America Built a Fighter Too Violent for Its Own Carriers, and Japan’s Pilots Paid for It

In September 1942, the United States Navy took the fastest single engine fighter in the world out to a carrier and watched it try to land. The aircraft came over the round down, touched the deck, and the landing gear threw it straight back into the air, over the arresting wires, past the barrier, into whatever was parked forward.

It did that repeatedly. When it did not bounce, it did something worse. 2,000 horsepower turning a propeller 13 ft 4 in across produces torque that will roll an aircraft onto its back if the throttle is opened suddenly at low speed, which is exactly what a pilot does on a waved off landing. And the pilot could not see the deck anyway because the engine and the fuel tank ahead of him put 14 ft of aeroplane between his eyes and the front of the aircraft.

45 m an hour in level flight. Faster than anything Japan had flying. Faster than anything the United States had flying. The Navy assessed it for carrier operations and refused it. The men who flew it in training gave it a name that stuck for the rest of the war, the Enen Eliminator. So the Americans stopped trying to put it on ships and gave it to the Marine Corps to fly off coral strips instead.

That rejected aircraft went on to claim 2,140 Japanese aircraft for 189 losses in air combat. And in February 1944, the Imperial Japanese Navy pulled every surviving aircraft out of rubble and never sent them back. The conventional way to tell that is as a story about an aircraft that overcame its faults. Engineers fixed the bounce, fixed the visibility, fixed the stall, and the fighter took its rightful place.

The faults were fixed. That is not what decided anything. What decided it was where the rejection put the airplane. Consider the geography of the war. In early 1943, the Americans held Guadal Canal. The Japanese held Rabal 600 m northwest, a harbor, five airfields 100,000 men, and the base from which every Japanese operation in the South Pacific was mounted.

Between the two lay the Solomon Islands chain, and the war in that chain was decided by which side could put fighters over the other side’s territory and keep them there. That is a range problem before it is anything else. A fighter that cannot reach Rabal is irrelevant to the campaign no matter how well it turns. The Corsair could reach Rabal.

It carried more fuel than any other American single engine fighter in the theater. It cruised faster and it fought best at the altitudes escort missions were flown at. It was by accident built exactly for the campaign the Marines were about to fight from land bases in the Solomons and it was available to them for one reason.

The Navy did not want it on carriers. An aircraft rejected as unsuitable was handed to the service that needed precisely its rejected characteristics at precisely the moment those characteristics decided a campaign. Nobody planned that. It fell out of a failed qualification trial in Chesapeake Bay. There is a second consequence of the same rejection and it is easy to miss.

Because the Corsair went to landbased squadrons, the United States Navy’s carrier fighter requirement had to be met by something else. And the something else was the Grumman F6F Hellcat, an aircraft designed from the outset around ease of handling and deck landing rather than maximum performance. So the rejection did not just put the Corsair in the right place.

It also meant that the fast carrier task forces went to war in 1943 with a fighter specifically built to be flown by a pilot with average hours at exactly the moment the American training system was producing average pilots by the tens of thousands. One decision in Chesapeake Bay put the right aircraft over Rabal and the right aircraft on the carriers and neither outcome was intended.

And the reason the airplane was so difficult to land in the first place goes back further still to a decision made in 1938 that had nothing to do with landing at all. But this did not begin on a flight deck. It began with a propeller. In 1938, the United States Navy issued a request for a new carrier fighter.

And the request was unusual in one respect. It asked for the highest possible performance around the most powerful engine available. And it was written by men who had watched European fighter development and concluded that the next generation of combat aircraft would be decided by installed horsepower. Transport’s design team under Rex Bisel took that instruction literally.

They went to Pratt and Whitney and specified the largest engine in existence, the R2800 double Wasp, 18 cylinders in two rows, 2,000 horsepower at a moment when a typical fighter engine produced 1,200. And then they ran into the problem that shaped everything else about the aircraft. 2,000 horsepower is worthless unless it can be converted into thrust.

Converting that much power at low air speed requires an enormous propeller. And the propeller VA selected was a Hamilton standard hydroatic of 13 ft 4 in in diameter, the largest ever fitted to a fighter aircraft. A propeller that size needs ground clearance. On a conventional low-wing design, the only way to get it is very long landing gear legs.

And long landing gear legs on a carrier aircraft are a catastrophe. They are heavy. They are structurally weak in a hard arrested landing and they fold badly into a wing. The alternatives were all worse and they were all considered. A smaller propeller would have wasted the engine. A fourb blade propeller of smaller diameter, which is the solution later aircraft used, was not available in 1940 at the power levels involved.

