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    Aircraft Carriers of the United States Navy
    Aircraft Carriers of the United States Navy
    Aircraft Carriers of the United States Navy
    Ebook288 pages1 hour

    Aircraft Carriers of the United States Navy

    By Michael Green

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    About this ebook

    This pictorial history of US aircraft carriers illustrates the many classes and types of carriers used by the navy from before WWII to the present day.
     
    In 1922 the US Navy commissioned its first small experimental aircraft carrier. This was followed into service by two much larger carriers in 1927 with five more being built— including three large Yorktown class—prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Then, to take the offensive against the Japanese Navy, the American Congress funded by far the largest carrier-building program in history.

    Since 1975, when the first of a fleet of ten nuclear-powered Nimitz class carriers was commissioned, The United States Navy’s fleet of carriers has optimized its superpower status and worldwide power projection. Yet these are due to be replaced in the decades to come with the even more sophisticated nuclear-powered Gerald R. Ford class.

    Compiled and written by Michael Green, Aircraft Carriers of the United States Navy contains superb images of all the different types of classes of carriers employed by the US Navy since 1922. These and its highly informative text and captions give the reader a broad overview of this fascinating subject.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateApr 30, 2015
    ISBN9781473854444
    Aircraft Carriers of the United States Navy
    Author

    Michael Green

     Michael Green (1930–2019) was one of the best-known British evangelical theologians and preachers of his generation. A scholar with degrees from the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Toronto, Green had a passion for evangelism and a rare talent for communicating complex ideas in easy-to-understand language. In 1996, Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey granted Green a Lambeth degree of Doctor of Divinity. ?He led university missions on six continents, pastored St. Aldate's Church Oxford, and introduced innovative approaches in seminary education. He authored more than seventy books across a range of fields, including evangelism, apologetics, biblical commentary, and academic theology.

    Read more from Michael Green

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    • 5/5
      Photos and text were excellent. It's a great book to own.
      Some photos of other interior compartments could have been added.

    Book preview

    Aircraft Carriers of the United States Navy - Michael Green

    Chapter One

    Pre-War Aircraft Carriers

    The honour of designing and building the world’s first true aircraft carrier goes to Great Britain’s Royal Navy. An uncompleted Italian ocean liner was acquired from a British shipyard in September 1916 during the First World War and fitted with a continuous wooden flight deck 565 feet long, supported by a metal framework. The ship was named the HMS Argus. It was not commissioned (taken into official service) until September 1918, just as the war was coming to its end. However, the ship did much in the 1920s to help the Royal Navy work out the kinks in aircraft carrier design and operation.

    US navy officers serving as observers with the Royal Navy during the First World War were very impressed with their efforts to come up with the world’s first aircraft carrier, normally shortened to just ‘carrier’. At the urging of these same officers, the US Navy Board organized hearings in the summer of 1918, attended by many of the leading aviators of the day. The opinions of these pilots were sought to assist in determining how much effort should be devoted by the US navy to having carriers of its own.

    Upon the conclusion of the hearings in September 1918, it was recommended that six carriers be built within the next six years. These ships would have a flight deck 700 feet long, be capable of a maximum speed of 35 knots and have a cruising range of 10,000 miles. However, Josephus Daniels, the secretary of the US navy (an appointed civilian position), was not convinced that carriers were needed and quashed the plan in October 1918.

    The First US Navy Carrier

    Some in the US navy continued to push for the development of the carrier. In 1919 the US Congress authorized the conversion of a US navy collier into the country’s first experimental carrier. Colliers were coal-hauling supply ships, employed by the navy from the late 1800s to the 1920s. There had originally been plans to convert a second collier into an experimental carrier but a 1922 arms control treaty agreed to by the US government put a stop to that project.

    As the conversion of the collier into an experimental carrier began, the US navy decided to name it in honour of a very early American aviation pioneer, Samuel Pierpont Langley. The experimental carrier was commissioned on 20 March 1922 and designated the USS Langley (CV-1). Unlike the more famous Wright brothers, Langley never managed to demonstrate a successful human-operated aircraft as the Wrights did in December 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

    The prefix ‘USS’ stands for United States Ship and was instigated in 1907 when President Theodore Roosevelt signed an Executive Order to that effect. It has been applied to all the US navy carriers mentioned in this work. The letter suffix designation code ‘CV’ is the US navy’s code for conventionally-powered aircraft carriers and is not an acronym, although there have been many variations over the decades such as CVE, CVL, CVB, CVA and CVN. The number/s following the suffix designation code for US navy carriers is a hull number for book-keeping purposes.

    The USS Langley had an overall length of 542 feet. Unlike all US navy carriers that followed it into service, it did not have a hangar deck. Rather, its aircraft were stored in the ship’s hold. When the time came to launch aircraft from the USS Langley they were brought up to the ship’s main deck, located below the flight deck, by crane. Once the aircraft were on the main deck, they were prepped and then brought up to the flight deck by a single centreline elevator for launching. The wooden flight deck was held up by a metal framework.

    In nautical terms, the ‘main deck’ of a ship is normally the highest complete deck (floor) extending from stem to stern and from side to side. The main deck is also typically considered a ship’s ‘strength deck’. A strength deck is a complete deck designed to carry not only deck loads but also hull stresses. On non-carrier ships the uppermost deck exposed to the elements is referred to as the ‘weather deck’ and if armoured is known as a ‘protective deck’.

