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In the last video, we told the story of Jiro Horikoshi and the Mitsubishi A6M0, the fighter that ruled the early Pacific. A machine so light, so agile, so impossibly capable that for six months after Pearl Harbor, no Allied pilot who
Explore the story of the Grumman F6F Hellcat, the rugged fighter built to defeat the fragile but deadly Japanese Zero in WWII.
Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.
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Key Takeaways
- The Hellcat was designed to counter the Zero’s weaknesses by focusing on armor and firepower over agility.
- Durability and pilot survivability were paramount in Grumman’s design philosophy.
- Collaboration among skilled engineers and factory management was crucial to the Hellcat’s success.
- Mass production capability was as important as combat performance in winning the Pacific War.
- The Hellcat’s legacy extends beyond WWII, influencing future naval aircraft design.
What the video covers
- The video contrasts the lightweight, agile Mitsubishi A6M Zero with the heavily armored and powerful Grumman F6F Hellcat.
- The Zero achieved a 12:1 kill ratio early in the Pacific War by sacrificing pilot protection for agility.
- The US Navy sought a fighter built on the opposite philosophy: heavy, fast, armored, and able to absorb damage.
- Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation was founded in 1929 by five men who prioritized durability and pilot survival.
- Key founders included Leroy Grumman, Jake Swerbul, William Schwendler, and Robert Hall, each contributing unique expertise.
- Grumman’s design philosophy emphasized building components to twice the required strength to survive combat and carrier operations.
- Robert Hall’s aerodynamic vision combined with Schwendler’s structural philosophy produced iconic naval aircraft.
- The Hellcat was designed not only to outfight the Zero but also to be produced rapidly in large numbers.
- The Hellcat played a decisive role in battles such as the 1944 Battle of the Philippine Sea, achieving massive kill counts.
- The video highlights the legacy of Grumman and its impact on naval aviation and American military history.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: The Mitsubishi Zero and its dominance
- 01:48Founding of Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation
- 03:50Key founders and their roles
- 05:51Grumman’s design philosophy and early challenges
- 07:42Robert Hall joins Grumman and design innovations
- 09:43The Hellcat’s design goals and production
- 12:13Combat performance and impact in the Pacific War
- 14:46Legacy of Grumman and the Hellcat
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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met one in the air could expect to survive the encounter on equal terms. The Zero achieved a kill ratio of 12 to 1. It dominated every theater it entered, and it did it by sacrificing everything that Western designers considered essential. No armor, no
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self-sealing fuel tanks, no protection of any kind for the man sitting behind the engine. Every gram Horikoshi removed to make the Zero untouchable became a gram of protection its pilot did not have. That was the trade. And by mid-
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1942, the United States Navy understood both sides of it. They knew the Zero was better than anything they were flying.
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They also knew it was fragile. What they needed was a machine built on the opposite philosophy entirely. Not light, not graceful, not elegant, heavy, fast, armored. A machine that could absorb punishment the Zero could not survive.
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Deliver firepower the Zero could not withstand and bring the pilot home alive when the fight was over. The Zero was the creation of one engineer and an impossible specification. The machine that killed it was the creation of four
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men in a factory on Long Island. A founder who believed every aircraft should be built stronger than it needed to be. A factory boss who walked carrier decks to ask pilots what was getting them killed. A structural designer who
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insisted every component be built to twice its required strength. And a chief engineer who had designed the fastest racing planes in America and now drew the fighter that would become the most lethal carrier aircraft of the Second World War. This is the story of the
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Grumman F6F Hellcat and the company they called the Iron Works. The company began in a rented garage. On December 5th, 1929, six weeks after the Wall Street crash, Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation was incorporated on paper.
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On January 2nd, 1930, it opened for business in an abandoned auto showroom in Baldwin, New York. The building had been used by a defunct aircraft company called Cox Clemen. The windows were broken. Dried leaves from several autumns littered the floor. The rent was
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cheap. That was the only thing about it that recommended the place. The founders were five men who had worked together at the Loening Aircraft Engineering Corporation in New York City. Loening built amphibious aircraft for the Navy.
