War Factories | Season 3, Episode 2: Enterprise - Rise of the Aircraft Carrier | FD History

thank you the untold story of war production all walls are about competition in production the side that can produce more is always going to Triumph This is a war between the factories the real story of how the world wars were fought and won it may sound strange but modern Wars they're not won by battles they're won by factories they swamped the other side with a tide of mass production and those factories would shape the modern world and Brands like Porsche skoda Rolls Royce they all honed their Craft on the research and development that was needed to win Wars you gotta get back to work [Music] [Applause] 30th of October 1942 the USS Enterprise limps into the American Naval Base of no mayor in the Coral Sea just over 1 500 kilometers southeast of Guadalcanal Enterprises have just survived the battle of Santa Cruz one of the most vicious battles in the early stages of the Pacific War staying the severe bomb damage to her flight deck her forward flight elevator and then she's also got damage below the water line she's in trouble frankly and to make things worse her sister ship the USS Hornet was sunk in that battle and the Enterprise had to take on all her surviving aircraft to Ferry them to safety this has left Enterprise as the only American aircraft carrier in the whole of the South Pacific the US has no other carriers at this point a crew defiantly posted a sign on their flight deck and it just read Enterprise versus Japan despite all her damage there's no time to complete repairs even though Enterprise is the only carrier left in the Pacific Enterprise must go back toward Guadalcanal and that's because the ship has to disrupt what the Japanese are doing Guadalcanal is this fight that's absolutely on a knife edge the Japanese were launching a May a major offensive against the island if that falls they're gonna the South Pacific the U.S couldn't just allow it to happen we couldn't afford to lose Guadalcanal to the Japanese and that meant that Enterprise had to sail Right Back Into the Danger Zone so on the 11th of November 1942 the Enterprise set sail for Guadalcanal five men of construction Battalion 3 nicknamed The Sea bees which were teams of construction professionals very highly qualified in terms of welding in terms of carpentry in terms of all the skills you need to rapidly build things the CBS basically turn Enterprise into a floating Factory during those days before the engagement they're able to repair the ship while it's at Sea by working around the clock they're cutting they're welding they're hammering they're doing everything it can to get that flight deck ready and the forward elevator back up and running so when it comes to fixing your aircraft carrier 75 of them turning up is every Chief engineer's dreams come true [Music] they're still working when Enterprise goes into action two days later while being repaired it's launching its own planes against the Japanese battleship Hyatt over the next three days she was critical to sink the hay which was a critical part of the Japanese advancing forces this was a major turning point of the war in the Pacific but not just because of the battle it was a prime example about the Americans were able to outbuild out prepare out produce the Japanese in the Pacific get their aircraft where they were needed faster and in greater numbers than the enemy so this isn't just story about battles it's a story about factories and the way that Americans use factories to help win the war it is also a story about aircraft carriers how they came of age how they won the war in the Pacific and in doing so how they changed the nature of warfare forever [Music] think of American might at the turn of the 21st century and you in the aircraft carrier it is a beast it's a massive sailing City that basically it's a waterborne advertisement for the might of the United States Navy it has thousands of people working within it it has a landing strip it has the one way it has repair facilities for planes it has hangars to store planes it has storage facilities for Torpedoes and bombs it is a floating Airfield you also have men that are associated with simply preparing food for and feeding the crew on a daily basis there's a post office a barber shop a dentist literally everything is on board this one floating city I mean the aircraft carrier is the ultimate symbol of American power and as the carrier Rose to prominence during the second world war one ship led the way the USS Enterprise [Music] the story of Enterprise in World War II is the story of the United States Navy in that conflict Enterprises literally everywhere in the Pacific Campaign she's the most decorated aircraft carried the U.S Navy have she's the Battle Star she's the ship they're all aiming to be or well actually this this is a Navy they're competitive they're one they're aiming to beat the battle history of USS Enterprise encapsulates the U.S Navy's Evolution from the old style of big gun Navy centered on battleships to the new Navy based on the aircraft carrier and the airplanes that can fly off of its decks she becomes the spirit of the U.S Navy the thing that encapsulates and it's why when Gene Roddenberry is wanting to lead America into a