THE GREAT HELLCAT/ CORSAIR PRODUCTION RACE
BOTH CHANCE VOUGHT AND GRUMMAN were given many Navy E (for “Excellence”) citations for production during
WW II. And, indeed, they both did produce a large quantity of excellent Navy fighters.
Ten Hellcats were delivered in 1942, just six months after the first flight of the XF6F-3. Grumman delivered 2,547 Hellcats in 1943—enough to fill the needs of all the fastattack carrier task forces. Grumman set the record for the greatest number of aircraft delivered by one company when it delivered 664 aircraft during March 1944. This beat North American, which had led the pack the month before with its P-51 production record. In total, Grumman delivered 12,275 aircraft by November 1945, when the line was shut down.
The XF4U-1 flew on May 29, 1940. Because of its carrier problems, the first Corsairs arrived at Guadalcanal in February 1943 as land-based Marine squadron aircraft. Vought, with the help of Brewster and Goodyear, delivered 11,418 Corsairs during that same period in WW II. Corsair production continued through the Korean War. The last Corsair, an F4U-7, was delivered on Christmas Eve of 1952, completing a total of 12,571 aircraft.
One should look into the differences in the production background of the two organizations to see why Grumman, as one company producing four other types of aircraft, could outdeliver—both in production rate and quantity—a combination of three other capable aircraft manufacturers concentrating on only one design.
The Corsair series had a much more sophisticated structure than the Hellcat. It had a very complicated, doubledihedral gull-wing center section and a fuselage that had many more bulkheads than the Hellcat. It had a doublecompound-curve fuselage and wing skins that were much more expensive and time-consuming to manufacture and install than flat skins.
The entire structure was flush-riveted throughout. The Hellcat had flat skins everywhere except for the engine cowl. It had round-head rivets, which took half the time to install and buck smoothly, and a very simple wing and fuel tank/wing center section.
The real reason Grumman was able to deliver 2,547 airplanes in 1943 after delivering only 10 airplanes in 1942 was that, in 1941 and 1942, it was building the Wildcat and Avenger designed to the same structural philosophy as the oncoming Hellcat. Those planes also used the same wingfold design. Together, the Avenger and the Wildcat were built at a rate of over 400 per month at Grumman as the Hellcat was coming up to speed on the same production line. To get the necessary production floor space, both the Wildcat and the Avenger programs were in a planned phaseout from Grumman Bethpage to General Motors at Linden and Trenton, New Jersey, respectively. Having that highly skilled workforce at Grumman was indispensable in reducing the production learning curve as fast as Grumman did to ensure such speedy delivery of Hellcats to the Fleet.
By contrast, Vought had no previous production experience in the highly sophisticated design philosophy of the complicated F4U-1 structure, let alone the coming buildup of the high rates of production that were required for the Pacific War.
The Brewster Co. was a disaster as a producer and was closed down in 1944, after delivering only 738 Corsairs. The Goodyear Co., however, was able to gear up and deliver 4,006 Corsairs before the end of the war.
It took the three companies of the Vought team seven months longer to deliver 11,418 Corsairs than it took Grumman to build 12,275 Hellcats. To give one an appreciation of the rate of production per month in 1944, all three companies that produced Corsairs delivered an average of 448 per month. Grumman delivered an average of 511 per month—still, a lot of great airplanes just when needed.
Adm. Metzger, the director of the fighter desk at the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics during the war, was quoted as saying that the production capability of Grumman and the practical simplicity of the Hellcat’s construction allowed the Navy to purchase Hellcats at a rate of five for the same price as three Corsairs. That the Grumman portion of the airplane cost the Navy only $35,000 is impressive in today’s context because that money probably wouldn’t buy a page change in a pilot’s flight manual for the F-18 Hornet!
In spite of the production rates, prices, flight characteristics, etc., there are two statistics in the final tally that tell an interesting story: the number of enemy aircraft shot down and the kill-to-loss ratio in combat. Navy records show that Hellcats shot down 5,155 Japanese aircraft and had a kill-to-loss ratio of 19 to one. The same records show that Corsairs shot down 2,140 Japanese aircraft and had a kill-to-loss ratio of 11 to one. These statistics, however, do not reflect the fabulous success of the Corsair in its groundsupport role during the island-hopping mopping-up required by the Army, Navy, and Marines in conquering the chain of islands leading to Japan.