Every Major WW2 Fighter Plane Ranked — Overrated vs Ruthless

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:09]History has been lying to you about some of the most famous fighter planes of World War II. Not about the facts, about the labels. We've spent 80 years calling certain aircraft legends and others footnotes, but overrated and ruthless have nothing to do with speed, nothing to do with looks. They come down to one brutal question. Did this plane actually do what people said it did? Today, we're setting the record straight. Some names on this list you've never heard celebrated the way they deserve. Others, the ones on the posters, in the movies, in the museum gift shops, are about to have a harder day and the plane that sits at number 10, it isn't here because it failed. It's here because history never gave it the name it earned. Number 10, Hawker Hurricane, United Kingdom.

[00:00:58]Summer, 1940. Britain is standing at the edge and the plane that saved it isn't the one on the posters. Here's what the posters leave out. The Hurricane accounted for roughly 55% of British aerial victories during the Battle of Britain, more than the Spitfire. The RAF knew exactly what it was doing. Send the Spitfires after the Messerschmitt Bf 109 escorts and send the Hurricanes after the bombers, >> [music] >> the Heinkel He 111s, the Dornier Do 17s, the formations leveling London. The Hurricane tore through them, but it had limits. It couldn't outrun fabric-covered fuselage, slower than the Bf 109.

[00:01:39]By 1941, it was already being phased out. The Hurricane wasn't a legend, it was the infantry of the sky, doing brutal, unglamorous work while someone else took the credit. It sits at number 10, not because it failed, because the sky doesn't wait and the Hurricane got old. If the Hurricane was forgotten for being too humble, the next plane was underestimated for something else entirely. [music] It was born on the wrong front. Number nine, Messerschmitt Bf 109, Germany.

[00:02:11]Erich Hartmann, 352 confirmed kills. A number that sounds like a misprint, [music] and he did it almost entirely in the cockpit of a Bf 109. Over 34,000 were built, more than any fighter in history. It flew every front Germany touched, from Spain in 1936 to the last days of Berlin in 1945. Fast, climbed hard, hit with a 20-mm cannon, constantly upgraded, but here's what the legend buries. The undercarriage was dangerously narrow. Pilots called it a ground looper. It would veer and flip on takeoff and landing. The cockpit was cramped. The canopy was difficult to jettison in an emergency, and the range was so short that over Britain, Bf 109 pilots had roughly 10 minutes of combat time over London before turning back. 10 minutes. That cost Germany the Battle of Britain. By 1944, the P-51 Mustang and the Spitfire Mark XIV had left it behind completely. The Bf 109 was great because of its pilots and its numbers, not because of what it was. That's overrated. If the Bf 109 is the myth that got too big, our next plane is the mystery that was never decoded properly.

[00:03:25]Number eight, Lockheed P-38 Lightning, United States.

[00:03:31]Look at a photograph of the P-38, and you'll do a double take. Twin booms, twin engines, the pilot suspended in a central pod like something out of science fiction. Lockheed's answer to a problem nobody thought was solvable. The credentials are real. The only American fighter in continuous production from the first day of of war to the last. In 1943, P-38s intercepted and shot down the transport carrying Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of Pearl Harbor.

[00:04:00]After American code breakers cracked Japanese communications, America's two highest scoring aces, Richard Bong with 40 kills and Thomas McGuire with 38.

[00:04:09]Both flew P-38s, both in the Pacific. In Europe, the story changes. At 26,000 feet over Germany in winter, the cockpit heating failed. Pilots came back with frostbite. In steep dives, compressibility made the controls go nearly rigid. Lockheed only partially solved it. Same airplane, two completely different fates. Ruthless where it fit, overrated where it didn't. While the P-38 was limited by geography, our next plane was limited by something more dangerous. The world didn't know it existed. Number seven, Yakovlev Yak-3, Soviet Union.

[00:04:48]The Eastern Front, the largest, bloodiest air [music] war in human history. And somewhere in that inferno, there was a fighter that Luftwaffe pilots were officially ordered to avoid engaging below 16,000 [music] feet.

[00:05:00]Think about that order for a moment.

[00:05:02]Eight out of every 10 air battles [music] the Luftwaffe ever fought happened on the Eastern Front. Western textbooks give it a paragraph, maybe two. The Yak-3 entered service in 1944.

[00:05:14]Small, light, brutally fast at low and medium altitude. Its design philosophy was ruthless simplicity. Strip out everything unnecessary. Optimize everything that remains for close-in dog fighting. The French Normandy-Niemen Squadron, French pilots fighting alongside the Soviets, were offered their choice of any aircraft. They chose the Yak-3 over the Spitfire, over the P-51. Ivan Kozhedub, the leading Allied ace of the entire war with 64 kills, flew Soviet fighters including the Yak series. The Luftwaffe called them nightmares.

