October 1973 brought one of the most dangerous Cold War confrontations the U.S. Navy experienced in the Mediterranean. On October 6 — Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar — Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated surprise attack against Israel. The Yom Kippur War, as it became known, created an immediate crisis not just for Israel but for the entire balance of power in the Middle East, and the United States found itself racing to resupply an ally while managing the risk of direct confrontation with the Soviet Union, which was supporting Egypt and Syria. In the Mediterranean, that confrontation played out at sea, and USS America (CV-66) was in the middle of it.
America in the Mediterranean
USS America (CV-66) was a Kitty Hawk-class carrier commissioned in January 1965. By 1973 she was a seasoned ship with Vietnam experience and a crew that understood what it meant to operate in a contested environment. Her 1973 Mediterranean deployment placed her in exactly that kind of environment at exactly the right — or wrong — moment. When the Yom Kippur War began, the Sixth Fleet repositioned to monitor the crisis and project American resolve.
The Soviet Navy also had a substantial Mediterranean presence — their squadron, known in NATO circles as the SOVMEDRON, was well-equipped and aggressive in its surveillance of American carriers. During the height of the Yom Kippur War, American and Soviet warships operated in close proximity in the eastern Mediterranean in a tense game of mutual surveillance that came uncomfortably close to the kind of incident that could have escalated unpredictably. America's crew operated at a heightened state of readiness throughout this period, acutely aware that the ship they were on was the most valuable — and most targeted — asset in the theater.
The Airlift and the Alert
On October 24, as Israeli forces were encircling Egypt's Third Army and the Soviets were threatening to intervene unilaterally to prevent an Egyptian collapse, President Nixon ordered a worldwide nuclear alert — DEFCON 3 — for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Sixth Fleet, including America, went to heightened readiness. It was one of the most tense moments of the Cold War, a nuclear shadow cast over a conventional war in the desert, and the sailors of the Sixth Fleet felt its weight. The alert lasted a matter of days as diplomacy pulled both superpowers back from the edge, but the men who stood watch during those days understood that they were not playing wargames.
What the MED Cruise Looked Like
Beyond the strategic drama, the 1973 Mediterranean deployment was also the everyday experience of a carrier cruise: flight operations in beautiful and challenging waters, port visits to Naples, Athens, Barcelona, and Cannes that gave sailors a few days of liberty in some of the most storied cities in the world, and the grinding routine of keeping a 75,000-ton ship and her air wing running around the clock. The men who made the 1973 cruise on America carried the experience of a deployment that mixed peacetime port calls with genuine crisis readiness — the kind of deployment that reminds everyone aboard that the Navy's job is not peace but the maintenance of conditions in which peace is possible.
America's Legacy
USS America served the Navy until 1996 and was decommissioned after 31 years. She was sunk as a target ship in 2005 during SINKEX exercises — a controversial end for a ship that many veterans believed deserved museum status. The men who served aboard her, through Vietnam, through the Yom Kippur crisis, through decades of MED and WESTPAC deployments, remember her with the affection sailors always carry for a ship that brought them home.
If you served aboard USS America or in the Cold War carrier fleet, browse the America collection at The Ship's Store — cruise shirts, license plate frames, and gear honoring the ship and her crew.