuel was lower than he liked.

“Blue Flight, report,” he said.

“Blue Two, Winchester on ammo,” Marky replied. “Bird still flies.”

“Blue Three, low fuel, no joy on more bandits,” the next voice said.

“Blue Four, I think I just aged ten years,” the last pilot added, voice shaky.

They turned for home.

Later, on the ground, Jenkins met Eddie at the hardstand, arms crossed.

“Don’t know why I bother patching her up,” the crew chief said, nodding at the new holes that peppered Gracie’s wings. “You’re just going to go out and let people shoot at her again tomorrow.”

“It’s mutual,” Eddie said, patting the fuselage. “We keep each other honest.”

In the debrief, the intel officer flipped through the gun camera film.

“I make that one, maybe two,” he said, marking his sheet. “That brings you to…”

He stopped.

“Thirty-nine,” he finished, looking up. “In one month.”

The room went quiet. Even Major Collins didn’t have anything to say for a moment.

Colonel Brennan cleared his throat.

“Well,” he said, “I suppose the Germans will have to find a new nickname for the Jug.”

From the back, someone muttered, “How about ‘nightmare’?”

There were chuckles, half relief, half awe.

Eddie just sat, suddenly very tired.

Thirty-nine.

It didn’t feel like a triumph. It felt like weight.

“You all right, Brick?” Tex asked later, when they were alone.

Eddie thought of the German voices on the radio, laughing about the “flying bathtub.” He thought of the same pilots, or pilots like them, looking over their shoulders now whenever they saw a bulky silhouette above them.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “It’s a strange thing to be good at.”

Tex nodded.

“Maybe,” he said. “But you’re good at it in a way that keeps other people breathing. That counts for something.”

---

Months later, when the front lines had moved east and the Luftwaffe was a shadow of its former self, Eddie found himself standing in front of Gracie’s Bathtub with a clipboard, making notations.

Her paint was faded. The little crosses on her fuselage—thirty-nine of them—looked almost comical on the squat, battered airframe.

A new pilot, straight from stateside training, walked up and whistled low.

“This the famous Jug?” he asked. “The one they talk about in the mess? Thirty-nine bandits in a month? Man, she’s ugly.”

Eddie smiled, a real, easy smile this time.

“She’s beautiful where it counts,” he said. “Up there, with gravity on her side.”

The kid touched the skin of the wing, lightly, as if he were expecting a shock.

“I heard the German pilots used to call her a flying bathtub,” the rookie said. “That true?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “At first.”

“What do they call her now?” the kid asked.

Eddie looked up at the sky.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I like to think they call her ‘sir.’”

The rookie laughed.

Behind them, Jenkins hollered something about getting away from his airplane with those greasy hands. The war, though not over, felt different now. The edge of constant terror had dulled, replaced by bone-deep fatigue and a cautious kind of hope.

Eddie walked away from the Jug, running his fingers once along her flanks.

He thought again of that hut, that rainy February day, the radio crackling with contempt from a voice twenty thousand feet above some other corner of Europe.

Useless, they’d said.

A bathtub.

He didn’t hate the nickname anymore.

Bathtubs, after all, were where you got clean. Where you washed off the dirt of whatever you’d been through. Where you could sit, quiet, and let your muscles remember what it felt like not to be clenched.

Maybe, when this was all over, he’d buy a house with a decent tub.

For now, he had a Jug.

She had thirty-nine little marks on her side from one month that had felt like a year. Those marks weren’t about pride, not really. They were reminders.

That when people laughed at something they didn’t understand, sometimes it was because they hadn’t yet seen what that thing could do under pressure.

And that sometimes, in a war full of sleek, celebrated designs, the machine that looked like it didn’t belong was the one that quietly kept everything else afloat.

Eddie squared his shoulders, tucked the clipboard under his arm, and headed for the briefing hut.

There would be another mission. Another briefing. More arguments about tactics and aircraft and who should be doing what.

But he knew one thing for certain.

No one in that room would dare call the P-47 “useless” again.