The keels of the carriers Tarawa and Kearsarge

On 1 March 1944 work began on two large aircraft carriers in two of the United States Navy’s own shipyards. At the Norfolk Navy Yard in Portsmouth, Virginia, the keel was laid of a ship that was named Tarawa and given the hull number CV-40, and at the New York Navy Yard in Brooklyn that of Kearsarge (CV-33). Both belonged to the Essex class, the American fleet’s standard class of fleet carrier, and to its later long-hull variant. The date matches official sources. For Kearsarge 1 March is undisputed. For Tarawa it is given by the US Navy’s official Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, although some sources give 11 March. Neither ship was completed in time to take part in the war it had been built to win. Their story illustrates well the scale of American war industry in the spring of 1944 and the gulf that separated it from Japan’s.

The Essex-class carriers

The Essex class grew out of the American Yorktown-class carriers but was larger, faster and better armed. The first three ships were ordered in May 1940, and further ships, in much larger numbers, under the programme Congress approved in the summer of 1940 after the fall of France. This was the Two-Ocean Navy Act, which was meant to allow the United States to fight a war in the Atlantic and the Pacific at the same time. The prototype, Essex, was commissioned at the end of 1942. A carrier of the class displaced about 27,000 tons standard, made more than 32 knots and carried 90–100 aircraft: Grumman F6F Hellcat fighters, dive bombers and torpedo bombers. By the end of the war her crew often numbered more than 3,000 men, largely because of the growing number of anti-aircraft guns that had to be manned.

In March 1943 the navy approved a design change for ships whose construction was still at an early stage. The bow was lengthened and given a more pronounced rake in the form of a clipper bow, which made room for additional anti-aircraft mountings and improved the ship’s seakeeping. Ships with this change were called the long-hull variant or the Ticonderoga subclass, after the first ship to enter service with it. The navy itself, however, did not treat them as a separate class. Tarawa and Kearsarge belonged to this group.

Where the names came from

The US Navy had as yet no fixed rule for naming carriers. It gave them the names of earlier ships or of battles, including recent ones. Tarawa was the first US Navy ship of that name and commemorated the Battle of Tarawa, the bloody capture of the atoll in the Gilbert Islands by the 2nd Marine Division on 20–23 November 1943. The keel was laid only a little over three months after that battle. The ship’s sponsor was later the wife of General Julian C. Smith, commander of the division that had assaulted the atoll.

Kearsarge drew on a much older tradition. The name, taken from Mount Kearsarge in New Hampshire, had been borne by the Union Navy steam sloop that on 19 June 1864 sank the Confederate raider CSS Alabama off Cherbourg. The new carrier was the third ship of that name. It had originally been intended for an earlier Essex-class ship ordered in 1940 from the Newport News yard. But when the carrier Hornet – the ship from whose deck Jimmy Doolittle’s bombers had taken off for Japan in April that year – was sunk at the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands in October 1942, the ship under construction took over her name as Hornet (CV-12). The name Kearsarge was passed on to one of the later ships.

A programme without precedent

Laying two keels on the same day was nothing exceptional in the United States in 1944. A total of 32 Essex-class carriers were ordered. Six were cancelled before construction began and two more while already on the slipways, as the war was coming to an end. Twenty-four ships entered service, making the Essex class the most numerous class of large warships of the 20th century. Alongside them the fleet received nine light Independence-class carriers, converted on the slipways from light cruiser hulls, and more than a hundred escort carriers. According to US Navy tallies there were about 120 of these for the US Navy alone, not counting those transferred to the Royal Navy. Kaiser’s yard at Vancouver, Washington, built 50 ships of the Casablanca class, delivering them to the fleet between July 1943 and July 1944 – on average one a week. In 1943 construction also began on three even larger Midway-class carriers.

By the spring of 1944 the results of this programme were already visible in the Pacific. On 1 March eight Essex-class ships were in service, the latest of them, Franklin, since 31 January. They formed the core of the fast carrier force that in February had smashed the Japanese base at Truk in Operation Hailstone and earlier had covered the landings in the Marshall Islands. These great ships were being built alongside a vast merchant fleet – in January the first Victory ship was launched at Portland – and battleships such as New Jersey. In wartime building an Essex-class carrier usually took from a year and a half to two years. Ships whose keels were laid in March 1944 could therefore not see action before the second half of 1945.

Japan could not keep up

The comparison with Japan is crushing. The Japanese navy entered the war with six large carriers, four of which it lost at Midway in June 1942. Throughout the war Japanese shipyards completed only a handful of large carriers built from scratch. The most modern of them, the armoured Taihō, was commissioned on 7 March 1944, less than a week after the keels of Tarawa and Kearsarge were laid. Her construction had taken more than two and a half years. In the second half of 1944 they were joined by three Unryū-class ships and by Shinano, converted from a battleship hull. Japan made do with conversions of passenger liners, auxiliaries and seaplane carriers, but these ships were smaller and slower and carried fewer aircraft. Still more damaging was the shortage of trained aviators, whose losses at Midway, over Guadalcanal and over Rabaul could not be made good.

So at the moment when the keels of two more carriers were being laid at Norfolk and in Brooklyn, the United States had more large carriers under construction than Japan managed to complete during the entire war. This disparity, foreseen by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto even before the attack on Pearl Harbor, decided the outcome of the war in the Pacific regardless of the course of individual battles.

After the war

Kearsarge was launched on 5 May 1945 and Tarawa on 12 May 1945, a few days after Germany’s surrender. The war with Japan ended before either had entered service. Tarawa was commissioned on 8 December 1945, Kearsarge on 2 March 1946. In 1946–1947 Tarawa made a cruise to the western Pacific, to the Marianas, Japan and the coast of northern China. She was placed in reserve in 1949 and reactivated in 1951 because of the Korean War. She served mainly in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, however, standing in for ships sent to Korea, and reached the Far East only in 1954, after the armistice. From 1955 she served as an anti-submarine carrier. She was finally decommissioned in 1960 and sold for scrap in 1968. Unlike most of her sisters, she never underwent a major modernisation and kept the appearance of a Second World War ship to the end.

Kearsarge had a longer and more varied career. After a reconstruction in 1950–1952 that adapted her to jet aircraft, she fought off Korea in 1952–1953. From 1958 she was an anti-submarine carrier. She earned a place in the history of Project Mercury by recovering astronauts from the ocean: Walter Schirra on 3 October 1962 and Gordon Cooper on 16 May 1963. In 1964 she operated in the Gulf of Tonkin, and later during the Vietnam War. She was decommissioned in 1970 and sold for scrap in 1974.

Their place in the war

The laying of the keels of Tarawa and Kearsarge was an industrial rather than a military event, but it shows well what the Pacific war looked like in March 1944. The United States could afford to build ships that, as it turned out, were no longer needed for victory. The Japanese carrier fleet, rebuilt with difficulty after the defeats of 1942, lost three carriers at the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944, including Taihō, sunk by an American submarine, and the remnants of its carrier aviation were destroyed. That autumn the remaining Japanese carriers served at Leyte only as a decoy. Victory was secured by ships whose construction had begun in 1941–1943. The carriers ordered later, such as Tarawa and Kearsarge, became the core of the post-war fleet that the United States maintained throughout the Cold War.