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Originally Posted by canadiancitizen
Asphalt or concrete ? Not on a naval ship.
Carriers are made of steel, and the flight deck is too, with a covering to reduce slipping in wet weather for the deck crew. WW2 British carriers had a wooden deck surface, which is easier to repair than metal. Remember that metal was in short supply then , while wooden timbers were more available.
Jim B. Toronto.
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The British may have had a shortage of metal, yet they had armored flight decks, where as the IJN and USN used wooden flight decks...perhaps the Akagi, Kaga Hiryu, Soryu might have benefitted at midway but with the number of planes and payloads left on the flightdeck from changing to torpedo's from bombs might not have mattered
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The carriers were subject to heavy and repeated kamikaze attacks, but because of their armoured flight decks, the British aircraft carriers proved highly resistant (unlike their U.S. counterparts), and returned to action relatively quickl
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During 1945, she saw service against
Japanese forces with the
British Pacific Fleet, and survived several
kamikaze attacks while supporting the
landings on Okinawa. On May 4th, Just after 11.30 a.m. a Japanese plane made a steep dive from "a great height" at
Formidable and was engaged by AA guns. The kamikaze was hit at close range, but crashed into the flight deck, making a massive dent about 10 feet (3 m) long, two feet (0.6 m) wide and two feet deep in the armoured flight deck. A large steel splinter speared down through the hangar deck and the centre boiler-room, where it ruptured a steam line, and came to rest in a fuel tank, starting a major fire in the aircraft park. Eight crew members were killed and forty-seven were wounded. However, the steel flight deck of
Formidable, (and many other British carriers) prevented further damage by Kamikaze attacks. (American carriers had wood-surfaced flight decks, while British carriers had steel ones)
HMS Formidable (67) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
bf109 Emil