AIR: The Navy’s Babies

Beside the lordly first-line carriers of the Essex class they look like tugboats with a flight deck. They carry only a score or so of aircraft. They are called CVEs, nicknamed “baby flattops” and they are designed for dirty, routine jobs—transporting planes, providing air cover for plodding convoys. But they have become the pets of the Navy Department, which this week gave them a big share of the credit for speeding up the Pacific war.

They were not always pets. They were born in days of desperation, when the U.S. needed many more carriers than it could hope to acquire in years if it stuck exclusively to its big first-line craft. The Navy was already converting oilers and C-3 cargo hulls into small carriers when President Roosevelt put the Maritime Commission to work on a new baby.

The Maritime Commission gave a contract to Henry J. Kaiser, who had never built anything more elaborate than a Liberty ship, and the Navy was told to keep hands off. While the Navy glowered and went on building its own escort carriers, the new 480-ft., 4,000-ton babies of the Casablanca class began rolling off the Kaiser assembly lines.

Kaiser’s Coffins. Navy officials do not talk, but Navy crews on the Casablanca told hair-raising tales. From some Kaiser ships came reports like these:

They were bow-heavy; in even moderate seas they corkscrewed like cooch dancers ; they sprang leaks along welds; pumps and auxiliaries broke down; hot water heater tubes burned out; stanchions and hooks cracked off; flight decks extended so far forward that heavy seas rolled up under them and in the case of at least one ship carried the forward end of the flight deck away. The Casablancas were an uncertain haven to returning planes, especially if the air was light and the ship was wallowing in a ground swell. Men nicknamed the carriers “Kaiser’s Coffins.”

Nevertheless the Navy sailed them, along with the converted oilers of the Sangamon class and the C-3s of the Bogue class. They swelled the baby flat-top fleet and they were probably as good as anything which could be provided, with the time and tools available.

New Role. The CVEs helped in the battle of the Atlantic. They fought in the Pacific in calmer seas. Though they were built to be expendable, only two were lost, both to enemy action; the Kaiser-built Liscome Bay, at Makin, late in 1943; the C-3 converted Block Island, in the Atlantic, May 1944.

With the deterioration of Japanese air and naval power, the CVEs—Casablancas, Bogues and Sangamons—began to assume a new role. In spite of their slowness, thin skin, light armament, they were thrown into front-line jobs.

Admiral Raymond Spruance used-them to fill out the ranks of his first-line carriers. The CVEs were entrusted with the job of covering the Saipan operation while the big carriers moved on to meet the Jap fleet off the Philippines. Last week a CVE air squadron, Composite Squadron 33, was home after ten months of combat in the Gilberts, the Marshalls, Hollandia, Aitape and the Marianas. Planes and guns of the baby carrier had destroyed 35 Jap aircraft. The little flattops had become an offensive weapon.

More than 70 are now operating with the fleet. U.S. yards have turned out more than 100 (some of which have gone to the British). In Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher’s fast-moving, hard-hitting Task Force 58 there are more CVEs than CVs (the big ones). Navy officials are now glad to defend the Casablancas, the last of which was delivered in July. Said one admiral: “Without them the U.S. Navy would not be fighting today west of the Marianas.”