No United States aircraft carrier ever absorbed more punishment and lived. On the morning of March 19, 1945, USS Franklin was closer to the Japanese home islands than any American carrier had yet dared to go when a single enemy plane put two bombs into her flight deck. What followed was one of the most harrowing days of survival in the history of the U.S. Navy — and the reason sailors still call her the ship that wouldn't die.
Big Ben
USS Franklin (CV-13) was an Essex-class fleet carrier, commissioned in 1944 and named for Benjamin Franklin — "Big Ben" to her crew. She joined the Pacific war at its height, flying strikes across the island campaigns and taking a kamikaze hit off the Philippines in late 1944 that sent her back for repairs. By March 1945 she was back, part of the fast carrier task force ranging off Japan itself, softening the home islands ahead of the planned invasion.
March 19, 1945
Just after dawn, with her deck packed full of fueled and armed aircraft preparing to launch, Franklin was caught by a lone Japanese plane that dove out of the cloud cover and released two bombs before anyone could stop it. The hits touched off a chain reaction in the worst possible place: a flight deck crowded with gassed-up planes and ordnance. Fires ripped down the deck, bombs and rockets cooked off, and explosion after explosion tore through the ship. Great columns of smoke rose thousands of feet. Ships miles away assumed she was finished.
She was not. Below and around the fires, her crew fought for their ship with a ferocity that became legend. Sailors trapped below decks organized themselves in the dark and the heat. Damage-control parties fought the flames foot by foot. Men formed bucket lines, flooded magazines to keep them from detonating, and carried the wounded through smoke-choked passageways. The cruiser USS Santa Fe came alongside the burning carrier — an act of extraordinary seamanship — to take off wounded and help fight the fires.
The cost was staggering. The blasts and fires killed more than 800 of Franklin's crew — the heaviest loss of life suffered by any U.S. warship that survived the war. Hundreds more were wounded. And yet, incredibly, Franklin stayed afloat.
Home Under Her Own Power
Taken in tow at first, Franklin eventually did something no one watching that morning would have believed: she raised steam in her own boilers and got underway. Down by the stern, listing, blackened from bow to fantail, she limped out of range and then made the long voyage home — across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal, all the way to the New York Navy Yard — largely under her own power. It remains one of the great feats of survival in naval history: a carrier that took damage that should have sunk her three times over, and brought her surviving crew home.
Two of her sailors received the Medal of Honor for their actions that day: the ship's chaplain, Lieutenant Commander Joseph T. O'Callahan, who moved through the fire administering aid, leading firefighting parties, and comforting the dying; and Lieutenant Junior Grade Donald Gary, who found a route out for hundreds of men trapped in a blacked-out compartment and led them to safety, then went back into the smoke again and again.
Legacy
Franklin was so badly damaged that she never returned to active service. She was repaired enough to be preserved, sat in reserve for years, and was ultimately scrapped — but her name never left the Navy's memory. What she represents is not a ship that won a battle, but a crew that refused to lose their ship. On the worst day imaginable, hundreds of ordinary sailors did extraordinary things, and they saved Big Ben.
That is the story worth remembering: not the bombs, but the men who fought the fire — and the ship that would not die because they would not let her.
The Ship's Store honors the crews of every ship that carried sailors into harm's way and brought them home. Browse the collections to find your ship, your rate, or a tribute to the fleet.
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