The First Hellcat Ace

By March 3, 1942, I had put aside the role of Hometown Hero and reported to the Aircraft Carrier Training Group—the ACTG—at Naval Air Station Norfolk, Virginia. While there, I would receive my last bit of training before being sent to join VF-9. The ACTG was where I was introduced to the Grumman F4F Wildcat.

The F4F was originally designed for the Navy as a biplane fighter, the follow-on to the F3F. The configuration changed in 1936, when the Navy decided that the biplane design had reached its limits and that the monoplane was the answer to increased performance. After being redesigned as a monoplane, the Wildcat competed in a fly-off against the Brewster XF2A and the Seversky XNF-1. The Wildcat came out as the loser to the F2A because it was equipped with a weak engine.

Nevertheless, the Navy saw promise in the Grumman design and ordered a modified version featuring a more powerful engine. This new version, with square-tipped wings, a more powerful Pratt & Whitney radial engine, and a two-stage supercharger (necessary for high-altitude performance), was more to the Navy’s liking. In August 1939, it ordered 54 production models. The Wildcat went on to become the Navy’s front-line fighter through the first part of the war, and variations served in a secondary role all the way to the end.

Like the Brewster Buffalo, the Grumman Wildcat wasn’t a pretty airplane. It was shaped like a beer keg with wings, and takeoffs and landings could be a bit touchy, but it was an honest plane otherwise. It was reasonably fast and maneuverable for its time, and had good high-altitude performance, a respectable combat radius, and was reasonably well armed with four .50 caliber machineguns—later increased to six. And Grumman built a toughness into it that enabled it to withstand tremendous battle damage and still bring its pilot home. That toughness saved a lot of lives.

The Grumman F4F Wildcat fighter was inelegant in appearance, but made up for it with reasonable performance, good armament, and legendary ruggedness. (U.S. Navy)

My first flight in the Grumman was uneventful and the rest of the transition from the Buffalo was no big deal, though I did have one “near thing” while at the ACTG. I was out on a familiarization flight one afternoon and was putting the airplane through its paces—loops and rolls and half-Cuban eights, that sort of thing. I stomped on the right rudder for a real hard snap roll, and it did. Snap, that is. Not the airplane, but the rudder pedal. The rudder pedals in the Wildcat hung down from a bar that ran horizontally beneath the instrument panel. I guess my big, size-13 foot came down a bit too hard, because the right rudder pedal broke off and was rolling around somewhere in the bottom of the airplane.

In the air you could fly the Wildcat around without the rudder pedal as long as you weren’t doing anything fancy. It wasn’t a big deal to trim the aircraft to balanced flight. But taking off without the rudder was impossible, and landing without it was very difficult because the right rudder was required to counter the torque from the engine. The Wildcat was a stubby little airplane, with a fairly narrow landing gear. That configuration, combined with a relatively powerful engine that generated a lot of torque, made directional control on the runway rather difficult at times—and impossible without rudder control.

Fortunately, the airfield at NAS Norfolk was a huge circular mat rather than a set of runways. I gingerly nursed the aircraft back to the field, descended, and set it down on the mat without too much trouble. As soon as the wheels were on the ground, I pulled the fuel-mixture control back and stopped the engine in order to prevent damage to it if the plane nosed over. From that point on, though, I was just a passenger.

Sure enough, the airplane started to drift left because of the torque of the still-spinning propeller. With no right brake—the brakes were actuated with the rudder pedals—I could not stop the turn. The airplane turned slowly at first, then more sharply until it spun around in a complete 360-degree turn and came to a stop. I saw a tow tractor already leaving the flight line to come retrieve me, so I let out my breath and congratulated myself. Home safe.

Though we flew a lot of familiarization flights and practiced a bit of air-to-air gunnery, the primary reason for us to be at the ACTG was to train to be carrier aviators. To do so, we spent quite a bit of time with Lieutenant Commander William A. Stewart. He was already something of a legend within the fleet as one of the best landing signal officers (LSOs) around, and he would go on to make even more of a name for himself later in the war. He was quite a character—stern, professional, and totally in control. He was the type of man who made you feel safer just by being around.

