At 7:30 a.m. on May 8, 1942, Lieutenant (junior grade) Stanley “Swede” Vejtasa tightened his harness in the front cockpit of a Douglas SBD Dauntless on the flight deck of USS Yorktown. The carrier’s deck vibrated under him as the ship plowed through the gray-green swells of the Coral Sea. Somewhere over the horizon, seventy miles to the northwest, radar operators were tracking a swarm of incoming Japanese aircraft.

Vejtasa was twenty-seven years old. He’d been flying combat for only five months. He had never shot down an enemy plane.

He was about to try it in an airplane that, on paper, had no business fighting fighters at all.

A Slow, Heavy Dive Bomber vs. the Best Fighter in the Pacific

The Douglas SBD Dauntless was built to do one thing really well: dive straight down from altitude, drop a bomb with precision on a ship, and then claw its way back into the sky. It was rugged, stable, and deadly in its intended role.

It was also heavy. Fully loaded, an SBD weighed nearly 11,000 pounds. Its top speed was around 250 miles per hour.

The Japanese Mitsubishi A6M Zero, by contrast, was purpose-built to dogfight. It weighed thousands of pounds less, had a top speed of about 334 miles per hour, and could turn so tightly that, in the hands of an experienced pilot, it could complete a full circle in roughly six seconds. A Dauntless needed nearly twice that time.

In a turning fight, the SBD was doomed. American carrier pilots knew it. They had a word for what Vejtasa looked like he was about to do that morning on Yorktown:

Suicide.

Unfortunately, Yorktown didn’t have the luxury of sticking to the textbook.

The previous day, May 7, American carriers Yorktown and Lexington had launched their strike groups against a Japanese light carrier, Shōhō. Dive bombers and torpedo planes from both ships had found her north of New Guinea and torn her apart. Vejtasa himself had scored a direct hit, dropping a 1,000-pound bomb squarely through her deck.

Now those same American aircraft needed to come back, land, refuel, and rearm.

That meant Yorktown would be vulnerable.

The carriers had only a limited number of true fighters aboard. Yorktown’s fighter squadron flew Grumman F4F Wildcats—tough little planes that could hold their own against Zeros under the right circumstances, but there were only eighteen of them on the ship. Nine Wildcats were already in the air on combat air patrol. The remaining nine were being kept in reserve in case the Japanese found the task force later in the day.

Radar now said they wouldn’t have a “later.” The Japanese were already on their way.

Aircraft from the big Japanese fleet carriers Shōkaku and Zuikaku—sixty-nine planes in all—were coming in fast. They included eighteen Zeros, plus dive bombers and torpedo planes. There simply weren’t enough Wildcats to intercept them all.

Someone had to fill the gap.

A Desperate Idea: Dive Bombers as Interceptors

The solution came from USS Lexington’s captain, Frederick “Ted” Sherman. He’d seen enough torpedo attacks in the first months of the war to know how vulnerable a carrier was when enemy planes came in low and straight, lining up their shots. If you could hit those torpedo bombers before they dropped, you might save the ship.

The SBD Dauntless had two forward-firing .50-caliber machine guns in the wings and a flexible twin-gun mount in the rear cockpit. All that firepower was meant for strafing and self-defense. Sherman suggested using it offensively.

He ordered certain SBD squadrons to fly “anti-torpedo plane patrols”—loitering at low altitude near the carrier, ready to pounce on Japanese torpedo bombers as they approached. In theory, the Dauntlesses would dive out of the sun, rake the slow-moving Kates with .50-caliber fire, and break up their attack runs.

In theory.

No one had ever tried it in combat.

That morning, Yorktown launched eight SBDs from Scouting Squadron 5 for this ad-hoc interceptor mission. Vejtasa led a four-plane section.

Their orders were blunt: orbit low, watch for torpedo planes, shoot them down before they can get within release range.

No one spent much time discussing what they were supposed to do if they ran into Zeros instead.

The Zero’s Edge—and Its Hidden Weakness

The Dauntless pilots knew the odds. Zero pilots had been training for years before Pearl Harbor. Many had already fought over China. Their planes were light, agile, and long-legged. The statistics were brutal: in the first six months of the war, Zeros achieved something like a 12-to-1 kill ratio against Allied aircraft. For every Zero that went down, a dozen American, British, Dutch, or Australian planes were lost.

