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Posted by Ralph Wood on May 17, 2025, 6:26:05, in reply to "aft elevator only goes down to 2nd deck"
Thank you. I find your link difficult because I am unable to enlarge those well enough to see anything.
I posted a link to plans that I could read. Those show stowage to be on the fourth deck, and I note multiple bomb elevators "around." I don't know how large they are, but they look more sizeable than human hatches. If large enough to get a car onto, they might work. I suspect there was no power to the elevators in any case. However, if they wanted it up badly enough, they knew plenty about rigging hoists. All they needed was an opening large enough to fit a car through.
Their aim with the jettisoning was to reduce top weight on the listing side to try to reduce the list. Hence, their first priorities were removing the port side guns, let go the port side anchor, and in getting aircraft out of the hangar overhead (top weight). Come to think of it, a car in the hold--low down--might actually be desirable to keep. So, it might then have been kept in the hangar somewhere after all...possible even in the hangar overhead. If that is the case, they would have wanted it down, like the aircraft, and were still lowering and pushing all that overboard when it all stopped.
Just a theory. 
Previous Message
if you were to look at Sheet 10 - Second Deck of that ship's BOGP or look at this link.
CV-5 USS Yorktown Booklet of General Plans (1940)
https://archive.org/details/cv5bogp1940 Previous Message
This article says the car was found in the aft of the hangar:
https://www.theautopian.com/a-ford-woody-wagon-was-found-aboard-the-sunken-wwii-aircraft-carrier-uss-yorktown-and-no-one-is-sure-why/
This Navsource photo shows the aft of the hangar on June 4th:
https://www.navsource.org/archives/02/020513.jpg
No car.
Caption reads:
"Scene in the hangar of USS Yorktown (CV-5), 4 June 1942, shortly after fires there from Japanese bomb hits had been extinguished. This rather fuzzy time exposure looks directly aft, with the sloping inner uptake sides at left. One bomb, which detonated on the flight deck just aft of the midships aircraft elevator, set fires in the area seen in the left distance. Note fire hoses on deck, and spare TBD-1 "Devastator" torpedo plane (with obsolete markings) hung under the hangar overhead.
Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives (photo # 80-G-312023)."
Ship was abandoned June 4th. Most of the major jettisoning took place on June 6th, and took hours. It was still ongoing when the torpedoes hit.
Accounts:
https://www.navsource.org/archives/02/020590.pdf
http://www.cv5yorktown.com/Documents/Reports/Loss/
https://www.history.navy.mil/research/archives/digital-exhibits-highlights/action-reports/wwii-battle-of-midway/uss-yorktown-action-report.html
The car was almost certainly stowed below somewhere, not on the hangar deck (and could even have been drained of gasoline to reduce fire hazard.) The salvage party aboard on June 6th at some point figured out it was another thing they could jettison. It would possibly not have been easy getting it up to the hangar deck from the hold below. I am not sure what elevators were working, and without gasoline, it would need to be pushed around to boot. If my theory is correct, and it was stowed this way, it was not the first thing on anyone's list to jettison. From the accounts above, you can see what had priority. They had not even got all the spare planes down from the hangar overhead when the torpedoes hit.
I don't read plans well at all, but it looks to me like most of the access to the holds for the hangar are aft:
https://maritime.org/doc/plans/cv5.pdf
My theory is that the car was stowed below, manhandled up to the aft of the hangar, then the torpedoes hit, and jettisoning stopped, and the ship was reabandoned for the last time. I think another half hour at most before the torpedoes, and no one would have found that car there.
My two cents. Previous Message
As I recall from reading the first volume of Lundstrom's "The First Team" about the USN carrier fighter squadrons from Pearl Harbor to Midway, space in the fleet carriers' hangars was in high demand in order to carry as many F4F-3s and F4F-4s (Doolittle mission and Midway) as possible. I am astonished a car made the cut, especially since the folding wing -4 Cat made it possible to carry more. Did Fletcher pull rank to get a car placed on the TO&E?
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