USS Midway Museum: The Steel City on the Sea

Why is it significant?

Stand beneath the towering gray steel hull of the USS Midway, stretching three hundred meters along Navy Pier.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand beneath the towering gray steel hull of the USS Midway, stretching three hundred meters along Navy Pier. Commissioned in September nineteen forty-five just days after the end of World War Two, this sixty-four-thousand-ton colossus was the largest ship in the world for a decade and served the United States Navy for forty-seven continuous years through the Vietnam War and Operation Desert Storm.

The Midway was literally a floating city at sea, carrying four thousand five hundred sailors and pilots, with its own post office, hospital with operating rooms, radio and television station, bakery baking three thousand loaves of bread daily, and four steam catapults capable of hurling a thirty-ton supersonic jet from zero to two hundred and sixty kilometers per hour in just two seconds!

During Operation Frequent Wind in April nineteen seventy-five, as Saigon fell, South Vietnamese pilot Major Buang miraculously landed his tiny two-seater Cessna bird-dog plane on the crowded deck without an arresting tailhook, after crew members pushed ten million dollars worth of military helicopters over the side into the sea to clear a runway for his family.

Walk south along the pier toward the famous twenty-five-foot sailor kissing statue.