new world he uses Enterprise because that is the name but Enterprise the motion picture is not just about combat it's a movie full of construction repair and maintenance and in order to tell that story you have to tell the story of the factories that provided all of the equipment that made the aircraft carrier possible [Music] that story starts at a shipbuilding facility in Virginia called Newport News Newport News was the epicenter of shipbuilding for the United States Navy in the Years immediately before World War II it's the heartbeat of the U.S Navy it's a massive facility in Virginia where the United States bases a large percentage of its Fleet at different times one of the largest factories in the world it's a shipyard but it's still a factory and it's still to this day [Music] going into the second world war Newport News was actually a private dockyard owned by some very Savvy investors who know that with the second world war breaking out you're going to have an unprecedented amount of work so they they make a good deal of money by floating in on the stock market it's floated for 18 million dollars which at the time is an extraordinary sum Newport News expands dramatically during the 1940s to support the war effort at its peak it employs more than thirty thousand people so it becomes you an example of the military industrial complex it's a private yard that the US government comes to rely on for a great deal of its Naval work because Newport News in many ways is the original private Public Finance initiative it marks this interesting partnership between government and private business and this is something that defines the way that the United States Rises to meet the war effort [Music] even before the war the U.S Navy had turned to Newport News for a brand new class of carrier to replace the ranger the first truly purpose-built carrier in the American Fleet using Newport News the U.S Navy commissioned their first generation of purpose-built aircraft carriers the Yorktown class the Yorktown class ships were to all be 800 feet in overall length they were to have Crews 2 900 Sailors they were capable of accepting air groups stretching all the way up to as many as 90 aircraft but that represented a maximum Loadout for a combat Loadout it was a little bit smaller than that but still a respectable 50 maybe 60 aircraft into these ships went all the Ingenuity and inventiveness of American shipbuilders and Engineers three new carriers were commissioned the Yorktown The Hornet and the USS Enterprise Enterprises commissioned May 12 1938 as a fleet aircraft carrier and what that called on the ship to do was to provide support for battle group her purpose was to basically generate as many aircraft onto the flight deck and into the air in a shorter pace of time as possible to carry out a massive Alpha strike that's a first wave strike on the enemy but all of that in support of the battleships the big gun the fleet carries at this point were not to act independently they were supposed to work with the battleships to be the eyes and ears of the American Fleet because the Enterprise was built to meet a very specific set of limitations imposed on the War factories of the great Powers after World War One [Music] in 1922 the major powers of the interwar era signed a treaty that limited Naval construction the Washington Naval treaty was designed in 1922 on the premise of stopping a future War by stopping an arminance race now it does this by limiting the size of new battleships new Cruisers that any power was permitted to build but the the treaty addressed primarily the big gun what this is is a classic case of planning for the last war rather than the next and it's a measure of how high bound that thinking was that the treaty actually puts a limit on the caliber of big guns that could be installed on a carrier and doesn't really think about what the carriers are really there to do they were thinking about the Battle of Jutland they couldn't yet imagine the Battle of Midway that would eventually come to greet them no one is imagining a battle fought at such long ranges the guns are gonna play no part in a naval conflict no one that is except the Japanese one of the Hidden agendas behind the Washington treaty was to prevent newly emerging powers like Japan from building up large navies from scratch the trouble is it does it by going okay American Britain are going to be the same we are they're going to be equal first-rate powers Japan is probably going to be stuck in a second great position so for every five battleships the United States and the United Kingdom have Japan can have the equivalent of three battleships this immediately sets up lots of problems because the Japanese Navy feel permanently slighted and what they say are words the effect of all right if you're going to limit our number of battleships we'll make our aircraft carriers do the battleships jobs for us so what they start doing is thinking outside the box and of course they're perfectly placed to do this because from their experience the first world war they already had four yeah most history books will tell you that the early pioneers of carrier Warfare were in the British Navy [Music] but their Pathfinders were located on the other side of the world during World War One