F6F Hellcat at War

By Cory Graff

This guide traces the history of the US Navy’s premier WWII fighter plane with archival photos, tech specs and illustrations.

F6F Hellcat at War follows the story of this iconic aircraft from its early development to its distinguished combat career in the Pacific. While the F6F was not the fastest or most maneuverable fighter, aviators loved their trusty Hellcats because they were incredibly tough, marvelously powerful, and easy to fly.

In the last two years of war, the Hellcat dominated the skies over the Pacific, stopping Japan’s once-vaunted A6M Zero and tallying a victory-to-loss ratio of over 19 to 1. Through compelling accounts, never-before-seen photographs, and detailed drawings, F6F Hellcat at War tells the story of one of the war’s most successful yet underappreciated fighter aircraft.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 15, 2009
• ISBN: 9781616732660

Book preview

F6F HELLCAT AT WAR

CORY GRAFF

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE         THE HELLCAT’S ORIGINS

CHAPTER TWO        THE HELLCAT’S CONSTRUCTION

CHAPTER THREE      BUILDING THE BEAST

CHAPTER FOUR       COMBAT DEBUT

CHAPTER FIVE        THE YEAR OF WAR

CHAPTER SIX          CLOSING IN

CHAPTER SEVEN     AFTER THE BATTLES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A book like this cannot be created by a single person. I’d like to thank all of those who helped me with art, translations, suggestions, and information: P. J. Muller, Shauna Simon, Patrick Kam, Shawn Chamberlain, David Brown, Justin Hotard, and Joshua Stoff of the Cradle of Aviation Museum. Those who graciously assisted me in acquiring the images for this volume were Dan Hagedorn, Hill Goodspeed of the National Naval Aviation Museum, Edwin Finney of the Naval Historical Center, and Holly Reed and the helpful people at the National Archives. And thanks to Stan Piet, who years ago collected an amazing assortment of color Hellcat shots, many of which are seen in this book. Great appreciation goes to Larry Feliu and Lynn McDonald of the Grumman Historical Center and the people of Northrop Grumman. Special thanks to Hellcat ace Edward Wendy Wendorf and Commemorative Air Force pilot Chris Rushing, who agreed to be interviewed for this volume. Also, thanks to Barbara Feller-Roth and to Steve Gansen and Scott Pearson of Zenith Press, who helped make this book a reality.

INTRODUCTION

It must have been a sickening sight for Japanese flyers—a pair of blocky blue fighters diving in from above. There was nowhere to go. The attackers were too heavy and moving too fast to avoid. It was impossible to run, nearly hopeless to even turn.

In a few brief moments, the midnight blue aircraft eagerly plummeted thousands of meters, hurtling into firing range. Their blunt-nosed cowls gave the impression of soulless, grinning monsters, wickedly amused by this dire situation. A ripple of fire leapt from the leader’s wings. A heartbeat later, heavy lead slugs sizzled through the air, tearing aluminum skin, shattering cockpit glass, and smashing through fuel tanks.

Enemy forces on the ground or at sea didn’t fare much better. The Grummans appeared at dawn and never left. Every blue U.S. Navy plane was called a Grumman by Japanese soldiers and sailors—Wildcats, Avengers, even Corsairs and Helldivers. But the planes that were seemingly everywhere, all the time, were Hellcats.

Their pilots were aggressive, coming eye-to-eye with frantic antiaircraft crews, lobbing bombs from a few hundred feet overhead, or coughing a stream of rockets. An A6M fighter plane caught in its takeoff run was bowled under by a swarm of the zealous beasts, leaving nothing but a smoking carcass and a smattering of hot .50-caliber shells littering the dirt.

But how you see the Hellcat depends solely on your point of view. A young man from Springfield or Portland or some other all-American town thought of the Hellcat in a totally different light than the terrorized enemy. Flying the Hellcat in combat in the Pacific, the aviator had grown to depend on his plane. He trusted it. He believed he could take on anything in the air, and win. He knew in his heart that his plane would bring him home. He might even tell you he loved his aircraft.

At a bar in some tropical port, after a few too many drinks, you might be able to get the flyer to admit that the Grumman F6F Hellcat wasn’t the fastest machine in a fight. You might get him to concede that a Zero could possibly outturn him or that a Lightning could outrun him. And if he was really three sheets to the wind, he might even call the Mustang a better-looking fighter.

But if someone said that the Hellcat looked like the packing box for a new Vought Corsair, he’d shoot back that he wouldn’t trade his Hellcat for any of those other heartless hunks of metal. He’d say the Hellcat had it where it counts.

