Aircraft Carriers, 1950s-60s
USS Valley Forge
USS Valley Forge, CVS-45, was an Essex class carrier. (US Navy photo via US Naval Institute)
| My father has no snapshots from his time aboard Valley Forge, but he has home movies of Grumman S2F Trackers operating from the flight deck. In the near future I hope to have some of that video available here. |
USS Kitty Hawk
My father as a Lieutenant Commander, around the time he was aboard the Kitty Hawk.
Kitty Hawk operating near Oahu, Hawaii
| Card certifying my father's status as a Horned Shellback. He received this card as a souvenir of the Kitty Hawk's maiden voyage from Norfolk, Virginia around the South American "Horn" to its new home port at San Diego, California. |
The Kitty Hawk's Terrier missiles frame the USS Arizona memorial in Pearl Harbor
U-2 Spy Planes Aboard Kitty
Hawk?
| Yes! Although the operations were secret at the time, the CIA experimented with operating the famous U-2 spy plane from aircraft carriers, and their first trials took place aboard the Kitty Hawk while my father was aboard. For more information, click here to visit the Naval Historical Center. |
| My father escorting photographers from Japan's Shohgakkan Publishing Company while Kitty Hawk was in Japan. The photographers were working on a story about the new American super-carrier for a Japanese magazine for aviation and naval enthusiasts. (Shohgakkan Publishing Co. photo) |
| One of Kitty Hawk's McDonnell F-4B Phantom II fighters photographed for the Japanese magazine. VF-114 was one of the first two Navy squadrons to equip with the F-4B. John Young, a friend of my father's and his classmate at Georgia Tech, set several world records for time-to-altitude while flying the new Phantom II. John Young later went on to become an astronaut in the Gemini, Apollo, and Space Shuttle programs. (Shohgakkan Publishing Co. photo) |
President John F. Kennedy visits the Kitty Hawk and addresses her crew in July, 1963.
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A Tu-16 "Badger" from the Soviet Union shadows the Kitty Hawk in the Pacific during some of the darkest days of the Cold War. My father was aboard the Kitty Hawk during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and he shared this vivid memory with me in a letter: "I feel as if I am back on the flight deck of the Kitty Maru, looking at the A-3s loaded (with you know what) and ready for immediate launch when the balloon goes up in the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Scary times -where are my babies? It was a dark night, with a faint moon, scudding clouds, and I remember going up there to witness the scene, thinking it may be the last night sky I would see, or maybe any sky. A-3s, armed Marine guards, the flight deck, silence, the sea..." |
Copyright 2003, Ian E. Abbott
Photo credits: US Navy, William B. Abbott III