Grumman F4F Wildcat

The Wildcat began as a step backwards. Grumman’s first answer to a 1936 US Navy fighter contest was a biplane, the XF4F-1 — and when the Navy sensibly preferred monoplanes, the design was recast as the XF4F-2, which then lost the 1938 competition to the Brewster F2A Buffalo. Grumman went back to the drawing board, gave the aircraft a more powerful two-stage supercharged engine and bigger wing, and the definitive XF4F-3 flew on 12 February 1939.

This time it won. The US Navy ordered it into production, and the Wildcat entered squadron service through 1940, just as war spread across the world. Britain’s Fleet Air Arm took it too, as the Martlet — and it was a Martlet, not a US aircraft, that scored the type’s first kill: a Ju 88 shot down over Scapa Flow on 25 December 1940, the first aerial victory by an American-built fighter in British service.

The Wildcat was pure Grumman: stubby, barrel-chested and immensely strong, built around a Pratt & Whitney R-1830 Twin Wasp 14-cylinder radial of about 1,200 hp. The definitive F4F-4 carried six 0.50-inch (12.7 mm) Browning machine guns and introduced Grumman’s ingenious “Sto-Wing” — wings that folded flat back along the fuselage, letting a carrier pack far more fighters below deck. It had self-sealing tanks and armour that its Japanese rivals lacked.

What it did not have was agility. At around 515 km/h the F4F-4 was slower than the A6M Zero, and it could neither out-turn nor out-climb it — a Zero could turn inside a Wildcat almost at will. Its manually cranked landing gear (28½ turns by hand) was a running joke. But it could out-dive the Zero, absorb punishment that would have torn a Zero apart, and hit far harder with its six heavy guns. The Wildcat’s war would be won by turning those trade-offs into tactics.

For the first year of the Pacific war the Wildcat was American naval air power. Marine F4Fs of VMF-211 made the epic stand at Wake Island in December 1941; Wildcats flew fighter cover at the Coral Sea and at Midway, where Lieutenant Commander John Thach first used his new tactic in combat. Against the Zero’s superiority, Thach’s “weave” — two pairs of fighters crossing flight paths so each could clear the other’s tail — let inferior aircraft fight superior ones and win.

The proof had already come at sea. On 20 February 1942, defending Lexington, Lieutenant Edward “Butch” O’Hare attacked a formation of Japanese bombers alone and was credited with shattering it — becoming the US Navy’s first ace of the war and earning the Medal of Honor. Chicago’s O’Hare Airport carries his name today.

The Wildcat’s defining campaign was Guadalcanal. From the mud strip of Henderson Field, the Marine and Navy F4Fs of the “Cactus Air Force” fought the daily bomber raids down from Rabaul through the second half of 1942 — outnumbered, worn out, but dug in where it counted. Marine ace Joe Foss ran his score to 26 victories flying Wildcats over the island, matching the World War I record of Eddie Rickenbacker.

It was attritional, unglamorous flying, and it broke the back of Japanese naval air strength before the faster Hellcats and Corsairs arrived to finish the job. In the hands of well-drilled pilots using the right tactics, the Wildcat achieved a claimed kill-to-loss ratio of roughly 6.9 to 1 against Japanese aircraft — a figure no one had thought possible for an aircraft the Zero could so easily out-fly.

As Grumman’s lines switched to the bigger Hellcat, Wildcat production passed to General Motors’ Eastern Aircraft division, which built it as the FM-1 and then the lightweight FM-2 — the “Wilder Wildcat,” with a taller tail and a lighter Wright R-1820 engine tuned for the short decks of escort carriers. Around 7,885 Wildcats of all marks were built between 1940 and 1945.

That escort-carrier role gave the little fighter a long second life. FM-2 Wildcats were still flying from the decks of the escort carriers at Leyte Gulf in October 1944, joining the desperate defence during the Battle off Samar — the same action in which the destroyer USS Johnston made her legendary charge. The Wildcat fought from the first days of the war to the last.

The Wildcat was never the best fighter in the sky, and its own pilots knew it. It was slower, clumsier and less nimble than the enemy it faced through the hardest year of the Pacific war. Its greatness lies entirely in what it did anyway: it held on.

From Wake Island to Guadalcanal, the Wildcat bought the United States the one thing it needed most in 1942 — time — until the industrial tide and a new generation of Grumman and Vought fighters could turn the war. It is the classic example of a machine made formidable less by its specifications than by the men who flew it and the tactics they devised to survive.

• Barrett Tillman, Wildcat: The F4F in World War II (Naval Institute Press).
• Barrett Tillman, Wildcat Aces of World War 2 (Osprey, Aircraft of the Aces).
• Steve Ewing, Wildcat! (Mesa).