 In the thousands of years that ships have fought at sea, perhaps no single battle revolutionized naval warfare as much as the battle of the Carl's Sea. It was fought not by battleships and cruisers and destroyers, but in the air. Not once did the opposing surface ships come within sight of one another. Instead, in the skies overhead, navy pilots engaged their enemy. The story of that battle is a landmark in the history of aircraft carriers. The men who have made history from the decks of aircraft carriers have always been inseparable from the flying machines they love. Bringing their birds home to roost on the roof of their floating home required all the skill they could muster after the tension of combat. You come around and you approach pattern at your minimal speeds. You turn into the groove and you just catch the eye of that signal officer and you'd love him all the more. You saw his hands out and he'd just bring you aboard. The Carl's Sea in May 1942, the first naval air battle, there was midway in June. The engagement that turned the tide against the Japanese forces. Midway, where aircraft carriers and the planes they launched proved again the strategic value of the navy's ungainly floating airfields. To protect themselves, the carriers covered their sky with fighter combat air patrols. If the enemy should get through, the crossfire of anti-aircraft guns would take over. That deadly airspace over the Japanese fleet. What was it like to push over a dive bomber at two miles up and go whistling down to a gun-filled deck? You were keyed up, of course, and you were apprehensive of what was taking place but through the fact that we'd had many training missions, we were real seasoned. So I think the only thing that you had was the apprehension of whether you're going to make that bomb hit on that deck or not. But you were thinking of that only, nothing else. There was nothing else in your thoughts. You were just doing the job that you were trained to do and that was it. Bob Ryder, radio man and gunner, tells how it looked from the rear seat. The radio man would normally call out the altitude to the pilot as he's coming down. 9,000, 8,000, 7,000, and 2,000 feet you'd haul a drop. But then would level the plane out. At this point, you were beginning to look out for this heavy flap and you could see this pattern of explosions behind you and you could hear this old bulldog-type sound going whoop, whoop, whoop. You tell the pilot to pull it up and this whoop, whoop sound was going beneath it. For the fighter pilots, even though they worked in teams, it was still in the end one man alone in his plane. What does it take to make a good fighter pilot? Gene Valencia, a top Navy ace who won 23 and lost none, sums it up. He has to be aggressive. He has to love to fight. He has to love to tangle. But he does not and he cannot do it foolishly. He has to know the performance of his aircraft. It's that simple. Simple, another Navy pilot, Hamilton McWardard, remembers that combat flying is not an occupation that accepts errors of judgment. You don't get a chance to make the one mistake. You use that one mistake is the last one. Landing a plane on a carrier deck, a moving, rolling, pitching platform also allows few mistakes. It was like putting an old match alongside of a swimming pool. And then you thought to yourself, are we going to make it on that little thing? David McCamble, the Navy's top World War II fighter ace. We've always had a man back on the platform with the landing signal officer and his job to watch for hooks and wheels down when the plane is well back in the groove, long before time for him to land. To a carrier pilot, no two landings are alike. Lieutenant Skip Phelps explains how it is. It's always something different. The day is different. The sea is different. The wind is different. And this is two years from me. Today it's as new as it was two years ago. A carrier as a capital ship of many of the world's navies has a birthright extending back to the Wright Brothers. Not a sleek greyhound of the sea, not a mighty battle wagon. She is a composite, a floating airfield, a battle command center, a city of men, 3,500 hard working men. The carriers took shape by trial and error, by the changing necessities of their age. Their development was always wedded to the refinements in the design of the aircraft that flew on and off their flat top decks. This was a marriage of convenience, unsure at first, but a marriage that has grown in importance. Today their 20th century machinery demands crews that include highly trained technicians, engineers, electronic specialists. The floating airstrips of World War II have doubled in size to become airports like the USS John F. Kennedy and the nuclear-powered Enterprise and Nimitz with flight decks covering four and a half acres. This mobile airbase, the Kennedy, can steam to any trouble spot at 600 nautical miles a day. Her airplanes can go to 85% of the world's surface. The Kennedy is free to roam where it chooses. Over the years, American carriers have protected friends and stood off would-be enemies. In peace as in war, they have been the shield and the power of America in a world where no day goes by without threat and crisis. A ship is nothing by itself, but steel and