“The bathroom or ‘head’ was another unique feature. On a conventional (non-nuclear) carrier like the Constellation, the water always had the aftertaste of fuel oil. The showerhead was a hose with a knob. The knob had a button that had to be held in for the ‘mist’ to dispense, in order to save water, which fluctuated between scalding and ice cold. At times it would just quit. This usually happened after you had covered yourself with soapy lather. It seems trivial, but after six months of such showers the desire for a long, warm shower with uninterrupted water is enormous.
“On another deployment, I graduated to a four-man bunk room located forward on the port side just under a catapult and abeam of the water-break. The water-break was the device that stopped the catapult shuttle, which travelled at 150 mph as it tossed a multi-ton aircraft into the sky. Imagine, if you will, that your cot is inside a dumpster and someone is randomly crashing a large sledge hammer into the side of it. You simply cannot sleep, period. Some people believed that if you could manage to sleep twelve hours a day the cruise would be only half as long. Some of them tried.”
Royal Navy Rear Admiral Dennis Campbell’s career as a Fleet Air Arm aviator exposed him to many near misses and close calls. He realized early on that one of the greatest hazards faced by a naval aviator was the probability of a collision with parked aircraft—or a barrier placed in front of such aircraft to protect them—if he should fail to catch an arresting cable in his deck landing. He came up with an amazingly simple solution … the angled flight deck, which allowed carrier pilots to approach the deck at a slight angle to the ship itself. Should the pilot fail to catch one of the arresting cables, he could “bolt” and go around again for another landing approach by applying full power on touch-down and flying off the clear port bow. The idea was so successful that both the Royal and U.S. navies adopted it immediately and most large aircraft carriers now have an angled deck for recovering aircraft. Thanks to Dennis Campbell (and to the gyro-stabilized mirror landing system which continuously signals glide path corrections), today’s naval aviator is able to make a landing approach on a constant speed and direction, and with a clear escape route should his tailhook fail to engage an arresting cable.
Chance Vought F4U Corsair fighters on the flight deck of the USS Badoeng Strait during the Korean War in the early 1950s.
Routine maintenance aboard HMS Illustrious. The BAE Sea Harrier was the principal fighter aircraft operated from Illustrious and her sister ships until the plane’s retirement in 2006.
During the Korean War, Bill Hannan served aboard the USS Kearsarge as a jet engine mechanic. “It would be difficult to imagine a more hazardous place to be than an aircraft carrier. Apart from the airplanes landing, and sometimes crashing, on our roof, the ship carried millions of gallons of flammables, including fuel oil, high-octane gasoline, jet fuel, paints, thinner, as well as tons of bombs, rockets, and assorted ammunition. And scuttlebutt had it that we were being shadowed by submarines.
“Although much of our maintenance work was performed on the hangar deck, some of it was topside, often under incredibly harrowing conditions. Imagine working on a wintry night, on a frosty deck in rough seas, close to the edge of the ship. Only dim, red-lens flashlights could be employed under blackout conditions. If a man happened to slip over the side into the ocean, about eighty feet below, there was little chance of him being missed, let alone rescued. Being assigned to plane-pushing meant long hours of physically hard work in particularly dangerous circumstances. Once during my turn on this dreaded duty, I was well forward on the wet flight deck during a launch operation when I was suddenly blown to the deck. I went sliding toward the propeller planes poised aft with their engines running. I was desperately clawing at the wooden deck, hoping to grab on to one of the numerous metal tie-down strips, when a huge bruiser of a fellow spotted my predicament and, at considerable risk to himself, literally tackled me and dragged me over the edge of the deck into a catwalk. Probably no one else had even seen me. I was speechless, and didn’t even have a chance to thank him before he rushed back to his post … a hero in my view, but probably all in a day’s work on the flight deck for him.
“Oral communication was usually difficult on the flight deck, even without aircraft engines running. With jet and prop-plane run-ups, it was almost impossible. The ship’s powerful ‘bull horn’ public address system could sometimes be heard over the din, but even in the absence of noise, the bull horn messages were sometimes garbled or distorted like old-time railroad station announcements. So an elaborate system of hand signals evolved that worked to make a point.
