How the Wildcat's Worst Weakness Broke the Zero at Guadalcanal

The F4F Wildcat could not turn with a Zero, could not climb with one, and could not match its range. Between August 1942 and February 1943 it held the sky over Guadalcanal anyway, and the Imperial Japanese Navy never again put a trained carrier air group over the Solomon Islands. This documentary reconstructs the reversal from the records. The specifications that made the A6M2 Model 21 the finest carrier fighter in the world, the 800 pounds of armor and folding gear that crippled the F4F-4, and the Beam Defense Position that John Thach worked out with matchsticks eleven months before the campaign began. It covers the Tainan Air Group's arrival at Rabaul, the 560 nautical mile escort mission of 7 August 1942, VMF-223 flying into Henderson Field on 20 August, the Australian coastwatcher network on Bougainville that gave the Cactus Air Force forty minutes of warning, the six hour air battle of 25 October 1942, and the withdrawal of Japan's finest fighter unit in November 1942 with almost none of its original pilots. Built from after action reports, squadron rosters and loss tables rather than legend, including the report in which the Wildcat's own doctrine author called it inferior to the aircraft it replaced. Subscribe for the definitive history of the United States in the Second World War, new documentaries every few days. #WW2 #WorldWarII #PacificWar #USNavy #WWIIHistory #F4FWildcat #A6MZero #Guadalcanal #CactusAirForce #MilitaryHistory #USAInWW2