[00:05:49]>> [music] >> Its weakness was range and high-altitude performance. That's why you've never heard of it. That's not the plane's fault. If the Yak 3 is the story nobody told, our next plane is the story everybody knows and almost everybody gets wrong. Number six, Focke-Wulf FW 190, Germany.

[00:06:08]September 1941, RAF pilots flying Spitfire Mark V's over the English Channel start encountering something they've never seen. A radial engine fighter, wide, brutish-looking that is faster, rolls better, and hits harder than anything they're flying. The RAF briefly suspected the Germans had reverse engineered a captured Spitfire.

[00:06:32]They hadn't. Designer Kurt Tank had simply built something better. The FW 190's roll rate was exceptional. A pilot could flip into a diving escape before a pursuer could react. The undercarriage was wide, which meant it actually landed safely, unlike the treacherous Bf 109.

[00:06:50]Some variants carried four 20-mm cannons plus two machine guns. It flew equally well as a fighter, a ground-attack aircraft, and a fighter-bomber. Here's the measure of how good it was. The FW 190 forced the RAF to rush the Spitfire Mark IX into service ahead of schedule.

[00:07:08]A plane that makes its enemies accelerate their own evolution is a dangerous plane. Its weakness was high altitude.

[00:07:16]The Luftwaffe eventually developed the Fw 190D with an inline engine [music] to fix it. Not glamorous, genuinely deadly.

[00:07:24]The Fw 190 broke an order. Our next plane broke [music] an entire myth of invincibility. Number five, Mitsubishi A6M [music] Zero, Japan.

[00:07:37]In 1940, Allied intelligence officers read the reports on the Zero and refused to believe them. A Japanese fighter that could outrun, outturn, and outrange everything the Allies had? Impossible.

[00:07:49]They were wrong. And that arrogance cost thousands of lives. At its peak, the Zero was terrifying. Range over 1,600 miles, double most opponents, two 20-mm cannons, two 7.7-mm machine guns. In a turning fight at low or medium speed, nothing could touch it. Designer Jiro Horikoshi didn't try to make everything perfect.

[00:08:12]He optimized the whole. Early kill ratios approached 12 to 1. The trade was fatal. No armor behind the pilot, no self-sealing fuel tanks. One good burst, the Zero [music] burned. Then came 1943.

[00:08:26]Allied pilots stopped turning with it.

[00:08:28]John Thach's weave tactic turned the Zero from hunter to hunted. The F6F Hellcat and F4U Corsair arrived. Built specifically to kill it, Japan's veteran pilots died and weren't replaced. By 1945, the Zero was being flown into Allied ships as a kamikaze weapon.

[00:08:46]Ruthless in the right hands in a short war, overrated when the war became long, the Zero teaches us that reputation can kill. Our next plane teaches the opposite, that ugly is sometimes the only thing standing between you and the ground. Number four, Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, United States.

[00:09:04]First time pilots climbed into a P-47, they felt like they were sitting inside a barrel. Over 17,500 pounds fully loaded. The heaviest single-engine fighter of the war, it didn't look like a fighter. It looked like a flying water tank. Then it went to war. P-47s came back with entire cylinders shot away and the Pratt & Whitney R-2800 still running. Hydraulics gone, half a wing missing, gear destroyed, still landed. The airframe absorbed punishment that would have vaporized anything else. At high altitude, where the turbo supercharged engine finally opened up, it was among the fastest things in the sky. Its early weakness was range. Bomber crews called the coverage gap the death zone, but once drop tanks extended [music] its reach, and commanders realized it could carry bombs, rockets, and 8.50 caliber Browning machine guns. 1 second of fire, 120 rounds. The Thunderbolt [music] became the most feared ground attack weapon in Europe. Convoys, rail lines, fuel depots, gone. Nobody wrote poetry about the P-47. It didn't need poetry.

[00:10:13]It had results. The P-47 is beautiful because it never needed to be. Our next plane is the opposite, beautiful by design and deadly by the same measure.

[00:10:24]Number three, Supermarine Spitfire, United Kingdom. Reginald Mitchell drew the Spitfire while he was dying of cancer. He knew he wouldn't live to see it fight. He didn't compromise a single detail anyway. Mitchell died in 1937.

