How Naval Aviation Changed The Face Of War [4K] | Angle Of Attack | Spark

[Music] they're sleek and they go fast and they make lots of noise and everybody is wowed by them [Music] they're deceptively beautiful it's like venus fly traps [Music] aircraft launched from the sea from carriers air-to-air missiles air ground missiles gps guided bombs one of those front line hornets has everything you could need to to really just go out there and wreak havoc [Applause] [Music] these aircraft have left their mark on america's history in ways that few of us know they had no right to win but they did and in doing so they changed the course of a war i lost 22 of the guys in my squadron 22 you never forget that this film follows young pilots today as they learn their craft and tells the sweeping history that they are heirs i watched every world war movie i could get my hands on his little kid the history was one of the things that really drew me to this life these were people who were willing to literally bet their lives to go ahead and bring this technology and this new kind of warfare to the forefront [Music] back in the early 20th century this is [Music] somewhat psychotic you are a part of a lineage of people that have been witness to the biggest events of the 20th and now 21st century you feel that every day you're a part of something bigger but embedded in this lineage is also controversy [Music] again and again over its hundred years this craft has been called into question as impractical extravagant obsolete now today a new round of deaths and reason to wonder if this generation of aviators just might be america's last this is the story of a weapon that changed the face of war [Music] [Applause] [Music] yeah we did our cross country to uh to vegas and she's a good instructor i started racing dirt bikes actually i kind of want to be professional dirt bike racer and then quit the race and went to college and decided to come in the marine corps and best decision ever made yeah should be pretty cool [Music] cool y'all following him out good luck thank you my mom used to take us to an airport nearby where we grew up and you could sit out close to the flight line and see people taking off and landing and stuff and saw planes flying over like this guy [Music] [Music] it kind of captivates a young mind i think and it definitely grabbed me early on i tell a student you know hey what am i going to teach you how to do here i want you to learn how to taxi take off go out and do something and you're going to come back and land and you're going to do that on land and you're going to do that on a ship every little thing will affect your psyche before you're going out to the boat you're going over the entire flight 500 times in your head long before you even get there [Music] you can imagine the the instruments and how they're changing in your head you can imagine the airplane accelerating faster [Music] we're gonna fly out there first time you see the carrier that you're going to it'll be about 15 miles out and you realize you're gonna be landing on there stopping on what looks to be about a little drop of oil in the sea i think universally the first time you roll up behind the boat oh crap is what comes to people's minds everybody says it looks like a postage stamp the first time you go overhead you look down and think well there's no way they made a bad mistake part of the mental preparation is trying to think okay i'm gonna i'm gonna see it it's gonna look different than what i imagine it's gonna feel different than the simulator i'm gonna freak out and i'm gonna keep flying in the early 20th century americans flocked to air meets to witness with their own eyes a man take to the sky in an age of innovation nothing seemed more wondrous than the airplane these air meets would draw people from all walks of life it was really popular because here they have these aircraft flying buzzing around oftentimes there were accidents which were almost as appealing as the flying itself the army and navy too were intrigued and sent their representatives to the very first air meets the army instantly saw the potential of flight and began purchasing airplanes the navy though was at a loss the idea of using a flying machine on the open sea was beyond almost everyone's imagination everyone except a middle-aged naval officer convinced that planes and ships working together could become a powerful new weapon captain washington irving chambers is sort of an unlikely champion of aviation he's a product of the 19th century traditional naval warfare he graduated from naval academy not too far removed from the civil war but chambers really expressed an interest in aviation he wanted to look into it and study it that's why he traveled to some of the air meets that were happening he would go there to see what the latest technology in aviation was in the fall of 1910 chambers attended an air show in belmont park new york in search of a pilot willing to try a grand experiment launching an aircraft from a ship among the daredevils and showmen at the meet one man clearly stood out eugene ely most people think early aviation they think of aviators and these you know leather jackets and flowing scarves and everything in ely he just doesn't look the part of the dashing aviator if you look at the pictures of him performing these feats he was wearing a standard business suit he had a bicycle inner tube wrapped around him for flotation he