‘A baited cat may grow as fierce as a lion.’
Samuel Palmer (1805–1880)
Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation’s cats—especially the F6F Hellcat, with more than 5,100 enemy aircraft shot down in the Pacific Theater of Operations in World War II—put the teeth in Palmer’s quote. Here, an F6F-3 warms up before takeoff from the USS Yorktown (CV-10) during her shakedown cruise in the spring of 1943. Note the aircraft handlers preparing to pull the chocks from the landing gear.
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