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Museum Pieces: Aircraft Carrier USS Intrepid [1]
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Date: 2025-07-15
The WW2 carrier Intrepid is now a museum ship in New York City.
"Museum Pieces" is a diary series that explores the history behind some of the most interesting museum exhibits and historical places.
USS Intrepid in action at the Battle of Leyte Gulf photo from Wiki Commons
After the outbreak of war in the Pacific, the US Navy knew that the role of the fleet carriers would be central, and it launched a massive effort to produce new ships. The keel for the third Essex class carrier, CV-11, christened Intrepid, had already been laid down on December 1, 1941, in Newport News VA, just a week before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Now, the United States turned into a war economy and resources were poured into expanding the carrier fleet.
Intrepid was launched in April 1943 with a crew of 3500, barely a year and a half after construction began. She was commissioned in August and undertook a shakedown cruise in the Caribbean before sailing through the Panama Canal and arriving at Pearl Harbor in January 1944.
In her first combat operations, “The Fighting I” joined the fleet carrier Essex and the light carrier Cabot in Task Force 58 for a series of strikes against Japanese forces at Kwajalein, which was invaded and captured. The Task Force then went on to participate in strikes against the Japanese base at Truk, which was then the primary Japanese naval and air center in the central Pacific. During two days of raids, American aircraft sunk a large number of Japanese ships in the harbor and destroyed most of the planes, ending the effectiveness of the base and forcing the Imperial Navy to abandon it and withdraw.
During the fighting around Truk, however, a lone Japanese torpedo bomber on a night attack managed to penetrate the carrier group's defenses and hit Intrepid in the stern, disabled the rudder, and forced the carrier to limp away using the propellers to steer and stabilizing the ship with a makeshift 40-foot sail rigged from canvas. After temporary repairs in Hawaii, Intrepid steamed under her own power to San Francisco for more work. She returned to action in September 1944 as part of Task Force 38, providing air cover for the invasion of Pelelieu and carrying out air strikes against Japanese bases in Mindanao in the Philippines. In October her planes attacked Japanese airfields in Formosa (Taiwan) and Okinawa.
During the Battle of Leyte Gulf in late October, attack aircraft from Intrepid joined with other carriers to sink the Japanese super-battleship Musashi (who took 36 bomb and torpedo hits), and then the carriers Zuiho and Zuikaku. After this battle Intrepid's air group launched raids against targets on Luzon. At the end of October she suffered minor damage from a Japanese plane in one of the first kamikaze attacks of the war, then a month later was attacked by a swarm of 25 suicide planes. Two of them got through and hit the flight deck and penetrated to the hangar, killing 7 crewmen. The fires were so bad that the captain considered issuing the orders to abandon ship, but after several hours they were brought under control, and the carrier withdrew from the fight and sailed to San Francisco for extensive repairs.
After two months of mending and refits, Intrepid returned to service and carried out a series of air strikes against targets in the Japanese homeland (and suffered a near-miss from a twin-engine “Betty” bomber on a suicide run) before being assigned to the invasion of Okinawa, where she was hit by another kamikaze and again took damage to the flight deck. After more repairs in California, Intrepid was in the Marshall Islands preparing for the invasion of Japan when the war ended. In total, she was credited with sinking over 80 Japanese ships.
After the Japanese surrender, Intrepid was placed on “reserve” status and decommissioned. In 1952, however, as the Korean War and the Cold War raged, she was recommissioned and underwent a $40-million series of modifications which added an angled flightdeck, a new island, and improved catapults for handling jet aircraft. Now outclassed by the newer and larger Midway carriers, she was assigned to anti-submarine duty and, designated as a CVS “support carrier”, she carried out a series of routine patrols over the next ten years.
In May 1962 Intrepid became the primary recovery ship for the Aurora 7 space mission, picking up the Mercury space ship and astronaut Scott Carpenter in the Caribbean after his three-orbit mission. Carpenter splashed down in the ocean about 250 miles off-course, and it took a while for the search aircraft to locate him. He was winched aboard one of Intrepid's helicopters, while his capsule was pulled from the water and carried to the flightdeck.
Then in March 1965 the carrier was assigned to the Gemini 3 operation. This was the first manned flight of NASA's new two-man spaceship, and was intended to test all of the complex systems in space, particularly the orbital-maneuvering engines. Intrepid recovered the “Molly Brown” spacecraft and astronauts Gus Grissom and John Young near Cuba after their three-orbit flight. Once again, the landing was off-course, by about 60 miles.
After another refit and upgrade under the Fleet Rehabilitation and Modernization (FRAM) program, Intrepid once again returned to combat duty. She was reclassified as a CVA “special attack carrier” and was sent to Vietnam, launching air missions from the South China Sea against targets in Southeast Asia. She did three combat tours from April 1966 to February 1969. While the new Forrestal-class carriers had four steam catapults for launching planes, the smaller 33,000-ton Intrepid only had two, so her crew became proficient at launching planes rapidly—on one occasion putting six A-1 Skyraiders and nine A-4 Skyhawks into the air in just seven minutes.
After the Vietnam War, though now some three decades old, Intrepid returned to carrying out patrols in the Mediterranean and Atlantic. She was finally retired from service and decommissioned in March 1974.
In 1976 the ship was temporarily placed on exhibit in Philadelphia as part of the Bicentennial celebrations. After this she was scheduled for the scrapyard, but the Navy offered to give her as a floating museum ship to any city that wanted her, and the nonprofit group Odysseys in Flight, led by New York businessman Zachary Fisher, managed to raise enough money to have the ship saved as a memorial.
At this point she had already been rusting away for eight years. But the nonprofit managed to raise $120 million, which included $55 million to prepare the ship itself and another $65 million to repair and upgrade the Pier 86 on the Hudson River where the carrier would be displayed.
The Intrepid Air and Space Museum opened in August 1982. In 2011 the NASA space shuttle Enterprise was donated to the museum and went on display in July 2012. Today there are several dozen naval airplanes and helicopters on exhibit, a boilerplate engineering test model of the Mercury spaceship, and the submarine USS Growler.
Some photos from a visit:
USS Intrepid museum ship
On the flight deck
The “island”
A-4 Skyhawk fighter/bomber on the hangar deck
The Chart Room
The Captain’s chair
The Navigation Bridge
The photo lab
The Galley
One of the ship’s propellers
An engineering boilerplate model of the Mercury spacecraft
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