Historically High - WW2: The USS Enterprise

Episode Date: September 2, 2026

The Japanese incorrectly thought they sink her three times earning her the moniker, The Grey Ghost. This week on Historically High, we chart the legendary run of the USS Enterprise (CV-6)—the carrier that carried the Pacific War on her back when it was literally Enterprise vs. Japan, and served as the godmother of modern naval aviation by pioneering 24-hour night combat and revolutionizing damage control. From her near miss at Pearl, to her critical role at Midway, to holding off suicide swarms at Okinawa, to her controversial absence at the Tokyo Bay surrender, we break down how the ultimate ghost ship became the most decorated warship in U.S. history...Tune in, spark up, and let’s talk The Big E. Thanks for listening and don’t forget to hit subscribe, leave a 5-star rating and write a review. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Join us at Patreon.com/HistoricallyHigh and get enrolled for some fun extra content Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Oh boy. I really, whenever we jump into these learning episodes and you get to teach me and I get to teach you, I love when you go historical fiction. I love the choices that you make. But there's a zone that you get in when we talk about war that is pretty unbeatable. I'm running out of fictional histories, man. Those take a lot of study. We have gotten the recommendations.

I know Warhammer's a big one, but that is. Here's the thing. And then I'll get back on the actual. topic because we're talking about a big sexy lady today. We're talking about the big E, the gray ghost, the USS Enterprise, not from Star Trek or anything like that, but this ship is the most decorated ship in all of World War II. And there's a reason that this name has been carried over not only through actual passage between other warships and everything, but also is used in fiction because it has that much recognition. Really quick,

going back to the fictional history thing. Because there are so many, because you've also recommended, like, can we do Marvel? Can we do something about that? There are so many different artists and interpretations and canon and everything like that,

that kind of like how Batman people like, you know, either like the Keaton or you like this version, the Nolan's and everything. It's just dependent on who's playing the character and what story they're telling that can make it like that. But I'm cooking up some stuff.

Maybe with Doomsday coming up if we do another teaching episode. Maybe I'll just do, because it'll get you ready for it. Maybe I'll do a condensed explanation of the entire Infinity saga leading up to Doomsday before we see it. And then when we go see it, you'll be completely caught up without having to watch 20 movies. Oh, the new Marvel? Yeah, the new Avengers. I don't want to hurt your feelings, but I might be pretty checked out on Marvel for a while.

No, no, no. Listen, I've been checked out on Marvel for a while. But this one is bringing back the OG Avengers cast. I will drag you. Isn't that kind of a desperate move, though? Depends on how they do it. I'm excited to see how they do it. They press the Robert Downey Jr.

button in a whole different character. You're getting the fucking episode, whether you want it or not. Okay. All right. Whether you use that knowledge, maybe some people listening here will find it. We'll find it useful.

But yeah, getting back to the episode. So we're talking about the aircraft carrier that pretty much served throughout the entire Pacific theater. And that's huge because at one point during the war, she was for I think a six-week period, was literally the only aircraft carrier in the entire Pacific. That was operable. Gotta feel pretty vulnerable.

They, and I'll probably touch on this later, they painted a giant banner and hung it on the flight deck that said Enterprise versus Japan. No, we'll pick you up. No. Okay. No. Just to get back to the Star Trek.

Is that why Star Trek used Enterprise? Yep. Really? Yep. That many years later? Mm-hmm. Wow. So, yeah, the name recognition stands alone by itself.

You said this is the most decorated ship of World War II. Does that probably make it the most decorated ship of all time just because we've moved away kind of from that? I guess the sea battles? guess you would say. Sorry. I guess the thought process on that would be, you get the decorations and the combat stars and things like that from being active in combat. So she got, apparently there were, I believe, 22, what they consider like battles that

you could earn a battle star. 20 or 22. I should have the exact number. It's probably at the bottom here. She earned, I want to say if it was 20, she earned 18. of those. If it was 22, she earned 20 of those. She was two away, and it was because not

that she was somewhere else doing something else, she was at everything, but she was actually being repaired during those two times. Wasn't that she didn't want to be there. Oh, she yearn't be there. To be there. But it's, and here's the thing,

this isn't just about a ship or anything like that. What was really cool about doing the research on this, we're hearing like the personal stories, and when you think about, we did the Midway episode, so we've talked about Enterprise before, she was crucial in turning the tide of the war, one of the two carriers operating against three carriers from the Japanese,

and she makes a huge statement during that battle. But it's not just about the pilots. It's about the actual sailors that are controlling the ship. It's about the crews that are working on the planes. It's about the gun crews that are fighting off the dive, bombers and the torpedo bombers trying to keep the floating home safe for over 2,000 sailors. It's about the command of the ship itself and about the fleet working hand in hand with the command for the aviation wing. And it's just like there's so many different factions within this ship

itself and how it operates, but everything is like symbiotic with the other one. You need a little bit of everything while at the same time the captain, the guy at the helm has to be able to coordinate or these kind of just units that work amongst themselves and know where to be, when to be, how to be. We'll get into that. Okay. Before we get in the episode, remember, patreon.com slash historically high. Bonus content just out the wazoo. I mean weekly on Fridays. some fun stuff we we have a lot of

it's enjoyable to be able to do these condensed episodes and just have these game shows and I really truly am happy that we're doing Patreon it's a little bit extra work but at the same time I think that we're getting some good stuff out five star reviews or reviews we love five star ratings if you can keep handing them to us that would be fantastic

or five star reviews just you can be Five stars, leave a nice comment. If you even want to put the five stars in the review, I don't know how that button works, but I'm assuming you can put emojis in there. Keep on subscribing. Let's keep growing this thing together. You're just as much of a part of this as we are.

Thank you for what you do. Let's set sail. All right, so the USS Enterprise, her designation was CV6. So if you just type in USS Enterprise, it's going to pull up any ship like that. If you put CV6, you'll get images of her. She's, again, the most decorated U.S. warship of World War II.

she was there from Pearl Harbor all the way almost up to that final victory in Tokyo. And as far as where she was in the interim during that entire time period, she was everywhere within the Pacific, all the major engagements, Midway, Guadalcanal, Latea, Gulf, Philippines, everything. Do you have nautical miles traveled? I don't. That would be something interesting to know. So by the war's end, she had earned the battle stars that we talked about.

She had helped sink 71 enemy ships. And not only was she really important throughout the entire course of the war, but because she was such like a longstanding, part of the secret why she was like, she had such survivability wasn't that she didn't get hit. She fucking got hit quite a bit. But there were guys that like the damage control commander in charge of all that stuff, pioneered a bunch of techniques that weren't standard at the time that made damage control of bombings and things like that much more manageable to where they could have fires under control in a fraction of the time that other carriers.

And they were just switching up like crazy-ass techniques. Like you know when you're like doing your firefighting or you're trying to put a fire out? You take a hose and you try to make it into a jet of water to hit, right? Aviation fuel apparently is not like that. so they were using like little fittings that went on it that fanned the water out into these huge like mist sprayers to contain like aviation fuel fires and things like that they were using like first generations of like foam and everything to like put out fires oh like chemical reactions to chemical type stuff the guy also and it's stupid little details but it's really important like when aviation fuel they would be refueling planes like down the flight death or in the hangar, he would have them purge every fuel line with, I want to say it was carbon dioxide or something like that, to where if there was an explosion, there wasn't trapped gas in those lines that just started all these other additional fires.

So even just small things like that that made it, you know, a lot easier to when the damage did happen to mitigate it as much as possible. So not only that, but she pioneers so many other things in naval warfare. It's still stuff that is just, it seems commonplace today. Like you see it in war movies. If you know anything about the operations of the military, these things will sound really familiar. She was the second of three ships of the Yorktown class. So the other ones were the USS Yorktown and then also the USS Hornet that were designed in the 1930s.

And they were designed under, we talked about it, I think, during the Imperial Japanese episode, the Washington Naval Treaty that was done to basically limit the amount of tonnage. of certain ships so people's navies couldn't start to build up their forces, things like that, yada, yada, yada. Before you continue, just look that up, traveled 275,000 miles during World War II. Over a quarter of a million miles, this ship traveled. Yeah, she made quite a few back and forth. That's so far. I know. So the limits that were enforced by the naval treaty forced the engineers that were designing these ships

to make certain concessions to try to balance armor speed, and then also what they were primarily supposed to be for, their capacity to carry planes, their aviation capacity. And so this ends up resulting in one of the most successful carrier designs in history based on how they performed and, you know, their war records and services. And this was purpose built as an aircraft carrier, right? This wasn't ever refitted? Correct.

This was a purpose built, kind of like we talked about. with the IGN episode. The last couple aircraft carriers that they made, they took battleship holes and simply then elevated flight decks and everything. So yes, this was purpose built. Some lighter carriers, they called them Jeep carriers. These are what they would use, like,

if you had to send a bunch of fighters out to Hawaii. You can't fly fighters. They don't have, like, bombers have the fuel capability to get all the way from the West Coast out there, or up to Alaska and then out there. fighters, you would have to just either crate them and send them out there or ones that you wanted to keep assembled, you would then just kind of taxi them out on these like light carriers, the Jeep carriers, which were basically converted holes that just had like flight decks on them.

Okay. So construction begins at the Newport, New or Newport Shipyard in Virginia on July 16th, 1934. So we're not even at war yet, but we're starting to build up our strength. it's kind of crazy how technology even in like 34 we were like so we need to design something that we can have on the ocean to launch and recover planes and basically uses a mobile airport because the future is going to be aviation but you still have that huge proponent of being like no battleships are still going to rule the day big guns all that suck

still got to get close enough to touch them with the aviation part of it but it's you can go much further than a battleship that's why that was the advantage But as far as, like, in order to get planes there, which will be the future, we have to have something that can carry and then launch the planes close enough to make the planes effective. Exactly. So she ends up getting launched on October 3rd to start like a 19-month outfitting. So launching is when they basically have it to where the hole can be floated. And then they'll go and they'll move it up against a pier.

And that's when they start dropping in all the guts and doing all that kind of stuff. So her overall length ends up being 809 feet. it ends up being expanded during one of her refits to 827 feet. So think about two and a half, just a little bit more than two and a half football fields, including the end zones. Or wait, that would be not including the end zones, right? It would be 120 yards. So what, 360 feet would be including end zones? Well, no, not.

Yeah, but how many yards is that then? 120 yards. I hate how we do have to do math during this. She's a little over two and a half football fields long. But that's huge, man. Like, I was trying to get a perspective of being like, what would it look like standing near that, something that large? There's a phobia about that, I think.

Like, large man-made objects that give you some type of anxiety. Well, I mean, some of the ways that I would think of it is, like, 175-yard par three, how far away that hole is? Yeah. Like, that's the distance. How far is it? It's 809 feet. or 827 eventually.

827 feet, so that's 200. Three football fields is 300 feet, correct? Yeah, almost three football fields is what we're going to go with. Yeah. So almost three football fields, that might be a light par four. Yeah. So from T-box to hole, that's how long the goddamn should be. That actually puts it into a real good perspective.

That's actually the way I should have thought about it. That's nuts. I have to hit a golf ball. If you're having to be like, I can't quite. see the flag. They said that it was far enough. I did see this. They said it was far enough

that when you were standing on one end of the flight deck, perspective shifted and made the other end of the flight deck smaller. Apparently there's a distance in which that optical effect takes... Yeah, I'm sure. But you would see it get skinnier

as it went down, which is crazy for something just moving around on the ocean. Also, maybe a dumb thing. I wonder if that's a long enough span toward it could feel the curvature of the earth. Like if the,

the bow and the stern fuel? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, you don't think so? Not a chance. Because I guess it's miles that you kind of have to look down on like a runway to see the curvature. You can't see the curvature of the earth in that sense. That's just the natural curvature of the runway to drain water. What about like the road? You can see the curvature of the earth if you look down something straight enough.

