The First Hellcat Ace

After Tarawa we headed back to Hawaii, with a short detour along the way to take a swipe at Kwajalein Atoll in the middle of the Marshall Islands group. This atoll was the center of enemy air and naval forces in the area and was scheduled for invasion in the near future. Anything that Task Force 50, with its contingent of six carriers, could do to eliminate enemy warships and merchant shipping as well as enemy aircraft, would ease follow-on operations.

Accordingly, on December 4, 1943, nearly 200 aircraft were launched against targets in the atoll. Rather than accompany the strike group, I was posted to combat air patrol over the task force. Again, as had happened while on CAP at Rabaul, I was frustrated by a lack of action. Although enemy aircraft got airborne in force to oppose our strikes, the Japanese did not try to attack the fleet.

This was just the way it was. I had had more encounters and opportunities to engage enemy aircraft than many of the other pilots. To become an ace required skill and aggressiveness, but it also involved a great deal of luck. And much of that luck dictated whether or not you were in the right place at the right time. There were several outstanding pilots in VF-9 who had never even had the opportunity to fire their guns at an enemy aircraft during the entire ten months the squadron was in the Pacific. So yes, I was disappointed that I didn’t see any Japanese aircraft during the strike at Kwajalein, but not overly so.

The Kwajalein strike was not a big success. There was some confusion over the target and consequently the airfield on Roi was not hit as hard as it could have been. Additionally, our torpedo bomber and dive bomber pilots were not as polished as they would have liked and thus scored poorly against the maneuvering ships in the lagoon. Although a few small merchantmen were destroyed, as were about 55 aircraft, none of the warships was badly damaged and there remained a sizable air presence.

McWhorter in the cockpit of his Hellcat, which wears 10 Japanese flags to signify the number of aircraft he downed while flying with VF-9 during its first Pacific cruise in 1943–44. (U.S. Navy)

Skittish about the possibility of being caught by Japanese forces from any of the many surrounding bases, our task force commander canceled follow-on strikes, and we retired the same day.

We arrived back at Pearl Harbor on December 8, 1943. We had been at sea for 47 days but had flown combat on only 12 of those days. It was more efficient than our in-and-out strikes to Marcus and Wake Islands, but still it seemed to be an awful lot of floating without enough fighting.

VF-9 and the rest of the Essex crew got quite a bit of time off through the rest of December and on into January. During this time—I don’t remember how or why—VF-9 was adopted by a kindly gentleman named Chris Holmes. He was a local mover and shaker and had a beautiful mansion on the beach right below Diamond Head. He gave it over to a very grateful VF-9 over the holiday season. We spent our time drinking milk punch out on the veranda or lying out on the beach. Milk punch was a drink containing milk and just about any liquor other than those from the scotch-whiskey family. It was actually quite tasty, and because we didn’t get much fresh milk when we were aboard ship, it was a favorite while we were ashore.

A lot of us enjoyed simply relaxing and catching up on sleep inside the spacious house. And it didn’t hurt the standings of the single guys when they swung their dates through such an impressive setup.

Not that there were many dates to be had. The competition was fierce. If Hawaii was bustling with military activity when we had arrived six months before, now, in the last days of 1943, it was absolutely bursting at the seams. The streets were crawling with soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen. Where the Essex was almost the only show in town when we had arrived in the spring, there were now several more big-deck carriers. And that’s not to mention all the other battleships, cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and support ships that made up the rest of the fleet.

I was perplexed. The number of ships and airplanes and men and equipment in Hawaii alone was staggering. And more were on the way. We knew that Japan could not hope to stand against such might. Nevertheless, we had just seen a tiny speck in the Pacific—Betio—consume a vast number of men and great quantities of material. All of us tried to see into the future: where would we be months or even years from now? Or weeks?

We left Hawaii on January 17, 1944, on our way to hit Kwajalein again. The atoll, with its lagoon and the airfields on Kwajalein Island and Roi, was the linchpin of the Marshall Islands group. And whoever controlled the Marshalls controlled that portion of the Pacific. Accordingly, several islands of the atoll were scheduled for invasion on February 1. We were sent to eliminate enemy shipping and airpower as well as to soften up the atoll’s defenses. The systematic destruction of enemy positions in the atoll was foremost in our leaders’ minds. There could not be another Tarawa.

What had happened at Tarawa, only two months before, stunned the Navy and Marine Corps leadership. There, newly operational, thin-skinned amphibious vehicles were launched into strong, unpredictable tides and had been left more or less on their own. Once in the water, with their loads of Marines and supplies, they had to scrabble over a treacherous reef through some of the most wicked and lethal defenses of the entire war. Many of the vehicles were trapped against the reef, or blown out of the water, leaving hundreds of Marines—those who survived—to swim or slog their way unprotected to the beach. Many of them did not make it. More than 1,000 Marines, nearly 20 percent of the attacking force, were killed, and the whole mess was already being called “Bloody Tarawa.”

But not all the problems were caused by the reefs or by the vulnerable amphibious vehicles. The Japanese defenses simply had not been hammered enough by warships or by carrier airpower. Though they had looked impressive as they fired from just offshore, the battleships and cruisers should have stood further away to bombard the Japanese defenses. This would have allowed them to fire their guns on a higher trajectory. Consequently, hitting their targets at a steeper angle, the shells would have penetrated more deeply and caused more damage. Additionally, the battleships and cruisers simply did not have time enough to fire the tons of shells required.

