“My reflecting gunsight made it look as if someone had painted an orange ring on the ground below and I jockeyed the plunging Hellcat to get the target in the center of that ring. By then, I was at 6,000 feet. A touch of the trigger and .50-caliber machine guns hammered out 4,800 rounds a minute. I pressed the button in front of my control stick, the rockets roared toward the parked planes that were getting bigger and bigger — that red ‘meatball’ insignia sharp against their green camouflage. At 3,000 feet, I dropped my 500-pound bomb and at that moment pulled out of the dive. I never saw the bomb fall and I never saw it hit.”

McNabb and his comrades started to climb after dropping their bombs. They were seeking out new targets when his earphones crackled to life for the first time that day.
“Redskin-one from Redskin: Abandon mission, negative on further attacks, return to base,” he said, recalling the message ordering the flight leader back to the Ticonderoga.
On the flight back, McNabb received word that other flights had lost planes that morning. Luck had always been on McNabb’s side, as he had also been assigned to the Ticonderoga after was hit twice by Japanese kamikaze attacks and to the USS Randolph before it was hit.


“We thought maybe they hadn’t been expecting us, maybe the gunners were waiting for a later strike when the light was better,” he said. “We would have felt pretty good except for that radio call — were we being recalled to help save the carrier from air attack? More likely, we thought it was a submarine attack on the fleet that might prevent the carrier from turning into the wind to receive us.”

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