Casablanca Class Escort Carrier - Service

Service

Although designated as escort carriers, the Casablanca class was far more frequently used in fleet operations, where their light wings of fighters and bombers could combine to provide the effectiveness of a much larger ship. These ships finest hour came in the Battle off Samar, when Taffy 3, a task unit composed of six of these ships and their screen of 4 destroyers and 3 destroyer escorts gave battle against the Japanese main force. Their desperate defense not only preserved most of their own ships, but succeeded in turning back the massive force with only aircraft machine guns, depth charges, high-explosive bombs, and their own 5" guns. Tasked with ground support and antisubmarine patrols, they lacked the torpedoes and armor-piercing bombs to tackle a surface fleet alone. Taffy 3 was to be protected by Admiral Halsey's Third Fleet with carriers and battleships. But the Third Fleet had left the scene to pursue a decoy carrier fleet, inadvertently leaving Taffy 3 the only force between the massive Japanese fleet and undefended landing forces at Leyte Gulf. The lightly armed vessels each had only one 5"/38 cal gun mounted aft, yet two of their numbers, St. Lo (ex-Midway) and Kalinin Bay, became the only US aircraft carriers to ever record a hit on an enemy warship by its own guns. St. Lo hit a Japanese destroyer with a single round and Kalinin Bay damaged a Myoko class cruiser with two hits. Recent evidence suggests that six 5" shells fired from the USS White Plains struck the heavy cruiser IJN Chokai. One of the rounds impacted amidships on the starboard side, causing a larger secondary explosion (probably from one of the Chokais own torpedoes) that proved fatal to the heavy cruiser. The White Plains gun crew put all six 5" rounds into the Chokai from a range of 11,700 yards, near the maximum effective range for the 5"/38 gun.

Another noteworthy achievement of the Casablanca class was when USS Guadalcanal under command of Captain Daniel V. Gallery, made the first capture-at-sea of a foreign warship by the US Navy since the War of 1812, by capturing U-505.

Of the eleven U.S. aircraft carriers of all types lost during World War II, six were escort carriers. Of those six escort carriers lost, five were of the Kaiser-built Casablanca class. The Casablanca class carriers lost during World War II were:

• CVE-56 Liscome Bay

Sunk 24 November 1943. Submarine torpedo launched from IJN I-175 SW off Butaritari (Makin).

• CVE-73 Gambier Bay

Sunk 25 October 1944. Concentrated surface gunfire from IJN Center Force during Battle off Samar.

• CVE-63 St. Lo (ex-Midway)

Sunk 25 October 1944. Kamikaze aerial attack during Battle of Leyte Gulf.

• CVE-79 Ommaney Bay

Sunk 4 January 1945. Kamikaze aerial attack in the Sulu Sea en route to Lingayen Gulf.

• CVE-95 Bismarck Sea

Sunk 21 February 1945. Kamikaze aerial attack off Iwo Jima.

Unlike most other warships since HMS Dreadnought, the Casablanca class ships were equipped with uniflow reciprocating engines instead of turbine engines. This was done in view of bottlenecks in the gear-cutting industry, but greatly limited their usefulness after the war. Some ships were retained postwar as aircraft transports, where their lack of speed was not a major drawback. Some units were reactivated as helicopter escort carriers (CVHE and T-CVHE) or utility carriers (CVU and T-CVU) after the war, but most were deactivated and placed in reserve once the war ended, stricken in 1958-9 and scrapped in 1959-61. One ship, USS Thetis Bay, was heavily modified into an amphibious assault ship (LPH-6), but was scrapped in 1964.

Originally, half of their number were to be transferred to the Royal Navy under Lend-Lease, but instead they were retained in the US Navy and the Batch II Bogue class escort carriers were transferred instead as the Ruler class (the RN's Batch I Bogues were the Attacker class).