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Remembering Midway – 68 Years Later
In every battle there is a moment when the combatants, and the world, seem to catch their breath. It is a fleeting moment, lost in the blink of an eye. But in that same blink, everything changes. Such moments are borne of desperation, of courage, of plain dumb luck. But they are pivotal – for…
Flightdeck Friday: Prelude to Midway – US Carrier-based Air
Task Force 17 – Rear Admiral Frank J. Fletcher in Yorktown Task Group 17.5 Carrier Group – CAPT Elliott Buckmaster USS Yorktown (CV-5) CAPT Buckmaster CVG-5 – LCDR Oscar Pederson VS-5 LT Wallace Clark Short, Jr. 19 (17) x SBD-3 VF-3 LCDR John Smith Thach 27 (25) x F4F-4 VB-3 LCDR Maxwell Franklin Leslie 18…
USS George H. W. Bush (CVN 77) Commissioned
11,000 tons gross displacement. 622.5 ft long. 45 aircraft – that was the USS San Jacinto (CVL 30). Sixty-five years ago, on a September morning, a young naval aviator launched his Grumman TBF Avenger from her deck on a mission to strike facilities at Chi Chi Jima. Forty-five years later he was raising his hand,…

Midway 70 Years Later: The Sea-based Air Order of Battle — JAPAN
KIDO BUTAI First Carrier Striking Force VADM Nagumo Chuichi Chief of Staff: RADM Kusaka Ryunosuke Carrier Division 1 – VADM Nagumo Akagi (flagship) – Captain Aoki Taijiro, commanding 18 x A6M2 carrier fighters (aka Zero) 18 x D3A1 carrier bombers (aka Val) 18 x B5N2 carrier attack aircraft (aka Kate) 6 x A6M2 fighters (6th…
Flightdeck Friday: Phriday Phantom Philms
OK, so a bit of a cop out but it serves in a pinch, especially after this kind of week…Up first, Phoreign Phantoms doing their thing to a bit of Wagner. Some vintage footage, and for those of us who spent a wee bit of time in Kef working with our RAF counterparts across the…
Saturday Matinee
Mike wonders aloud at how the VAW community seems to have a surfeit of talent when it comes to making videos – *we* all know it comes from our regular dosing of Vitamin R in the form of the megawatt+ of energy we haul around with us. How else can one explain the likes of…