Scouting Squadron 5 already had its own scars. Earlier in the Coral Sea campaign, they had lost SBDs to antiaircraft fire and Japanese floatplanes over Tulagi. By May 8, their eighteen-plane complement was down to seventeen flyable aircraft.

There was, however, one area where the SBD had an advantage.

Firepower.

The Dauntless’s forward-firing .50-caliber guns packed a punch. The Zero’s armament—twin 7.7 mm machine guns and a pair of 20 mm cannons—was deadly, but the light rifle-caliber guns were designed for tearing up fragile pre-war biplanes, not chewing through armor.

And the Zero had a critical vulnerability that American pilots were just beginning to understand: it was built like a racing plane. To save weight, Japanese designers had left out armor plating around the cockpit and engine. They had not given it self-sealing fuel tanks.

The result was a beautiful, lethal machine that could turn inside anything in the sky—but it couldn’t take a punch.

A short, well-placed burst from .50-caliber guns could rip a Zero apart or set it ablaze. The trick, of course, was surviving long enough to get that burst on target.

Eight Zeros vs. Four Dauntlesses

Around 10:55 a.m., Yorktown’s radar scope lit up with a large incoming formation at about sixty-eight miles. Fighter directors vectored the nine Wildcats already on patrol to intercept.

They made a critical mistake: they placed the Wildcats too low, assuming the Japanese would be coming in at wave-top height with torpedo planes. In reality, the Japanese strike was approaching at around 10,000 feet.

The Wildcats never even saw them.

That left the eight SBDs of Scouting Squadron 5, orbiting at low altitude between the Japanese and the American carriers, as the only thing in the air.

Eight slow, heavy dive bombers against roughly eighteen fighters, thirty-three dive bombers, and eighteen torpedo planes.

Vejtasa saw the enemy first—dark specks emerging from the northwest, growing into a black, buzzing swarm. He counted at least fifty aircraft. Then he saw eight peel away from the formation and angle down toward his little four-plane section.

Eight Zeros, hunting four Dauntlesses.

Japanese pilots must have thought it was going to be easy. Many dive bomber pilots would have agreed.

What they didn’t know was that Stanley Vejtasa had figured out something about his sluggish SBD that wasn’t in any manual.

Turning Into the Attack

Standard advice for a dive bomber or torpedo plane under fighter attack in 1942 was simple: run.

You dropped your nose, headed for the deck, and hoped gravity gave you enough extra speed to reach the protective umbrella of your own ships’ anti-aircraft guns before the enemy fighters could chew you apart.

Turning away from the attacking fighters—trying to flee—made intuitive sense.

It was also, in many cases, fatal.

During training, one of Vejtasa’s commanding officers had drilled a different lesson into his head. When a faster attacker comes in from behind, turning away offers the enemy a perfect, predictable target. Your plane traces a wide, smooth arc. The fighter behind you simply puts his guns a little ahead of your flight path, squeezes the trigger, and lets physics do the rest.

Turning into the attack, on the other hand, throws geometry into chaos.

If you pull hard into the threat, you’re no longer a fleeing target. Your nose swings toward the attacker. Closure rates spike—combined speeds can top 500 miles per hour in a head-on situation. Angles change rapidly. The attacker has only a brief, rapidly shifting shot window before you are either head-on and firing back or colliding.

Most pilots, even experienced ones, struggle to hit a target that’s coming straight at them and jinking at the same time. And most have no desire to trade their own life for a kill.

Now, over the Coral Sea, eight Zeros were diving in. At about 800 yards, they opened fire.

Vejtasa shoved the stick forward and did the opposite of what every instinct screamed for him to do.

He dove right at them.

Then, as the range closed, he yanked the stick over and back, hauling his Dauntless into a tight climbing turn—not away from the lead Zero, but toward it.

The Japanese pilot, expecting a quarry that would try to run, suddenly found the big American dive bomber looming larger in his windscreen, nose swinging toward him. At their combined closing speed there were only seconds to react.

He broke off, pulling up and away to avoid a collision.

The first pass had missed.

Seven more Zeros were dropping in.

Fifteen Minutes in Hell

For the next fifteen minutes, Vejtasa and his rear gunner fought a battle that should have been unwinnable.

The Dauntless was never meant to dogfight, but its design had one virtue that mattered now: it was tough. The pilots sat in front of armor plate. The fuel tanks were self-sealing. Control cables were well protected. It could take hits that would shred a Zero.

