The Bird Farm

by Philip Kaplan

  Copyright © 2015 by Philip Kaplan

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or info@skyhorsepublishing.com.

  Skyhorse® and Skyhorse Publishing® are registered trademarks of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  Visit our website at www.skyhorsepublishing.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Tom Lau

  Cover photographs courtesy of (clockwise from top) Philip Kaplan, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. National Archives, and HMS Illustrious

  Print ISBN: 978-1-63450-482-9

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63450-555-0

  Printed in China

  CONTENTS

  THE BIRD FARM

  THE AIRCRAFT

  ATTACK ON TARANTO

  INFAMY

  TURKEY SHOOT

  DIVINE WIND

  KEEP ’EM FLYING

  KOREAN AIR WAR

  LEARNING CURVE

  BRING ME IN

  NAM

  SLIDERS

  SHARKEY

  DEPLOYMENT

  IN THE GULF

  GALLERY

  Over the years, the aircraft carrier has come to be known to many American naval aviators as “the bird farm.”

  THE BIRD FARM

  ON 2 DECEMBER 1908, REAR-ADMIRAL W.S. Cowles, Chief of the U.S. Navy Bureau of Equipment, recommended to the Secretary of the Navy that “a number of airplanes be purchased to operate from a ship’s deck, carry a wireless telegraph, operate in weather other than a dead calm, maintain a high rate of speed, and be of such design as to permit convenient stowage on board ship.” Thus began the history of the aircraft carrier and naval aviation.

  At the advent of the aircraft carrier, the major navies of the world were battleship forces. These great vessels were the largest, most heavily-armed and armored warships afloat, and their very presence had, on occasion, seen them prevail without even engaging the enemy, so intimidating were they. Why, then, did the aircraft carrier virtually scuttle the venerable battlewagon as the new capital ship of the world’s great sea powers? To begin with, it was her versatility. The aircraft carrier is at once a self-propelled mobile airbase that is essentially self-sufficient, as well as being a wholly effective servicing facility. Into the twenty-first century, the modern U.S. supercarrier operates as the spearhead of an awesome force called a carrier battle group. The other types of ships in carrier battle groups—destroyers, frigates, cruisers, replenishment tankers, and fast attack submarines—are there to protect “mother,” the CVN or nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.

  The carrier weapon has another edge over the battleship. It gives a fleet the ability to fight and win a naval battle at arm’s length, out of sight of the enemy. At the start of the new millenium, the twelve operational carrier battle groups of the U.S. fleet, and its assault carriers, were capable of covering immense areas of ocean, sending massive air strikes at inshore as well as ocean targets, providing air support for amphibious landings, helicopter troop ferrying, search-and-rescue, and conducting highly sophisticated anti-submarine warfare. While perhaps less than totally invulnerable to enemy attack, the CVN, within the protective shelter of her battle group, is the biggest, widest-ranging, most powerful and fearsome threat that has ever put to sea. In just a quarter of a century her capabilities have utterly eclipsed those of her battleship predecessor. According to the late United States Senator John C. Stennis (namesake of the USS John C. Stennis, CVN-74), Chairman of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee from 1969 to 1980, and a strong supporter of a powerful, well-trained and well-equipped military, “The best way to avoid war is to be fully prepared, have the tools of war in abundance, and have them ready.” Of the modern nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, Stennis said: “It carries everything and goes full-strength and is ready to fight or go into action within minutes after it arrives at its destination. There is nothing that compares with it when it comes to deterrence.”

  Clement Ader, a less than successful early French aviator, made the world’s first “flight” in a powered airplane from level ground on 9 October 1890. He did the hop in a steam-powered monoplane, the Eole, a large bat-like craft. Ader was then asked by the French Minister of War to design, build, and test a two-seat plane to carry a light bombload for the military. The result was a failure, crashing at Satorg on 14 October 1891, and the contract for the warplane was cancelled. Ader, however, had an unshakeable faith in his personal vision of the future of aviation. He accurately forecasted that land warfare would be transformed by the practice of reconnaissance from aircraft, and that it would also revolutionize the methods of war fleets at sea. He predicted that they would carry their aircraft to sea with them. He coined the term porte-avions (aircraft carrier) and wrote that such ships would be unlike any other, with clear, unimpeded flight decks, elevators to take aircraft (with their wings folded) from the flight deck to stowage below for servicing and repairs and bring them back again, and the ability to operate at a high rate of speed. His foresight was amazing.