wore a primitive football helmet he's from iowa as far away from the ocean as you can possibly imagine and someone who really didn't really care for the water and didn't really like swimming but when chambers proposed the idea ely the man who didn't like water couldn't resist in addition to being a pretty good pilot ely also had a surprising eye as an engineer he gets the idea that he can build a wooden flight deck on a warship like a cruiser or a battleship and actually get it going fast enough that if he flies his airplane off the end of it he can actually get it into the air and safely maneuver it [Music] well back in the early 20th century this is somewhat psychotic [Music] soon after their meeting chambers outfitted the cruiser the uss birmingham with a makeshift wooden deck built to ely's specifications the platform was only 83 feet long and 24 feet wide on the morning of november 14 1910 rain squalls filled the sky [Music] eely waited nervously finally at three o'clock in the afternoon the weather cleared so ealy climbed aboard and revved up the engine as much as it would go and as he went over the edge of the deck and out over the water he actually descended a little bit quicker than he thought he thought he might crash and the wheels actually grazed the water as he took off from birmingham but um picked up enough flying speed that the wind went beneath the wings developed some lift and he was able to take off and fly to shore chambers was pleased but he knew the hardest part was yet to come landing a speeding airplane on a rolling ship again chambers relied on ely's practical know-how [Music] elite was facing the prospect of flying into the back of the smokestacks of the ship so he had to come up with some way of stopping the airplane so what they did is they had sandbags connected by ropes and these ropes were strung across the wooden deck at a series of intervals and there were a series of hooks beneath the aircraft and as these hooks snagged on those ropes the weight of the sandbags there would bring the plane to a stop as it hit the deck the weather on january 18th 1911 was cold ely flew from an air meet to the uss pennsylvania 10 miles offshore eugene ely made his approach to cruiser pennsylvania and successfully got into what is now referred to as the proper glide slope [Music] hit the deck and the ropes caught the hooks on the bottom of his aircraft and eventually brought the plane to a stop and it was just an amazing event no one had ever seen anything like this before i mean you have to think at that time you're only about seven years removed eight years removed from the wright brothers flights and here you have sailors seeing an aircraft land aboard their ship there was something that was you know really one observing it must have been an experience to remember [Music] and the amazing thing is the metaphors laid out by ely of the flight deck of the arresting gear of the tail hook are things that we still use a hundred years later the man was a visionary but eugene ely would not live to see the magnitude of what he'd achieved within months he was killed in a plane crash during an air meet [Music] my father was an asics intruder guy so as a young one i got taken to lots and lots of air shows i'd climb up on my dad's shoulders any kid is going to look up and think it's grand and amazing and they want to do it and remember what i told you about the roll in is that when you when you see that that line down there the thought of landing on the carrier is still a very big idea and not ominous but it's still a heavy thought landing on a giant chunk of metal in the middle of the ocean [Music] yeah all right yeah second last fight for uh head off to the boat on monday so two more chances to perfect it before we go or or bracket the mistakes when you're preparing to go to the carrier all the students will grow a mustache it's kind of maybe a little bit of a badge of courage around the squadron that you're far enough in the program that they're going to let you go to the boat some of the fine young gentlemen going out to the boat are not quite as gifted in the mustache growing department i guess some of them look exceptionally creepy i'm not a mustache guy but and it doesn't help that my mustache is blonde so uh it's not coming in too great but unless you're a very special girl and you are not going to grow a mustache but i have every intent of either finding like some like stick-on mustache or i'm just going to draw it on every day because you know you gotta you gotta run with the guys have you seen the one with the russian guy i mean when i'm at work i'm one of the dudes when i get home it's hair down skirts dresses i like being a girl and i've found myself to end up being more feminine now than i used to be because it's almost like recharging the estrogen levels when i get home it's definitely a competition everybody wants to be the best you know it doesn't matter if there are army guys here or air force guys here it's the same thing everybody just wants to be the best but that being said i mean navy guys are my good friends too there's always a little bit of a rivalry between the navy and the marines jordan and i are pretty good friends we've gone through all of flight school in kingsville together we classed up back 14 months ago and pretty much been flying together yeah me and rob we started ground school day one in this building together and went through everything pretty much