The First Hellcat Ace

Our training began in earnest at Pensacola; we studied subjects that dealt directly with flying—navigation, aerodynamic theory, engineering, meteorology, and a host of other disciplines. One of the least popular classes was celestial navigation. It was difficult, and it was useless as far as I was concerned, because I was sure I was going to become a fighter pilot. Fortunately, I never had to use it, but I’m sure it was important to patrol airplane pilots.

Again, as CPTP students, we got very little primary training because we were already rated pilots. Once in a while we got to fly a familiarization flight in whatever aircraft was available, just to keep our heads in the game. One of these airplanes was the seemingly ancient SBU-1, built by Vought. Intended as a two-seat scout bomber when it entered service in 1935, it was obsolete by the time we flew it. It was a biplane constructed largely of wood and fabric. That, along with all the wires and struts that held it together, certainly made it look obsolete. Still, with its 700-horsepower engine, it was a bigger, more powerful beast than anything I had flown before. And flying it was better than not flying at all.

Such flights were infrequent, though, and because we weren’t studying for primary training like the other students were, we had a lot of free time. Pensacola wasn’t a bad place to have free time. Founded by the Spanish in the late 1600s and taken in turn by the British, the Spanish again, the French, the United States, the Confederate States, and finally by the United States once more, Pensacola is one of the oldest towns in the country. Blessed with miles and miles of sugar-white beaches, plenty of places to have a drink, and a relaxed Southern attitude, it provided numerous diversions for hundreds and later thousands of young pilots-to-be.

Among those diversions were women who came from all over the surrounding area in hopes of meeting someone they might like. It didn’t hurt our feelings to give them the opportunity. Being a young man, I felt like I was dead center in the perfect time and place. It was just a shame that it took an impending war to make it happen.

Cadet McWhorter, front cockpit, checks out an SOC floatplane with another cadet at NAS Pensacola in October 1941. (McWhorter Family)

My class finally began regular flight training at the end of September 1941. In the mornings after formation, we boarded big, open-sided trailer rigs we called “cattle cars.” They had long wooden seats down the middle and horizontal grab bars for us to hang onto. Packed inside, we bounced our way out to Saufley Field. We normally spent all day at the field, flying twice, before we were crammed back into the cattle cars for the return trip to Pensacola.

Our training began a little more than one-third of the way through the program at what was called the “33-hour check.” We did most of our basic training in the N3N, and our later instrument and cross-country training in the SNJ. Our basic training included aerobatics, formation work, and all sorts of takeoffs and landings.

The N3N was a simple little biplane. Similar in many ways to the Stearman, it was built by the Navy in its own factory in Philadelphia. Powered by a 235-horsepower, Wright-built radial engine, it could do about 110 miles per hour on a good day. Interestingly, there was no wood in its structure; it was all aluminum, the Navy having quite a bit left over from its defunct dirigible program. The instrumentation in the cockpit was minimal, and communication between the instructor, who sat in the front seat, and the student, who sat in the back, was done mainly through a Gosport tube. This tube had a mouthpiece on the instructor’s end and earphones at the student’s end. One-way communication was pretty much the standard.

The N3N had an all-aluminum structure and was manufactured by the Navy in its own factory. McWhorter remembered it as a docile, easy-to-fly trainer. (U.S. Navy)

Things went along really well for us. Historically, the CPTP classes experienced a washout rate of only seven percent; much lower than the typical classes, and I don’t remember any washouts from my own class. I was doing well also. The only real trouble I had was of my own making.

Our training syllabus included plenty of solo flights. These were intended for us to practice various aspects of our flying and to help us develop our confidence. Because I didn’t feel particularly challenged, I often grew bored with the officially sanctioned solo flying. Confidence wasn’t much of a problem for me either, and I wasn’t alone in this.

It was quite common for cadets in search of excitement to meet over predetermined points at an agreed-upon time—or to take advantage of chance meetings—and engage in mock dogfights. These were wonderful, twisting, turning affairs that actually were good training. But if mistakes were made, they could be dangerous. Because of the danger, these encounters were officially frowned upon, and we were admonished against them.