the Japanese were allied with the British fighting against the Germans and as the world went to war they had their eyes on the German Colony Port of xingdao in 1914 singtel on Dae King Bo is the Crown Jewel of the German Far East Empire it's kaiserville Helms dream Japan decide they're going to blockade the port of singdale so the Germans decide to launch a task force to lift the blockade and this is led by a cruiser called the kaiserine Elizabeth now during the progress of the sijacing town the Japanese needed to provide observation for their artillery so they brought in a seaplane carrier which would be launching aircraft on a regular basis to try and get over flights on the 6th of September biplane launched from the ship intercepts the Kaiser in Elizabeth and it drops two bombs on her there are no bomb racks there's no structured way to drop bombs on a Target at this point it involves someone in the airplane heaving one over the side and attempting to Chuck it both bombs Miss but nonetheless this is the first strike from a carrier launched airplane in history and they also had the first aircraft shot down when a German Airman just gets so fed up with them trying that he waved his pistol over the side of his airplane and shoots at one of the biplanes the Japanese pilot when he was actually coming down just thought something had gone wrong with his aircraft he didn't even realize he'd been shot down and it was only later on examination that they found the bullet had managed to Lodge in part of the engine and cause trouble it was a not a one in a million it is a one in a trillion fluke it shouldn't have happened according to any laws of mathematics it just did and that is the first as I know it the first recorded takedown of an aircraft by another aircraft British observers were watching all of this with interest navies by their habit learned from each other the raw Navy saw what the Japanese were doing and so the operations in singtel fed into the operations the Royal Navy was thinking about what it could do with Naval Aviation what it could achieve and in December 1914 you have a much better structured raid and that's on cux Haven at Christmas and what they do is send in a carrier with airplanes and make a raid on the German Naval Port the British Navy would go on to conduct several other celebrated carrier strikes during World War One but it was the Japanese Imperial Navy that would fully unleash the wrath of carriers upon the world and it did say because of War factories on the 19th of November 1923 the battle cruiser akagi began its conversion into an aircraft carrier at The Courier Naval Arsenal near Hiroshima Japan the curry Arsenal is one of the four critical shipyards the Imperial Japanese Navy relies on it's in many ways they're equivalent to Newport News after the Washington treaty happens when the Japanese are forced to stop all Battleship construction the Japanese make the decision to switch curate and Yokosuka which is another major facility in the Tokyo area to the conversion of battleships to aircraft carriers the switch to carriers would have a profound effect upon the thinking of the akagi's third captain Yamamoto [Music] Yamoto especially after having served time as Naval attache in the U.S was quick to appreciate the strengths of the US Navy versus the Imperial Japanese snake what Young motor real izes is that Japan trees to go head-to-head with the United States by building battleships and that forced him to look at other possibilities the possibilities for example of using aircraft to sink a battleship instead of guns you used aircraft you could not only concentrate your Firepower on the ship's dead you could also do it from a distance where the enemy's battleships couldn't fire back so during the 1930s Yamamoto quietly went about putting the pieces in place for a military Revolution Yamamoto is key in building up one of the greatest forces in the interwar period which really shows its medal earlier in the war and that's Japanese Naval Aviation when Yamamoto is promoted to rare Admiral his first posting is to the naval Aeronautics Department which develops the weapons programs the Japanese Imperial Navy now it's in this position that he's responsible for commissioning not only the Mitsubishi zero but also the Betty Bomber and the torpedo bomber the Kate three of the key Mainstays of the Japanese Navy's carrier Strike Force in August 1939 Yamamoto takes command of the Japanese combined Fleet and at that point he realizes that although it's a powerful force it still needs one thing and it's a big thing he needs more carriers to achieve this Yamamoto used a carrier Force called the Kido bhutai the Kira batai was designed around six aircraft carriers it was designed around that because of the way aircraft operated from aircraft carriers [Music] Yamamoto understands that Japanese air [Music] is their best way to use them in combat against an enemy is to concentrate your Force to bring multiple aircraft carriers moving in one body if you can bring all your carriers together you can turn them into a strike force you don't launch one attacking come home you can launch attacks and waves you can launch different kinds of aircraft at different times you will have one pair of carriers launching your aircraft one pair