together seven that looks good probably anytime i was having issues i would go talk to rob and rob would get me straightened out so we can keep working at joker but at bingo no kidding it's time to knock it off and point toward home we're creating a tactical jet naval aviator certainly most of the aviators coming through our program are likely to see combat and yes they'll be ready [Music] for more than a decade after eugene ely's pioneering flights u.s naval aviation stood still most people would think that hey this is a triumphant event this is a major demonstration the navy is going to fall over itself to buy aircraft well that wasn't the case airplanes were still made of wood and fabric and could barely hold the weight of a man much less a heavy bond [Music] but from the moment he witnessed ely's plane land on a ship captain washington chambers could imagine the future chambers could look down the pipeline and see that there were tantalizing new technologies beginning to appear on the horizon new materials like aluminum new structures like monocoques new fuels like high octane gasoline planes were going to get faster they were going to go farther they could lift more they were also going to be more deadly and more maneuverable by the end of world war one the airplane had become a part of modern warfare the british were the leaders but the americans were anxious to catch up so were the japanese who built the world's first aircraft carrier from the ground up the navy embraced seaplanes for reconnaissance but the effort involved in lowering and retrieving the planes made them useless for much else for chambers it was clear the navy was falling behind he continued to press you have chambers going and doing this incredible marketing job to a very conservative general board of the u.s navy trying to sell a very new very expensive technology which oh by the way required the building of some of the largest and most powerful warships in the world to prove that it was even viable for the navy brass carrier aviation was a distant fantasy nothing could replace the king of their fleet the battleship up to this point the war plans of every nation in the world still envisioned big gun battleships 8 10 12 at a time lobbing one-ton shells at each other until one side of the other gave up and that would determine the fate of nations [Music] the final push towards carrier aviation came unexpectedly not from inside the navy but from an inter-service rivalry fueled by a brash army general named billy mitchell mitchell had been in charge of all america's airplanes in world war one an experience that forever changed his vision of war [Music] if you look at world war one it was just a horrific experience you had trench warfare people killed by the thousands and hundreds of thousands and you had people like general billy mitchell who looked upon the airplane as a way that could change warfare and would get warfare out of the trenches mitchell's determination matched his arrogance he wanted to consolidate all military air power under one service an independent air force under his command mitchell set out to do something big something never done before if the whole world believed that airplanes could not kill ships well then he would prove them wrong in july of 1921 he orchestrated a show for decision makers in congress [Music] mitchell's airplanes first destroyed several old battle cruisers then came the most important test each plane carried a newly invented 2 000 pound bomb their target a captured german battleship long deemed unsinkable [Music] this was a triumph for billy mitchell and it achieved the exact opposite of what he wanted it triggered in navy leadership a decision to look at hey we have this air power advocate general billy mitchell and if we don't embrace aviation and look at aviation as an adjunct to the fleet then we may have an independent air force on our hands and also may have a navy that's greatly diminished within a few months the navy regained the lead converting a cargo ship into an aircraft carrier christened the langley [Music] the age of american carrier aviation was born the langley operated for two years in an experimental role testing aircraft and training pilots [Music] we like to talk about the golden age of naval aviation in the 20s where we had wooden airplanes and iron men these were people who were willing to literally bet their lives to go ahead and bring this technology and this new kind of warfare to the forefront it was hard and it was dangerous and a lot of naval aviators died and this is really where the reputation of naval aviation began to be built the naval aviators of the interwar period are very much characters out of the movies yeah they had silk scarves yeah they had leather jackets and flying helmets yeah they had steely-eyed looks and they were handsome and they did daring deeds they were for lack of a better term the macho men of their time the guys that had no fear just as they were confident in their own capabilities set apart from those that prefer to keep their two feet on the ground i guess the word is probably ego probably ego it was probably what got me into it i man i want to you know i want to be a big shot the image of a naval aviator was a red convertible topped down with a beautiful blonde alongside who could want anything else [Music] [Music] every day you're operating in three dimensions [Music] you don't have time to we call breaking out the