I don't think you can. You got to have quite a bit of elevation to remotely see the curvature. You got to be like very, very high to see the curve. curve you're like up in a plane. Buddy, you need to look this up. Okay. You need to look that up. Look up how high you have to, not how stoned, but how altitude wise, how far you have to be up there.

Okay. So as far as her width, it was, I want to say like 95. That was at the water line. It was 95 inches after she had a refit to add some of those huge like torpedo blisters. that they would put on battleships to absorb the impact from a torpedo. What were the blisters made of? Steel. Okay.

So think of it just like if you were to take, I love that you're getting into this with me. Okay. If you had the whole of a battleship or something, and then like you just took Plato and kind of curved it along and made like humps almost down the side. Okay. And those things would essentially be hollow portions where, or sometimes filled with like water or something.

like that where if a torpedo hit that, it's not hitting the hole of the ship. That's where it's exploding. And it's not going to do any damage to the actual structure of the ship. You're almost doing it like, you know when in like war movies or if you see footage on TV, if they're driving around a place where there are rocket launchers, they can be launched, they have those screens on their vehicles to hit the impact and break it up before it hits the actual Jeep or the Humvee or whatever. That's what the blisters kind of did. They were just essentially an extension of metal that went out that was then hollow section between that and the hole, and that's what would absorb the impact.

So it wouldn't detonate inside that section. And once they take one, they could be discarded and... No, no, no. It would still be there, but it's much easier to just simply be able to patch that section and not patch the inner hole of the ship. And it was about survivability. So even if those things got hit three or four times, as long as it's not hitting and flooding the inside of the ship, it's still going to stay afloat.

Pretty hard to have two direct torpedo hits in the same spot, I'm sure. Pretty hard in the same spot, but I mean, it could get hit multiple. You get hit multiple times, but it's not going to hit the same 20-foot area. Yeah. So the maximum width of the actual flight deck itself was 114 feet. So if you're standing on one side at the widest spot and you're looking just width across, it's over 100 feet. that's width wise is nuts.

Yeah. It's a thick lady. So she was powered by nine. This is going to be familiar for you. Babcock and Wilcox boilers. That powered four Parsons geared steam turbines. Really? Yep.

Obviously these weren't nuclear yet. Thank God. Yes, but you can kind of see how... Did it have a valve that was supposed to open and let off steam? Okay, so personal stuff. story. No shit. So when my grandpa was in World War II, he served in the engine room because he was a mechanic. Yeah. In the engine room of a, I think it was a cruiser. And I read a story about this when I was doing research. And he had told me stories like this. And I was like, holy shit, that took me back. So if there were leaks in the steam room, the steam, if there was a pinprick that you couldn't even see in any of the steam pipes or anything like that.

and the steam was under such pressure. It would be invisible to the human eye, but it would, they would have to take a broom handle and wave it out in front of them to search for steam leaks and it would sever the fucking broom handle. It would slice it.

So when they were waving it in front of them, walking down here to see where there was a leak, if they waved it in front and that thing, it would get cut in half or cut wherever the steam leak was. Because of the pressure it's being expelled? Yep. So not just the heat.

heat the okay the pressure itself okay and I'm guessing the heat I mean that's shit so superheated but it was so pressurized that it would cut like a piece of wood like the laser beams yeah pretty much wow but he I remember him I was like that's fucking crate like if someone wasn't like decapitation shit huh so total output was 120,000 horsepower on these giant four propellers she was fast as shit, she could travel 32 and a half knots, which is almost 37 and a half miles an hour. So she could outrun most other ships, and this was also really important, because when you're on a ship, you are generating your own headwind to get these planes off your deck.

The more speed you can generate, the more wind you can generate, and you can launch planes easier. So she had to be fast as well. So if she was cruising just at a normal like 15 knots or so, she could reach on like one fuel load out to about like 12,500 miles, would be her range. So she could cruise a pretty sizable area. What's the size of the fuel tank? I didn't look that up.

Sorry, I keep asking these questions. No, no, that's fine. But what's crazy too is the way they would store this fuel oil is the bottom of these ships as well, kind of down where they would get hit before these torpedo blisters, they had like a section where there would be a section of the hole, then a hollow section filled with either water or fuel oil, and then another intersection of the hole,

to where once that outer section got hit, the liquid in there would disperse the shockwaves, and it wouldn't buckle apart the interior of the ship. 4,271 tons of fuel oil, roughly 1.3 to 1.5 million gallons. for its own propulsion boilers and about 160,000 gallons of aviation gasoline for its parked aircraft. I don't even want to look. Can you imagine the final numbers for how many gallons of fuel were used just by the Navy in the Pacific? The sheer amount of time that it would take just to fuel it.

All those dead dinosaurs, man. Yeah. So how many crew she had on her? So like early war peacetime, she would have 2,200 a little bit more personnel. That includes the ship's officers, the enlisted crew, and then also pilots what they consider like the air wing. And then during peak wartime, which was 1944 to 45, she had almost 3,000.

And the crew ended up growing because the Navy, as more battle experience had occurred, they saw planes being able to get through. They upped her like anti-aircraft guns and a bunch of new advance like radar tracking rooms that they would be able to use for, because they were using this ship also. A lot of these guys, like the admirals,

were using this as a flagship, where they would be commanding entire operations from. That was probably a pretty foregone conclusion, right? That that was just going to be the chosen flagship. After a certain point, I mean, when those three first came out, it could have been kind of any one of them

because she wasn't the first one off the line. I think it was the Yorktown. So it could have been someone being like, I want the Yorktown. I think once she kind of proves herself, that's when there's a certain mystique about it. And it's going to be, we talked about him during Midway,

but Bull Halsey, he's the one that had to sit midway out because he got the rash like the dermatitis really bad he's the one that's going to be kind of early on the captain and then he turns it over when he has to get sent back stateside to get medical treatment so the enterprise carried an average of like 80 to 90 aircraft and they had a maximum of like 96 if they squeeze the flight deck full and then also into the hanger deck so they would carry and most aircraft are going to be aircraft carriers are going to be the same, but they're going to carry three types of aircraft. They're going to carry the fighters, which early on were the wildcats, and then later on were the hell cats.

Die bombers, which throughout the entire war, they used the dauntless die bombers because they were fucking money. And then for the torpedo bombers, they would use early on the devastators, and then later on they would use what are called the Avengers. So the way that warfare essentially would work aircraft carrier to aircraft carrier, naval battles would work, is you would launch your fighters, and your fighters would essentially be the protectors of the aircraft carrier, and they would run basically a screen, they called it Combat Air Patrol. So they would basically go in areas where they thought the enemy would be coming from most likely. You would have the radar back on the carrier directing them if they start

picking up enemy contacts. Fighters go take out these bombers and torpedo bombers that are trying to come in and sink our ships. The torpedo bombers and the dive bombers from the enterprise would be going out to try to find the other aircraft carriers and ships from the enemy force and would attack them two different ways. So the torpedo bombers, early on especially, were these just slow-ass things. I think they had two or three crew members and they would have to be slow because they would have to get low, have to slow down because if they dropped the torpedo and, you know,

to the water at too high of a speed, it would break apart. They were already insanely notorious for being so unreliable that, like, I think half the time, they didn't even explode when they hit. You would just start playing, and then it would sink, yes. Oh. I think we talked about that during midway, too. So these guys, if there was nothing tying up the enemy combat air patrol, they would just be easy pickets because they would also be getting shot out by the ships, kind of flying it

at low levels and flying in slow. and you'd have to get line of sight and line yourself up to drop that torpedo because it's only going straight. These aren't heat seekers or anything like that. It's a straight line trajectory thing. The dive bombers, exactly like it implies, would attack from way up high,

dive straight down at the ships, and then basically drop a bomb that they had suspended under the plane to try to then punch through the flight deck wherever and hit these ships and take them out. Pull up on that yoke or throttle. Hard as humanly possible. Yep, exactly.

So they carried those three ties. to defend themselves and then to attack the enemy that they were going after. So the flight deck, and I'm just going to kind of let you know what the aircraft care, because we haven't done one on carriers, so this is kind of merged into this one as well. So the flight deck is basically the heart of the ship, axes of floating, highly synchronized and insanely dangerous airport. Because not only do you have all of these planes, a normal airport if you're thinking about it, is so structured.

Planes never really go out at the same time. everyone's waiting their turn. It's a well-oiled machine, but there is a overarching theme of extreme safety about it. Now you're taking a ton of prop planes, jamming them onto a, it's still a large flight deck, but in comparison with how many planes you have on,

it's really not. And you have people running around that are trying to do multiple jobs. So... All-steel flight deck? No. Yeah, we'll get into that little bit. buddy i love that you're asking these questions so the flight deck is like a masterpiece of 1930s engineering

and it's not only maximizing how planes take off but it's also maximizing how they land how we get them into a position where they can refuel or damage planes can get into a repair and we can clear this flight deck to make sure that it can be just launching and recovering the entire time so it's actually made of Douglas fir. And modern carriers are all made of metal and everything like that. They're armored flight decks. But the Enterprise is built with that Douglas fir deck

and it's laid over a very thin steel subdeck and then like the framework and everything. And the reason they chose wood is because it kept the ship's center of gravity very low. I mean, those things are already very top heavy. So if you put armor up there,

it's going to throw that off and it's going to tip and rock and everything. And they also did that because they could repair it a lot easier. Because even if it, you know, they had armor, it's only going to be, it has to mitigate at some point where it's like, are we going to put enough on here to stop everything? And if we do, it's going to be so heavy, it's not going to function. So they were like, if it hits, it's going to penetrate. We're going to have to deal with it when explodes in the hangar, deck below or whatever. But the whole point of this thing is to keep the flight deck going. So wood allowed us to basically

over a gaping hole in the deck to throw down a steel sheet and then put pieces of wood on there to actually repair it, smooth it out, and keep it operating until we're able to get out of combat and then do some more extensive repairs on it. I wonder whether they used a soft wood. Would hardwood just be heavier and it would kind of defeat the purpose of a lighter deck? Maybe. Yeah.

It just seems weird that you would use something that's soft that would scrape pretty easily. I mean, I'm sure they had... Maybe it was also easier to work with, because they were, like, sawing pieces and cutting pieces that they had to try to fit them in specific areas. Did they have a lumber mill on the plane? Somewhat, yeah. That's fucking cool. Yeah. I like that.

Yeah, they also had supply ships, because remember, these things would travel in groups. So the supply ships could have something like the lumber mill and things like that, machine shops in them as well. And then you're just cutting them to form to whatever. whatever size you need to replace on the deck. That's weird. That's cool. So they also had catapults too. They were using catapults that early on.