machinery. When you put people aboard, it becomes a living thing. And it was with people, visionary and insistent, that the aircraft carrier had its beginning in the first decade of the century. The year is 1909. William Howard Taft is our president. The automobile is still a newcomer in our streets. Hardly have we succeeded in propelling ourselves along the ground on four wheels with the gasoline engine than the Wright brothers have used it to propel themselves through the air. Now Orville Wright is demonstrating a later model at Fort Meyer, Virginia. Navy Lieutenant George Sweet, attending as an observer, reports back, the Navy must have that. It will be most important to us. With these words, he sits in motion forces that will change history. The Navy's first experiments with the flying machine are directed toward a design that will land and take off from the water. Recently, the blueprints for this fragile machine were dusted off, and a replica of the Navy's first aircraft soared out of history. But soon the question is raised. Might an airplane be of greater use to the Navy if it could be flown to and from the deck of a ship? In 1910, at Hampton Roads, Virginia, a civilian pilot, Eugene Ealy, tests the idea. He takes off in a 50-horsepower Curtis plane from a wooden platform built over the bow of a cruiser and lands safely ashore. But could a plane return to a ship and land safely on it? Two months later, in San Francisco Bay, Ealy takes off from shore and lands on a platform rigged over the afterdeck of the cruiser Pennsylvania. Now an airplane has both taken off from and landed aboard a warship at sea. The implication for the Navy is revolutionary. The Navy's first pilot, Lieutenant Theodore Ellison, is already learning to fly with Glenn Curtis, a pioneer in aircraft design and construction. The first groups of Navy air pilots to win their wings contain men who will make naval aviation history, men who will lead carrier aviation through a world war. Early in the century, there's no question that Britannia rules the waves. But Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm decides to challenge England with a naval race. Bridges sea dogs, old hands at naval warfare, but always ready for new ideas. Build his majesty's ship, Furious, the world's first aircraft carrier. The U.S. Navy takes its own steps into the future by fitting three cruisers with catapults to launch planes. But as America enters World War I, the battleship continues to play the star role as the capital ship of the fleet. From shore bases on both sides of the Atlantic, Navy planes are the airborne eyes of the fleet, scouting for German submarines. Their brief missions are limited by the short range of the aircraft. Admiral William Sims, the commander of naval forces in Europe during World War I, tells a congressional committee, the fast carrier is the ship of the future. This same vision of the importance of aircraft at sea has struck a young Japanese naval attaché in Washington, Isoruku Yamamoto. In his words, the fiercest serpent can be overcome by a swarm of ants. Yamamoto is a fleet admiral in World War II. We'll see the truth of this adage work triumphantly for him, and disastrously against him. In the same year, Congress authorizes the conversion of the coal ship Jupiter to become a prototype aircraft carrier. In 1919, a flying boat with a far longer range is completed, the NC boat, N for Navy, C for Curtis. Designed for mid-ocean sub-patrolling, the NC comes too late to help in World War I. It makes another kind of history. Leaving Rockaway, New York, the NC-4 reaches Lisbon, Portugal, stretching the range of aircraft to the width of the Atlantic. But this first crossing of the ocean by a Navy flying boat will become a footnote in aviation history when it is eclipsed by later landmark flights. In 1921, while a Jupiter is still being rebuilt, the Navy undertakes a series of aerial bombing tests using captured German ships as targets. Under the command of Brigadier General Billy Mitchell, Army aircraft sink the battleship Ostfriesland. Our newspapers spread the word. Airplanes have made surface navies obsolete. The Navy quietly reminds us that the Ostfriesland was merely a sitting duck, unable to make evasive movements and unprotected by either its own guns or fighter planes. In 1922, the conversion of the Jupiter is finished. She is commissioned as our first carrier, the USS Langley. At once, she's nicknamed the Covered Wagon. She is fitted with arresting wires across the landing area to catch hooks mounted between the wheels of her airplanes. The planes have no brakes and shoulder straps are yet to become standard cockpit equipment. In these days, Navy pilots with tongue-in-cheek define a successful landing as one which the pilot can walk away from. But scores of future air admirals will be among the thousands who will win their wings on the Navy's first carrier. It will become a proud boast for graying eagles to say, I threw off the Langley. That pilot in trouble, Lieutenant Gerald Bogan, will one day as a rear admiral command a carrier task group through an important battle in World War II. My tail hook, as it sometimes would happen, instead of engaging the arresting wire, rode one of these foreign aft wires which caused the