On radar picket duty off Okinawa, the USS Laffey (DD-724) fights off a kamikaze on 16 April 1945, in a painting by John Hamilton. During this 80-minute action, the destroyer downed eight planes while being hit by six kamikazes and four bombs. Samuel Eliot Morison wrote, ?Probably no ship has ever survived an attack of the intensity she experienced.?

With her studsails set to her sides, the USS Constitution runs before the wind, in Tom Freeman?s painting Never Has She Failed Us. The historic frigate is now docked at Boston Harbor?s Charlestown Navy Yard. Read Tom Huntington?s article about ?Old Ironsides? and the navy yard.(Boston's Naval Treasures)

The ironclad USS Choctaw steams along the Mississippi River, in a painting by Tom Freeman. One of the Civil War?s most unusual-looking gunboats, the side-wheeler featured a relatively small forward casemate and a layer of rubber between her iron plating and heavy wooden frame. Read Spencer Tucker?s article about the Union?s Western riverine campaign. [Conquering the Confederacy's Western Waters]

The distinctive mushroom cloud of an atomic explosion rises above Bikini Lagoon after Operation Crossroads? Test Able detonation, in a 1946 painting by Captain Charles Bittinger, U.S. Naval Reserve. Vice Admiral Jerry Miller?s article about Operation Crossroads begins on page 16.

As Union blockade ships patrol the entrance to Charleston Harbor, a lone sentry on Fort Sumter’s battered parapet stands watch, in Confederate soldier-artist Conrad Wise Chapman’s The Flag of Fort Sumter. Read Tom Huntington’s article about the naval history–related sites of Charleston, South Carolina. [Birthplace of the Civil War]

A Sailor cranks the inertial starter of a Navy N3N “Yellow Peril” trainer, in Georges Schreiber’s 1943 painting Wind Her Up! This issue features a pair of naval aviation articles: Randolph Bartlett tells the story of VF(N)-101, [The Big E's Impatient Virgins] while Carl LaVO’s account of Bob Schiller’s aviation odyssey begins on page 52.