the last Mustangs in the US Army

The P-51 Mustang was one of WWII’s greatest fighters and one of the best era-adjusted fighter planes of all time. Within the American consciousness it is almost synonymous with WWII.

Decades after WWII and after the P-51 had left service as a fighter, the Mustang briefly “came back from the grave” to serve not in the US Air Force, but in the US Army.

(P-51 Mustang during WWII.)

(F-51D Mustang chase plane follows the Sikorsky YUH-60A prototype during the US Army’s UTTAS competition of 1976, seeking a replacement for the UH-1 Iroquois of Vietnam War fame. Sikorsky’s design defeated Boeing’s YUH-61 to win UTTAS and was developed into the UH-60 Blackhawk of today.) (official US Army photo)

(US Army F-51 Mustang during 1970s experiments with airborne recoilless rifles.)

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MG 151: post-WWII use

The guns arming WWII warplanes were usually of limited general interest, just a component of the overall aircraft and leaving service with the planes they were installed in. Germany’s MG 151 on the other hand, had an extremely long and varied career after WWII, being used in any number of roles in the air, on the ground, and even on the sea; all around the world for many decades.

(MG 151 being serviced on a Luftwaffe fighter during WWII.)

(French MG 151 crew on a “Pirate”, or up-gunned H-34 Choctaw, during the Algerian War.) (photo via tenes.info website)

(Image from a 1980s South African VHS video promoting Vektor’s helicopter mount of the MG 151.)

USS Albemarle / USNS Corpus Christi Bay

WWII-era seaplane tenders were on their way out of the US Navy by the time of the Vietnam War. However one, USS Albemarle, would have a second life as a US Army floating repair base during that conflict.

(Launching of the WWII US Navy seaplane tender USS Albemarle.) (Associated Press photo)

(The ex-USS Albemarle being converted into USNS Corpus Christi Bay (T-ARVH-1) at Charleston Naval Shipyard.)

(USNS Corpus Christi Bay during the Vietnam War.) (photo by Bob Brandt)

Twilight of catapult aviation after WWII: pt.1

(A Kingfisher scout plane catapults off the cruiser USS Detroit (CL-8) during WWII.)

(Abandoned Kingfishers lay in a US Navy storage lot in 1946, a year after WWII ended)

Because most photos of battleships concentrate on the inter-war and WWII era, it’s generally assumed that catapults and seaplanes were always a fixture on them, but this isn’t accurate.

If one considers the “battleship era” starting with the Spanish-American War in 1898 and ending with the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 , it was only half a century that that this type of warship ruled the seas. Of that, seaplanes aboard battleships had an even shorter run, about 24 years. For context, there were US Navy sailors who enlisted before battleship catapults existed and retired after they were already gone.