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In 1929, Keystone Aircraft bought Loening and moved the operation to Bristol, Pennsylvania. The five men refused to go. They decided to start over on Long Island instead. Leroy Randall Grumman was the leader. Born in Huntington, New York in 1895, he had
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studied mechanical engineering at Cornell, enlisted in the Navy during the First World War, failed a flight physical because of flat feet, been sent to pilot training at MIT anyway, thanks to a clerical error, and served as a naval
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aviator and flight instructor. After the war, he spent a decade at Loening, studying how to build aircraft that survived the most punishing environment in aviation: carrier decks, saltwater, arrested landings, the repeated stress of launching and recovering machines on
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a pitching ship at sea. Grumman understood from the beginning that a Navy airplane was not judged by how fast it flew or how tightly it turned. It was judged by whether it brought the pilot home. He mortgaged his house for $16,875
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to start the company. Leon Albert Swerbul, universally known as Jake, was the second founder. Born in Manhattan in 1898, the son of Latvian immigrants, he had grown up on Long Island and served as a marine during the war. Where
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Grumman was quiet, cerebral, and shy, Swerbul was loud, physical, and relentless. He was a factory man. He understood production flaws, labor management, supply chains, and the mechanics of turning raw material into finished machines on schedule. He contributed $8,125
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of his own money. His mother borrowed $6,000 more. Swerbul would run the production side of Grumman for the next 30 years, and it would be his management of the factory floor that turned the Hellcat from a design into 12,000
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aircraft in three years. William T. Schwendler was II. Born in 1904, the son of a German immigrant, he graduated from New York University in 1924 as one of the school's first students of aeronautical engineering. Schwendler was a structural thinker. He understood
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loads, stresses, and the forces that tore an airplane apart in flight or on impact. At Grumman, he became the guardian of a design philosophy that would define every aircraft the company built. Build the structural components to twice the
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required strength. Not because the specification demanded it, because the specification did not account for what actually happened to a Navy fighter in combat, in storms, in botched carrier landings, in the hundred unpredictable moments that separated a machine that
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came home from one that did not. The three men kept the company alive through the depression by repairing Loening amphibians, building aluminum truck bodies, and welding pontoon floats.
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Grumman invented a retractable landing gear mechanism demonstrated with a bent paper clip and a pencil eraser. The Navy gave them a contract, then another. In 1931, Grumman designed the FF1, the first Navy fighter with retractable wheels and the fastest naval fighter in
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the world at 198 mph. The company moved to Valley Stream, then Farmingdale, then in 1937 to Bethpage, Long Island, where it purchased farmland and built a factory with its own airfield. Bethpage became the company's permanent home. In
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1934, Grumman told his partners that 250 employees should be the company's absolute maximum. The accountant informed him that payroll was already at 256.
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Grumman accepted the information. He never accepted the principle. He never wanted a large company. The war overruled him.
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The fourth man arrived in 1936. Robert Lester Hall was born in Taunton, Massachusetts in 1905, the son of a mechanical engineer. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1927 with a degree in mechanical engineering and immediately entered the world of
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high-speed aircraft. He joined the Granville Brothers Aircraft Company in Springfield, Massachusetts, first as a designer, then as chief engineer and test pilot. At Granville Brothers, Hall designed the GB Model Z, one of the most famous racing airplanes ever built. The
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GBZ was a radical machine, essentially a massive engine wrapped in the smallest possible airframe. A short, fat, barrel-shaped monoplane that observers said looked like a section of sewer pipe that had sprouted stubby wings. It was blindingly fast. At the 1931 National
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Air Races in Cleveland, Hall and another pilot flew GBs to five first-place trophies. The GBZ set speed records.
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Jimmy Doolittle called it the sweetest ship he had ever flown. The GBs were also lethal. Their short coupling and small control surfaces made them dangerously unstable. Multiple pilots died flying them. The Granville Brothers company went bankrupt in 1934. Hall
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moved on. He worked briefly at Stinson Aircraft in Dayton, Ohio, designing a Stinson Reliant. In 1936, he joined Grumman as chief engineer and chief test pilot. The combination of Hall and Schwendler created a design partnership that would produce the most
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consequential series of naval aircraft in American history. Schwendler provided the structural philosophy, the insistence on overengineering every load-bearing member, the refusal to sacrifice durability for weight savings.
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Hall provided the aerodynamic vision, the instinct for how an airplane should fly, and the rare willingness to personally fly the prototypes he designed. Hall would make the first flight of the F4F Wildcat, the TBF Avenger torpedo bomber, the F6F Hellcat,
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the F8F Bearcat. He tested every machine he drew. If the aircraft could kill a pilot, Hall found out before anyone else sat in th...
