USS Enterprise (CV-6) is the most decorated ship in American naval history. Twenty battle stars in World War II — more than any other American vessel, more than ships that survived multiple Pacific campaigns, more than ships that were there from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay. She was called the Big E, and the name fit: she was big in her presence, big in the campaigns she shaped, big in the losses she absorbed and kept coming back from. She survived torpedo hits, bomb hits, kamikaze attacks, and a collision that would have ended lesser ships. She came home from the Pacific War in September 1945 with twenty battle stars and a war record that no other ship would ever match. And then, fifteen years later, she was scrapped.
The Ship
USS Enterprise (CV-6) was commissioned on May 12, 1938 — the third ship to bear the name, after the schooner that fought in the War of 1812 and the carrier CV-6's older but shorter-lived predecessor. She was a Yorktown-class carrier, 809 feet long, displacing more than 25,000 tons fully loaded, with a flight deck that could operate the aircraft that would fight the Pacific War. Her air wing at the time of her commissioning flew biplanes. By 1945, the planes on her deck were jets by any other name — the Hellcats and Helldivers and Avengers that swept the sky over the Pacific. Enterprise flew through that entire transformation, from the age of the biplane to the threshold of the jet age, without leaving the war.
Pearl Harbor and the Early War
Enterprise was at sea when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, returning from delivering Marine aircraft to Wake Island. She arrived in the waters off Pearl Harbor while the attack was still being processed, launching aircraft that encountered the Japanese returning strike force. The ship that would define American carrier warfare in the Pacific was at sea when the war began, and it stayed at sea — more often than not — for the next four years.
In the early months of the Pacific War, when the United States had only a handful of carriers and every one of them mattered enormously, Enterprise was at the center of everything: the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo (she was part of the task force that escorted Hornet), the Battle of Midway (where she and Yorktown and Hornet sank four Japanese fleet carriers and turned the war), the Guadalcanal campaign (where she fought in multiple engagements and was twice reported sunk by Japanese authorities who were wrong). She was the ship that the Navy could not afford to lose, and she refused to be lost.
The Long Pacific War
Enterprise fought in virtually every major carrier action of the Pacific War. The Battle of the Coral Sea, where she was not present; every significant engagement from Midway onward, where she was. She was hit by Japanese bombs, torpedoes, and kamikazes. She was repaired, returned to sea, and hit again. By the end of the war she had absorbed damage that should have killed her multiple times and kept fighting. Her nickname — the Grey Ghost, given to her after the Japanese repeatedly reported her sunk — captured both her resilience and the frustration she caused her enemies. She was not sunk. She would not be sunk. She kept coming back.
At the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944 — the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot — Enterprise's aircraft were part of the carrier force that destroyed Japanese naval aviation so completely that Japan never recovered an offensive carrier capability. At Leyte Gulf in October 1944, the largest naval battle in history, she was there. At the final carrier operations of the war, with kamikazes crashing the flight decks of American carriers daily, she survived where others did not.
The Scrapping
USS Enterprise was decommissioned on February 17, 1947. Efforts to preserve her as a museum ship — which included petitions signed by thousands of veterans and the support of many senior naval officers — ultimately failed. She was sold for scrapping in July 1958. It took two years to disassemble her. The Big E, the most decorated ship in American naval history, the ship that won the Pacific War as much as any single vessel can be said to have done, was cut apart in a New Jersey shipyard while the carrier that bore her name — CVN-65, the nuclear-powered Enterprise commissioned in 1961 — was under construction. The name was preserved. The ship was not.
If you want to honor the Big E's legacy or know someone who served on one of her successors, The Ship's Store carries collections for Enterprise and the ships that carry her tradition.
Legacy
The name Enterprise has been given to eight American warships, and the tradition each one carries is the tradition CV-6 established in four years of Pacific warfare. The twentieth battle star on her hull summarizes what that tradition means: presence, resilience, and the refusal to accept defeat regardless of what the enemy does to prevent it. The Big E is gone. The name lives on, as the Navy has always intended names to do — carrying the record of the dead ship into the service of the new one, preserving something that would otherwise be lost.