The Hellcat was an easy, honest plane. The big, advanced, fire-breathing fighter could be flown by a farm boy with two hundred hours of stick time under his belt. Other fighters were far more dangerous to their masters; quirky and temperamental at best, and downright vicious if an aviator didn’t know exactly what he was doing. The Hellcat simply purred. It wanted to leap into the skies. It stalled right. It was predictable in a spin. It was a solid platform to shoot from. An aviator could handle an F6F well in the groove—approaching the deck of an aircraft carrier.

The F6F Hellcat was tough and almost supernaturally resilient. The fighter was designed by a former navy flyer, Leroy Grumman, and he knew how the plane would be treated in combat. The navy stated the plane needed to survive a nineteen-feet-per-second drop to the deck of a carrier during a rough landing. The violent collision between aircraft and the vessel’s deck was simulated with a ten-foot free-fall drop. In a hangar, Grumman engineers dropped an F6F airframe from ten feet with no ill effects. Just for kicks, they hoisted the plane to the ceiling and let it plummet twenty-one feet to the concrete. The gear still didn’t collapse.

Grumman’s workmanship translated to an in-theater combat aircraft that could stand a horrific beating and still stagger home. The shot-up F6F, alighting on a carrier with shredded skin, twisted gear, and hot oil gurgling from the engine, was enough to make any wartime flyer want to turn away in horror. But it also gave him hope. He knew that the day he clipped the masthead of some Japanese ship or sprang a trap set by a group of Zeros, there was still a pretty good chance his old bird would get him home.

If a flyer painted himself into a corner, the trusty Hellcat gave him a chance to muscle his way out of the room.

Mechanics liked the Hellcat because it was simple and well built. Were good looks sacrificed for functionality? Probably. But since when had good looks ever flown a combat air patrol or blasted a Betty bomber headed for the fleet? The navy was quick to point out that for the price of three nice-looking and speedy Vought Corsairs, it could buy five pugnacious Hellcats. An amazing 90 percent of the time, an in-theater Hellcat was ready to fly.

At the height of production, in March 1945, Grumman made 605 Hellcats in a month. Some 12,275 of them were built before the end of the fighter’s construction run in late 1945.

For much of their brief stint flying and fighting for the U.S. Navy, there was nothing better in the air than mottled blue, exhaust-streaked F6F Hellcats. The fighter allowed navy pilots to excel at protecting the fleet and slaughtering Japanese aircraft. It turned out to be a solid fighter-bomber too.

Researchers claim that F6Fs and their pilots shot down 40 percent of the Japanese planes lost in air-to-air combat with U.S. aircraft. Official figures show that 5,156 enemy aircraft fell to the omnipresent Grumman navy fighters, while only 270 were lost to Japanese flyers, earning the Hellcat a kill-to-loss ratio of more than 19 to 1.

While the Mustang and Corsair get much of the credit, the blue collar Hellcat carried more than its own weight. There were about 93 Corsair aces at the end of World War II. Their kill-to-loss ratio was 11 to 1. Mustang squadrons made roughly 274 aces and the plane racked up a similar 11 to 1 ratio. Some 306 young aviators became aces at the controls of a F6F Hellcat—more than any other U.S. fighter type.

The sentiments of nearly all Hellcat flyers are perhaps best expressed by one pilot who is said to have blurted to a group of men aboard his carrier, If this plane could cook, I’d marry it!

Cory Graff

Bethpage, New York

June 2008

This scruffy, scrappy Hellcat cartoon character appeared in some of the first F6F pilot’s handbooks. P. J. Muller

CHAPTER ONE

THE HELLCAT’S ORIGINS

A pair of sharp-looking Grumman F3F-3s patrol near the Yorktown. The planes flew in threes; the section leader has a completely red cowling and the number two man is flying above and to the left. The third man is shooting the photo. The distinctive diving eagle insignia of VF-5 is barely visible under the cockpit rail. U.S. Navy via Stan Piet

A new Grumman F4F-3 Wildcat cruises the skies over Long Island in late 1942. The Wildcat was a great success, but it was outmatched by contemporary fighters of other nations. Grumman History Center

LEON JAKE SWIRBUL AND HIS BUSINESS associate, Leroy Grumman, slowly picked their way along the edge of a muddy Long Island roadway. They were looking for metal.

The metal was for the shop. Their young business was struggling, so they used practically anything they could find. A hammer that slipped off the bumper of a delivery truck became a tool used every day. A solid piece of metal strapping they had liberated now supported a set of new shelves. Something as simple as a shiny silver bolt or washer was scooped up, examined, and slipped into a pocket.

