Early in the air battle in the Pacific, the US Navy's front line fighters were the "Wildcats" (F4F). It had problems taking on the Japanese Zeros. Shortly thereafter, the "Hellcats" (F6F) were introduced (When?). How did the Hellcats fare with the Zeros. Then there were the "Bearcats" (F8F). Were these carrier planes? How about the "Tigercats" (F7F)? Were they effective? The F4Us (Corsairs) were excellent fighters but I understand they were used on aircraft carriers in limited basis because the pilots had problems seeing up front during take taxiing and take offs.
Briefly, Wildcats were effective against Zeros when piloted properly and used with good tactics. Hellcats were the master of the Zero from the day they were introduced. Bearcats and Tigercats were both introduced too late in the war to have any combat experience. Corsairs were thought to be unsuitable for carrier operations due to the vision issue and landing gear set-up. However, the British seemed to be okay with the early Corsair models on carriers and the F4U eventually was used on all types of US carriers. tom
The Wildcat was used through the entire war. Hellcats started being introduced at the beginning of 1943 (January VF 5 on Yorktown was the first deployed squadron). The F8F Bearcat was intended as a fleet defense interceptor. It had a very high rate of climb and high speed. The intended use was against Kamikaze that leaked through CAP and screens. The F7F Tigercat was used almost entirely as a nightfighter operationally. It was too late to see any WW 2 operational service however.
Contrary to popular belief, the US Navy was using Corsairs on carriers before the British, and as night fighters no less.
The US navy trialed the Corsair on carriers in 1942, but did not operate the F4U from them until 1944. In the meantime, the Corsair was used by the US Marines from land bases and the British accepted them for carrier operations in mid 1943. tom
The first two FAA Corsair Squadrons were formed in the Summer of '43 and began workups to operational status. The first operational use of Corsairs from carriers by the FAA was in April 1944 with HMS Victorious. The USN had several detachments of F4U-2's from VF(N)-101 operational with the fleet in January 1944.
So the Brits were first to accept the Corsair for carrier ops but the Yanks were first to actually operate them from carriers. I wonder, would the Yanks have kept trying had the Brits not actually proved the Corsair usable from carriers? tom
No, VF-17 was fully qualified for carrier operations in the Summer of '43 and the USN never actually rejected the F4U for carrier ops. The British benefited from the work that VF-17 did. The following is a cut-and-paste from an earlier post on Corsair development issues that is relevent here: The Corsair had many developmental problems. Some major, some minor, some related to carrier operations, others were not. VF-17 exerted major influence in solving many of the problems dogging the Corsair. VF-17s engineering and maintenance department under Lt. Butch Davenport did much to solve the oleo problem. They were also responsible for the air flow spoiler on the right wing which became standard to tame the vicious left wing drop at stall. VF-17 had unmodified F4U-1s when they completed their carrier qualification aboard Bunker Hill in the Summer of '43. There were many blown tires and broken wheels and one F4U was written off. It caught a wire as it initiated a high bounce and was slammed back to the deck. VF-17 had F4U-1As with all the major modifications by the time they embarked for transit to the war zone. The order pulling them from Bunker Hill was more for supply logistics reasons than for operational concerns. At the time they would have been the only carrier based Corsair squadron. The logistics of supplying an additional type of fighter on the carriers, especially in the forward areas would put an additional burden on the already stretched supply system. They were supplying F6Fs on the big decks and F4Fs on the jeeps. The Hellcat was certainly accomplishing the mission, and there was need to replace the Marines F4Fs that were still operating as front line fighters. So the decision to keep the F4U land-based was more logistical than operational. The British were starting workups with the Corsair about the time VF-17 deployed on Bunker Hill's shakedown cruise. The British profited from VF-17s experiences and adopted the modifications they pioneered. One modification the Brits alone made was to clip 8 inches off each wing tip to provide clearance for the folded wings in the lower overhead of the British hanger decks. This modification provided an additional benefit of reducing the F4Us tendency to float in ground effect on landing.
The info I've got has the first model to operate from carriers as the Corsair ll (F4U-1D). It had the clipped wings for below deck storage.
