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World War Two in Navy photo recognition slides

Float planes on Navy warships; Curtiss and Vought competed. The B-25 Mitchell (the aircraft Doolittle Tokyo raiders flew is here).

You have reached the wwii folder, the fourth folder on this website. Skip this next italicized paragraph which is an overview of the structure of this website.

This website, www.daileyint.com is organized in four folders. The first folder on this website, www.daileyint.com/seawar was created,back in the 1990s. It gives a web reader material from the book pictured at the upper left, about a World War II destroyer which served in North Atlantic convoys before acting as gunfire support ship for the five Mediterranean amphibious landings, Casablanca, Sicily, Salerno, Anzio and Southern France. The second folder on this website, www.daileyint.com/flying was created just before 2004, to give the reader excerpts from the second book pictured on the left, about instrument flying and its place om tje history of U.S. aviation. The third folder, www.daileyint.com/mytimes was created about 2000, to give readers some episodes of my life that derive from my memoir of my Parochial School years with the Sisters of St. Joseph in Brockport, New York. You are now reading from the index page of the fourth folder in the isebsite series, www.daileyint com/wwii. This folder was created sometime after 2005, to present to readers photos from the U.S. Navy Recognition Slide Set used to teach Navy men what they were seeing as they searched the skies in areas where there might be enemy planes.

wwii This is my abbreviation for World War II material. In this foldler I will be placing mainly slide photos from the U.S. Navy Recognition Slide Set used to teach Navy lookouts aboard ship what aircraft looked like in the sky, mostly through 7x50 binoculars, and identify the aircraft as friend or foe.

I apologize for beginning this effort and having then been tardy in its execution. It is now April 7, 2013, I am 92, and will endeavor to catch up. I will add slide photos to the first 11 "pages" of this folder starting with the "Operation Torch" page at the top of a column of (blue) links down the left side of the page.

The bottom five links in the left hand column revert to war tales. The first three of the five, beginning with USS West Point AP23 War Cruise-part 1 depart from the Navy Recognition Slide effort to tell of the fateful journey of a Navy transport (originally SS America) as she leaves Halifax NS loaded with Britich soldiers in World War II..Two of tthese come from West Point's Quartermaster, and the third is written by a man, as yet unborn, when West Point reaches Singapore, who tells of his mother's escape Singapore, Fateful Stop on "Joan's Journey" from the oncoming Japanese conquest of that city on West Point via Batavia, Java. The bottom two links are a U.S. sailor's story of his ship's (the USS Brooklyn) role at Casablanca and Sicily.

Explanations end, content begins:

Here now, how one of those Navy Recogntion slides looks when not projected, but simply laid on a background sheet and photographed with my Kodak EasyShare CX4230 camera.. These are 35mm positive slides. This one happens to be the Convair PB2Y Coronado which did not participate in World War II combat action to the best of my knowledge. Interestingly, in my third tour with VP-107 based at NAS Kodiak, when on forward station, I flew as copilot for the skipper, LCdr Ed Hogan USN. He had flown the Coronado when the Navy tried using that aircraft to do inflight fueling of Dutch Harbor PBYs, to see if they could get enough gas in them to make bomb runs at Paramashiro in the Kurille Islands and have enough fuel to get back to Dutch Harbor. These were PBY-5s and were not amphibian aircraft, so use of the runway at NAS Attu after the U.S. retook that island was not feasible. However, the PV-1 Venturas did make that round trip, though many were lost and some crash landed in Siberia attempting to return to Attu.

Photo of a slide from the Navy Recognition slide set in World War II. This one contains a slide photo (35mm) of the Convair PB2Y Coronado, which did not serve in combat in the war.

WWII Navy Recognition slide, photographed, not projected. (See below this same Navy PB2Y Coronado slide, as projected in a slide projector, as a Navy crewman aboard ship in World War II would have seen the aircraft, in the next illustration.

Navy Convair built 4-engine flying boat from U.S. Navy Recognition Slide Set World War II

When the slide is used as intended in a slide projector, one sees this sketch above of the Convair PB2Y Coronado. This aircraft was a 4-engine flying boat, as sketched for a Navy recognition slide. This aircraft likely never participated in combat. Perhaps, just in case an air defense gunner in California saw a plane like this, he would realize it was 'friendly.'

