Sharp-Shooting Hellcat

“Mac” McWhorter runs up the score.

- Robert F. Dorr

When 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, 1943. 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 I was born in 1921 in Georgia into a middle-class family. I was nine years old when Dad arranged my first flight, in a Ford Tri-Motor. Soon afterward, I saw a fighter plane for the first time. I wanted to fly fighters. I attended college in Georgia, but my real satisfaction came from qualifying for naval aviator training. I was learning to become a Navy pilot when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. In training, I flew the Brewster F2A Buffalo; it was completely inadequate. After pinning on wings and ensign’s bars in 1942, I trained in the Grumman F4F-4 Wildcat. They assigned me to Fighting Nine, or squadron VF-9.