plane to slew to the left. There were several people, including Commodore Reeve, standing in the gallery near the two smoke sacks on the port side, and I was afraid that my propeller would chew them up. So against all regulations, I gave her full throttle and I did a very beautiful wing over over the port side and into the drink. I was picked up by the plane guard. Retired rear admiral Leslie Garries was another Langley eagle. The qualification consisted of three successful landings and takeoff, and once you'd made three of them, you were a carrier pilot. And of course we built this thing up. Those of us who were carrier pilots, we affected the look down our nose at all other aviators because we were Langley pilots. And we built this all up to be quite a thing and then later on we got the other carriers and it was our job to train and classify other. Then we had to break it all down again and convince everybody it was easy and safe and nothing to it. But that Langley was really something. The 1920s, the jazz age, the golden age of sports, and bathtub gin, the era of wonderful nonsense. Beneath the facade of frivolity, there is a desperate desire to prevent a Second World War. At a Washington conference, the leading powers agree to cut down their navies. The treaty calls for the United States to cancel two battle cruisers under construction, the Saratoga and the Lexington. But it permits the construction of aircraft carriers by conversion of these hulls. The Lexington becomes carrier number two and the Saratoga number three. One day they will play their roles on the Pacific stage, helping to stop an enemy from sweeping across the ocean. These are the years when man's imagination and ingenuity take him on ever-lengthening journeys across the skies. Charles Lindbergh crosses the Atlantic and later demonstrates his skill by flying from an aircraft carrier. Air mail service begins. The United States wakes up to an age in which men are accepting the challenge of flight and enjoying the thrill of accomplishment in the sky. In 1929, navy pilots practice their trade in a fleet exercise at the Panama Canal. Saratoga serves with the attackers and Lexington with the defenders. Making new ground rules, the attackers launch a pre-dawn airstrike. The results will catch the attention of many who scoff at the Navy's aviation program. Admiral Garry's flew a fighter off the Saratoga. My squadron was assigned to go after what was then the Army Air Corps airplanes over at the Army field on the Atlantic side of the canal. Everybody was just absent and we romped up and down the field and in theory destroyed all the aircraft. The bombers went in and the scouts were bombing and I think the other fighter squadron was romping around over Miraflores. Anyway, by 2, 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock, we were all through. Well, the umpires declared that the battle fleas had won the war because the Panama Canal had been so damaged by this air attack that it was out of commission and couldn't function. Was it established fleet aviation as a real combat arm of the fleet? In the years that follow, we add five more broad-shouldered heavyweights to the carrier force. Enterprise, Hornet, Wasp, Yorktown, and Ranger. Proud names that reflect the heritage of the nation. Across the Pacific, a nation watches us and also builds carriers. As a Japanese Air Admiral, we're one day disclosed. Our principal teacher in respect to emphasizing aircraft carriers was the United States Navy. We were doing our utmost all the time to catch up with the United States. Naval aviators learned the thrill of aerial acrobatics, skills that will one day be used in combat. Admiral Garry's remembers the fun of flying. And I never had so much fun in my life. In those days it wasn't, as I say, we were, to some degree, kind of pampered pets, primadonas. We were developing dive bombing techniques. We were developing a formation of tactical technique. We had a pretty free hand. Hollywood, for the first time, makes screen heroes of this new generation in MGM's feature film, Hell Divers. Wallace Birian, Clark Gable, are the friendly rivals. I got a nice bell on you, Wendy. Hey, listen, all I wish had been real bullets in that gun up there today. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Well, if those had been real guns instead of cameras, they'd be kicking dirt in your face right now. Yeah. Yeah, and Baldi, here'd be playing taps for you on a big alone. I don't like to play taps. Make me cry. Hey, listen, you can't be the guy that's been the champ of this outfit for five years. No? No. Yeah, only in your five days, and you're through already. In 1938, in another exercise, Navy pilots are launched from their carrier at dawn. Arriving unopposed, their theoretical attack is a great success. By the rules of the game, an American island fortress has been destroyed. Once more, air power from the sea proves its worth. The island base, Pearl Harbor. This time we have the Saratoga and the Lexus. We have the Saratoga and the Lexington, both in our side. And the idea was that we were going in and direct the Navy out and attack and bomb and torpedo and sink any ships we could find there. In the meantime, the fighters were then mobilized and pinned down any Air