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No-Internet-7532 t1_j9qkl3a wrote

F5F5 Hellcat pilot, nice !

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TampaSaint OP t1_j9ql32c wrote

Thank you I am impressed with your knowledge! He always said he flew Hellcats and loved them, but I didn't know if this actually was a Hellcat or just something he happened to lean against for a photo.

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No-Internet-7532 t1_j9qpauj wrote

That’s a dash 5 alright. The most successful carrier fighter of wwII. Most likely a training aircraft given the large white number

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Southern_Snowshoe t1_j9rhfw7 wrote

Impressive and a great photo. My father was a Wildcat and later a Hellcat pilot during the war. I wish I had a good quality color photo of him like this. All I have are a few black & whites. Thanks for posting!

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TampaSaint OP t1_j9u026t wrote

Thank you. I have no clue where or when this was taken, and only found found it years after his death when his younger brother died. We also only have a few black and whites from those times, mostly group pictures and such. This one stands out. I wish I had seen this picture while he lived, to get the story behind it.

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Southern_Snowshoe t1_j9ufthl wrote

Do you know which carrier(s) your father was assigned to? Mine was assigned to the escort carriers Bismarck Sea and Barnes. The former was lost to suicide attack off Iwo Jima, although Dad wasn’t aboard at the time. He lamented the fact that all his belongings, including a bunch of aircraft parts he’d swiped and squirreled away, were lost. He had some harebrained scheme to use all these “found” parts and instruments to build his own plane after the war. Probably just as well that it didn’t play out that way since Uncle Sam would take a dim view of it if Dad were found out.

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TampaSaint OP t1_j9uhspg wrote

Ha Ha good plan. My dad was mostly on an obscure carrier called the USS Chenango which I linked in a comment above. Oddly, he almost never spoke of the time. We have no idea how her earned all the medals. Its on his official discharge papers but he never spoke of combat. Only that he liked the food and that he thought he suffered less than those doing infantry type fighting. The only stories he ever told us were when he had an engine failure during combat, ditched into the sea, and earned the name "Corky" because his buddies all said he was bobbing up and down just like a cork.

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Southern_Snowshoe t1_j9uliq3 wrote

That’s a great story! Funny, my father also said he felt fortunate to not be a Marine or soldier slogging it out in the jungle. I remember him saying more than once, “Barring being forced down, I always knew I had a warm dry bed waiting for me and that I wouldn’t be sleeping in a muddy ditch.”

I missed the link you mentioned. I’ll check that out. I happened across a photo of my father last year in the Wikipedia article on his ship, the USS Bismarck Sea. Buried in the article is a photo of an accident unfolding on the deck and a crumpled individual in the middle of the mess. It seemed very similar to a story Dad told me about an accident he was involved in, so I dug a bit deeper. Sure enough, it was Dad. He was mentioned in the photos source material. (He was virtually uninjured but his plane captain and another pilot were lost).

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GenoPax t1_j9rs1xa wrote

Very impressive, he sounds like a great man and very humble.

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