Vought F4U Corsair

The Corsair began with a simple, brutal premise: build the smallest possible airframe around the largest available engine. In 1938 Vought's chief engineer Rex Beisel wrapped a fighter around the new Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp, an 18-cylinder twin-row radial of over 2,000 hp — at the time the most powerful engine fitted to any fighter.

That engine demanded an enormous 4.0 m (13 ft 4 in) propeller, and keeping it clear of the deck without absurdly long landing gear forced the aircraft's defining feature: an inverted-gull wing that met the fuselage at its lowest point, allowing short, strong undercarriage legs. First flown in May 1940, the XF4U-1 became the first US single-engined fighter to exceed 400 mph (644 km/h) in level flight.

The production F4U-1 reached about 671 km/h (417 mph) on its 2,000 hp R-2800, climbed strongly and dived superbly. Armament was heavy and standardised: six 12.7 mm (.50 cal) Browning M2 machine guns in the wings, later models adding up to 1,800 kg of bombs or eight 127 mm rockets for ground attack.

But the early Corsair was a difficult carrier aircraft. The long nose blocked the pilot's view over the deck on approach, and the stiff landing gear caused a vicious bounce; combined with a sharp stall it earned the nickname 'Ensign Eliminator'. The US Navy initially banished it to land-based Marine squadrons while the more docile Hellcat went to the carriers.

A cockpit raised by some 180 mm, a longer tailwheel strut, a 'stall strip' on the starboard wing and improved oleos eventually tamed it. By 1944 — helped by British Fleet Air Arm clearance for carrier operations — the Corsair was at last fully cleared for US carrier decks, becoming one of the great shipboard fighters of the war.

It was the Royal Navy, not the US Navy, that first took the Corsair to sea in strength. The Fleet Air Arm — which operated some 2,012 Corsairs, its wingtips clipped about 20 cm to fit British hangar decks — worked out the curved, continuously-turning landing approach that kept the deck in view past the long nose, and cleared the type for carrier operations in 1943, months ahead of the Americans.

British Corsairs flew strikes against the battleship Tirpitz from April 1944 and fought across the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. Off Japan on 9 August 1945, the Canadian FAA pilot Robert Hampton Gray pressed home an attack on an escort vessel through massed flak and was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross — one of the last of the war.

Production ran to roughly 12,570 aircraft over more than a decade, built by Vought, Goodyear (as the FG-1) and Brewster (F3A). The F4U-1A introduced the raised cockpit; the F4U-1D added pylons for bombs and rockets; the F4U-1C swapped the machine guns for four 20 mm cannon.

The night-fighter F4U-2 carried radar, while the late F4U-4 fitted a 2,380 hp engine and four-blade propeller for over 720 km/h. So sound was the design that it stayed in production until 1953 — the longest production run of any US piston fighter — and fought again over Korea as a ground-attack aircraft.

The Corsair entered combat with Marine squadron VMF-124 at Guadalcanal in February 1943 and quickly became the scourge of Japanese airpower in the Solomons. Marine aces such as 'Pappy' Boyington and his 'Black Sheep' squadron built their reputations on it. Japanese pilots, unnerved by the sound of air through its wing-root oil-cooler intakes, are said to have called it 'Whistling Death'.

Flown by US Marine and Navy units and the British and New Zealand air arms, the Corsair ranged across the Pacific as a fighter, fighter-bomber and close-support machine. US Navy and Marine Corsairs were credited with about 2,140 air victories against 189 losses in air combat — an 11:1 kill ratio, the best of any US fighter in the theatre.

Beyond air combat it became a superb ground-attack platform, hauling bombs, napalm and rockets in support of island invasions. Its career did not end in 1945: Corsairs flew extensively in the Korean War and remained in some air forces into the 1960s.

The F4U Corsair was the most capable American carrier fighter of the Second World War — faster than the Hellcat, harder-hitting, and able to out-climb and out-dive the Japanese fighters it faced. Once its early carrier-handling vices were cured, it combined air superiority and ground-attack roles in a single, immensely strong airframe.

Its 11:1 kill ratio, its long production life and its return to combat over Korea mark it as one of the outstanding piston-engined fighters ever built. The bent-wing 'Whistling Death' remains, with the Mustang and the Spitfire, one of the definitive fighters of the age.

• Barrett Tillman, Corsair: The F4U in World War II and Korea (Naval Institute Press).
• Barrett Tillman, F4U Corsair Aces of World War 2 (Osprey, Aircraft of the Aces).
• William Green, Warplanes of the Second World War (Macdonald).