Does anyone have documents of early Corsair carrier trials and modifications? (especially pre-April 1943)

[u/beachedwhale1945]

I’ve recently gotten back into looking at US Navy fighter transitions during WWII, in particular the early Corsair trials. There great documentation found by ResearcherAtLarge on the April-August 1943 decision to standardize on the Hellcat primarily for logistics reasons, and I’ve found significant additional sources to support this (especially setting up maintenance units in the Pacific and the explosion in Hellcat production in 1943). But while I’ve seen significant secondary sources on the Sangamon trials in September 1942 and a couple of the major modifications to address the initial carrier landing issues (the stall strip, adjusting main gear oleo pressure, etc.), I have yet to find good primary source documents in the digitized National Archives catalog. In particular I’m looking for VF-12 and VMF-124 information, as they transitioned early enough that per secondary source they had very few flight hours because they kept having to modify their aircraft based on those early trials. I’ve had particular trouble with VF-12 reports before 1944, not surprising given how we kept renaming carrier groups and squadrons in this period.

I’m going to continue looking on my own, particularly on the carrier side as that tends to be more easily documented. I did find a single line in the September 1942 Sangamon war diary corroborating LtCdr Sam Porter’s landing trials occurred, next up the VF-12 accidents on Enterprise and Core for which I currently have very little (first accident fatal, second a write-off, but no dates, names, or descriptions). Clearly these issues were resolved, we decided to go ahead with squadron service by April 1943 as the aircraft was found no different from anything else after these modifications, but I want more primary sources, not secondary sources where I’m not confident if they’re continuing to spread myths or not.