book and read and see what the problem is and fix it you just don't have time to do that so if you don't have things memorized cold you can't put them into action quick enough we make our own mistakes and tell the plane to do the wrong thing sometimes if things go wrong they can go really wrong [Music] some days you're you're just on some days you're not hopefully we'll we'll peak when we head to the boat and and have a good day we're practice we're you know well rested we're ready to go and we're at the the top part of the game close to being as good as we can be they're going to move it in 500 pound increments when you give them the signals so palm up like that and then the palm down horizontally is move it down i'm having a feeling that i'm gonna look and be like wow i have to land in that little that little spot and you know that boat's not as big as i thought it was gonna be but trying to keep those out of the head right now and just focus on what we were taught to do this will be a completely new experience for me and most all the other students we have no fleet experience it's going to be loud it's going to be busy i mean they've been showing us all week of people killing themselves behind the boat you know crashing left and right it's all learning points you can take from and remember don't do that i don't want to turn into a fireball i'd like to land and come home at the end of this the nerves crank up it is uh completely foreign and probably the most exciting thing we've done to in our lives at this point so [Music] in the mid-1920s the navy had just one small carrier the language airplanes had become sturdier the pilots better trained but still unresolved was how to use all of this in war amid the wavering one figure emerged to take the lead his name was admiral joseph mason reeves every move of these naval aircraft has a definite purpose and has the single aim of achieving a fighting fleet his nickname was billy goat reeves because he had this beard and goatee that he wore he's a hard charger a football player at the naval academy studied tactics and he is a convert to naval aviation reeves chafed at naval doctrine that confined planes to reconnaissance he was after a weapon as lethal as the battleship for him it very quickly became how can we use this aircraft carrier not as a support weapon but as an offensive weapon as the offensive centerpiece of of a naval force admiral reeves understood even with langley that you had to maximize the number of planes that could be launched from that flight deck bringing the most intense concentration of firepower onto a target as possible [Music] in 1928 reeves got a platform that matched his ambitions the united states takes two incredible halls of battle cruises they were building and they put all of their tonnage into these two ships and they produced two of the most beautiful powerful and in fact the fastest warships in the world the lexington and the saratoga reeves loaded the two carriers with nearly a hundred planes each and within a year he overcame the seemingly impossible [Music] launching and landing dozens of airplanes in rapid fire succession [Music] it's a jigsaw puzzle it's like baseball it's a game of inches you can pick a million different cliches and and i don't think any of them really accurately capture what happens on a flight deck with dozens of airplanes some launching some recovering there was this constant ballet going on choreographed by the deck department the air department literally hundreds of young men using their bare hands and muscles to push 90 or 100 airplanes new and better planes were in the pipeline the curtis sbc-4 hell diver could carry a 1 000 pound bomb almost 600 miles the next challenge delivering the bombs with more precision and for that they invented dive bombing dive bombing is a technique that was developed by the navy because it provided a very accurate way of bombing a pinpoint target and ships are pinpoint targets the planes come in at about 10 000 feet and then pushes over into a steep dive and when i say steep meaning going straight down inside of the cockpit they often flew with their canopies open as the airplane would push over the visceral feeling of being lifted out of your seat and hanging from your straps looking through a very simple reflector gun sight meanwhile this ship that you're aiming at well it's a moving target it's snaking it's circling it's changing its speed then at about 2800 to about 1500 feet which isn't very high at all you would release the bomb [Music] and then immediately pull in excess of anywhere from four to six or seven g's to come out of that dive naval aviation had gained power reach numbers and precision but was still untested in battle starting in 1929 the navy began a series of war games called fleet problems that put reeves theories to the test none proved as prophetic as the vast specific exercise known as fleet problem 13. on february 7 1932 the carriers lexington and saratoga peeled away from the fleet and sailed towards hawaii 152 planes were dispatched to attack pearl harbor with dummy bombs in the mock assault they pounded the airfields and port facilities and why it's so important is because it showed that the carrier could operate independently and operate as its own task force and did not need to have the battle line there for support and it showed the offensive firepower of the aircraft carrier the navy minimized the risks of an attack