of carriers threading their aircraft and one pair of carriers receiving their aircraft he's imagining a world where he can pound an enemy force with Fighters dive bombers and torpedo aircraft while another wave of Fighters bombers and torpedo aircraft are approaching to hit them again in this way the carriers could deliver a series of continuous never-ending strikes you've got hundreds of aircrafts been raining down hell on their targets at once and just so many that you simply can't shoot them all down because as a Defender you can concentrate your bar on a battleship but you simply can't focus on several hundred Hornets or buzzing around trying to sting you at once and if they take out your aircraft first you can't even strike back at all it's a very important mental leap and it allows for the Japanese to attempt an operation like the Pearl Harbor attack these new tactics work perfectly on the 7th of December 1941 when Yamamoto unleashes his carriers on the unsuspecting U.S base Pearl Harbor and sailing towards that Maelstrom this USS Enterprise on the 7th of December 1941 the USS Enterprise was sailing back towards Pearl Harbor when she discovered that Warfare had changed Forever on the morning of December 7th Enterprise was returning from delivering F4F Wildcat fighters to the island awake at dawn the ship launched vs6 those are SBD dauntless dive bombers that are associated with the ship's scouting Squadron 18 of them in all those vs6 SPD dauntlesses took off to fly on ahead of the ship toward Pearl Harbor to land at the Naval Air Station on Ford Island but as those aircraft approached Oahu they were jumped by the enemy and so the way the Enterprise learns that the war has started is listening in on radio Transmissions from the dauntlesses of vs6 as they're being attacked by the enemy Enterprise was immediately diverted Southwest of Hawaii in the search to spot the Japanese carriers launching the attack and it is a good thing that the ship was sent in the wrong direction to look for the Japanese because if Enterprise had been sent North that afternoon they might have found the fleet and that's the worst possible thing that could have happened as one under equipped aircraft carrier versus the mites the keto batai would not have been a good scenario for America or for Enterprise as it was all three U.S carriers operating in the Pacific the Lexington the Saratoga and the Enterprise were away from Pearl Harbor and survived the attack the U.S Navy after Pearl Harbor a scrambling round for everything if it floats it will be sent to Pearl Harbor and the way they do so is by repositioning aircraft carriers from the Atlantic all the way to the Pacific Pence Enterprise as soon joined by Yorktown and Hornet her sisters but despite their Reliance on the alpha strike U.S planners had still not yet learned the key lesson of Pearl Harbor Pearl Harbor was known to be a great Japanese success but most people including the Americans believe that the real success was because they caught the battleships in Harbor so they hadn't fully understood that what year you needed were the aircraft carriers alone and to mask the aircraft carriers so what the United States does is it brings most of its carriers to the Pacific only the Enterprise and the Hornet teamed up in April 42 to launch the Doolittle Raid now this was a long-range bomber attack on Tokyo and that caused some damage to Yokosuka Shipyard but it was really only a token exercise aimed at restoring America's damaged Pride America had been attacked at home they wanted to return the favor at last the Nazis of the Far East were being made to swallow their own medicine it would take the loss of the Lexington and the crippling of the Yorktown at the Battle of the Coral Sea as late as May 1942 before it began to Dawn on American planners that maybe their carriers were better off working in packs rather than alone by contrast Admiral Yamamoto is routinely grouping at least four of the six carriers he has operating in the Pacific into this unified Strike Force the so-called Kido bhutai and this meant that he could deploy more than 300 attack planes against the enemy at any one time and if they were able to find you in those vast ways race of the Pacific 300 aircraft are going to be more than enough to overwhelm any traditional Fleet defenses if they find you you're going down but the Americans were learning on the 4th of June 1942 six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor the combined Fleet of Admiral Yamamoto containing four Fleet carriers is surprised by the carrier's Enterprise Hornet and Yorktown off the island of Midway Midway is one of those classic 20th century Naval battles one site is trying to lure the other into a trap and that other side thanks to intelligence managed to turn the tables Yamamoto was trying to pin the Americans against his Battleship Fleet which was steaming towards Midway behind a carrier screen the American carriers are waiting for the Japanese the Japanese carriers marched their attacks on Midway and lo and behold soon discovers that they have been found by the American carriers [Music] this is the nightmare scenario when you are rearming when you're reloading your aircraft in a space you can't defend for dive bombers or any kind of strike to come