Naval Legends Marathon: Aircraft Carrier Hornet | 🔊 Now in 6 languages!

They were designed to be the best. They met enemies face to face, endured tragedies and enjoyed victories. They went down in history due to the bravery of their crews. They are the ships that deserve to be called Naval Legends. In this episode, the invulnerable Hornet. While the Pacific campaign was in full swing, the U.S. Navy started receiving new Essex-class heavy aircraft carriers. They became the long-awaited reinforcements that helped the Americans crush the Japanese Imperial fleet. One of the most famous ships of this class, CV-12 Hornet, inherited her name from another aircraft carrier that distinguished herself at the start of the war. In April 1942, four months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Americans prepared a bold and daring operation. Sixteen ground-based B-25 Army bombers had been brought aboard aircraft carrier CV-8 Hornet, which sailed towards the Japanese islands. That was to let the Japanese know that you bomb our homeland, you come close to our homeland, we'll come to you. They literally sent the B-25s off of an aircraft carrier, something that had never been done before, and it was a one-way mission. They didn't have enough fuel to get back. The Doolittle Raid inspired Americans and strengthened their belief in victory over Japan. In September 1942, CV-8 Hornet received serious damage during the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands and sank. However, its famous name was given to a new aircraft carrier, CV-12, that was under construction at the Newport News shipyard. The keel was laid in 1942, and a year and a month later, in 1943, the ship was underway. A remarkable production in one year, especially when you realize it was done without computers, just slide rules and blueprints. 24 of these ships were produced during the Second World War. It's amazing to consider that. General performance capabilities of USS Hornet. Total displacement—up to 36,000 tons. Length—up to 873 feet. Beam—147 feet, 8 inches. Draft at full load—29 feet, 10 inches. Armament—59 Oerlikon cannons. Caliber—0.8 inches. Ten quadruple Mark II Bofors guns. Caliber—1.6 inches. Twelve Mark XII dual-purpose guns. Caliber—5 inches. Armor—main belt and beam bulkheads. 4 inches. Hangar deck—2.5 inches. The air group consisted of four squadrons with up to 103 aircraft in total. Hellcat fighters, Helldiver dive bombers, Avenger torpedo bombers. Maximum speed—up to 33 knots. Cruising range—15,000 miles. So, an aircraft carrier is a heavy attack ship. It's a floating airfield, but at the same time, the aircraft carrier itself becomes a main target for enemy attacks. It became clear, to prevail at sea, one must destroy aircraft carriers. Accordingly, in addition to every aircraft carrier being heavily armed with anti-aircraft defenses, they were covered by allied ships. For example, USS Hornet had up to 60 guns of various anti-aircraft artillery aboard. All anti-aircraft weapons on board, all of our weapons were devoted to anti-aircraft. The single-barrel guns could put between 6 and 10 rounds of explosive anti-aircraft shells in the air per minute. So, you multiply that times 12, that's a lot of shells in the air. We could put up a lead curtain that kept most of the attacking aircraft away. The closest a kamikaze fighter ever got was cartwheeling over the deck into the water and never hit us with a bomb or the aircraft itself. But even with this colossal number of guns, the main anti-aircraft weapon of an aircraft carrier is its fighter aviation. The striking force of an aircraft carrier consisted of bombers and torpedo bombers, whose range was many times greater than that of the artillery of modern battleships of the time. The very first aircraft carriers built after World War I showed that no matter how powerful booster engines were on planes, the flight deck was too short for them to gain the necessary speed. Then the idea appeared that aircraft should have an additional method for acceleration. Now, they can't do it by themselves. They have to have assistance through the catapult system. This cable, it's hooked up underneath the wing, goes down, wraps around the front of that shuttle down below, and that shuttle runs in this track out to the front of the ship. There's a hydraulic engine ram way, way down below that is powering this thing. And at that point, the plane is doing about 120 to 130 knots. It's a rather, rather exciting start. Right after takeoff, pilots had exhausting work to do. The tension was growing with every mile of flight, and when they arrived at the target area, it would become immense. The pilots were aware of the risks they took in flying over the enemy territory and in combat there. And then as they got back to the ship, they'd tend to relax because now they feel safe. But they should always