The best American ship class of WW2 was the Essex-class aircraft carrier. Japan had no answer for it. Nobody did. December 1941. The US Navy goes to war with seven fleet carriers. Within a year, four of them are at the bottom of the Pacific. Lexington at Coral Sea. Yorktown at Midway. Wasp and Hornet off Guadalcanal. By late 1942, at times the US had just one carrier operational in the Pacific. But something was already coming down the slipways. Back in 1940, after France fell, Congress had passed a massive naval expansion bill. Part of that order was a new class of fleet carrier. Bigger, faster, tougher than anything before it. Around 27,000 tons, about 90 to 100 aircraft, a crew of more than 2,500 men. The lead ship, USS Essex, was commissioned on the last day of 1942. Then they just kept coming. American shipyards turned them out at a pace that's still hard to believe. Some were built in well under two years. A few in barely more than a year. Twenty-four were eventually completed, more than any other class of fleet carrier in history. Several took the names of the carriers that had been sunk. A new Yorktown. A new Lexington. A new Hornet. A new Wasp. The ships Japan had sunk came back to haunt them. During the same war, Japan managed to finish only a handful of new fleet carriers. One of them was Shinano, which sank on its first voyage. By 1944, the Essex class was the backbone of the Fast Carrier Task Force, the most powerful naval strike force ever assembled. In June 1944, at the Battle of the Philippine Sea, Japan launched everything it had at the American carriers. Essex-class fighter squadrons shot down hundreds of Japanese planes in a single day. American pilots called it "the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot." Japanese carrier aviation never recovered. Their air groups helped sink both of the largest battleships ever built. Musashi in October 1944. Yamato in April 1945. And their toughness became legendary. USS Franklin was hit by two bombs in March 1945 with planes fully fueled and armed on deck. The explosions tore her apart and killed around 800 men. She was dead in the water, burning, listing, close enough to Japan to see it. Her crew saved her. She made it all the way back to New York. USS Bunker Hill took two kamikazes in under a minute in May 1945. Hundreds killed. She survived. USS Intrepid was hit by a torpedo and multiple kamikazes over the course of the war. Sailors started calling her "the Evil I." She survived too. Not a single Essex-class carrier was sunk in the war. And their story kept going. They fought in Korea. They fought in Vietnam. They hunted Soviet submarines. USS Hornet recovered the Apollo 11 astronauts after the first Moon landing. The last one, USS Lexington, wasn't retired until 1991. Nearly 50 years of service. Four of them are still afloat today as museums: Yorktown, Intrepid, Hornet, and Lexington. Japan's admirals had planned for a short war because they knew what American industry could do if given time. The Essex class was what that looked like.

Ukraine is not asking the West about military intervention, it doesn't ask about giant summs of money or increase of support. All Ukraine is asking for is to keep the same minimal level of support. The West failed to deliver even on that.