We're still using catapults apparently. So I've heard. Yes. So she was originally fitted with these two hydraulic catapults that were flush with the bow, like on the flight deck. They end up being rarely used because the early warplanes were light enough to just take off at a standard rolling run with her speed generating enough lift. plus if you're trying to use a catapult you have to get the planes spotted you have to get under them you have to make sure the cable is secured

and then you're launching one or two to time then you have to get the other ones up in line if it's possible to just be like go go go go go plane takes off go go go go go go plane takes off go go go that's much faster much easier so they also had one when they were designing it that was built inside the hangar deck so how these hanger decks were built

is you had the flight deck up top and then underneath it was a two-story hangar that ran probably 75% of the width of the interior of the ship, and then probably, again, 75% of the length of the interior of the ship and the flight deck. Crazy long. But it stretched. So basically, if you think about it, you have a flight deck, and then below it, you have something that's completely flat and can be worked on. and you can almost, because of the elevator system they had, you can run an assembly line.

So what would happen is there were three elevators on the ship. And one was forward, midship, and then in the AFS section. And they were hydraulic, and they could lift a fully armed five-ton aircraft from the belly of the ship up to the flight deck in under 10 seconds. Under 10 seconds? They were fast. Wow. And so these elevators,

what they would do is, let's say that when you were getting ready to launch planes, you would have them all ready and prepped at the rear of the deck. They would all launch. And then as those planes are launching, if you're trying to launch more, you have those ready to go below deck. You've warmed up the engines and everything like that. And those are sitting at the back of the ship, ready and waiting for that rear elevator. As soon as that flight deck is clear, that elevator's going to go down,

it's going to have planes loaded onto it, raised up. Those things are going to launch. It's going to lower back down, get more planes. Those things are going to launch. And the hangar deck, instead of being solid and completely enclosed, had these giant sliding, like, metal screens that when they were fueling or warming up planes, they opened them so they weren't building up like fumes and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, that's just what I was thinking.

And also, if something did penetrate the flight deck, when those were open during battle or whatever, the force could go outward. Instead of just staying condensed. And that's what happened with the Japanese carriers is they'd had, no doors or anything like that. It was all the flight decks were completely enclosed. And so all that fumes and all that kind of stuff built up in there, and all that stuff would ignite.

Also seems pretty sketchy having a propeller in an enclosed area spinning, especially that many. I think you could engage and disengage the, but they would warm up the engines, make sure they were firing correctly, and then maybe shut them down as they started bringing them back up to the deck. So there were three of these. And so, like, again, as you're launching,

you're bringing more up to launch. When you're recovering, the planes go in. All of a sudden, they hit the cables that, you know, hydraulically slow down. The planes, there were nine cables that were placed along the back part of the flight deck that they would hit. And as soon as that happened, shut the plane down and a crew that was designated, I think I'm going to get to the shirts here in just a second. Let's see. The blue shirts, they were the plane pushers and the chalkmen. These guys were like plane wrestlers.

As soon as this thing shut down, these guys would shove this plane and they would either get it to the, mid-deck elevator or the forward elevator and if there was damage or anything needed to be done to the plane they would drop the plane right down into the flight deck and then what they would do is anything they needed to do to the plane they would either get it off to the side we're trying to repair this or if it just needed to be refueled or reloaded they weren't doing it on the deck they would lower it down refuel it rearment and just push it all the way back to the back of the plane and have it ready for that elevator to then raise it back up and launch it again so it literally worked as a conveyor belt, just like as it went down, it just pushed them to the back of the line and then brought them back up.

The speed of the elevator is probably more crucial during landings than takeoffs, right? To get everything clear? Correct, because you can't have a gaping hole in the middle of the flight deck. So as that, and what they would do is they would probably push them to the furthest one down. Yeah. Because if they missed those arresting cables, there was something, a giant net that would come up in front, like a crash net. But you couldn't have a big hole where that midship. elevator was because then that thing would crash in, burst into flames or do whatever.

Wow, that's, we've talked about firing off from these aircraft carriers a lot. This has given me all sorts of questions about the catch net is ridiculous. But insanely necessary. Yeah. And it's, if you're thinking about any way to do it, and that's really the only thing that you could do. It's not like you could put a crash pad back there. No.

Because you had to be able to collapse it down real quick. and then, and if planes were damaged, especially during like combat, I was watching, there's not a ton of footage, but there's some good footage. There's footage of this thing being hit twice. But some of the footage is if the thing is constantly moving when it's in battle, it's turned into the side. You can see the deck tilting and guys running up the deck,

like they're trying to run uphill or run sideways down the deck while it's moving back and forth. Guys on the complete outside skirts or were all of the anti-aircrafts, stuff and they're just firing off like up in like all directions. But if a plane would come in and it would be in bad shape, it would be on fire or anything like that, they were like, no, fuck this. And they would just get the thing and shove it off the ship, get the pilot out and everything and just get rid of the plane. They could have a new plane.

They had plenty of spares down there. Plenty of spares. Probably get them as they're bringing them out to you. We're building them as fast as they can. Not building them and repairing them. But as far as like rearmaments and stuff. Oh yeah, yeah, definitely. So these elevators were, if these dive bombers could focus on something, because a lot of these ships, even the Japanese ships had elevators, you would be trying to focus on dropping your bomb near these elevators because if you could disable one of these things, you could potentially put a big hole in the flight deck by taking it out, or you could completely throw off their ability for the conveyor belt to work and slow that thing down, and then they would be less effective.

So these were huge targets. And if you look at them on the American decks, I mean, you can definitely tell it there, but they're not like they don't stand out, but you can see where the wood trim is carved around them and everything. So for the deck operations, you had of like five different crews out there with different responsibilities. It was this basically choreographed chaos

that was managed by crew members that would be standing up like on the tower, but looking down on the flight deck kind of making sure everyone was doing their shit that they were supposed to be doing. So the yellow shirts were aircraft handling officers and plane directors, and they're the ones that basically

conducted the symphony of what was going on on the deck. The blue shirts, again, were the plane pushers and the chalkmen. You had the red shirts, who were the ordinance guys, that are bringing out the carts that are loaded with the 500,000 pound bombs or whatever it is, rockets, machine gun ammo and getting the planes reloaded. The green shirts were the catapult

and arresting gear crews, who either hooked up the planes at the front, which they didn't do a whole lot. They were basically stepping in during recovery to make sure that they were, as soon as they hit the arresting cables, they were getting them disconnected them, you know, for the guys to be able to move them off. And then the purple shirts were called the grapes. And these guys were the aviation fuel handlers,

basically making sure that they were getting these things gassed up. Everybody else didn't get a nickname, but the... I'm sure everybody had nicknames. I think I would have been a plane pusher. That feels more my speed. I think that would probably be your speed. Get it down there. Let me push it around.

Let me use the brute force to get it where it needs to go. I want to conduct the symphony. I want to make the music. Or be the guy that gets to do the exaggerated hand signals when they're winding up the prop, and they get to point him down the runway to go. Signal crew, is that? Yeah, that is definitely is, yeah.

Huh. So the island itself on the enterprise, you had basically the island structure that I want to say was like if you're standing on the, like you were standing on the dock next to it and you looked up, they said the top of the island structure was as tall as about a 15-story building. So 150 feet up. And then that also housed in the interior of it,

that's where the smoke stacks were. So a pretty big section of that tower when you look at it is hollowed out by the smokestacks that are supposed to direct the boiler and all the exhaust and everything off and away from the ship. Probably a pretty crucial spot to hit too if you're trying to bomb, right? The stack? Yeah. I don't think you would do as much damage because it might, like, damage it in the sense of the smoke can't get out.

It might be fumes. Correct. But that's, they're going for essentially, they know where the weak points are. They have to get their bombs below deck where there's ammo and fuel. Plus, they're probably more concerned making, hey, getting the defensive planes out of the way and stopping what's going on coming off the front. So the lower levels of the tower, that's the flight deck level, and that had like the access hatches to actually get onto the flight deck,

had ready rooms for the pilots, and then like a little, they called it a sea cabin, where the captain could basically sleep during like high-ler operation, so he could be very close to everything. The middle levels would be command and control, so you had the navigation bridge, which was the navigation for the ship itself, the wheelhouse, and that would of course be front-facing

where you could see everything that was going on. That's where the captain, the XO, and the navigators basically handled the actions of the physical ship. This is where you also had all of the radio commitment to communicate with the rest of the ship. The flat bridge was directly above that, and that was like a separate command space. And this is where if this was acting as a flagship,

like the Admiral would actually have his staff to run the broader fleet operator. without being in the way of the captain running the ship. So they had all of this stuff compartmentalized to where there was no overlap. Upper levels. It's going to be helpful with that many people. I mean, 2,000 crew on this thing. And when, if you ever watch footage of like the flight deck when they're not in combat,

there's a hundred people plus just out there push. There's probably no joke when they're moving these planes. There's probably 20 guys per plane, maybe more. There's usually eight to ten on each wing and then three or four on the rear wing pushing it backwards into place. So, I mean, they're moving these things fast because these are big planes. Yeah, not small at all. So upper levels had aviation control. Primary flight control was located at the very top of the island so it could overlook the whole flight deck and get a view out for planes coming in.

This was where the air boss would sit and he basically just made sure the conveyor belt kept going. You have the chart house, upper level spaces were used for like navigation planning. And then you would have above that would just be like the mast and the superstructure where you'd have like the radar. And then also can you imagine if your job was the lookout? Because they had them at all times. Guys up there whose job it was to go up there with high power binoculars and just constantly watch the sky and watch the horizon for other ships and planes. where was our what is that word of waiting me

not navigation radar where were we on radar at this point in time so she did have radar to begin with and it looked like a giant box spring mattress just you know without the fabric and everything on it is what it kind of looked like it later gets upgraded

but she was one of the first ships to carry that huge ass search radar and it allowed her to detect incoming Japanese strike over 50 miles away. Damn. So that was why she's also extremely survivable because she's like they're 50 miles out, start launching our fighters to go out and intercept them. Huh.

What about the bakery? Of course it had a bakery, my man. Big bakery? Are we talking all sorts of confections? Oh yeah. Huh. Yeah. God, I want to go back in two of the Missouri with you just to be able to have you going to look at the ice cream shop. Mess hall.

And the bakery and everything. Yeah, definitely. All right. Now that we know what she looks like and how she kind of is all put together, let's talk about what she's actually done. Like that idea. I just, it's fascinating to think how many people,

2,000 people, again, we talked about, it's just a shitload of people. The birthings, is that where they slept? Yeah. You would have to have. have so many birthings. You've seen the way that they stack Navy or naval beds.

That shit's crazy. So I think a lot of the birthings were at the front of the ship, but it operated in the sense that you only needed enough birthings for, I think, half to a third because they were... Hot-cott-kot-net or whatever they called it. Yep. Hot-cock, hot-cott-knit. That's right.

Not hot-cock. Hot-cott-I think they called it. All about that. Yep. All right. So let's jump back, May 1938 to April of 1933. She's out in the Atlantic in the Caribbean. She goes down to Rio de Janeiro.

She's doing kind of her sea trials, and they like to do them because you can get some swells out there in the Atlantic, so it starts to kind of put the ship through its paces. And they did some war games in the Caribbean and along the east coast. They transferred it to San Diego in April of 1939, so she did go through the Panama Canal. And she was designed, the way she was designed again, had to fit within the size of the canal. with that in mind. It was Panamax or whatever they called it. It was Panamax. Good job, buddy.

But they said it was inches on each side. But then if you were standing on the concrete where it was passing you and you looked up, the flight deck overhung quite a bit, so you're still standing under the ship. So she ends up arriving at Naval Air Station, San Diego, which was on the North Island. And she gets there in time to be featured in this movie called Die Bomber,

which was a World War II movie, that starred Errol Flynn. Okay. I guess it's not imminent use at this point, so we can just be using it in a movie. Like, we weren't mid-war at this point in time where it's like, hey, we need this person out there. No, we need a week for Errol Flynn to shoot a movie on this.

