The Jeep Carriers
Eight U.S. Navy Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers and six Grumman F4F-4 Wildcat fighters on the flight deck of Sangamon-class escort carrier USS Santee (CVE 29) during Operation Torch in November 1942.
U.S. NAVY
BY DWIGHT JON ZIMMERMAN
ESCORT CARRIERS, NICKNAMED “baby flattops” and “jeep carriers,” were slow, thin-skinned, small, and cramped. Their crews, in a sarcastic reference to the classification “CVE,” called them “Combustible, Vulnerable, and Expendable.” On top of that, at first, the U.S. Navy high command didn’t want them. In 1940, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Harold Stark believed advances in aircraft technology made escort carriers impractical, so development was stopped. President Franklin Roosevelt overruled them and demanded a crash program converting merchantmen into carriers for use in anti-submarine warfare (ASW). Of the nearly 150 aircraft carriers built by American shipyards during the war, 122 were escort carriers. Designed more to be easily mass produced rather than as the most efficient warships, they were based on existing hulls originally planned for C-3 merchant ships, tankers, oilers, and fast transports. Many were supplied under Lend-Lease to the Royal Navy. Because they were both slow and roughly half the size of fleet carriers, they didn’t usually have enough wind over their short decks for combat-loaded aircraft to safely reach flying speed, so CVEs had catapults installed to assist in launching aircraft. With few exceptions, the U.S. Navy’s escort carriers, too slow to operate with the fast carrier task forces, worked anonymously: ferrying aircraft, protecting convoys,
providing tactical air support for amphibious landings, even taking soundings of uncharted ocean depths for the Navy’s Hydrographic Office. Even though escort carriers helped provide air support for Operation Torch, their primary mission in the Atlantic was ASW, initially defensively operating as escorts in or near convoys and later offensively in independent hunter-killer groups. The U.S. Navy’s most successful ASW escort carrier in that theater was USS Bogue (CVE 9), namesake of the second largest escort carrier class built in the war. Bogue entered service in February 1943 and served as the flagship for six ASW task groups that conducted operations from April 20, 1943, to Aug. 24, 1944. Bogue and her escorts sank 13 enemy submarines and received the Presidential Unit Citation, which noted “. . . Bogue and her escort vessels were largely instrumental in forcing the complete withdrawal of enemy submarines from supply routes essential to the maintenance of our established military supremacy.” Escort carrier workload in the Pacific was more varied. Initially they shuttled aircraft to Australia and island outposts throughout the Pacific. USS Chenango (CVE 28) and USS Suwanee (CVE 27), both veterans of Operation Torch, were the first escort carriers to see combat action in the Pacific, engaging Japanese forces in the Battle of Rennell Island, the last major naval battle of the Guadalcanal campaign. USS GERALD R. FORD
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