 In 1960, not long ago on the calendar of history, a new Navy began to emerge. The ships of this new Navy would be atomic powered. Now this new Navy has come to life. The most flexible instrument of sea power ever known. The USS Enterprise, CBAM-65. She's really something to see. But maybe to understand this ship and all she represents, you'd have to have grown up with carriers. Started out years ago when the old Langley CB-1 was little more than a gleam in some dreamer's eyes. That was way back in the early 1920s. About the same time in 1921, the Navy set up a series of tests. The bombing of captured German warships slated for scrap. Taking turns, Army, Navy and Marine Corps pilots bombed a submarine, a destroyer, and the cruiser, Frankfurt. And defenseless, they were easily hit and all three sank. The big show was the bombing of the battleship Ostfriesland. After a second low altitude attack with seven 2,000 pound bombs, Ostfriesland went down. And Army General Billy Mitchell, who led this attack, almost convinced America that surface ships were obsolete. We didn't agree. It wasn't a question of whether planes could sink and anchored an undefended vessel. They've done that. But what struck us was the promise and the idea of using planes to defend these ships. And extend sea power. Rear Admiral William Moffat believed wholeheartedly in the idea. Moffat took the Navy's case to President Coolidge. He named a number of prominent civilians, the Morrow Board headed by Dwight Morrow, to determine basic aviation policy for all our military services. So in this somewhat skeptical atmosphere, the USS Langley CV-1 emerged. She was an experiment at first. A flight deck built on an obsolete Collier's hull, an airport sent out to sea. Lieutenant Commander Chevalier made the first landing on the Langley deck in 1922. For the next few years, Navy pilots and the Langley crew worked hard to master the complex techniques for handling both the carrier and her planes. Hard way, but we learned to land on her deck. We worked hard at learning to take off and at air navigation, gunfire spotting, and aerial gunnery. The early 1920s also saw the development of catapults, a resting gear, a faster elevator to clear the flight deck, safe fuel handling techniques, a landing light system, and all the other hardware needed to launch and land to refuel and maintain aircraft at sea. All our early work was complicated by the progress made in aircraft design from 1925 to 1930. Engines were increasingly bigger and more powerful. Planes got heavier and yet flew higher, farther, faster almost every day. As the speed and range of our planes increased, the original mission of naval aircraft as fighters and scouts and gunfire observers for the fleet began to shift. Pilots began to experiment with different methods of bombing. We dropped everything, even delicate submarine torpedoes in a continuing search for new methods of attack and defense. All this while, we were doing more than learning the mechanical and flight techniques of operating the carrier in its planes. We were also developing carrier doctrine, the theory of how the naval air arm should operate, including some new ideas of the strategy, the maneuvers that carrier-supported fleet might use in war. Not everyone always understood the big changes underway. In 1926, the Morrow Board had refused the Navy a separate air arm. This was a disappointment to men like Admiral Moffat, who even then foresaw war in the Pacific and the role of naval air and carriers in that war. But Moffat took it gracefully, I thought. Hell, he said, we won't see seed from the Navy over this. We'll take it over. So what we'd learned in the Langley was applied to two new carriers that joined the fleet in 1928. The USS Lexington, CV-2, was the first of these. Then came the Saratoga, CV-3. Lexington and Saratoga were improvements over the old Langley. But as carriers, both were compromises. The best we could do with converted cruiser hulls, whose flight decks had to take increasingly faster and heavier planes. But both the Lexington and Saratoga served us well. It was on their flight decks, in their shops and hangers, in their wardrooms, too, that we worked out the operational techniques that made our naval air arm the best in the world. With Lexington and Saratoga, we also proved the basis of our whole carrier doctrine much earlier than you might think. Admiral Joseph Mason Reeves was one of the first to advocate independent carrier strikes, apart from carrier operations supporting the battleship line. Reeves was one of the first to prove the effectiveness of a carrier-centered task force. Fleet problem 10 was held early in 1929 to test naval and shore defenses of the Panama Canal against a conventional battleship attack. Reeves left his safe position behind the line of battleships approaching the western canal locks from the north. He brought Saratoga through a wide sweep south of the canal zone. Then he turned back north to approach his target along an unexpected course. We took off from the Saratoga at two in the morning, while still 200 miles at sea. Nobody'd ever done that before. We hit the canal locks at dawn with a beautiful high altitude, crisscross dive bombing attack. No one's ever done that before either. We took the defenders completely by surprise. Joe Reeves was delighted, so were we. We knew this was really the first unveiling of carrier aviation. Others knew it too. A year later, Lieutenant Commander Forrest Sherman, later Chief of Naval Operations, advocated a fleet formation that anticipated the carrier-centered task force. Meanwhile, planes kept getting faster, heavier, farther ranging. And there were plenty to choose from. In the early 1930s, Navy test pilots found themselves flying one new model after another, and they were able to do the same thing. In the early 1930s, Navy test pilots found themselves flying one new model after another. Some were dogs, but others like the F-4B became workhorses for the fleet. This rapid development of aircraft had a profound influence on carriers. The USS Ranger CV-4 was the first carrier built from the keel up as a carrier. But by the time she was commissioned, she was too small, and her flight deck too short. Her arresting gear was unable to handle the faster and heavier planes still coming along. Not until Yorktown CV-5 was commissioned in 1937 did we get a third assault carrier to join Saratoga and Lexington. By this time, flight techniques and aircraft design had progressed enough to justify steady building. Enterprise CV-6 and Wasp and