Ships and Aircraft of World War II(most photos from U.S. Navy WW 2 Recognition Training Slide Set)

The OS2U was an important floatplane used in the U.S. Navy for operations off battleships and cruisers going into WW Ii. O is for observartion, S is for scout, and the U was for the manufacturer, Vou

Above, an OS2U Observation Scout floatplane, by Vought Aircraft, carried by battleships and cruisers in the U.S. Navy on the eve of WW II;.(U.S. Navy WW II Recognition Slide Set)

OS2U floatplane used on U.S. Navy battleships and cruisers on the eve of WW II.

Another view of the OS2U; (U.S. Navy WW II Recognition Slide Set)

From the U.S. Navy's World War II Recognition File Set: This is the SO3C, Scout Observation aircraft manufactured by Curtiss. Intended to replace the SOCs on U.S. Navy cruisers or battleships, the wa

An SO3C, Navy's intended replacement for SOC aircraft on cruisers; (from the U.S. Navy WW II Recognition Slide Set- in rare landplane configuration.)

This SO3C aircraft was designed and built for the Navy just before World War II . The sudden advent of the war left the Navy 'making do' with its earlier SOC floatplane. I persnally never saw a 'floatplane' on wheels but always in their waterborne configuration. "SO" was the Navy designation for Scout Observation and "OS" was for Observation Scout . The appending alphabet letters were for manufacturers. The "C" in SO3C was for Curtiss. The "U" in OS2U was for Chance Vought.

Designed for catapault operation off a cruiser or battleship, the SO3C aircraft was normally fitted with a single large float underneath the fuselage and a smaller wingtip float under each wing. Intended primarily for at-sea launch, and sea recovery from cruisers and battleships, aircraft in the Scout and Observation class could be fitted with fixed landing gear to operate off airfields.

The then prevailing (late 1930s, up to U.S. entry into WW II) floatplane models, SOC and OS2U, actually served through the war. The U.S. Navy priority for war production went to the carrier-based fighters and bombers and it was not operationally persuasive to be introducing new aircraft of the scout or observation type to the fleet with a war going on. I do not recall ever seeing the SO3C aircraft on an operational ship in WW II. Its likely mission was to be used for utility purposes in the continental U.S.

A later page in this folder (wwii) series will show an SOC on the catapault of a U.S. cruiser. Some very exciting ,crucial, moments were contributed by earlier design cruiser-based SOC scout aircraft in the "Torch" invasion that targeted Casablanca in November 1942. More such moments occurred off Sicily in July 1943. These can be found in mybook pictured at the upper left on this page, "Joining the War at Sea 1939-1945. In that book, the photo illustrations included the aircraft that participated in the war actions that my destroyer was involved in.

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I will attempt to showf all the relevant ship and aircraft participants in World War II from all over the world and not just those in which I was educated, first as a destroyer gunnery officer in WW 2, and later as a Naval Aviator, designated in October 1945.. Here now, a look at a carrier based plane, standard U.S.Navy equipment at the outset of World War II.

This is the SBD Douglas-built divebomber, the carrier-based bomber that the U.S. Navy used at the outset of the seawar, notably at the Battle of Midway.

Above, the Douglas-built SBD, the Navy's carrier-based bomber. It made news at the Battle of Midway!

The U.S. Navy's Recognition Slide Set includes ships and aircraft of all nations, which had or even might have had an involvement in World War II, including Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard!

The next set of three slides show the U.S. Army Air Corps B-25, Mitchell bomber, one of the most important combat aircraft of World War II. Squadrons of this aircraft were in the South Pacific war early, and the aircraft served with distinction in Europe. This is the plane that Jimmy Doolittle and his pilots and crews flew as they took off from the carrier USS Wasp, and bombed Tokyo. Crews of Navy ships needed to correctly identify this plane as 'friendly,' so the U.S. Navy recognition slide set contained many shots of her in different aspects.

B-25 Mitchell bomber as U.S. Navy crewmen might see her.

U.S. Army Air Corps Mitchell B-25 bomber as Navy crewmen might hvve sighted her, incoming! Do not Fire! Friendly!

U.S. Navy recognition slide from WW II of B-25 Mitchell bomber.

Army Air Corps Mitchell B-25 bomber, as Navy crewmen might have seen her, going!

Army Air Corps B-25 Mitchell bomber, in distant view.

Army Air Corps B-25 Mitchell bomber as Navy crewmen might have seen her, distantly, a little harder to identify.

I will close this introductory page with a more recent photograph. I am not good with a camera but the scene makes this picture.

Photo of Old Glory taken from front porch in Alpharetta (Milton) GA on Veteran's Day 2008

Sunrise at Alpharetta (Georgia) Veteran's Day 2008

Franklyn E. Dailey Jr. July 20, 2007: Revised July 31 2011 Revised April 7, 2013

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