Captain David McCampbell was the U.S. Navy’s all-time top fighter ace, “the ace of aces,” with 34 kills. Flying F6F-5 Hellcats off the USS Essex (CV-9) during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, then-Commander McCampbell and his wingman, Ensign Roy Rushing, shot down a remarkable 15 Japanese planes (McCampbell splashed nine, Rushing six) on 24 October 1944. McCampbell set a U.S. aerial combat record for shooting down the most enemy planes in a single mission on that eventful day. He would receive the Medal of Honor for his exploits both at the June 1944 Battle of the Philippine Sea and at Leyte. In his U.S. Naval Institute oral history conducted by Paul Stillwell, McCampbell described his Leyte experience:
To this day, I think that the day my wingman Roy and I got 15 planes, just the two of us, that those must have been kamikazes, because they gave us very little fight. Two or three of them tried to climb up to higher altitude. Of course, we picked them off in a hurry. The rest of the time, they were just flying right along, taking it, and we were knocking them off right and left.
Since they were headed back to Manila and away from our task group, we were in a position freely to strike them from the rear. There was no great hurry to get the leader. And we never did get him, by the way. Now, the real leader was a twin-engine bomber that led them in, and he was down. All the bombers were behind him; the fighters were above them. But it wasn’t too much of a fight for us—just a question of taking our time to make sure we got one. We didn’t get one every time, but we pretty well took care of them.
We had the altitude advantage all the time we attacked the Japanese. We zoomed down, would shoot a plane or two. Roy and I would each take one, and I’d tell him which one I was going to take, if it was to the right or to the left, which one it was. By telling him this, it allowed him to know which way I was going to dive, and then allowed him to pull out after we attacked, which gave me freedom to go either way I wanted. This worked very successfully. I’d pick out my plane, then he’d pick out his. We’d make an attack, pull up, keep our altitude advantage, speed, and go down again. We repeated this over and over.
We made 20 coordinated attacks, and my wingman went down with me every time. We got those 15 planes, and three probables. Most of the Japanese planes were highly vulnerable, because they didn’t have self-sealing wing tanks or seat armor. And we learned real early that if you hit them in the wing, anywhere near the wing roots, where the fuel was, they’d explode right in your face. So then after that, all of us, we learned to shoot for the wings instead of going for the pilot or the engine. And it turned out very successful.
I was not anywhere near as sharp on recognition as my wingman was, so I’d take his word for what I shot down. He was always that close to me when I was in air-to-air combat. The day we shot down the 15, for instance, we shot down three different type planes—the Zeke, or Zero [A6M carrier-based fighter], the Oscar [Nakajimi Ki 43 fighter], and the Hamp [A6M3-32 variant of the Mitsubishi Zero].
Overall in the war, I shot down 13 different types of planes. [Aviation historian] Barrett Tillman dug those out of the combat action reports, and he got a list for me. But the Zeke was by far the most frequent plane that I met in air-to-air combat, and I guess that was the one I had the most respect for. Although I shot down different types, I considered the Zeke superior to the others.
