About a Wildcat and the pilot who flew it
While I kept searching for more and more information on VF-5 and on these mostly unsung heroes seen on the above picture shared by Tom Harmer, the son of Richard “Chick” Harmer, I stumbled upon this Website which will guide me for my next project on My Forgotten Hobby.
This is the link : http://www.daveswarbirds.com/cactus/cactus.htm
This is the introduction written by the author.
Introduction
This site is dedicated to those men who helped defend the skies over the island of Guadalcanal during the period August 1942 through November 1942.
You might wonder why a website has been made just for this subject. It started merely as an exercise in web page development, but soon became a labor of love. I had just finished reading the book “Fighter Squadron over Guadalcanal” by Max Brand, and I found myself thinking the same thoughts that I had had when I had read “The…
View original post 761 more words
My Forgotten Hobby III 
Excerpt from
http://www.daveswarbirds.com/cactus/cactus.htm
During this time ‘Cactus’ became the unexpected host of another fighter squadron: (U.S. Navy) VF-5 with 24 Wildcats arrived from the carrier Saratoga. The Saratoga had been torpedoed by a Japanese submarine, and it sent most of its air group to Guadalcanal while it was out for repairs. The arrival of this big, confident squadron with twice as many planes as the two Marine outfits put together gave a real boost to the Cactus Air Force’s sagging morale. While lacking the experience of the battle-hardened Marines, the Navy pilots of VF-5 soon learned the kind of fighting required, and they began their tour with six credited victories in their first engagement. This meat-grinder of a campaign exacted its price, however; out of the 24 F4Fs that arrived on September 11th, only 5 remained after five weeks of combat.
LikeLike