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Grumman set the philosophy. Build it strong, keep it simple, and make sure it works. Swerbble ran the factory and maintained the relationship with the Navy that kept the contracts flowing.
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Schwendler ensured the structural integrity that made every Grumman aircraft tougher than the specification required. Hall designed the aircraft and flew them first. The Navy started calling the company the Iron Works. The nickname did not refer to elegance or
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speed. It referred to the fact that Grumman airplanes came home. The Wildcat was the machine that proved the philosophy and exposed its limits. The F4F Wildcat was a stubby squat barrel-chested monoplane with folding wings, 650 caliber machine guns, armor
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plating behind the pilot, and self-sealing fuel tanks. It was not fast. It was not agile. It was not graceful. It was a Grumman. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December the 7th, 1941, the Wildcat was the Navy's primary carrier fighter.
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Within weeks, it was fighting zeros across the Pacific. The results confirmed what every American pilot already knew. The Zero was faster. It climbed faster. It turned tighter. In a traditional dog fight, the Zero won. But the Wildcat had something the Zero did
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not. It could take a beating and keep flying. A Zero that absorbed hits from the Wildcat six heavy guns came apart or caught fire. A Wildcat that absorbed hits from the Zero's machine guns often flew home with holes in the fuselage and
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the pilot still breathing. Lieutenant Commander John Thack devised the Thack Weave, a two-lane defensive maneuver that exploited this disparity. Two Wildcats flew in a weaving pattern. When a Zero attacked one, the other turned into the attacker and fired. The tactic
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refused to play the zeros game. At the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942, Wildcats shot down 14 zeros for a loss of 10. At Midway the following month, Thatch's Wildcats fought outnumbered against waves of zeros while American
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dive bombers slipped through and sank four Japanese carriers over Guadal Canal. From August 1942 through February 1943, Marine and Navy Wildcat pilots ground down Japan's experienced aviators in a six-month air campaign that killed the men faster than Japan could train
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replacements. The conditions were brutal. Henderson Field was under constant bombardment. Pilots flew multiple sorties a day in tropical heat with inadequate maintenance and limited fuel. The Zeros they faced were flown by Japan's best veterans of China in the
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opening campaigns who had been killing since before Pearl Harbor. The Wildcats held the field. By the end of Guadal Canal, the kill ratio had improved to nearly 7 to1. The attrition of Japan's experienced pilots was invisible from the outside. It was fatal from within.
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The Wildcat held the line, but Jake Swerbull knew the line was not enough. Swerbble had contacts throughout the Navy. He traveled to carrier decks and air stations. He talked to the men who flew the Wildcat into combat. He asked
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them one question over and over. What do you need? The pilots answered. They needed a fighter that climbed faster.
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Give us something that will go upstairs faster, they said. They needed more speed. They needed more power. They needed more armor. They needed a machine that did everything the Wildcat did, but did it well enough to stop surviving the
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Zero and start killing it. Swearbull carried those requests back to Beth Page and put them on the desks of Schwendler and Hall. The story that persists in popular history is that the United States recovered a crashed Zero from
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Akutan Island in the Illusions, studied its secrets, and built the Hellcat to exploit its weaknesses. The story is dramatic. It is also substantially wrong. On June 3rd, 1942, during the Japanese diversionary attack on the Illusions, a 19-year-old pilot
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named Tadayoshi Koga took ground fire that severed his Zeros oil line. He attempted an emergency landing on Akatan Island. The aircraft flipped on marshy ground. Koga was killed. The airframe survived nearly intact. American forces recovered it a month later, repaired it,
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and began test flights in late September 1942. But the Hellcat was already flying. Grman's design specifications for the XF6F one were dated February 24th, 1941, 10 months before Pearl Harbor, and more than a year before Kir's crash. The Navy
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contract was signed on June 30th, 1941. The first prototype, the XF6F1, took to the air on June 26th, 1942 with Bob Hall at the controls 3 weeks after the Dutch Harbor raid and months before the Autanzer was even recovered. Hall
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flew the prototype for 25 minutes over Beth Page, Long Island. A second prototype, the XF6F 3, flew on July 30. The first production F6F3 made its maiden flight on October 4th, 1942, just two weeks after flight testing of
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the Acutan Zero began in San Diego. The timeline makes the myth impossible. The Hellcat was not born from a crashed Zero. It was born from the reports of Wildcat pilots who had been fighting Zero since December 1941. Those pilots
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described in precise detail what the Zero could do and what it could not. On April 22, 1942, Lieutenant Commander Butch O'Hare, already a Medal of Honor recipient for single-handedly attacking a formation of nine Japanese bombers over the Lexington, visited the Grumman factory
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at Beth Page. He sat with Hall, Schwendler, and the engineering team and analyzed the Wildcats performance against the Zero in combat. He told them where the Wildcat fell short. He told them what the Zero could do that no
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American fighter could match. and he told them what the Zero could not do. It could not take a hit. It could not dive without risking structural failure. It could not roll quickly at high speed.
