Now that the aircraft carrier has replaced the battlewagon as the Navy's capital ship, the carrier is beginning to grow. The Navy announced that somewhere between the drafting tables and the shipways are three new carriers which will be the biggest in naval history. Some time before year's end, the keels of two will go down; construction of the third will start early in 1944.
Biggest carrier now afloat is the 33,000-ton U.S.S. Saratoga, originally laid down as a battle cruiser. The new class (CVB), proudly announced by Secretary Frank Knox last week, will be 45,000-tonners big as a battleship of the Iowa class. Almost twice the tonnage of the Essex class carriers, they will be faster, able to take "a lot of punishment above & below the water line."
The new CVB's will be "the base of operations for planes larger than any which have heretofore been operated from the decks of aircraft carriers." This, said Knox, meant planes bigger than the B-25s which left the Hornet to raid Tokyo. Actually, the Mitchells did not "operate" from the carrier they merely took off. But by the time the CVBs are finished (18 to 24 months from keel laying) there will be newer and bigger planes to make full use of their spreading flight decks.
Helena
She was fleet and lean, 10,000 tons, with a 100,000-h.p. heart and fifteen 6-in. guns for her voice. Only her boxy stern, where she could carry eight planes, and the squat derrick cocked on her fantail, marred her clean lines. She was water-borne in the murky tide off Brooklyn in August 1938, while Japanese "fishermen" could still map soundings off U.S. coasts. She died in the early dark of July 7, 1943, deep in the Kula Gulf between New Georgia and Kolombangara in the South Pacific. Her pallbearers: the eleven Jap cruisers and destroyers which had gone down under her guns in her short career of headlong action.
That was the light cruiser Helena.
Last week the Navy released her story, for the honor of the men who served in her, and for the tradition that she made.
First Look, First Blood. Putting in at Montevideo on her shakedown cruise in 1939, the Helena got her first look at war when she passed close aboard the German pocket battleship Graf Spee, scuttled in the bay. Her second, closer look came at Pearl Harbor. She was hit, and that day her crew became a fighting team. Her 5-in. anti-aircraft battery, her light weapons spoke with the trained, nervous insistence of a machine. Helena knocked down six Jap planes that calamitous day.
Patched up at Pearl Harbor, she limped to Mare Island, Calif, for permanent repairs. With new men aboard, she sailed for the South Pacific, trained incessantly at the job her men prized most—gunnery. She made two runs to Guadalcanal, served as escort for the carrier Hornet, then joined the task force which included the Wasp. The Helena was there when the Wasp was torpedoed, took aboard many of the survivors.
On Oct. 11 last year, the Helena steamed into her first major engagement. She was part of the task force ordered to intercept the strong Jap force moving to reinforce their units on Guadalcanal. In the Battle of Cape Esperance, the U.S. force turned back the Japs, sank four cruisers, four destroyers and a transport. The Helena cashed in then on her gunners.