Before there were cats

Flight Journal, Jun 1998 by Tillman, Barrett

It was not unknown for a pilot's leg to slip during early maneuvering, which let the gear unwind at a demonic pace back toward the extended position. At such times, there was nothing to do but grit the teeth and stick a knee into the whirling arc of the handle, thus arresting the process. The resulting bruises to legs and knees lasted for days.

If the F3F was sometimes a bearcat to take off and land, it was, said one aviator, "a pussycat in the air." Rolls were simple to initiate, with the merest stick pressure required to bring the wings vertical to the horizon. Past that point, full aileron deflection was needed to complete the maneuver, but stick pressure remained light. Elevator control also was sensitive, and caution was necessary to avoid making too abrupt a pull-out from a prolonged dive.

On the eve of WW II, the U.S. Navy was still heavily committed to biplane fighters. The fleet organization in June 1939-three months before the blitzkrieg erupted in Europe-found Saratoga's VF-2 still flying F2F-2s while Lexington's VF-3 and Ranger's VF4 had F3F-ls. Enterprise's VF-6 flew F3F-2s, and her sister Yorktown's (CV-5) VF-5 had new FF-3s. Meanwhile, the two Marine Corps fighter squadrons at Quantico, Virginia and San Diego, California, both flew F3F-2s.

The last F3Fs in squadron service belonged to VMF-111 and 211, as reported on Marine Corps allocations for October 1941. By then, all Navy "FitRons" and one Marine squadron were flying Brewster F2A Buffaloes or Grumman F4F Wildcats.

Used as advanced trainers toward the end of their careers, many F3Fs had all unessential items removed: armament, radios, bomb shackles, etc. Greatly lightened, but with the same horsepower as the combat configuration, these little birds were at once the bane and the delight of undergraduate naval aviators. The skittish landing characteristics remained, but performance was astounding. It was possible to initiate and complete an Immelmann from cruise power without touching the throttle. Rate of climb in the stripped-down biplanes soared ridiculously-in the neighborhood of 4,500 feet per minute. Few, if any, production fighters of WW II could touch them when it came to initial rate of climb.

The F3F was never intended as anything more than a pure-blooded dogfighter, and in that capacity, it excelled. In part, the naval fighter victories of 1942 were built upon the foundation established by a few hundred prewar aviators who learned their trade in the 216 F2Fs and F3Fs.

Many pilots, such as Ensign Richard L. Cormier (later Commander "Zeke" Cormier, skipper of the Blue Angels from 1954 to 1956), referred to Grumman's agile little F3F-3 as the sports car of biplane fighters and said, "It didn't have the feline nickname of later Grumman products, but it probably should have been called the `Pussycat.' Whatever you called it, the F3F was the epitome of scarfand-goggles aviating."

Building on the previous airplanes, the next Grumman fighter, the XF4F-1, was set down as an evolutionary design: another closed-cockpit, all-metal biplane with handretractable wheels. The Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics, however, anticipated a revolutionary change with Brewster's monoplane XF2A-1, later called Buffalo. Therefore, Grumman split the difference between the original XF4F's top and bottom wings and produced a midwing monoplane that first flew as the XF4F-2 in September 1937. Thus was born the initial kitten in the Grumman litter, the famous Wildcat