Longer main gear legs would have added weight in the worst possible place and would have been the first thing to fail in a hard arrested landing. Mounting the wing higher on the fuselage would have wrecked the pilot’s view and complicated the folding mechanism a carrier aircraft has to have. So VA bent the wing, the inverted gull wing, the feature everyone recognizes the Corsair by was not styling and it was not aerodynamics.

It was a solution to a clearance problem. By angling the wingroot sharply downward from the fuselage and then back up at the outer panels, the lowest point of the wing came close enough to the ground that a short strong undercarriage leg could still give the propeller its clearance. It also gave the wing route a near perpendicular junction with the fuselage which cut drag and it let the main gear retract rearward and rotate flat into the wing.

It was elegant. It solved the problem it was designed to solve. And every difficulty that later got the aircraft rejected for carrier service came out of the same chain of decisions. The huge engine required a long cowling, and the fuel tank had to be moved from the wings to the fuselage ahead of the cockpit to make room for the armament, which pushed the cockpit far aft and left the pilot looking down 14 ft of nose.

On the approach to a carrier in the three-point attitude, he could not see the deck at all in the final seconds. The torque of that engine and that propeller was enormous and at low speed and high power it wanted to roll the aircraft. The gullwing itself created an asymmetry in how the wing stalled so that at low speed the port wing would let go before the starboard one dropping a wing at the worst possible moment.

And the landing gear, short, strong, and fitted with stiff olio struts to survive arrested landings, behaved like a spring. It absorbed the impact of a deck landing and gave it straight back. The aircraft that could not land on a carrier was not badly designed. It was the direct and logical consequence of designing an aircraft around the biggest propeller anyone had ever put on a fighter which was the direct and logical consequence of a request written in 1938 for the most powerful engine available.

It is worth putting the armament decision alongside the rest because it compounded everything. The prototype had been designed with guns in the fuselage cowling and a pair in the wings. And combat reports from Europe made it clear that a modern fighter needed a much heavier battery than that. The production aircraft went to six half-in machine guns, all of them in the wings with their ammunition boxes.

Six guns and their belts occupy a great deal of wing volume. And the volume they occupied was where the fuel had been. So the main tank moved into the fuselage into the only space available which was directly ahead of the pilot and the cockpit moved back another 3 ft. The pilot’s terrible view forward was therefore not a single mistake.

It was the accumulated result of an enormous engine, a long cowling to cover it, and a fuel tank displaced by an armament increase that everybody agreed was necessary. The XF4U1 flew on 29 May 1940. In October of that year, it became the first American single engine fighter to exceed 400 m an hour in level flight.

Nobody at that stage had thought hard about what it would be like to bring it aboard a ship. Now, the thing that fighter was eventually going to have to break because it was not an aircraft type. It was a place. Rubble sits at the northeastern end of New Britain around a flooded volcanic caldera that forms one of the finest natural deep water harbors in the Pacific.

Japan took it from a small Australian garrison in January 1942 and then spent two years turning it into the largest and most heavily defended base in the Southern Hemisphere. By late 1943, the numbers were these. Five airfields, Laconai, Vunakanau, Rapopo, Tbera, and Kerabat cut into the plateau and the coastal flats around the harbor.

Somewhere close to a 100,000 army and navy personnel. Several hundred anti-aircraft guns cighted on the Calera rim, firing down and across at anything entering the bowl. coastal artillery. Supply dumps dug into volcanic rock and eventually hundreds of miles of tunnels. Every Japanese operation in the South Pacific ran through it.

The convoys to New Guinea, the reinforcement runs to Guadal Canal, the air groups that contested the Solomons, all of it staged from Rabol. And the aircraft that flew from those five fields were in 1943 still very good and still flown by good men. The A6M0 remained the standard Japanese naval fighter in improved marks. It could outturn anything the allies had at low and medium speed.

It climbed superbly. Its 220 mm cannon would destroy an aircraft rather than damage it. And its range was extraordinary. A zero from Rabal could fight over the central Solomons and get home, which no Allied fighter based on Guadal Canal could reliably do in the other direction until the Corsair arrived. The men flying them in early 1943 were still, in many cases, the pre-war professionals.

The pilot corps had been badly hurt at Midway and over Guadal Canal, but the units cycling through Rabol that year still contained veterans with hundreds of hours and years of combat. And they fought the way Japanese naval aviators had been trained to fight, closing to short range, using the turn, and killing anything that tried to match them at it.

