She was hit by kamikaze aircraft five times during World War II and survived every one. She recovered astronauts from the ocean after their splashdowns. She carried anti-submarine aircraft during the Cold War's tense decades of Soviet submarine hunting. And now she sits along the Hudson River in Manhattan, a museum that 1.5 million visitors walk through every year — most of them with no idea that the ship beneath their feet has one of the most storied careers in the history of the United States Navy. USS Intrepid (CV/CVA/CVS-11) was many things in her thirty years of active service. All of them are worth remembering.
Building a Warship
USS Intrepid (CV-11) was an Essex-class aircraft carrier, the workhorse class of World War II — seventeen ships in all, each carrying roughly 90 aircraft and a crew of nearly 3,000 men. She was laid down at Newport News Shipbuilding in December 1941, just days after Pearl Harbor, as the United States was mobilizing its industrial capacity for a war it had just been forced to join. She was commissioned on August 16, 1943, named for a schooner that had attacked the pirate port of Tripoli in 1804 — a tradition of boldness built into her name from the start.
World War II: The Fighting I
Intrepid joined the Pacific Fleet in early 1944 and was almost immediately in combat. She participated in strikes against Truk Lagoon — the Japanese fleet's major Pacific base — in February 1944, one of the most significant carrier raids of the war. She was present at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944, the largest naval battle in history, where her air wing flew combat missions as the Japanese Navy made its final desperate attempt to destroy the American invasion fleet.
And she was hit. Repeatedly. Kamikaze attacks during 1944 and 1945 struck Intrepid five times, killing crew members and causing serious damage each time. She returned to Pearl Harbor for repairs after each attack, and each time she came back to the fight. Her crew called her “The Evil I” and “The Decrepit” — with the dark humor of men who have survived things that should have killed them — for the number of times she absorbed punishment and kept going. The Japanese thought they had sunk her more than once. They were wrong every time.
By the end of the war, Intrepid had participated in some of the most significant naval campaigns of the Pacific theater and had helped demonstrate that carrier aviation was the decisive arm of naval warfare — a lesson the Navy had learned at Pearl Harbor and spent four years proving in the Pacific.
The Cold War Years
After World War II, Intrepid was modernized and updated to handle the new generation of jet aircraft entering naval service. She received an angled flight deck and other modifications that kept her relevant in the jet age. She was redesignated CVA-11 (attack carrier) and deployed through the 1950s as part of the Cold War Navy's forward presence in the Atlantic and Mediterranean.
In the 1960s, as newer and larger carriers took over the fleet attack mission, Intrepid was redesignated CVS-11 — an anti-submarine warfare carrier. Her air wing now carried S-2 Tracker aircraft and SH-3 Sea King helicopters, hunting Soviet submarines in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean. It was unglamorous work: long patrols, sonar buoys, tracking contacts that may or may not have been submarines, always prepared for a cold war to turn hot without warning. She was good at it.
Astronaut Recovery
Between her anti-submarine deployments, Intrepid served as a recovery ship for NASA space missions — one of the most unusual assignments in the Navy's history. She recovered the capsule and crew of Aurora 7, Scott Carpenter's Mercury flight, in May 1962. She recovered the Gemini 3 capsule — Gus Grissom and John Young's first American two-man spaceflight — in March 1965. And she recovered Gemini 10 — John Young and Michael Collins — in July 1966.
The connection between carrier aviation and the space program ran deep. Many of the Mercury and Gemini astronauts were Navy test pilots, and the recovery ships were familiar territory to them. For Intrepid's crew, watching a capsule fall out of the sky and splash down a few hundred yards from the ship was something you did not forget. It was the future arriving in the present, and they were the ones who fished it out of the ocean.
Vietnam
Intrepid made multiple deployments to the Western Pacific in the late 1960s, operating in the South China Sea in her anti-submarine role during the Vietnam War. The war was primarily an air war over land, and the CVS carriers were less central to the strike mission than the big attack carriers on Yankee Station — but they were present, and their crews served. The deployments of 1967, 1968-69, 1971, and 1972-73 are documented in the collections in the store, and the men who served on those cruises carried the ship with them when they came home.
If you served aboard USS Intrepid or want to honor someone who did, browse the full Intrepid collection — cruise shirts, license plate frames, and gear for everyone who served on the “Evil I.”
Decommissioning and Second Life
USS Intrepid was decommissioned on March 15, 1974, after thirty years of active service that spanned the hottest and coldest years of the American century. She was preserved — after a long campaign by veterans and preservationists — and opened as the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum on Pier 86 in New York City in 1982. She has been there ever since, berthed on the Hudson, with the Concorde on her flight deck and the submarine Growler moored alongside and, as of 2012, the Space Shuttle Enterprise in a specially built pavilion on her flight deck.
It is a second life that few warships receive and that most would not have earned. Intrepid earned it five times over — once for each kamikaze that failed to sink her. The sailors who served aboard her can visit her now, walk her passageways, and show their grandchildren where their rack was. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, quite a lot.