Force fighters we found. Three years later, the Japanese did it practically the same way. Under the command of Admiral Yamamoto, Japanese carrier air power had challenged a fleet considered the strongest to float. All our Pacific battle wagons are gone. The fiercest serpent had been overcome by a swarm of ants. What was left to stop Yamamoto from making the entire Pacific a Japanese lake? None of our seven carriers are at Pearl Harbor on December 7. Of the three assigned in the Pacific, Saratoga is at San Diego, her home port. Lexington and Enterprise are steaming at sea. From the Atlantic Fleet, the Hornet, Twasp and Yorktown will join the Pacific forces in 1942. The seventh carrier, Ranger, will serve in the Atlantic and Mediterranean until 1944. Meanwhile, Japanese forces are seizing vast areas of the Pacific. To let the enemy know we are still fighting, Vice Admiral Bull Halsey, commander of what's left of our Pacific fleet, sends his carriers on hit-and-run raids against the enemy shore bases. The enemy's fliers meet our attackers with skilled airmanship. Our naval aviators in combat for the first time fight against heavy odds. The enemy pilots are more experienced. Their fighter plane, the Zero, though lightly armored, is faster and more maneuverable than our Wildcat. Fighter ace Gene Valencia had great respect for his opponents. He didn't tangle with them alone. If you did, you were crazy. And I don't know any fighter pilot that will tell you he fought plane for plane with the Zero. And we did have to depend on each other. It was a matter of tactics. The rule was to fly always in formations of two or four fighters. And the basic tactic, conceived by Lieutenant John Thatch, became known as the Thatch Weave. You can't shoot anything if you can't bring your guns around the barrel on it. I would ask myself, now what should we do if we're flying along in a formation? Let's say we've got four planes, two sections. And we saw an enemy. Well, if you think the enemy can outperform and you don't turn and run, of course he can catch you. And you'll be easy target. You turn toward them. Try to keep turning toward him so he can't get on your tail. I wasn't sure how well this would work. So I went out one morning and I got a hold of a young man named Butch O'Hare and gave him four airplanes and I took four. It really worked. Edward O'Hare, one of the first aviator heroes of World War II, helped perfect the art of night fighting and scored feats like shooting down five enemy planes in a single engagement. One night he didn't come back. Chicago's International Airport was given his name. Alexander Brashu, a top navy fighter ace himself, flew with O'Hare as his wingman. He had a way of presenting a problem not only in the air by example, but by quietly explaining it in a little more detail on the ground if need be. But you got the message rather quickly and in a way that it stuck with you. Little things like maybe conserving fuel, looking over your shoulder at the right time, or at least before making a run or making an attack. I can safely say that I saved my life a couple of times by remembering little rules like this. In April 1942, a daring strike is ready that will hit the enemy exactly where he lives and let him know he is vulnerable. A squadron of 16 Army B-25 bombers will attack Tokyo from an unlikely air base for the Army Air Corps, the deck of the USS Hornet at sea. For land pilots to lift heavy Army bombers the carrier took months of training. Navy Lieutenant Henry Miller, now rear admiral, showed them how. Light loads at the start, medium loads and then a final heavy load which was 2,000 pounds over the maximum designed weight of the aircraft. It was a rough day. The wind was blowing, the seas were pretty high. We slowed down the Hornet because we had so much wind over the deck and we were taking water over the bow. Jimmy Doolittle was the first one. He, of course, was a crack aviator and it wasn't a flaw in his technique. And it took one hour to get the rest of the planes on. At precisely the time that the first plane was supposed to be over Tokyo, the Japanese radio went off the air and then it came back on the air and was talking about enemy planes over Japan. Shere went up all over the ship because we knew they got in there and were dropping their bombs. It was a tremendous shot in the arm for the great American public. Three weeks later, the Yorktown in Lexington far corner of the Pacific north of Australia steamed toward an enemy fleet. Facing them was the test for which the Navy had been training for 20 years. In the tradition of great battles at sea, Trafalgar, the Monitor and Merrimack at Hampton Roads, Jutland, the planes of the Saratoga and Lexington would meet their rendezvous with destiny over the Coral Sea. For the first time in history, a naval battle would be fought only in the sky. In the spring of 1942, the American Pacific fleet is beginning to recover from the beating it took at Pearl Harbor. None of the Navy's seven aircraft carriers were in Japanese bomb sites on December 7, 1941. In the months that followed, carriers engaged in hit-and-run attacks on enemy bases. Early in May, an enemy force led by three carriers is making an end run around New Guinea to capture Port Moresby. If they