Time after time, as a Zero lined up, Vejtasa turned into the attack. The Japanese pilots were used to American bombers breaking away and giving them easy shots. Now, when they committed to a firing pass, the target lunged back up at them.

Sometimes, the Zeros tried to hold their course and trade fire. Sometimes, at the last second, they flinched and broke away to avoid mid-air collisions.

In the back seat, Vejtasa’s gunner swung his twin .30-caliber guns in wide arcs, firing whenever a Zero flashed across his sights. Those light rounds didn’t have the punch of the .50s in the wings, but they forced Japanese pilots to think twice about sitting on the Dauntless’s tail.

Around them, the rest of the Dauntless patrol was being cut to pieces. Vejtasa’s aggressive turning tactic worked against one attacker at a time, but there were eight fighters in the sky and only four SBDs. While he was dealing with one, others picked off his comrades.

Within minutes, half the patrol was gone. Four SBDs went down in flames or broke apart in the air. Some crewmen made it into the water. Others did not.

Vejtasa kept flying.

And he started shooting back.

Three Zeros in a Dive Bomber

Every time he turned into an attack, there was a brief instant when the nose of his Dauntless pointed roughly at a Zero barreling in.

He used those instants.

He kept his bursts short—just a second or less each time—conserving ammunition, knowing every round had to count. The .50-caliber guns in his wings spat heavy slugs across the sky.

The Zero’s strengths—speed and agility—came at a cost. Its cannons carried limited ammo. Its rifle-caliber guns were light. Its lack of armor meant even a few solid hits could be fatal.

On one head-on pass, a Japanese pilot miscalculated, committing just a bit too long in hopes of raking this stubborn American bomber. Vejtasa’s guns opened up. Bullets smashed into the Zero’s engine. It coughed smoke and flame, rolled inverted, and plunged toward the sea.

Kill number one.

Another Zero tried the same tactic. Another short, savage burst of .50-caliber fire. Another fighter tumbled from the sky.

Kill number two.

The third victory was something out of a war movie—except that it happened for real.

Vejtasa and a Zero ended up on a collision course neither pilot seemed willing to give up. The gap shrank. Neither broke.

At what had to be the last possible moment, both men snapped their controls over just enough to avoid a direct, nose-to-nose impact. They flashed past each other so close that some accounts say the Dauntless’s wingtip clipped the Japanese fighter.

Whatever happened in that instant, the Zero lost a wing and spun away, disintegrating as it fell.

Kill number three.

Three Zeros, in a dive bomber not designed to fight fighters at all.

And the battle wasn’t over yet.

Torpedoes in the Water

While Vejtasa and his fellow Dauntless crews fought for their lives, the main Japanese strike force bore down on Lexington and Yorktown. Torpedo bombers—Nakajima B5Ns, known to the Allies as “Kates”—dropped to wave-top level, lining up for their runs. Higher up, dive bombers—Aichi D3A “Vals”—prepared to attack from above.

The whole point of the anti-torpedo patrols had been to hit those Kates before they could release.

But the Kates were already too close.

After finally shaking the Zeros, Vejtasa pointed his battered SBD toward the torpedo planes. His .50-caliber ammo was low. The airplane had taken multiple hits. Bullet holes peppered the wings and fuselage. Control responses felt mushy. Still, the engine was running. The airplane still flew. That was enough.

He dove on the torpedo planes as they streaked toward the carriers. He fired at one, saw pieces fly off, saw it stagger—but the Japanese pilot stayed on course. These men had been trained to attack through anything. They didn’t jink, didn’t break, didn’t try to save themselves.

They had one job: put their torpedoes in the water.

At 11:20 a.m., two torpedoes slammed into Lexington’s port side. The big carrier shook. Compartments flooded. Power faltered. Damage control teams raced to contain the flooding and vent fumes. For a while, it looked as if “Lady Lex” would survive.

Yorktown fared better. Captain Elliott Buckmaster maneuvered his ship skillfully, dodging a forest of white wakes. Eleven torpedoes were launched at his ship. Every single one missed.

But the danger wasn’t over. While Vejtasa and other pilots were focused on the low torpedo planes, Japanese dive bombers were lining up from 18,000 feet.

Thirty-three Vals dove on Yorktown. Anti-aircraft guns filled the sky with black blossoms of shrapnel. Seven Vals were blown apart before they could release. Twenty-six got through.

