On December 14, 1952, the last Corsair rolled off the production line in Dallas, Texas. After 12,571 aircraft built across sixteen variants spanning more than a decade of war, the production run was done. Bureau number 133722 was one of the final 94, a variant called the F4U-7 built exclusively for the French Navy. The Americans called it "For French Only." The French called it exactly what they needed.
The United States purchased the aircraft through its Military Assistance Program and transferred them to the Aéronavale, France's naval air arm, which was fighting a colonial war in Southeast Asia and needed carrier-capable fighters. Bureau 133722 was assigned to Flottille 12F and went to war.
The first war was Indo-China.
France had been fighting to hold its Southeast Asian colonies since 1946, and by 1953 the war was not going well. The Viet Minh, led by General Vo Nguyen Giap, had grown from a guerrilla force into a conventional army supplied by China and the Soviet Union. The French decided to force a decisive battle by establishing a fortified garrison in a remote valley in northwest Vietnam near the Laotian border, a place called Dien Bien Phu. The plan was to use air superiority to keep the garrison supplied and to destroy any Viet Minh force that tried to take it. The French believed the Viet Minh had no capability to move heavy artillery through the jungle terrain surrounding the valley.
They were wrong about that.
The Viet Minh moved 50,000 troops and an artillery force that outnumbered the French four to one into the hills overlooking the valley, dragging their guns up through terrain the French had considered impassable. The siege began on March 13, 1954. Bureau 133722 and the other French Corsairs flew from carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin and from shore bases, providing close air support, strafing Viet Minh positions, attacking supply columns, dropping napalm on artillery emplacements. It was not enough. The anti-aircraft fire was heavier than anything they had planned for. Transport aircraft dropping supplies were being shot down. The runway inside the garrison was destroyed. The French paratroopers and Foreign Legionnaires and North African troops fought for 57 days in what survivors would call 57 days of hell.
On May 7, 1954, the garrison fell. Of the French prisoners taken, roughly 60 percent died in captivity. France signed the Geneva Accords in July, withdrew from Indochina, and lost its colonies. Bureau 133722 had flown for the losing side.
The second war was Suez.
In July 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. Britain and France, who had controlled the canal, coordinated secretly with Israel for a military operation to take it back. The Israelis would attack Egypt from the east; Britain and France would intervene as peacekeepers and seize the canal zone. Operation Musketeer began in late October 1956. The French carriers Arromanches and Lafayette launched their Corsairs with yellow and black recognition stripes painted on the wings and fuselage. On November 3, sixteen F4U-7s attacked Egyptian airfields in the Nile Delta. One Corsair was shot down by anti-aircraft fire, killing Lieutenant de Vaisseau Antoine Lancrenon. Two more were damaged landing back on the carriers. The operation was proceeding.
Then the phone rang, so to speak. The United States, under Eisenhower, threatened economic consequences for Britain. The Soviet Union threatened military intervention. Britain and France stood down. The canal stayed Egyptian. The operation was abandoned within days of beginning. Bureau 133722 had flown for the losing side again.
The third war was Algeria.
At the end of 1956, all French Corsair flotillas relocated from the carriers to airfields at Oran, Telergma, and Bizerte in Algeria, where France was fighting a brutal eight-year war against an independence movement. The Algerian War of Independence had started in November 1954, six months after Dien Bien Phu fell, and it would grind on until 1962. Bureau 133722 flew close air support missions over rough terrain, escorted helicopters, and participated in what the French called pacification operations against Algerian fighters. The war consumed enormous resources, tore France apart politically, and ended with Algerian independence in July 1962. The French military never lost a major battle in Algeria. France lost the war anyway.
In 1959, while bureau 133722 was still with Flottille 12F, the French conducted an experiment worth noting. They fitted Corsairs with SS.11 wire-guided anti-tank missiles and attempted to develop a new close air support capability. The concept required the pilot to guide the missile manually using a joystick in one hand while still flying the aircraft with the other, tracking a flare on the missile's tail as it traveled two kilometers to the target at low altitude. The pilots described it as very tricky. The system was deemed effective but was never used in combat in Algeria because the fighters they were fighting had no armored vehicles to destroy. The experiment was discontinued.
Bureau 133722 was retired from French service in 1963 when the Aéronavale transitioned to the Vought F-8 Crusader. It was sent to England for reconstruction and restoration. Eventually it made its way across the Atlantic to the United States, where it was acquired in 1994 by the Erickson Aircraft Collection in Madras, Oregon.
Three wars. Three political defeats. One aircraft still flying.
The Erickson Collection initially painted bureau 133722 in Navy colors in memory of Jesse Brown, the first Black naval aviator to die in the Korean War. In 2018 the collection went further, repainting it specifically as bureau 97231, VF-32, tail code K, nose number 211 — Jesse Brown's exact markings as he flew them on December 4, 1950 over the Chosin Reservoir.
Jesse Brown died two years before bureau 133722 was built. The aircraft that now wears his name and number was sitting in a Dallas factory being assembled while Brown's actual Corsair was being destroyed by napalm on a North Korean mountainside. The connection is not historical. It is intentional. Someone decided that this aircraft, this survivor of three failed campaigns across two continents, should carry Jesse Brown's name into the sky.
Bureau 133722 appeared at Beale Air and Space Expo 2025 wearing those markings, and I photographed it on the ramp without knowing what I was looking at. I looked up the bureau number afterward.
That is how this works. You photograph the plane. You look up the number. Sometimes what you find is three wars and a second act.
The story of Jesse Brown and his wingman Thomas Hudner is told in the article Jesse Brown — The Sharecropper's Son Who Earned His Wings. The aircraft that flies as his tribute deserves its own story. This is it.