Most of these aerials were for the various radio and electronic equipment of the 1940s. A lot of the longer cockpit to tail aerials were high frequency (HF) for radio reception and transmission. This blog post details some of the various USN aerials and their variety. Other aerials were used for friendly identification (IFF), radio direction finding, and, increasingly, radar. The growing power of radios increasingly led to the abandonment of long HF aerials mid-war even as smaller whip aerials proliferated.