The First Hellcat Ace

Through the first month of our operations at Okinawa, I still hadn’t engaged any enemy airplanes in aerial combat. But my turn was coming. And it was about time. My friend Hal Vita—we had been together since our early days in VF-9—had shot down five enemy fighters since I had last scored on February 16.

During the night of May 12, we left the Okinawa area and headed north for a two-day attack against the airfields on Kyushu, the southernmost of the Japanese home islands. In the hopes of reducing the number of kamikazes getting through to the fleet at Okinawa, we aimed to destroy as many airplanes and airfield facilities as possible.

On May 13, for the first flight of the day, I was on combat air patrol near the task force and was vectored to intercept a high bogey. I turned to comply with the vector and really poured on the coals. It’s a good thing I did, because when I looked behind me, I saw about a dozen other Hellcats struggling to catch up and shoot my bogey down before I could get there.

After about five minutes, as I led my division up through 20,000 feet, I spotted the bogey. It was a single engine Nakajima C6N reconnaissance airplane—codenamed “Myrt.” It was up at about 25,000 feet, 3 miles in front of us, and traveling away. During a brief tail chase I was able to close to about 500 feet. From directly behind and slightly below, I put a burst into the enemy’s rear fuselage and belly.

The Myrt immediately flamed, then exploded. I was so close behind it that engine oil from the burning airplane covered my canopy and windscreen. Two parachutes opened alongside the Myrt after it exploded, and a moment later—when I was sure there were no other Japanese airplanes nearby—I circled around to take a look at them. To my surprise, neither parachute had anyone in it. To add to the mystery, we hadn’t seen anyone fall from either the airplane or the parachutes. Instead, in the seat straps were boxes about the combined size and shape of our own seat cushions and the attached survival gear. But they were very heavy and solid. One of my ensigns found this out when he got too close to one of the parachutes and smashed into its box with the wing. Sometimes I felt like I was leading small children. It left a very deep dent in his wing’s leading edge, all the way to the main spar.

McWhorter’s final aerial victory of the war was a fast and high-flying Nakajima C6N reconnaissance aircraft, codenamed “Myrt.” He downed it near Kyushu on May 13, 1945. (Wikimedia Commons)

After we got back to the ship and debriefed with intelligence, we learned very little more. To this day I can only guess that the boxes may have been some sort of beaconing devices.

This was one of the few aerial victories I scored that actually yielded decent gun-camera footage. After the film was developed, you could easily identify the aircraft type from the footage, and the flames coming out of the fuselage made it obvious that the airplane was mortally damaged. The quality of this footage was by far the exception. We had been carrying gun cameras and film ever since we started flying the Hellcat, but we typically had lousy luck with it. Mounted in the leading edge of the port wing, the lens typically got gummed up with oil, dirt, and salt spray, or rolled itself out of focus. On top of that, vibrations from the engine and the firing of the machineguns often rattled the camera so badly that it captured nothing at all discernible. Besides, with everything that was required to get the airplane ready for combat—regular maintenance, fueling, arming, and such—the care and feeding of the gun camera placed fairly low on the list of priorities. The results were consistently poor. Targeted airplanes usually showed up as shapeless gray blobs—consumed with a bright flash if they exploded.

I had just returned from a sweep against Omura airfield in northwestern Kyushu on May 14 when I got orders to get my division ready for another mission. Ensign John Morris and his gunner, ARM3 Phegley, had gotten their VB-12 SB2C dive bomber shot up on a strike against Usa Airdrome in northern Kyushu. They had ditched about five miles offshore in the Inland Sea and were in the water, awaiting rescue. My division was to escort two Kingfisher floatplanes from the cruiser Astoria for the pickup.

Soon after we were airborne we joined formation with the floatplanes. Initially I put the division in a normal escort position, about 1,000 feet above the Kingfishers, and set up a weaving pattern with our airspeed at about 250 knots. I wanted to keep our airspeed high enough so that we could engage enemy fighters if we were attacked. Otherwise, we were little better than the floatplanes we were assigned to protect. Traveling as they were at only about 80 to 85 knots, the Kingfishers were sitting ducks.