At 11:27, one 500-pound bomb punched through the carrier’s flight deck and exploded deep inside, killing sixty-six men and touching off fires throughout the interior.

From his cockpit, Vejtasa saw smoke pouring from both carriers as he limped back to Yorktown to land.

When he rolled to a stop on the deck, ground crews swarmed his SBD and whistled. The airplane looked like it had flown through a hailstorm made of lead. Dozens of holes. Chipped prop blades. Frayed control cables. A cracked canopy.

It shouldn’t have been flying. But it had brought him home.

Coral Sea: A Bloody Draw With Hidden Consequences

By the time the smoke cleared, the Battle of the Coral Sea had cost both sides a carrier. Japanese bombs and torpedoes had ultimately doomed Lexington. Despite heroic damage control efforts, gasoline vapors ignited in her bowels, triggering a series of explosions that forced Captain Sherman to order abandon ship. “Lady Lex” rolled and sank that evening, taking 216 men with her.

On the Japanese side, the light carrier Shōhō was on the bottom, thanks in part to Vejtasa’s bomb the day before. More importantly, Shōkaku had taken three serious bomb hits. Her flight deck was a twisted, burning mess. She would spend months in the yard at Kure being rebuilt.

Strategically, Coral Sea was a draw on paper. Tactically, the Japanese could claim some bragging rights: they had sunk a fleet carrier. The U.S. Navy had never done that to them.

But the battle forced a change in Japanese plans. Shōkaku was too damaged to sail. Zuikaku had lost so many planes and pilots that she might as well have been empty. Both carriers would be unavailable for the next major operation on Japan’s calendar: the attack on Midway.

A month later, at Midway, four Japanese carriers went down under American bombs. If Shōkaku and Zuikaku had been there, the outcome might have been very different.

In the ready room of Yorktown after Coral Sea, those strategic considerations were far from anyone’s mind. Vejtasa and the other pilots of Scouting Squadron 5 focused on a simpler tally.

They had launched eight SBDs on anti-torpedo patrol that morning.

Four did not come home.

Half their number, gone.

But one of those who returned had done something no one thought possible: shot down three Zeros in a dive bomber.

Word of Vejtasa’s feat spread quickly through the air group. Command took notice. Within days, orders came through.

Stanley “Swede” Vejtasa was headed to fighters.

From Dive Bombers to Wildcats

By late May 1942, the U.S. carrier force in the Pacific was hanging by a thread.

Lexington was gone. Saratoga had been torpedoed in January and was still in the yard. Yorktown limped back to Pearl Harbor with her Coral Sea damage patched enough to sail, but some assessments said she would need months of work.

In reality, shipyard workers at Pearl banged on her day and night, racing the calendar. The Navy expected another major Japanese offensive soon. They didn’t know where it would come, but they couldn’t afford to have Yorktown stuck in drydock.

In a minor miracle of industrial improvisation, the ship was patched, rearmed, and turned around in seventy-two hours. She steamed out again to join Enterprise and Hornet at Midway.

Meanwhile, the Navy was looking hard at its pool of pilots.

They needed fighter jocks—men who had proven they could survive encounters with Zeros and think creatively in the air. Vejtasa fit the bill perfectly.

He was transferred stateside to Grumman F4F Wildcats and assigned to Fighting Squadron 10, VF-10—the “Grim Reapers”—under Lieutenant Commander James H. “Jimmy” Flatley, Jr.

Flatley was already a rising star in naval aviation. He had just come off Lexington and the Coral Sea battle himself. He knew firsthand what worked and what got you killed against Zeros.

Conventional wisdom at that point held that the Zero was just flat-out superior to the Wildcat: faster, more agile, better climbing. American pilots who tried to dogfight Zeros horizontally got carved up. Early in the war, the unofficial advice had been: “If you see a Zero, run.”

Flatley refused to accept that.

He’d seen the Zero up close. He knew it had weaknesses: no armor, no self-sealing tanks, stiff controls at high speed. The Wildcat, by contrast, was sturdy. It had six .50-caliber guns. It could take a beating and still fight.

Flatley began drilling his squadron relentlessly in tactics that exploited those strengths.

