Word: essexes
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Allowing for the time difference, it was only 5 p.m. on Friday in Newport News, where riveters and welders were hard at work on the growing hulls of two other aircraft carriers: the Essex, and one to be called the Bon Homme Richard. U.S. carrier warfare, whose spectacular history Lieut. Oliver Jensen, a writer (on military leave) for LIFE, has now chronicled in one of the best-written and incomparably the best-illustrated book on the Navy in World War II, was in its feeble, hit & run infancy...
...forces and a turning point in the Pacific War. But on that day high-ranking officers, one after another, trooped out on the top "deck" of the concrete headquarters building at Makalapa, overlooking Pearl Harbor, focused their binoculars on a grey shape across the loch, by Ford Island. The Essex, first of America's post-Pearl Harbor battle carriers, had arrived to take her place in the battle line. Soon her sister ship, now named Yorktown instead of Bon Homme Richard, and a first cousin, the Lexington, would follow...
Lieut. Commander Philip Torrey, skipper of the Essex' Air Group 9, was a brave man. But when the target was announced, he later recalled, "My first instinct was to jump overboard." On the first day at Truk, 127 land-based Jap planes were shot down, 77 more were bagged on the ground. On the second day, not one got off the ground. Two of the hardiest myths of the war in the Pacific had been exploded: 1) Truk was not impregnable; 2) in a contest with seaborne planes, land-based air power was no better than its planes...
...carrier is no one actual ship; it is typical of carriers of the Essex class (27,000 tons). Much of the action was shot on one particular carrier, which the Navy does not wish to identify...
Flying Leathernecks. From one of the Essex-class carriers flew two squadrons of new-type Chance-Vought Corsair fighters, piloted by Marine Corps aviators. The marines long ago had won their fight to fly from escort carriers (TIME, Oct. 23), but this was different; this was the big time. They went as escort for Avenger torpedo bombers. Grumman Hellcats with Navy pilots made up the rest of this carrier's complement. It had no dive-bombers-McCain and Thach never had believed in dive-bombers...