Word: hellcatted
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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There, with his bride, he admired rows of his favorite Hellcat fighter planes (see BUSINESS), like a man staring at Niagara Falls. But he was cagey when a newsman asked what he had named his own plane: "I refuse to say for purposes of security." Then, beaming: "Marital security." And in France a 24-year-old lieutenant named Clarence E. Coggins became a hero in an unorthodox way: he got captured...
...Hellcat is a tough, round-bellied fighter plane that looks like two beer barrels, end to end. The U.S. Navy calls it the greatest sea fighter in the world. The Japs respect it above all other planes. Wherever the Hellcats have roved in the skies above the Pacific, they have conquered. At Guam, Ensign W. B. ("Spider") Webb nosed his Hellcat into a cluster of Jap dive bombers, joined them in their landing circle, leisurely shot down six. In the first attack on the Bonin Islands in June, Lieut. L. G. ("Barney") Barnard shot down two Jap planes...
...Navy tirelessly trumpets the Hellcat record. In the first five months of this year, Navy pilots officially blasted out of the air 444 Jap planes, destroyed another 323 on the ground. The Navy lost only 71 planes, mainly because Hellcats, when they are seemingly held together only by will power, limp home to their carriers somehow. In the battle of the Marianas, which Navy flyers scoffingly call the "turkey shoot," Hellcats shot down 360 Jap planes in one day, the greatest aerial bag of the war. In this combat, the Navy lost only 22 planes...
Down U-Boats. The Japs also respect a smaller brother of the Hellcat, the Wildcat fighter, and a halfbrother, the Avenger, a torpedo bomber. The Germans learned to respect them also in the once nip-&-tuck Battle of the Atlantic. With a "now-it-can-be-told" flourish, the Navy has let out the news that the most potent weapon of all against the U-boats were Wildcats, flying from baby flattops, and rocket-firing Avengers. In one six-month period, these planes sent 31 U-boats to the bottom, more than half of the entire total sunk...
...Hellcat's Father. The father of the Hellcats is a medium-sized, 49-year-old man. He has a pink face, seamed with hundreds of tiny wrinkles, sharp, bright blue eyes, sandy red hair and the twanging voice of a New England storekeeper. He is stoop-shouldered and extraordinarily shy, moves about as if he hopes no one will notice him. A Navy flyer, meeting him for the first time, said: "You don't look like the guy who builds Hellcats." Roy Grum man looks more like the suburban fellow who lives next door...