WW II Air War 15When retired Cdr. Hamilton “Mac” McWhorter III,
87, died on April 12, 2008, at El Cajon, California,
the Navy lost one of its great World War II fighter
pilots—a hero who inspired many.
Deadly Dogfight
Imagine you’re in a metal shed and someone throws
rocks against the outside. That’s what it sounded like
when machine-gun fire ripped into my Hellcat.
I looked around, and sure enough, a pair of Japanese
Zero fighters was right behind me. Tracers were
coming at me.
I was the pilot of a magnificent Grumman F6F
Hellcat, probably the best fighter of World War II.
I was a member of Navy fighter squadron VF-9,
operating from the USS Essex (CV 9). We were
escorting our carrier’s bombers on a strike to Rabaul,
New Britain, in the South Pacific on November 11,- American troops had just landed at nearby
Bougainville.
This was a big battle, high over Rabaul, with 100
Zeros and 50 Hellcats fighting one another and
planes tumbling all over the sky. When I heard slugs
hitting my Hellcat, I wondered if this huge, sprawling
dogfight was going to be the last of my brief (so far)
Navy career, which had begun shortly before Pearl
Harbor. I had never really wanted to kill or be killed,
but since childhood, I had wanted to fly. Early aviator