remember that one of the most challenging and dangerous things they're going to do is land back aboard this ship. An aircraft has a very high speed when landing. If it attempts to land by itself, it will just roll along the deck and fall off the other edge. That's why the question arose, how do we stop this? This area, and there's four of these on either side of the deck where the cables would stretch out, and down below decks, there's a bunch of equipment that's being tensioned, and they know how much the plane weighs that's coming in, so they actually tension the wire for the weight of that plane. And so as it comes in, they grab the hook, and they will stop before they get to the end of this angled deck here, which is only another couple hundred feet beyond this touchdown area. Once they touch down and stop, they retract their hook, the cable is retracted, it's set for the next plane. It's sometimes, it's often only 30 seconds between aircraft landing. Some airplanes were much easier to land on board than others, and the particular airplane that I flew, the F-8 Crusader, was a difficult airplane to land. The ship that we're landing on is moving through the water, and we don't always have calm seas or good visibility and such as that. So it was necessary to land sometimes at night, maybe we're in rough seas and the whole deck is heaving and swaying. If the ship has to go faster to accommodate the landings on the ship, very often stack gas that comes out of the stacks drift across the landing area, and it interrupts your smooth flight on board to the ship. There was a peculiarity during World War II. When landing on a deck, pilots had to drop all ammunition remaining after an attack down into the sea. Why? Because the accident rate was high. Pilots were landing by themselves, after all. There wasn't any guidance, radio navigation, nothing at all. They had to do it all by themselves, and they were tired and exhausted. If the worst happened, and an aircraft crash-landed, its whole ammunition stock would explode. It's a very precise maneuver to land on these, and any interruption of that can result, of course, in a crash or an air crash. It's a point of pride that we were able to do that and do it consistently well. This ship went through something around 200,000 landings before it was decommissioned, so it's a round-the-clock process, round-the-clock. I lived on board ships like this for a total of 29 months, so I'm intimately familiar with the flight deck of the aircraft carrier. The Hornet aircraft carrier was commissioned in 1943. The United States had the advantage in the Pacific theater of operations by that time, but their enemy was still extremely dangerous. A raid by a carrier task force could be compared to a royal hunt. The Queen is escorted by several dozen ships of different types, from fuel transports to battleships. Crews are at battle stations. Scouts are sweeping hundreds of square miles of ocean looking for prey. My favorite room on the Hornet, this is combat information center. In this room, all of the sensors for the Hornet come into this room. All the radars, sonar information, electronic warfare information, it's all flowing into this room, and they're figuring out what needs to be filtered out and acted upon and passed up to the bridge for action. A scouting report comes in. The enemy was detected. That's it. The flag officer gives the order to attack. What does that involve? Launching an aircraft or a group of aircraft from a carrier? It all starts from the top. The speed and direction of the wind. We're now in the areology office, otherwise known as the weather office for the ship. And there was a crew here 24 hours a day keeping an eye on the weather. Big thing for an aircraft carrier is how fast is the wind. So they're constantly monitoring that. They're even sending off weather balloons from just outside this office to keep track of some of the upper atmosphere conditions that are going on. The commanding officer of the task force, the flag officer, Admiral, gives the order. Prepare for takeoff. The flagship navigator calculates the course necessary for aircraft to take off. The aircraft carrier turns around. Accordingly, the whole formation turns around. And that's basically controlled by two enlisted men right here at these stations. Obviously, this is the wheel, and this is the ship's steering wheel. And what's going on is the operator is watching his compass, his gyro compass repeater. He's getting orders from one of the officers out there in the bridge to steer a certain course. The ships have turned around. Then the work on the flight deck starts. The deck gets cleaned. They remove all debris, bolts, dirt, and garbage. Maybe there's some ice or dew. They get removed too. Then comes the hangar service unit. Elevators come up. Aircraft get rolled out. And at the same time, the oil