More big new carriers continued to appear in the Pacific and a new type of sea power came into being, the carrier task force. Here we saw air power based on a great fleet of large and small carriers forming the spearhead of a naval offensive. The flat-top had truly become the “Queen of the Fleet.”
Now we see come into being the ideas born in the minds of a group of pioneer naval aviators twenty years ago. The airplane has not only gone to sea with the fleet but, as the striking power of the Navy, it is leading the fleet to victory.
It was the work of the fighting planes based on Admiral Marc A. Mitscher’s carrier Task Force 58 that hammered a path to the very front door of Japan.
Since Pearl Harbor, naval aviators have shot down over ten thousand Japanese aircraft with the loss of less than two thousand of our own planes. This gives our Navy pilots a score of better than five to one. These figures include the dark days of the first year of war when our Navy boys were outnumbered ten to one.
From a force of a few carriers and a handful of moderately fast warplanes, naval aviation grew, in three years, to the world’s greatest sea-borne air force. The speed of our fighters increased by more than a hundred miles an hour. Our dive-bombers and torpedo planes, the world’s finest, tripled their bomb and torpedo loads. Our big patrol bombers and transports fly the Pacific unarmed.
Jack Towers, who in 1911 was one of the Navy’s first three aviators, is now Vice Admiral Towers, Air Chief of the Pacific. John Pride, one of the first aviators to fly from the deck of the Langley, is now a rear admiral with our Pacific aërial task forces. Pioneers of naval aviation such as Admirals Ballentine, Sherman, Clark, Radford, and others are all in the Pacific. These men, none of them much over fifty years old, are practical flying officers. Many of the other men, who for the past twenty years or more have devoted themselves to the development of naval aviation, are also rear admirals. That is fitting, for it was they who kept naval aviation alive in the days of peace.
