As I’ve long maintained, the Supermarine Spitfire won the Battle of Britain, certainly, and fair enough; credit where due. But if it can be fairly said of any one plane—be it fighter, bomber, pursuit, escort, etc—it was North American Aviation’s P51 Mustang that won the war.

Tommy Hitchcock, one of America’s most renowned polo players and the youngest American to win a pilot’s commission during the First World War, has become the archetype of the potency of individual human achievement.

Born on Feb. 11, 1900, in Aiken, South Carolina, the soft-spoken Hitchcock rose to prominence for his aggressive, hard charging ways during polo matches. His marriage to a Mellon family heiress in 1928 only helped to cement his celebrity status.

Actor David Bruce called Hitchcock the “only perfect man he had ever met,” while F. Scott Fitzgerald modeled two characters after him — writing that the athlete-turned successful businessman was “high in my pantheon of heroes.”

During World War I, the teenaged Hitchcock downed two German planes — for which he was awarded the Croix de Guerre — before being shot down inside German territory on March 6, 1918.

Badly wounded, Hitchcock spent several months recuperating inside a German POW camp before, according to author Lynn Olson’s account in “Citizens of London,” the 18-year-old pilot, who was in transit to another camp, “stole a map from a sleeping guard and leaped from the train. Escaping detection, he hiked nearly a hundred miles to neutral Switzerland.”

Upon America’s entry into the Second World War, the 41-year-old volunteered his services as a fighter pilot but was turned down personally by Gen. Hap Arnold, chief of staff of the U.S. Army Air Forces, for being above the flying age.

Frustrated, the well-connected Hitchcock turned to his old friend John Gilbert Winant, who was, at that time, the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain. Winant, according to Olson, suggested that the polo player-turned-fighter pilot-turned investment banker come to London as assistant U.S. military attaché to act as a liaison between the Eighth Air Force and the Royal Air Force’s Fighter command.

Hitchcock accepted the job on the spot.

Conceived by a German émigré who had once designed Messerschmitt fighters before fleeing to America, the P-51 — built by California’s North American Aviation Co. — was initially planned as an RAF low-level tactical fighter-bomber.

Hitchcock was stunned. The performance of the P-51, when fitted with a British Merlin engine, could “go as fast and as far as the bombers without losing its fighting characteristics,” historian Donald Miller wrote. It was, he noted, “the plane the Bomber Mafia had claimed was impossible to build.”

Despite this, Hitchcock’s superiors remained unimpressed and rejected the introduction of the American-British hybrid fighter.

“Sired by the English out of an American mother, the Mustang had no parent in the [Air Force] … to appreciate and push its good points,” Hitchcock wrote in 1942.

The Mustang, however, would soon find an adopted parent in Hitchcock.

The former fighter pilot became relentless in his quest to adapt the aircraft into the best fighter on the Western Front.

If you’re anything like the avid military aviation buff I’ve been my entire life, you aren’t going to want to miss a single word of this compelling, in-depth slice of real, true history—a must-read if ever there was one. Excellent pics, too. Notable quote:

“The story of the P-51,″ the official wartime history of the USAAF declared, “came close to representing the costliest mistake made by the Army Air Forces in World War II.”

One among many similar near-fatal errors, sad to say, which is but par for the usual course in wartime. Thanks so very much to our old friend Stephen for the steer to this top-notch article.