Word: hornets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...obvious candidate for the new big air job would be wizened, frail-looking 58-year-old Vice-Admiral Marc A. Mitscher, a naval aviator since 1915, pilot of the NC1 on the first Navy transatlantic flight in 1919, commander of the carrier Hornet, which launched the Doolittle raiders against Tokyo, best known as the boss of famed Task Force 58 which has swept the Pacific from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo...
Thus, when World War II came, Newport News was one of the few yards ready & able to turn out big carriers. Nine of them, including the Enterprise and Hornet, slid from the ways. Helping matters were 1) an apprentice system that provided a backlog of topnotch workers, and 2) an incentive-pay plan that has kept the yard free of work stoppages...
...daybreak on Saturday, April 18, 1942, a bald, slight naval officer with a skin like a dried red apple stood on the bridge of the aircraft carrier Hornet, 850 miles from Tokyo. Marc Andrew Mitscher, muffled in blues, was the captain of the ship; he had small part in the decision reached by Lieut. Colonel James H. Doolittle (at his side) and Vice Admiral William F. Halsey (aboard the nearby carrier Enterprise) to fly 16 B-25 medium bombers off the Hornet for the first stunt raid on Japan's capital...
...Bottom. Fourteen months later, the Hornet was at the bottom of the ocean. So were the Lexington, the Yorktown and the Wasp. The Enterprise was at Pearl Harbor, recovering from a year's accumulation of battle wounds. There was only one U.S. carrier fit for actioa in the Pacific, the old Saratoga. Marc Mitscher, now a rear admiral, was sweating in open-necked khakis in a Dallas hut by the Lunga River on Guadalcanal, commanding land-based aircraft in the Solomons...
Before dawn on Feb. 16, a date which will be ringed in red on many a Navy calendar, the carriers turned into the wind to launch planes. Mitscher had been almost as far as this before: he was skipper of the Hornet when she carried Doolittle's daring little squadron toward Tokyo. But in the intervening 34 months, America's seaborne air force had grown beyond recognition. Now, hundreds of planes circled the carriers as they formed up: for two simultaneous dawn strikes, there were (by Jap count) 300 planes in each attack group...