Writing shortly before his death on Okinawa in 1945, the American war correspondent Ernie Pyle described an aircraft carrier as “a noble thing,” though not in appearance. “A carrier has no poise,” Pyle wrote. “It has no grace. It is top-heavy and lopsided. It has the lines of a well-fed cow. It doesn’t cut through the water like a cruiser, knifing romantically along. It doesn’t dance and cavort like a destroyer. It just plows. . . . Yet a carrier is a ferocious thing, and out of its heritage of action has grown its nobility.”
That heritage began—ignobly enough—with Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor using carrier-based airplanes. The U.S. was ill-prepared in part because so few people at the time understood the full lethality of air power and the great distances that such power could be projected by carrier fleets. A scant six months later, the tide of war in the Pacific turned when carrier-based American warplanes sank four Japanese carriers at the Battle of Midway.