  The world’s first reasonably successful take-off by a fixed-wing aircraft from the deck of a ship was made by Eugene Ely, an exhibition pilot for aircraft designer and builder Glenn Curtiss, achieved in a Curtiss Pusher in November 1910. Ely flew the craft down a gently sloping wooden platform on the forecastle of the U.S. light cruiser Birmingham in the afternoon of 14 November as the ship steamed slowly in Chesapeake Bay. In the attempt, Ely’s aircraft actually hit the water once, but he retained control and managed to land safely on the shore.

  In another equally significant trial held at San Francisco in January 1911, Ely successfully landed a Curtiss aircraft on a specially-built platform over the quarter deck of the cruiser USS Pennsylvania. He used undercarriage hooks to engage one of twenty-two transverse wires that were stretched across the platform and anchored at the sides with sandbags. Within months of this second successful carrier trial, Eugene Ely was dead, killed in an air crash.

  In the month prior to Ely’s landing trial, Curtiss offered at his own expense, “to instruct an officer of the U.S. Navy in the operation and construction of a Curtiss aeroplane.” On 23 December Lieutenant T.G. Ellyson reported to North Island in San Diego bay, and four months later was “graduated” by Curtiss who wrote to the Secretary of the Navy: “Lt. Ellyson is now competent to care for and operate Curtiss aeroplanes.”

  HMS Illustrious is the fifth Royal Navy ship to bear that name. The 20,000-ton Invincible-class aircraft carrier supported a mix of up to twenty-two aircraft. She was a sister ship to Invincible and Ark Royal.

  Take-off from the flight deck of the USS Lexington in February 1929.

  Within eight years of the Wright brothers’ initial powered flight at Kitty Hawk on the North Carolina coast, the capability to take off from and recover an aircraft to a carrier deck (using arresting wires) was proven. Gradually the American Navy became convinced of the value and importance of aviation for patrol and reconnaissance in its future. It concluded that floating airports—aircraft carriers—would have to be developed and acquired to support and exploit its combat airplanes. However, it was the British who, by the occasion of the Royal Na
vy’s 1913 Naval Maneuvers, had identified and defined nearly all the fundamental requirements for carrier-borne operation, aircraft, and equipment. Wing-folding to facilitate the improved stowage of otherwise bulky aircraft on the limited space of a ship deck, the testing and evaluation of bomb-dropping, gun mounting and firing, and the successful launch of a fourteen-inch torpedo from early British-built carrier-borne aircraft propelled the Royal Navy to the forefront of such development. They also concluded that the purpose-built aircraft carrier must be developed and, by the end of World War 1, had achieved that goal. The way to this achievement led to the 1914 conversions of the bulk carrier Ark Royal and the large light cruiser Furious to aircraft carriers, Ark Royal being designed almost from scratch to meet the needs of naval air operations as they were then perceived. At the same time, the Japanese began work converting the merchant ship Wakamiya to carry seaplanes. The French were actually the first to make such a conversion when, in 1912, they changed a torpedo depot ship to an operational seaplane carrier.

  The American Navy followed the British lead and converted the collier Jupiter into an experimental aircraft carrier, recommissioning it as the USS Langley on 20 March 1922. On 22 December of that year, Japan commissioned its first aircraft carrier, the Hosho, and the first take-off from its deck was performed in a Mitsubishi 1MF1 by a British pilot named William Jordan, formerly of the Royal Naval Air Service. Hosho was one of the most significant aircraft carriers ever built. Quite small, displacing only 7,470 tons, she was so well designed, with her spaces so well planned, that she could operate up to twenty-six aircraft—a remarkable capability for her size. Even more remarkable, however, was her pioneering installation of an experimental light-and-mirror system for aiding pilots in their landing approaches to her flight deck. It was a concept far ahead of its time, as the approach speeds of the carrier aircraft of the day—and for many years to come—were far slower than those which were to require the eventual design and refinement of the ultimate mirror-light landing system. It is ironic that Hosho should be the only one of the ten principal Japanese carriers to survive the Second World War.

