John Bruning on LinkedIn: The Long Island's Catapult: Part I. On August 20, 1942, the Marine… (2024)

John Bruning

Military Historian and Military Affairs Writer

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The Long Island's Catapult: Part I.On August 20, 1942, the Marine aviators of VMF-223 and VMSB-232 manned their F4F fighters and SBD dive bombers and went through their preflight rituals on the flight deck of America's first escort carrier, CVE-1, the USS Long Island. Their mission: get to Guadalcanal a hundred and eighty miles distant, where the besieged Marines desperately needed air cover, and a strike force to stop the Imperial Japanese Navy from delivering troops and supplies to the island.The launch from CVE-1 would be no easy feat. The Long Island was an odd warship making its only appearance in a combat area with this operation, largely because of her many faults as a carrier. She began life as the cargo liner Mormacmail in 1939. Two years later, in March of '41, she was acquired by the US Navy and hastily converted to a baby flat-top. She was a ninety day wonder, completed in June and sent to sea. The Navy quickly realized the flight deck was too short, so she went back to the yard to have it extended over the bridge by about eighty feet. There was no feasible way, or the time, to move the oddball catapult system installed earlier on the ship, so it remained over a hundred feet behind the end of the flight deck. Even more unusual, the catapult was angled at about a forty-five degree diagonal off the portside bow. In early August 1942, she embarked the two Marine squadrons at Pearl Harbor and steamed for the South Pacific. VMF-223 and VMSB-232 were filled with green naval aviators, Marines straight from flight training back in the States. In July, they had joined Captain John L Smith's 223 and Major Dick Mangrum's 232 with almost no time in combat aircraft. Smith and Mangrum were given less than four weeks to train them on the F4Fs and SBDs they would take into combat. This included very brief carrier qualification training, where the aviators landed and launched from the USS Hornet. But none of the neophytes had ever experienced a catapult launch off a ship.The cat-shot off the Long Island would become a supreme first test for these Marines, who if they survived, would face the hell of Guadalcanal's early days as their reward.

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Grant Campbell

Shell Aircraft - Air Safety - Airbus H175 B1.3/B2 LAE

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CVE-1 finished life as the Nelly. Rebuilt after the war as a merchant ship. She was bought in 1965 after her last voyage as a immigrant carrier across the Atlantic and employed by Rotterdam University as a students' hostel until 1971 and as a migrant hostel until 1977, when she was scrapped in Belgium.

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  • David Gurney

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  • BGI, LLC

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    Training Aviators has been in the BGI wheelhouse for decades. Every phase of teaching is critical, building warfighters from IFT to whatever MDS/Aircraft possible is the journey.

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