Military museum lecturer focuses on naval aviation

BOALSBURG — The Pennsylvania Military Museum in Boalsburg recently presented a lecture by aviation historian Jim Krombach on U.S. Naval aviation at the dawn of World War II.

Krombach grew up near Willow Grove Naval Air Station in Horsham, and developed an interest in aviation at an early age. Following a 35-year career as an elementary school teacher, Krombach has done extensive research on aircraft, training and tactics used by the U.S. Navy in the World War II era. He is associated with the Mid-Atlantic Air Museum in Reading and the Wildwood Naval Air Station in New Jersey.

Krombach began his talk mentioning the “first team” of the American naval aviators which engaged the Japanese in battle. There were four squadrons assigned to each aircraft carrier: scouting, bombing, torpedo and fighting. These men went up against a Japanese force with better training and aircraft.

“The Japanese were very well trained,” Krombach said. “Probably the best trained pilots in the world.”

The American fighter pilots flew the Grumman F4F Wildcat fighter against the Japanese Mitsubishi A6M “Zero” fighter. The Zero was faster, more maneuverable and had a longer range than the Wildcat, thereby putting the Americans at a disadvantage.

Krombach said it took nearly a year for the Americans to equal the Japanese through the training of more pilots, improving their fighting tactics and deploying new aircraft designs, including the Grumman F6F Hellcat, which became the dominant carrier-based fighter in the Pacific.

Krombach also described some of the good and bad features of the fighter planes used by the Navy. The Wildcat was light and maneuverable, but used a fuselage-mounted retractable landing gear adapted from the earlier F3F biplane fighters of the 1930s. The gear had a narrow track, making landings difficult, and to save weight, it was operated by the pilot with a hand crank rather than by electricity or hydraulics. “Any pilot could tell you it took 29 cranks to crank it up,” said Krombach. He said many Wildcats were seen wobbling shortly after takeoff because the pilot had to take his right hand off the control stick to crank up the gear.

The famed Vought F4U Corsair fighter was developed for carrier use, according to Krombach, but was soon relegated to land-based use because its high nose and rearward cockpit location made it very difficult to land on a carrier deck due to poor forward visibility. He said the unique bent-wing design was chosen to avoid using long landing gear legs which are prone to failure on hard landings.

Krombach said the Japanese Zero had the same horsepower as the Wildcat, but was more efficient, having a range of 1,150 miles compared to the Wildcat’s 800 miles. He noted that the Zero had very large ailerons on its wings, enabling it to roll into and out of sharp turns very quickly. Testing a captured Zero, American engineers discovered that its ailerons caused the Zero’s control stick to be very hard to operate in a dive, and so pilots were advised to dive their Wildcats to escape Zeros on their tails.

Self-healing fuel tanks, developed by the Goodyear Company, saved many planes from fires when their tanks were pierced by bullets. The tanks’ design used a three-layer construction with natural rubber in the center layer. “The natural rubber, when it came in contact with fuel, would ooze into the hole and fill it in,” he said. “It would keep the fuel from spilling out, reducing the chance of a fire.”

The drawbacks were that the rubber tanks weighed more than the previously used aluminum tanks, and they held slightly less fuel. “It added another 400 pounds to an already heavy aircraft,” said Krombach.

Another innovation which aided the carrier-based squadrons was the use of folding wings on the Wildcat fighters, and on the subsequent F6F Hellcat design. This reduced wingspans from 38 feet to just 14 feet, thus allowing the placement of 50 percent more planes on a carrier deck compared to previously numbers.