![]() America’s fleet entered World War II with substandard aircraft, junior aviation leadership, and a bureaucracy that still favored the battleship over mobile airpower. When the war began, naval aviation was in a tough spot. The 1944 success of McCampbell and Rushing could hardly have been anticipated even two years earlier. The fighter arrived just in time to unleash the offensive power of the Navy’s carrier task forces. The tale of the Hellcat isn’t just a hardware story, though. It was the Hellcat that beat back the Japanese Zero, defended US Navy warships, and gave the lethal American dive-bombers and torpedo aircraft their path to sink Japanese carriers and ships of the line. However, while the Mustang was the dominant fighter in Europe, there is no doubt the Hellcat dominated the Pacific. The Mustang shot down 4,950 enemies in the air and destroyed more than 4,000 more on the ground, along with 230 V-1 vengeance weapons. The Mustang flew a good 50 mph faster than the Hellcat and outdid it in ceiling and range. The US Army Air Forces partisans could counter with a similar claim for the P-51 Mustang-like the Hellcat, a late entrant in the second World War. Hellcat pilots logged 5,156 aerial victories, and 305 of them became aces. The fighter that McCampbell and Rushing flew turned out to be America’s greatest acemaker: the Grumman F6F Hellcat. McCampbell was a stellar pilot (he became the top Navy ace of all time and recipient of the Medal of Honor), yet there was more to that story than the pilots. It remains a feat that is unmatched in the annals of US Navy fighter aviation and ranks among the great fighter actions anywhere. This was at the start of action in the famous Battle of Leyte Gulf. Within mere minutes, McCampbell shot down nine Japanese airplanes. ![]()
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