In spite of our favorable ratio of victories over the Japs in the air, they still outnumbered us ten to one in the Pacific. During 1942 many new Navy airplanes were delivered. Thousands of young naval aviators were trained at our naval air stations. A great naval air transport service was created to fly men and materials to distant Pacific islands. With only one carrier, the _Enterprise_, left in the Pacific, a great new carrier fleet was rushed into service. By the Fall of 1943 a tremendous change was wrought in the Pacific. In September the first three new carriers, the _Essex_, the _Yorktown_, and the _Independence_, were battle-tested in the raid on Marcus Island. _Avengers_ and _Hellcats_ began to appear in great numbers to take the place of _Wildcats_ on the decks of our big carriers. Raid followed raid. The Gilbert Island chain, Tarawa, Kwajalein, Truk, Palau, Saipan, and other islands fell before the blows of our new carrier-based air power. More big new carriers continued to appear in the Pacific and a new type of sea power came into being, the carrier task force. Here we saw air power based on a great fleet of large and small carriers forming the spearhead of a naval offensive. The flat-top had truly become the “Queen of the Fleet.” Now we see come into being the ideas born in the minds of a group of pioneer naval aviators twenty years ago. The airplane has not only gone to sea with the fleet but, as the striking power of the Navy, it is leading the fleet to victory. It was the work of the fighting planes based on Admiral Marc A. Mitscher’s carrier Task Force 58 that hammered a path to the very front door of Japan. Since Pearl Harbor, naval aviators have shot down over ten thousand Japanese aircraft with the loss of less than two thousand of our own planes. This gives our Navy pilots a score of better than five to one. These figures include the dark days of the first year of war when our Navy boys were outnumbered ten to one. From a force of a few carriers and a handful of moderately fast warplanes, naval aviation grew, in three years, to the world’s greatest sea-borne air force. The speed of our fighters increased by more than a hundred miles an hour. Our dive-bombers and torpedo planes, the world’s finest, tripled their bomb and torpedo loads. Our big patrol bombers and transports fly the Pacific unarmed.