by carriers for the next decade the old strategy stayed largely unchanged these are tough times this is the depression we had existing battleships they were there they were paid for they were we knew exactly how to employ them and they worked [Music] but fleet problem 13 did not go unnoticed across the pacific the japanese studied it closely [Music] over the next decade they would expand their fleet of large carriers to six they would build the zero a state-of-the-art fighter plane [Music] they would train 3 500 naval pilots [Music] the carrier force that moved toward pearl harbor in december of 1941 was the largest and most powerful in the world [Music] in a bitter irony pearl harbor would stand as the first real world proof the carrier aviation was the next super weapon [Music] [Music] when you walk out in the deck in the mornings it's uh it's it's pretty impressive it's quiet it's peaceful and you start to uh pre-flight you can feel the ship starting to wake up you can hear the surf going underneath the hall you can look out in the horizon see the clouds and you just breathe in that fresh air and you're a good day to fly flew out as a division of flight of four and everybody that was qualifying was solo and that's another appeal to to what we do is that you get to go out there alone it's on you everybody says that your reputation it doesn't matter how well you fly in the air your reputation that everybody hears about is how well you land on the carrier and the formation part of the flying was really shaky i thought we should have looked better coming overhead the ship just some i think that was more nerves than anything but the the three students we definitely it was it was pretty ugly coming overhead to see that piece of american territory out there in the ocean is awesome it it the first time when you're coming over and you look down it's you kind of get the chills i don't know if they were nervous chills or or just but wow it makes you very humble when you get out to the boat pretty much just spend 10 minutes giving yourself this like once in a lifetime pep talk the next thing you know towers calling you down to get set up for landing [Applause] you have an lso who's standing next to the wires on the deck on the landing area and he's grading all your passes they're listening for the sounds the engine's making they can tell you've made a mistake before you see the mistake rolled out the ball was a little high to begin with and uh to keep it safe bumped up the power a little bit the landing area is angled to the left of the center line of the ship so anytime you roll up behind the ship the landing area is actually moving away from you not just away from you but to the right so you're always lining up a little right [Music] you'll see the plane kind of undulate you'll see black smoke shooting out the exhaust because you're you're in there fighting saw the lsos go by and they were all staring straight up at me all the wires go by it's 30 feet over them i knew mid pass that it was that i just bought that bolter big time so it power back up and take back off a bolter is when they come around with their hook down and they land too long and they miss all the wires and they have to go around and try it again the first trap was kind of a rough pass for me rolled out center line i believe it was a good start to a little high in the middle and trying to chip it down trying to chip it down a little high at the ramp the first trap is there's no way to really describe how it's going to be this screeching noise your body gets thrown forward in your seat when you get that feeling it's it's nice because you know you're in fact stopped and on the boat first attempt at stopping on the boat made it they taxing me over to get fuel and you know you're still shaking your foot sitting there pulsing and you know they tax you up to the cat shoot me off everything goes dead silent my first initial thought was that my engine just failed i had to realize that i was still climbing and my air speed was increasing to realize that i'm i'm safely airborne coming down a high start and trying to chip it down while remembering the first pass which was my fly through down for the one wire didn't want to do that kept too much power on it and i forgot to put my hook down around i went so second day the fangs came out a little bit more i guess the cockiness came out maybe jordan meredith one of my good buddies he had a better second day but it ended up being uh i edged them out just by a little bit [Music] with rob being in the navy me being the marine corps rob's chances going back to the boat are almost guaranteed i mean that's all the navy jet pilots go to the boat whereas marine jet paws don't necessarily go to the boat ever again we've pretty much been flying together we've gone out to el centro to do bombing together and obviously we went to the carrier together so it'll be uh taffy's marine which means that odds are i probably won't see him again in my career i was kind of depressed because the fact that marines don't always get to go to the boat and the fact that i may never go to the boat again it's such a cool experience that you don't want it to end and when it does it's kind of kind of rough [Music] [Music] [Music] the devastation at pearl harbor was the work of carriers 350 japanese planes launched from hundreds of miles out of the sea in just two hours they wiped out most of the battleships of the pacific fleet