Fight in pairs. Always have a wingman. Don’t get into flat turning contests; instead, attack from above in diving slashing runs. Use altitude as energy. If a Zero latches onto your tail, dive hard. The Japanese fighter’s controls would stiffen. It would struggle to follow. The Wildcat, with its heavy weight, would pick up speed fast and could often pull out and climb again before its pursuer.

In another corner of the Pacific, John “Jimmy” Thach was developing a defensive maneuver that would become famous as the “Thach Weave”—two Wildcats crisscrossing paths so that any Zero that dove on one would be driven into the line of fire of the other.

When Vejtasa arrived at VF-10 in San Diego, he brought his own experience to the mix.

He’d tangled with Zeros in a plane that should have been easy meat and lived to tell about it. His instinct was aggressive. He believed in turning into attacks, in forcing the enemy to react to you instead of vice versa.

He and Flatley pushed each other. They ran mock fights. They tested variations on the Thach Weave. They refined diving attack profiles. They turned the Grim Reapers into one of the most tightly trained, hard-hitting fighter units the Navy had.

By the time VF-10 sailed for combat aboard USS Enterprise in October 1942, the strategic picture in the Pacific had changed dramatically.

Midway had shattered Japan’s offensive capacity. Four carriers—Akagi, Kaga, Sōryū, and Hiryū—were on the bottom. Hundreds of elite pilots and deck crews had been lost. For the first time since Pearl Harbor, Japan’s naval air arm was on the defensive.

But the fight was far from over.

The Road to Santa Cruz

In August 1942, U.S. Marines had landed on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, seizing an unfinished Japanese airfield and turning it into Henderson Field. The strip gave the Allies a base from which to threaten Japanese shipping lanes and push back across the Pacific.

The Japanese understood the danger. They threw everything they could at retaking Guadalcanal—destroyers run at night (the “Tokyo Express”), troop convoys, battleship bombardments, and repeated air raids.

By October, they were ready to make another big push. They assembled a powerful naval force, including the carriers Shōkaku and Zuikaku—the same ships Vejtasa had faced at Coral Sea—plus the newer carriers Jun’yō and Hiyō. Their plan was to smash the American carriers covering Guadalcanal, obliterate Henderson Field, and land enough troops to overrun the Marines.

Opposing them was Task Force 61 under Rear Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, built around Enterprise and Hornet, plus the new battleship South Dakota and a screen of cruisers and destroyers.

VF-10’s Wildcats were now Enterprise’s shield.

The battle that followed would be known as the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands.

Ironically, the day before it began almost ended in disaster due to American mistakes, not Japanese bombs.

A Dangerous Wild Goose Chase

On October 25, 1942, a PBY Catalina flying boat spotted the Japanese carrier force roughly 350 miles northwest of Task Force 61. They were at extreme range but within reach of a strike.

Kinkaid faced a tough choice. If he launched immediately, American planes might catch the Japanese by surprise—but they’d have to find their way back and land after dark, in a storm, on moving decks. Night carrier operations in 1942 were dicey at best.

Kinkaid decided to strike. He ordered Hornet’s air group to launch as the primary attack force, with Enterprise serving as the “duty carrier” holding her fighters back for defense.

Then he changed his mind.

At 2:25 p.m., he ordered Enterprise to launch twelve SBDs on a wide search to get a better fix on the Japanese position. Half an hour later, he reversed course again and sent out the rest of the ship’s air group—including VF-10’s Wildcats—on more search legs.

To the pilots, the search patterns looked wrong—pointed toward empty ocean rather than where contacts had last been reported. Worse, the timing meant they’d be returning after sunset.

Flying over vast stretches of water, often alone or in small groups, with radios restricted and fuel gauges dropping toward empty, they began to realize they might not find their way back.

Vejtasa remembered something from a combat air patrol earlier that day: Enterprise had been leaking oil. A thin slick had trailed behind her as she plowed through the sea.

As darkness fell and aircraft searched frantically for the carrier, he dropped down low to the surface and began scanning for that slick. In the fading light he found it—long, shimmering, black on dark water. He followed it and, like breadcrumbs, it led him toward the carrier.

He was able to guide other planes in, talking them down or giving them bearings as they converged on the ship.

The recovery that night was hairy. Some planes crashed on landing. Others flamed out just as they rolled to a stop, fuel tanks bone dry. A few didn’t make it and ditched in the sea.

But thanks in part to Vejtasa’s quick thinking, Enterprise had enough of her air group aboard to fight the next day.