The tactical proposition was simple, and it had been true since 1941. If an Allied pilot attempted to turn with a zero, he died. The base’s anti-aircraft defense deserves its own line because it shaped how the campaign had to be fought. Rabbel’s harbor sits inside a caldera ringed by high ground. And the Japanese put guns on that high ground.

An aircraft attacking shipping in the anchorage flew into a bowl with artillery looking down at it from every direction. at ranges where a heavy anti-aircraft gun is most accurate. Air crew who flew it described the harbor as the most heavily defended target any of them saw in the Pacific. And Rabol had one further advantage that had nothing to do with aircraft.

It was defended in depth by distance. To attack it, Allied aircraft had to fly 600 m over water from Guadal Canal, fight over the target with whatever fuel they had left, and fly 600 m back. Every mile of that was flown over ocean, at the end of which a damaged aircraft or a wounded pilot had very little chance. The Japanese fought that battle over their own airfields.

The Americans fought it at the far end of their endurance. That was the problem in the Solomons in early 1943, and no amount of maneuverability was going to solve it. It was a problem of fuel, speed, and distance. Set against that, the American position in the air over the Solomons at the start of 1943 was not comfortable, and the aircraft available were each wrong in a different way.

The F4F Wildcat was rugged, wellarmored, and thoroughly outclassed on performance. It had done the job at Guadal Canal because it had to and because it could absorb damage, but it did not have the legs to escort bombers to Rabal and it did not have the speed to dictate an engagement. The P39 and P400 era Cobras were fast at low level and useless above about 15,000 ft where the fighting happened.

The P40 was tough and could dive and could not reach the target either. The P38 Lightning had the range and the performance and was in desperately short supply because the priority for Lightnings ran through other theaters. There is one further constraint that shaped everything and rarely gets mentioned.

Guadal Canal in early 1943 was a supply problem as much as a combat one. Henderson Field and the strips around it were being fed by ship across a long line. Aircraft spares were short and serviceability rates were poor. A squadron with 24 aircraft on strength might put 12 into the air. Whatever fighter went into that theater had to be one that could be kept flying in mud, heat, and rain by mechanics working without hangers.

and the new fighter that was supposed to solve all of it was the one the Navy had just refused to accept. The list of objections from the carrier suitability trials in September 1942 is worth reading in full because every item on it is real and none of it was invented by cautious officers. The bounce.

Stiff olio struts needed to survive an arrested landing returned enough energy on touchdown to throw the aircraft back into the air and over the wires. The visibility. On the approach, with the nose high, the pilot lost sight of the deck entirely in the last stage of the landing. He was flying the most critical 15 seconds of a carrier landing blind.

At the end of a straight approach with a landing signal officer he could only see out of the corner of his eye. The stall. The aircraft dropped its left wing without adequate warning at approach speeds. A characteristic that is unpleasant in an aeroplane over an airfield and lethal in an aeroplane 50 ft above a ship’s stern.

The torque on a wave off opening 2,000 horsepower quickly at low air speed produced a rolling moment the pilot might not be able to hold and pilots were killed demonstrating it. The oil cowl flaps at the top of the engine cowling vented oil directly onto the windscreen which mattered enormously in an aircraft where the pilot was already struggling to see forward.

The tail wheel. A short tail wheel strut kept the aircraft’s attitude too flat on touchdown, contributing to the bounce and making the hook less likely to catch a wire. Put those six together in one airframe and the professional verdict was not unreasonable. It was correct. In September 1942, the F4U Corsair was genuinely unsuitable for carrier operations, and a service that accepted it aboard ship would have lost a great many pilots to landing accidents before it lost any to the enemy.

The Navy had a fighter that was faster than anything in the world and could not be used for the purpose it had been designed for. What it did next was the decision that decided the Solomons. It gave the aircraft to the Marine Corps. That reads today like a consolation prize and at the time it was more or less meant as one.

The Corsair was in production. The production could not be stopped and the aircraft had to go somewhere. Marine fighter squadrons in the South Pacific were operating from land from Henderson Field on Guadal Canal and from strips being cut out of the islands behind it. And land-based squadrons do not care whether an aircraft bounces on a carrier deck.

The Navy would keep flying wildcats and would wait for the Hellcat, which Grumman had deliberately designed to be easy to land. The Marines could have the difficult one. There was a further reason the Marines were the right recipient, and it had to do with what fighter squadrons in that theater were actually asked to do. A carrier fighter’s primary job in 1942 was fleet air defense, orbiting over the task force, being vetored onto incoming strikes and getting back aboard afterwards.

