BATTLE FOR THE SOLOMONS – Task Force 50 to Rabaul

ARTIST’S NOTES – The Inspiration Behind the Painting

This scene was inspired by accounts from Navy pilots who described their actions that day, in particular from VF-17’s Commanding Officer Tommy Blackburn’s great 1989 book The Jolly Rogers.
After only just returning to the deck of the Bunker Hill on the morning of November 11th, Blackburn’s Corsairs were pivotal in this day’s action, as well as carrier-based Hellcat squadrons VF-9, VF-18, VF-22, and land-based squadrons VF-33 & VF-6 . Several vivid narratives from their pilots recounted remarkably similar victories against Nakajima ‘Kate” bombers attempting water-level torpedo runs against the Bunker Hill, running the gauntlet of ferocious AA fire. In many accounts, Hellcats & Corsairs proved to be a lethal combination against these “Kates”, while intense battles raged overhead.
Reading some of these narratives from Tom Blackburn’s book immediately conjured up powerful images in my mind, recreating the ferocious chaos of the battle and inspiring my attempt to capture this in my painting:

“The view from the surface up to 25,000 feet was almost beyond belief. The whole hemisphere of sky was polka-dotted with black 5-inch shell bursts interlaced with colorful 20mm and 40mm tracer. Here and there, dark-tailed orange comets marked the passage of burning airplanes as they arced toward the cobalt surface. Around the twisting ships, bomb and shell spouts heaved up spectacular white geysers. Through it all, planes rolled and turned with sunlight glinting off their flat surfaces and contrails streaming off their wingtips as they executed maximum-gee high-speed pullouts, some right on the deck. The scream of overrevving engines and props was punctuated with the whomps of bombs, guns, and shells, plus the staccato rat-a-tat of machine guns. It was technicolor bedlam, and then some.”
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“Ensigns Howard ’Teeth’ Burriss, Ike Kepford & Lt Lem Cooke slanted in to hit the Kates with a horizontal pass from the target’s port side…Shortly, Teeth found a lonesome Kate as it dropped down to begin its torpedo run on one of the ships. As he set up his firing run, a Hellcat zoomed in from out of nowhere and went after Teeth’s target. Their combined competitive fire sent the Kate cartwheeling across the surface, and so they each got credit for a half kill”.
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“According to Bunker Hill’s gunnery officer, ‘I saw a Kate about twenty feet off the water dart by the formation with a Corsair closing fast. Like a cowboy roping a wild steer, the Corsair sent tracers licking out, and the Kate went in with an awesome splash. Johnny (Kleinman) killed the Kate, but in the process a friendly 20mm round exploded on contact with his heavy glass bullet-proof windscreen’. Like Kleinman, Ike Kepford drilled right on through the intense friendly AA to burn a Kate just as it seemed ready to launch its fish only 1000 yards from Bunker Hill. Unlike Johnny, however, Ike evaded the friendly fire. However, at the same moment he was killing the Kate, unbeknownst to Ike, a Hellcat blew a Zero off his tail.”

Although this scene depicts a specific snapshot in time on 11 November ’43, I also intended this painting to be a tribute to ALL the great Corsair and Hellcat units who helped win the War in the Pacific, indisputably the two best Navy fighters of World War II. Hellcat pilots achieved an amazing 19:1 kill ratio, downing 5,156 enemy aircraft in just two years, accounting for 75 percent of the Navy’s aerial victories during the war. By the end of the war, the Corsair flew over 64,000 sorties, shot down over 2,000 enemy aircraft, and only lost 189 planes in action to the enemy, the lowest loss rate of any aircraft in the Pacific War.
 – John D. Shaw