That next day would demand everything they had.

“Attack. Repeat. Attack.”

At dawn on October 26, scouts from both sides found each other’s fleets almost simultaneously.

At 7:40 a.m., a Japanese search plane reported the American carriers. At 7:50, Enterprise’s radar picked up a large incoming formation from the northwest. The plotting boards in the carrier’s combat information center began to look like someone had spilled black ink on them.

Both sides launched strikes. Both sides knew the other had done the same.

Once again, carrier warfare came down to who could put fighters in the right place at the right time.

VF-10 had eight Wildcats airborne on combat air patrol that morning, with more on deck ready to launch. Vejtasa was among the eight in the air.

The first Japanese wave—fifteen Val dive bombers and a dozen Kate torpedo planes escorted by Zeros, mostly from Shōkaku and Zuikaku—found Hornet first and tore into her around 8:50 a.m. VF-10’s Wildcats did what they could, but fighter direction was chaotic. Radio channels were clogged with excited calls. Multiple enemy groups at different altitudes were bearing down on the task force, and radar operators were overwhelmed.

Still, Vejtasa managed to intercept two dive bombers as they began their runs.

He climbed toward them, closing head-on. At about 12,000 feet he opened fire on the lead Val. His .50-caliber rounds ripped through the engine cowling. The Japanese plane, mortally wounded, kept trying to hold its dive but rolled over and plunged into the sea without releasing its bomb.

The second Val had already committed to its dive on Hornet. Vejtasa rolled inverted and yanked his Wildcat through a hard pull-through, trying to get back on its tail. He was slightly out of phase but close enough to hose a long burst down the attacker’s path. He saw flashes along its fuselage as bullets hit.

Seconds later, a bomb smashed into Hornet’s deck near the island, blowing men into the air and setting planes and fuel on fire. Moments after that, a wounded Val—possibly the one he’d just hit—crashed into the carrier’s stack in a ball of flame, spreading burning fuel across the superstructure.

Hornet was in mortal trouble. Torpedoes slammed into her starboard side. More bombs hit. By 9:15, she was dead in the water, her deck a maze of flames and wreckage.

But there was no time to mourn. Enterprise was next.

Breaking the Torpedo Attack

The second Japanese strike zeroed in on Enterprise. This group included forty-four aircraft, among them twenty Kates loaded with torpedoes.

A well-coordinated torpedo attack is one of the most dangerous threats a carrier can face. Planes come in from multiple directions. The carrier can dodge one spread only to turn right into another. Anti-aircraft fire struggles to hit low-flying torpedo planes zigzagging at fifty feet above the waves.

The best defense is to kill the attackers before they release.

Vejtasa understood that in his bones.

He dropped onto a group of eleven Kates coming in from Enterprise’s port side. He attacked from above and behind, the classic position the flat-winged, high-drag Wildcat was designed to exploit.

At about 400 yards he opened fire. The first Kate he targeted exploded under his guns, trailing smoke and flame as it hit the water. Shrapnel and debris spooked the formation. Pilots broke off, scattering.

Some of them panicked enough to dump their torpedoes harmlessly, jettisoning the heavy weapons so they could maneuver more freely. The careful timing and alignment required for a massed attack began unraveling.

Vejtasa stayed with them. He bounced from one target to the next, taking hits from Japanese rear gunners but trusting the Wildcat’s armor. A second Kate went down. Then a third. Then a fourth. Then a fifth.

Five torpedo bombers in roughly four minutes.

Combined with his two earlier Val kills, that made seven enemy aircraft destroyed in a single mission.

No U.S. Navy pilot had ever done that before. Not at Pearl Harbor. Not at Midway. In fact, no American pilot in any service had downed more enemy planes in one engagement up to that point in the war.

More importantly, that shredded torpedo formation never put its weapons in the water in any coordinated way. Enterprise still took several bomb hits from accompanying dive bombers and near misses that buckled her hull and set fires, but the devastating torpedo spread that might have broken her back never materialized.

She survived.

So did Guadalcanal.

“Greatest Single Combat Fight Record in History”

That evening, after the battered task force withdrew and the crews had time to tally damage and victories, Jimmy Flatley sat down with Vejtasa’s flight log.

In neat handwriting, he wrote a simple assessment of his operations officer’s day:

“Greatest single combat flight record in history.”

