The Navy commissioned its newest carrier this week—Fighting Lady, all wood, 103 feet long. She will patrol the lower plaza in Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center as an attention-getter for the Seventh War Loan drive.
Exactly scaled to one-ninth the size of an Essex-class carrier, she was prefabricated at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, trucked to the site in sections. Total cost: $35,000. Topside, she bristles with 20-and 40-mm. and five-inch guns, all exactly scaled. Parked on her flight deck are faithfully scaled models of Helldivers, Hellcats, Avengers and Corsairs (donated by the manufacturers). Her innards—which visitors may see if they buy a war bond—contain a model of a carrier’s boiler room, a section of enlisted men’s quarters complete with pin-up girls on the bulkheads.
A crew of 25, many of them veterans of the Pacific war, man her. Among the veterans: indestructible Captain Dixie Kiefer, one of the Navy’s top carrier skippers; he was severely wounded when the carrier Yorktown sank in the Battle of Midway, was seen commanding a carrier in the brilliant documentary movie The Fighting Lady and was wounded again this year in battle.
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