Dragging our way through February in the Great Lakes…why do we live up here? Snow, ice, cold wind. The only good thing about it is that it does make spring look that much better.
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On 25 February 1933, the Navy launched the aircraft carrier USS Ranger, named after a renowned Revolutionary War vessel (as most US pre-WWII carriers were). As the fourth US Navy aircraft carrier, her hull number was CV-4. Smaller than the two previous 36,000-ton carriers of the Lexington class and the next, the 20,000-ton Yorktown class, 14,500 ton Ranger was, like so many warships in the 1930s, a compromise to stay within Washington Naval Treaty requirements. She was more notably the US Navy’s first ship designed from the beginning as an aircraft carrier. Everything about Ranger was a learning experience, including her pre-1939 deployments in Latin America, the eastern Pacific, and Alaska: she was the first aircraft carrier to launch and recover aircraft under Arctic conditions. Designed to house and launch as many as 76 planes, Ranger was also the first to get Grumman F4F-3 Wildcats for her fighter squadron in October 1940.
Because of her size and geared turbines, she lacked the range and speed to operate in the Pacific. Pearl Harbor found Ranger returning to Norfolk from a Neutrality Patrol off the Carribean. Ironically, the US Navy’s smallest “fleet” carrier (a designation developed during WWII, she wasn’t referred to as that) was the largest aircraft carrier in the Atlantic Ocean in 1942, spending much of her time as an aircraft ferry, even though she still took part in the naval battle of Casablanca 8 November 1942. Ranger was famous enough for the Germans to have claimed to have sunk her with torpedoes in April 1943–when she was in drydock. She spent the last half of 1943 as part of the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet, participating in a raid on Norway known as Operation Leader on 4 October.
The Norway raid was Ranger’s last combat operation. A plan to lengthen and modernize her in 1944 was abandoned as not worth the resources. She spent the rest of the war as an aircraft ferry and training carrier, once again venturing into the Pacific as far as Hawaii. In 1945 Ranger trained carrier pilots for night intercepts and transported returning personnel. She was decommissioned in 1946 and scrapped in 1947.
On 25 February 1945, the US Navy’s Task Force 58, consisting of 11 fleet and five light carriers, turned away from their ravaging of Japanese airfields that had begun 16 February in support of the Iwo Jima landings that began on 19 February. Though the numbers are fuzzy, there may have been as many as a thousand US planes involved in the attacks, resulting in a claim of over 400 Japanese aircraft destroyed to less than a hundred US losses. These attacks on the Japanese Home Islands were not undertaken with impunity, for the Japanese responded with kamikaze and conventional air attacks. It is interesting to note that Ranger’s predecessor, USS Saratoga (CV-3), then the oldest operational aircraft carrier in the world, was among the fleet carriers attacking Japan, and survived a kamikaze attack on 21 February 1945. It is also interesting to recall that Saratoga was expended at a nuclear target in 1946 and that her hull was still intact as late as 2011.
National Tell A Fairy Tale Day
National Tell-A-Fairy-Tale Day is tomorrow, 16 February, once again because the good folks at the National Day Calendar say it is. Fairy tales, as we all know, are supposed to be fanciful renditions of what were once grim moral folk stories told for the benefit of children that since the late 19th Century have always ended with “and they all lived happily ever after.” According to the Australian Fairy Tale Society: “Once upon a time, the people tried to define fairy tale. They are still trying.” Their website suggests the modern fairy tale hearkens back to ancient mythology, and I’ve got nothing to dispute that. Yes, there really is an Australian Fairy Tale Society: click on the link above if you don’t believe me.
But tellers of fairy tales aren’t just in children’s books. They include salesmen of all sorts, especially of used cars, life insurance, and retirement investments. They are also tort lawyers, publicists of all stripes, and marketing and advertising copywriters. Included in this group are, of course, the mass media of both “wings” of American discourse: those at left are merely the most notorious.
The most pernicious, however, are the tellers of fables among elected officials (which would be nearly all of them) and their hangers-on, all of whom scream that they are scrupulously honest right up to the election day. The image on top is, of course of those famous tellers of fairy tales, President Clinton and Wanna-Be-President Clinton. We all remember Wille Jeff’s memorable nationally-televised and emphatic finger-pointing telling of “I did not have sex with that woman, Monica Lewinsky,” and Hilly Rod’s spookily animated “it was the video” fable in 2012, and the serial denials that she told it afterward…and that Congressional hearing? Epic fable-telling at its best, right up there with Nixon’s “I am not a crook.”
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