A Marine fighter squadron in the Solomons was doing something else entirely. long range escort, offensive sweeps, and ground attack against positions ashore, all flown from a fixed strip. The second list rewards range, speed, load carrying, and structural strength. The first list rewards docsility. Look at what that actually did.

It put the longestlegged, fastest fighter in the American infantry into the one theater where range and speed were the binding constraints in the hands of the one service whose airfields were positioned to use them. At the exact moment the Solomon’s campaign moved from defending Guadal Canal to attacking up the chain toward Rabol, the Corsair’s internal fuel and its crews performance meant a marine squadron on Guadal Canal could escort bombers to targets that had previously been out of reach and could later from strips built further north at Munda and

on Buganville reach Rabol itself and fight over it. Every single thing that made the aircraft unsuitable for a carrier was irrelevant on a coral runway 5,000 ft long. The bounce did not matter when there were no arresting wires and no barrier. The visibility on the approach did not matter when the pilot could fly a long flat circuit and land on a strip that was not moving.

The torque on a waveoff did not matter when a wave off meant going around over an island rather than into the back of a ship. The aircraft had been rejected for its behavior in the last 15 seconds of a flight. Everything it did in the preceding 3 hours was superb. And land basing meant those were the only 15 seconds that had to be paid for.

Marine Fighting Squadron 124 received Corsair’s and was at Guadal Canal by 12 February 1943. There is a second half to the decision and it belongs to industry rather than the navy. Vort could not build the aircraft fast enough alone. So production was licensed to Goodyear and to Brewster. Goodyear built Corsair’s in Akran under the designation FG1 in very large numbers.

That licensing decision is why an aircraft the Navy had just declined to accept was nonetheless available in quantity to squadrons in the South Pacific within months and why when the carrier problem was eventually solved, there were enough of them to matter. An aircraft can be rejected by the customer and still be built by three companies at once if the contract is already running.

The Corsair went to war on the momentum of a production program that the qualification failure had not been allowed to stop. The first test came 2 days after the squadron arrived and it was a disaster. On 14th February 1943, Corsair of VMF124 flew as part of a mixed fighter escort for B-24 Liberators attacking Japanese shipping off Bugenville.

Roughly 300 miles up the chain from Guadal Canal, the escort was assembled from whatever was available. Corsair, P38 Lightnings, P40 Warhawks flying together for the first time at different speeds and different altitudes with no common tactical doctrine and in the Corsair’s case with pilots who had a handful of hours on type and no combat experience in it at all.

Japanese fighters from Cahili intercepted in strength. What followed the Americans afterwards called the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The escort was broken up and worked over. Two Corsaires, four Lightnings, two Warhawks, and two Liberators were lost. Against that, the Japanese lost three aircraft. 10 for three on the Corsair’s combat debut in the aircraft that was supposed to be the answer.

The reasons were not mysterious, and every one of them was about how the aircraft was being flown rather than what it was. The escort had been tied to the bombers, which meant the fighters were slow, low, and predictable, surrendering the exact advantages the Corsair possessed. Pilots meeting zeros for the first time did what pilots have always done, which is to turn with the aircraft that is shooting at them against a zero at zero speeds in a Corsair.

That is a losing proposition and several men proved it. And the formations themselves were incoherent because three fighter types with three different optimum speeds and climb profiles had been put on the same mission with no agreed way of working together. The debut also revealed something about how the aircraft was being introduced.

Pilots were arriving on type with very few hours in a fighter that punished low experience harder than anything else in the infantry and were being sent straight onto long overwater escort missions against experienced opposition. The squadron was learning the airplane and the enemy simultaneously 300 miles from base over water.

Now the revealing part and it was visible in the same combat reports. Not one Corsair was lost because it could not keep up, could not reach the target or could not sustain damage. The aircraft got there, fought, and in several cases got homeshot to pieces. Pilots reported that they could disengage from a zero at will simply by putting the nose down and opening the throttle and that nothing the Japanese had could follow.

They reported closing on formations from below and behind at speeds the enemy could not match and climbing away afterwards. The aeroplane was not the problem. The aeroplane was doing exactly what its specifications said it would do. What was missing was a way of fighting that used it and a set of modifications that would let an average squadron pilot bring one home in one piece.

