Japan Stunned When 15 Essex Carriers Unleashed 956 Aircraft Turkey Shoot скачать в хорошем качестве

Japan Stunned When 15 Essex Carriers Unleashed 956 Aircraft Turkey Shoot

Japan Stunned When 15 Essex Carriers Unleashed 956 Aircraft Turkey Shoot June 19th, 1944, 0545 hours. Philippine Sea, 160 miles west of Saipan. Task Force 58 cuts through heavy swells at thirty two knots, fifteen Essex class aircraft carriers arranged in four task groups spread across fifty square miles of dark ocean. Admiral Marc Mitscher stands on the flag bridge of the American fleet carrier USS Lexington, his weathered hands gripping binoculars that have tracked Japanese aircraft from Guadalcanal to the Central Pacific. Nine hundred fifty six American aircraft crowd the flight decks of the largest concentration of naval airpower in human history. The stakes are absolute: control of the Marianas Islands, bomber bases within twelve hundred miles of Tokyo, and the survival of Japanese naval aviation itself. The Essex class carriers represent American industrial might transformed into floating airfields. Each ship displaces twenty seven thousand one hundred tons at standard load, stretches eight hundred seventy two feet from bow to stern, and carries between ninety and one hundred aircraft. Their construction time averaged sixteen to twenty months compared to the three to four years required for prewar carriers. Newport News Shipbuilding, Brooklyn Navy Yard, Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, Norfolk Navy Yard, and Fore River Shipbuilding have delivered these vessels at a rate of one every two months since 1943. The numbers tell the story of a nation at total war: thirty two Essex carriers ordered, twenty four completed, seventeen