it was a master stroke japan had not been stopped and there were some people in the united states who believed japan couldn't be stopped that eventually japan would not only control all of china the philippines the dutch east indies but the northern coast of australia possibly even india [Applause] in the united states the loss of the battleships upended every plan for how a war in the pacific could be fought and won by sheer luck three aircraft carriers had been spared they were out at sea during the attack you have this bizarre situation that the japanese attack with aircraft carriers forces the united states into a carrier-based naval strategy it was now up to the u.s carriers to hold the line against japan's imperial navy [Music] in june of 1942 the japanese fleet moved toward a pair of small american-held islands in the pacific midway atoll was just a thousand miles west of hawaii and strategically important [Music] a threat of invasion was sure to draw a full-out american response [Music] it was designed as a perfect trip the american sortie with about 50 ships three of them are aircraft carriers [Music] they're facing off against what looked to be impossible odds the enemy has vast vast numbers of ships almost 200 ships they've sorted the entire combined fleet the morning of june 4th did not start well for the americans radar on midway began tracking 107 incoming japanese planes [Music] within minutes every operational us plane was in the air the japanese bombers swept through the defenses [Music] out at sea the u.s carriers enterprise hornet and yorktown launched their planes hoping to hit the japanese carriers before they could unleash a second strike three squadrons of tbd devastator torpedo planes reached the japanese fleet flying at wave top level they were easy prey for anti-aircraft fire [Music] [Music] of 41 torpedo planes only four survived not one torpedo scored [Music] the early strikes that morning both from midway and from the american carriers suffer crippling losses the casualties were just insane of the men and aircraft that launched that morning about half did not return [Music] meanwhile two squadrons of sbd dauntless dive bombers launched from the enterprise in search of the japanese carriers [Music] they were led by a 40 year old lieutenant commander from buffalo new york named wade mccluskey mccluskey gets out to the point where he's been told the japanese fleet will be waiting for you there gets out there butkus nothing in sight staring at the vast expanse of ocean mccluskey had to decide whether to return his men to the enterprise or lead them on a fool's errand and mccluskey decides well i'm going to take my force of two squadrons of dive bombers and i'm going to have them follow me on a very methodical search pattern [Music] now he has a little problem he's running low on gas and more than a few of his pilots are looking at their gas gauges wondering if the old man really knows what he's doing and then mccluskey spots a japanese destroyer he figures that japanese destroyer is going at high speed towards something i'll bet you that's the japanese fleet mccleskey followed the destroyer approaching from the south he spotted three japanese carriers bombers plunged into their dives catching two of the carriers by complete surprise [Music] minutes later a third u.s squadron stumbled on the scene and attacked as mccluskey looked behind through the tall columns of smoke he was stunned the americans had sunk three carriers along with some 300 aircraft and nearly 4 000 men [Music] that man [Music] and that action took the japanese navy essentially out of the war at that moment the japanese have gone from an absolute position of supremacy to they never go on the offensive ever again and it all came down to about um four dozen dive bombers the pilots who followed mccluskey that day were ordinary men many were newly enlisted they had no right to win but they did and in doing so they changed the course of a war the battle of midway was the most decisive single naval battle in u.s history over the course of world war ii navy airplanes would provide the dominant firepower in every important battle in the pacific carrier aviation had proved itself beyond measure [Music] oh [Music] congratulations real proud done congratulations good work marine i've watched every world war movie i could get my hands on this little kid attack on pearl harbor battle midway the history has shown that even small carrier forces can bring a lot to bear the way things are one person can change history basically so it's a it's a very large responsibility what you got there a set of wings [Music] it's a nice finish to a you know a lot of hard work so yeah it's definitely definitely a good time i let him bask in the glory of it for a day and i was like guess what the next challenge is ahead of you [Music] you

Channel: Spark

Views: 175,922

Keywords: naval aviation, history of naval aviation, angle of attack, military history, us navy, aircraft carrier, drones, the navy, world war ii, vietnam, battle footage, war, aerial battles, strike missions, navy men, navy women, fighter planes, fighter pilots, aviation, aviation documentary, military documentary, navy documentary, aircraft documentary, history documentary, history lovers, navy history, air planes, blue angels, Flyboy, special air service

Id: 9GP4DiGusGU

Length: 53min 16sec (3196 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 24 2021