I think you will find that the Corsair II was the F4U-1A and not the -1D. Corsair history with the Fleet Air Arm: Chance-Vought Corsair F4Uaircraft profile. Aircraft Database of the Fleet Air Arm Archive 1939-1945
I think we've arrived at cross purposes somehow based I believe on nomenclature. For example, we commonly speak of the Sherman tank without regard to the army it served in, be it American, British or Russian, when in reality the AFV was known officially as "the Sherman tank" only to British and Empire forces. It was always the M4 to the United States armed forces, at least formally (ah... the famous, ubiquitous and confusing M designations, one could on ad nauseum on this point). A similar situation developed with aircraft. The United States Army Air Corps (later the USAAF, and later still the USAF) had a rather simple designation scheme: a letter indicating general type -- B for bomber, P for Pursuit (though by 1942 nobody but a desk-bound pencil pusher in Washington used anything but "fighter"), C for cargo or transport, etc. -- followed by an ordinal number indicating the comparative order in which a particular aircraft was either officially evaluated or development contract awarded. X or Y was used as a prefix to the designation indicating an experimental design or a production prototype. Suffix letters were used to indicated a model or revision of the design. The Air Corps system packed a lot of information into a few characters, and someone who knows the nomenclature knows something about the plane without having any further information. This could be an intelligence weakness however. For example, suppose a Japanese intelligence office gains access to a telegram from the US War Department to an overseas commander in the Philippines stating that the 99th Pursuit Squadron with 24 P-40 aircraft are being dispatched to his command. If the Japanese officer knows that the pursuit squadrons already in the Philippines have 68 P-26 aircraft, then he can reasonably conclude that the Philippines are being reinforced by substantially more advanced fighters simply based on the designations. The system could lead to erroneous assumptions, however. 40 comes before 39 and 38, yet the P-40 is less sophisticated than either the P-39 or the P-38. In the war years the USAAF adopted or evaluated at least 42 fighter types (though some were cancelled while under development) yet the public generally knows of only a few of them. The designation system in the USN was more complex and less informative: A one or two-letter general type designator (F for fighter, SB for Scout Bomber, TB for Torpedo Bomber, OS for Scout, PB for patrol bomber, etc.) followed by a model number and a letter designator for the manufacturer, which may or may not be evocative of the manufacturer's corporate name. Consider the designation F2A -- F for fighter, A for Brewster Aeronautical Corporation and the number two meaning that this is the second Brewster-made fighter type aircraft adopted by the United States Navy Bureau of Aeronautics (BuAer). OK, so may we assume the F1A was the first Brewster navy fighter? No... because in the BuAer naming system the first of a type made by a specific manufacturer has no number. Therefore the first Brewster fighter is the FA, right? Wrong again. The first Brewster-built was a scout bomber type known as the SBA, so the rules about numbering changed before the F2A was adopted. So why A for Brewster? Because Brewster was the first aircraft manufacturer to supply the US Navy? No, that was Curtiss. Brewster got A because Boeing got B first. Curtiss got C, and Douglass got D. So why was Grumman indicated by F and not G? Well... duh. In the case of Grumman the BuAer designations make reasonable sense if you just accept that F means Grumman -- their first fighter was a biplane called the FF, followed by the F2F, the F3F, and then the famous F4F. It takes a bureaucracy working tirelessly for no measurable output to come up with this kind of stuff, thus the BuAer nomenclature system became fraught with inconsistencies and useless detail. Consider for example the TBF. After producing several hundred examples of their first torpedo bomber (No number in the designation means first of the type from a given manufacturer, remember?) Grumman decided they needed to concentrate on building F6F fighters. So the manufacturing was moved to a General Motors subsidiary called Eastern Aircraft, and hence the Bureau of Aeronautics applying their system rigorously and pointlessly created a new designation for the same plane -- the TBM. The manufacturers had their own naming system which made sense only within the company, but even before marketing became a profession all its own they knew a jazzy name for the brochure or to win over a key politico was good policy. So when the execs at Republic have a golf date with Senator Foghorn they don't chat about their new fighter called the AP-4, no they boast about their new high altitude interceptor called the Thunderbolt! Zowie! Sometimes the manufacturer's publicly known name came to be used by the Air Corps and the Navy, unofficially of course. In the British armed services a naming bureaucracy didn't exist. Aircraft were acquired by the Ministry for Air for the RAF and the Fleet Air Arm which operated the machines acquired for them by the Ministry and called them what they were told to call them, which was the name given by the manufacturer, except when it wasn't. (For example the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk was officially the Tomahawk or Kittyhawk for reasons that elude me. The name Kittyhawk was probably galling for Curtiss, Kittyhawk being the location where the Brothers Wright made their historic test flight, the same brothers who sued Glen Curtiss dozens of times.) Vought's famous gull-winged fighter was known as the F4U in USN service, except when manufactured by Goodyear, in which case it was known as the FG-1 (BuAer goes off the rails again, to be consistent it ought to have been simply FG). The British, on the other hand didn't distinguish between the Vought-made planes and those from Goodyear, instead they were simply Corsairs, with mark numbers to indicate major revisions -- Corsair Mk. I, Corsair Mk. II etc. Here's where Poppy made a slight error in that he writes Corsair II where he means Corsair Mk. II. The difference is important because there is a Corsair II, but it is a post-war jet also called the A-7, an attack derivative of the Vought F-8 Crusader fighter. In an attempt to correct Poppy Takao compounds the error. The F4U-1D (aka Corsair Mk. IV) wasn't the first carrier-worthy Corsair, that was the Corsair Mk. II, which Poppy was referring to by the slightly incorrect term "Corsair II." The Corsair Mk. II wasn't identical to the F4U-1A, though many of the improvements introduced by the Mark II were incorporated into the F4U-1A. The most obvious difference is the wing span, the FAA version having a span nearly a foot shorter. This "clipped wing" adaptation was needed to clear the lower overhead on RN carriers. In the Royal Navy carriers were designed primarily for Home Fleet and Mediterranean Fleet operations, which entailed risks of carriers coming under shore battery fire. Consequently the fight decks were armored and the whole ship was lower in the water than USN CV-type carriers. Standard US design had the flight deck built as superstructure, with the hangar deck being the main deck. In British practice the flight deck was the main deck and the hangar spaces were within the hull, thus their hangars more cramped with lower overheads and accommodation for fewer planes. The IJN followed a similar paradigm, flight deck as superstructure. Some say the Taiho was a British-style design with her enclosed hurricane bows, however, close inspect will show that the hangar deck is above the hull, just as in the other IJN fleet carriers. USN "jeep" carriers like St. Lo had their flight decks at main deck level and hangar space within the hull, but not because they carried armor. It was simply done that way for stability.
