On June 4, 1942, a damaged Zero flipped over in the marsh mud of Akutan Island in the Aleutians, killing pilot Tadayoshi Koga but leaving the aircraft largely intact. That accident handed the Allies the key to defeating the most produced Japanese combat aircraft of World War II. This episode follows the Zero from the near-impossible 1937 Imperial Navy requirements that drove Nakajima out of the competition to designer Jiro Horikoshi's fanatical weight reduction using extra-super-duralumin, a one-piece wing and fuselage, and no armor or self-sealing fuel tanks.

The result was a fighter with a stall speed under 69 miles per hour, a 1,600-mile range, and a 12 to 1 kill ratio in the early Pacific war. But the same fragility that made it agile made it a glass cannon, and Japan could not replace the veteran pilots it lost. American test pilots fl ...