On a good day, the scavenging pair might find some high-grade hunk of alloy that could be made into something else. Though they didn’t mention such things to their customers, a few fragments of every airplane float and truck body that their company produced were fabricated from hand-me-downs. Even portions of their new fighter plane had come straight out of the ditch.

With luck on their side, there was no telling what they might find. But for the past few years, it seemed, luck eluded them. As a result, the duo kept a wary eye on the traffic—each half expecting his life to end under the wheels of a wayward freight box or carryall that had strayed too far over to the shoulder of the road.

Leroy R. Grumman, a former naval aviator, took to designing and building what he knew. His company created planes that were often basic and utilitarian, but also incredibly tough. In interviews, he often said, We always tried to do a solid job. Grumman History Center

THE FORMATION OF GRUMMAN AIRCRAFT ENGINEERING CORPORATION

They could have blamed Edgar Gott, the president of Keystone Aircraft Corporation, for their misfortune. Keystone had, however indirectly, taken their jobs. Swirbul and Grumman had recently been part of the senior staff at the Loening Aeronautical Engineering Company, based in New York City. Until, that is, Grover Loening was forced to sell to Keystone and the companies merged in 1929.

Grumman and Swirbul had come to work at Loening’s aircraft factory in an unusual way. The pair had been in the military: Grumman was a navy pilot, and Swirbul served in the Marine Corps and then became a civilian inspector for the Army Air Corps. They had been sent to the Loening company to oversee the production of military floatplanes.

Grover Loening and his brother Albert knew talented aviation men when they saw them. The Loenings soon devised ways to have Swirbul and Grumman work for them instead of with them. By the time the business came apart in 1929, Grumman was Loening’s general manager and Swirbul worked as the factory manager.

The Loening workforce fragmented when Keystone announced that Loening’s Manhattan factory would be closed. The jobs were moving seventy-five miles south, to Bristol, Pennsylvania. Grumman, Swirbul, and some others didn’t want to leave New York. They hatched an idea to create their own aircraft company. And it had been rough going ever since.

In December 1929, they scraped together $81,325. Grumman was the voting stockholder with the most shares, and the new company became Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation.

The Grumman name was painted on a large sign outside a building on Railroad Avenue in Baldwin, New York. It was an uphill battle from the start. When they first moved into the place, the windows had been shattered and the skylights were caved in. Drifts of dead oak leaves covered the floor.

MAKING ENDS MEET

Grumman Aircraft began operations on January 2, 1930. It was terrible timing. The Wall Street stock market crash had occurred a little over two months before. No one, it seemed, could afford the new airplanes that Leroy Grumman was hoping to build.

This rare image shows Grumman’s first facility in Baldwin, New York. Rumor has it that Grumman Aircraft Engineering didn’t really have a sign most of the time. It was hastily assembled by the shop men especially for the photo. Grumman History Center

As former employees of Loening Aeronautical Engineering Company, Grumman and his small workforce carved out a niche for themselves in the early years by repairing wrecked aircraft like this mangled Loening Commuter. Grumman would purchase the planes from insurance companies at low prices, put them back in flying shape, and sell them at a profit. Grumman History Center

To make ends meet, the company repaired mangled Loenings. The first airframe they dragged home nearly did them as much harm as good. The boys bought the crashed plane from an insurance company and towed it to Baldwin behind Grumman’s Hudson automobile. The nose of the soon-to-be-repaired plane stuck out into the street. In the winter darkness, a passing motorist smashed into the plane. Grumman calmed the angry driver by telling him he had all the tools, manpower, and know-how to fix the automobile in his shop, and for a time the crunched car sat beside the injured plane, awaiting overhaul.

Another job was much more profitable. The crew acquired a wrecked Loening Commuter on Lake Champlain for $450. After a lot of hard work, the repaired plane sold for $20,000. The resurrected wrecks, along with some aluminum truck bodies and floats for U.S. Navy planes, kept Grumman in the black even during that bleak first year. They made $5,500 profit.

It wasn’t enough to keep the company’s senior-most executive officers off the streets, so to speak, scouring the gutters for discarded treasures. Wouldn’t it be the supreme irony if Grumman or Swirbul was run down by a truck they’d recently helped build?

Grumman’s profit came at a price during that first year. Besides getting raw materials wherever they could find them, company leaders sometimes had to skip paying their employees for a week.

When Grumman operated an airplane, the company insured the machine only for the hours it was actively test flying. And then everyone prayed that there wouldn’t be a fire where the fueled aircraft was parked during the night.

Grumman’s first big break came in the form of Model A floats for the Vought O2U Corsair observation plane. The float, equipped with wheels and arresting hook, made the aircraft a go-anywhere machine—on land, water, or the deck of a carrier. Grumman History Center