What aircrafts are on the aircraft carriers?

Both American and Japanese carriers had three types of airplanes: fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo bombers.

Fighters were to provide protection for the carriers and other ships of the friendly fleet, and to shoot down enemy airplanes. Fighters would escort the bombers when they went to attack the enemy fleet, to duel with the enemy's fighters, which would be trying to protect the enemy fleet. Naval fighter were single seat, single engine aircraft. The Japanese fighter plane throughout the war was the Mitsubishi A6-M "Zero". US carriers at first had the Grunman F4F Wildcat, and later the Grunman F6F Hellcat. The Vought F4U Corsair was also produced for carriers but proved to be too heavy, so was flown mostly by Marine aviation units operating from land bases. The Corsair was the fastest piston engine (that is, non-jet) airplane of the war.

Dive bombing was pioneered by the US Navy, but quickly copied by the Japanese Navy and the German Air Force. They usually carried one five hundred pound bomb slung beneath the belly of the plane. They would come over the enemy ships at several thousand feet and nose over into a steep dive, aiming the airplane at the enemy ship below. Somewhere between one and two thousand feet they would release the bomb and pull out of their dive. Dive bombers had two crewmen - a pilot, and a tail gunner who sat behind the pilot facing backward, with machine guns to fight off enemy airplanes trying to come in on their tail and shoot them down. The Japanese had the "Val" dive bomber. The US dive bomber was the Douglas SBD Dauntless. This was the airplane which sank four Japanese carriers at Midway.

Torpedo bombers were the biggest carrier aircraft. They were still single engine prop aircraft, like the others, but had to have a massive, powerful engine. They carried three men, pilot, rear gunner and radio operator. They carried a single torpedo slung externally below the plane. These torpedoes weighed just over one ton. These bombers were considered to be the worst menace to surface ships. The torpedoes they carried were the same type fired by submarines, and by destroyers on the surface. Since they had a large warhead and struck below the waterline the torpedoes could sink ships much more readily than dive bombers. It was Japanese torpedo bombers that caused most of the damage to US Navy ships at Pearl Harbor. Torpedo bombers had to come in "low and slow", less than one hundred feet above the water, and fly straight at the enemy ship, so the torpedo would run true. Meanwhile the enemy ship would be twisting and turning in wild evasive action and every anti-aircraft gun that could be brought to bear would be blazing away at the incoming torpedo bomber. At Midway, one reason the dive bombers were so successful is that the US torpedo bombers reached the Japanese fleet a few minutes before the dive bombers and attacked immediately, without waiting to coordinate the attack with the dive bombers. Every single US torpedo bomber was shot down, and they scored no hits at all on the Japanese ships. But, they did pull all the Japanese fighter planes down "on the deck" to shoot at them, so the dive bombers found no enemy fighter planes above the enemy fleet when they arrived. The Japanese had the "Kate" torpedo bomber. The US had the TBD Devastator at the start of the war, which was agonizingly slow. It was these Devastators which were slaughtered at Midway. Then the new TBD Avenger reached the fleet and became the US torpedo bomber. This was the type of aircraft flown by the first president Bush in the war.