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Every weakness O'Hare described was a specification the Hellcat would be built to exploit. The Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics directed Grumman to raise the cockpit higher for better visibility. It directed Grumman to switch from the right R two 600 engine
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to the more powerful Pratt and Whitney R. two 8000 double Wasp producing 2,000 horsepower. Schwendler redesigned and strengthened the airframe to carry the heavier, more powerful engine. The wing was mounted lower on the fuselage. The landing gear was moved from the fuselage
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to the wing roots to accommodate a larger propeller. Hall integrated the changes and flew the result. The Akatan Zero confirmed what the pilots and engineers at Beth Page already knew. And the captured Zero's data allowed Grumman to make late refinements before the
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Hellcat entered feat service. But the airplane existed before the Zero was recovered. It was designed from pilot reports, not from a captured enemy machine. The Hellcat that Hall flew and Schwendler structured was the philosophical opposite of the Zero.
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Where Horicoshi stripped weight to gain performance, Schwendler added weight to gain survivability. Where the Zero sacrificed protection for agility, the Hellcat sacrificed agility for everything else. The design philosophy was deliberate, unapologetic, and rooted in Grman's founding principle. The
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machine must bring the pilot home. The F6F 3 Hellcat weighed 12,598 lb fully loaded. The Zero weighed roughly 6,100.
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The Hellcat was more than twice as heavy. It carried 212 lb of cockpit armor. The Zero carried none. The Hellcat had self-sealing fuel tanks that could absorb multiple bullet strikes without catching fire. The Zero's fuel tanks had no protection. A single
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incendiary round could turn a Zero into a fireball. The Pratt and Whitney R 2800 produced 2,000 horsepower. The Zero's Nakajima Sakai produced 1,130, nearly double the power. The Hellcat was faster, reaching 376 mph at altitude against the Zero's 331.
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It could dive at speeds that would tear the Zero apart. Its aileron roll rate at high speed was dramatically superior.
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Above 200 knots, the Zero's ailerons froze. The Hellcats did not. The Hellcat carried 6.50 caliber M2 Browning machine guns with 400 rounds per gun. It could also carry two 1,000lb bombs or six rockets under its wings. The armorament
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was not subtle. It was overwhelming and the Hellcat could absorb punishment. Pilot after pilot reported bringing Hellcats home with holes in the fuselage, sections of wing shot away, hydraulic lines severed, oil streaming from the cowling. Schwindler's structural philosophy, building every
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component to twice its required strength, paid its dividend not in the engineering specifications, but in the cockpits of damaged fighters limping home to carrier decks across the Pacific. The Hellcat was also forgiving.
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It was designed so that a young pilot with limited training could learn to fly it quickly, operate it from a carrier deck competently, and fight it in combat without the machine punishing his inexperience. This was not accidental.
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Grman's philosophy demanded it. The Navy was training thousands of new pilots every month. Those pilots needed a fighter they could master in weeks, not months. The Hellcat gave them that. The machine did not need to outmaneuver the Zero. It needed to outfight it, outlast
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it, and outproduce it. Out production was Swerbull's department. Before the war, Grumman employed 700 people. By 1943, the Beth Page workforce had reached $25,500.