Hornet CV-7 and 8 were all commissioned before 1941. As these new carriers joined the fleet, we continued to sharpen the techniques and tactics involved in their use. During fleet maneuvers in 1938, Vice Admiral Ernest J. King foreshadowed the Japanese attack of 1941, with a practice strike against Pearl Harbor. Ernie King was a cantankerous old curmudgeon, but a genius with carriers. He followed his Pearl Harbor attack with a successful strike against Maryland Navy Yard. In 1939, King's Carrier Division I, the Saratoga and Lexington, was joined by the New Yorktown and Enterprise making up Carrier Division II under rear Admiral William F. Halsey. Together, Ernie King and Bill Halsey gave us a preview of how World War II was going to be fought. And so on the eve of that long foreseen war with Japan, the planes, the carriers, the doctrine, and the great carrier commanders who'd lead us to ultimate victory were there. Fortunately, none of our carriers was at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. After that carrier-based Japanese attack, no one, as Admiral Nimitz pointed out, could doubt the effectiveness of naval aviation. When Enterprise and Yorktown came back to Pearl from raids in the Pacific early in 1942, the carrier significance was fully understood. We on the Yorktown followed Halsey in. There was the pick and flower of our Navy in shambles. And yet as we passed this wreckage, cheer after cheer went up from the men who had taken the Japanese attack. Because they knew it would be men like themselves, led by men like Halsey, and the carriers and their planes who were going to win this war. The great carrier-led assault began almost at once. It was first dramatized by the Halsey du little raid on Tokyo from the Hornet in April 1942. Their target was hundreds of miles away when these B-25s took off in weather that wanted to wreck the world. Then the carriers and their planes really got underway. Now we really hit the Japanese Navy in the Coral Sea in May 1942 at Midway in the following June. The Japanese came to Midway with four carriers. We sank all four. This helped to ensure our successful landing on Guadalcanal in August. It was never easy. When the war began, the Japanese zero fighter was the best naval airplane in the world. With three times the rate of climb we had, Japanese pilots could outrun us or catch us when we tried to run. They could turn inside of anything that flew. We had to get back on equal terms with the enemy. And we did. We developed tactics like the Thatch weave, relying on teamwork between our pilots to trap and evade the enemy and to shoot them down. We also developed better planes. First the F6F. Later there was the F4U. Meanwhile, SX class carriers joined the fleet. Now under Ernie King as chief of naval operations, with Nimitz, Halsey, Mitcher and Spruance, we swept across the Pacific from victory to victory at sea and in amphibious invasions assured. From the Marshall Islands to the Marianas, the carriers moved on. By then we were really a team. We knew how to bore in on the enemy and stay on his heels. And this great drive across the Central Pacific, the carrier and her planes, came into their home. The Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944 brought out the Japanese fleet and cost them three more carriers and most of the remaining planes. As Admiral Nimitz pointed out, a truly secret weapon of the war was our ability to replenish at sea. What we had learned even in World War I, refueling destroyers at sea and all we had learned during fleet maneuvers between the wars stood us in good stead. By the time we came to the battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944, the Japanese were desperate. Now they resorted to desperate measures. Suicide attacks by kamikaze pilots turned their planes into human guided missiles hoping to sink our carrier. Most of the kamikaze pilots were shot down. But we took some hits. Okinawa and Iwo Jima, the war was all but over. You can say this of carrier performance in World War II. Carrier strike forces, Japanese or American, always defeated land-based forces. The issue was in doubt only when there were carriers on both sides of the battle. It wasn't until after the war that carriers knew another threat. This came from the new high-speed jet aircraft. Their speed and weight and the added load of the original heavy atom bomb first seem to indicate that any jets meeting other operational requirements might be too heavy and too fast for carrier landings. But the first jet carrier landing was made by an FH-1 Phantom in July 1946. The first jet squadron qualified on the SIPAN in May 1948. They were still in business. But as jet performance and weights increased, we were headed for trouble back where we'd been with Ranger in 1934, with planes too fast and heavy for the flight decks from which they had to operate. This became increasingly apparent during the Korean War. We began to hear an echo of Billy Mitchell's old argument. Carriers, all surface ships were obsolete in this age of atomic weapons and jet airplanes. Yet even before the Korean War was over, we were well on the way to solving the problems we faced. Flight decks were strengthened to take the heavier weight of landing jets. In February 1952, we were taking a second look at the old catapult for launching these heavy planes. In June 1954, the first steam catapult went into operation on the Hancock, kicking off over 250 aircraft of many types. Meanwhile, in 1952, we began looking into the idea of an angled deck on which high-speed jets could land without danger. The first angled deck was installed on the Antietam. Steam catapults and angled decks were incorporated into forest-all-class carriers that began to appear in the mid-1950s. From their 720-foot decks, we could now launch jets carrying atomic bombs and oncoming long-range fighters like the Mach 2 F4H. By 1955, we were working out a better landing system for these faster planes. A mirrored landing system was installed on the Bennington. On the midway in 1963, fully automatic landings were made hands-off with both flight controls and throttles operated by signals transmitted from the carrier. And so the carrier survived, evolving into an even more effective ship than those whose names are legendary. Langley, Saratoga, Lexington, Yorktown, the earlier enterprise of World War II. This is the new enterprise. She's something to see all right. A complex instrument of war or peace just barely dreamed of 50 years ago. A shining example of our new Navy and of sea power at its best.