Pilots and Planes: Smithsonian on Capt. David McCampbell, World War II aviation and the Grumman Hellcat
Posted By RichC on February 24, 2024
A few of the history oriented books I read in 2023 were about World War II Naval Aviation in the Pacific … after the previous years studying Navy and US Marine battles. As much as I enjoyed the books by several aviators who flew Corsairs (1, 2, 3, 4) … I really enjoyed reading last week about the Grumman F6F Hellcat in a Smithsonian article.
Two Grumman F6F Hellcats streaked across the sky above the Philippines. Below them, armadas of ships clashed in an epic battle to control the sea around the island of Luzon, where American and Australian ground forces engaged the Japanese in bitter combat.
It was October 24, 1944, and the Battle of Leyte Gulf—the largest naval engagement in modern history—had just begun. The Hellcat pilots, U.S. Navy Capt. David McCampbell and his wingman Ens. Roy Rushing, were looking for trouble up ahead and they found it—a squadron of 60 Japanese aircraft, including bombers escorted by Zeroes, the feared fighter of the Japanese Imperial Navy.
Despite being overwhelmingly outnumbered, the American pilots never hesitated. Throttling their Hellcats’ powerful 2,000-horsepower engines, they ascended for the attack. From on high, they waded into the enemy on repeated sorties, each blasting away with six .50-caliber machine guns.
“We’d make an attack, keep our altitude advantage and speed, and go down again,” McCampbell recalled in a 1987 interview for the U.S. Naval Institute’s oral history project. “We repeated this over and over till we made about 20 coordinated attacks.”
The American pilots shot down a total of 15 planes—an achievement still unequalled in combat aviation. Both earned “ace in a day” status by downing five or more aircraft each on one mission. That day, McCampbell scored nine “kills”—seven Zeroes, also known as the Mitsubishi A6M Reisin, and two “Oscars,” the Nakajima Ki-43. None of the Japanese bombers reached their targets. With their formation so scattered, the enemy pilots had to abort their mission.
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