USS Coral Sea (CVA-43) was not the biggest carrier in the fleet. She was not the newest, or the fastest, or the most celebrated. What she was, across four decades of service that stretched from the early Cold War to the end of the Vietnam era and beyond, was one of the most consistently deployed and continuously useful ships the United States Navy ever operated. She commissioned in 1947 and decommissioned in 1990 — forty-three years of service that took her to every ocean on earth, through every major American military commitment of the postwar era, and into the affections of every sailor who ever called her home.
A Midway-Class Carrier
Coral Sea was the third ship of the Midway class — large carriers designed late in World War II and commissioned just after it ended. The Midways were built to be the Navy's capital ships of the atomic age, large enough to carry the nuclear-capable aircraft that strategic doctrine demanded, and they were repeatedly modified throughout their service lives to keep pace with the evolution of naval aviation. Coral Sea's flight deck was rebuilt and angled over the years, her island was modified, her arresting gear upgraded. Each modernization extended her life and adapted her to aircraft — the F-4 Phantom, the A-6 Intruder, the A-7 Corsair, the F/A-18 Hornet — that her designers had never imagined.
Cold War and Vietnam
Coral Sea spent much of the 1960s and 1970s on Yankee Station, flying combat missions over North and South Vietnam. She made multiple WESTPAC deployments during the war, and her air wings flew thousands of sorties against targets in the North, on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and in support of ground forces in the South. The 1971-72 WESTPAC was among the most intense: Operation Linebacker, the heavy bombing campaign that followed North Vietnam's Easter Offensive in 1972, put enormous demands on carrier air wings, and Coral Sea's crew delivered. They flew in conditions of high threat and high tempo, and they brought their ship home.
She also carried the distinction of having launched from her flight deck during Operation Frequent Wind in April 1975 — the evacuation of Saigon — not combat aircraft but the helicopters and fixed-wing planes that carried the last Americans and many South Vietnamese allies out of a falling city. The fall of Saigon was one of the most painful moments in American military history, and the sailors of Coral Sea — positioned offshore as the city collapsed — had a front-row seat to the end of the war they had spent years fighting.
The Late Career
Coral Sea kept working through the 1980s. She participated in exercises in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, maintained her forward-deployed presence, and continued flying even as she aged past any point her designers would have predicted. By the mid-1980s, she was one of the oldest carriers in the fleet, and her maintenance requirements were significant, but she remained operational. She was involved in the 1986 Libya operations — Operation El Dorado Canyon — as part of the naval forces in the Mediterranean during that period.
She was decommissioned on April 26, 1990 — one year before the Gulf War that several of her sister ships and successors would fight in. She had served forty-three years and every year of it counted. The sailors who served aboard Coral Sea ranged from the Korea-era men of the early 1950s to the Cold War sailors of the late 1980s, and every one of them served on a ship that was always older than they expected, always more capable than anyone predicted, and always more beloved by her crew than a ship of her age and limitations had any right to be.
The Name
Coral Sea takes her name from the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942 — the first naval battle in history fought entirely by carrier aircraft, in which neither fleet's ships came within sight of the other. The original USS Lexington (CV-2) was sunk in that battle, and USS Yorktown (CV-5) was damaged. The Japanese were turned back from their planned invasion of Port Moresby, New Guinea. It was the battle that stopped Japan's southern expansion, and every ship that has borne that name since has carried its weight.
If you served aboard USS Coral Sea, browse the Coral Sea collection at The Ship's Store — cruise shirts, license plate frames, and gear honoring the ship and her forty-three years of service.