[00:10:38]The Spitfire fired its first shot in anger in 1940. Those elliptical wings weren't beautiful by accident. They were the engineering solution to optimizing lift and drag [music] simultaneously, so difficult and expensive to manufacture that Supermarine nearly couldn't produce them fast enough. Summer 1940, the Spitfire and Hurricane together stopped the Luftwaffe from taking the skies over England. Without the Spitfire holding off the BF 109s escorts, the Hurricane couldn't have done its work alone. Then the Spitfire kept evolving, 24 major variants. The Mark I flew with 1,030 horsepower. The Mark 24 finished with 2,035, nearly double the power, same soul.

[00:11:21]Still competitive when the war ended, which no aircraft designed in 1936 had any right to be. Pilots didn't say it was fast. They said it felt like part of their body."

[00:11:32]>> [music] >> That's not overrated. That's just true.

[00:11:34]Most people just don't know why. The Spitfire saved a nation. Number two, saved a campaign. Number one, saved the war itself. Number two, Vought F4U Corsair, United States.

[00:11:51]The Japanese called it whistling death.

[00:11:53]The sound of those inverted gull wings cutting through Pacific air carried a specific, recognizable frequency.

[00:12:00]Japanese pilots who heard it knew what was coming. That nickname was not a compliment. It was a warning. Here's the story nobody tells. The US Navy rejected the Corsair for carrier operations. The long nose blocked the pilot's view on approach. The landing gear bounced. It was dangerous and difficult. The Navy handed it to the Marines who flew it from land bases instead. Then the British received Corsairs under Lend-Lease and did something America couldn't. [music] They figured out how to land it safely on a carrier deck by changing the approach angle curved instead of straight. America learned the fix from its own ally. In Marine hands, the Corsair achieved an 11 to 1 kill ratio across the Pacific. Then the war ended and the Corsair kept flying.

[00:12:45]Korea. Piston fighters against MiG 15 jets. Rejected, doubted, handed off, then became one of the greatest fighters ever built. The Corsair proves reputation isn't a prerequisite for greatness. Number one, proves it in a way that cost even more to learn. Number one, [music] North American P-51 Mustang, United States.

[00:13:09]Fall, 1943.

[00:13:12]The American daylight bombing campaign over Germany is collapsing quietly.

[00:13:16]August 17th, Schweinfurt-Regensburg, 60 B-17s gone in a single day. October 14th, Black Thursday, 77 more. Over 600 American airmen, the loss rate was mathematically [music] unsurvivable. The problem was simple and unsolvable. No fighter could escort bombers to Berlin and back, the P-47 ran out of fuel, the P-38 ran out of fuel.

[00:13:40]The bombers flew alone. The Luftwaffe was waiting. Then, came the Mustang.

[00:13:46]Designed to a British specification in 1940, built in roughly 117 days, its original Allison engine was adequate low, useless high. In 1942, RAF test pilot Ronald Harker suggested pairing the airframe with the Rolls-Royce Merlin. Everything changed. Suddenly, one fighter combined four things.

[00:14:06][music] Nothing else had simultaneously.

[00:14:09]Range over 1,600 miles with drop tanks, speed of 437 mph, exceptional high-altitude performance, mass production, over 15,000 built December 1943.

[00:14:23]Mustangs appeared over Berlin. German pilots didn't believe what they were seeing. Bomber loss rates fell from 9.1% in October 1943 to 3.5% by February 1944.

[00:14:36]The Luftwaffe didn't lose one battle. It was bled to nothing. Adolf Galland, Germany's greatest fighter ace, was asked after the war when he knew Germany had lost the air war. His answer, "When I saw Mustangs over Berlin." The Spitfire saved a nation. The Zero owned an ocean for 6 months. The Corsair became a legend despite being rejected.

[00:14:56]The Mustang did what nothing else could, broke the Luftwaffe, and opened the skies of Europe. Not the fastest, not the most beautiful, the most decisive.

[00:15:05]So, what does all of this actually mean?

[00:15:07]So, what actually separates ruthless from overrated? Not speed, not firepower, not beauty. It's the gap between reputation and reality.

[00:15:17]Overrated means the legend exceeds the machine. Ruthless means the machine exceeds the legend. Some aircraft didn't make this list. The Grumman F6F Hellcat, effective, genuinely deadly, but built on a myth. The story that the crashed Akutan Zero redesigned it isn't true.

[00:15:34]The Grumman F7F Tigercat F4F Wildcat held the line against the Zero before anything better arrived. The Nakajima Ki-84 Hayate gave Japan a world-class fighter too late to matter. Every one of them deserves a longer conversation. Is this list arguable? Absolutely. That's the point. History stays alive because we keep arguing about it. These planes flew through a world on fire. We look back and rank them, but the men in those cockpits had no time for rankings. They had time to fly and to hope their plane wasn't the one wearing the wrong label.