Bad captains can have a large impact on operations.
Here s What You Need to Remember: No bad deed went unrewarded in the case of Leslie Gehres. The navy whitewashed his misdeeds. He was decorated with the Navy Cross, its loftiest award for martial valor, and ultimately promoted to a rear admiral.
Seldom does your humble scribe come away incensed from reading history. The saga of the World War II aircraft carrier USS
Franklin (CV-13) constitutes an exception. We normally think of
Franklin’s history as a parable about the importance of shipboard firefighting and damage control. It’s about materiel and methods, in other words. And these things are important without a doubt. Fighting ships are metal boxes packed with explosives and flammables. Suppressing fire represents a crucial function, which is why the first thing a new sailor does after reporting aboard is qualify in rudimentary damage control.
Intrepid
Many a ship has a remarkable tale to tell but few have survived as many scraps as the aircraft carrier berthed at Pier 86 in Hell’s Kitchen, New York. The
Intrepid (CV-11) and its sailors and aviators survived hits from four Kamikaze planes, helped sink the largest battleship ever built, recovered three astronauts from the sea, and shot down a MiG jet over Vietnam.
The “Fighting I” was one of two dozen Essex-class fleet carriers that entered U.S. Navy service during World War II. The 266-meter-long flattops, which displaced twenty-seven thousand tons empty, were larger and boasted superior armor protection made possible by the termination of the Washington Naval Treaty in 1936. The carriers could accommodate the heavier combat aircraft entering service, such as the SB2C Helldiver, the TBF Avenger torpedo bomber, and Hellcat or Corsair fighters, and bristled with new air- and surface-search radars, up to seventy-two forty-millimeter Bofors air-defense guns, and
These weapons are incredibly powerful.
Key point: Sea and air power were decisive in many conflicts and reign supreme today. Which ones have stood the test of time?
In today s world, where everyday it seems a new piece of military technology is poised to take over the battlefield and make everything else obsolete, there are several weapons of war that seem to have some staying power.
This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.
Aircraft carriers, while some may consider them obsolete, remain one of the ultimate ways to display national power and prestige, with the unique capability to attack targets from the world s seas with deadly accuracy.
But Japan was defeated too quickly.
Here s What You Need To Remember: Before the plan could be carried out, however, on April 1, 1945, the crucial battle for Okinawa began. Geographically, Okinawa is part of the far-reaching islands constituting the island nation of Japan. With that battle engaged, it was as if Japan itself was finally attacked.
As soon as Colonel James Doolittle’s B-25 raid struck Japan in April 1942, Japan sought to wreak revenge on the United States, but by 1944 devastating aerial bombings on Japan by the Americans had become all too regular.
It was not until early 1945 that the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) was ready to strike America even further than it already had on December 7, 1941. After considering, then ruling out San Francisco, San Diego, New York City, and Washington, D.C. as targets, the IJN chiefs settled on America’s vital Panama Canal. The plan to disable the canal––through which the United States was funneling military resources from t