USS Lexington

So here's a little piece, Chicago trivia, if you, if you didn't know this.

ORD, O'Hare, uh, the, the, the airport call sign, ORD, is because it used to be an apple orchard, right? But the cool thing about O'Hare, it's named O'Hare because it was named after Eddie Butch O'Hare, a World War II naval fighter, uh, pilot out in the Pacific, who won the Medal of Honor because he single-handedly saved the USS, uh, Lexington.

He was flying back after a sortie, and he saw nine, uh, enemy bombers heading towards that fleet.

And so he shot down five on his way back, ran out of bullets, used his plane as a weapon, scared off the other four.

Millions of once free people in Europe were made subject to a powerful and cruel German occupation, and millions were dragged off to prison camps or killed.

Japan, secretly allied with Hitler and Mussolini since September of 1940, had launched a surprise attack from their aircraft carriers on the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December 7th, 1941, killing over 2,403 American sailors and soldiers and devastating the American Pacific Fleet, with the exception of her aircraft carriers, which were not in Pearl Harbor on the day of the surprise attack.

America's aircraft carriers and the men who flew the planes that were based on these carriers had never seen battle at sea.

They had trained for it, but had no active battle experience.

Battleships had always fought battleships.

The winner here would ultimately win World War II.

Everything was on the line.

At the same time they attacked the US at Pearl Harbor, Japan struck important targets all through the Pacific using the fleet of six aircraft carriers with huge numbers of cruisers, submarines, troop carriers, and battleships.

that was a tough one.

The USS Lexington and Yorktown went against the Shokaku and the Zukaku.

The

Japanese light carrier Shoho was in the fight as well on May 8.

At about 1130 a.m., the Lexington was hit by multiple bombs and torpedoes.

Despite the crew's most heroic efforts, the Lady Lex was lost.

At 5 p.m., Captain Frederick Sherman gave the order to abandon and scuttle the ship.

Heartbroken sailors complied with the order, but some decided...

They were gonna refuel in Howland and then head to Hawaii the next day, and the Itasca immediately began searching for her when they lost radio contact.

It was soon joined by the USS Colorado, which had some planes that it launched and flew over the neighboring islands and searched the sea around Howland, and then later the USS Lexington joined, and it had something like 65 planes that essentially over the course of that 16-day period or so, they searched a, an area the size of Texas-

Wow

... and did not find a trace of them.