"ttyymmnn" (ttyymmnn)
06/07/2016 at 12:35 • Filed to: planelopnik, planelopnik history
5
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"ttyymmnn" (ttyymmnn)
06/07/2016 at 12:35 • Filed to: planelopnik, planelopnik history | 5
| 3 |
Welcome to This Date in Aviation History , getting of you caught up on milestones, important historical events and people in aviation from June 4- June 7.
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June 4, 1942 – The Battle of Midway begins. By 1931, Japan had already seized portions China, and by 1937 it had begun a full-scale invasion. But still in need of natural resources to continue their conquests, the Japanese turned south, invading French and Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia. Early in the war, the Japanese were almost unstoppable, capturing Thailand, Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies, along with numerous islands that they garrisoned with troops and aircraft. But with the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! on Pearl Harbor, and America’s entry into the war, Admiral !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , the Commander in Chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy, knew that it was only a matter of time before their advances were halted. Speaking to Japanese cabinet minister Shigeharu Matsumoto and prime minister Fumimaro Konoe, Yamamoto said, “In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.” Though bloodied at Pearl Harbor, the American fleet was not destroyed as the Japanese had hoped. Many ships had been sunk or damaged, but not the all-important aircraft carriers. On May 7, 1942, the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! was fought between the US and Japan, and while the battle was indecisive, it set the stage for the Battle of Midway a month later, another battle that, like Coral Sea, would be fought entirely between aircraft of the opposing fleets. The Japanese were of the mistaken belief that they had sunk two American carriers, !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , in the Coral Sea. But only Lexington had been lost, and Yorktown survived to join !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . The planned Japanese invasion of !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , a strategic atoll that got its name from its location half way between California and Asia, began on June 4 with a feint attack at the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. But the American fleet had intercepted and decoded Japanese transmissions and knew that the real target of the invasion was Midway, and they moved to blunt the Japanese advance. The Japanese fleet opened the battle by bombing the island, but even though the American defenders were heavily mauled, the Japanese still had to rearm their planes for a second land attack. While the rearming was underway, the Japanese learned of the presence of the American fleet northeast of Midway and turned to meet it, forcing the American’s first aerial attack to miss its target. American torpedo bombers then located the Japanese fleet, but without fighter cover the attackers were !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . By now, the Japanese knew of the presence of the American fleet, and they struggled to switch their armament from land bombs to armor-piercing anti-ship bombs. As the decks of the Japanese carriers were covered with planes, fuel and ordnance, dive bombers and fighters from all three US carriers arrived, and within minutes, the carriers !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , and !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , all of which had taken part in the Pearl Harbor attack, had been sunk. Japanese planes from !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! counterattacked, damaging the Yorktown, which was later sunk by a Japanese submarine while salvage efforts were underway. American planes then attacked Hiry , which was heavily damaged and scuttled the next day. In the course of roughly 24 hours, the Japanese had lost four heavy carriers and the tide of the Pacific War was irrevocably changed, and initiative passed to America and its Allies for the rest of the war. Coming just 6 months after Pearl Harbor, Yamamoto’s words had proven eerily prophetic, though the war would continue to drag on 3 more bloody years. (US Navy photo)
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June 4, 1942 – The crash of the Akutan Zero. In the early days of WWII, the Japanese !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! fighter, which was more maneuverable than anything the Allies could field at the time, ruled the skies over the Pacific. In one battle in April of 1942, 36 Zeros attacked the British naval base at Columbo, Ceylon (modern day Sri Lanka). About 60 RAF aircraft rose to meet them, a mix of different types, many obsolete. After the battle, almost half of the RAF planes were shot down: 15 !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , 8 !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , and 4 !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . The Japanese lost 1 Zero. Early in the war, the Zero enjoyed a 12-1 kill ratio. When the Americans entered the war following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, they fared little better. Though tactics were developed that would help level the playing field against the Japanese fighter, the Allies still had no fighter that could go toe-to-toe with the nimble Zero. What the Allies sorely needed was to get their hands on one of the elusive fighters in the hopes of divining its secrets and finding a weakness they could exploit. Concurrent with the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! in early June of 1942, the Japanese !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! the islands of Attu and Kiska in the Aleutians, hoping to divert attention away from their real target, Midway Island (American admiral Chester Nimitz never took the bait). On June 4, 1942, before invading troops came ashore in the Aleutians, a group of Japanese planes took off from the carrier !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! to bomb Dutch Harbor. After the attack, Flight Petty Officer Tadayoshi Koga, flying an A6M2 Zero, realized that he had been hit by ground fire and was losing fuel. He knew he would not be able to return to the Ryj . Hoping to ditch his plane on what looked like firm ground, Koga instead came down on soft tundra and his fighter immediately flipped over. Japanese procedure called for the other aircraft in his group to destroy the grounded plane, but Koga’s wingmen couldn’t bring themselves to strafe the Zero on the chance that Koga had survived. Short on fuel themselves, they returned to the carrier. Five weeks later, the overturned, mostly intact Zero was spotted by a Navy reconnaissance plane and a salvage operation was undertaken. US Navy personnel made their way to the plane and found the lifeless Koga still hanging upside down in the cockpit. They buried his body, and the plane was shipped intact (the construction of the Zero prohibited the removal of the wings) to San Diego where it was repaired. Flight testing began immediately.
