Warbird Information Exchange

C-47 OUT-WITS JAPANESE ZERO TO WIN IN AERIAL BATTLE

UPPER ASSAM BASE - Visitors to this base often stare in amazement when they pass No. 721, a C-47 Air Transport Command plane with a
history. For on its blunt nose is something seldom seen except on fighters and bombers - a miniature Japanese flag indicating one enemy plane accounted for.
This unusual achievement was rung up not long ago over Burma, when the supposedly helpless transport plane was attacked by one of the Japanese killers of the air. Thinking fast, Lts. Charles (Pat) Lawton of Berkeley, Calif., and George Laben, of Indiana, at the controls, went into a power dive from 4,000 feet to tree-top level in an effort to break away.
This did not succeed, for the Japanese followed them leisurely, waiting for the right moment to strike like a hunting hawk at a fat chicken. But, unknown to the Japanese, the transport was heading for a valley which dropped sharply for 500 feet just on the other side of a ridge.
The transport hopped the ridge and dropped several hundred feet into the valley, just as the Zero dove for the kill. The hapless Japanese pilot, unaware that the valley existed, was unable to come out of his dive after he realized the trick that had been played on him, and flattened his plane (and himself) like a pancake on the ridge.
So that's how innocent-looking No. 721 joined the killer class, and that's why its crew points proudly to the Japanese flag on its nose, put there to commemorate perhaps the only victory in the air of an unarmed transport plane over a deadly Zero.

From a modeler perspective anyone have a Serial Number for No. 721??

(41-)38721 (c/n 6180) to USAAF Dec 28, 1942 - 10th AF, India Jul 12, 1943. To spares Sep 16, 1944.