Over the following 10 months, both arrived. It took 8 hours to get every name and number in this segment right. The afteraction reports, the loss tables, the squadron rosters. If that work is worth something to you, hit the like button. It’s the only signal that tells us to keep doing it this way instead of the fast way.

The rule change came in two parts and the first part was mechanical. The stall was cured by a piece of metal 6 in long. Engineers fitted a small triangular strip to the leading edge of the starboard wing just outboard of the guns. Its only function was to make the right wing stall slightly earlier, deliberately spoiling the airflow so that both wings gave up at the same moment instead of the left one letting go on its own.

It cost a negligible amount of performance and it removed the characteristic that had been killing pilots on the approach. The visibility was cured by raising the cockpit 7 in and replacing the heavily framed canopy with a clear blown one, giving the pilot a view over the nose and out to the sides that he had not previously had.

The tail wheel strut was lengthened, which put the aircraft into a more nose down attitude on the approach and improved both the view and the hook’s chance of catching a wire. The olio struts had their air pressure reduced so they absorbed the landing rather than returning it. The upper cowl flaps were sealed shut and the oil stopped arriving on the windscreen.

Six objections, six fixes. None of them involved redesigning the aircraft and all of them were in production aircraft during 1943. One further change belongs on the list and it was not about landing at all. The early production aircraft carried a small window in the belly, a hangover from an earlier idea about downward visibility, and various detail features that squadrons in the field found useless.

Field modification units in the South Pacific stripped what they did not need and improved what they did, and the manufacturers fed the results back into production. The aircraft that reached the Solomons in late 1943 differed from the one the Navy had rejected in dozens of small ways, none individually decisive and collectively transforming.

The second part of the rule change was flying, and it came from two directions at once. The landing problem had a technique solution that the Americans had not found because they were not looking for one. Royal Navy pilots who took the Corsair because they needed a fighter and were not in a position to be selective worked out that the whole difficulty came from flying a straight approach.

If instead the aircraft was flown around a continuous descending turn onto the deck, a curving approach held all the way until the last moment with the ship kept in view out of the left side of the canopy. The nose never blocked the pilot’s sight of what he was landing on. He rolled level a second or two before touchdown, and by then he was committed and lined up.

It is a technique, not a modification. It required nothing except teaching it, and it turned an aircraft that could not be landed on a ship into one that could. The combat doctrine was worked out over the Solomons in the same months, and it consisted of refusing the fight the enemy wanted. A Corsair pilot did not turn with a zero.

Ever he fought in the vertical instead, coming down from altitude at high speed, taking one firing pass and using the energy he had gained to climb back up out of reach where the Japanese fighter could not follow because it did not have the power to sustain the climb or the structure to sustain the dive. The Zero’s advantages all lived in a narrow band of speed.

Below about 250 m an hour, it was the finest dog fighter in the sky. Above 300, its controls stiffened badly. Its roll rate collapsed, and it could not be maneuvered hard. The Corsair fought entirely above that line and simply never entered the region where the enemy was dangerous. The formation structure went with it. Sections of two aircraft and divisions of four working as mutually supporting pairs replaced anything that required individual virtuosity.

One pilot attacked and one watched. Neither of them had to be exceptional. And that was the point. The doctrine was written to be executed by a squadron of ordinary pilots with a few hundred hours, not by a handful of gifted ones. That is the whole doctrine, and stated flatly, “It sounds like cowardice.” It was arithmetic.

A fighter that can choose whether to engage, choose the direction of attack, and choose to leave, will win a campaign against a fighter that cannot, regardless of what happens in any individual turning contest. Add the six mechanical fixes to that doctrine, and add the range that had been there since 1940, and by December 1943, the Marine and Navy fighter squadrons in the Solomons had an instrument they could point at Rabal.

The campaign against Rabal had been running since the autumn and the shape of it was set by a decision at the top that is worth stating before the flying starts. The allies had concluded that Ribbal would not be captured. It would be surrounded, cut off, and destroyed as a functioning base from the air and the 100,000 men inside it would be left there.

To do that, Japanese air power at Rabal had to be eliminated, and Japan had every intention of contesting it. In late October 1943, the Imperial Japanese Navy committed its carrier air groups to the defense, flying the aircraft and air crew off the carriers at Tru and sending them to Rabol to operate from land in an operation intended to break the Allied advance on Bugenville.

It put over 170 aircraft into the fight, including the trained carrier pilots the Japanese fleet had spent a year rebuilding. They arrived at the exact moment the American fighter force in the Solomons had finished solving its problems. The carrier strikes came first. On 5 November, aircraft from Saratoga and Princeton hit the harbor and caught a Japanese cruiser force at anchor, damaging six heavy cruisers so badly that the force never operated as intended again.

