USS Enterprise (CV-6)

USS Enterprise was the seventh US Navy ship to bear the name, and the second of the three Yorktown-class carriers — the vessels in which American naval aviation came of age. Designed in the mid-1930s within the tonnage limits of the naval treaties, the Yorktowns distilled a decade of hard-won experience from the navy's pioneer carriers into a fast, balanced and rugged design optimised above all to operate and sustain a large air group.

Commissioned in 1938 and built at Newport News, Enterprise entered service in the last years of peace and spent them honing the carrier tactics that would soon be tested in earnest. When war came to the Pacific she was already a seasoned ship with a well-drilled crew — and, by a stroke of fortune that would shape the war, she was at sea, not in port, on the morning of 7 December 1941.

Enterprise could embark an air group of around 90 aircraft — fighters, dive-bombers and torpedo planes — giving her a striking power that made her a capital ship in her own right. Her machinery drove her at over 32 knots, fast enough to run with any task force, and her generous flight and hangar decks allowed her to cycle large strikes quickly, the decisive measure of a carrier's worth.

Where the American carriers truly differed from their Japanese rivals was in the unglamorous art of damage control. US doctrine, training and ship design placed enormous emphasis on fire-fighting, compartmentation, fuel-line safety and the ability to absorb punishment and keep fighting. Time and again this would mean the difference between a damaged ship saved and a burning ship lost — the very margin that doomed Akagi and her sisters at Midway and preserved Enterprise through blow after blow.

She was not invulnerable. Her flight deck was unarmoured, and like all carriers she was acutely exposed to air attack. But her toughness, her speed and the superb crews who fought and saved her made Enterprise one of the hardest warships in the world to kill — a reputation she would earn the hard way, again and again.

Enterprise's defining hour came at the Battle of Midway in June 1942. On the morning of 4 June, after a confused and costly search, her SBD Dauntless dive-bombers found the Japanese carrier force at the perfect moment — flight decks crowded with fuelled and armed aircraft. In a matter of minutes, dive-bombers from Enterprise mortally wounded the carriers Akagi and Kaga, while planes from Yorktown crippled Sōryū.

It was one of the most decisive strikes in the history of naval warfare. In those few minutes the cream of the Kidō Butai — the force that had run wild from Pearl Harbor to Ceylon — was shattered, and the balance of the Pacific war was overturned. Enterprise's aircraft later helped finish the fourth Japanese carrier, Hiryū, completing a victory from which the Imperial Japanese Navy never recovered.

That her dive-bombers should have been the ones to sink Akagi — the very ship that had led the attack on Pearl Harbor — gave the moment a fitting symmetry: the carrier that opened the war destroyed by the carrier that would do more than any other to win it.

For the rest of 1942 Enterprise carried the Pacific war almost single-handed. Through the desperate Guadalcanal campaign she fought at the Eastern Solomons and Santa Cruz, absorbing repeated bomb hits that started fires and killed many of her crew — yet each time her damage-control parties saved the ship and brought her back into action. After Santa Cruz, with other US carriers sunk or under repair, she was for a time the only operational American carrier in the South Pacific; a sign hung on her island read, defiantly, "Enterprise vs Japan."

No ship of the US Navy fought harder or was honoured more. Enterprise ended the war as the most decorated American warship of the conflict, earning 20 battle stars and taking part in nearly every major carrier action of the Pacific — from the aftermath of Pearl Harbor to the final blows against Japan. Where the fighting was hottest, “the Big E” was almost always there.

As the great fleet carriers of the Essex class poured out of American shipyards, Enterprise fought on at the heart of the fast carrier task forces, ranging across the central Pacific. She pioneered night carrier operations, struck the Marshalls, the Marianas, the Philippines and the Japanese home islands, and supported landing after landing as the Allies closed in on Japan.

So often did Japanese propaganda claim to have sunk her that 'the Galloping Ghost' became one of her nicknames. In 1945, off Okinawa, she was at last struck by kamikazes that blew her forward elevator high into the air and finally forced her out of the war for repairs — battered, but never beaten.

USS Enterprise was the most decorated US warship of the Second World War, earning twenty battle stars and a Presidential Unit Citation for a record of service almost beyond belief: present at Pearl Harbor's aftermath, decisive at Midway, the saviour of Guadalcanal, and in the front line from the first months of the war to the last. No single ship did more to win the war in the Pacific.

Tough, fast and superbly handled, she embodied everything that made American naval power so formidable — not the biggest guns or the heaviest armour, but balanced ships, brilliant damage control and crews who refused to let her die. Efforts to preserve her as a memorial failed, and the Big E was scrapped in the 1950s — an unworthy end for perhaps the greatest aircraft carrier in history, but one that could never erase her record or her name.

• Edward P. Stafford, The Big E: The Story of the USS Enterprise (1962) — the classic ship history.
• Barrett Tillman, Enterprise: America’s Fightingest Ship and the Men Who Helped Win World War II (Simon & Schuster, 2012).
• Craig L. Symonds, The Battle of Midway (Oxford University Press, 2011).