U.S. Navy / U.S. Naval Institute Photo Archives
Captain David McCampbell, U.S. Navy, ACE
With 34 kills, Captain David McCampbell was the U.S. Navy’s all-time top fighter ace. He was one of the few pilots to receive the nation’s top award for actions during aerial combat, earning the Medal of Honor for his exploits during the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
On 24 October 1944, McCampbell and wingman Ensign Roy Rushing launched in a flight of seven F6F-5 Hellcats from the USS Essex (CV-9) to take on Japanese fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo planes menacing U.S. carriers in Leyte Gulf. McCampbell would shoot down nine planes and Rushing would down six. In his 1988 Naval Institute oral history, McCampbell describes flying above some 40 of the enemy planes and then going in for the kill when they broke their orbiting formation.
So we had the altitude advantage all the time we attacked the Japanese. We zoomed down, would shoot a plane or two. Roy and I each would 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. . . . that 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, and he got the news. 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 about 20 coordinated attacks. . . .
Pretty soon, Roy called me. He said, “Skipper, I’m out of ammunition.” I called back, and I said, “Well Roy, I’ve got a little left. Do you want to go down with me for a couple of more runs, or do you want to sit up here and watch the show?”
He said, “Oh no, I’ll go down with you.” So he followed me down for a couple of more attacks, and then I looked at my gas gauges, and I saw I’d emptied one main tank. I was about on the second one, and I was getting low. By then I was out of ammunition, too, getting low on gas, so I called Roy and said, “Well, we’ll go back to the ship. I’m getting low on gas.” By now, having followed this flight away from the task group toward Manila, we had gotten pretty far away from the ship. I’d estimate maybe about 100 miles, give or take a few.
So we headed back to the ship, and when I picked it up on YE on my ZB system [an aircraft-homing system], I was about 6,000 or 8,000 feet in altitude. I figured I was about 65 miles away, which turned out was about right, based on the length of time it took us to get back to the ship. I called the ship when I first got the YE signal and asked if they could take me as soon as I got back. They said, “Oh yes, come on in.” So we kept heading for the ship, and when I got over the ship, I found they had a flight deck full of planes, and I knew that to launch all those planes would take a good 20 minutes, and I didn’t have that much gas left.
So I called the ship and told them that, and the admiral called the Langley and directed them to launch nine torpedo planes, so they could give me a clear deck to land aboard, which they did. When I saw the deck was clear, I came around and made a pass, but the LSO didn’t cut me on the first pass. They still hadn’t cleared the deck properly for landing. So I made a quick turn around, came back again, and he gave me the cut, and I landed safely.
But when I tried to come out of the landing gear, I gave it near full gun, and the engine conked out on me. So I ran out of gas on the deck. They had to push me out of the landing area. I found out from the mech who reammunitioned the guns that I had exactly six rounds left in the starboard outboard gun, and they were all jammed. But it worked out all right.