A runway that was never allowed to stop
31 December 194224 of 3213 battle stars
Photo: USS Essex (CVA-9) underway in heavy seas, 12 January 1960 (NH 98517) · Wikimedia Commons
Twenty-four completed of thirty-two ordered
The Essex class was ordered in numbers that assumed a long war and delivered at a rate that is the actual story of the Pacific campaign.
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Essex underway in the early 1950s. Twenty-three sisters were commissioned behind her, the last in May 1946.
Photo: USS Essex (CV-9) underway in the early 1950s · Wikimedia Commons
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Thirty-two hulls were contracted. Twenty-four were commissioned. That rate is the story.
Four were cancelled before significant construction and four during it. The last of the class, USS Philippine Sea, was commissioned in May 1946, into a war that had already ended.
Figures: Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships
An elevator on the side of the ship, not through the deck
The deck-edge elevator kept the flight deck intact and let aircraft move while flight operations continued — the single most consequential detail of the design.
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25 November 1944, and the deck was working again quickly
Essex took a kamikaze strike in November 1944; the damage-control response and the speed of return to operations are the documented point.
Read itFifteen men were killed and forty-four wounded. Casualty figures: Naval History and Heritage Command.
Scorched plating and rivets. The aircraft struck the port edge of the flight deck.
Where she was, and in what order
- 1RabaulNovember 1943Carrier strikes on the harbour and the shipping in it, in support of the Bougainville landings.
- 2Leyte GulfOctober 1944Four separate actions, fought across an area larger than most whole campaigns.
- 3
Who keeps this going
Yards keeping the record.
Supporting the whole site
Supporting the yard pages
Supporting the service record
Five ways in
Built faster than anyone expected to need them
Newport News, the class, and the rate of construction.
The design decisions that made her work
The deck-edge elevator, the armoured hangar, the arrangement.
Where she was, and what happened there
Marcus, Rabaul, the Marianas, Leyte, Okinawa.
Kept useful for another twenty-four years
SCB-27A, SCB-125, Korea, and Apollo 7.
The numbers, and what they mean
Dimensions, aircraft, armament, and the sisters.