Lexington did launch its air group when a Japanese carrier was reported.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
We made air attacks on the Japanese anchorage, sinking and damaging several vessels. However, the Japanese were alerted to the fact that American carriers were nearby.
We were very fortunate that the carriers weren't in the harbor.
Once our carrier fleet went all nuclear in 2005, we went from having two aircraft carrier homeports on the East Coast to one.
In Nagasaki, American planes did drop warning leaflets - but not till Aug. 10, a day after the city was bombed.
I was a child of World War Two . I saw films of pilots taking off from aircraft carriers and decided that was the only thing I wanted to do. And it had to be flying from sea carriers. Airfields were not enough.
They got word that the Japanese planes were coming back, so we sunk her ourselves so the Japanese wouldn't get it. We didn't want the Japanese to get it intact.
I had some airline stock, but the airlines tanked. I didn't have a lot of money in them, though.
Our duty was to try and find the Japanese fleet. We never did find the Japanese fleet and I am awfully glad, because they had attacked us there with six carriers, three battleships, 10 or 15 cruisers, and about 20 destroyers.
The good news was that Enterprise and the newly arrived Yorktown had attacked the Marshall and Gilbert islands. Those attacks had a great effect on morale.
On December 5, 1941, Chicago led a task force built around the carrier Lexington to Midway Island, at the western end of the Hawaiian Islands, about 1,000 miles from Pearl Harbor.