USS Yorktown (CV-10) was not supposed to be named Yorktown. She was laid down as Bonhomme Richard and was under construction at Newport News, Virginia when her predecessor — USS Yorktown (CV-5) — was sunk at the Battle of Midway on June 7, 1942. The Navy renamed the ship in progress to honor the lost carrier, and CV-10 went on to have one of the most distinguished combat records of any ship in the Pacific War. She would be there for nearly every major engagement from 1943 onward, earning eleven battle stars and the nickname “The Fighting Lady” from the documentary film made about her operations. She is now a museum ship in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, and she is one of the most visited naval attractions in the United States. But the story of how she got there is worth telling in full.
Construction and Commissioning
Yorktown was commissioned on April 15, 1943, an Essex-class carrier — the most capable class of fleet carriers the United States had ever built. The Essex class was the product of prewar naval planning and wartime urgency: a ship large enough to operate a full air group, fast enough to operate with the fleet, rugged enough to survive the kind of damage that had sunk her predecessor at Midway. Twenty-four Essex-class carriers were commissioned during and after World War II; they formed the backbone of American naval aviation for the next fifteen years.
Yorktown was homeported with the Pacific Fleet from commissioning. She joined the war at a moment when the initiative was shifting decisively to the United States — the Battle of Midway had broken Japanese carrier aviation's offensive capability, and the long campaign of island-hopping and carrier strikes that would carry the war to Japan's home waters was beginning.
World War II Service
Yorktown's Pacific War service began in earnest with raids against Japanese-held islands in late 1943 and accelerated through 1944 and 1945. She participated in the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944 — the “Marianas Turkey Shoot,” the largest carrier battle in history, in which American carrier air wings destroyed the last of Japan's trained carrier aviator cadre in two days of combat. Yorktown's air group flew against the Japanese Mobile Fleet, attacking carriers and defending against the waves of Japanese aircraft that were systematically destroyed by American fighters and anti-aircraft fire.
She struck targets across the Western Pacific: Truk, the Philippines, Formosa, the Japanese home islands. Her aircraft flew against Japanese surface ships, airfields, and military installations throughout the final year of the war. She was present at the end — still operating in the Pacific when Japan surrendered in August 1945, having earned her eleven battle stars through sustained, aggressive combat operations across two years of the most intense naval warfare in history.
Postwar and Korea
After the war, Yorktown underwent modernization — her flight deck and arresting gear updated for jet aircraft, her island reconfigured. She served through the 1950s and into the Korean War era, operating as an attack carrier and then, after further modernization, as an antisubmarine warfare carrier. The Essex class adapted to the changing demands of postwar naval aviation with a flexibility that extended their service lives well beyond what prewar planners had anticipated.
Yorktown served until 1970, when she was decommissioned after twenty-seven years of active service. She had outlasted most of her contemporaries and had participated in naval operations spanning from the height of World War II to the late Cold War. Her final active service included recovery duties for the Apollo 8 mission in December 1968 — the first crewed spaceflight to reach the moon and return — connecting her service history to the American space program as well as its naval one.
The Fighting Lady Today
Yorktown was donated to Patriots Point Naval and Maritime Museum in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, where she opened to the public in 1975 and remains as the centerpiece of the museum complex. She is one of four Essex-class carriers preserved as museum ships, and one of only a handful of World War II-era warships that visitors can walk aboard and experience. Her flight deck, her hangar bay, her island, her ready rooms and berthing spaces — all provide a direct connection to the naval history of the 1940s that no photograph or film fully replicates.
If you served in carrier aviation or want to honor someone who did, browse The Ship's Store — cruise shirts, license plate frames, and the gear that connects veterans to the ships that defined their service.
Legacy
USS Yorktown (CV-10) carries two names' worth of history: the ship she replaced, sunk at Midway, and her own extraordinary combat record. She represents the Essex class at its finest — a platform that allowed American naval aviation to fight its way across the Pacific, to defeat Japan's carrier force, and to project power in ways that accelerated the end of the war. She is now a monument to that service, moored in a harbor in South Carolina, her flight deck open to the sky, her story available to anyone willing to walk aboard and listen.