Grumman F4F Wildcat
Carrier fighter of the United States Navy and Marine Corps at the start of the Pacific war: outmaneuvered by the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, the F4F Wildcat relied on heavy armament, armor and rugged construction, and on tactics such as the Thach Weave, to hold the line until stronger fighters arrived. Britain's Fleet Air Arm flew it as the Martlet. In 1943 production passed to General Motors' Eastern Aircraft Division, whose FM-1 and FM-2 served from escort carriers to the war's end; on Smithsonian Magazine's accounting, 7,860 Wildcats were built in total, 5,280 of them by General Motors.
Why It Mattered
When the United States entered the Second World War, the Grumman F4F Wildcat was the primary fighter of the United States Navy and Marine Corps, and by 1942 every American Navy fighter squadron flew it. Its main opponent, the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, could outmaneuver it, yet the Wildcat's heavy armament and solid construction gave an advantage to skilled pilots. Smithsonian curator Larry Burke credits the Wildcat with standing firm for the Navy while the war was still young, and with being the principal fighter in most of the Pacific's earliest large carrier engagements — four out of the first five. The type served from Pearl Harbor to the Japanese surrender, ending its career on the small escort carriers its size and modest weight suited it to.
Design Notes
Grumman first answered the Navy's 1935 requirement with a biplane, the XF4F-1, but the Navy canceled that contract in favor of a monoplane, the XF4F-2, which made its first flight on 2 September 1937. Brewster's competing fighter won the first production contract, but overheating engines and landing-gear failures pushed the Navy to order Grumman's redesigned XF4F-3 into production instead. Where Japanese designers had rejected self-sealing fuel tanks and armor protection to save weight, Grumman proved that survivability could be more valuable than maneuverability, and the Wildcat could take a tremendous amount of damage and keep flying. The F4F-4, which entered service in 1941, combined six machine guns with Leroy Grumman's Sto-Wing, a diagonal hinge that folded the wing back alongside the fuselage so carriers could stow more fighters. Its armament was heavy for a fighter of its size: multiple .50-caliber machine guns and wing space for two 100-pound bombs. In 1943 Grumman handed production over to General Motors' Eastern Aircraft Division, whose versions the Navy designated FM-1 and FM-2; on Smithsonian Magazine's accounting, General Motors built 5,280 of the 7,860 Wildcats produced.
Operational History
On 8 December 1941, the first day of the battle for Wake Island, Marine Fighter Squadron VMF-211 lost eight of its twelve F4F-3s; its remaining aircraft sank a cruiser and a submarine with 100-pound bombs before the last two Wildcats were destroyed on 22 December. Britain's Fleet Air Arm flew the type as the Martlet, and on Christmas Day 1940 a Martlet brought down a Junkers Ju 88 over the Royal Navy base at Scapa Flow, the first German aircraft shot down by a British pilot flying a U.S. aircraft in the war. Outmaneuvered by the Zero, Wildcat pilots answered with tactics, above all the defensive formation John S. "Jimmy" Thach worked out with matchsticks at his kitchen table in Coronado, in which paired fighters maneuvered in coordination to counter diving attacks. The maneuver became known as the Thach Weave, named for Thach by fellow pilot James Flatley; Thach used it successfully at Midway, and the tactics are credited with saving untold numbers of Navy fliers. A young pilot in Thach's squadron, Edward "Butch" O'Hare, received naval aviation's first Medal of Honor, credited with shooting down five Japanese G4M bombers that were attacking the carrier Lexington on 20 February 1942. Across the war, Wildcat pilots were credited with destroying an average of seven enemy aircraft for every Wildcat lost. Navy and Marine squadrons flew the Wildcat in front-line combat for just twenty months, from December 1941 to August 1943; after that, flying from escort carriers, it supported troops ashore and hunted for enemy submarines until the war ended.
Afterlife
The National Air and Space Museum's Wildcat is an Eastern Division FM-1, Navy bureau number 15392, the four-hundredth FM-1 built at Linden, New Jersey, which the Navy accepted on 21 July 1943. It operated almost entirely from Naval Air Station Norman, Oklahoma, and after thirteen months of service the Navy struck it from the active roster; it was transferred to the Smithsonian in 1960. Grumman Aerospace restored it in 1974 using former and active company employees, many of whom had built Wildcats during the war, and early in 1975 it emerged looking like new and in nearly flyable condition. It is on display in the museum's Jay I. Kislak World War II in the Air gallery in Washington, DC. A second restored survivor, FM-2 bureau number 57039, rolled off the deck of the training carrier Sable into Lake Michigan in December 1944 and rested there for 68 years before its recovery in December 2012. Volunteers and staff at the Air Zoo in Kalamazoo, Michigan, invested more than 50,000 hours over a decade restoring it, and the finished aircraft was bound for its permanent home at the American Heritage Museum in Hudson, Massachusetts.