Word: midways
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Though replacements kept the Midway's complement only a hundred or two below her wartime strength of 3,425 (excluding aviators), this was no index to the crew's efficiency, for most of them had never been to sea before-there were even chief petty officers in this class...
Shaking down in the Caribbean last week was the first of a new class of monster aircraft carriers, the Midway - the U.S. Navy's and the world's mightiest warship. As a fighting machine, the Midway seemed to have everything: her flight deck was armored; thousands of tons of alloy steel encased her vitals; she had 200,000 h.p. to drive her 45,000 tons (60,000 or more at full load) at better than 33 knots; in her new, long-barreled 5-inch guns there was fire power to keep an enemy away while 120 planes operated...
...might be unable to leave port unless qualified replacements were supplied at once, to take the place of engine-room officers and men going ashore for discharge. Scraping holes in the bottom of its manpower barrel, the Bureau of Naval Personnel had found enough hands to keep the Midway's twelve boilers and four engines running...
...Midway was so vast (986 ft. long) and so intricately divided into watertight compartments below the hangar deck that a boot sailor could be excused if he took days to find his way around. But the vastness of the flight deck eased the operations of Commander John T. ("Tommy") Blackburn's Air Group 74; pilots even approved the emery-paper landing surface on the steel deck. The 5-inch, .54-caliber guns had beginners' luck and brought down a good bag of towed sleeves and radio-controlled drone target planes. Eventually, all departments would function as smoothly...
Died. Commodore Dixie ("Indestructible Man") Kiefer, 49, barrel-chested, battered carrier hero, exec of the Yorktown at Coral Sea and Midway, Captain of the twice-Kamikazed Ticonderoga, who remained on the bridge for eleven hours directing damage-control operations after he had absorbed 65 bomb-fragment wounds; when his twin-engine plane crashed near Beacon, N.Y. in pea-soup...