Posted on 01/18/2024 8:08:54 PM PST by SunkenCiv
Dated May 25 and delivered by plane while the Yorktown was about a hundred miles from Oahu, the report that Nimitz read was sobering...
One day ahead of schedule, on May 27, the Yorktown limped into Pearl Harbor. The next morning, after Nimitz had cut orders voiding the safety rule of spending a day purging her tanks of stored aviation fuel, the Yorktown eased into Drydock Number One. The caissons closed behind her, and pumps began draining out the water. With at least a foot of water still remaining in the drydock, men in waders gathered to inspect the hull. One of them was Nimitz. After staring at the burst seams and other damage on the hull, Nimitz turned to the technicians and said, "We must have this ship back in three days." After a long silence, hull repair expert Lt. Cmdr. H. J. Pfingstag gulped and said, "Yes, sir."
Within minutes the first of 1,400 repairmen, who would work around the clock, swarmed into the drydock to begin repairing the Yorktown. To satisfy the enormous power needs of the repair crews the Navy contacted Leslie Hicks, president of the Hawaiian Electric Company, who arranged a series of rolling blackouts in Honolulu...
At 11:00 a.m. on May 28, Drydock Number One was flooded and the Yorktown was towed into the harbor with workmen still busy aboard. On the morning of May 30, more patched than repaired but fit enough to fight, Yorktown steamed out of Pearl Harbor. With an air group composed of aircraft from three carriers, Yorktown sped to a rendezvous with the Enterprise and Hornet at "Point Luck" to participate in one of the most decisive battles in naval history.
(Excerpt) Read more at defensemedianetwork.com ...
The USS Yorktown drydocked at Pearl Harbor after the Battle of Coral Sea. Shipyard workers had just three days to patch up Yorktown and return her to the fleet in order for her to participate in the Battle of Midway.U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command photo
We forget how how so many things had to go right including getting the Yorktown out there and including luck
For Midway to be successful
Thanks for posting
One of the greatest stories of World War II.
View of the underside of Yorktown’s flight deck structure, showing the impact hole made by the Japanese bomb that struck the ship amidships during the Battle of the Coral Sea. A patch over the flight deck’s broken wooden planking is visible within the hole. Note structural beam in lower part of the photo, distorted by the bomb’s passage. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command photo
View of damage on the third and fourth decks, amidships, aboard the USS Yorktown. This view looks forward and to starboard from the ship’s centerline at frame 110. The photographer is in compartment C-301-L, shooting down through the third deck into compartment C-402-A. The large hole in the deck was made by the bomb’s explosion. Many men were killed or badly injured in C-301-L, a crew’s messing space that was the assembly area for the ship’s engineering repair party. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command photo
GREAT History Lesson! Thanks for posting this. I cannot imagine Nimitz telling the crews “You have three days” when the first estimates were 90 days.
The Yorktown had a magnificent crew, even by the standards of WWII US naval vessels.
Yet the shipwrights righted the ship...
Indeed! One bomb took out a chunk of the ship’s engineering repair party, and they still got it to port.
“It’ll take nine months.”
“You have three days.”
And they did it, finishing up as the carrier was under way to its last battle.
That is how you get people to think outside the box.
My pleasure.
Three carriers to four, with the Japanese having a qualitative edge in most respects, including the most experienced and best flight crews launching off their carriers. Their planes had a larger flight radius. US torpedoes weren’t reliable until sometime in 1943, “just use them, the torpedoes are fine” until then.
Midway played the role of the fourth US carrier, which alleviated the flight radius problem. Capture and/or surrender was considered dishonorable by the Japanese, so after their carriers went down, their best option was to ditch as close as they could to a retreating Japanese vessel — they couldn’t land on Midway.
Attacking the US was the greatest military blunder, not only of WWII, but of all military history, IMHO.
Either they get it done in three days, or it may as well be 90 years. :^)
Another way to get people to think outside the box is to drop a couple of nuclear bombs on their sorry asses.
Definitely. They knew they had to get it fixed with alacrity so they could get back into the battle line. :^)
If only they’d had a crew of trannies, the Yorktown would have been combat ready in TWO days!
That happened as well with ships they’d hit and sunk at Pearl, and within weeks they’d had to engage them in western Pacific.
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