“The Kearsarge converted sea water into fresh quite efficiently, but it had to serve many purposes, the first of which was feeding the ship’s thirsty boilers. Conservation measures had to be strictly observed. The shower protocol, for example, was to wet down, turn off the water, soap up, turn on the water, rinse, and turn off the water. Once I had just finished soaping up and was covered with suds when ‘general quarters’ was sounded (loud horns over the intercom system, meaning ‘Get to your duty station immediately!’). I grabbed a pair of shower sandals and my jockey shorts and rushed up to the hangar deck. A ‘red alert’ was in effect and we could not leave our stations for any reason until the ‘all clear’ was sounded. Still covered in soap suds, I was very cold and beginning to itch all over. But it could have been worse. At least I wasn’t up on the flight deck.
“Field Days were clean-up times, and meant hard work for anyone involved. The worst thing about them was the closure of the heads (toilet facilities) for cleaning. Time on the ship for ‘pit stops’ was at a premium, and often there was little margin for delay in attending to such bodily functions. How frustrating then, after climbing down a deck or two, to find a HEAD SECURED FOR CLEANING sign on the entrance, and, either by coincidence or design, any nearby heads were also frequently out of service.
“We headed home at a leisurely pace, probably to reduce wear and tear on the ship’s machinery. As keeping idle hands out of mischief was a foremost consideration in the Navy, all sorts of chores, such as chipping paint from decks and then repainting them, were assigned to anyone who appeared to be unoccupied. In our squadron, the most unsavory of our F9F Panther jet fighters was selected to have its paint stripped, a dirty, tedious job at best, especially when it was freely admitted that the job didn’t really need doing.”
An aircraft carrier is a noble thing. It lacks almost everything that seems to denote nobility, yet deep nobility is there. A carrier has no poise. It has no grace. It is top-heavy and lop-sided. It has the lines of a well-fed cow. It doesn’t cut through the water like a cruiser, knifing romantically along. It doesn’t dance and cavort like a destroyer. It just plows. You feel it should be carrying a hod, rather than wearing a red sash. Yet a carrier is a ferocious thing, and out of its heritage of action has grown nobility. I believe that today 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.
—Ernie Pyle, war correspondent
Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.
—from The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
A converted ocean liner, HMS Argus served in the Royal Navy from 1918 to 1944;
The Royal Navy escort carrier HMS Pursuer, one of many such American-built ships in the British inventory during the war.
HMS Illustrious driving through a squall in the Bay of Biscay in 1999. After the Falklands War of 1982, the Illustrious and her sister ships Invincible and Ark Royal evolved into strike-fighter platforms.
THE AIRCRAFT
A McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom twin-engine, all-weather, long-range supersonic jet interceptor / fighter-bomber originally developed for the U.S. Navy. Entering service in 1960, the Phantom was the primary air superiority fighter of the the Navy and the U.S. Air Force in the Vietnam War. This one is being prepared for launch from the
aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk on Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of Vietnam.
SHE WAS THE “STRINGBAG” TO ALL WHO flew in her or were associated with her. The Fairey Swordfish was a remarkably successful aircraft in its principal role as a carrier-based torpedo bomber of the 1930s and 1940s, and she performed creditably in other roles as well. She resulted from specifications for a naval torpedo bomber issued in July 1932 to the Fairey Aviation Technical Department. The requirement called for an aircraft to perform: 1) fleet reconnaissance with a crew of three; 2) torpedo attacks with a crew of two and of limited range; and 3) bombing attacks with two or three crew according to the bomb load.
Trials of several early models of the plane resulted in the specification S.38/34, calling for three developmental aircraft to be built. The subsequent production machines based on these craft became the final Swordfish.