It was more than a week. And here's the other thing I was thinking, kind of the same thing. Like, this is a brand new naval asset. Like, let's get her out doing some shit. Well, do you recruit? recruiting potential of that because apparently this movie is like

really fucking good looking for the time and everything and I you know being able to use Errol Flynn as a recruitment tool for the Navy was probably too good of an opportunity for them to pass up You said to make sure that none of the film got to Japan Yeah because I mean think about it it was in 1941 that this came out So people are watching this when it's high time for people to have Walked Down to the Recruiting Office

Then Pearl Harbor So kind of as the, you know, the water's heating up between Japan and the United States. Shit's already been popping off over in Europe. FDR decides to move the forward base of the Pacific Fleet from San Diego out to Hawaii, just basically as a deterrent against the Japanese for trying to invade or anything like that. So she's sent out there to Oahu as well. Is that Coronado where the naval base is? I think that's where that's at now.

Okay. I'm not insanely familiar with it. We were hunting for Coronado during the Gears of War episode and kept coming up with Catalina. Wait, during what? During the Gears of War episode when you were talking about that island

off of the coast where the conservatory laboratory was? Ahzura? Sure. That's what it's called Azura. Yeah. I think we were looking for Coronado and we kept coming up with Catalina.

Okay. That hit me, I don't know, five days ago at about 2 o'clock in the morning as I was lying in bed. I had to pull up my notes and make a note about a trip I want us to take. That would be a really interesting episode. Okay, anyway, so for the next year and a half, she's basically doing a shit ton of pilot training

and a bunch of high-stakes ferry missions to get planes out to like Wake Island and out to Midway as well. Because, again, at this point, we're full on prepping to go to war. So we're getting as many assets as far out into the Pacific as we possibly can. So we are pushing out to the Pacific.

Japan is rounding up most of Southeast Asia after we cut off the rubber supply. And gas, I think. And the gas supply. We know that something is imminent coming our direction most likely after we cut those sources off. So we're trying to rush to catch them before they can get close enough to our seaboard, our western seaboard? I think we're just trying to, like they were trying to create that sphere, that co-prosperity, like that line that was defensible. We're trying to do the same thing on our side by making our response be able to respond to a certain point out away as far from the continental United States as we can. Enterprise carrier fleets move from San Diego out to Hawaii.

Correct. The entire Pacific fleet is moved out to Oahu. That's why there's so many ships when December 7th rolls long. And we're also worried about the Philippines because that's the, that's us at that point. So we actually do come to December 7th. So she is not in Pearl when the Japanese launched the attack that sinks a shit ton of ships. And she's actually outfaring. I think it was planes out to like wake or something like that. Technically she was scheduled to be back that morning,

but she'd ran into a storm that slowed down some of her destroyer escorts and she wasn't going to leave them alone. Good. Exactly. So when she pulls in. I think they have her stay out there. She pulls in at night on the 8th to refuel and then is sent out to go try to hunt down the Japanese fleet. And she spends the next few days doing that. On December 10th, her dive bombers end up sinking a Japanese submarine I-70.

And this is the first Japanese warships sunk by U.S. aircraft in World War II. So she's got a first. She's already got a first there. It's kind of crazy how it happened, too. So apparently, die bomber was flying off, spotted the submarine, dropped a bomb, and when the bomb dropped it didn't hit it, but it hit close enough to where the concussive shockwave, it had damaged something, I think it was a rudder and her ability to submerge. And so then she was stuck on the surface.

The dive bomber is like, I dropped my bomb. I'm heading back, but this is where I saw her other die bombers show up, and one ends up dropping and hitting it and just destroying the shit of it. but that's got to be nuts to be able to fucking hit a sub that's partially submerged with a in a dive. You also have to know when you get a direct hit, right? Oh, yes.

It's going to look much different than if it hit the water first. There's going to be a lot more smoke rising, if yeah. The noise too, I'm sure, is... Well, if you're in there, I mean, a lot of these guys would ride with the cockpit open a little bit until the wind and the sound of the engine, I don't think you could hear shit. And you also have your cans on to be able to talk to you because the Dauntless dive bombers had a crewman in the back that would run a rear-facing machine gun for rear defense. So you're also on cans talking to him as well and on the radio. In the dive for those dive bombers, you're sitting in the back on the gun.

Are you, you're not facing forward. You're falling in reverse. Jesus. At an extreme rate. And so at that point, gravity is trying to, where it's pushing the guy in front into his seat, it is actively trying to pull you out of your seat. Dix's half an inch longer.

And I think in those situations when there was no one behind, I think that person was able to turn around and maybe face because then they would be reading out altitude while the other person just stayed focused on keeping the ship deck in the crosshairs. February 1st, so in 1942, she was at the Marshall Island raid. She launched the first American offensive airstrikes of the war against Terowa, and I can't even pronounce this, Quagelan. She survived her first direct, coordinated counterattack by Japanese twin-engine bombers.

And so the bombers, the twin-engine ones, weren't like dive bombers. They were trying to basically drop, like the ones in Europe, they would drive multiple bombs, and they would try to kind of carp a bomb across the path of the carrier. They're not going to hit with everything, but they would try to drop them across the path. So they're swerving out of the way to try to dodge these. And during that time, any aircraft fire had damaged one of the engines on one of these twin-engine bombers. So as this thing's flying away, they start to see this thing make a loop. And it starts coming back and it's aimed right for the ship.

So as this thing is coming in, every fucking piece of any aircraft guns. And at this point, this is just what she has in the beginning of the war. it's not super robust, it's just what they have at the time that they're equipping these things with. So everything's opening up on this plane. It's not doing enough damage to stop it from its trajectory. And so the deck of this is packed with fueled planes and everything. It's going to cause extreme destruction. This thing doesn't have bombs on it, but it is a flying bomb unto itself at this point. So guys are diving for cover. This dude named Bruno Guido. And, not crazy about the Midway movie they made back in like 2019,

but Nick Jonas actually plays this dude Bruno Guido. And no, no, no. What I'm getting at is before I heard the story, I didn't know if this factually happened, if this guy actually did it, but they said it word for word, and this actually occurs. So I don't know if he was as handsome as Nick Jonas,

but. So people are diving for cover. This guy runs over to a, a die bomber and jumps into the back seat of it, whips out the gun, and starts actively firing at this thing from the back. And as they're watching, as they're watching the tracer rounds from his, they're hitting in the cockpit and they're hitting this plane. He hits it enough to where at the last minute, the plane veers off.

And as it veers off, I shit you not. The wing of this thing hits the tail of the dauntless that he's in and shears it off. before it tumbles into the ocean. A gun's a gun at that point. If that gun's used for anti-aircraft fire in the air, you might as well utilize it on the ground, I know. But to be someone where all of the other guns and the pilots are out there and everyone's kind of like run for cover

because this thing's going to hit the deck. And he just runs and does that. That's insane. I think Halsey was watching this happen. He's up on the deck. He's like, get that guy up here. He instantly promotes him. He's dumb as fuck, but he is so brave.

No shit, man. Well, I mean, and you got to have those guys. Yeah. So going over to February 24th. So she's really active during this time. She takes part in the Wake Island raid. They're hitting Japanese installations that they had captured that were previously American outposts to try to kind of interrupt their ability to perform like reconnaissance in the area to get a sense of where like the American Navy is going and things like that. When is that? February 24th of 42.

Okay. So we're still away. These attacks that are happening are happening. We still haven't sent Doolittle over to... Nope. We're coming up on that here in a second. This is literally two and a half months after Pearl. So we're still really on the back foot. Again, we're trying to retake or disrupt Wake because they've taken it from us.

That was originally one of the places that she was ferry and planes to. March 4th, 42 is a thing called the Marcus Island raid. she launched a strikes just a thousand miles from Tokyo and kind of does that as a bit of a psychological boost for the American public and I think kind of looking at that because Doolittle was planning the Doolittle raid for a while it wasn't just a spur of the moment type thing

go back list of that episode it's insane awesome episode but we come to April 18th of 42 which is the Doolittle raid so as she's being loaded up and everything for what is being everyone's aware it's going to be a long voyage because they can see everything's being maxed out as far as like fuel, rations,

anything that they can bring on, they're bringing on. They don't know what the mission is because this thing again is top secret. Yeah. And as they're leaving Hawaii, they end up getting out to sea. And I think they said they were out on the flight deck one day and they see, on the horizon,

they see the silhouette of the hornet. And as it gets closer, they're like, what the fuck? And they see all of the, I think it was the B-15s that were strapped to the deck. And they're like, what is going on? And as they're going, this is when they get the message that it's, force is bound for Tokyo. And as they're, after they rendezvous and everything, I think it's on the eighth when they leave Pearl. And it's the 13th when they meet up with Hornet just north of Midway at that point.

And as they're looking at this flight deck, they're like, like there's no way that they can launch fighters off the Hornet. They're like, oh shit, we are wholly responsible for the safety of this entire thing. Because if something were to happen and let's say that like we get, this thing gets sunk and we got planes up in the air, they have to then get rid of all those planes from the doolittle and try to land like it would cause complete pandemonium. These little floating islands of fighting, it's it's so. fascinating to me to think that they're all a part of the same ecosystem.

The Hornet and the Enterprise are all a part of the same system. Their sister ships do. They just, they do different things. They have different crews working independently of each other. I'm sure there's shift to ship communication, but that's just on the bridge, right? Like nobody down on the flight deck is able,

they're probably calling up to the bridge being like, hey, talk to the Hornet about this, ask them about that. But there's not like Hornet deck to... I don't think anyone's technically doing that just from a chain of command standpoint because they don't get that force is bound for Tokyo message like right away. They're just heading in a direction. They know what direction they're heading in because these guys are smart enough to know like hey, we're headed. We're headed west. Yeah, exactly. It was B-25 Mitchell. Sorry, I want to get that right. But yeah, they're basically completely and wholly responsible for that.

But go back and listen to do a little episode. They end up having to launch quite a ways out further than they anticipated, and that's its own story. As soon as they launched the planes, they said that they took a high-ass speed turned, full clip turned around and started going back for Hawaii. Was it the

enterprise that we talked about? We've done so many of these, I completely forgot, which ship it was, where the runway wasn't technically long enough for the planes to be able to take off effectively the bigger planes. Do you know what I'm talking about? There was a plane that needed a

longer runway that was, I think it was the first time they had launched a plane off of a ship? That was the B-25s. That was during the Doolittle raid. They never launched bombers off of a flight deck. That was the first time they did it. They went down, they painted the flight deck on the training base, and they were doing that. They were hitting the lines. They were like, this is where the end of the ship is. Okay. Exactly. Gotcha. And that was for the Enterprise. That, yep. For the Hornet. It was the same size of the Hornets flight down. Okay. Yep. All right. So we come to the Battle Midway.

June 4th through the 7th of 1942. Before we get into that, let's take a bathroom break. Well, hello. Listen, while we had to the restroom and get ourselves something to drink, why don't you do something nice for yourselves? Head on over to patreon.com slash historically high and get signed up for a little bonus content. I mean, come on, you deserve it.

