Word: essex
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Exactly scaled to one-ninth the size of an Essex-class carrier, she was prefabricated at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, trucked to the site in sections. Total cost: $35,000. Topside, she bristles with 20-and 40-mm. and five-inch guns, all exactly scaled. Parked on her flight deck are faithfully scaled models of Helldivers, Hellcats, Avengers and Corsairs (donated by the manufacturers). Her innards-which visitors may see if they buy a war bond-contain a model of a carrier's boiler room, a section of enlisted men's quarters complete with pin-up girls...
...sleek, V-shaped hull, the 45,000-ton Midway has enough electric power to light up a city of 1,000,000, enough steel for 25,000 autos. It is wider and almost half again as heavy as the Essex class carriers, now the first line craft of the U.S. fleets. But the tin-hatted, horn-handed men who built the Midway are accustomed to superlatives. They have long bragged that: 1) Newport News is the biggest U.S. shipyard; 2) its sharp-eyed, terrier-like boss, Homer Lenoir Ferguson, 72, is by all odds the best builder of warships...
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...