The flights exposed weaknesses that could be exploited, such as a lack of maneuverability at high speeds, a preference to roll left rather than right, and a propensity for stalling under negative-G maneuvers. Allied pilots learned to dive quickly to take advantage of the Zero’s tendency to stall, then gain separation while the Japanese pilot was restarting his engine. Then, a quick roll to the right would put the Zero in the American’s sights. Testing with the captured Zero continued, but the aircraft was destroyed during a taxiing crash when it was rammed by a
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which sliced the fragile fighter into bits with its propeller. Several Gauges were salvaged and donated to the National Museum of the US Navy, and other small pieces reside in the Alaska Heritage Museum and the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.
(US Navy photos)
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June 6, 1944 – A huge airborne armada carries Allied troops across the English Channel to begin the D-Day invasion of Europe. On the morning of September 1, 1939, the German army !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! Poland, thus beginning World War II, a global conflict that would eventually claim the lives of 70-85 million people. When France !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! to the Nazis on June 25, 1940, it left Germany and Italy in control of almost all of Europe, and the Nazis would continue to rule France through the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! until 1944. While the Russians strongly advocated the creation of a second front in Europe to fight the Germans and relieve pressure on the Eastern Front, Allied leaders balked, saying that they didn’t have the men or materiel to make an effective invasion. They opted instead to invade North Africa ( !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! ) and Italy ( !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! ) in an operation that British prime minister !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! claimed would strike at the “soft underbelly” of Europe. That underbelly would turn out not to be so soft, and though the invasion of Italy would eventually bog down, the Allies gained valuable experience with amphibious landing operations that they would put to use in the eventual invasion of mainland Europe. At the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! in Washington, DC in 1943, Allied leaders decided that the time to invade Europe had come, and the French beaches in Normandy were selected as the point at which the Allies would try to gain a foothold in !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . But in order to carry out the largest amphibious invasion in history, airborne troops would have to go in first to pave the way for the seaborne invasion forces. The first landings were made by pathfinder companies who were sent to deploy ground beacons for the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! system. These beacons would direct planes loaded with paratroopers. The pathfinders were followed an army of airborne soldiers, including 13,000 troops from the US Army !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , along with 6,000 British troops of the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and 500 paratroopers from !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . These paratroops were dropped into the Norman countryside behind the invasion beaches to block German reinforcements from coming forward, to capture causeway exits from the beaches, and to establish river crossings so troops on the beach could fan out across the countryside. They also marked out landing zones for the nearly 4,000 glider-borne troops that would land at first light. To transport the paratroops, the Allies assembled a fleet of over 900 !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! (RAF designation Dakota) which were arrayed in consecutive V-formations, nine planes wide, and crossed the English Channel in a line that stretched 300 miles. The aerial assault didn’t go completely to plan, as many of the soldiers were widely scattered, and some took days to rejoin their units. But most of their objectives were met, and they helped clear the way for the nearly 160,000 Allied troops that would come ashore at dawn on D-Day. (Photo author unknown)
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Short Take Off
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June 4, 1996 – The first successful launch of the Ariane 5, a heavy-lift launch vehicle that, depending on variant, can lift payloads of up to 44,000 lbs into !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! or up to 23,100 pounds into !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . The Ariane 5 was originally designed to carry the proposed !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! spaceplane into orbit, but that project was canceled in 1992. Ariane 5's first launch failed and the rocket self-destructed due to a software problem, and the second launch was a partial failure. The first successful flight took place in October 1998, and the first successful commercial launch followed in December 1999. Since then, Ariane 5 has completed a total of 81 successful launches, with the latest one scheduled for June 8, 2016. ( !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! photo)
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June 4, 1974 – Construction begins on Orbital Vehicle 101,
the first Space Shuttle.