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just want to reach out and say hello, you can hit us up on our email at historically high podcast, H-I-G-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-G-H-G-H-Mail. All right, and with that said, let's get back to the good stuff. All right, so we come again to Midway. So if you listen to the episode You know this is kind of the turning point for the Pacific War

During the course of the battle I'm not going to get too far into it Because we still got further to go on Enterprise itself But Commander Clarence Wade McCluskey is leading 32 don'tless dive bombers And they're out in a search pattern They cannot find the Japanese fleet

They know they're supposed to be here Station hyfo is decoded all the signals and everything This is the time that's supposed to spring the trap and he spots a lone Japanese destroyer that's just haul an ass in a certain direction. He's like, I think this thing might be heading back to the fleet. It's probably fine. Probably follow this guy, right?

I mean, he's out here by himself. Why not? Worst thing that happens is he'd dive bomb this guy and get him. Maybe he'll turn around and ask us for directions. Exactly. Who knows? So at 1022, McCluskey, he ends up catching sight of the entire, like, Japanese mobile force,

and their flight decks are just packed with fueled and armed planes that are ready to strike at the American fleet that's been discovered by this point. And there are zero protective like fighters up there because before that the torpedo bombers had come in and their insanely slow vulnerable planes pulled all of those fighters down low to take them out and no one was covered up top. So in less than five minutes, Enterprise bombers split up their attack and end up striking two of the fleet carriers. and they're in such a vulnerable position because of all of the planes

that are stacked up and then down below in the hangar they have all these weapons stacked up because they tried to change them from attacking Midway Island the land. So bombs that were supposed to fall in that they have to switch them over

to like armor piercing for a naval ship. They're just stacking stuff off to the side while they switch ordinance out and when a bomb hits it just detonates everything. The Caga is hit by at least four bombs from McCluskey's group. And then the Akagi is hit by Lieutenant Richard Dick Best.

And he ends up putting one that detonates in the upper hanger and then basically just chain reactions through the entire ship. And then while Enterprise was hitting those two, the Yorktown was taken damage from the plane sent out from the last of the Japanese carriers to hear you. And then Enterprise was like, shit, we got to take this thing out. because if it's hit in Yorktown, we're going to be next. Because they're not going to hit an already damaged ship. They're going to try to hit the one that's still in service. So Enterprise kind of launches this composite of like some torpedo bombers, some dive bombers and stuff to find this last carrier.

They end up locating it. They hit it with four bombs. The explosion basically devastates the entire ship. It's effectively wiped out. And not only from a standpoint, of like taking away these huge pieces of you know resource that they had for these carriers and the planes and everything all of these air crews that were trained to repair the planes to run the assembly line the conveyor belt on japanese or on japan side to get their planes off

all of these are all lost at this point is all that's still there it's got all still be there right oh yeah it's i mean it's deep water because it's not like they're right off midway they're hundreds of miles from midway Well, we know where they are. I'm pretty sure we do because it was such a, we knew where they sunk, because when they went out to run scouting and everything like that, they could either see one of them was stolen fire at one point,

but then it got scuttled or it finally sank, and they would have called in the radio positions when they hit them, so they would have a general idea. I'm pretty sure they've actually probably been discovered. I'm not one to, I guess, give Christopher Nolan, any suggestions off of the heater that he's on now. he's the one with the submarine, right? James Cameron.

Cameron, Cameron. Yeah, sorry. I feel like he should... I feel like he's done with the planet Earth. He's doing his own thing on whatever avatar planet is, and that'll be his last movie. I'd like to see some footage of this, though. I'd like to see some footage of these sunk ships out there. It'd be awesome.

Maybe we'll get enough money one day to be able to launch a voyage. Oh, I was hoping he'd say to buy a submarine. That too. You can get it from Russia at one point during coal where you could pretty easily. So while it was this overwhelming strategic victory, the enterprise had this huge cost in like human and materials. Her air groups were effectively pretty much wiped out because, again, it's an overwhelming force on the side of Japan. They had three carriers, which means they had that many planes and everything. And again, those torpedo bombers especially were just completely screwed over.

And you can't just, even if your fighters were still in good shape, you can't do anything with just fighters. It takes away your effectiveness at pretty much every stage. The Akagi rests upright on the ocean floor to depth of 18,011 feet. That's down there. Yeah. More than 1,300 miles northwest of Pearl Harbor. There's a lot of bodies still in there because a lot of guys went down with those ships. Yeah. Yeah, that's

Nobody's going to want, well, it actually looks like they found it And they've taken pictures of it, that's pretty crazy Yeah, the bones aren't going away Those people are probably fairly well preserved at that depth at that temperature, right? Yeah, I would think so. And I guess it's not that big of a deal if they're sinking fast As far as like getting the bends and expanding or anything like that Because they're probably dead.

Yeah. Wow. Because I mean, it takes them along. Like it takes a while to sink and they sit down. So anyone in those compartments that are trapped to probably drown hopefully. Huh. I don't want to think about that. I mean, the losses that she suffered a midway,

this forces her to kind of reshape her crew, forced them to kind of go back to the drawing board about how naval aviation tactics are going to work from this point going forward because they've seen, we can fight this kind of fight. We did get lucky because we knew they were going to be. But this was still a loser. battle, even though we had the

advantage and had the element of surprise. We've lost so many of our planes at this point. We need to develop a system where we're getting more guys home because we are losing experienced pilots, and that's not something that we can just instantly replace. And if

these guys are experienced, we need them to then go back and teach like the next generation. It was a Japanese problem. They weren't training anybody else up in that. They were keeping guys in those roles because they were good and they wanted talent out there, but they weren't passing that knowledge along. So, again, as it completely guts kind of the veteran leadership of the air group, McCluskey,

who was the one that followed that destroyer, was wounded during the fight and then promoted out-of-combat operations. He was sent back to actually train guys and everything. Dick Best, who hit those two ones, the two carriers, had inhaled this mixture that's, you know, supposed to be pumping oxygen into his mask and everything. but apparently you get this toxic soda because of a faulty oxygen rebreather and he was breathing in like caustic materials

and it fucked up his lungs. It triggered apparently like latent tuberculosis. And after that fight, he was done. His military career was over. He could still go back and kind of teach what he knew and everything like that but he was still laid up pretty bad for a while. Yeah, to breathe caustic material.

So they had to go into kind of the next phase and again, they're not damaged. They weren't damaged. And this Yorktown, I think, took a hit. And I think Yorktown might have been sunk during this. I think it was. I think it took a torpedo from, like, when they were toned it back, it took a torpedo from a Japanese sub.

So the Enterprise has to go into this next phase of the war, the Guadalcanal campaign, basically with this complete lack of, like, veteran ranks. They're relying on these fresh, green replacement pilots who pretty much had to learn to survive on the fly. and even though we've taken out a huge section of like the strongest Japanese like air forces and everything, they still have more experience than these guys that are flying here do. So Midway also showed them that the Devastator, the torpedo plane, was basically a flying death trap. And they were pretty much done using it.

The Enterprise completely retired the Devastator. they end up getting equipped with the Avenger that was heavier, faster, and much more survival because it had more armor plating and had like a rear powered turret that could actually protect the crew that was like, you know, like the ball turret

in the belly of, it was kind of like that except facing up and then outward where they could do that. So Midway also proved that uncoordinated strikes basically led to massacres because although the dive bombers worked, like we talked about it, the guys that came in earlier were completely wiped out.

It was just, it worked out in their favor, fortunately. So the Enterprise fighter pilots kind of came to a realization like, hey, we can't just be concerned about the ship because the more guys we lose out there, the less protected the ship becomes because then they're not able to take out the enemy forces and they can just repeatedly pour on their attacks. We don't leave somebody at home. Yep. So they pioneered this thing called the Thatch Weave, Tactical Doctrine, which basically,

revises like the launch schedules and how planes fly together. So going forward, no strike force left the enterprise without a dedicated, um, formation of Wildcat and then the Hellcats later on explicitly assigned to like shield those bombers from the Japanese fighters. Because they're not going to be able to just come in behind these things and take them off if they're worried about getting shot down behind them too.

It's the game within the game. I guess at that point, hits. Well, it just shows you how much goes into it. It's not just from like just a perspective of watching a movie. It's just guys on the flight deck and the planes are already ready to go and they just, the pilots get in and then they take off

and you don't really see a lot of, yeah, they go and they bomb the enemy ship, but you don't see what goes on behind the scenes of like there's so much that has to happen for them to even fly off that deck. And there's so much that has to happen after they do what they're supposed to do to get back and be able to go try to do that again.

Yeah, because it's not the same deck arrangement for takeoff is certainly not the same deck arrangement for landing. And then in the middle, in the midst of trying to get that changed over for anybody that's coming back, you also have to have your eyes in the sky to be able to run to those anti-aircraft

guns. One of the things that really kind of helped out was because the Yorktown was no longer an option. A bunch of like veteran Yorktown pilots and planes actually came over to help kind of rebuild the air division for Enterprise. And so you kind of get this cross-pollination of

crews because again the crews come over with the planes like there were crews dedicated to each plane there was a specific like crew chief for each plane and it was his job to make sure that was taken care of so guys that are coming over that maybe do things a little bit different but do it better or have seen something maybe the guys on the enterprise didn't see you get these the mixing of kind of like tactics and stuff that it creates this really resilient and adaptable kind of culture on the enterprise to where that starts to rewrite the doctrine of being. And as we talked about with the Japanese, air crews were assigned to that carrier. And then if something happened and that carrier was out of whack, they didn't do anything with that air crew.

You just sat and waited for your carrier to get ready. American carriers, if they lost division, they were just like, we're going to give you more planes than another air crew to go ahead and keep fighting. And so that ability to interchange that kind of stuff made them really flexible. Well, they're building an all-star team. And then from that all-star team, they can build a doctrine from. So it's only beneficial. the All-Stars to train the next guys coming up so they're not coming in, they're coming in green,

but with a lot of knowledge of like, oh, now I know how to do this. I'm going to try this move. I'm going to make sure I'm flying in this formation. Is that a relief? Do you think to go back and be a trainer? Or do you think you still want to be out there on the front lines? I guess it's dependent on everybody, but. It was an individual thing because they talked about certain instances where guys were, they were wanting

to promote guys up to like command of an air group. And they're like, nah, I got to be flying with the guys. I got to be up there in a plane. That's what I signed up for. I'm going to have my greatest impact out there. And then there were guys like McCleskey that got wounded that really didn't have the option. But they're like, but you can still do a lot of good. You can still train the next generation.

Dog shit out there. Most important guy here. So we come to kind of closer to the end of 1942, August 24th to 25th is the battle of the Eastern Solomons. And this battle kicks off this month-long Guadalcanal campaign. It was the first time since Midway. that American and Japanese carrier fleets had actually fought against each other. And this time, the Japanese are out looking to try to avenge what happened at Midway. And the enterprise was apparently known to them at this point because it's got a big six on the flight deck.

These guys study and have seen pictures. They know how to identify. Like, the American pilots, if they were going after a Japanese carrier, when they spotted those, they're like, I know which one that is. because I've seen images of it and everything, like they prep that much. So they're trying to specifically target the enterprise. So the primary goal of this task force that was centered around Enterprise and then another one around Saratoga was to basically protect the U.S. Marines on Guadalcanal

and to stop this massive like reinforcement convoy that Japan was sending over to try to take back the island. So American scouts that were sent out had spotted this light. carrier called the Ruyo and planes from the Saratoga were basically like send them out let's get this thing sunk and they swarmed her and sinker this turns out to be a trap the Japanese had laid though because they used her as a decoy to draw out the American planes to leave Enterprise and Saratoga less defended against the heavy fleet carriers that were Shokaku and Zui Kaku. The heavier fleet carriers will carry more planes, more power. And so they had launched all of their planes

against Enterprise and Saratoga. So Enterprise's radar picks up this huge wave of incoming Japanese dive bombers and torpedo bombers and in this crazy coordinated strike, Japanese bombers end up breaking through the fighter defense. They get through like the picket lines of like the destroyers that are firing and the battleships that are firing up into the sky.

