Though pugnacious rather than elegant, the Hellcat was a truly war-winning aircraft. It was designed and developed with great speed, mass-produced at a rate never equalled by any other single aircraft factory and used to such good effect that, from the very day of its appearance, the Allies were winnning the war in the Pacific.
The Hellcat began life as the XF6F-1, a natural development of the F4F Wildcat with R-2600 Double Cyclone engine. Within a month the more powerful Double Wasp had been substituted and in the autumn of 1942 the production line took shape inside a completely new plant that was less advanced than the Hellcats inside it! This line flowed at an extraordinary rate, helped by the essential rightness of the Hellcat and lack of major engineering changes during subsequent sub-types. Deliveries in the years 1942-1945 inclusive were 10; 2,545; 6,139; and 3,578; a total of 12,272 (excluding two prototypes) of which 11,000 were delivered in exactly two years.
These swarms of big, beefy fighters absolutely mastered the Japanese, destroying more than 6,000 hostile aircraft (4,947 by USN carrier squadrons, 209 by land-based USMC units and the rest by other Allied Hellcat squadrons. In fact, in the F6F's first big engagement of the war, on 4 December 1943, 91 of them met 50 Japanese A6M Zeros and destroyed 28 enemy fighters, for the loss of two Hellcats. This would have given the Japanese a very good taste of what was to come from this tough and agile little fighter. The Fleet Air Arm, which originally chose the name Gannet, used Hellcats in Europe as well as throughout the Far East. Unusual features of the F6F were its 334 sq ft of square-tipped wing, with a distinct kink, and backward-retracting landing gear. The F6F-3N and -5N were developed as night fighters with APS-6 radar on a wing pod; the -5K was a drone and the -5P a photographic reconnaisance version.