This is a 20th Century Fox promotional film in color made for the navy. It is quite good and very interesting. A lot of it is like what I have written about earlier but in a different war. One thing that struck me was while the pilots had nice flight suits for protection against fire, the enlisted radio operators and gunners just wore ordinary chambray shirts and navy dungarees. I guess the navy did not consider them important enough to have protective gear. The fighting lady is the USS Yorktown, a major asset during world war 2. There are lots of actual combat video, landings (some not so good, some downright dangerous and tragic). The Yorktown as the other world war 2 carriers was much smaller than the super carriers of today. The fleet carriers were about 30,000 tons displacement, 37% the size of those in service today and there were no catapults and no angled decks in those days. There is footage of how people lived on those carriers. I have written before about how the navy refers to stairs as ladders on board ships. In the video when the ship goes to general quarters you will see why the stairs are called ladders. The video is 1 hour and 20 minutes long and like a movie documentary feature. At 45 minutes you will see the battle of the Philippine sea and the retaking of Guam Tinian and Rota, the Marainas island chain. That includes the Marianas turkey shoot where the US navy shot down 600 Japanese planes while losing only 123 US planes, most of them due to landings with planes either running out of gas or landing with severe damage after aerial combat. If you have an hour and 20 minutes it is well worth watching.
The video brought back a lot of my own memories. Those sailors used manpower pushing planes around, not like in my day when they had tractors to move planes. In those days if a pilot hit the deck but did not catch an arresting wire, there was no way to hit the throttle and lift off again because the other planes were parked up front on the deck. The pilot had no choice but to run into a wire net and damage the plane. Even if you never saw an aircraft carrier, the film is interesting. In my day we didn't have the guns on a carrier like in world war 2. In WW 2 carriers bristled with 5 inch guns like destroyers have along with multiple anti-aircraft guns. During the earlier days of WW 2 carriers didn't have many destroyers with them for anti-aircraft and submarine protection, Most of the destroyers were used in the Atlantic to protect convoys to get supplies to Britain, so they needed guns on board the Pacific carriers in case Japanese aircraft broke through our own combat air patrols.
My time during the Vietnam war was exciting to me, but I think, I wish I had been aboard a carrier during WW 2, when the adrenaline must have flowed like water over Niagara Falls. I would have wanted a fleet carrier rather than an auxiliary carrier (much smaller, much more dangerous and slow and much more uncomfortably cramped). I would have loved to be a radioman/gunner back then.
The video brought back a lot of my own memories. Those sailors used manpower pushing planes around, not like in my day when they had tractors to move planes. In those days if a pilot hit the deck but did not catch an arresting wire, there was no way to hit the throttle and lift off again because the other planes were parked up front on the deck. The pilot had no choice but to run into a wire net and damage the plane. Even if you never saw an aircraft carrier, the film is interesting. In my day we didn't have the guns on a carrier like in world war 2. In WW 2 carriers bristled with 5 inch guns like destroyers have along with multiple anti-aircraft guns. During the earlier days of WW 2 carriers didn't have many destroyers with them for anti-aircraft and submarine protection, Most of the destroyers were used in the Atlantic to protect convoys to get supplies to Britain, so they needed guns on board the Pacific carriers in case Japanese aircraft broke through our own combat air patrols.
My time during the Vietnam war was exciting to me, but I think, I wish I had been aboard a carrier during WW 2, when the adrenaline must have flowed like water over Niagara Falls. I would have wanted a fleet carrier rather than an auxiliary carrier (much smaller, much more dangerous and slow and much more uncomfortably cramped). I would have loved to be a radioman/gunner back then.
No comments:
Post a Comment