MartinJQuinn wrote:
Do you know in what order they were spotted on the deck? I'm assuming Hellcats first, Helldivers last?
This is as good as a point as any to mention this. One thing that has held up my much delayed Essex class book is deck spotting. I started writing the actual text a couple of years ago and found that while I had a lot of information on the SHIPS and the AIR GROUPS, I had nothing on the interface between the two.
It turns out this is another case where "It's easier to theorize than actualize" is very true. It's one thing to say "I'm going to include information about how decks were spotted and how the carriers worked to turn around air groups and quite another to actually find that information. No one seems to know where one might find that and if any of it was kept. I've talked with Dr. Friedman, Doug Siegfried (Tailhook association Archivist), Dana Bell, I think Bob Cressman, and two different archives staff members who specialize in Naval records and no one can remember seeing any manual or materials for deck operations.
US WWII Carriers had what was known as a Flight Deck Officer, and there must have been some institutionalized training and procedures for them, but I've found bugger all in the records of BuShips (not surprising), BuAir, Chief of Naval Operations, Commander of Aircraft Carriers, Pacific. There's still a couple of other record accessions to look through, but for the time being I'm going to press on and treat it as a dead topic. No publisher so there's probably enough time for one more research trip, but we'll weight time spent on that against the other details that are coming up missing in the writing. Those points were whittled down by a fair amount on my trip last week.
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Tracy White -
Researcher@Large"Let the evidence guide the research. Do not have a preconceived agenda which will only distort the result."
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Barbara Tuchman