in at this point is when the aircraft Carriage most exposed to fuel and the initial over the place you've got three Japanese carriers the sorry you the cargar and the akagi all their refueling planes are on the deck and they're attacked by these dauntless dive bombers uh from the Enterprise in the Yorktown and in just four minutes four minutes those three carriers are reduced to funeral pars it's the combination of c and pepper which comes in the struggle for Mastery relentlessly scientifically the extermination of the Japanese continued [Music] the fourth Japanese carrier the hiru survives long enough for her planes to [ __ ] the Yorktown but is dealt a death blow by a second wave of dive bombers from the Enterprise the Japanese battleships well they just turn tail and they ran off without even seeing the enemy they didn't even fire a shot by the time that the battle was over four Japanese Fleet carriers have been lost in combat so for the Japanese it's an ambitious and bold plan and it fails utterly it was a crippling blow to the Japanese Imperial Navy but contrary to popular belief it wasn't a knockout one Midway did not make it so the Japanese Navy was now inferior to the American Navy in many ways what Midway does is it equals the score Japanese still have two large Fleet carriers in operation the United States has two Fleet carriers in operation it means that both navies are about the same size when it comes to striking problems the Japanese responded to the Battle of Midway by renewing an army plan to conduct an overall offensive operation that would drive down into the Solomon Islands and New Guinea now this is the scene of Santa Cruz and Guadalcanal where the Hornet was lost and the Enterprise took direct hits but survives to help sink the hea by the time the campaign was over Japan had four carriers still operating in the Pacific America had only one the Enterprise now on paper things are still looking manageable for the Japanese look they've still got two Fleet carriers and they've got another one in the works and they got two light carriers converted from other ships and on top of that the Japanese Imperial Navy have planned an entirely new class of carrier to replace the ones they've lost so the Japanese had not given up hope after Midway they still believe that their their Warrior Spirit was Superior and then in the end they would Outlast the Americans because they would be willing to fight harder and longer but the Japanese were about to learn the hard way that Warrior Spirit doesn't win modern Wars Factories do long before Midway Japanese High command had recognized that they were going to take carrier losses so five months before they launched their attack on Pearl Harbor the Kawasaki company had laid the Keel for a brand new class of carrier at their Shipyard in Kobe the Tai ho was this really heavily armored carrier designed to survive multiple hits from bombs and Torpedoes you name it this was a sensible move by the Japanese you know they had no idea that Pearl Harbor was going to be quite so successful and the expectation was that they need a strong replacement carrier by the end of 1942. in the same year the United States had begun building a new class of carrier named the Essex at Newport News Virginia the Essex class was the following class to the York towns they were the successes to Enterprise and ancestors they were built and ordered by the U.S Navy when it was realized the treaty system had long ceased to be effective in that no one was now paying attention to it and so their 27 000 tons they've got three and a half thousand crew and they're supposed to operate up to 400 aircraft the fate of the tihoe and the Essex class carriers would graphically drive home the differences between American shipbuilding and Japan's it took the Japanese 32 months to complete the taihoe and she was put into service just a couple of months before the battle of the Philippine Sea which becomes the biggest Naval disaster Japan would suffer during the entire War by the battle of the Philippine Sea American industrial night is beginning to tell they're turning out warships in almost a conveyor belt fashion the speed of their construction and the simplification of their construction meant that there were six Essex class carriers available to take on the Japanese at the Philippine Sea when the Japanese had just got tiho and the rest of the damaged and increasingly aged Japanese Fleet this was the day our Navy had been waiting for it's there that this supposedly torpedo-proof armored carrier was sunk by a single hit from American torpedo and it's the speed with which the Essex is built that will make the crucial difference in the war the responses to the battles of Midway and the Philippine Sea show us the extreme differences between the Japanese and American capacity for shipbuilding simply put their War factories then the Americans managed to scrape together three aircraft carriers for the Battle of Midway to oppose four Japanese Fleet aircraft carriers at the Philippine Sea though the United States has 15 or 16 aircraft carriers against the Japanese nine between those two battles the Americans had built Essex and her Five Sisters versus tihoe and one converted carrier the shinanu that's a production difference of about four