Landing on the Wrong Carrier July 3, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
This is the most bizarre aircraft carrier story of them all. It involves suitably enough a Japanese and an American aircraft carrier. May 7 1942 American and Japanese forces are fighting in the Coral Sea. Both American and Japanese planes have been flying off the flat-tops, hoping to hunt down the enemy’s ships. It was a bad day all round. American bombers had gone heroically after an Allied conovy and then the Japanese… Well, the combination of nerve and incompetence takes one’s breath away. It was close to dark and a Japanese strike group had been hit by American fighters. The Japanese had broken out of formation and despairing of finding any kills dropped their bombs in the open ocean and looked for their aircraft carrier. The planes, though were badly disorientated and, in the dark, wandered over Task Force 17, the main American fleet, something that would have meant bingo had they still had full bombloads. Here the fun really began. Seeing the two American carriers, the Yorktown and the Lexington, but not realizing that they were enemy ships (!) the Japanese pilots sent out recognition signals and wheeled round preparing to land! Of course, the Americans, once they were sure that they had Japanese planes in their sights opened up with everything that they had, but in this confusion at least one Japanese pilot actually began a landing run on the Yorktown, the most courageous American carrier of them all, and one that would not survive Midway. Beach feels a little anger writing this that the American anti-aircraft guns hadn’t the sense of history to hang on for just another twenty seconds. Imagine the photographs of a Japanese pilot being pulled out of his cockpit: imagine his eyes as he takes in the Yorktown around him. The sudden burst of fire caused, in any case, confusion everywhere: no one is dropping bombs on us so why are we banging at the sky? An American pilot in the air was horrified to see the flak explode around him and radioed down: ‘What are you shooting at me for? What have I done now?’ Beach has been unable to discover whether any of these confused Japanese planes made it back to ‘mother’ or whether they ended their war in the shark-infested waters of the Coral Sea. Any other attempts to land on the wrong carrier? Drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com Beach doubts it, but he has run this site long enough to know that the incredible repeats itself; and that the impossible laughs in the face of the possible.