On 11 November, the carriers came back and did it again. But those were raids. The thing that finished Ribbal was the fighter campaign that ran through December, January, and February from land at the far end of the chain. New airfields at Tokina on Bugenville put Allied fighters within about 220 mi of Rabal. That changed the whole equation.

A Corsair from Tokina could arrive over the target with fuel to fight rather than arriving with fuel to turn around. On 17th December 1943, the first large Allied fighter sweep went over Rabal. Not an escort mission, a sweep with no bombers to protect and no obligation to stay with anything. Around 76 fighters, Corsair among them went up to the target for the single purpose of forcing Japanese fighters into the air and destroying them. That is the reversal.

And it is worth understanding why it worked because it looks like a simple change of mission type. An escort mission hands the initiative to the defender. The escort must stay with the bombers at the bombers’s speed and altitude and absorb attacks on the bombers’s terms. That was the situation on 14th February and it is why 10 aircraft were lost for three.

A fighter sweep inverts it completely. The sweep arrives high and fast with no responsibilities. It can dive on anything below it, take a pass, climb away, and come back. The defender must come up because the alternative is to sit on the ground while the enemy circles his airfields. And every time he comes up, he climbs into an engagement in which the other side already has the height and the speed.

Through the last week of December and into January, sweep followed sweep. The strikes came almost daily as the weather allowed. Japanese fighter units at Rabol were compelled to launch and each launch cost them aircraft they could not easily replace and pilots they could not replace at all. There is a further element that made the sweeps work and it was on the ground.

By this stage, American fighter control in the Solomons was mature, radar sights up the chain, controllers who could vector formations onto contacts, and an air sea rescue organization of flying boats, submarines, and small craft that gave a pilot going into the water a real chance of being picked up.

The Japanese had none of that reaching rubble. Every American pilot recovered went back to a squadron. Every Japanese pilot who went into the sea was gone. The kill ratios in individual actions varied and the claims on both sides were inflated as they always were. The trend did not vary. The Japanese fighter strength at Rabol reinforced repeatedly from trou was ground down through January into February while the Allied strength grew.

By the middle of February 1944, the position was no longer defensible. On 17 and 18 February, the American fast carriers struck troop itself, the fleet anchorage behind Rabbel, from which every replacement aircraft had been coming and wrecked it as a base, sinking a large number of ships and destroying a great many aircraft on the ground.

That closed the pipeline. Rabal could no longer be reinforced from behind and it could no longer defend itself in front. By the second week of February, the sweeps were finding fewer and fewer defenders willing or able to come up, and the ones that did came up in smaller numbers each time. That is the signature of an air force being consumed rather than defeated in a battle.

There is no decisive day, only a curve. On 19th February 1944, the Imperial Japanese Navy withdrew every remaining flyable aircraft from Rabol and flew them out to Tru. The largest and most heavily defended Japanese base in the South Pacific with five airfields, 100,000 men and 2 years of construction in it was abandoned by its own air force in a single day.

not captured, not besieged into surrender, simply left without aircraft because there were no longer any aircraft to leave there. What happens in the next 12 minutes is the part most documentaries skip entirely. If you want the rest of this war told the same way from the records, not the legends, subscribe before it starts. Count what Japan lost at Rabal because the aircraft were the smaller half of it.

The air groups committed from the carriers in late 1943 were destroyed. Of the aircraft flown in from Tru to defend the base, well over half were lost within a few weeks and the air crew went with them. Those were carrier trained pilots, the replacement generation the Japanese fleet had spent a year producing after the losses over Guadal Canal.

And they were expended defending a land base they were never intended to fly from. That decision has consequences that run all the way to the Maranas. When the Japanese fleet went into the Battle of the Philippine Sea 4 months later, the carrier air groups it took there were not the ones trained in 1943. Those had been spent at Rabul.

What went to the Maranas was the generation after that with a fraction of the training and the result is a matter of record. Then the base itself, a 100,000 men remained at Rabal with no air cover, no functioning port under air attack, and no prospect of relief. The Allies did not invade. They cut the supply lines, neutralized the airfields with repeated bombing, and went past.

Those 100,000 men spent the remaining 18 months of the war growing vegetables in volcanic soil, digging tunnels, and being bombed. They surrendered in 1945, having played no further part in anything. That is the single largest bypassed garrison of the Pacific War and it was created by the elimination of an air force rather than by a battle on the ground.

