YouTube transcript reformatted at textformatter.ai (excerpt).TranscriptDoris "Dorie" Miller was a mess attendant second class aboard the battleship USS West Virginia on December 7th, 1941, in Pearl Harbor. His actions that day were legendary. He helped carry many of his crew members to safety, including his captain. And then he took control of an anti-aircraft gun despite having no training in the weapon and defended his ship, shooting down at least one Japanese aircraft. He became a national hero overnight. He became the first black sailor to be awarded the Navy's highest award for valor in the face of the enemy, the Navy Cross. He was nominated for a Medal of Honor.
Much less remembered was his death just two years later aboard the escort carrier USS Liscome Bay. Miller's death represented the risks faced by the young men who served aboard the ships that were derisively called Kaiser's coffins. The fleet carriers, the Essex carriers, grabbed all the headlines with their sprawling air groups and their fast attacks. But the small carriers, the jeep carriers of the Casablanca class, were the indispensable backbone of Allied naval operations.
The battle in which Dory Miller became a hero put the US into a difficult position regarding naval aviation. In 1941, the US had only seven fleet aircraft carriers, a precious few, even considering that none had been lost at Pearl Harbor. More were being constructed, but fleet carriers took time to build, and the air groups required training.
Well, even the vaunted Essex class carriers had their own design flaws. When the USS Franklin (I think) was hit by a kamikaze, it suffered damage to its ventilation system which then spread toxic smoke throughout the ship, resulting in many smoke related deaths.
I believe this flaw was identified in the postmortem damage assessment, and addressed in refits of other Essex class carriers, but all ships have design flaws...many do not have them exposed in combat, but some do.
When the USS Forrestal had its terrible fire in 1967, it came very close to going from terrible from catastrophic when fires threatened the LOX (Liquid Oxygen) generator compartment towards the aft portion of the ship above the port quarter. There was a sailor who became trapped in that compartment, and the bulkhead was glowing red from the fires on the other side. He managed to stay alive in that oven, but if the fire had breached that bulkhead and entered the LOX generation machinery compartment, it was estimated by engineers that the explosion involving that volume of LOX may have blown off the stern of the vessel. During the damage control operations when fighting the fire, nobody was aware of that ticking time bomb.
When the postmortem damage control assessment was later performed, this so alarmed the US Navy that they retrofitted all carriers that followed the Forrestal with rails on which the machinery was mounted. There was a giant hatch to the exterior of the ship that could be removed (I don’t know how easily or quickly THAT could have been done) and the entire LOX generation plant could have been rolled out the side of hull and pushed into the ocean.
Our engineers were never perfect. The Sherman tank had a terrible reputation for catching fire after being hit, as it ran on gasoline and not diesel.
But we had to fight the war with the weapons we had, designed under tight deadlines and to make the best use of scarce resources.
Granted, these were built by Kaiser, who had the reputation for building Liberty ships, not warships. The building of warships was not well translated from merchant to warship building by shipyards and shipbuilders, so the Casablanca class was an exception. Normally, they did not transition merchant ship builders to warship builders, but kept them segregated. This is not a knock on Kaiser or the teams that built Liberty ships, it was simply a well known fact to everyone, including the shipyards and builders themselves. (according to Thomas Heinrich who wrote “Warship Builders-An Industrial History of US Naval Shipbuilding 1922-1945...an excellent and fascinating book if this interests you)
The Casablanca class was the largest class of carriers ever built, fifty were built, and five were lost during the war. One to torpedo attack, one to naval gunfire during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, and three to kamikaze-not surprising, as they were not robustly built, lacked armor, and had light defensive systems.