succeed, they will have a springboard to invade Australia. To stop the oncoming enemy, a U.S. force moves into the Coral Sea, spearheaded by the carriers Yorktown and Lexington. The result is the Navy's first major fleet engagement of the century. For naval historians, this is a first. The first sea battle in history in which the opposing surface forces never come within sight of one another. The Lexington's fighter squadron commander, now retired Vice Admiral Paul Ramsey, remembers this battle. Of course, we didn't see each other except by air. We didn't see the surface forces didn't see each other. Most sea battles, normally the opposing forces are inside of each other. In this particular case, they were anywhere from 300 miles to 100 miles away. We made attacks on them and did some damage with it at that time. We didn't know, but we caused quite a lot of havoc. In the meantime, the Japanese attacked Lexington and the Yorktown. They put one bomb in the Yorktown flight deck which did not severely handicap her for landing operations and take-offs. But the Lexington had received three hits. My squadron, we had then gone through them. I said, we just don't have fuel enough to get to Yorktown. It's better to land on a flaming deck than to put the fire out, than to land in the ocean and lose all our aircraft. So they let us land aboard the ship. No fire pressure on any of the hoses throughout the ship, which was just devastating. So after, oh, maybe two and a half or three hours, it got so bad that the skipper said to abandon the ship. The Lexington sank during the night with her battle flag flying. Also sunk, an American destroyer and an oiler. Japan loses a carrier and a second is damaged. Who won? In the view of Captain Ted Duleja, naval historian. Although they sank more of our ships, they did not get Port Moresby, which was the essential aim of their war plan. So the aircraft carrier involved in this battle proved to be the essential instrument, yet there was another test that was required. Whether an entire fleet could be knocked out because of the presence of air power. The Navy prepares for the inevitable next test. New Navy pilots are being trained by the thousands. Shipyards work around the clock, but time is running out. On the staff of Admiral Chester Nimitz, Pacific Commander, a team of code breakers has untangled a mass of enemy radio messages. They contain grim news. Early in June, hardly a month after the battle of the Coral Sea and 5,000 miles to the north, Admiral Yamamoto plans a massive attack on Midway Island, the strategic American outpost. His objectives are to secure an advanced base for new all-out attacks on Pearl Harbor and to lure the remnants of our Pacific fleet to annihilation. The odds are overwhelming. Admiral Nimitz has no battleships against Yamamoto's 9. Only 8 cruisers against 15. Facing 4 Japanese carriers, the Hornet, Enterprise, and hastily repaired Yorktown. But we have the advantage of knowing Yamamoto's plan. Reinforcements are flown into the Midway-based squadrons. The battle commanders, Rear Admiral's Frank Jack Fletcher and Raymond Spruance, place their three carriers in weight north of Midway. Wade McCluskey, then Commander of the Enterprise Air Group, now a retired Rear Admiral, remembers how it started for him. I was called into Admiral Spruance's cabin and he told me then, it could be a turning point because we had very few ships left. So if this was going to be a major battle and we were defeated, well, that meant the end of the war practically. Then that, well, it was 8 o'clock before we actually got a report of the Japanese striking force which included their carriers. And then it became our time to take off. Fiercely, unflinching, knowing mistakes, eight waves of our airmen go after the Japanese fleet, dive bombers, torpedo planes, and fighters. The American carrier pilots with the odds stacked high against them will score an incredible victory. About five after 12 using binoculars and I was still at 19,000 feet while I discovered straight ahead about 30 miles of Japanese striking force. Unaware of the nearby American carriers, the Japanese are caught at a great disadvantage. In the sights of our dive bombers as they scream out of the sky are Japanese flight decks packed with airplanes and high-explosive bombs. The Japanese pay a heavy price. When the Holocaust ends, their four carriers with their planes and a cruiser are at the bottom. What makes Midway so distinctive in contrast to the Carl C. is that it was a decisive battle. Clearly, this was the end of the beginning of the end of Japanese naval power in the Pacific. But we also pay a price. Our carrier Yorktown is lost and a hundred airplanes put out of action. We had terrible disasters and I think particularly with our torpedo planes. These were really old-fashioned types of aircraft to engage in a modern battle. And the torpedo squadrons which took off from the three carriers we had available got slaughtered. The plane was wiped out completely. This was torpedo squadron 8 under the command of John Waldron. There was one survivor, his plane crashed, but he was fished out of the sea a little later. The one survivor of torpedo-aided Midway is George Gaye, today an airline pilot. Most of us were brand new incidents