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Sales in 1940 totaled $4 million. By 1943, they reached $400 million, a 100fold increase in 3 years. Swbble ran the production floor the way he ran everything else. Personally, he walked the factory. He talked to workers by name. He set up training programs for
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new employees, many of whom had never touched an aircraft before Pearl Harbor. Women entered the Beth Page factory by the thousands, building wings, riveting fuselages, assembling engines. In November 1943, three women test pilots, Barbara Jane, Elizabeth Hooker, and Teddy Kenyon, flew
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Hellcats and Avengers off the Beth Page runway in front of reporters. They were believed to be the only women in the country testing military aircraft for a manufacturer. Employee turnover at Grumman during the war was half the rate
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of competing aircraft plants. Profit margins held at 10% while competitors slipped to four. The Navy awarded Grumman the E award for production efficiency 5 years in a row. At peak output, the Beth Page factory was building one Hellcat every single hour
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around the clock. In 1944, the Navy asked Grumman to slow production to 500 aircraft per month. Swerbble told them he could build 700. In March 1945, the factory produced 664 aircraft in a single month. Secretary of the Navy
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James Foresttol said publicly that Grumman saved Guadal Canal. The Hellcat was designed to be manufactured. Hall and Schwendler made deliberate engineering choices to simplify assembly, reduce unique parts, and enable workers with minimal training to build combat ready fighters at
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industrial speed. The Hellcat was not just designed to win dog fights. It was designed to win a production war. And in the Pacific, the production war was the war that mattered most. By the end of the conflict, Groomman had produced
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12,275 Hellcats in roughly 3 years. Rear Admiral John S. McCain said that the name Grumman on a plane had the same meaning to the Navy that Sterling had on Silver. The F-6F Hellcat entered combat on August 31st, 1943 when Hellcats from
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VF5 aboard the USS Yorktown destroyed a heavily defended Japanese flying boat near Marcus Island. It was a modest debut. The first real test came over Tarowa in November 1943. Hellcat pilots reported 30 zeros destroyed for the loss of a single F6F.
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For pilots who were largely new to combat, many of them having trained on the Hellcat for only weeks, the result was extraordinary. It was not the result of superior airmanship. It was the result of a machine that compensated for
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inexperience by being more forgiving, more durable, and more powerful than anything the enemy had. Over rebal in New Britain that same month, Hellcats and Corsaires fought dayong battles against concentrated Japanese opposition from multiple airfields and claimed over 50 aircraft destroyed. The reputation
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was established within weeks. Word spread through the fleet. The new Grumman fighter was not just an improvement over the Wildcat. It was a different category of weapon. The pattern established itself within weeks.
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Hellcat pilots used the tactics that combat experience and the Akatan zero evaluations had codified. Dive from altitude, use superior speed to close the gap. Fire with devastating volume from six heavy guns. Extend away before the Zero could bring its turning
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advantage to bear. If the Zero tried to follow in a dive, it risked structural failure. If it climbed, the Hellcat's 2,000 horsepower engine closed the distance. If it fought at altitude, the Hellcat held every advantage. The Hellcat's greatest day came on June
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19th, 1944 at the Battle of the Philippine Sea. The Japanese Navy launched four massive carrier strikes against the American fleet. 480 Hellcats from 15 carriers rose to meet them. In the first wave, 42 of 69 Japanese aircraft were shot down. In the second,
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over 100 of 128 were destroyed. By the end of the day, Japanese naval aviation had lost approximately 350 aircraft.
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American losses were minimal. Pilots called it the Great Mariana's Turkey Shoot. The name was not boastful. It was descriptive. Japanese carrier air power never recovered. The battle did not merely decide who controlled the skies over the Mariana Islands. It ended
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Japan's ability to conduct large-scale carrier operations for the remainder of the war. The disparity was not the Hellcat's work alone.
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Japanese pilot training had collapsed. The experienced aviators who had terrorized the Pacific in 1941 and 1942 were dead, killed over Guard Canal, Rabbal, and the Solomons. Their replacements were undertrained, given fewer flying hours, and sent into combat against American pilots whose training
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improved every month. The Hellcat made the disparity lethal. A trained American pilot in a Hellcat against an inexperienced Japanese pilot in a Zero was not a contest. It was an execution.
