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The F4F-4 Wildcat was the best US naval fighter during the key fighting over the Solomon Islands in the summer and autumn of 1942, where the Americans finally began to get onto equal terms with the fearsome Japanese Zero. This book looks at how the Americans learnt to overcome the superior flying characteristics of the Japanese aircraft and take advantage of the firepower and robust construction of the Wildcat to hold their own over Guadalcanal.
We start with an account of the early clashes between the F4F and Japanese aircraft over Guadalcanal. As well as the narrative of the battles we also get the post-battle analysis, which saw the Americans start to come to grips with the threat of the Zero. This was key to what was to come – the Zero was faster, climbed faster and more maneuverable than the Wildcat, but also far less robust, and the Americans soon worked out how to take advantage of that.
Setting the Scene gives us a useful overview of how the two sides ended up fighting in the Solomon Islands, which certainly hadn’t featured in any pre-war American plans.
Path to Combat starts with a look at how US naval aviators were trained. The pre-war system was designed to train a small number of aviators to fly everything in the Navy’s arsenal. However this changed after the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, when the duration of training was cut in half. In the summer of 1941 the requirement to train on fighters, dive bombers and torpedo bombers went and new pilots trained on one type of aircraft. As a result the speed of training increased dramatically, without cutting the quality of the resulting pilots by any great amount – although the number of flying hours for a fighter pilot in training dropped from up to 600 down to 300, many of the lost hours would have been bombers. Because the focus is on the F4F we don’t get anything on the equivalent Japanese training system, which would have been useful.
We get a good account of the development of the F4F from the first biplane prototypes, through the switch to a monoplane and on to the main F4F-4 production version. This looks at its strengths, in particular its robust construction and how easy it was to fly, and its weaknesses – speed and general performance compared to the Zero.
The art of war returns to the emphasis on how the Americans learned to deal with the Zero. We get a good diagram showing exactly how the Thach Weave worked, and a look at the tactics developed by different US commanders.
The Combat chapter focuses on the most intense period of fighting over Guadalcanal, roughly from August to November 1942, where the islands F4F squadrons saw constant combat. We get a mix of a narrative of the fighting and first hand accounts from many of the pilots, with a good balance between the two.
Overall this book gives us a good feel for the intensity of the aerial battles over Guadalcanal in 1942, the pressures faced by the American airmen based on the island, and the ways in which they were able to use their robust fighters to help keep control of the island.
Chapters
1 – In Battle
2 – Setting the Scene
3 – Path to Combat
4 – Weapon of War
5 – Art of War
6 – Combat
Author: Edward M. Young
Edition: Paperback
Pages: 80
Publisher: Osprey
Year: 2023