World War Two in Pictures: Float planes on Navy warships: Curtiss, Vought competed. SO3C, Navy's intended replacement for SOC aircraft on cruisers

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Float planes on Navy warships; Curtiss and Vought competed.

Ships and Aircraft of World War II(many 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

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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In the bottom half of these web pages, I will be showing photos of all the relevant ship and aircraft participants in World War II all over the world not just those in which I participated as first 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!

First Eleven pages in this folder.

We introduce here 11 pages, picwar1.htm through picwar11.htm (see links in lefthand column) in which we will further introduce ships and aircraft used in or intended for use in combat in World War II. Photos will be the primary tool and often we will use the glass slides flashed before U.S. Navy ship personnel as training for anti aircraft combat, to differentiate 'friend or foe.' These are the 600 glass photo slides flashed for a fraction of a second to train Navy personnel. Those pages are the first eleven (11) links in the column on the left.

The Next Five pages.

The bottom five links (see link column to the left) contain U.S. Navy sailor (white hat) records of their eyewitness service in waters as far distant as the Mediterranean Sea, the South Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, South Asia and Pacific Ocean, all under combat conditions in 1941, 1942 and 1943. The USS West Point story (in two parts) is told by a Quartermaster, and the action on the USS Brooklyn is told (in two parts, Casablanca and Sicily, then Anzio) by a Radioman 1/c serving as bridge 'talker' passing along 'calls' for his ship to fire on enemy shore installations to the gun director and to the Captain of his light cruiser. The center link of the five, Singapore, Fateful Stop on "Joan's Journey" contains an Australian man's tale of his mother's escape from Singapore in January 1942. This author of "Joan's Journey" read the story of the USS West Point's first war cruise right here on these pages, and determined from them that during USS West Point's hasty stop in Singapore, his mother managed to get aboard as far as Batavia, and escape the oncoming Japanese forces that took Singapore and killed or captured all the Briitish forces defending it.

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

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