There is an accounting point here that is worth making precisely. Rabol was not destroyed by bombing it into rubble. Though a great deal of bombing was done, it was destroyed as a base by making it impossible to keep aircraft there. A harbor without air cover cannot receive ships. Airfields without fighters cannot protect anything, including themselves.

Once the fighter defense was gone, everything else at Rabal became inert. The guns, the tunnels, the garrison, the two years of construction. The wider consequence is the one that decided the campaign structure for the rest of the war. Rubble proved that a fortified Japanese base did not have to be assaulted.

If its air power could be destroyed and its supply cut, it could simply be left behind. Every subsequent Allied advance in the Pacific used that principle, and it is why the war reached the Philippines and the Maranas as quickly as it did. One further loss belongs on the list and it never appears in tonnage tables.

Rabal had been the school. Japanese units cycling through it in 1942 and early 1943 had learned the theater there and the veterans based there had been the informal instructors for everyone who arrived. When the base emptied, that accumulated local knowledge went with it, and the units that later fought over the Philippines and Formosa had no equivalent.

Now, the American ledger and the Corsair’s own numbers are stranger than the legend suggests. Across the war, F4U pilots were credited with 2,140 aircraft destroyed in the air against 189 Corsaires lost in aerial combat. That is a ratio of better than 11:1. And it is the figure that gets quoted. The figure that does not get quoted is the rest of the loss column.

Roughly 350 corsairs were lost to anti-aircraft fire, which is nearly twice the number lost to enemy fighters, a consequence of the ground attack work the aircraft did increasingly as the war went on. Around 230 more were lost to operational causes while flying combat missions, and close to 700 were lost in the United States in training and in non-combat flying.

before they ever reached a combat theater. That last number is the Enen Eliminator’s real bill. More Corsaires were destroyed learning to fly Corsaires than were destroyed by the Imperial Japanese Navy. The aircraft that killed more Japanese aircraft than any other Marine fighter of the war also killed a very large number of young Americans on training fields and around training carriers.

and it did so because of characteristics that were correctly identified in September 1942 and were fixed in the aircraft but never entirely fixed in the airplane’s fundamental demands on a low hour pilot. The Navy’s original assessment was not wrong. It was a statement about who could safely fly the aircraft and it stayed true after every modification.

Lay the ark out by date because the shape only appears in sequence. 1938 The United States Navy requests a carrier fighter built around the most powerful engine available. VA specifies the Pratt and Whitney R2800 double Wasp, 18 cylinders, 2,000 horsepower. 1938 to 1940. To convert that power into thrust, VA selects a propeller 13 ft 4 in across, the largest ever fitted to a fighter.

To give it ground clearance on short landing gear, the wing is bent into an inverted gull. The engine and the relocated fuel tank push the cockpit 14 ft after the nose. 29 May 1940, the XF4U1 flies. In October, it becomes the first American single engine fighter to exceed 400 m an hour in level flight.

September 1942, carrier suitability trials. The aircraft bounces over the wires, blinds its pilot on the approach, drops its left wing at low speed, threatens to roll on a wave off, and sprays oil on its own windscreen. The Navy declines it for carrier service. Late 1942, the aircraft is assigned to the Marine Corps for landbased operations.

Production is licensed to Goodyear and Brewster alongside VA. 12 February 1943, VMF124 arrives at Guadal Canal with Corsair’s. 14th February 1943, the combat date. A mixed escort over Bugenville loses 10 aircraft against three Japanese. The Corsair’s get there, fight and come home, and the pilots report they can disengage from a zero at will.

Through 1943, the six fixes, the stall strip on the starboard leading edge, the raised cockpit and blown canopy, the longer tail wheel strut, reduced olio pressure, sealed upper cowl flaps. Royal Navy pilots developed the curving approach that keeps the deck in view. Marine and Navy squadrons in the Solomons adopt a vertical fighting doctrine and stop turning with zeros.

Late October 1943, Japan flies its rebuilt carrier air groupoups into Rabol to defend the base, over 170 aircraft, including the pilots trained to replace the losses over Guadal Canal. 5 and 11 November 1943, American carrier strikes hit Rabal Harbor and wreck a Japanese cruiser force. December 1943, new airfields at Tokina on Bugenville put fighters within about 220 mi of Rabal.

