When the blue Navy Corsair fighter plane with the gull wings sweeps over the tiny airport as part of the “Wings Over Wiscasset” air show, Hilary Heaton will look up and smile.

In fact, even a photo of the chunky plane triggers more than a smile. You could say it is a wide grin.

Many Midcoast residents know the 85-year-old with the twinkling eyes and the ready quip as the former owner of one of the area’s most popular waterfront restaurants, East Boothbay’s Lobsterman’s Wharf.

But only a handful of friends know that 70 years ago, he was a 15-year-old runaway who fibbed about his age and joined the U.S. Marines.

It was in the first months of World War II that Heaton, as a longtime gun enthusiast, was sent to ordinance school and trained as an armorer, learning how to maintain and service the powerful machine guns mounted on the war birds’ wings.

In months, he was sent to the South Pacific, assigned to VMF 111, one of the Marine’s first flying units. They were based on a tiny atoll in the Gilbert Islands called Makin.

This was not the famed Marine “Black Sheep Squadron” featuring “ace” pilots whose exploits grabbed the headlines. He said his unit was the kind of second string; they were assigned to attack and harass the Japanese held islands that had been bypassed by the U.S. forces.

The Corsair fighters were ordered by the Navy, but  assigned to the Marines when the Navy was reluctant to station them on carriers.

They were planes designed around an engine, the 2,000-plus horsepower Pratt & Whitney R-2800, an 18-cylinder supercharged radial powerhouse.

The mighty engine could pull that plane to over 400 mph in a straight line, and, in a dive, some pilots were able to crack the 500 mph barrier. Corsairs were fast and tough, armed with six .50 caliber machine guns.

Heaton’s unit figured how to turn the fighter into a dive-bomber. “We put two 500-pound bombs on the wings and later a 1,000-pound bomb under the fuselage.”

Later, they began to augment that payload with 2 and 4 inch rockets.

The Corsairs were also fitted with movie cameras, but because his unit was targeting ground installations, they removed the cameras.

“We used to put bottles of Pepsi in the empty camera compartment during flights to chill them, but some of the bottles broke and spilled cola and glass all over the planes, so the officers told us to stop that,” he said.

VMF 111’s nickname was “Devil Dogs,” a name bestowed on the Marines by German soldiers in World War I. Their job was to mount low level attacks.

“Our pilots were crazy. Our commanding officer came back from one raid with palm tree branches wedged in his wings because he flew so low,” Heaton said.

“I wrote home and told my folks the pilots were crazy. That got me in trouble. They censored all our mail and one of the (censoring) officers came to me and asked me if I had an attitude,” he said.

After getting into a scrape with another Marine, Heaton said he landed in the brig. That led to a change of assignment. Guard duty.

After he got out, he and some pals, friends he met while in the brig, were assigned to help guard supplies as the whole island (Kwajalein) was turned into a staging area for the invasion of Iwo Jima.

“There was a mile-long line of supplies for the officer’s mess tents. There was canned fruit and other goodies. It was the first time we had seen ketchup for a while, and we appropriated cases of it for our friends,” he said.

“Guys would put ketchup bottles in their back pockets when they went to chow. You could say we were kind of getting even with the officers,” he said as that wide grin returned to his face.

As he sat in an air-conditioned office, Heaton showed off tiny photos he took during his time with the Corsairs. He told how he and his friends would work in the burning South Pacific sun and how they had to be careful when they picked up tools that had been lying in the torrid sands.

“The Corsair was a good work horse. They would fly day after day. We worked on them out in the open. Sometimes they would pull the engines out using a hoist hooked up to a tree, although many of the trees were gone after we took the islands.

“They were terribly rugged planes.”