nize it as a George—a brand-new Japanese fighter
and he’s make a damn good overhead run on me!
As he closed on me, his tracers looked as if
they were close enough that I could reach out
and touch them. I stomped my boot down hard
on the right rudder, all that my Hellcat could
take hoping she wouldn’t snap roll on me at 180
knots. The skid seemed to do the trick and defiantly saved my life as the George’s bullets passed
behind and to the side of me. The George dove
straight through our Hellcat flight as we all rolled
over in unison and split-ess’d after that guy. The
VF- 19 Scoreboard
Combat
Planes destroyed
Planes probably destroyed
Planes destroyed on the ground
Planes damaged on the ground
500 lb. general purpose bombs dropped:
500 lb. semi-armor piercing bombs dropped
350 lb. depth charges dropped
155
16
190
127
247
19
64
. 50 caliber rounds fired
Total sorties
680,313
2,071
Awards
Aces
Navy Crosses
DFCs
Silver Stars
Purple Hearts
Air Medals
11
16
32
9
16
25
F6F-3s of VF- 19 sit on the flight
deck of the USS Lexington
CV- 16 during an air attack on
October 24, 1944, during the
Battle of Leyte Gulf. (Photo
courtesy of Jack Cook)
George kept on pouring the coal to his throttle
and finally leveled off about 20 feet above a large
sugar cane field. Lt. Albert Seckel lobbed a few
rounds into his smoking engine as his canopy
came off. It was an unbelievable sight as the Japanese pilot tried to bail out at such a ridiculously
low altitude. He never had a chance has his body
slammed into a lone tree that was standing in the
field. The George cut a large swath into the cane
field before it blew up.
As we climbed for altitude Ens. R.A. Farnsworth
became our “Divine Wind” or kamikaze when an
Oscar tried to ram him head on. Farnsworth’s
Hellcat bore the brunt and brought back part of
the Oscar’s wing that had snapped off and lodged
in his Hellcats wing. That was a heck of a way to
score a victory and save ammunition!
As we turn for home, low on gas and almost
out of ammo we climb to an approximate homeward heading expecting to pick up our usual YE
homing signal. The navigation signal is dead;
no one is picking it up. None us knew that a kamikaze had hit Lexington while we were gone.
With no homing device I resorted
to my training and slide the Mark
VIII plotting board from under the
instrument panel and held my stick
between my knees. I begin some
very rough navigation and plot
that in 46 minutes we should see
our carrier. I think I aged 20 years (I
was only 25 years at the time) in ¾
of an hour. We finally spotted ships
ahead of us and found our Number
Some of the Hellcats were very low on fuel as
they fell out first to land. With all of us safely on-board, we scrambled down from our Hellcats and
head for the ready room to debrief. It’s a very somber sight when we were told that a Kamikaze dove
his bomb-laden plane into the island structure
and wiped out 50 men, 11 of them from our air
group. The enemy airplane also tore away most
of the antennas and communication gear, so we
knew why we couldn’t pick up the ships signal.
When we told air group commander Hugh
Winters of our great hunting success in almost
downing all the Japanese planes we encountered
except one or two, the only response the CAG
gave was, “Why the hell did you let the others get
away!” I just smiled and said, “I’ll have a scotch
and water please.” That was my last mission of
the war as Lexington pulled out for repairs and
VF- 19 was sent home. I was reassigned to a Corsair squadron and was on my way back to the
war but never made it because the atomic bombs
were dropped on Japan. ;