John W.G. Wellham flew the Swordfish in the Fleet Air Arm attack on the Italian port of Taranto in November 1940. “It was astonishingly easy to fly. It was never used as a trainer because it was too easy to learn on. It had a very low take-off speed, a very low landing speed, and was incredibly robust. You could thump it down on a carrier deck, you could knock bits off it, you could bend it, and it still went on flying. It would carry almost anything you put on it. It was originally supposed to carry torpedos and a few bombs. Gradually, they added more and more: a modern radio, radar, later the homing torpedo, depth charges, and, if we were travelling somewhere, as when the squadron made a sudden move, we even tied motor bikes to the torpedo rack, spare propellers to the wings, and stuffed everyone’s luggage into the back. It still took off and flew. Technically it wasn’t allowed, but you could do aerobatics in it. I once did a loop with a roll off the top, and it did it perfectly happily.”
“A venomous-looking little bumblebee of a fighter, the Wildcat—destined to be the progenitor of a dynasty of Cats—made up for its lack of aesthetic appeal in purposefulness of appearance … “ wrote Royal Navy test pilot Eric Brown of the Grumman plane that fought against the best the enemy had in 1942. The Japanese Zero could easily outperform the F4F Wildcat in a turn, climb, or dash, and was only at a disadvantage against the Grumman fighter when the Wildcat had both height and surprise on its side. In a fight, the Wildcat had one other thing going for it. Though outgunned by the Zero, the Grumman was better able to absorb damage than the Japanese plane, and the Wildcat pilot was far better protected by armor and a bullet-proof windscreen.
In the Atlantic, the Royal Navy operated the Wildcat, which they called the Martlet (though later in the war they came to accept the U.S. nickname), from small escort carriers which sailed with Allied convoys and provided essential air cover protecting against enemy aircraft and U-boat attacks. Among the best-known achievements employing the Wildcat is that of Lieutenant Edward H. O’Hare of VF-42, flying from the USS Lexington (CV-2) on 20 February 1942. The Lexington had launched the Wildcat squadron to intercept inbound Japanese aircraft and Lt. O’Hare managed to down five Betty bombers that day, for which he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Bob Croman flew the SBD Douglas Dauntless, referred to by some of its crews as “the clunk” or “the barge.” In its role as a dive-bomber, Croman recalled: “We dropped bombs, diving from up to 15,000 feet. We pulled out at about 1,500 feet and in this performance, the SBD4 never failed me. The only minor fault I found was that the landing flap handle and dive flap handle were next to each other and occasionally one could move the dive flaps when landing. This resulted in many accidents. The SBD was very capable in carrier landings and I very seldom received a wave-off from the LSO (landing signal officer).” Eric Brown: “Mundane by contemporary performance standards, the Dauntless was underpowered, painfully slow, short on range, woefully vulnerable to fighters, and uncomfortable and fatiguing to fly for any length of time, being inherently noisy and drafty. But it did possess certain invaluable assets that mitigated these shortcomings. Its handling characteristics were, for the most part, innocuous and it was responsive; it was dependable and extremely sturdy, capable of absorbing considerable battle damage and remaining airborne and, most important, it was an accurate dive-bomber.
“Throughout the Pacific War, it remained the principal shipboard dive-bomber available to the U.S. Navy; it was the only U.S. aircraft to participate in all five naval engagements fought exclusively between carriers, and, deficiencies notwithstanding, it emerged with an almost legendary reputation as the most successful shipboard dive-bomber of all time—albeit success that perhaps owed more to the crews that flew it in truly dauntless fashion than to the intrinsic qualities of the aeroplane itself.”
The Curtiss SB2C Helldiver was the third in a line of Curtiss planes to carry that name. The SB2C was purpose-built to be both a bomber and dive-bomber, and was a sturdy, two-man, low-wing, all-metal monoplane which had a production run of 7,200. Flown by both the U.S. Navy and Marines, the later versions of the Helldiver were armed with either four 12.7mm wing-mounted machine-guns or two 20mm cannon. Late variants were also produced by both Fairchild, and Canadian Car & Foundry, which was a manufacturer of later marks of the Hawker Hurricane fighter as well.