Unfortunately, the situation just didn’t allow us to keep our airspeed up. The downed fliers were 180 miles away, and at the speed the rescue planes were traveling the mission would clearly last five or six hours. If we stayed at 250 knots, we would be out of gas before we got back to the Randolph. Reluctantly I pulled the power back until the engine was producing only 1,200 rpm. The F6F propeller had two-to-one reduction gearing, so it was turning at only 600 rpm—slow enough that I could see the individual blades as they passed in front of me.

Even then, we still were traveling at about 110 knots and had to continue our weave pattern in order to keep from outrunning the Kingfishers. With the hair on the back of my neck standing almost straight up—I was fearful of being caught by enemy fighters—I settled down for the long trip to the Inland Sea.

Sitting still in a small, cramped space for any length of time becomes uncomfortable for anyone. In the F6F it became uncomfortable very quickly and stayed that way. We sat on top of our survival pack, and right at the top of that pack was a can of water. It was positioned in just such a spot that it dug a divot smack in the middle of your right rear cheek. After several hours, it became so painful that it was actually a distraction. Pilots tried all sorts of tricks to relieve the pain—extra cushions, extra underwear, whatever. Nothing seemed to work very well. Always, beneath whatever extra padding you had between your buttocks and that seat, you could still feel the edge of that can; it was like the Navy version of the fable about “The Princess and the Pea.” Today, more than a half-century later, I think I’m still walking around with a dimple in my backside.

After about two hours we reached the entrance of the strait leading to the Inland Sea, only to be greeted by flak popping nearby. Someone came up on the radio and asked if anyone could see where it was coming from. Someone else answered—in a squeaky voice—that he didn’t care where the hell it was coming from. He just wanted to know where it was going!

About this time Lieutenant Lane Bardeen, whose division was providing cover for the downed SB2C crew, advised that he had to leave because of low fuel. Earlier, Bardeen and his wingmen had strafed and driven off two destroyers that had poked their noses too close to the downed fliers. I advised him that we were approaching the area, and soon after I spotted the bright yellow dye marker that the fliers were trailing from their raft.

As the Kingfishers dropped down to set up for their water landings, I detached my division and we increased speed and climbed to establish top cover. Though we were in the heart of the enemy’s home, my anxiety decreased as my airspeed and altitude increased. From high above I watched the floatplanes touch down. The first Kingfisher water-taxied to the raft and picked up the first crewman with no difficulty.

Next, I watched the pilot of the second floatplane jockey into position; I was concerned because I could tell that his engine was idling very slowly. But I was absolutely astonished when I saw his propeller stop ticking altogether. He had cut his engine in the middle of Indian country! This seemed foolhardy to me in the extreme, particularly since the Japanese airbase at Usa was only 15 miles away.

After the floatplane fished the second flier out of the raft, I saw a puff of white smoke come out of the second floatplane’s engine as the pilot fired his starter cartridge. These were gunpowder cartridges—similar to shotgun shells—that turned the engine over fast enough to let the ignition sequence take place. The engine didn’t start. I watched anxiously as the pilot attempted another start. Another puff, and again the engine failed to start.

I turned and scanned the sky and sea for any sign of the enemy. The coast was clear. For the moment, I had even forgotten the pain from the water can that was biting into my fanny. The Kingfisher pilot tried again to start his engine. And again. Still no luck.

I rechecked my fuel gauges and wondered how many starter cartridges the Kingfisher had.

Finally, the engine caught. When that propeller started spinning, I think there was a big sigh of relief from every man in every plane. We learned later that the engine had started on the very last cartridge.

The return flight was still slow, but thankfully uneventful. After a total of five hours and 36 minutes we dropped the Kingfishers off at the Astoria and landed back aboard the Randolph. Our bomber crew was back with us by late that afternoon. This was the longest sortie I flew during the war.

Sadly, we lost another squadron mate this day, during a fighter sweep over Sodohara Airdrome on Kyushu. Ensign Robert Welty was hit, probably by ground fire. He failed to recover from a strafing run and crashed into the ground.

On May 18, we launched a long-range sweep against Tokuno Airdrome on Yaku Shima, just south of Kyushu and almost 250 miles from the task group. Armed with 5-inch HVARs, I rolled in from 10,000 feet and lined up on a pair of Zeroes parked in a double horseshoe-shaped revetment. The antiaircraft fire rising from the gun emplacements on the airfield was, as always, incredibly intense. It made my firing run seem particularly long.