But the temptation was too great. One sunny October morning I was cruising above the pine trees of the flat Florida panhandle when I spotted another N3N flying in the same direction. Fair game! I banked hard toward the other pilot just as he saw me and turned into my pretend attack. The fight was on. We swirled around each other, rolling and twisting. The wire and fabric of my airplane was singing—straining against gravity and against the engine. Still, we coaxed our aircraft at each other in slashing attacks, picturing ourselves as wing-borne Knights of the Sky. This went on for what I am sure was several minutes, until I saw another aircraft descending toward us.

Both cockpits of this aircraft were manned, so I knew that it had an instructor aboard. The jig was up. I forgot the other student, hauled back on the stick, and kicked the right rudder hard. My airplane responded perfectly and immediately went into a spin. Once, twice, three times the airplane spun around its vertical axis. I held the controls hard against the stops and watched for the instructor’s airplane. Four, five, six revolutions now. There he was, still following me down. Seven, eight, nine; the ground was rushing up at me. Caught between the instructor’s airplane and the earth, I had only two choices; neither was good. I couldn’t win an encounter with the ground, so I neutralized the stick and kicked the rudder against the direction of the spin. Again, the N3N responded perfectly. After the spin tightened for just a fraction of a second, the airplane hesitated, swung once or twice, then steadied into a nose-low dive. I hauled back on the stick and leveled out above the landscape, which was very much closer than it had been.

I gave a sheepish look over my shoulder, and just as I had feared, the instructor was flying off my wing. He was frowning as he signaled me back toward the field, indicating that I should land. I saw his student looking at me with commiseration on his face.

My heart fell into my stomach as I nodded and turned back toward the field. I suddenly felt very foolish. What if I had just ruined my lifelong dream? What if the Navy decided to wash me out of the flight program? After all, what good is a pilot who can’t follow instructions? What good is a pilot who willfully disobeys orders?

I was sure that I was finished. Carefully, I landed back at the field, parked my airplane with all the other bright yellow N3Ns, and started back toward the flight line shack to put my gear away.

I turned and recognized the instructor who had sent me back to the field. “Yes, sir,” I answered, stiffening to attention.

“That spin was really a pretty good trick,” he said. “You almost lost me.”

I was flabbergasted. I had expected to be roughly upbraided. His remark was almost a backhanded compliment. “Well, sir, . . .” I started, then stopped. There really was no good thing for me to say.

“No, sir, I mean, yes, sir . . . I mean . . .” How was I supposed to answer that?

“I think it would probably be a good idea if you went up to visit with the commanding officer,” he said.

I dropped off my gear, then headed to the operations building and made my way upstairs. After smoothing my khaki uniform with my hands and straightening my tie—we flew in uniforms then—I stepped into the CO’s office.

I got lucky. Rather than chew me out, the commanding officer calmly spelled out the perils of doing anything unauthorized, especially dogfights. He emphasized that nearly every rule or regulation in the books was written in blood. That is, that someone had died doing the things that were forbidden or controlled.

My punishment seemed surprisingly light. In order to emphasize his point, he “secured my liberty.” That is, he restricted me to the base for 10 days. He also gave me the opportunity to further consider the importance of the rules and regulations of naval aviation, as well as the roles that trust and responsibility played in the life of a naval officer. That opportunity came in the form of an order to march for two hours on the parade deck after each working day, for two weeks, with a 1903 Springfield rifle on my shoulder. I was to be a one-man parade.

Considering the punishment I could have received, I didn’t particularly mind my daily dates with the Springfield. Looking back on the whole incident now, and thinking back to the instructor’s first remark about my “neat trick,” I wonder if the whole incident might have worked in my favor. Maybe by demonstrating an aptitude for aerobatic flight, illicit as that demonstration was, I had increased my chances of being selected for training in fighters.

As it turned out, I learned that the other student was my classmate, Sam Logan. Sam was a Marine who also was picked to fly fighters and ended up flying combat in the Solomon Islands. In 1943, while chasing a Zero, he was shot down from behind by another Zero. While Sam descended in his parachute, his attacker turned on him and made several passes to try to chop him out of the sky with his propeller. In the end, the enemy pilot slashed off one of Sam’s feet and mangled the other.

Remarkably, Sam kept his cool. Upon splashing down into the water, he managed to climb into his life raft and administer first aid to himself until he was picked up by a floatplane. Ultimately, he was able to keep the Marine Corps from discharging him and after his convalescence he returned to flying as a transport pilot.

