An armored flight deck with a 3.5-inch thick armor belt sounded like a solution to a simple wartime problem: keep the bombs out of the most vulnerable areas of the carrier long enough to keep flying.” The Midway class showed that this was a successful design, but also that “armor would lead designers and users down a line of compromises that would follow these ships for decades.”
The Midway carriers were planned as a transition between the World War II-era mass-produced fleet carriers and the larger “supercarriers” of the Cold War era. The intended design was essentially an Essex-sized ship with greatly improved protection and defenses, based on the premise that carriers would be damaged and would have to withstand such damage without sacrificing their ability to produce airpower. The wartime study summarized the reasoning thus: “The damage experience of several British carriers” demonstrated the effectiveness of armored flight decks in protecting hangars and critical areas below against general-purpose and semi-armor-piercing bombs.
The Midway’s protection was not for show. The reference specs for the type include a 3.5-inch flight deck and 2-inch hangar deck, plus substantial side belt armor a very heavy layout for an aircraft carrier that would be operating with a lot of aviation fuel, ordnance, and tight maintenance spaces. This survivability philosophy was further expressed in the ship’s design: the machinery spaces were highly subdivided, and the hangar itself was divided into several compartments by means of fire doors and bulkheads to slow the passage of heat, smoke, and blast damage. That is, the Midways were designed as if the initial strike might not be the decisive blow.
This philosophy led to the early trade-offs. In order to maintain a manageable weight, the ships eliminated much of the defensive gun armament that had been planned, including the cruiser-caliber guns. This created a carrier capable of carrying a very large air group for its time often reported to be up to 130 aircraft and also carrying the weight of the armor high in the ship.
The implication manifested itself in the numbers and in the water. With a full load displacement of 60,000 tons and a beam that eclipsed the width of the Panama Canal locks, the ships were large enough to be meaningfully strategic but not quite “modern supercarrier” large. This also betrayed a further truth: the Navy was constructing vessels capable of supporting high-tempo aviation operations at sea, even if it meant tolerating operational inconveniences.
The Midway class also served as a proving ground for what the future of naval aviation would hold. In 1947, the USS Midway was home to the V-2 rocket experiment that challenged the fleet to think along the lines of missile age mentality. The purpose of the experiment was clearly stated by Rear Adm. Daniel Gallery: “The primary purpose of Operation Sandy was to find out some of the answers to the problem of launching a larger bombardment type rocket from a ship at sea.” The experiment culminated in Operation Sandy.
Where the class really earned its extended relevance, however, was in modernization. The most extreme example of this came during the USS Midway reconstruction project in the late 1960s, which was described by the Navy as the most extensive ever attempted at the time. The reconstruction project increased the size of the flight deck from 2.82 to 4.02 acres, added longer catapults, improved arresting gear, and added heavier elevators all of which were designed to handle 100,000 pounds. These were not simply aesthetic upgrades; rather, they represented a tacit acknowledgment that the post-war aircraft expansion would ultimately sink any carrier that was not designed to handle the increased weight of landing aircraft, the increased speed of approaching aircraft, and the increased complexity of aircraft maintenance. The carrier’s aviation fueling system was also changed from a combination of JP-5 and aviation gasoline to JP-5 alone, which removed all aviation gasoline tanks from the carrier and brought the carrier’s fueling system in line with safer, higher flash-point fueling standards.
In retrospect, the Midway class appears less like a single design solution and more like a series of arguments between armor, aviation, and sea-keeping. Armor increased survivability and influenced damage control. Size purchased growth rates for jets and new electronics. However, the same mass and configuration presented challenges some of which were addressed by later supercarriers with deeper hulls, different strength deck configurations, and an architecture focused on air operations as the primary mission rather than one of several.