Grumman F6F Hellcats on the USS Yorktown, circa 1944.
Problem: Aircraft handles funny. Solution: Aircraft warned to straighten up and fly right.
The Imperial Japanese Navy sent its requirements for a new front-line fighter to both the Nakajima and Mitsubishi aircraft companies in 1937. It wanted a top speed of at least 310 mph, the ability to climb to 10,000 feet in 3.5 minutes, exceptional maneuverability, and greater range than that of any existing fighter. It had to be armed with two cannon and two machine-guns, a requirement thought to be unrealistic by both manufacturers, and Nakajima pulled out of the competition to design and build it. Although Mitsubishi agreed to solve the problem of the plane’s armament, the requirement was eventually modified. In their determination to keep the weight of the new fighter to a minimum, thus enhancing its overall performance, a new lightweight alloy that the manufacturers called Extra-Super Duralumin (ESD) was used. The new carrier fighter was called Zero-Sen, and designated A6M1. It was accepted by the Imperial Navy on 14 September 1939. Later, when the Navy accepted a new 925 hp aero engine built by Nakajima, the NK1C Sakae 12, the next Zero variant carried the new powerplant and was designated A6M2. It was this greatly improved aircraft that Allied fighter pilots in the Pacific had to contend with in 1943 prior to the arrival in that theater of their own new and highly capable Corsair and Hellcat fighters.
Among Japan’s principal performers in their surprise attack on the U.S. battleships in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, which brought America into World War Two, was the Aichi D3A Val naval dive-bomber. A successor to Aichi’s D1A, the Val was prominent in Japan’s strikes throughout Southeast Asia and the South Pacific until late in 1942 when the quality and performance of the U.S. carrier fighters improved dramatically. After that, the Val was no longer in the game and was utilized in secondary roles, including training, land-based attack and, finally, in the desperate kamikaze suicide attacks of 1945 against the American fleet.
No one has flown and evaluated more military aircraft types than Eric Brown, the extraordinary British test pilot who became the first naval officer to head the elite Aerodynamics Flight at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, England: “As a result of a brilliant piece of improvisation, the Navy had been presented with the Sea Hurricane, which had proved that a high-performance shore-based fighter could be operated with relative safety from a carrier, but the Hawker fighter’s chances of survival against a Bf 109G or Fw 190 were anything but good. Nevertheless, its successful adaptation for the shipboard role had at least brought about something of a revolution in naval thinking, and logically enough in 1941 the Admiralty began to demand a similar adaptation of what was then the highest performing fighter available—the Spitfire.
“This scheme was received with mixed feelings by those naval pilots in the know. Everyo
ne admired the Spitfire and itched to fly it—but from an aircraft carrier? That was a horse of a very different color! No one needed convincing of the performance or handling attributes of this magnificent fighter which was surely one of the greatest warplanes ever conceived, but there was a certain air of fragility about the aeroplane: a ballerina-like delicacy that seemed inconsistent with the demanding, muscle-taxing scenario of shipboard operations. Could that slendor fuselage stand the harsh deceleration of an arrested landing? Would that frail undercarriage absorb the shock of 15 ft/sec (4.7 m/sec) vertical velocity, and could those wafer-like wings take the acceleration forces of a catapult launch? What of the Spitfire’s high landing speed? Above all, would the pilot ever be able to see the carrier deck on the approach?
“I had been selected to undertake the first Seafire deck trials on an escort carrier. At 1330 hours on 11 September 1942 I was flying a Seafire towards HMS Biter—the time being significant as it turned out. As I approached Biter, I confidently assumed that all would be breached up for this momentous occasion—the first landing of a Seafire on one of these postage stamp-sized platforms—and I did a quick circuit at 400 feet and settled into my approach. Contrary to earlier recommendations, I adopted a straight final approach with the aircraft crabbed to starboard so that I had a good, clear view to port of both the deck and, supposedly, the batsman of whom, in the event, I saw no sign.
The Bird Farm Page 2