or five to one and those carriers and new planes that they're carrying are so effective that they can simply shoot anything the Japanese could throw at them in fact it's such a massacre that it becomes famously known as the great Marianas turkey shoot but despite being so one-sided it wasn't the battle that turned the war it was the War factories foreign the turkey shoot at the Philippine Sea is often cited as the battle that destroyed the Japanese air fleet but despite horrendous losses it wasn't the battle that did most of the damage as well as her aircraft in the pilots who flew them Japan lost three Fleet carriers at the Philippine Sea so this means that she is reduced from six Fleet carriers on December 41 to just one by October 44 and even that was destroyed at the Battle of Lady Gulf hamstrung by mismanagement and lack of Supply Japan's War factories were simply too slow to produce The Replacements they had planned in time for them to have any effect on the war so the consequence of this is that the Japanese Imperial Navy simply can't afford to divert any carriers to escort duties or to transport aircraft from the factories to their deployment areas this is where the size of the Pacific Theater and the lack of pilot training the Japanese give their pilots by from 1944 is proving to be devastating the geography of the Pacific is so fast that that planes were often having to fly the equivalent of London to New York just to get close to the battles so the Japanese are sending thousands of their aircraft in very dangerous missions just to get them into battle many of them ever appear so while the Japanese in 1944 lose 3600 in combat operations they lose over 6600 just trying to deploy them to the battle areas the knock-on effect was disastrous without escorts Japanese transport ships on the Voyage Home to her War factories were sitting ducks to U.S Hunters in 1945 Japanese shipments of oil and bauxite are slashed in half bulk site is one of the key elements that's used to make aluminum and aluminum is an absolutely crucial component in Japanese aircraft it's one of the things that makes the Mitsubishi zero for example such a lightweight versatile fighter that means that they no longer have access to the aluminum to manufacture airplanes and then they no longer have a sufficient supply of oil to fuel the airplanes and if you don't have aluminum and fuel you no longer have an air fleet you no longer have a Keto bhutai and without the Kido bhutai Japan was Dead in the Water by the end of 44 Japan had basically lost all of her carriers in the Pacific so without any carriers to carry them and with basically no experienced Pilots to get them across the ocean you've got this whole Fleet of Japanese carrier planes effectively grounded Americas was not the United States Navy on the other hand is just going from unparalleled Naval Aviation strength to unparalleled Aviation strength the Americans produced so many Essex class carriers that they can deploy them in groups of four and then group the groups of four so that they end up creating the Strike Force Base around the Essex [Music] celebrated December the 7th Pearl Harbor day was to launch the aircraft carrier Bunker Hill a giant yet but only a fraction of Roosevelt's mathematical certainty of the Fate in store for Japan and it's not just Newport News That's turning out carriers so by this stage of the war shipyards in Brooklyn Philadelphia and Norfolk Virginia among others all working 24 7 putting those new Essex class carriers together Brooklyn alone employs 75 000 people and that includes women and African Americans who had been previously banned from such trades what Brooklyn becomes known as is the can do yard because of its attitude and it's just one example of the way that the US throws itself wholesale into war production the chip building industry is working flat and every yard in America is doing its share they can keep building more and more of these ships they become a conveyor belt of construction on the other side you've got the Japanese with technically three new carriers in the pipeline and they're planning at least 11 more but they've got a problem resources are scarce and also their production rate is really slow so that the Japanese War factories only managed to turn out one of these carriers before the war is over and what happens to that it's promptly suck on its very first Supply run by the end of the war the United States had 17 Essex class aircraft carriers and Fleet Service over the course of the conflict we commissioned just over 100 aircraft carriers of all sizes and classes during the course of the second world war the Japanese commissioned 22. cannot argue with numbers like that under that formula for the Japanese World War II was unwinnable as the wall Drew to a close Japan would resort to suicidally desperate measures in its attempt to slow down American Carrier fleets Japan has no carriers and it has no Pilots that can actually fly effectively from carriers it now has to change the way it fights the war and that's one of the reasons they bring in suicide attacks you have to turn the pilot into the bomb the Japanese ultimately unleash a Kamikaze offensive against the United States during the course of the war that's best illustrated by what happens at