General Motors FM-2 Wildcat

The Grumman F4F served in many, major WWII battles, including Coral Sea and Midway, where carrier-based Wildcats provided vital fighter cover for SBD Dauntless and TBD Devastator attack planes. Land-based Wildcats also played a major role in the 1942/1943 campaign for Guadalcanal in the South Pacific.

Derived from the Grumman-built F4F-4, our FM-2 Wildcat variant was manufactured by General Motors and featured several design improvements, including a modified tail, more powerful engine (Wright Cyclone R-1820-56) and a reduced number of wing-mounted machine guns to provide greater room for ammunition. 

General Motors continued to produce Wildcats and improve upon their design even after Grumman switched over to manufacturing the more advanced F6F Hellcat. The Museum’s FM-2 received its first assignment to San Pedro, California in April 1944, having been built just a short time earlier at General Motors’ Eastern Aircraft Division plant in Linden, New Jersey. It was assigned to the South Pacific during the summer of 1944, before eventually returning to San Diego, California, and then moving to Florida, where it joined a training unit. In July 1945, a short time before war’s end, the fighter received a new assignment at Naval Auxiliary Air Station Pungo in Virginia Beach, just 4 miles north of the Museum! 

NAAS Pungo: Also known as NOLF Pungo, due to its origin as an outlying landing field for aircraft training at Norfolk, NAAS Pungo’s mission involved supporting the operations and training of composite squadrons, many of which operated from small escort carriers in the Atlantic Ocean. The squadrons had the primary mission of protecting convoys while also hunting and destroying enemy U-Boats. Twenty four of these squadrons passed through Pungo during WWII, with most of them comprising a mixture of Wildcats and Avengers.