Finally within range, I fired two rockets, one from each wing, and watched as they streaked downward. I started to become concerned when the rockets veered toward each other on a collision course and then crossed paths. I thought to myself there was no way they were going to be on target. Incredibly, they both hit home; the rocket from my left wing exploded into the Zero parked on the right side of the revetment, and my right rocket hit the Zero parked on the left.

As I pulled out of my dive, I couldn’t help but feel a little pleased with myself. Ignoring the streams of enemy tracers that were reaching for my airplane, I lined up on a third Zero parked across the airfield and filled it full of machinegun fire. It didn’t burn, despite the volume of fire I poured into it. I believe that it had no fuel onboard.

After we completed our strafing runs I gathered my division and turned toward the air group’s rendezvous point. As we made our way through a corridor of towering cumulus clouds I spotted a Nakajima J1N twin engine reconnaissance aircraft—codenamed “Irving”—about half a mile away at my one o’clock position. It was coming toward us.

I turned into it, and it immediately banked away and started a shallow dive for the clouds. Even though I was at full power I was not gaining appreciably on the Irving. I considered jettisoning my centerline tank in order to gain some speed, but it still had fuel in it and we were well over 200 miles from the carrier. The idea of dumping fuel didn’t really appeal. I started to go to war emergency power, but I remembered my experience at Barbers Point when my engine had quit and the plane had turned into a big blue glider. I decided I wasn’t too keen on that option either. In the end, the Irving simply outpaced my F6F, and disappeared into the clouds before I could reach firing range. The rest of the flight proved uneventful.

Sadly, we lost a pilot at Tokuno. Ensign Charlie White crashed and was killed. Although the actual cause of the crash was not known, it is possible that he shot himself down. He was recovering from a strafing run when he fired one of his 5-inch HVARs from very low level—only about 100 feet above the ground. Fired from such a low altitude the rocket would have hit its target almost immediately, and Charlie’s plane could well have been within lethal range of the exploding warhead.

It was on this day that the Randolph set a new record. While engaged in combat operations she launched a total of 199 airplanes. She recovered 197—two were lost. Such was the tempo of our operations during the Okinawa campaign.

As the war progressed, the operations of the big fleet carriers were augmented more and more by jeep carriers, CVEs. These were small ships converted from a freighter-type designs, generally about 500 feet in length. While they were useful, they could make only about 16 knots. This affected their ability to keep up with the faster fleet carriers, which could make 30-plus knots. It also limited when and how they could launch their airplanes.

The CVEs, with a much smaller deck, also presented challenges to their pilots, who flew FM Wildcats— an improved four-gun model of the venerable F4F built under license by General Motors—and TBMs. I remember getting airborne one day off the coast of Okinawa just before dawn. There was no wind and the Pacific was like a millpond—as still as I had ever seen it. Climbing to altitude, I was startled by a bright flash out on the horizon. I didn’t learn until later that the explosion had occurred when a fully loaded TBM crashed after being launched, without enough wind over the deck, from one of the escort carriers.

Our losses continued to grow. We had already lost more than half the airplanes we started with, although with constant replacements being flown aboard from the escort carriers, we were never lacking for aircraft. In fact, since the time we had picked up the very first Hellcats for VF-9, just more than two years earlier, Grumman had produced more than 10,000 of the new fighters. And Grumman wasn’t the only manufacturer churning out airplanes. The Navy, which had fewer than 2,500 aircraft when Pearl Harbor was attacked, had accepted nearly 60,000 new airplanes from a number of manufacturers. A telling example of America’s industrial prowess at this point in the war involves Navy airplane losses at Okinawa. During the campaign, we lost approximately 550 airplanes of all types. Where it would have taken eight months to replace that many airplanes in 1941, by 1945 the country could do it in only 12 production days. We weren’t just outfighting the Japanese, we were burying them with equipment.

Almost all of the missions we flew took us into antiaircraft fire, and while a flier could take certain measures to decrease his chances of being hit, it was a matter of luck whether his “number” came up. We started to joke grimly among ourselves about how we were playing a long, strung-out game of Russian roulette. Typically, we spent four or five days “on the line,” flying combat air patrol or support missions, and then took a day off to refuel and resupply the ship. Even then, the pace of operations was such that we occasionally flew missions on our nominal day off.