  During the First World War, the Royal Navy, motivated by German airship bombing raids on East Coast Britain and reconnaissance activity over the North Sea, leaned toward development of sea-borne aircraft in an early warning / interception role: floatplanes operating from carrier vessels in the North Sea. But the concept was flawed. The seaplanes were simply too slow and lacked an adequate rate of climb, preventing them from a timely closure with the German aircraft. The drag created by the floats on the underpowered British planes was just too great. Still, the German airship campaign compelled the Britons to stick with the ineffectual concept.

  A Royal Navy pilot, Squadron-Commander E.H. Dunning, was operating aboard HMS Furious in the summer of 1917. The ship was extremely fast and Dunning was convinced that her speed would provide the key to developing a routinely safe landing procedure for his pilots, who were flying the agile Sopwith Pup. He soon discovered that the Pup could be easily and gently coaxed over the flight deck of Furious to an acceptable landing. The ship had no arrestor wires, but Dunning had rope handles fitted to his Sopwith aircraft and instructed the deck hands to grip the handles once he had landed, to hold the little plane firmly on the deck. On 2 August 1917 he approached Furious and made the first successful carrier deck landing on a ship that was steaming into wind. In a similar landing attempt two days later, Dunning touched down on the deck, a tire on the Sopwith burst, and the aircraft cartwheeled off the edge and into the sea before the deck party could stop it. Dunning was drowned. It was soon accepted that, for an aircraft carrier to operate its aircraft effectively and with relative safety for the pilots and aircrew, a much larger hull would have to be utilized to provide a far greater deck area—an area closer in size to that of a conventional airfield.

  The warship designers had to rethink their approach to planning the layout of an aircraft carrier deck and the necessary bridge, funnel, and other external structures. Consensus finally led to acceptance of a full-length flight deck, as free of obstructions to the safe launch and recovery of the ship’s aircraft as could be achieved. Safety and practicality required that take-offs be made from the forward end of the ship, and landings onto the aft end. Naval architects had to wrestle with the considerable challenge of positioning the ship’s funnel in such a way as to at least minimize the hazard to aviators caused by the smoke of the ship’s boiler gases, which reduced visibility for the airmen on landing. Various ideas were tried over many years of carrier development, including a system of ducting to take the smoke discharge toward the stern rather than allowing it eminate from amidships, as was the norm in island superstructure placement. The problem of smoke from a carrier funnel flowing across the flight deck, as it sometimes did, was never fully resolved until the advent of the (smokeless) nuclear powerplant for aircraft carriers in the 1960s. Logic and pilot preference eventually dictated the starboard placement of the island superstructure, adopted by most of the world’s navies for their carriers. The verticality of the narrow island structure which became a standard, and the funnel positioned behind and in line with it, stems from the need to put the bridge, and especially the navigation platform, relatively high and to discharge the smoke conveniently, if not always to the advantage of landing aviators.

  I remember the jokes about sabotage and Dublin,

  The noisy jungle of cranes and sheerlegs, the clangour,

  The draft in February of a thousand matelots from Devonport,

  Surveying anxiously my enormous flight-deck and hangar.

  —from “HMS Glory” by Charles Causley

  We sail the ocean blue and our saucy ship’s a beauty, we’re sober men and true and attentive to our duty.

  —from HMS Pinafore by William S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan

  In 1927, the new U.S. Navy carriers Lexington and Saratoga became the platforms on which the transverse arrestor wire-landing technique was perfected. Their thirty-four knot high speed and other features fulfilled Clement Ader’s prophecy.