right out of training. When we got to Midway and were to make our takeoff, it was the first time we'd ever carried a torpedo pickle, as we called them. We just went into the fleet, tried to get around the destroyers and then the cruisers and things to take whatever came first as a target. They had about 75 airplanes down there trying to eat us up and we only had 15, so we didn't last very long. I was tailing Charlie, last aircraft in the whole formation and I was kind of sitting back here watching this whole thing. I made my attack on this carrier and I somehow got in close enough to drop my torpedo and get through. I couldn't use this hand. I had a bullet in here and one in this arm. The zeroes jumped on me again out on the other side and shot me down. So when I came back to the surface, bumped into my life raft, also this black cushion. I didn't want them to pick me up. So I put this cushion over my head and I would turn this sideways to any ship or anything that was close and I could watch them out of the corner. I'd see through this thing, they were looking at me with binoculars but they'd see this thing and assume that it was a box or a piece of debris or something rather than my head bobbing up out there and they passed me up. I was able to stay there all day even though they were picking people up all over the place. I'm sitting right in the front row here of this big battle. I saw our dive bombers come in and I knew all those boys too and I knew that this was their first dive, not only with a bomber board but in that airplane. So I was just cheering like a football game. PBY came by, landed on the water and picked me up in this PBY, took me into Midway. I lost about 24 pounds during that time. When I got down to Pearl Harbor and the Admiral came in, Admiral Nimitz, he said he wanted to know about it. A fish eye view and a front row seat to the biggest naval battle in history. Well, I'm kind of proud of that. I don't want to go through it again just to lose 24 pounds but it was something to remember. A grateful nation comes to idolize these fliers who can leave their mobile airstrip with no assurance it will be a float to come home to. In all their jokes, they laugh off the mortal danger of their trade. One pilot amid the chaos of an aerial dogfight radios to his squadron buy war bonds. Somebody's got to pay for all these fireworks. Another overwhelmed by zeros radios his shift. I've got four already and 30 more cornered. The deck crews scoffingly call the fliers air dales but worship them. The fliers make no secret of their own respect for the deck crews. I trusted the man that put that aircraft under me and I think that's the supreme compliment you can pay somebody. The enlisted man, whether he's the man in your squadron or whether he's a shipboard deck handler, the man that unhooks your tail hook, the man that catapults you, or the man that moves you between planes. Gene Valencia. My plane captain was 19 years old, 18 years old, Sammy Bell from the Essex. And I just have to ask him if the plane ready to fly. One subject is strictly taboo. In the ward room after a mission, as they count empty chairs, their only comment is bleeding silence. The one thing that I've tried to keep with me when I lost friends, my fellow pilot, and pilots that I didn't know so well in my various commands was that that individual was doing something that he loved. By mid-1942, a little brother of the attack carrier begins to come off the ways in increasing numbers. The escort carrier, nicknamed baby flattop or jeep carrier, is about a third the size of an attack carrier. Carrying only 30 planes apiece, they give support in troop landings, and also play a key role in hunter-killer groups that roam the mid-Atlantic to fight wolfpacks of German submarines that are cutting the lifeline to England. Dan Gallery, now a retired rear admiral, commanded a jeep carrier in the Atlantic. For one long career, we were losing over half a million tons of ships per month. All together, we lost several thousand ships. The shore-based airplanes we had early in the war were not long enough range to reach all the way across the Atlantic, and so there was a so-called mid-ocean gap. Our CVEs came along and closed that gap up. When they did, the CVEs really made a shambles of a sudden fleet. In this bizarre war between birds and fish, the jeep carrier Guadalcanal manages to capture a whole live submarine. We took it from the pole and brought it home, and incidentally it's now parked at the museum of science and industry in Chicago. In the Pacific, both sides have been so badly mauled that there are no major fleet engagements for a whole year. We use the pause to bring out a new generation of carrier planes. The Wildcat fighter gives way to the Hellcat and Corsair. Swifter, more agile, they fly higher and have better guns. The dive-bombing Dauntless is succeeded by the Helldiver, the torpedo plane devastated by the Avenger. The Navy gives them letter number designations like F6F and SB2C. The pilots have their own names for planes they dislike, such as Beast and Turkey. But the Hellcat wins a famous tribute from Jean Valencia. Well, I was so happy with the plane, when I got back aboard the Yartown, I said if the F6F could cook, I'd marry it. We