And within three minutes, the carrier gets hit. the enterprise gets hit with three direct bomb hits and then several like near misses. Oh, damn. And the near misses, if they hit to the outside of the ship, they may not cause damage in the sense of an explosion, but structurally they can bust rivets and seams and everything like that and cause shit to leak

and start taking on water. It could jam a rudder if it hits toward the back and completely take the steering away from the ship. It can do a shit ton of damage. So the bombs that were used by the Japanese are these delayed action armor piercing ones that are basically designed to penetrate into the deck, not just explode when it hits something like the wood, but to get in there and then explode, like in the hangar or down below in like armory or something.

They're hunting fuel depots, armories. Anything that goes boom, which is going to be in the more protected lower sections of the ship. Yeah, exactly. So hit number one hits the flight deck. Basically a bomb goes right through like the back aft corner. and goes down three levels and explodes next to a petty officer's quarters. It kills dozens of men instantly and sets off this huge ammunition fire. You can watch footage of this on YouTube.

Warning, you do see some guys get blown up. The footage also then, because this happens in really rapid succession, hit two happens 30 seconds later, and you see this one hit two. The camera goes like white for a second, and then as the camera comes back into focus, there's this crater in the deck. that one hits this gallery of like five-inch guns that they had for anti-aircraft protection and it detonates inside a service locker packed with a bunch of anti-aircraft shells and wipes out like that entire side of the gun crews on that one

and then the third one hits like midship where the camera wasn't positioned and it strikes just behind the island structure punches a hole through the flight deck and severs a bunch of like electrical and water lines so this guy his name is Robin Lindsay. He's the landing signal officer. He's the dude that's standing on this exposed platform at the back that is signaling to planes. And as you're watching this footage, the plane is making these huge arcing turns at high speed, just trying to dodge the bombers that are trying to hit him, dodge torpedoes. You see the deck shifting and pitching. You see guys running up the deck like they're running up a hill. And this signals officer is just on the back, just riding it out.

I don't know, he's probably hooked up to something and everything, but he's on this little platform. so when this happens and the plane start hitting he's got no time to like duck for cover and he's completely exposed so he dives into this safety net that hangs like on the outside of the deck kind of like how they have it top golf to keep people from falling that's awesome dives into that but when the first bomb hit just a few feet away the blast threw him back out onto the burning flight deck that's bad yeah so he's fucking stunned he's shell shocked he's bleeding from shrapnel he looks up there's this wall of fire blocking him because he's right next next to he's to this, he crawls through the smoke, finds a severed fire hose, reconnects it by touch, and begins dragging it toward the burning ammo lockers to try to cool them off. By touch, you mean he was just feeling it around? He's feeling it where it got disconnected and then connects it again. Okay. And starts doing that.

Severed, just disconnected, not like cut. So down below the waterline where the engineering spaces are for the turbines, the steam engines, everything like that, it ends up like shattering the ventilation ducts that pump fresh air into those, and it ends up becoming like an instant like heat trap. So temperatures go over 130 degrees. Sailors down there are just feigning from heat stroke at their control stations. This dude, he was a chief machinist mate. His name is William Smith.

So he leads this team. They wrap wet rags around their faces. They're standing in front of these blistering steam pipes, trying to manually adjust valves to redirect stuff to get pressure down, to try to keep the ships running or to keep the engine running so they can continue to maintain speed to keep dodging these torpedoes and these bombs. Because basically if this thing loses any speed, it's dead in the water. And then torpedoes and bombers, it's, you know, a sitting duck.

So the flight deck looks like basically a plowed field. At this point, it's got this chunk off the backside that's missing. It's got this crater in it. and as the crews are looking at this, they're like, okay, time to the fire crews are putting out the fires below. We're in charge of the deck stuff. They're using this rapid hardening cement, steel plates. They're bringing up heavy timber.

They're filling the bomb craters while the ship is still, like, being shaken and pitching and rolling due to these near hits. And an hour after taking the three direct hits, they have all the stuff flattened out, and they can start landing aircraft again. probably all on the other side of this the Japanese are doing many high fives oh yeah they hit her three times very proud of what they just did without knowing that this thing is basically made of adamantium and is just going to re-animate itself at that point too because it's always exaggerated for the hits or the damage you got three guys reporting that they hit and you're like we sunk that thing game over we 100% sunk that thing So Enterprise ends up being able to get out of there. The Navy technically won like a strategic victory by basically forcing like the convoys that were trying to reinforce Guadalcanal to pull back. I think they ended up taking out like eight out of the 11 ships. But Enterprise has to limp back to Pearl Harbor for like a ton of hole repairs.

And while she's away, the Saratoga ends up getting torpedoed and damaged. And then the Wasp, which was one of the only other carriers there ends up. up getting sunk. So by the time the enterprise is patched up and then rush back to the South Pacific two months later, Enterprise and the Hornet were the only two American carriers left in the entire ocean. Jeez, stands alone. And they don't have, you know, these battles that they get into aren't really being dictated by them because they're simply having at this point to be on the defensive,

but just respond to what the Japanese Navy is doing at this point. so they can't afford to, you know, sit around and try to wait for anything. You get the battle of Santa Cruz Islands that happens in October of 1942. Die bombers end up dropping two armor-piercing bombs that hit into the Enterprise again just within seconds of each other. The first one explodes on the forward, I guess it's Starboard 5-inch gun gallery. So kind of not the same one, but another 5-inch gun gallery that was on the other side. blows a huge gaping hole through like multiple lower decks, wrecks the machinery for elevator number three to run.

And then bomb two punches through the flight deck near the island. It detonates like way down inside the carrier and basically just floods the entire inside with smoke. And she got off light because Hornet ends up taking the brunt of the attack. She ends up catching on fire, losing all power, surviving planes from the Hornet are trying to circle around the enterprise to try to be able to land on her. And they're able to, despite, you know, a fucking deck crater and damage elevators, they keep the arresting gear functional and just basically are landing guys. And like, don't overshoot these because you're going into a hole in the deck if this happens.

And these guys are hitting this arresting gear. And so they're just keeping it going and getting these planes pushed forward or if they're damaged pushed off the deck. They're just trying to get guys on the deck so they can try to get out. Something so counterintuitive about trying to land on an aircraft carrier that just took two major hits. Yeah, but it's the only thing you have at that point. Yeah, if it's the only thing, I guess that's the only thing. It's kind of like we were talking about during the study portion of this. Eventually, when your body and your mind is just pushed to the max capacity of what you can handle,

when it comes down to some of these decisions, it's really just, if I don't do anything, I'm going to die. If I do do this, there's still a chance I'm going to die, but it's also less of a chance, and this might work out. And it's such a well-oiled machine that it's like they know exactly what to do. So while this is happening and they're still trying to recover planes and still under attack, the bomb shrapnel from one of them had warped and jammed, like we were talking about that third aircraft elevator. Is that front or back? I think the third one would have been shit. Would have had to been either in the front, because they were still able to be able to.

use the arresting gear and maybe. But what they ended up doing is the damage control teams went in there and basically use torches to cut away all the twisted steel and everything. While planes are still strafing around in the area, they are able to use like timber shoring, quick-draining cement against steel plating, get that done as far as just patching over the deck while these guys work on this elevator underneath it. And as they're working underneath it, they are trying to prop up this insanely heavy 15-ton elevator and get it back up into a position where it's level with the flight deck and then

get supports under it and just weld them into place basically knowing hey this thing ain't getting fixed we just need to make sure the flight deck is operational to where people can land on it you can park some planes on this building a parking lot out of this elevator and while this is going on you have gasoline lines that were near the uh damage deck sections that had caught fire so you have repair parties that are flooding compartments with carbon dioxide to try to to not allow spreading of the fire and everything like that. You have bucket teams that are basically, you know, throwing water and foam and stuff like this to blanket, you know, burning bulk has just trying to control this.

And the USS Hornet ends up getting ordered to abandon ship. And as they're doing this, they're looking out and they see the smoking. As they're watching the enterprise, it's like a time lapse where you see it smoking and everything like that, and then the smoke is slowly subsiding as they're doing these repairs. Like if you could see it and do a time-lapse, it would be guys out there, like, doing repairs and, like, fixing shit and everything like that, like,

in a video game, and then they see their planes and the whole time, they see their planes landing on the deck, and so they're like, at least our planes are getting, like, recover and everything. The crews are definitely, the crews from, they were on it during the first time they got hit the three times.

Still on it for the second time, right? So, it's not, really old hat while still being something that you had just previously experienced. But at the same time, you're like, we just got this fixed. We just spent the last two months getting this fixed. And she's getting fucked up again. Once you go back out the third time, you're just expecting to get hit at that point, right? Or is it like, hey, we got hit two other times.

At least you've seen your like, our fucking damage control is amazing. Yeah. Because we've, this thing's been hit a lot and we're still floating. Something to be said about confidence in recovery. maybe making you more bold the next time you go out? Yes. Yeah. So following Santa Cruz, the enterprise is, I mean, it's in a desperate situation,

as is kind of the situation in the Pacific because she's heavily damaged, and now she's the only operational and not operational at this point, aircraft carrier in the entire Pacific Ocean. So they're like, what are we supposed to do here? We're literally in the South Pacific. We can't return to Pearl Harbor or the, U.S. mainland, that's going to take months. We don't have months. And there's this massive Japanese fleet that's trying to get together and retake Guadalcanal. So pretty much a miracle needs to happen.

And the enterprise limps into this forward U.S. base on Nomea, which is in New Caledonia, on October 30th of 42. And this repair ship, the USS Prometheus, was basically just ready and waiting for, along with this company B of the Third Navy CB Construction Battalion, which I think we've done enough episodes about, like, the Pacific where we've talked about the CBs and their ability to throw down runways on these islands. They were basically the miracle construction crew that were just able to come in and turn nothing into something. I could probably figure out how to get an episode out on the CBs, right? 100%.

A full episode, yeah. So this is where we get the famous huge banner across the flight deck Enterprise versus Japan. And 75 of these CBs board the Enterprise with welding torches, air, air, hammers heavy steel plates and it's cue lover boy everyone's working for the weekend as they start just working 24 hours a day in shifts alongside the ship's own crew damage control crew because they know exactly what needs to happen they're directing traffic and they have 11 he gives them 11 days i think uh halsey's not around at this time but whoever is captioned i should written that down is basically like you have 11 days to to get this thing going 11 days go or are up and the

forward aircraft elevator is still jammed and the hole was still warped from some of those near misses. But time had run out. Japanese fleet was moving and Halsey, oh, it is. Halsie at this point, orders the Enterprise to sail immediately. So instead of allowing the CBs to get off, Halsey basically kidnaps these guys. Keeps them on the ship. They don't get off. And as the Enterprise is heading directly into the combat zone, the CBs are still cutting, welding, riveting down, you know, anything they possibly can that needs to get fixed. Are we moving? Huh?

Are we moving? Yeah. Why are, fuck. I don't know if you guys noticed, but there's no land. They only stopped working and went to battle stations when the ship's combat alarms started. What battle stations are they prep for? Probably damage control. Yeah.