As in previous battles, the Japanese launched night attacks. Calls to general quarters in the middle of the night became almost routine as flights of enemy airplanes—real or imagined—made their way toward our task group. There was no way to sleep during these raids, so we spent much of our time either in the wardroom beneath the armored hangar deck or up on the flight deck watching the fireworks. The greatest achievement of these enemy forays was probably that they deprived us of so much sleep. After a while, it became telling.

The horrors that could befall us were well understood—more than 700 men, including a large number of the pilots in Air Group 5, were killed when an enemy plane bombed the aircraft carrier Franklin on March 19. Ironically, 23 very fortunate—and thankful—pilots in VF-12 had transferred in from VF-5 shortly before we had left the States.

The Franklin incident showed that, aside from kamikazes, the Japanese were still able to score with conventional bombing attacks despite the woeful condition of their air forces. The threat of death or injury aboard our ship was very real, and the crew, quite naturally, responded in different ways. Some men adopted a cavalier, devil-may-care attitude. Others withdrew into themselves, speaking little or not at all. Some were openly fearful and made no pretense about putting themselves into the safest compartments of the ship.

Others took unusual precautions. I still remember Jim Whiting, a bomber pilot who was desperately fearful of being burned. He had gotten hold of a quantity of the heavy, white, zinc oxide anti-flash burn cream that the antiaircraft gunners put on their exposed skin. Whenever general quarters was sounded, Jim showed up in the wardroom all bundled up in his flight suit and flying gloves, his face covered with cream. We all huddled in the wardroom, and in the middle of the crowd, sitting nonchalantly, was Jim with his stark-white face. For some reason, the incongruity of it struck me as hilarious. He took a lot of good-natured ribbing from us because of that cream.

There were so many attacks during this time that it seemed as if general quarters was sounded whenever we turned around. Quite often, we just stayed at general quarters for hours at a time. We actually started to become conditioned to it—just like lab rats. It got to the point that as long as the Randolph was firing just her five-inch guns, we pretty much conducted business as usual, figuring that the bogey was still four or five miles away. When the 40-millimeter guns opened up, we became a bit more concerned, because that meant the bogey had closed to maybe just a couple of miles. If the 20-millimeter guns started firing there was a mad rush to get down to the wardroom, below the armored deck.

The stress started to manifest itself among all of us, including me. On May 28, 1945, our last full day at Okinawa, I returned from a mission just at dusk. Flying up the ship’s wake, I arrived overhead, then turned hard into a left downwind to set up for landing. As I came around the corner in a left-hand turn, just prior to setting up in the groove—the final approach—I scanned over to where the LSO was perched on the port side of the stern. To my surprise, he had his paddles well above his head, the signal indicating that I was high.

Now, if I wasn’t the most experienced pilot on that entire ship, I was certainly in the top four or five. And I knew that the LSO was wrong. I could fly the landing pattern in my sleep. For that matter, the Hellcat without a pilot could just about fly the pattern. So, I disregarded the signals the LSO was giving me and continued my approach. As I did, he kept waving his paddles above his head, trying to communicate to me that I was much too high. I knew I was right in the groove, so I ignored him.

I was also beginning to get a bit frustrated with this confused LSO, and I made a note to myself to debrief him after the flight. His was a role that was critical to safe and efficient operations. If he couldn’t perform it properly, he had no business being at the back end of the ship.

It wasn’t until I got over the ramp that I finally realized—in fact, was completely astounded by the realization—that I was 60 or more feet above the deck. I should have been at 20 feet. It dawned on me then that the LSO wasn’t the player in this game who needed a little bit of counseling. As quick as I could, I poured on the power to execute the wave-off that he was frantically signaling me to take. There was no way I’d be able to safely salvage the approach. Once I was away from the deck of the ship, I flew the pattern by the numbers, just as if I was a brand-new ensign, and I finally got aboard.

I know that it was the stress of the months-long combat tour that had nearly killed me, and I mentally kicked myself. Losing my life in combat would have been tragic enough, but to die—and maybe kill others in the process—because I fouled up a routine landing would have put an ugly stain on what I hoped was an otherwise worthy career.