were awfully proud of it. It was a rugged plane. It maybe wasn't quite as maneuverable as the Zero, but it could stay with it. And it was tough. The new S6 class carriers, which had been on the drawing board before the war, start reaching Hawaii in May 1943. The Ford Island Tower greets one. You look good out there, honey. The new ships become the heart of a fast carrier force, screened and protected by battleships, cruisers and destroyers carrying thickets of anti-aircraft guns. The task force is organized in groups of three or four carriers, each of which can operate independently. At times, this awesome force will include as many as 17 attack carriers, stretching 50 miles across the sea, capable of putting more than a thousand planes into a single strike. No fleet in history has ever packed such a puppet. A vast service squadron following in its wake serves as gas station, grosser, arsenal and machine shop, enabling the carrier force to stay at sea months at a time. The enemy, often under simultaneous attack at widespread points, becomes convinced there must be two such forces. We encourage their confusion by giving the force two alternating numbers. It's called Task Force 38 when assigned to the third fleet, and Task Force 58 when it is with the fifth fleet. It is alternately led by Admiral John McCain and Mark Mitchell, who is to be remembered as one of the Navy's greatest admirals. Retired Admiral Arleigh Burke was Mitchell's chief of staff. He knew his aviation. He'd been an aviation all of his life. He knew when an air group was getting tired. He talked to a lot of pilots every time they came back from the flight. One of the best naval officers I've ever known. In February 1944, the Task Force tackles the heavily fortified island of Truck, main anchorage of the enemy's Central Pacific fleet, called the Japanese Gibraltar. Captain Armistice B. Smith found himself in history's greatest dogfight, in which our tactics and new planes paid off 15 to one. The enemy put up a lot of airplanes, and they began attacking and they didn't stop attacking for the entire operation. Every time you turned around, you could anticipate another airplane. I had a lot of luck when I shot down three airplanes, but at the same time I got shot down myself. At Truck, as in other Pacific battles, submarines aid in picking up downed aviators. Retired rear Admiral Richard O'Kane skippered the tank. About noon on the first day, we received the first report. By the time the tank finished the job, it was on course for Pearl Harbor with 22 very happy downed pilots on its passenger list. As far as I know, and I've inquired, every lad that came down alive was rescued. There were no prisoners taken. Moving closer to the Japanese homeland, the task force hit Saipan in the Mariana silence. It leads to one of the great Navy legends, an overwhelming air victory that a flier nicknames the Mariana's Turkish ship. Later in the June afternoon, Mark Mitchell sends his fliers after the retreating enemy, at extreme range. Alexander Brashew was one of those fliers. I know that a lot of us gave a salute as we were going across the deck and we figured that that was the longest carrier strike. It just didn't seem too probable that some of us may get back. But we went into it with that realization, and before you know it, the two hours passed and we hit them somewhere around 6.30 just before sunset. Mission accomplished, but night has fallen. In the dark, hundreds of fliers groped their way home, fuel running low, unable to locate the carriers. Aboard the Hornet, rare Admiral Jaco Clark gives the word to his carrier task group, lights on. The task force takes a calculated risk that no enemy forces are within striking distance. Admiral Mitchell passes the order. Across the whole task force, and search lights pierce the black knife to guide the pilots in. We knew that there were land-based aircraft that could come down from that area, and there might be some Japanese carrier aircraft, too. But the Admiral justices, we got into the wind, turned on the lights. Alexander Brashew was returning from that mission. I just couldn't believe that anyone would turn on the lights. It was against, like you say, all doctrine. It was against all experience. It wasn't until they said land it near a space that the signal getting stronger that I was able to visualize that it was. In reality, at that very point, the lights were turned off for us. As we move to liberate the Philippines, the Jeep carriers have their finest hour in the battle for Laity Gulf. Never intended for a major fleet engagement, a division of these midgets suddenly find themselves facing the big guns of an enemy battleship force. David was face to face with Goliath. Retired Vice Admiral J.P. Whitney was a Jeep skipper then. He remembers sighting the Japanese battle wagons coming toward him. They looked like providers walking on the water. Here they were, coming over to the right and right straight for us. Well, there wasn't anything to do but to turn around and start running. While this was going on, of course, we were arming the rest of our planes. But in order to launch, we had to turn right back into the Japanese fleet again because that's where the wind was from. Of course, all this time we were under