By November 1941, we were flying the North American SNJ trainer. Also built as the AT-6 Texan for the U.S. Army Air Forces, and as the Harvard for the British, the SNJ was a fairly advanced trainer for its time. An all-metal, low-wing monoplane, it had retractable landing gear and was powered by a 600-horsepower Pratt & Whitney R-1340 Wasp radial engine. We did instrument training, formation work, and advanced navigation in the SNJ. It also had a single .30-caliber, cowl-mounted machinegun for gunnery. For us, it was an exciting airplane to fly—almost a real fighter.

But for communication between cockpits, the old Gosport tube was still the standard. On one instrument training flight, when I was flying under the hood in the rear seat of an SNJ, my instructor tested me by putting the airplane into an unusual attitude. Somehow, I missed his signal for me to take control and recover the airplane. So, there we both sat, wondering what the other was doing while the aircraft rolled inverted and started into a steep dive. Finally, I heard him shout at me through the Gosport to “do something about this!” Startled into understanding what had happened, I grabbed the controls and brought the straining airplane upright before we got into too much trouble. Such were the vagaries of the Gosport tube.

North American made outstanding advanced trainers for both the Navy and the Army Air Forces. The Navy’s variant, the SNJ, was virtually identical to the Army’s AT-6. (U.S. Navy)

On December 7, 1941, I was behind the barracks, throwing a football around with a bunch of the other guys. We heard shouting and looked up and saw a group of cadets waving wildly from the windows. Confused, we stopped playing ball and waited until someone ran out and told us that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. This was a shock to us, as most of the war news came from Europe. Some of us weren’t even sure where Pearl Harbor was. And although we guessed correctly that the attack meant we were in the war, we weren’t too sure what that would mean to us.

We found out quickly enough. Almost immediately, the training schedule shifted to an eight-day week—we trained for eight straight days, then had a day off. Also, the workdays stretched to ten or twelve hours, rather than the eight-hour days we had gotten used to.

It all had a dramatic effect. Some of the guys didn’t adjust and partied on the very next Saturday night as if they were on the more relaxed schedule. The result was deadly. The next day, Sunday, there were five fatal accidents. Most of them involved cadets who just flew straight into the ground. I can only guess that they were hungover and had blacked out under heavy maneuvering. One evening, the personal effects from one of the boy’s bodies were brought back. Someone showed me his room key, which was in his pocket when he crashed. He hit the ground so hard that the key was bent at a 90-degree angle.

The stepped-up training tempo produced the results the Navy was looking for. My class finished training on December 18, two weeks ahead of schedule.

I was overjoyed when I learned that I had been selected to fly fighters. I had thought about little else, and my flying marks, combined with some pretty good work in the aerial gunnery pattern, were enough to get me assigned to Naval Air Station Miami at Opa-locka, Florida, for fighter training. I departed Pensacola on December 23, 1941, and rode down with a classmate, Bill Bonneau, in his 1936 Ford convertible. Bill and I had been together since the class began in August and, unbeknown to us, we would be together for a long time thereafter. We checked in at NAS Miami on December 26, 1941.

At that time, every fighter pilot in naval aviation took his training at Opa-locka. Located more or less in Miami, it had more to offer in the way of social life than even Pensacola. And we tried out every bit of it.

But there wasn’t one of us there who, if given the choice between flying fighters and partying, would have hesitated at choosing flying. We were all tigers and were excited to be getting on with our training. There was a war on, and each of us knew in our heart-of-hearts that he, personally, was going to win that war.

The transition from the Grumman F3F biplane fighter to the Brewster F2A Buffalo at Opa-Locka had been completed just before we arrived. As the years have passed, the F2A has had heaps of criticism piled onto it as a poorly performing, tough-to-maintain, badly constructed piece of junk. Rightly so. It had been, and would be, terribly mauled by the Japanese. But at the time it was still a front-line fighter with some flying organizations, including the U.S. Marine Corps, and we were excited to get our hands on it.