  The period from 1928 through the decade of the 1930s was, despite the economic depression and the drastic restrictions on most nation’s economies, one of important development of carriers and their aircraft and tactics. Britain got to grips with the threat posed by Germany rearming, and began a radical reevaluation of the needs of her armed forces. The Fleet Air Arm had been operated under the control of the Air Ministry and had not been well managed under these auspices. It lacked state-of-the-art aircraft and had lost many of its Royal Naval Air Service pilots through absorption into the newly formed Royal Air Force in 1918. Interservice rivalry between the Royal Navy and the RAF finally caused the British government in 1937 to return the responsibility for British naval aviation to the Royal Navy.

  Among the most important contributing factors in the development of the aircraft carrier by the great naval powers of the world during the 1930s was the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922. The agenda at Washington was clearly to redefine the sea power of the signatories, in part by imposing a strict rationing on heavy warship construction in a blatant attempt to minimize battleship building. That ultimately worked, though not through the honorable adherence of the treaty participants to the type and tonnage limitations they had imposed on themselves. Rather, future development of battleships was largely curtailed owing to a clause in the treaty which allowed the signatories to opt for converting their unfinished battleship hulls to completion as aircraft carriers. Britain opted to complete her unfinished battleships Nelson and Rodney as battleships, which later proved to be a mistake as they were unable to achieve more than a twenty-three-knot top speed in a time when aircraft carriers were already capable of speeds in excess of thirty knots. The United States and Japan elected to take up the carrier option, and in so doing were able to launch fast new carriers in the same year that Nelson and Rodney were launched.

  In another controversial decision, the British chose to convert
Furious to a proper aircraft carrier, but in the effort they chose to give her a flush-deck in combination with a short bow flying-off deck, for reasons of economy as much as utility. They gave the same design to her sister ships Glorious and Courageous.

  The Japanese, who for several years had been heavily influenced by British carrier design and innovation, promptly based the design of their newest carriers Akagi and Kaga on that of Furious. The mistake here lay mainly in not recognizing that carrier-borne aircraft, both of the future and those about to come on stream, were becoming larger, heavier, and faster, and were certainly going to require considerably more flight deck for take-offs and landings, and more stowage space. The bow flying-off deck would quickly become obsolete. After many years of leading the field in aircraft carrier design and innovation, the British were suddenly no longer on the same page as the Americans.

  Like many pilots who have flown for airlines since the Second World War, Frank Furbish came from a military aviation background. He was on the USS Constellation (CV-64) from 1984 through to 1986, flying the F-14A Tomcat with VF-21. “Life on an aircraft carrier is like no other. More than 5,000 men (and women now) are packed tightly within the floating city. As large as the ship is, the spaces are generally small and are separated by watertight doors. Only two levels allow continuous fore and aft access—the second deck and the 03 level. And even those levels have ‘knee knockers’ every few yards.

  “On the Constellation there were two stores with sundry items, a barber shop, and a small gym. Room accommodations were directly related to one’s rank. Enlisted personnel were in large bunk rooms. Junior officers were in smaller bunk rooms, and senior officers either had their own rooms or shared a room with another officer. I had eight roommates. Our junior officer bunk room was about the size of a large hotel room, with three sets of three-deep bunks which were nothing more than metal frames and foam pads. The spacing between the bunks was so restrictive that big-shouldered guys could not roll over without first jutting out of their bunks. We had a desk/locker combination, a few stand-up gym lockers, and one sink. Privacy was obtained by hanging a curtain around your bunk. Your room was not only your rest area, but also your office. There was little air conditioning and plenty of noise. Rest was constantly interrupted by the needs of fellow roommates to report for watches at all hours of the night. Rest and paperwork was also affected by the location of the berthing. Aircrews were required to be on the 03 level, just below the flight deck. The noise level there is quite high during flight ops, with thirty-ton aircraft landing just above your head. Additional noise was provided by the ‘chock chuckers’ throwing heavy metal chocks and tie-down chains, and by ‘paint chippers.’ It always amazed me that there was a constant need for someone to chip paint somewhere on the ship.