    The planes launched from the USS Langley took off unassisted by mechanical means. They were assisted in take-off only by having the carrier sail into the wind to increase the amount of lift available for the aircraft’s wings. For a brief time the Langley’s flight deck was fitted with two experimental compressed-air catapults to assist in the launching of the ship’s aircraft. The ship was later fitted with a Norden mechanical flywheel-operated catapult.

    Like HMS Argus, the USS Langley lacked any type of superstructure, commonly referred to as an ‘island’ on carriers, on its flight deck. HMS Argus had a small retractable wheelhouse that was raised from the flight deck when aircraft were not being launched or recovered. The navigation bridge extended out on either side of the Argus’s main deck. The navigation bridge is the station of the officer in charge of a ship.

    The USS Langley had a navigation bridge at the bow of the ship underneath the most forward portion of the flight deck that included the functions of a wheelhouse. Both the Royal Navy and the US navy quickly realized that this arrangement was far from optimum and on most of their subsequent carriers an island of varying size was fitted. Carrier islands provide the space for a navigation bridge, staff officer functions and a flight control centre that can oversee the launching and recovery of aircraft.

    Service Use

    From 1924 to 1936 the USS Langley served with the US navy’s Pacific Fleet and continued to perfect its operational capabilities. Upon the launching of the first plane from the flight deck of the ship, US navy Rear Admiral William A. Moffett declared: ‘The air fleet of an enemy will never get within striking distance of our coasts as long as our aircraft carriers are able to carry the preponderance of air power to sea.’ Not a pilot himself, Moffett was nevertheless a key player in the early adoption of the carrier by the US navy and the rise of naval aviation within the service.

    By 1936 the Langley’s usefulness as an experimental aircraft carrier had run its course and it was converted into a seaplane tender. It was attacked by Japanese aircraft on 27 February 1942 near the coast of Indonesia and badly damaged. Rather than have it fall into enemy hands, the ship was sunk by its escorting destroyers; a sad and inglorious end to the US navy’s first carrier.

    The Impact of the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922

    In February 1922 the Washington Naval Treaty, which limited the numbers of ships that could be built or retained by the world’s leading navies, was signed by government representatives of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Japan in Washington D.C. The treaty was an attempt by the civilian politicians of the respective countries to rein in what they believed to be a ruinous naval arms race which they feared would bankrupt their countries and possibly lead to another world war.

    As battleships and battle-cruisers were the barometer of naval power in the early 1920s, the Washington Naval Treaty focused most of its concern on the number and characteristics of such ships then in service and those planned for the future. Less attention was given to the development of carriers as they seemed to be far less of a threat to the world’s balance of naval might.

    In fact, the Washington Naval Treaty proved to be very generous in allowing the navies of the various signatories to either convert existing ships into carriers or build new carriers from the ground up. This aspect of the treaty acted as a very powerful stimulus to the evolutionary development of carriers. There were also follow-on naval arms control treaties to supplement the original 1922 treaty which was to expire in 1938.

    The Next Generation of US Navy Carriers

    The United States and Great Britain received authorization from the Washington Naval Treaty to operate up to 135,000 tons of standard displacement for its carriers. Japan received authorization for 81,000 tons of standard displacement, while France and Italy were restricted to 60,000 tons.

    In nautical terms, displacement is the weight of the water displaced by a ship; this weight being equal to the weight of the vessel. By the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty, the term ‘standard displacement’ refers to a ship fully crewed with all armament and ammunition, minus its fuel and reserve boiler water. The tons listed under the treaty were long tons (2,240lb per ton), rather than short tons (2,000lb per ton).

    There was another built-in cap in the Washington Naval Treaty, mandating that no carrier could exceed 27,000 tons of standard displacement. However, an important last-minute provision added to the treaty allowed all the signatories to build two carriers apiece with a standard displacement of 33,000 tons each from existing capital ships (battleships or battle-cruisers).

    The US navy decided to convert two uncompleted battle-cruisers, originally intended to be scrapped per treaty requirements, into carriers. There was some controversy within the US navy at the time, as some felt that it made more sense to build a larger number of smaller carriers rather than fewer larger ones.

    The first of the large converted carriers was the USS Saratoga (CV-3), which was commissioned on 16 November 1927. It was followed a month later by the commissioning of the USS Lexington (CV-2) on 14 December 1927. These vessels were also referred to as ‘battle’ or ‘fleet’ aircraft carriers, although these terms were never official US navy definitions.

    Lexington-Class Carriers

    Officially, the USS Lexington and the USS Saratoga formed the Lexington class of carriers. The US navy assigns ships of similar type into classes as they tend to share the same operational capabilities. The US navy, like other navies, names each class of ships after the first ship authorized in that class. Hence, despite the USS Saratoga being the first ship in its class to be commissioned, it was still listed as number three as the USS Lexington had been authorized first.

    Due to the armoured hulls inherited from the battle-cruiser design, the standard displacement of the two Lexington-class carriers came in at 36,000 tons, thereby exceeding the limit set by the Washington Naval Treaty. The US navy circumvented this problem by using a clause in the arms control treaty that allowed the modernization of existing ships with 3,000 tons of additional armour for protection from both aerial and underwater attack. Full load displacement of the Lexington-class carriers was 41,000 tons.

    In the US navy, the term ‘full load displacement’ refers to that of a ship ready to sail into action with a complete load of fuel and reserve boiler water. As with the term ‘standard displacement’, full displacement is measured in long tons (2,240lb per ton) rather than short tons (2,000lb per ton).

    The overall length of the Lexington-class carriers was 888 feet. Both had been fitted with a single Norden mechanical flywheel-operated catapult on their flight decks for the occasional launch of

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