‘It was not as you remember it, Saburo. I don’t know how many Wildcats there were, but they seemed to come out of the sun in an endless stream. We never had a chance….Every time we went out we lost more and more planes. Guadalcanal was completely under the enemy’s control….Of all the men who returned with me, only Captain Aito, [Lt. Cmdr. Tadashi] Nakajima and less than six of the other pilots who were in our original group of 80 men survived.’

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Those words of top Japanese ace Hiroyoshi Nishizawa, part of a November 1942 conversation that was reported in fighter pilot Saburo Sakai’s autobiography, Samurai, might be the best tribute ever paid to the Grumman F4F Wildcat. While the newer Vought F4U Corsairs and F6F Hellcats grabbed the spotlight, it was the Wildcat that served as the U.S. Navy’s front-line fighter throughout the early World War II crises of 1942 and early 1943.

The Wildcat is unique among World War II aircraft in that it was originally conceived as a biplane. By 1936, the Navy had drawn up specifications for its next generation of shipboard fighters. Although presented with ample evidence that the era of the biplane was over, a strong traditionalist faction within the Navy still felt the monoplane was unsuitable for aircraft carrier use.

As a result, on March 2, 1936, Grumman was ordered to develop yet another single-seat biplane, the G-16, to replace the successful F3F biplane series. The design, the XF4F-1, was ordered both to placate the traditionalists and to be a backup for the Navy’s first monoplane, the Brewster F2A Buffalo. Grumman engineers, however, showed that the installation of a larger engine in the F3F would result in performance comparable to that expected from the new design, and began work on a parallel monoplane project, the G-18 (or XF4F-2). The Navy finally saw the logic of Grumman’s actions and officially sanctioned them.

Although redesigned as a monoplane, the XF4F-2 that rolled out of Grumman’s Bethpage, Long Island, assembly shed on September 2, 1937, showed a strong family resemblance to the F3F family with narrow-track landing gear that retracted upward and inward into the barrel-shaped fuselage. That, in combination with the placement of the cockpit high on the fuselage to give good vision, helped give the Wildcat its distinctive, pugnacious appearance.

Although the new ship was not a true ‘aerobatic’ performer, it was stable and easy to fly and displayed excellent deck-handling qualities. One problem that would remain with the F4F throughout its life, however, was its manual landing gear retraction mechanism. The gear required 30 turns with a hand crank to retract, and a slip of the hand off the crank could result in a serious wrist injury.

The prototype F4F had to best two competitors during spring 1938 trials before its acceptance by the U.S. Navy–the prototype F2A and a naval version of the Seversky P-35. Although the F2A was judged the winner because of teething problems encountered with the F4F, the Navy saw enough potential in the design to order continued development incorporating a newly designed Pratt & Whitney R-1830 radial engine with a two-speed supercharger.

The resulting redesign, the XF4F-3, differed from the original in several respects. Longer-span wings with squared tips–later a Grumman trademark–were added, and the armament of four .50-caliber machine guns was concentrated in the wings. Weight, however, had crept up to 3 tons. First flight for the new machine was February 1939, about two months after the first flight of the Mitsubishi A6M1 Zero prototype in Japan.

International tensions were rising, and the Navy awarded Grumman a contract for 600 Wildcats by the close of 1940. Enough of them were received to begin operations from the carriers Ranger and Wasp by February 1941.

First combat for the F4F was not with the U.S. Navy but with Britain’s Royal Navy, and its first victim was German. The British had shown great interest in the Wildcat as a replacement for the Gloster Sea Gladiator, and the first were delivered in late 1940. On Christmas Day 1940, one of them intercepted and shot down a Junkers Ju-88 bomber over the big Scapa Flow naval base. The Martlet, as the British also called it, saw further action when 30 originally bound for Greece were diverted to the Royal Navy following the collapse of Greece and were used in a ground attack role in the North African Desert throughout 1941.

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