Flatley was not a man who handed out praise cheaply. He was also famously stingy with award recommendations. Naval culture at the time viewed medals—particularly the Medal of Honor—with almost superstitious reverence. They were not to be tossed around lightly.

This time, Flatley made an exception.

He began drafting a nomination for Vejtasa to receive the Medal of Honor.

He laid out the facts: seven enemy aircraft destroyed, including five torpedo bombers; the direct role Vejtasa’s actions played in saving Enterprise from a lethal torpedo strike; the broader strategic implications of keeping the last operational fleet carrier in the Pacific afloat at a moment when the Guadalcanal campaign hung by a thread.

He drew comparisons to another famous naval aviator, Lieutenant Edward “Butch” O’Hare, who earlier that year had been awarded the Medal of Honor for shooting down five Japanese bombers threatening USS Lexington.

O’Hare’s feat had rightly captured the American imagination. Flatley argued that Vejtasa’s accomplishment—seven planes in one day under comparable or worse circumstances—deserved the same recognition.

The nomination went up the chain of command to Rear Admiral Thomas Kinkaid.

And that’s where it died.

Politics, Optics, and a Downgraded Medal

The Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands was, on paper, a Japanese victory.

They had sunk Hornet and heavily damaged Enterprise. The United States was left with one battered, barely operable fleet carrier in the entire Pacific.

Kinkaid and other senior commanders knew the strategic picture was more nuanced. Japanese losses—especially in trained pilots—were crippling. Ninety-nine Japanese planes had gone down. Many of those pilots were veterans from Pearl Harbor and earlier campaigns. Japan could not replace them easily.

Still, in late 1942, the mood in Washington and Pearl Harbor was grim. The loss of Hornet so soon after Lexington and Yorktown raised uncomfortable questions. Had U.S. leadership mishandled its limited carrier forces? Were mistakes being made at the flag level?

Kinkaid’s own judgment at Santa Cruz was under quiet scrutiny. His decision the day before the battle to send Enterprise’s air group on that risky, fruitless search still rankled among the pilots. Had Japanese aircraft found the task force during that window, they might have caught one carrier effectively disarmed.

The fighter direction problems during the battle—radios cluttered, CAP fighters mispositioned—were also being examined.

A Medal of Honor recommendation tends to focus attention. Reporters might have dug into why eight Wildcats were left defending two carriers against more than sixty attacking planes. Congressional staffers might have asked why VF-10 had gone into combat exhausted and low on some aircraft because of the previous day’s search.

Some historians believe Kinkaid, consciously or not, decided that this was not the moment to highlight a story that pointed so directly at desperate circumstances and near-disaster.

He downgraded the recommendation.

Instead of the Medal of Honor, Stanley “Swede” Vejtasa received his third Navy Cross.

The citation praised his “extraordinary heroism and conspicuous gallantry” and specifically mentioned his seven confirmed kills and the disruption of the torpedo attack. It did not mention that his commanding officer had originally wanted him to receive the nation’s highest military honor.

Within VF-10, the decision stung. They knew what he had done. They knew how close Enterprise had come to being another smoking hole in the ocean.

Vejtasa himself said little.

He accepted the medal, did his job, and moved on.

A Career After the Shooting Stopped

The war did not end with Santa Cruz. For Vejtasa, though, the dogfights were over not long afterward.

By early 1943, with his combat tour complete and his experience considered too valuable to keep risking, he was rotated stateside. He spent the rest of World War II training new fighter pilots at bases like Naval Air Station Atlantic City.

He taught them everything he’d learned the hard way: how to fight in pairs, how to handle a Wildcat at the edge of its performance envelope, how to attack from above and escape by diving, how to think tactically under pressure.

His final official aerial victory tally stood at ten and a quarter kills—three Zeros at Coral Sea, seven aircraft at Santa Cruz, and a shared kill earlier in the war. By the traditional standard of “five kills makes an ace,” he was an ace twice over.

But Vejtasa’s life did not peak at twenty-seven.

He stayed in the Navy.

Over the next decades he commanded fighter squadrons, served as an air officer aboard USS Essex during the Korean War, attended the Naval War College, and rose steadily through the ranks.

In 1962, now a captain, he took command of USS Constellation—a massive supercarrier nearly five times the displacement of the carriers he’d fought from in 1942. From dive bomber pilot to commanding officer of a floating airbase with eighty jet aircraft on deck: it was a career arc few could have imagined in the smoky chaos over the Coral Sea.

