USS Yorktown Poster

She fought through three of the most important carrier battles of the early Pacific War — and her stubborn, almost miraculous refusal to die helped win the battle that turned the entire tide of the conflict. USS Yorktown (CV-5) was a fast aircraft carrier, the lead ship of her class, and her story is one of relentless courage, hard fighting, and endurance that astonished even her enemies. After the war began, Yorktown was thrown straight into action, raiding Japanese island bases in the Pacific and helping to slow the enemy's seemingly unstoppable advance. In May 1942, at the Battle of the Coral Sea — the first carrier battle in history, in which the opposing fleets never even sighted one another and the entire action was fought by aircraft — her planes helped sink a Japanese carrier, but Yorktown herself was badly damaged by a bomb that penetrated deep into her. Experts who examined her estimated the repairs would take months. She had days. With the decisive Battle of Midway looming and every carrier desperately needed, the shipyard at Pearl Harbor worked around the clock in a frantic, almost superhuman effort, and Yorktown limped back out to battle patched up in just seventy-two hours — a feat that stunned the Japanese, who believed they had already sunk her at Coral Sea and that she could not possibly be present at Midway. But she was. At Midway in June 1942, her aircraft joined the strikes that destroyed four Japanese carriers and shattered the Imperial Navy's offensive power. The enemy struck back hard: Japanese dive bombers and torpedo planes from the carrier Hiryu found Yorktown and hammered her with bombs and torpedoes, leaving her dead in the water and listing heavily. Twice she was hit, and twice her crew fought desperately to save her, controlling the fires and the flooding through sheer skill and will. Even abandoned, she refused to sink. A salvage crew returned to fight for her, lashed alongside by the destroyer Hammann, and slowly began to bring her back — until the Japanese submarine I-168 slipped through the screen and torpedoed both Hammann and Yorktown. The little destroyer sank in minutes; the great carrier held on through the night. At last, on the morning of 7 June 1942, the gallant Yorktown finally rolled over and sank into the deep Pacific. But she had done her work, and it was decisive: Midway was won, and the war in the Pacific had turned. Her wreck was discovered by Robert Ballard in 1998, lying upright and remarkably intact some 5,000 metres down — a fitting monument to a carrier that simply would not quit. To reconstruct USS Yorktown is to capture that spirit of dogged endurance — the carrier repaired in three days, the ship that fought at Coral Sea and Midway, that was hit again and again and refused to die until her job was done. She is the embodiment of the hard, desperate, war-turning fighting of 1942, and of a ship whose toughness helped save the Pacific.