Built by the Brewster Aeronautical Corporation, the first F2A Buffalo had been delivered less than three years earlier as the Navy’s first monoplane fighter. Armed with four .50 caliber machineguns and powered by a 1,200-horsepower Wright Cyclone radial engine, it could do about 320 miles per hour.

McWhorter recalled the Brewster F2A fighter as a difficult-to-fly and unreliable aircraft. This example flies over NAS Miami where he trained. (U.S. Navy)

The Buffalo’s performance numbers weren’t that bad on paper, but in practice it just couldn’t compete. I wasn’t particularly fond of it either; it just didn’t handle very well. It was also rather unforgiving if it was only slightly mishandled when you were pulling high Gs. More than once I came in on a gunnery run and perhaps skidded a bit too much, or didn’t have the yaw trimmed just right—or something—and that airplane snap-rolled so quick that it made my head spin.

We did not have G-suits at that time, and it was very easy to pull too many Gs and black out during gunnery runs. I lost consciousness more than once and came to in some rather unusual attitudes. The time I spent training to recover from unusual attitudes proved to be well spent. More often than not I regained consciousness from these gut-wrenching episodes as a mere passenger in an inverted airplane.

I returned from a gunnery flight one morning and set myself up for landing. I put the landing gear down and checked that it was down and locked. The only indication that it was down was a pointer on a braided wire that ran across the bottom of the instrument panel as the gear went down. When it wouldn’t move anymore, and the pointer on the wire lined up with a mark on the instrument panel, the pilot was supposedly assured that the gear was down and locked in place.

With the flaps lowered and the aircraft trimmed—no small feat in itself—I checked the windsock one more time and aligned the nose of the stubby little fighter with the landing area. I brought the nose up slightly an instant before touching down and waited for the airplane to settle to earth.

It did settle—all the way down. In a screeching, frightening roar, the landing gear folded, the propeller blades flailed at the ground, and the airplane hit the grass field and skidded several hundred feet in a huge cloud of dust. Of course, the engine stopped and the silence that replaced the screeching of the tortured metal was nearly as unsettling. Instinctively, on pure muscle memory, my hands went through the shutdown procedures and I scrambled out of the damaged bird. The short trip down to the ground felt distinctly peculiar.

Fortunately, I was exonerated of any wrongdoing. What happened—and it had happened quite a number of times before—was that the over center locks on the landing gear did not push the gear into place. When the weight of the aircraft transferred to the landing gear, it simply folded.

Eventually, manufacturing problems and poor management got so bad at the Brewster plant that the Navy physically walked in and shut it down in 1944. That this happened at the height of the war, when aircraft were badly needed, is telling evidence of how bad the problems were at Brewster.

We trained right through New Year’s Day at Opa-locka. For me, other than my sledding episode in the Brewster Buffalo, things went well. I finished training on January 22 and received my wings and designation as a naval aviator. Finally, on February 9, 1942, I was commissioned as an ensign in the United States Naval Reserve and received orders to Fighting Squadron 9 (VF-9) at Norfolk, Virginia. We really didn’t do much celebrating after we were commissioned, but it was a kick to be saluted by every enlisted man around. The tradition was that you had to give a dollar to the first person who saluted you after being commissioned, and every sailor went out of his way to salute us.

My classmates and I would have been commissioned a bit earlier, but we were held back until they could expedite the students out of the Trade School at Annapolis—our nickname for the Naval Academy. The Navy wanted to get them commissioned the day before us hurriedly indoctrinated pagans from the V-5 program. That sort of subtle favoritism toward Naval Academy graduates rubbed a lot of us the wrong way, but it was something that was with us throughout the war and beyond.

Most of us were just too anxious to get home on leave to worry about partying. I went straight back to Athens and stayed with my parents. They were very proud—but anxious at the same time. The nation had been at war for only a couple months and things were not going well. Wake Island had fallen a couple of weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and our forces in the Philippines were taking a drubbing.

Nevertheless, I was young and felt nearly invincible. About the only real danger I faced in Athens was getting my back patted off. I stopped at the airfield, of course, and visited with all my former instructors and flying buddies. I spent quite a bit of time answering questions and, without meaning to, recruiting a few more pilots for the Navy. It felt pretty good to strut around in my new uniform with its shiny gold ensign bars and aviator wings. And I think that helped my stock quite a bit when I visited my old girlfriends!