David McCampbell is the absolute record holder in the US Navy with 34 victories, all achieved in a Hellcat. His record of 9 enemy aircraft shot down in a single mission (October 24, 1944) remains unbroken to this day.

Six kills while flying a Hellcat with a malfunctioning supercharger is crazy. Vraciu could’ve turned back and nobody would've blamed him, yet he stayed in the fight. I’m not sure whether that’s courage or the kind of risk commanders normally try to prevent.

It wasn't just a better plane. The pilots still had to change the way they fought. As good as the Hellcat was, it still couldn't turn with a Zero.

Another invaluable historical piece from this channel. Those unsung heroes and inventors deserve to be remembered. Wishing the channel more and more success! 🛡🌍

I say this history post is fabulous!

Got to have lunch with Alex Vracio in the 90s.  Epic hero.

I was stationed on Marcus Island (Minami-Tori-shima) for a year in the early 90s manning a LORAN aids to navigation system. It's halfway between Hawaii and Japan. There's still a Japanese long lance torpedo on display in front of the generator building. There are underground tunnels for assembling torpedos but most are caved in now. There's a concrete port that has been reclaimed by the ocean. These stories help fill in the questions I had during my time there. This island was also bypassed during the island hopping campaign. I can't imagine being cutoff from food supply during WW2 where 3 to 4,000 soldiers and airmen waited until the surrender. We needed an C-130 cargo plane to deliver supplies once a week for only 26 guys. The soil is basically crushed coral so most of the plants are smaller than average including coconuts. Amazingly, there are thousands of rats there.

F6F is a great creation for war

Leroy Grumman was a pilot. He understood what it takes to make a pilot. He treated the Navy pilots with reverence, they needed to survive, they needed to make it back alive.

Pappy Boyington also received the Congressional Medal of Honor during WW2 in Marine Air Pacific...

f6f is awesome

Why do you think Japanese pilots feared the Hellcat most: its firepower, its survivability, or the fact that it dominated combat even in the hands of average pilots?

Great post! From Louisiana.

Grumman gets an A+ for the F6F. Earlier F4F was underpowered and Zero fighters knew it, so they would purposely get pilots into a climb, where F4F would stall out first, allowing Zeros to drop on them for the kill. Japanese pilots thought F6F was the same plane, since Grumman used same basic plane. F6F could out climb a Zero, and fooled the Japanese pilots into that same climb strategy.

good video

There is a persistent myth/lie/error of understanding that the recovery of the crashed Zero in the Aleutian Islands and subsequent testing of the same in the July-October 1942 time frame (starting at 5:15) is what resulted in the Navy beginning the Request For Proposals and design process that became the Grumman F6F Hellcat, successor to the Grumman F4F Wildcat. In fact, Grumman had begun design work on what became the Hellcat in 1938, 3 years before the Japanese attack on American forces on Hawaii and at Pearl Harbor on 07 Dec 1941.
.
From the Wikipedia article on the Grumman F6F Hellcat: “Grumman had been working on a successor to the F4F Wildcat since 1938, and the contract for the prototype XF6F-1 was signed on 30 June 1941.” Note that this contract date was more than 5 months before the Japanese attack on US forces on Hawaii and at Pearl Harbor on 07Dec1941. Continuing, “…  the first [uprated engine Pratt & Whitney R-2800, 2,000 hp] Double Wasp-equipped aircraft, the XF6F-3 (02982), which first flew on 30 July 1942. The first production F6F-3, powered by an R-2800-10, flew on 3 October 1942, with the type reaching operational readiness with VF-9 on USS Essex in February 1943.”
.
Undoubtedly the results of the test program the Navy put their captured Zero through were used to tweak the F6F Hellcat design before the final production design was frozen, but the Hellcat's design was largely complete by mid-1942 when the Zero crashed. The major value of the study and the flight testing of the captured Zero was to educate the Navy as to what the Zero was, how it achieved its extraordinary performance and what its flight characteristics were. Because there is no such thing as a perfect aircraft with perfect performance, those studies showed the Zero's strengths and weaknesses and informed the Navy how to fight and kill it while avoiding being harmed by it. For example, according to a quote cited in the Wikipedia article, the Zero had a slightly higher rate of climb than the F6F-3 Hellcat below 14,000 ft and could easily out turn it a lower airspeeds. However, the Hellcat had powerful advantages otherwise, which leads to the fighter pilot wisdom to "Fight your fight, using your individual strengths and those of your airplane. If you let the other guy manipulate you into fighting his fight, where he has the performance advantages, you're likely to die."

Great post. I listened in carefully <3

Random images--why am I looking at a Dauntless when we are talking about the Hellcat? Talking about Campbell, but looking at Vraciu.

And yet for the duration of the war the F4F had a kill ratio of 5.9 to 1 versus Zero. I think the reality is at the very beginning of the war when people didn't know how to deal with the Zero it was a problem. But by the time of the Guadalcanal campaigns the Americans had learned how to use the F4F against the zero and the tables turned.

32:39 Why doesn't the video show us this famous photograph, instead of just describing it? instead of just describing it?