USS Hornet (CV-8)

Hornet was the third and last of the Yorktown class, laid down at Newport News on 25 September 1939 — three weeks after the war began in Europe — and built to a design the US Navy already considered settled. She was not an improvement on her sisters so much as an insurance policy: a third hull of a proven type, ordered while the newer Essex design was still on paper.

She was commissioned on 20 October 1941, seven weeks before Pearl Harbor. That timing shaped everything that followed. Her air groups had flown together for months rather than years, and when she sailed for her first operation none of her squadrons had been in combat.

The Yorktown class was the US Navy’s first carrier design drawn without treaty tonnage dominating every choice, and it settled the pattern American carriers kept for the rest of the war: a long unarmoured flight deck, three elevators, a hangar open at the sides, and an air group of around ninety aircraft — far more than a British armoured-deck carrier of similar displacement.

The trade was deliberate and it decided how she died. Her protection was concentrated low: a belt of 64–102 mm around the machinery and magazines, with no armour on the flight deck at all. Against surface gunfire that was a reasonable bargain; against dive bombers it meant that a hit anywhere on the deck went through.

On 2 April 1942 she sailed from San Francisco with sixteen USAAF B-25B Mitchells lashed to her flight deck — medium bombers no carrier had ever operated, and which could not land back aboard. Her own fighters were struck below: for the whole approach Hornet could not defend herself, and depended entirely on Enterprise sailing with her.

On the morning of 18 April the force was sighted by a Japanese picket boat and Admiral Halsey ordered the aircraft off early, further from Japan than the plan allowed. All sixteen got airborne and bombed Japan; none came back to the ship, flying on to China as the plan required.

At Midway on 4 June 1942 Hornet’s air group had the worst morning of any American carrier in the battle. Her fighters and dive bombers flew a course that found nothing — the "flight to nowhere" — and took no part in the attack that decided the war in the Pacific.

Torpedo Squadron 8 went the other way. Lieutenant Commander John Waldron led fifteen TBD Devastators to the Japanese carriers without fighter cover and attacked anyway: all fifteen were shot down and Ensign George Gay alone survived, in the water among the enemy fleet. The torpedo squadrons pulled the defending Zeros down to sea level minutes before the Enterprise and Yorktown dive bombers arrived unopposed overhead. On 6 June her Dauntlesses helped sink the heavy cruiser Mikuma.

The autumn of 1942 emptied the American carrier force faster than the yards could refill it. Lexington had been lost at Coral Sea and Yorktown at Midway; Saratoga was torpedoed in August and sent back to the yard; Wasp was torpedoed and sunk in September; Enterprise was bombed at the Eastern Solomons and went to Pearl Harbor for repair.

For a stretch of October 1942, with the Guadalcanal campaign at its worst, Hornet was the only operational Allied fleet carrier in the entire Pacific Ocean.

On 26 October 1942, covering Guadalcanal, she met four Japanese carriers at the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. Her strike found Shōkaku and crippled her with multiple bomb hits, putting the fleet carrier out of the war for nine months.

The Japanese found Hornet first. In roughly a quarter of an hour she took three bombs, two aerial torpedoes and two aircraft deliberately flown into her — one into the signal bridge, one into the forward elevator shaft.

Dead in the water and burning, she did not go down. The heavy cruiser Northampton took her under tow and her repair parties were close to raising steam when a second strike put another torpedo into her and the tow was cast off. The order came to abandon ship.

What followed is the part of her story that has no parallel. Her own escorts were ordered to scuttle her: the destroyers Mustin and Anderson fired sixteen torpedoes into a stationary, abandoned ship — many of them duds or misses, in keeping with the Mark 14 torpedo failures the US Navy spent 1942 denying — and then put more than 400 rounds of 127 mm into her. She was still afloat and still burning when they withdrew at the approach of Japanese surface forces.

It took four 610 mm Type 93 torpedoes from the Japanese destroyers Makigumo and Akigumo to sink her, in the early hours of 27 October 1942. She took 140 of her roughly 2,900 crew with her.

No American fleet carrier was lost to enemy action after her. The name did not stay on the bottom either: the Essex-class CV-12, launched in August 1943, was renamed Hornet before commissioning and fought through to Tokyo Bay.

The original was found in February 2019 by the research vessel Petrel, sitting upright on the floor of the Solomon Sea at about 5,300 metres, her anti-aircraft guns still trained upward.

• Roger Chesneau (ed.), Conway’s All the World’s Fighting Ships 1922–1946 (Conway Maritime Press).
• Norman Friedman, U.S. Aircraft Carriers: An Illustrated Design History (Naval Institute Press).
• John B. Lundstrom, The First Team and the Guadalcanal Campaign (Naval Institute Press).
• Samuel Eliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Vol. V: The Struggle for Guadalcanal (Little, Brown).