They're going to be doing the same. Okay. So, I mean, this leads right into the naval battle at Guadalcanal on November 12th through the 15th of 42. Enterprise arrives just South Guadalcanal to anchor Task Force 16, so she's going to be the centerpiece because she's, again, the only aircraft carrier here. And because her forward elevator is still broken, the hangered deck crews are having to manually push aircraft around like the damaged areas, which is slowing down the launch time. So it's making her less effective. November 13th, kind of her big things that she does during that is there's this brutal

close range like night fight that leaves between battleships that leaves the Japanese battleship, Ha'i, really damaged and kind of limping around near Savo Island. H-I-E-I. Yeah, don't give it to me the way you need to. Ha-e-E-I. There you go. Okay, thank you.

Sorry, a song podcast, yeah. So at Dawn, Enterprise launches her dive bombers and the torpedo bombers. They end up swarming this battleship. They slam it with multiple torpedo and bombs until the crew is just like fuck it and they end up scuttling the ship so it was the first Japanese battleship lost in the entire war so again tip of the cap another first for her uh November 14 so a day later this is when oh sorry this is when she destroys the transport fleet that's

trying to reinforce Guadalcanal so japan launches this last stitch effort to land like 10,000 troops right onto Guadalcanal using these fast transport ships so working alongside the marine planes from Henderson Field on the island, they are just ambushing the shit out of this convoy. They end up sinking seven of the transports and force the remaining four to beach themselves and pretty much destroy the Japanese ability to reinforce the island.

Big score. And this ends up breaking the back of the Japanese offensive. She ends up holding the line completely alone. And by the end of 1943, this wave of new Essex class carriers actually begin to arrive through the Panama Canal to go ahead and kind of give her some backup. So she gets a little bit of reprieve between November and May.

And so by May of 43, again, her holes warped from near misses. Electrical systems are failing. She's got a forward flight elevator that's not working. She's been fighting pretty much continuously since Pearl Harbor. And she's ordered back to Bremerton, Neil Yard, which I think is in Puget Sound. I don't know if they're different. in Washington for a massive structural overhaul. Did they take the Indianapolis up that far?

Or was that just to San Francisco? I think it was just to San Francisco, wasn't it? Yep. So this is when the shipbuilders weld that massive torpedo blister alongside each side of the hole increases that underwater protection against subattacks. And then all of the outdated anti-aircraft guns are basically ripped out.

They're like, she's getting hit too many times. Yeah. So we probably need to. goose up the entire aircraft. They basically, any weight that they can work with, they basically use for any aircraft guns. And they pack this thing. They have a bunch of the 40 millimeter,

and this is going to be kind of pointless to the state out. But the bofers, the ones are like, doom, do, do, do, do. 20 millimeter cannons, they turn her into a floating fortress that could basically just throw up a blanket of lead into the sky. Which she needs desperately at this point. I want to point this out.

We've had another. time that we could have done this, right? Maybe we should have done it after the first time. No, no, because we were still desperate for just holes that could launch planes. I mean, yeah, but the first refit or the first rebuild after they got hit. Again, you're working with what you know. Yeah. And again, carrier fighting has not happened. You're designing these in 34. She's out in 38, 39. I mean, you don't know until you know. And they found out. Yeah, hard way. Several, several times. May 27th of 43, Admiral Chester Nimitz actually comes aboard the ship and awards her the presidential unit citation. Makes her the first aircraft carrier in history to receive the honor, well deserving.

And then when she ends up returning to the Western Pacific in November, she is pretty much kind of the, she's a legend at this point. And she's leading this massive armada of these Essex class and independence class carriers that had finally arrived. and this is when, you know, Japan at this point thinks they've sunk her, I think three separate times. She starts being known as the gray ghost. I mean, she's, yeah. So is this battle of Tarwa?

Let's see. November of 43? Not yet. We still got a little bit before that. Tara was going to be Operation Galvanic. That's in November of 43. That's in the Gilberts, I think, which is still kind of,

Tarawa might be kind of in that. There's so many South Pacific Islands, man. Well, not to lead into it, but this is the first time that we get to see previous episode, USS Indianapolis, and the Enterprise in the same fight. Ooh, nice. Yeah.

Five times they did this. This was the first time. This is a little bit later in the war for that. So, yeah, she ends up supporting the landings at Tarawa and Mocken. We come to June of 44 and the Battle of the Philippines. the great Mariana Turkey Shoot. So during the battle, Enterprise, who has had her radar upgraded while she was getting refit and everything like that. And her fighters end up helping to annihilate the remnants of the Japanese Navy as far as their air strength and everything.

During this whole battle, not just from Enterprise, but during the Mariana Turkey shoot, American pilots shot down over 400 Japanese aircraft in a single day. And it just ends up permanently breaking the... Japanese carrier pilot pool. There's no one left. Maybe the most satisfying day in the Pacific War, probably. If you're a pilot and a carrier, you know, working on a carrier, yes. To have your guys come back and being like, it's in, reload.

It's too easy. What? They lost a handful of planes? Not a lot. Very, very. The disparity was enormous. Because now you have all these guys who are super experienced on the American side, kind of flying against some of these guys who are rookies on the Japanese side.

And the Japanese are launching these massive waves of aircraft. Again, that's why so many of them are getting shot down toward the American fleet. And the sky is just this swirling massive dogfights. Enterprise, because of her experience in the crew, is assigned as the Combat Air Patrol hub for the entire fleet defense, for multiple carriers. So she's actually in communication. and one of the things that she pioneers

that you see in every carrier every naval movie, you know the map room that's got that Plexiglass map that has all the points when they're tracking stuff? She was the first to do it. It used to be where everything was taking place in the tower and you'd be over a little radar screen, a guy in a room and he'd be trying to shout out

to the captain what's going on. And I think it was Halsey at one point was like, we need to get this stuff centralized or guys that Halsey worked with, maybe Spruins because he was like insanely smart about things. They designed, this room, a darkened room in the bow of the ship where all that information is fed in, and they're tracking stuff on this big plexiglass in real time to move divisions, track

incoming, and they're commanding all the fighters and everything from this one centralized place without any distractions from anything else. And it's insanely effective. And that's why every single naval ship at this point now has a room like that. Real time. Mm-hmm. So because Enterprise pilots also had been training heavily, in early night fighting. This is something again that had never been done before

and like instrumentation only operations. She had this fighter group. It was called VF10. Their name was the Grim Reapers. And they're one of the most highly decorated like fighter groups in World War II.

They're ordered to handle dawn and dusk shifts. And so what they would do and I might be jumping a little bit ahead but just to kind of explain how they pioneered the night fighting thing is when you're taking off, you don't really have any lights because you can't be showing your location because there are

night Japanese patrols that are flying around torpedo bombers and dive bombers just simply looking for the ships and how they would track the ships. Do you remember in the movie Apollo 13 Jim Lovell he's telling this story about he was landing a night mission on an aircraft carrier and all the instrumentation went out and it darkened in his cockpit. He could still fly and he had power and all that kind of stuff, but he couldn't find the carrier and he was running really low on fuel. And he's looking down at the ocean and he sees an algae bloom in the wake of where the carrier was. And he falls the algae bloom in.

The Japanese were doing the same thing. And that's how they were tracking these carrier groups because he would see these trails of algae blooms where they had gone. So to defend against that, they take a torpedo bomber and they modify it with like radar pods and everything on the wings. And they have a guy that's piloting, a guy that's in the back as a gunner, and the guy in the middle is running the radar and communication with two fighters

that go along with them. And they fly along until they pick up something on radar. The ship's picked it up first, usually they vector them out. And then they are trying to pick these planes up, and then the fighters are like, they'll swoop in and take them out. Yeah. So this is something that has never been done before,

and they're also landing. on carriers at night using instrumentation, really only in some of these situations. Sometimes there's really dull red light that the ship will use to be able to adjust to night vision a little bit. But these guys are fucking insane. Flight decks, everybody's just holding up their lighter, trying to give them any little bit that they can.

Yep. On June 20th, kind of mid-afternoon, a scouting team of dive bombers end up launching from the Enterprise and spotting the retreating Jack. They were about 275 miles away, and that's like the absolute limit of American, you know, carrier planes fuel capacity. And so basically to send them out, they would have to fly into the sunset, attack the fleet, and then attempt a pitch black return flight with their fuel tanks running on empty. So the guy that's in charge of this, Mitcher chooses to take the risk. He launches this massive

strike force and the Enterprise Strike Group catches up to the Japanese fleet. The Avengers and the dive bombers help sink the Japanese carrier, Herio, and cripple a couple others. But now they have to turn around and go back. So by 8 p.m., it's pitch black. There's over 100 American planes that are sputtering out of fuel. They're blindly searching for these carriers in the middle of a dark ocean. Again, remember we talked about like in Indianapolis, there's no light.

Like, it's just whatever you're getting maybe from the moon. and breaking insanely strict like wartime protocols, Mitcher is basically gives the order. He says turn on the lights. So the carriers turn on their massive search lights, point them straight up into the sky. All these pilots, when their engines are starting to cut out and stuff, just start dropping on whatever deck they can possibly see first.

So they're running out, you know, the crews on the deck and everything like that are running out onto the decks. It could be strange pilots landing from other carriers. They're grabbing the pilots out of the cockpits. They're pushing the aircraft down, you know, the elevators to clear the deck for the next planes landing behind them. At one point, I think they said Essex pilot crashed his Hellcat into the Enterprise Island, like he landed and then slid it into it. The crew, the guy that was in charge of the deck, ends up rushing over to the burning wreckage with his team. They put it out with foam hoses, and then they use axes to chop the plane apart and clear it in less than four minutes.

Jesus. just pitching fucking things over the side. And one of the other things, this damage control commander that was on the Enterprise pioneered was he had an entire dedicated crew. They would wear these asbestos fire fighting suits. But if anything caught fire down in the hangar deck during these like battles and everything, he would have him open the sliding doors and they would just shove everything off into the ocean. burning ammo, anything like that would just get dumped off before it could explode. So this is also now a crew that serves on

carriers now that's dedicated to doing this, like with forklifts or machines or doing whatever. Yeah, hopefully not still in asbestos. Maybe, you never know. July 44, she provides close air support in the landings for the ground forces that secure type hand, Tinian, and Guam. Next month, August,

she's detached back to Pearl Harbor for another overhaul. Her air group gets rotated off and new air group gets brought on. By September, she's already rejoined with Task Force 38 under William Halsey. So he's been promoted up to like an entire task group. They fly against the Bonin Islands, Palau, probably mispronounce that, to kind of soften up some defenses for future invasions. October, she's in the air battle. in Formosa later in October

Battle of Laethegolf They end up helping to sink in Lategolf the battleship Masashi Which is the sister ship to the Yamoto or Yamato The big boy The largest one that's ever been constructed They end up

On October 25th The planes from the Enterprise helped finish off Another carrier and several other escorts And then between November and December she's kind of as things are going really well. They start to use her more to work on night operations. And so during that trip to Pearl Harbor, she gets fitted with these special radar capabilities,

and she's now like the premier dedicated night fighting carrier. So if there's any nighttime operations, she's going to be there. March to May, we're into 45. This is Okinawa. And so between March 18th and March, 20th, she ends up striking the Japanese mainland. She sends planes out. That's how, again, we're in 45 at this point.

So she's getting close enough to be able to with carrier-based aircraft, which again, 275 miles is the range of those things. They're able to hit the mainland. But again, those are the islands that they consider the mainland and everything. She ends up returning on April 11th to Okinawa, and she is hit by two near-Miss kamikazis, the buckle or hole again. but the damage is kept under control and she's still operational. And then on March 14th of 1945, there's this lone, she's under attack, it's a small force. They're focused more, I think, on some torpedo bombers.