17 December 1943, the first large Allied fighter sweep over Rabal. Around 76 fighters, no bombers to protect, no obligation to stay with anything. December 1943 to February 1944, sweep after sweep. Japanese fighter strength at Rubble is ground down faster than Tru can replace it. 17 to 18 February 1944, American carriers strike Tru and destroy it as a fleet and staging base.

19th February 1944, the Imperial Japanese Navy withdraws every remaining aircraft from Rabul. 100,000 men are left without air cover and are bypassed for the rest of the war. December 1944, with kamicazi attacks overwhelming carrier fighter defenses, Marine Corsair squadrons are ordered aboard US Essex. 1953.

Corsair production ends after 12,000 aircraft. The longest production run of any American piston engineed fighter. Four things turned a rejected carrier fighter into the aircraft that emptied Rabal. And the first of them was a mistake. The first was the propeller. Everything about the Corsair, the Gullwing, the long nose, the blind approach, the torque, the stiff gear descends from the decision to build the aircraft around the largest propeller ever fitted to a fighter, which descends from the decision to build it around the

largest engine in existence. That chain produced an aircraft that could not land on a ship and an aircraft that could outrun, outclimb, and outrange everything Japan had. The same decision produced both. It was not a design that had a flaw. It was a design that had a price. The second was the rejection itself.

Had the Corsair passed its carrier trials in September 1942, it would have gone to sea with the fast carrier task forces and would have been employed as those forces were employed. Instead, it went to marine squadrons on coral strips in the Solomons at the precise moment the Solomon’s campaign became a question of reaching Rabal and fighting there.

The single most consequential thing the Navy did with the Corsair was refuse it. The third was the 6-in strip of metal and the curving turn. The mechanical fixes and the technique were not clever engineering in any grand sense. A spoiler on one wing to make a stall symmetric, a canopy raised 7 in, a longer tail wheel leg, and a way of flying an approach that keeps the target in sight.

Together, they converted an aircraft that killed its own pilots into one that squadrons could operate. and they cost almost nothing. The fourth was the refusal to fight the enemy’s fight. The Zero was better than the Corsair at everything below 200 and 50 m an hour and worse at everything above 300. American pilots were taught systematically to live above that line and never cross it.

A fighter that always chooses whether to engage and always chooses when to leave does not need to win a single turning contest. And over Rabal it did not fight one. Strip away the performance charts, the kill claims and the flag planting and what remains is a single reversal. The United States built a fighter so violent that its own navy would not let it near a ship.

sent it to the Marines as the service that could not object and discovered that the qualities which made it unfit for a carrier deck, the enormous engine, the enormous propeller, the fuel to feed them, the speed that came out of all of it were the exact qualities that decided a campaign fought at 600 miles range over open water. And folded inside that reversal was a second one, quieter that nobody noticed until it was already finished.

In the autumn of 1944, the Japanese began flying aircraft into American ships deliberately, and the American carrier fleet discovered that its fighter defense was not fast enough. A kamicazi approaching low and fast has to be caught and destroyed in the time it takes to cover the last few miles. And the margin for that is measured in seconds.

The Navy needed the fastest interceptor it could get onto a flight deck and it needed it immediately. So in December 1944, the United States Navy ordered Marine Corsair squadrons aboard US Essex. The aircraft that had been refused for carrier operations in September 1942 went to sea because it was the most violent thing available and nothing else would do.

The characteristic that had disqualified it, that it was built for maximum power at any cost, was now the only characteristic that mattered. By 1945, Corsa’s were flying from American fleet carriers off Okinawa as a standard part of the air group. The Navy had been right in 1942 and right again in 1944, and both times for the same reason.

There is a symmetry worth noticing in the whole sequence. The airplane was designed around a request for maximum power, refused for being exactly what was requested, sent to a service that could use it for exactly that reason, and finally recalled to the carriers for exactly that reason again. At no point in 8 years did anybody change what the aircraft fundamentally was.

What changed four times over was the question being asked of it. The Corsair outlasted the war it was built for. It stayed in production until 1953, the longest run of any American piston engineed fighter, 12,000 aircraft, and it flew combat in Korea after the jets had arrived. because there was still work that wanted an aeroplane that could carry a heavy load a long way and come back.

On the bottom of Lake Michigan off Chicago, there are still aircraft from the two paddle wheel steamers the Navy converted into training carriers to teach deck landings in fresh water far from any enemy. Several of them are corsairs sitting upright in the silt where they went off the end or over the side during qualification.

in the cold and the dark of an inland lake a thousand miles from any ocean. If you want to understand how America actually won its war, not the version in the highlight reels, subscribe. There’s a new one every few days.