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Guadalcanal. Solomon Islands
Three Grumman F4F Wildcats approached Henderson Field from the west in a shallow descent from 15,000 feet.
These three single-engine fighters represented one hundred per-cent of the aircraft available to Marine Fighter Squadron VMF-221-which put them at thirteen planes short of the sixteen they were authorized. The Cactus Air Force, and ultimately the United States Marine Corps, obviously had to do something.
The remaining pilots of VMF-221 had heard two fairly credible rumors about what they would do.
According to the most pleasant rumor, any day now they would return to Henderson and find the taxiways and sandbag revetments crowded with sixteen glistening, new, well-maintained Wildcats of a Marine fighter squadron flown in from an aircraft carrier to replace VMF-221.
To those who desperately wished to believe this rumor, it didn’t make much sense to send replacement aircraft and pilots to a squadron that had already suffered a loss of two hundred twenty percent of its original aircraft and seventy percent of its original complement of pilots. The only sensible solution was to bring in a fresh squadron.
The other theory attempted to account for the reason why VMF-221 had neither received enough aircraft and pilots to re-place operational losses, nor had been relieved and replaced by a fresh Marine Fighter Squadron. According to this
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