After receiving its first Vought F4U Corsairs in October 1942, VF-12 earned the nickname “ensign eliminator.”
The best fighter aircraft in the Pacific region of World War II was the Vought F4U Corsair. On May 29, 1940, Lyman A. Bullard, Jr., a Vought test pilot, made the first flight of the Vought XF4U-1 prototype.
Rex Beisel, the chief designer for the Vought team, rebuilt each outboard folding wing panel to accommodate three.50 caliber machine guns after the US Navy demanded additional armament for the production Corsairs, according to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum website. The fuel tanks located on the front edge of each wing were replaced by these weapons. An 897-liter (237 gal) fuselage tank was added between the cockpit and the engine to make up for this lost capacity. Beisel had to move the cockpit approximately three feet to the back in order to maintain the fast and small fuselage profile. So, at the most crucial portions of the landing, the wing entirely obscured the pilot’s field of vision.
Aside from having a nasty stall, strong torque and propeller effects at low speeds, a short tail wheel strut, main gear struts that frequently shook the aircraft after touchdown, and cowl flap actuators that dripped oil across the windshield, the early Corsair also had a short tail wheel strut. These challenges made it practically impossible for the aircraft to land on the cramped deck of an aircraft carrier, in addition to the poor vision inside the cockpit. Because of its propensity to take the lives of these rookie pilots, Navy pilots quickly gave the F4U the nickname “ensign eliminator.”
The term “ensign eliminator” originated after the first Corsair squadron, VF-12, received its aircraft in October 1942, according to Martin Irons’ explanation in the book Corsair Down! Tales of Rescue and Survival during World War II. Stationed at NAS San Diego they suffered through slow delivery of their planes and the usual teething problems of early birds.
Walter Burkhart Bayless, USN, was forced to crash-land the Corsair 02167, just the fifteenth dash-one constructed, only a few weeks after receiving their Corsairs. The Annapolis man put his bird down on a mesa close to La Jolla after logging 1,000 hours of flight time. Just short of a 300-foot drop, Bayless was able to halt his bird after it tore through wire fencing and hit fence posts. On another day, both the human and the machine would finally take to the skies again.
With fourteen pilots lost by the Fighting Twelve by the middle of 1943, attrition was considerable. The squadron relocated from San Diego to Pearl Harbor in the spring in order to get ready for future carrier-based missions on the USS Saratoga.
Lt. Cmdr. Bayless led a dawn flight of four birdcages from Maui on May 4th. When last spotted, the division was approaching a storm front. They never came back. Further searches for the missing division turned up nothing except oil slicks and floating debris. It was never known if the birds were lost due to a midair collision, a loss of control in the storm, or structural failure due to the strong winds. Bayless and his charges, both aged 29, were listed as “missing.” The Navy eventually reclassified them as “dead.”
When they headed east to fight, Fighting Squadron 12 swapped their Voughts for Grumman Hellcats. Throughout the remainder of the war, they flew F6Fs. The task of making a Navy Corsair squadron combat debut would fall to VF-17.
Corsair Down! Tales of Rescue and Survival during World War II is published by Schiffer Publishing and is available to order here.
Photo by: U.S. Navy