Tag Archives: dive bomber

White 35, in full Color

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Check out this original Kodachrome, taken some 80 years ago today, of LT(JG) George T. Glacken and his gunner, Aviation Radioman Second Class Leo W. Boulanger, in their Douglas SBD-5 Dauntless dive bomber, White 35, of VB-16 from the Essex-class aircraft carrier USS Lexington (CV-16) off of Palau, 30 March 1944.

(LIFE Magazine Archives – JR Eyerman Photographer)

You can make out the details of the bomb hashes, and Boulanger’s twin AN/M2s, capable of a blistering 1,200 rounds per minute as long as the belts hold out.

You can see the squadron’s distinctive eagle insignia on the side of White 35.

Bombing Sixteen would earn the Presidential Unit Citation “Received for action from the U.S.S. Lexington (CV-16) at Tarawa (September 18th, 1943), Wake (October 5-6th, 1943), Palau, Hollandia and Truk (March 18th – April 30th, 1944), Marianas (June 11th – July 5th, 1944), and Gilbert Islands (November 19th, – December 5th, 1945).”

Glacken is listed as a Navy Cross holder. Born in 1916 in Lorain, Ohio, he passed in 1990. Meanwhile, Boulanger would earn the DFC.

And, of course, the “Grey Ghost” that they flew from is preserved as a museum ship at Corpus Christie, Texas.

Galvanic Battlewagon

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Some 78 years ago today:

A Douglas SBD-5 Dauntless dive bomber from the Essex-class fleet carrier USS Lexington (CV-16)— or possibly her sistership Yorktown (CV-10)— in the background, flies anti-submarine patrol over the North Carolina-class fast battleship USS Washington (BB-56) while en route to the invasion of Tarawa and Makin Islands in the Gilbert Island chain (Operation Galvanic). 12 November 1943.

USN photo # 80-G-204897, now in the collection of the National Archives.

Laid down by Philadelphia Naval Ship Yard, 14 June 1938, Washington commissioned 15 May 1941 and earned 13 battle stars during World War II in operations that carried her from the Arctic Circle to the western Pacific. Decommissioned in mid-1947 and assigned to the New York group of the Atlantic Reserve Fleet, she was stricken and sold in 1961 for scrap.

Ironically, both Lexington and Yorktown are preserved as floating museum ships.