OV-101, which had originally been named
Constitution
and had been planned to be unveiled on Constitution Day (September 17, 1976), was instead named
Enterprise
in honor of the
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television series after a huge write-in campaign.
Enterprise
was built without engines or a heat shield, and was initially used for
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(ALT) after being released from the
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(SCA) and for Mated Vertical Ground Vibration Tests. NASA had planned to then convert
Enterprise
for space flight, but significant redesigns of the Shuttle since
Enterprise’s
rollout made that plan too expensive, and another test vehicle still under construction would later become the Shuttle
Challenger
.
Enterprise
is now restored and on display at the
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in New York City.
(NASA photo)
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June 4, 1934 – The US Navy commissions the USS Ranger (CV-4), its first purpose-built aircraft carrier. America’s first aircraft carrier, !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! (CV-1) was converted from the USS Jupiter (AC-3), which had originally been designed as a collier. Ranger was the first ship to be designed from the keel up as a carrier, and was originally designed without an island superstructure, though one was added later. Ranger was too slow to see combat in the Pacific, and served instead in the Atlantic, where it took part in the invasion of French North Africa ( !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! ), and later in !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , where she carried out attacks on German shipping off the coast of Norway. Ranger was decommissioned on October 18, 1946 and sold for scrap in 1947. (US Navy photo)
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June 5, 1989 – The Antonov An-225 Mriya sets a world record for the greatest maximum takeoff weight ever flown. The An-225 was originally designed to transport the Russian space shuttle !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , though with the end of the Buran program following the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! in 1991, Mriya was converted to a super heavy-lift strategic airlifter. As part of a demonstration for the 1989 Paris Air Show, Mriya flew from Kiev to Paris-Le Bourget airport carrying Buran on its back with a combined weight of 1,234,600 pounds, a record that still stands. (Photo by Ralf Manteufel via !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! )
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June 5, 1944 – The first combat mission of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress. Deployed to bases in southern China and India in April 1944, the B-29 flew its first combat mission against Japanese targets in Thailand. Of the 77 bombers launched on that first raid, 5 were lost, though none to enemy fire. Then, on June 15, 68 Superfortresses attacked Yahata, Japan in the first attack on the Japanese homeland since the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! of 1942. Operations from China and India proved difficult, so the decision was made to capture the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! to construct air bases that were close enough to attack the island of Japan. Superfortresses carried out bombing raids, fire bombing raids, and mine laying missions from these forward bases, culminating in the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Later, the Surperfortress saw action in Korea, and the airframe was modified into reconnaissance and aerial refueling tankers before finally being retired in 1960. (US Air Force photo)
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June 6, 1915 – Zeppelin LZ 37 becomes the first Zeppelin destroyed in air-to-air combat. During WWI, the Germans flew !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! to carry out strategic bombing missions against France and England. On the night of June 6-7, LZ 37 of the German Imperial Navy ( Kaiserliche Marine ) took part in a three-airship raid on Calais when it was attacked by Royal Naval Air Service pilot !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! flying a !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! fighter. Warneford climbed above the Zeppelin and dropped bombs on the airship, setting it on fire and causing it to crash. The explosion caused Warneford’s fighter to roll and lose power and he was forced down behind enemy lines, but he was able to restart his fighter and return to base. Eight members of the nine-man crew were killed, along with two people on the ground. For his actions, Warneford was awarded the British Victoria Cross and French !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . (Photo author unknown)
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June 7, 1981 – Israeli fighters destroy the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak. As part of a program to develop what they maintained was a peaceful nuclear power program, the Iraqi government, with the help of French engineers, constructed a nuclear reactor at Osirak near the capital city of Baghdad. Following attempts at sabotage, including the assassination of a French scientist working on the program, the Israeli government carried out !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , sending six !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , each carrying two 2,000 pound unguided bombs and protected by six !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , to destroy the Iraqi facility. Ten Iraqi soldiers were killed in the attack, along with one French civilian. Iraq vowed to rebuild the facility, but it was finally completely destroyed by the US in 1991 during the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . (Photo by KGyST via !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! )
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Recent Aviation History Posts
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If you enjoy these Aviation History posts, please let me know in the comments. And if you missed any of the past articles, you can find them all at !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! .
S65
> ttyymmnn
06/07/2016 at 12:40 |
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Today’s My Birthday.
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ttyymmnn
> S65
06/07/2016 at 12:41 |
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Happy Birthday!
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S65
> ttyymmnn
06/07/2016 at 12:43 |
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Thank You!