That/those are great points CPL P..., the myriad of initials, between the services and the manufacturing companies themselves can be confusing to say the least. And not just in aircraft either, those confusions were extended into land vehicles as well, and some of them simply refuse to die to this day. My favorite is that GP stood for General Purpose and was shortened into the phonetic "jeep" name. GP was the Ford designation for the vehicle itself internally to Ford. G for government, and P for the 80 inch wheelbase of the vehicle. When their own design failed to be adapted by the military, they modified their run to produce the Willys design and added the "W" in parenthesis behind their own GP designation GP(W).
Dang. That sure was purdy CPL. Not dance hall girlie purdy, but sundown purdy. Thanks for the interesting bit......I referenced Bill Gunstons "Allied Fighters of WWll" above.
Some great posts above. The USN 1944 combat evaluation of F4U-1D, F6F-5 and FM-2 versus the A6M5 capitalises none of these aircraft should ever attempt to dog fight a zero, nor follow one in loops or a half roll and pull through. Zeroes also have superior pilot view, which can be a big thing in combat. The Hellcat only manages a parity with Zero level turns at high altitude and high speed. The control forces are high, at speed in the Zero so a minimum combat engagement speed is 175 KIAS with 200 KIAS advised, otherwise they run rings around pretty much anything in the sky...literally (can come around behind a Hellcat from tail-on in less than 3/4 turn if you don't keep your speed up and extend). If a zero is on your tail in any of these aircraft you must extend with diving high speed turn as they cannot be shaken, only outrun and any other manoeuvre could be instant death. ie. boom and zoom or you're dead, given pilot equivalence and health. Not so easy in the Wildcat so the preferred tactic is attrition: head ons with guns blazing, rinse and repeat and Zeroes will drop before Wildcats will...even if they don't more Wildcats will bring pilots with combat damage back to base than Zeroes will so you win the day retroactively anyway having less pilot attrition per sortie rate irrespective of kill confirmations at the battlefield. Fortunately later competition for the Zero accelerate like it's standing still and have a lot, a lot more energy to play with. Japanese vets complain that American pilots refused to fight properly and just kept shooting on the run, turning around out of range, coming back, shooting on the run, etc. until they were all downed. It's exactly like finding the cheat in a computer strategy game and just exploiting it. No skill or technical superiority (besides brute power) involved, you just found a cheat, light a smoke and stare out the window, and systematically exploit it until it says game over and your points score is up at the top listing. There is also the issue the in the south/central pacific from mid-43 living conditions and the medical health of Japanese pilots were so atrocious they had a death rate on down time, one Japanese ace stationed at Rabaul said by the time that campaign was reaching its climax many pilots were in such bad health that when ordered up they were defeatist, dilerious with fever and got themselves killed on purpose. He was quite sincere and a bit upset about it, he said if they weren't in the field they'd have been in hospital and really should've been. The big thing any Hellcat has over any Wildcat versus the Zero is one stalls out in a side by side climb before the Zero, the other after the Zero so under that particular condition the Hellcat is a completely different animal, and at first a lot of Zero pilots took on Hellcats like they were fighting Wildcats. They lost some good aces that way in early encounters. It used to be an old cheat Zero aces used, if Wildcat pilots went vertical they were almost always dead meat. Tables are turned with the Hellcat most markedly in this kind of fight, especially at higher altitudes. All the US competitors except the FM-2 had far superior altitude performance than any Japanese aircraft except the daimler engined one too, so if you could get the combat height up around 20,000ft you were laughing. Light build of the Zero in particular also means in sustained dives/extends you were laughing too, so once the exploits got figured out pretty much all US aircraft could use them. One of the nasty little tricks of the Zero, also from its very light build and modern layout was the fact it could do a tighter loop at the same rate of climb bleeding less energy than pretty much anything anywhere. So in a tight aerobatics display it has the dynamics of an aircraft with probably twice the energy it has, not even a Corsair can keep up with this. There's some footage of some doing aerobatics above Port Moresby taunting USAAC and RAAF pilots, who learned quick you die if you went up at that point. You're either already up, or you go find cover. Coastwatching and sortie rates became crucial, early warning, plenty of CAP and having more in the air more often.
One wonders if that's the famous bit Sabuo Sakai wrote about in Samauri, wherein he, Hiroyoshi Nishizawa, and Toshio Ota stayed behind after a mission to perform an aerial Danse Macabre over the heads of the Allied pilots.