and lubricants unit starts to bring fuel hoses and tanks to the upper deck. And all these people, about 2,000 crewmen, just to make it possible for 10 aircraft to take off. Takeoff. Everything works. Everything flies. It's a very complex procedure. And by 1943, the Americans mastered it. As the saying goes, they knew it like the back of their hand. However, not one of the carrier's crew indulged in illusions. Everyone understood that experience, discipline, and excellent organization might not be enough to protect against an enemy torpedo or bomb. The last room I wanted to show you was all the way here in the back, and it actually required another combination to get into. You had to have top-secret clearance to get into this room. Now, it sounds exciting. The information that's being printed on these teletype machines is classified top-secret. It's a warship. If the ship got hit, it's being sunk. You're in enemy territory. You would take the most important security things, put them in the bags, which are weighted very heavy at the bottom with a steel plate, and then you head outside and toss it over into the ocean, and it'll sink, and hopefully the other guys don't get it then. The attack on Pearl Harbor showed the high efficiency of aircraft carriers. In accordance with the traditions of Eastern philosophy, Americans learned the lesson that the enemy had taught them and started beating the Japanese at their own game. Every day, commanding officers of task forces resolved issues and set in motion enormous amounts of resources without realizing that they lay the foundations of new naval warfare tactics. In general, we're talking about Essex-class carriers. Hornet is one of them. They are attack ships. An operation is carried out, ammunition and fuel are used up. The next operation won't start until these ships return to base and get more fuel, ammunition, food, and water, as well as new aircraft and new pilots. We're preparing a new general engagement. Well, the Americans are. When? The day those aircraft and aircraft carriers are ready. The day when the Hornet is ready. Having participated in dozens of battles, Hornet had to pass the final exam. In the face of inevitable defeat, the Japanese fleet command decided to go all-in. Battleship Yamato was sent to stop the Americans. April 7, 1945, became a day to remember for Hornet and seven other U.S. aircraft carriers. Task Force 58 was huge. It consisted of five heavy and three light aircraft carriers. Imagine, 227 aircraft of the attack wave taking off. 227 aircraft attacking. Everyone found their positions in their air groups. This whole wave arrived at the target. Orders were coming from ships, from the flagship. The aircraft attacked. They attacked from different directions simultaneously. The Japanese couldn't do anything about it. Battleship Yamato was defenseless against such a well-organized air attack. The strike was delivered. The ship was destroyed. The aircraft flew back. One by one, they left their formation, found their aircraft carrier, landed, and all this without hindering other pilots. The destruction of Yamato was the pinnacle of the U.S. Navy's airstrike organization. This operation put an end to the Japanese Imperial Fleet. Several months later, the Empire itself fell as well. We were at Hunters Point Naval Shipyard and just finished our sea trials, sea readiness trials, and World War II ended. We became the lead ship in Operation Magic Carpet. This is how we got our guys home from over there. We didn't have any way to fly them home, so all naval ships were pressed into service. What they did is they welded 3,000 bunks to the hangar deck of all the aircraft carriers, Hornet being the first. It's a nine-day trip from the Pacific Theater back to Pearl Harbor, where we took our guys. We were luxury accommodations. We did have a visitor some years ago who was aboard during that time, and he told us the story of it. And the story was, you got one meal a day, you were either in your bed, in a line to go to the bathroom, or a line to get chow. That was it. That was your routine for nine days, and that was the entire ship's crew as well, in addition to doing their jobs. But the passengers particularly, they were happy to be going home, but they were fairly bored on the way home. The Hornet's biography is the history of the Pacific War. She took part in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the Battle of Leyte Gulf, and the attack on Yamato in April 1945. Today, the aircraft carrier is one of the most popular attractions in California and a reminder of the heroic past of the U.S. Navy. She had an enviable record, one of the best records from World War II. She fought in 59 battles and was never hit by a bomb, never hit by a torpedo, never hit by a kamikaze. During all that time, she was considered one of the luckiest ships in the Navy.