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By war's end, the F6F Hellcat was credited with 5,163 aerial victories. Only 270 Hellcats were lost in air-to-air combat, a kill ratio of 19 to1. The Hellcat accounted for 75% of all aerial victories recorded by the United States Navy in the Pacific. It
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produced 306 aces. The most successful was Captain David Mccambbell who shot down 34 Japanese aircraft. On October 24th, 1944 during the Battle of Lee Gulf, Mccell and his wingman Nsin Roy Rushing intercepted a formation of 60 Japanese aircraft. Two Hellcats against
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60. Mccambell shot down nine. Rushing shot down six. The formation broke. Mccell received the Medal of Honor. The Hellcat was not the fastest fighter in the Pacific. The Corsair was faster. It was not the most advanced. The P-51
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Mustang was more refined. It was never the most agile. It was the most effective. It arrived at the right moment in the right numbers with the right capabilities. And it did the one job it was built to do. The four men who
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built it went separate ways after the war. Jake Swerbble managed the postwar downsizing with the same intensity he brought to the buildup. scaling Grumman down so efficiently that it was the only American aircraft manufacturer to post a profit in 1946.
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He died of colon cancer on June 28th, 1960. He was 62 years old. The man who had run the factory floor that built 12,000 Hellcats did not live to see the company land men on the moon. William Schwendler continued to lead Grman's
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engineering. He became executive vice president, then chairman of the board. His structural philosophy, build to twice the required strength, ran through every aircraft the company produced after the war. From the F9F Panther to the F-14 Tomcat, he died on January
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15th, 1978 in Farmingdale, New York. He was 73. Robert Hall rose to corporate vice president and supervised the design of Grman's first jet fighters, the F9F Panther and the F9F Cougar. The man who had designed the fastest GB races of the
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1930s and the most lethal carrier fighter of the 1940s helped guide the company into the jet age. He died in 1991 at the age of 85. Leroy Grumman retired as chairman on May 19th, 1966 and was named honorary chairman for
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life. He visited the Beth Page factory regularly until diabetes took his remaining eyesight in the early 1980s.
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On October 4th, 1982, he died at Northshore University Hospital in Manhasset, Long Island. He was 87. He had watched the company build the Luna module that landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldordin on the moon on July the 20th 1969.
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A machine built at Beth Page by the same factory that had built the Hellcat.
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Grumman constructed 13 Luna modules. Everyone that flew performed without failure. When the Apollo 13 service module was crippled by an explosion in 1970, the Grumman Luna module served as a lifeboat and kept the crew alive for 4 days. He had watched it build the F-14
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Tomcat, a variable geometry swingwing interceptor that defended the American fleet for three decades and became the most recognizable naval fighter of the Cold War. He had watched a company that started with five men and 64,300 and $25 in a broken down garage become the most
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important naval aircraft manufacturer in American history. In 1994, 12 years after Grumman's death, Northrop Corporation acquired the company for $2.1 billion, topping a $ 1.9 billion offer from Martin Marietta. The new entity was named Northrup Grman. The Beth Page factory was closed. The Long
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Island facilities that had produced Wildcats Hellcats Avengers Tomcats and Luna modules were shut down or converted into office complexes and residential developments. The 6,000 acre test facility at Calverton was turned into an airport. The company that had been the largest employer on Long Island
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for most of the Cold War, a company that had never posted a loss in any year of its 64-year existence, ceased to exist as an independent entity. The name Grumman survives inside Northrup Grman the way a fossil survives inside rock.
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The outline is visible. It is not the living thing. Jirro Horicoshi built the zero alone. One engineer against an impossible specification, stripping weight until the machine weighed less than physics seemed to permit. The result was a sword without a guard,
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lethal but fragile, dominant until the enemy learned to stop fencing and start hammering. The Hellcat was not the work of one man. It was the work of fall.
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Grumman set the philosophy. Build it strong. Swerbble gathered the intelligence from the men who were dying in wildats and carried their words back to the factory. Give us something that will go upstairs faster. Schwendler built the structure to twice the
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strength the specifications demanded because the specifications did not account for war. Hall drew the airplane and flew it first, testing every machine he designed before any other pilot sat in the cockpit. The zero was a masterpiece of subtraction. The Hellcat
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was a masterpiece of addition. Armor where the zero had none. Power where the zero had efficiency. Weight where the zero had grace. And the result was not elegance. The result was 19 to1. 5,163 victories. 75% of every aerial kill the
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United States Navy recorded in the Pacific. Built at the rate of one per hour on Long Island by a workforce that grew from 700 to 25,500 in three years.
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The Iron Works did not build the most beautiful fighter of the Second World War. It built the one that brought the pilot
Topics:Grumman F6F HellcatMitsubishi ZeroWorld War II fighternaval aviationPacific Waraircraft designmilitary historycarrier aircraftfighter aircraftaeronautical engineering