He retired from the Navy in 1970 after thirty-two years of service. His ribbon rack included three Navy Crosses, two Bronze Stars, the Legion of Merit, and numerous campaign and unit awards.

The Medal of Honor was not among them.

Remembering “Swede” Vejtasa

In the decades after the war, Vejtasa rarely spoke at length in public about the Medal of Honor that never was. When journalists or historians asked about it, he tended to steer the conversation toward the men he flew with, the squadron commanders he admired, or the pilots who didn’t make it home.

In 1987 he was inducted into the Carrier Aviation Hall of Fame. In interviews around that time he talked more about James Flatley and the training culture of VF-10 than about his own records.

The full story of the Santa Cruz Medal of Honor recommendation and downgrade only really came into wide view in the 2000s, when researcher and author Ted Edwards began digging into Navy archives for a biography. Edwards traced the paper trail: Flatley’s original nomination, the endorsements, the point where Kinkaid scratched out “Medal of Honor” and substituted “Navy Cross.”

Edwards titled his book Seven at Santa Cruz—a reference to Vejtasa’s seven kills that day.

By the time the book came out, Vejtasa was in his late nineties. He died on January 23, 2013, at age ninety-eight. In accordance with his wishes, his ashes were scattered at sea.

The ocean that had once reflected the burning hulks of Shōhō and Lexington, that had once boiled under the impact of torpedoes and bombs, received him gently this time.

The question of whether he should be awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously still surfaces occasionally in veterans’ circles and online forums. Legally, it’s possible: Congress can waive the normal time limits, and presidents have approved such waivers for overlooked World War II heroism before.

But Stanley “Swede” Vejtasa never lobbied for it. He never demanded reconsideration. He never wrote bitter memoirs about being denied.

In many ways, his own attitude toward the medal mirrors the way he flew.

Do your job. Fight hard. Protect the men around you. Let history sort out the rest.

The Weapon vs. the Warrior

Looking back at Vejtasa’s service, it’s easy to get caught up in the statistics: three Zeros in an SBD at Coral Sea, seven aircraft at Santa Cruz, ten and a quarter kills overall. Those numbers matter. They quantify something that seems almost impossible.

But the deeper lesson in his story isn’t just about combat scores or medals.

It’s about what happens when a person refuses to accept the limitations that everyone else takes for granted.

Every manual in 1942 said that dive bombers and torpedo planes should do one thing when fighters showed up: run for home and hope someone else dealt with the threat. On the morning of May 8, 1942, in the Coral Sea, Vejtasa looked at his situation—four SBDs facing eight Zeros—and decided to do the opposite.

He turned into the attack.

He used an airplane that was slower, heavier, and less agile in almost every respect than its opponent and found the one edge it had: toughness and firepower. He used geometry and nerve to force better machines into bad positions.

And he didn’t just survive. He won.

Later, in a Wildcat at Santa Cruz, he took the same mindset into one of the most lopsided fights of the war: fewer than a dozen American fighters trying to hold off more than sixty attacking Japanese planes. Again, he used what he had—altitude, diving speed, armor, and the simple willingness to close and keep shooting—to punch far above his weight.

Today, we live in a world obsessed with hardware: the newest fighter jet, the latest missile, the biggest carrier. It’s easy to assume the outcome of any confrontation is determined by who has the better gear.

Vejtasa’s story is a reminder that hardware matters—but who’s in the cockpit matters more.

A slow, heavy dive bomber flown boldly can beat a superior fighter. A stubby, outclassed Wildcat can rip the heart out of a torpedo attack that should have sunk a carrier. A pilot who pays attention to an oil slick on the ocean can find his ship in the dark when radar and radios fall short.

The Navy sent Stanley “Swede” Vejtasa into combat in airplanes that many thought were outmatched and expected him to do his best.

He did more than that.

He rewrote the odds.

And in the process, he made sure that ships with names like Yorktown and Enterprise—and the tens of thousands of sailors and Marines depending on them—had a fighting chance to survive, regroup, and eventually turn a desperate defensive war into a long, grinding, victorious advance.

If the Medal of Honor never found its way to his chest, history still remembers what he did.

In the end, that may be the highest kind of honor: when your actions become part of the story a nation tells itself about what courage, skill, and stubborn refusal to quit can look like in the worst of circumstances.