Okinawa during this three-month campaign for Okinawa the U.S Navy is going to lose 26 ships and is going to suffer damage to another 164. born from Japanese suicide Pilots the US Navy suffered the greatest attrition at any point in the war of aircraft carriers even the Enterprise itself will be hit twice and would have to go home for repairs after the Kamikaze was not just in destroying American warships if you're fighting an enemy that is willing to sacrifice themselves in waves to try and stop you it has a significant emotional impact the Japanese V pilot has ended his career with a direct hit on a carryout of the Essex plus he's caused casualties and damage on board an enemy ship and it's for just that purpose that his own life was written off from the first day of his training so to the Americans it looks like the enemy is becoming increasingly more and more desperate to prevent us from approaching the home islands and it looks like their commitment to hold us back as long as they can is absolute the last line of defense of the Kamikaze was a final frontier doomed to fail but the reaction it provoked from the Americans would Mark a significant milestone in the story of the carrier long after the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war the USS Enterprise chalked up another first in the illustrious history of its name in November 1961 the ape ship to carry the name USS Enterprise was also the first ever nuclear aircraft carrier to be put into service the ship was built at Newport News and was powered by eight nuclear reactors two for each of its propeller shards this was Undiscovered Country it was the first time they'd actually paired nuclear reactors to operate together it could have been a disaster [Music] but it wasn't and although this was potentially fraught with Peril the new Enterprise is a stunning success and it is the warship that brings us into the era of the nuclear-powered super carrier along with the Workhorse Essex carriers and the nuclear Nimitz carriers that followed them the mission roster of the Enterprise reads like a history of America's involvement in the Cold War and Beyond participates in the blockade of Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis she would steam around the world as part of the nuclear Squadron the U.S Navy sent a shot their power and strength at one point her crew forming a massive E equals MC squared on her flight deck just because they could it even ends up launching planes against Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 1998 and 2003. so just like her predecessor the modern USS Enterprise covered a broad swath of modern conflict every conflict of the United States Navy has been a part of since the second world war she was decommissioned in 2012 to make way for the next generation of supercarrier the Gerald R Ford Enterprise 9 will be the third forward-class carrier to be built but she is under construction at a time when the very future of the aircraft carrier May well be Slipping Into Darkness carriers are brutally expensive the United States newest super carrier the general R Ford costs about 14 billion dollars to to build the most recent Enterprise is going to cost 11 billion dollars the reports put it at six and a half million dollars a day to operate the U.S aircraft carrier some people do ask quite reasonably if this is money well spent especially in an era of kind of counter-terrorism operations and cruise missiles the Chinese are developing a new anti-ship missile which people claim will be able to engage warships a thousand kilometers from the coast of China ironically it's the activities of the Chinese Navy that may well lift the carrier Beyond those current concerns while China interestingly has not only building anti-ship missiles they seem to be building the carriers themselves now the Diane is a soviet-era carrier which has been the nascent ship of the emerging Chinese carrier Force they can now have a second carrying service and they have a third the type 003 under construction which they claim is going to be a nuclear-powered supercarrier equivalent to default class and furthermore there's all this Intelligence coming in that suggests it's even built a dedicated carrier base on the island of Hainan as part of its build up in the South China Sea the Japanese are returning to carrier construction they're working to assemble a modern carrier Force themselves which can hopefully deter the Chinese [Music] the Next Generation in the history of the Enterprise May well be first contact with a Chinese carrier Fleet in the South China Sea [Applause] thank you [Music]

Channel: Free Documentary - History

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Keywords: Free Documentary, Documentaries, Full Documentary, documentary - topic, documentary (tv genre), History, History Documentaries, Free Documentary History, War Factories, Secret History of World War 2, World War II, WWII, WW 2, Second World War, War Production, War Industry, History of World War 2, Military Production, War Factories Complete Series, War Factories Season 3, War Factories Full Episodes, History Documentary, USS Enterprise, Pacific War, US Aircraft Carriers

Id: pD5ZtXKFqiQ

Length: 43min 59sec (2639 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 05 2023