I have a family connection to two planes - the mossie and the F6F.
My father was Canadian and flew the mossie with the 105 Pathfinder Squadron. He immigrated to the US after the war. I never got a chance to talk to him in too much detail about the Mossie. He died when I was 14 years old as my interest in aviation was just starting and he was reluctant to talk too much about it, as many people of his generation were.
After he died, we were taken in for a while by my uncle on my mother's side - Uncle Steve. He was a recently retired US Navy admiral who lived in Washington DC. He was a very down-to-earth, modest and generous man who had an interesting career and traveled in some lofty circles. He fostered my interest in aviation while constantly calling me "plebe." He was a 1933 US Naval Academy graduate. Remarkably, Congress had a squabble over the number of officers authorized for the navy, and the Annapolis class of 1933 was not commissioned - they were sent away to be civilians. It goes to show you that Congress has always been worthless.
Congress came to their senses a year later and my uncle received his commission, spending the next 5 years as a line officer on destroyer and cruiser duty until 1940 when he went to flight training. In 1941 he was on the USS Wasp flying the F4F Wildcat and spent the first year of the US war in the Atlantic. His pug nose came from an intimate encounter with the gunsight of a Wildcat that got away from him on one carrier landing.
He transitioned to the F6F and in 1943 was commander of VF-35 (The Grim Reapers) and CEAG-35 (The escort carrier equivalent of CAG - F6F-3s and TBMs) on CVE-28, the Chinango. He flew the F6F-3 during the battle of Tarawa and other operations at the end of 1943 through 1944. He was promoted to Cdr and was assigned in 1944 to form a new air group, CAG-94. They were deployed to the USS Lexington (CV-16) in 1945.
Here's a couple photos of him from the CAG 94 cruise book:
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Our default skin for the F4U-4 is VBF-94 from the time my uncle was CAG, but he flew the F6F-5. I'd be pretty happy if we could get a new F6F-5 model with a AG-94 skin and 'double nuts' (00) number for his plane.
That's why I fly the F6F quite a bit. I rarely look at my stats, but I was surprised to see I used the F6F so much. I had 95 kills and 8 deaths in it last tour. I'm hopeless in the mossie, though.