As an air group LSO, Stewart was in charge of your life when you arrived, gear and flaps down, hanging on the prop at 75 miles per hour, at the back end of the ship. His word was law. But his word wasn’t passed via the radio. Rather, he had a pair of paddles, similar to shortened tennis rackets, with strips of fabric stretched across the face instead. This enabled him to wave them about without having to wrestle against the 20-plus knots of wind that blew constantly across the deck of the carrier.

The LSO could pass a number of signals with the paddles: both paddles held out horizontally at arm’s length meant to continue—everything was looking good; crossing them over his head meant a mandatory wave-off, or go around; dropping the left paddle to his side and bringing the right paddle sharply across his chest meant to cut power and land the aircraft on the deck into the arresting wires; both paddles raised above the horizontal meant that you were too high; and both paddles held below the horizontal meant that you were too low. There were many other signals; it was almost a distinct language.

After we were lectured more than we thought was necessary, we were finally turned loose to practice on dry land. A flight of four or five of us took off to find some obscure grass field in the surrounding countryside, where Lieutenant Commander Stewart waited for us. Through good fortune we managed to find it, even though we had no navigational aids or two-way radio contact with him. I took my turn and banked into a left downwind—the carrier pattern is always to the left—for my first pass. I busily set my Wildcat up for landing: gear and flaps down, mixture set, trim set, propeller pitch set. Carefully, I double-checked my distance and altitude. Looking good. This wasn’t going to be too difficult. Everything was setting up nicely and I was flying what I thought was the proper pattern.

Until I turned onto final approach. Stewart was there at the edge of the field. For all practical purposes he was jumping up and down. So were his paddles—chopping up and down on the ground. It was the signal to land. I remembered that much from his lecture. Suddenly, I wasn’t so sure that everything was going as smoothly as I had thought.

A few seconds later I put the airplane on the ground and taxied to where he stood waiting for me with his hands on his hips. The canopy of my aircraft was open, and I leaned over and watched him scramble up onto the wing and pull himself up to the cockpit until his face was only a few inches from mine.

“Ensign, how’s the weather in Tennessee today?” he shouted over the idling engine.

“Listen, Ensign, this is a carrier landing pattern you’re supposed to be working on—not a low-level, cross-country navigation flight! You were so low and so far out that I could barely see you.”

This bothered me. I thought I had done a pretty fair job of flying what I believed I had been taught. Nevertheless, he was a lieutenant commander with more experience than nearly the entire Navy, and I was just a wet-behind-the-ears ensign.

“Okay, sir. I’ll tighten it up,” I answered, pretending that I suddenly remembered every procedure and nuance associated with landing on an aircraft carrier.

Fortunately, he didn’t buy it. He spent a few more minutes with me and in no uncertain words made it plain how I was supposed to fly his carrier pattern.

And that did the trick. From that time on, I really never had any more problems with carrier landing procedures. After a week or so, we were all qualified at the field, and a few days later, on April 20, 1942, we got to try it for real.

We were sent to qualify aboard the escort carrier Long Island in Chesapeake Bay. In the spring of 1942, the German U-boat campaign was really taking a toll on American shipping up and down the Atlantic coast. Chesapeake Bay was considered safer than the open ocean. Later in the war, carrier training was moved into even safer waters—Lake Michigan.

As I flew in formation with my instructor as flight lead, I sneaked peeks downward as we made our way over Chesapeake Bay. When I finally caught sight of the carrier my reaction was typical: I blinked my eyes and tried to lean closer. A nervous flutter went through my stomach—the ship looked so tiny! From where we orbited thousands of feet above, the little wooden-decked escort carrier didn’t look like much more than a toy.

But landing aboard the carrier wasn’t child’s play. Partway through the day one of the ensigns made a rough approach, bounced hard, and rode his airplane over the side. There was a frantic scramble aboard the ship as sailors rushed to the edge of the deck to throw rescue equipment overboard, watching for the hapless pilot to scramble clear of the airplane. Unfortunately, the pilot perished. He was either knocked out by the crash or he got hung up in the airplane, because he never came up.

After crisscrossing the water for a while, the carrier and its escorts were brought back on course. The ensign was given up as lost, and flight operations resumed. My own landings—eight of them—went well, but the loss of one of our ensigns was sobering, a reminder to the rest of us of just how dangerous our profession was. A few days later, on April 24, 1942, my stint at the ACTG was complete and I reported to VF-9, ready for combat. It had been only 10 months since I had enlisted in the Navy.