By Kevin Seabrooke
Many of the men in the new VF-15 Fighter Squadron had three things in common: a love of flying and the desperate desire to fly fighters in combat. That’s where the third and most frustrating similarity came in–they were assigned to non-flying duties. Some were so desperate to fly fighters that they went north and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force.
Dave McCampbell knew their frustration well. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1933 and was honorably discharged because congress had limited commissions that year. He tried the Army Air Corps, but was denied for hyperphoria, which made the vision in his right eye slant upward. He was four years out of Annapolis before he managed to get into flight school, then served two years with VF-4 on Ranger before transferring to the newly commissioned USS Wasp in 1940. By 1942, McCampbell was senior landing signal officer (LSO) on Wasp.
He kept making requests to return to fleet aviation. Finally at 33, nearing the upper age limit for a Navy fighter pilot during the war, McCampbell’s persistence paid off and he was sent to New Jersey to form and command VF-15.
The Fighting Fifteenth, also known as “Satan’s Playmates” and the “Fighting Aces,” had a rough start in training and with their first carrier assignment, but they would go on to be responsible for taking down more enemy aircraft—310 in the air and 348 on the ground—during WWII than any other squadron in the U.S. Military.
Flying Grumman F6F Hellcats off of the carrier USS Essex, more than 26 pilots from the Fifteenth became aces and McCampbell led them all, becoming Navy’s “ace of aces” with 34 kills, third among all Americans during the war.
They participated in the Battle of the Philippine Sea and Battle of Leyte Gulf, and conducted strikes on the Marianas, Iwo Jima, Taiwan, and Okinawa. On October 24, 1944, in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, McCampbell would shoot down nine enemy aircraft.
Fighting Fifteen: The Navy’s Top Ace and the Deadliest Hellcat Squadron of the Pacific War (Stephen L. Moore, Dutton Caliber (PenguinRandomHouse), New York, NY, 432 pp., Nov. 18, 2025 $35 HC) includes a roster of all the Fighting Fifteen pilots deployed on the USS Essex, a list of the top-scoring pilots, a glossary, notes, bibliography and index.
This is a must-read for military buffs and anyone who wants to know what these young men went through to get into the cockpit and finally make their way across the far Pacific to put their lives on the line for their country.
Based on numerous first-hand accounts and interviews, Moore’s narrative of the tragedy and triumph of these fliers proves him to be a masterful storyteller.
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