And this lone zero piloted by this guy named Lieutenant Shinsuki Tomayasu ends up diving out through cloud cover, inverts himself into a straight dive, and slams directly into the, forward elevator on the ship. So he's got his bomb strapped to him as well. There's a famous photo of the Enterprise because someone on another ship,

one of her escort ships is watching it, so they're watching the plane go down the heads. So the blast basically is contained within this like shaft that this elevator is currently in, and it's kind of it funnels it. So there's only one place for this explosion. to go and it's up.

So the blast rips through the forward flight deck and launches this 15-ton elevator 400 feet into the air. And you can see an image where there's a big white puff of smoke from the front of it and way, way up in the air is this broken, partially rectangular portion of the top of the elevator. They said it just, the crew that were watching it

said it looked like it hung up there for minutes and then it started to come down and they're like, Oh fuck, oh fuck, because it looked like it might have been coming down kind of in their general direction. It ends up splashing down. They said when it splashed, it made a splash higher than the top of the stacks, the tower. You can't move fast enough to get out of the way, so you just have to brace for it. You do, but what would that do had that thing landed on the flight deck? Yeah, for sure.

And despite all this, I mean, casualties only 14 are killed. The crew extinguishes the fires in 30 minutes, but the structure. Trill the damage, destroys the catapults, the forward flight deck, and it puts her out of flight operations. So that's the only thing that the carrier is supposed to do. So that ends up being the thing that knocks her out of the war, because again, we're right at the tail end of it. So between June and August, she ends up steaming over to Puget Sound Neal Yard in Bramerton again for a ton of structural, like major structural repairs. And by August 15th, the repairs are nearly complete. but this is when Japan surrenders.

So between the time that she was damaged and the time she's almost complete, we've dropped the two bombs, they've surrendered, and before the war, before she could return back into service, the war ends up ending. Now, I kind of looked into the fact,

like, was this the reason that she wasn't chosen? Because I thought she might have been out in time to be the ship that sailed into Tokyo Bay to accept the surrender. Yeah. She wasn't, but they, looking into it, there were also a bunch of, like, political states, that wanted to be made with the surrender and the Missouri was like the epitome of big guns in American power

So that's what got used for and it was also the fact that I guess Truman's wife had been the one to break the champagne bottle to christen it and Truman was president at the time so that's what they ended up deciding but again she wouldn't have been able to serve in that capacity regardless Now comes to the sad part Probably just should have towed her into the bay, huh? Just let the gray go show up just for funzies one more time. Oh, have a smokescreen laid down. I mean like, I ain't dead yet, bitches. Have the Undertaker's theme song Q-N. Yeah, the bell.

So after surviving every major character battle in the Pacific War and earning, again, I have it written as 20 battle stars, I guess. I thought it was 18. Can you look that up? I want to make sure that's right. The fate of the big E, basically in the post-war era, is very frustrating and very sad. So she takes part in Operation Magic Carpet, which is getting everybody back. So fresh out of the Puget Sound shipyard.

What the fuck, man, magic carpet? Yeah, that's what it was called. So after V and J Day, Enterprise, or VJ Day, sorry, she's retrofitted with a bunch of of berths in the hangar deck to basically bring home troops from Europe and the Atlantic. So she goes back through the Panama Canal. She ferried over 10,000 veterans across the Atlantic back home. in June of 1946 she's docked at the New York

Naval Shipyard and is placed out of commission basically in reserve on February 17th of 47 and after that she never moves under her own power again 20 Battlestars Camp glad I got that right so for a decade

she just sits in the Atlantic Reserve fleet in Bayonne New Jersey just fucking decaying she's been mothballed at this point because again she was built in like you know completed in 38 there were three two or three other classes of carrier that had come out that were bigger

more heavily armed faster and those were going to be the ones when they pivoted away from props to jets which is going to be the Cold War thing she wasn't able she didn't have the size to supporting that the elevators wouldn't be able to lift the planes or anything like that so a bunch of veterans though are like this is the most decorated ship in World War II and everything. We're just going to die in New Jersey.

Huh? We're just going to die in New Jersey. Yeah. It's going to Bayonne to die. Fleet Admiral at this point, William Bull Halsey ends up spearheading the Enterprise Association. They're trying to purchase the ship from the Navy and preserve it as a permanent national memorial in Washington, D.C. or New York Harbor. Now, at this point, museum ships weren't like a known thing. I think the USS Texas, which was a like old school dreadnought battleship that had been around from like late World War I or something that had been turned into a museum ship and I've actually seen the Texas.

I saw it being. Oh, uh, restored when I was down in Houston. Oh. I saw it. Yeah, we went to a restaurant that was sitting right out on the water and out there in the water was the, it's fucking just incredible to see it's this dark, dark gray. Yeah, it has to have patina in a crazy. way since then. But I mean, they've restored it. Now it looks like

it was supposed to when it came. Oh, it was that dark to begin with. Oh, yeah. If you look at images, it almost looks like it's like super dark blue. But the association only needed about $2 million. I know that doesn't sound like a lot, but to preserve this ship, it doesn't seem like a lot. To dry dock it,

restore it, and prepare a permanent birth for it. So for everything, it was $2 million. It would only be like $22 to $25 today. So that's still not a ton for something like this. But apparently there was a lot of indifference and all the post-war defense budgets were cut. Again, people don't want to pour all the money to that. We want to go post-war. We want to get back to the economy, all that kind of stuff.

What a world it would be to live in where post-war the military budget gets slashed. Oh, if only that's, no, because it's never post-war. Yeah. It's just pre the next fucking war. The public's focused on the cold war in the atomic age at this point, the bombs and everything. Eisenhower is showing little interest in financing any type of like legacy warships or anything like that. He wasn't a Navyman. Still, you'd think you'd have a little bit of respect for what was going on over in the Pacific, right? Yeah. But the grassroots fundraising ends up going way

short on it. So by the late 50s, the Navy deemed the Yorktown design is completely obsolete. Again, elevators too small, deck too short. Pretty much doesn't work for the jet age. And she gets struck from the Naval Register on July 1st of 58. And that month she sold for scrap to this fucking lip steel or lip-sit steel products corporation for a little over $560,000. April to May, she's towed to Kearney, New Jersey. The most decorated warship of the United States Navy

is cut down for scrap. She's completely gone by mid-1960. But, thankfully, at least a few things, Things got saved. A few pieces are scattered across the country, like, have been sent to certain places. So the nameplate that's on her stern says Enterprise that's mounted on the Riverfront Park in Rivervale, New Jersey. The ship's bell is mounted at the United States Naval Academy, so at least in Annapolis, you can see something there. That's what's actually rung after naval football victories over Army.

Is the Enterprise's bell? Fuck yeah. The anchor is displayed outside the Navy Department in Washington. And then some of the steel was actually recycled. They said thousands of pounds, which that's fucking nothing, you know, in regards to how much was in that ship. But thousands of pounds of the steel cut from it were melted down and then incorporated into the keel and the hole of the first nuclear powered aircraft carrier, which is also named the USS Enterprise. So basically carried her lineage into the nuclear age. but a shitty unceremonious end to a beautiful sturdy gal.

She could be a bad bitch of history. Yeah, absolutely. It just seems so weird that they just cut her down for scrap. And I understand that was what they did back in the day because you don't spend money on anything that can't kill. Keep one carrier. Why would you not, like, just as an example for, like, naval history, not only just, I get that only three of these were made.

They're like, oh, it was the first carrier, you know, we'll keep one of the newer one. No, this is the one that fucking had so much impact during the war. If you're trying to save an old war relic and it's a spear, generally the shaft isn't going to be the most important part. You're going to want to save the spearhead, right? Show it off, the designs, anything like that. It should have stuck around. But even at the very least, if you're going to melt it down and just,

it for scrap. You're telling me that post-World War II, you can't make some sort of a memorabilia piece or... Oh, I want one so bad. If I could find any fragment or anything like that. Absolutely. But this, you know, in addition to the insane combat record, just the fact of what this ship itself, it's weird to think that like the oldest serving or one of the oldest serving carriers during that entire war ends up being the one that one that. that pioneers night-based carrier operations, which is a completely standard thing at this point. The modern combat information center, which every naval vessel uses at this point, and then also pioneered all these modern damage control and survivability systems,

firefighting methods, all of this stuff, which lends to the reason that the Navy is so successful today, despite those poor folks on the Abraham Lincoln. The ship still works. But he snuck up on the balcony of the Abraham Lincoln. Get him home. Fuck. But anyway, yeah. Naval history, I think kind of mid-episode we were talking about it, it's so fascinating to me because if you're on land,

you have pincor movements, you have all sorts of strategy. And when you bring it out to the water, you have these floating kind of cities that have to work. working concert and in unison to fight against a whole other island of other battleships. Over the span of hundreds of miles. Yeah, that you'll never ever come inside of. And it's a deadly game of hide and seek and, you know, trying to be in a place that they don't think you're going to be in. I think sometimes, like, the whole perspective thing about this is we have grown up in a time where flight is just so fucking normal.

getting on the fucking bus or whatever. This was at a time when this was still something that was so new and we were still learning all about it. But just like, again, greatest generation, these people being built different, these guys are sitting in these planes, staring down this runway, and just in front of them is nothing but blue.

And they're just like, I'm going to take off of this thing. And then after I get done, trying to fly and get shot at and trying to get blown up and trying to blow up somebody else, I'm going to come back to this thing and I'm going to land my plane on it. and then I'm going to have them refuel and do it all again. Like just to have that mentality of, you know,

it's not going to like that great beyond, but it's like going where no one has really gone before at that point of being, you know, the first. It's just crazy to think about. Like what, like you can't put yourself in that mindset. You can try, but it's just like, what is the feeling of standing on that deck during battle? and there's just noise of the guns going off around you

and you're hoping you don't get blown up and everything. That's why they say a lot of it because it was such an extreme experience for everybody, why so many World War II veterans just simply choose not to talk about it. It also, too, I think, becomes, the ship becomes a part of you. When you talk about, well, I flew airplanes for the Navy, if you're on the enterprise,

your story, your title isn't I flew planes for the Navy anymore. It's I flew planes for the Navy on the Enterprise. Yeah, I was on the Enterprise. Yeah, it becomes... I called the Biggie Home. It becomes just a part of your story. Yeah.

And that's where the legacy lives on for as long as we can hopefully keep those people alive and keep telling the story. That's true, yeah. The Enterprise, most of this stuff that is so famous can never go away

because it should stay in family history. Yeah. Well, you're never, forgotten until somebody utters your name for the last time. And we're, I hate to say it, but pretty far past this in war technology advancements. But at the same time, you have to remember the forerunners. You have to remember the Wright brothers. You have to remember all of these firsts that happen.

Because without that building block, there's no way to get to where we are now. All right, man. Good shit. Yeah, a lot of fun. If anyone has any stories about the enterprise, grandparents knew somebody that served or had just a story related to it. Yeah, drop us some information, email us, drop us a comment or anything. We'd love to hear about it. Also, if you do have a piece of the enterprise, uh, anything that came from the enterprise.

I don't care if it's a shredded carpet or anything and you can part with a fraction of it. I'd like some steel or some wood. Just to set a little parameter on that. We can begin the negotiations there. I'll take a tiny piece of a uniform for someone who served on the enterprise. All right, guys. Thanks for joining us. We'll catch on the next one.

Peace.