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Carrier operations represented the highest and most complex refinement of naval warfare. ‘The flight deck looked like a big war dance of different colors,’ wrote a sailor aboard Enterprise. ‘The ordnance gang wore red cloth helmets and a red T-shirt when they went about their work of loading machine-guns, fusing bombs, and hoisting torpedoes … Other specialties wore different colors. Brown for the plane captains – one attached to each plane – green for the hydraulic men who manned the arresting gear and the catapults, yellow for the landing signal officer and deck control people, purple for the oil and gas kings … Everything was “on the double” and took place with whirling propellers everywhere, waiting to mangle the unwary.’ The US Navy would refine carrier assault to a supreme art, but in 1942 it was still near the bottom of the curve: not only were its planes inferior to those of the Japanese, but commanders had not yet evolved the right mix of fighters, dive-bombers and torpedo-carriers for each ‘flat-top’ – after the Coral Sea, captains deplored the inadequate proportion of Wildcats. US anti-aircraft gunnery was no more effective than that of the Royal Navy. Radar sets were short-sighted in comparison with those of the later war years. Damage control, which became an outstanding American skill, was poor.

The US Navy boasted a fine fighting tradition, but its 1942 crews were still dominated by men enlisted in peacetime, often because they could find nothing else to do. Naval airman Alvin Kiernan wrote:

Many of the sailors were there, as I was, because there were few jobs in Depression America … We would have denied that we were an underclass … There wasn’t such a thing in America, we thought – conveniently forgetting that blacks and Asians were allowed to serve in the navy only as officers’ cooks and mess attendants. Our teeth were terrible from Depression neglect, we had not always graduated from high school, none had gone to college, our complexions tended to acne, and we were for the most part foul-mouthed, and drunkenly rowdy when on liberty … I used to wonder why so many of us were skinny, bepimpled, sallow, short and hairy.

Cecil King, chief ship’s clerk on Hornet, recalled: ‘We had a small group of real no-goodniks. I mean these kids were not necessarily honest-to-God gangsters, but they were involved in anything that was seriously wrong on the ship – heavy gambling and extortion. One night one of them was thrown over the side.’ For most men, naval service required years of monotony and hard labour, interrupted by brief passages of violent action. A few, including King, actively enjoyed carrier life: ‘I just felt at home at sea. I felt like that’s what the Navy’s all about. Many times I would wander around the ship, particularly in the late afternoon, just enjoying being there. I would go over to the deck edge elevator and stand and watch the ocean going by. I feel like I’m probably one of the luckiest people in the entire world … for having been born in the year that I was, to be able to fight for my country in World War II; this whole era … is something that I feel real privileged for having gone through.’

The expansion of the US Navy’s officer corps made a dramatic and brilliant contribution to the service’s later success, and some learned to love the sea service and the responsibilities it conferred on them. Most ordinary sailors, however – especially as ships began to fill with wartime recruits – did their duty honourably enough, but found little to enjoy. Some found it all too much for them: a sailor on Hornet climbed out on the mast yardarm, and hung 160 feet over the sea trying to muster nerve to jump and kill himself until dissuaded by the chaplain and the ship’s doctor. He was sent to the US for psychiatric evaluation – and eventually returned to Hornet in time to share the ship’s sinking, the fate of which he had been so fearful.

Those who experienced the US Navy’s early