Mission: Bond Sales

The Navy commissioned its newest carrier this week--Fighting Lady, all wood, 103 feet long. She will patrol the lower plaza in Manhattan's Rockefeller Center as an attention-getter for the Seventh War Loan drive.

Exactly scaled to one-ninth the size of an Essex-class carrier, she was prefabricated at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, trucked to the site in sections. Total cost: $35,000. Topside, she bristles with 20-and 40-mm. and five-inch guns, all exactly scaled. Parked on her flight deck are faithfully scaled models of Helldivers, Hellcats, Avengers and Corsairs (donated by the manufacturers). Her innards--which visitors may see if they buy a war bond--contain a model of a carrier's boiler room, a section of enlisted men's quarters complete with pin-up girls on the bulkheads.

A crew of 25, many of them veterans of the Pacific war, man her. Among the veterans: indestructible Captain Dixie Kiefer, one of the Navy's top carrier skippers; he was severely wounded when the carrier Yorktown sank in the Battle of Midway, was seen commanding a carrier in the brilliant documentary movie The Fighting Lady and was wounded again this year in battle.

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