I’ve been reading a lot of books about the war in the Pacific. I don’t know why it fascinates me, it just does. Maybe it’s a guy thing, all those big ships and airplanes and bombs and torpedoes. Whatever the reason, it’s dominated my reading for the past three or four months. I even read The Caine Mutiny for the nth time. It’s one of my favorite novels, and it just happens to be about a guy who serves on a minesweeper in the Pacific during World War Two.

Anyway. My reading these past weeks and months smacked me in the face with tidbit that perfectly illustrates how unconscious I can be to the details. I was trying to find out more about a squadron of bomber pilots who flew off the aircraft carrier Saratoga. Every squadron’s got a number, and this squadron was known as VT-3. I learned years and years ago that the T was for torpedo, because that’s what they dropped. If they had dropped bombs, they would have been known as VB-3. I was at least that clued in. I didn’t learn until maybe ten years ago that the V stood for “air.” I guess “A” was already being used for something else. So the aircraft carrier Saratoga, for instance, is numbered CV-3. She used to be a cruiser, and cruisers are CC, so she would have been CC-something if they had finished building her as a cruiser, but they didn’t. They put a flattop on her and called her CV-3 because she was the third aircraft carrier in the Navy.

What I was completely unconscious about was the reason for numbering the squadrons. I thought that VT-3 was numbered that way because it was the third torpedo squadron, and it was, sort of. But it wasn’t just a random, one-up serial number, as I thought it was. My facepalm moment came to me while I was paging through a copy of Miracle at Midway and ran across this footnote at the bottom of page 101:

American carriers were numbered in order of commissioning. Saratoga was 3, Yorktown 5, Enterprise 6, and Hornet 8. The aircraft squadrons assigned to each carrier bore that ship’s number with a letter indicating type: VB for bomber, VS for scout, VF for fighter, VT for torpedo plane.

Oh. Well. That makes sense. I guess I’ll just try to remember that from now on.