The WW2 aircraft carrier USS Midway is on display in San Diego Harbor as a museum ship.
In the pre-WW2 years, a difference of opinion was demonstrated between the US Navy on one hand and the British Royal Navy on the other. The British favored “armored” carrier decks, with a layer of steel plate that protected the hangar deck underneath; the Americans built their carriers with unarmored flight decks made from plain wooden planks.
Each had their advantages and drawbacks, and both were really designed for different circumstances. The US, with its potential war focused in the Pacific, faced primarily air threats from Japanese carriers, especially torpedo bombers, and a heavily armored deck was considered unnecessary. A wooden flight deck was lighter, and allowed the ship to carry a larger contingent of aircraft. The downside, of course, was that they gave less protection—a weakness that the US Navy paid for when the Japanese began aiming Kamikaze planes at the vulnerable flight deck.
The Royal Navy, meanwhile, was focused mostly on the Atlantic theater, where there were no enemy carriers to worry about and the primary threats came from either large surface ships (like the Bismarck andTirpitz) or land-based heavy bombers. The British defended against this with armored decks made from steel plate. But this, in turn, added weight to the ship, and reduced the number of aircraft it could carry.
In 1940-41, the US Navy undertook a study to see what effect adding an armored flight deck to its new planned Essex-class carrier would have. Initial calculations showed that it would reduce the size of the carrier’s wartime aircraft complement from around 75 to around 65. So the US decided to stick with the unarmored deck. But the Americans also recognized the potential benefits of deck armor, and so took their study one step further, asking what would be required to produce a carrier that had an armored flight deck, but which would still have the same number of aircraft as the Essex-class.
The first requirement was that the carrier would need to be massively large—over 50,000 tons, 1000 feet in length and with a beam of 121 feet, which made them too wide to fit through the then-existing Panama Canal. In exchange, however, they would be able to carry at least 100 aircraft and, with some scrunching, up to 140, making them the most powerful strike force in the world. And, as British experience demonstrated, the armored flight deck provided better protection for the carrier. The island would also be armored, and to balance that weight and keep stability, the waterline anti-torpedo armor was asymmetrical and heavier on the opposite side. It was decided to build three of these “super-carriers” (officially termed “battle carriers”) and deploy them to the Pacific. The keel for the first, the Midway, was laid down in October 1943, and two others, the Coral Sea and Franklin D Roosevelt, followed. Although construction was given priority, in the end, none of the carriers in this class would see action in the war. Midway entered service in September 10, 1945—a week after Japan’s formal surrender.
The real contribution of the Midway-class would come after WW2, however, when the carrier was wedded to another technological innovation that had been developed during the war but not perfected until after its end—the jet aircraft.
After the war, the Navy’s first jet-powered fighter, the McDonnell FH Phantom, was introduced. Because the Midway-class was the largest carrier available (and their armored decks offered protection in case of an accident), they were selected for testing, and most of the Phantom’s flight evaluations were done on the Franklin D Roosevelt. The Phantom was quickly followed by the F2H Banshee and the F9F Panther.
Because jet aircraft were bigger and heavier than the prop-driven planes of World War II, post-war carriers could only handle fewer of them: the Midway class’s air group shrunk from 100 to 65. Launching jet aircraft also required better steam catapults; conversely, with their higher landing speeds, the arrestor system had to be improved as well.
The most significant improvement in carrier design, however, was the angled flight deck. This idea, like so many other carrier innovations, came from the British Royal Navy. In effect, the angled deck divided things into two distinct areas: aircraft could be launched by catapult from the bow end of the flight deck, while other aircraft could land at the stern end on a slanted runway—and since these operations would not interfere with each other, they could be done simultaneously. Together, the two distinct sections gave a much greater effective length for landing and taking off, without adding to the actual length of the ship. This arrangement also offered more safety. Landing on a carrier at jet speeds was far more difficult than the wartime piston-engined planes had been, and pilots often either approached at an unsuitable angle or failed to catch any of the arrestor wires that would bring them to a stop. The angled flight deck allowed the pilot in this case to “bolt”—to rev up his engine to takeoff speeds and fly off the angle end of the deck to go around for another try.
By this time, the Midway had already served as an experimental ship. The Navy had test-launched a captured German V-2 rocket from her flight deck to evaluate the idea of using missiles instead of guns as naval armaments. In 1955, Midway was rebuilt with a new angled flight deck, part of the effort to retrofit all of the existing Essex and Midway-class carriers.
Between 1965 and 1975, the Midway did several combat tours in Vietnam, launching strikes against enemy targets. She then served in the Pacific and did a series of patrols before participating in Operation Desert Storm in 1990, launching some 3,000 combat sorties.
The carrier was finally decommissioned in 1992 after 47 years of duty, making her the longest-serving US carrier. In 2003 the Midway was donated to the nonprofit San Diego Aircraft Carrier Museum, and became a floating museum ship a year after that.
Some photos from a visit.
USS Midway
Although the ship is huge, everything is cramped inside
Squadron commander stateroom
Squadron ready room
Ordnance Control Chief, in charge of arming the planes
Maintenance manager
Combat Information Center
Radar console
Crew bunks
Anchor chains
Steam accumulator for the catapults
Hangar deck
Aircraft elevator converted into a lunch patio
On the flight deck
The “island”
Front edge of the angled flight deck
The “shooter”
The Landing Signal Officer (LSO) platform. He guides the planes in for a landing.
