I guess that is the name of the thing on the HIstory channel.. Last night they did the Battle off of Samar....great tie in with Leyte Gulf campaign. I cannot tell you how wonderful it was. A minute by minute, blow by blow description of the battle and the cgi of the ships and all that. If you get an opportunity to catch it, it is riveting. Here is a bit of trivia that I'll bet most of you don't know....the only 2 types of aircraft that participated were Helldivers and gulp..Wildcats. I would have bet the farm on Hellcats being the fighter plane. The last 20 minutes of the show were dedicated to showing Operation TEN-Go which involved the death of the Yamato.

The series is Dogfights. I saw that episode (of course). Yeah, I was looking for them to tell me about the VC squadrons Wildcats and Avengers harassing the Japanese fleet while Taffy 3 made a run for it. It was a great show though. All of them are, especially the one about the Catus Air Force.

Kenny

Thanks for the correction Kenny. It WAS Avengers off of Samar. The Helldivers were the ones blasting the Yamato in April of 45 between Japan and Okinawa. Of further note, most of the planes defending Taffy 3 were unarmed except for machine guns, but like the brave crews of the Destroyers and escorts plowed right in doing whatever they could to disrupt the shooting of the Japanese fleet. I think that not enough Medal of Honor and Navy crosses were awarded for what these people did to stave off the mighty Japanese task force which surely would have mopped up the landings at Leyte had they continued. For once the 300 Spartans won the battle.

An interesting footnote on the Wildcats used on the escort carriers. These were not F4F-4s, but technically a different plane, the FM-2. Grumman couldn't keep up with all the demand, and once they started making Hellcats, they turned over production of the F4F-4 to the Eastern Aircraft Company, which was really General Motors. GM had several factories standing idle and created Eastern to build planes. The original version, the FM-1 was identical to the F4F-4, but the FM-2s had a larger rudder, were about 500 lbs lighter, partly due to the reduction back to only 4 .50 cals instead of 6, and as a result had a much improved rate of climb over the F4F-4. By the end of the war, Eastern had built just over 3000 FM-2s.

Virtually every one of the escort carriers used these instead of the F6Fs used on the big carriers.

And it's ironic that this "non-frontline fighter" was so instrumental in winning this engagement, ESPECIALLY as has been pointed out, so many of the pilots made "strafing runs" with empty guns, just to disrupt the attack.

Tom

(Help received: Aerodata's "U.S. Navy Carrier Fighters of WW II")

Another interesting fact is that CVE and CVL pilots use to joke with the Essex class radio operators by asking which runway they wanted them to use. They were very proud to fly off the baby flattops.

Kenny

The thing that blows my mind about landing on the old straight deck carriers, is that you only got one shot, unless you were waved off on approach. Once you were over the deck, the LSO gave you a "cut" sign, and you killed the engine and that was it. If your hook didn't grab a wire, you went forward into the barrier.

Today on the angle deck carriers, it's the opposite. As soon as you touch down, you apply full throttle. If the wire grabs, great, it will hold you, and when you know you've trapped, you go to idle. But if the hook doesn't grab, (a "bolter") then you should have enough power to get back in the air like a touch and go, and can try again. The only time the barrier is rigged is if your hook is broken.

Flight ops from the old straight deck days are filled with instances in which planes missed the wires, went into the barriers, but still crashed into planes parked in front, with the frequent result of the pilot of the plane just before the offended at risk of being killed by the propellor. Another hazard of the barrier was the possibility that the forward elevator, which was right in the middle of the flight deck, might be down and you could drop into the hanger deck.

The other nightmare is the whole issue of respotting the deck. You could either recover aircraft when the aft end was clear, or you could launch aircraft when the front end was clear, but you could really do both at the same time. Trying to maintain a CAP of fighters over the ship at all times, while either keeping a deckload strike ready to launch once the enemy was found, or keep the deck ready to recover a strike and prepare a second one, really took an incredible amount of planning and hard work moving the planes around, and at often while under attack.

Those guys really earned every dime of their pay!!!!!


Tom