And the carriers basically did not deliver sufficient airpower. Despite the number of carriers and airplanes involved in the operation, there weren’t enough sorties generated. And like the battleships and cruisers, the carriers weren’t there long enough. Kwajalein was to be different.

There were nearly 100 enemy airplanes based at the airfield on Roi, on the northern side of Kwajalein Atoll. At dawn, on January 29, I was again flying in Mike Hadden’s division as section leader. As part of an all-fighter sweep we were free of escort duties. Instead, our job was to clear enemy fighters from the sky ahead of the strike group.

Once joined following the launch, we test-fired our guns, as we always did prior to starting toward the target area. In the old Wildcat, charging the six, .50 caliber machineguns had involved pulling handles that were attached by steel cables to the individual guns; charging the Hellcat’s guns was easier and more sophisticated. On the center console in front of the pilot were two hydraulic charging buttons—one for the three guns in each wing. Pushing these buttons released hydraulic pressure from accumulator bottles located on the engine firewall. After the guns were charged, they could be selected to fire by pairs—the two inboard guns, the two center guns, and the two outboard guns.

If a pilot wanted, he could fire just one gun by charging only the guns on one wing, then selecting only one pair. I had heard of one pilot who actually tried this. Word had apparently gotten around the fleet about my “One Slug” moniker, and there was a pilot who was intent on besting me—shooting a plane down with fewer bullets. He actually flew a combat flight with only one gun charged, hoping to run into some Japanese airplanes. Evidently, he wasn’t successful since I never heard anything else about it.

Firing just one gun was a tough proposition anyway. The recoil from a gun—without the recoil from the corresponding gun in the other wing—caused the airplane to yaw and subsequently made it difficult to aim. No one with any common sense purposely went into combat with only one gun ready to fire.

Overall control of the airplane’s armament was maintained through the master armament switch. This switch controlled the electrical firing impulses to the guns and bomb racks. It was provided for safety purposes so that the guns couldn’t be fired accidentally. You were supposed to put it into the armed position whenever the flight entered enemy territory. Once back over friendly forces, and certainly prior to landing, you were supposed to put it back into the safe position. More than one guy messed this up, though, and sprayed the landing area with machinegun fire by accidentally coming down on the trigger with the master armament switch in the armed position. This sort of slip didn’t particularly endear a person to the flightdeck crews.

When we arrived overhead, Kwajalein was covered by a 6,000-foot overcast. Fortunately, we had briefed a plan for this circumstance. In order to hide ourselves from enemy antiaircraft gunners, we were to climb into the overcast as we approached the island, then turn a few degrees away from each other to minimize the chances of colliding. After a certain amount of time, Mike Hadden was to make a call over the radio, whereupon we would all simultaneously dive out of the clouds. From that point, we would make our attacks on the enemy antiaircraft guns or airplanes or whatever other targets we could find.

As planned, we popped up into the clouds as we approached the island, then took our heading cuts away from each other. After a minute or so, Hadden made the call to drop out of the clouds. For some reason I hesitated a long moment before I pushed the nose of my fighter down.

I blinked twice as I dropped out of the clouds and into the clear. There, slightly below and ahead of me, at my 11 o’clock position and only about 500 feet in front of me, was a Zero. It was flying in the same direction I was—straight at Mike Hadden’s section. Almost as quickly as it takes to think about it, I slid behind him, superimposed the pipper of my gunsight onto his fuselage, and pulled the trigger.

Mike and his wingman, Jack Kitchen, flushed like quail when the Zero exploded. They didn’t even know he was back there. I shook my head at my good fortune. It could have just as easily been me dropping down in front of the Zero instead of the other way around.

Hadden got the division rejoined and we dropped down and strafed the airfield. It seemed to me that most of the Japanese airplanes there had already been hit and burned. There wasn’t much left to destroy, so I put my rounds into the hangars. It was still not very bright and, as always, I was a bit mesmerized by the bright arc of my tracers against the dim early morning light.

I finished my strafing run and climbed away from the airfield to the southeast. As I approached the eastern edge of the atoll at about 7,000 feet with Bud Gehoe still on my wing, I spotted another Zero ahead of me, flying in the same direction. It seemed that Fortune never ceased to smile on me. From about a half-mile, I closed the distance to 500 feet—all the while checking for enemy fighters that might be stalking me. Finally, I captured the Zero in my gunsight, placed the pipper just at the wing root, and squeezed the trigger.

I am sure that the enemy pilot never knew I was behind him. I turned away to the right to avoid the fireball that was his airplane only a few seconds earlier.

It was also at Kwajalein that one of our pilots made his second entry in the “It’s Tough to Argue with Success” chapter of the book on aerial combat techniques. George Blair, who had knocked down a Japanese torpedo plane at Rabaul by dropping his belly tank on it when he was out of ammunition, exercised his unique brand of improvisation to down another Japanese airplane without firing a shot. Out of ammo again at Kwajalein, he maneuvered his plane to a position directly above a Japanese airplane and forced it to crash into the water!

In large part because of the preliminary poundings delivered by naval surface ships and air strikes, the invasion at Kwajalein went well, although we lost two more squadron mates. Steve Wright and John Benton were killed by antiaircraft fire.