The Grumman F4F Wildcat was the standard carrier-based fighter of the United States Navy for the first year and a half of World War II. An improved version built by General Motors (the General Motors FM Wildcat) remained in service throughout the war, on escort carriers where newer, larger and heavier fighters could not be used.
The Wildcat was outperformed by the Mitsubishi Zero (its major opponent in the Pacific war) but held its own by out-surviving it (the Grumman airframe could take much more damage than its lightweight, unarmored Japanese rival) and out-gunning it.
The original Grumman F4F-1 design was a biplane, which when proving inferior to rival designs was recast as the monoplane F4F-2. This was still not competitive with the Brewster F2A Buffalo which won initial US Navy orders, but when the F4F was fitted with a more powerful engine, the Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp, it showed its true merits and became the F4F-3. US Navy orders followed as did some (with Wright Cyclone engines) from France; these ended up with the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm after the fall of France. In British service, these were known as the Martlet I.
A new version, the F4F-4, entered service in 1942 with six guns and folding wings, allowing more to be crammed on a carrier; this was the definitive version and the one that saw the most combat service in the early war years including the Battle of Midway.
Grumman production ceased in early 1943 to make way for the newer F6F Hellcat, but General Motors continued producing them for both US Navy and Fleet Air Arm use. At first they produced the identical FM-1 model but then switched to the improved FM-2 (based on Grumman's F4F-8 prototype) with a more powerful engine and a taller tail to cope with the torque. In all, 7,251 Wildcats were built.
Many Wildcat pilots were saved by the Wildcat's ZB homing device, which allowed the pilots find their ships in poor visibility, provided they could get within the 30-mile range of the homing beacon.
Grumman produced 220 examples of the Martlet IV in 1942, but six were lost en route to Britain.
Unable to dogfight on even terms, Wildcat pilots at Midway and Guadalcanal were forced to develop tactics suited to the performance limitations of the F4F-4, emphasizing weaving to protect each other's tails, diving away in emergencies, and hit and run attacks using the deflection shooting techniques that were emphasized in naval fighter pilot gunnery training.
Grumman's chief designers, Dick Hutton and Bill Schwendler, saw the light and quickly converted their biplane design to a mid-wing monoplane configuration, with the Navy agreeing to the change in July 1936.
It was a welcome improvement: Wildcat pilots were painfully aware of the type's limitations, with Jimmy Thach saying later that its successes against the Zero were mainly due to poor marksmanship and "stupid mistakes" on the part of the enemy, and good piloting skills plus teamwork on the part of the Americans.
Wildcats operating on antisubmarine patrol in the Atlantic were generally painted in a neat color scheme with white on the bottom and a light "gull gray" on top.
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