fire, you understand. In the CBEs, we had one five-inch gun on the start. Well, in order to maintain morale, we were throwing smoke at that time and everything else. The carriers launched their air groups to pound the enemy fleet from the sky. In the late morning, after we'd been under fire for over two hours, the Japanese Admiral turned around and headed back. I read somewhere that he thought that he was running into the heavy, heavy carrier groups. And here we were, just little CBEs. The last spring of the war finds us on Okinawa, doorstep of Japan. In desperation, the enemy launches mass suicide attacks called kamikaze, or divine wind, for a storm that saved Japan from an invasion fleet in times past. In all, Japan sends more than 2,500 planes out, laden with high explosives, to hurl themselves down on the decks of the fast carrier force. Most are brought down before reaching their targets. Some will build the goal of the divine wind. But the task force continues to operate throughout the Pacific and becomes known as the fleet that came to stay. Not one Essex-class carrier is ever sunk, and the Franklin, after bomb hits explosions and fires that kill and wound a third of her crew, makes history by sailing 13,000 miles home to New York, the most heavily damaged Navy ship ever to make port under her own power. With the Japanese surrender in 1945, a war ended in which the aircraft carrier had taken the place of the battleship as the spearhead of naval power. Our carriers had been required to cover great ocean areas, and their aircraft to hit targets against the opposition of powerful sea and air forces. This, they did. And their role did not end with the war. Simply by being on hand, the Navy's powerful grade diplomats have been a stabilizing influence around the world. In the Korean War, jets from carriers go into combat for the first time, supporting ground forces, knocking out enemy supply routes and bridges. In the 50s, carriers take on a new look, with powerful steam catapults to give an extra shove to the much bigger planes. A new angled deck separates the landing area from craft parked on the flight deck. An astonishingly simple and efficient mirror for night landings puts a beam of light astern up the glide slope that the returning pilot can follow down to a safe landing. The meatball, they call it. In the missile crisis of 1962, carriers help blockade Cuba until the Russians take their nuclear rockets home. As new carriers like the Forest Hall and Kitty Hawk go to sea, older attack carriers switch to the role of submarine hunter-killers, with radar systems that see over thousands of square miles of ocean and sonar that can hear down to its depths. In Vietnam, a new enterprise, eighth ship with that name and the largest ship ever built, joins Task Force 77. On its nuclear-powered engines, this marvel can cruise 20 times around the world without great fueling. New planes like the Phantom, Crusader, Skyhawk, Vigilante, Corsair, and Infruder have taken their places on the catapults of our Navy's carriers. Captain Julian Lake, skipper of the John F. Kennedy, has seen carrier flying come of age. The type of flying that we do has become highly precision. We're doing things now that they never dreamed of doing back in the early days. We take the whole air wing complement of a modern attack carrier and operate it in just about all kinds of weather conditions day and night. Back when I started flying, the night business was a specialty. To the new pilots who fly the new planes, Artie Doyle, a retired admiral who won his wings a half century ago, pays this tribute. The first plane I handled probably didn't cost more than a few hundred dollars, a few thousand dollars. Think of the young Anson, graduate of the training command, had been given a three million dollar airplane and told the land of the bottom aircraft carrier. They're the cream of the country. In the half century since the coal ship was converted to become our first aircraft carrier, a whole new world has come into being with new confrontations, new crises, and a naval doctrine in which the carrier serves as the primary guarantee of the free use of the seas. I think that the best way for the attack carrier, or for the aircraft carrier itself, is versatility. It has run the gamut from being a tool to support amphibious operations, to showing the flag at one time, not so much anymore. It was a very important part of our nuclear deterrent force, but it could immediately shift from that purpose over to a limited war purpose. As you well know, in Lebanon this was demonstrated, in every engagement or confrontation that we have had, virtually everyone, the attack carrier has had a Lyho role to play. And I see no lessening of that role for many, many years to come. More than ever, the tribute that World War II correspondent Ernie Payle paid the aircraft carrier still holds true. A carrier is top-heavy and lopsided. It has the lines of a cow. It doesn't cut through the water like a cruiser, knifing romantically along. It just plows. Yet a carrier is a ferocious thing, and out of its heritage of action has grown its nobility. Every navy in the world has as its number one priority the destruction of enemy carriers. That's a precarious honor, but it's a proud one.