March in Holgate is a quiet time of year. But 80 years ago, the skies would have been full of Navy aircraft on training missions. The throaty roar of 18-cylinder, 46-liter engines – that’s nearly eight times the size of a modern Dodge Challenger supercharged engine – could be heard constantly from F6F-5 Hellcats as they headed to and from Atlantic City Naval Air Station (NAS), along with F4U Corsairs from NAS Wildwood.
But on March 15, 1945, in the skies over the Jersey Shore, four of these planes went missing and did not return to…
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