USS Hornet

The Vessel

USS Hornet (CV-8) was the third and last of the Yorktown-class aircraft carriers of the United States Navy, commissioned at the Newport News Shipbuilding Company on 20 October 1941. She was 251 metres long, 25,600 tons standard displacement, carried 82 aircraft, and designed for 32 knots. Her construction had been accelerated by the 1940 two-ocean navy appropriation; at her commissioning, six weeks before Pearl Harbor, she was the newest American fleet carrier in service.

Her commanding officer through her brief 12-month career was Captain Marc A. Mitscher, 54, a career naval aviator who had served on the first American carrier USS Langley in 1923 and who would, after the war, become the principal American carrier force commander of the late Pacific campaign. His Hornet command was his first major sea command.

Her first operational deployment is the mission for which she is primarily remembered: the Doolittle Raid. On 2 April 1942 Hornet departed Alameda, California, carrying 16 Army Air Forces B-25 Mitchell medium bombers under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel James Doolittle. The aircraft, loaded on her flight deck (no American carrier had ever carried medium bombers on an operational deployment before), were launched on 18 April 1942 at a distance of 650 nautical miles from Tokyo for the first American aerial attack on the Japanese home islands. The Doolittle Raid caused minimal physical damage but had large psychological consequences for Japanese strategic planning; it was cited by Japanese planners as one of the reasons to expand the defensive perimeter to Midway, the operation that would ultimately destroy the Japanese carrier force.

The Voyage

Hornet served at the Battle of Midway (4-7 June 1942) with Task Force 16 but her air group's poor performance on the morning of 4 June was one of the puzzles of the battle: VT-8 (her torpedo squadron) was annihilated without hits, and her dive bombers failed to locate the Japanese carrier force. The operational failure of the Hornet air group at Midway has been studied by American naval historians as a contrast to the success of the Enterprise and Yorktown air groups the same morning.

From July through September 1942 she operated in the Solomons campaign supporting the Guadalcanal landings. By late October 1942 she was the only operational American fleet carrier in the Pacific (Enterprise was damaged from the earlier Battle of the Eastern Solomons, Saratoga was torpedoed and under repair, Lexington and Yorktown had been lost). Task Force 17 under Rear-Admiral George D. Murray, built around Hornet, was the principal American striking force for the October 1942 carrier battle known as the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands.

On 26 October 1942 Hornet and Enterprise (just returned from repair) engaged the Japanese fleet carriers Zuikaku, Shōkaku, Zuihō, and the light carrier Junyō off the Santa Cruz Islands. The two-day engagement was the fourth carrier-to-carrier battle of the Pacific War (after Coral Sea, Midway, and Eastern Solomons).

The Disaster

The Japanese strike reached Hornet at 10:12 on 26 October 1942. Over the following 25 minutes, Hornet was struck by four bombs, three from diving Val dive-bombers and one from a crippled Aichi D3A that crashed deliberately into her stack as a suicide attack. She was also hit by two Type 91 aerial torpedoes on her starboard side, and by a second suicide-crash Japanese aircraft on her flight deck forward. By 10:40 she was listing 8 degrees to starboard, her engine rooms were flooded, her steering was disabled, and she was on fire in her forward hangar.

The cruiser USS Northampton took her in tow at 14:30. The second Japanese strike, delivered by nine more Vals from Zuikaku's reserves, reached her at 15:15 and scored two more hits. Hornet was now clearly beyond salvage. At 17:27 on 26 October 1942 Captain Charles Mason (her recently-appointed commanding officer) ordered abandon-ship. The damaged crew was transferred to Northampton and the destroyer Russell; 140 of her 2,340 crew had died in the attacks.

Through the evening of 26-27 October 1942, the American task force attempted to scuttle Hornet before she could fall into Japanese hands. Eight torpedoes from USS Mustin and Anderson struck her without sinking her; over 400 rounds of 5-inch gunfire from the same ships set her burning but she did not sink. At midnight on 26-27 October, with Japanese search aircraft reported approaching, the American destroyers withdrew, leaving Hornet still afloat but burning from end to end.

Hornet was sunk in the small hours of 27 October 1942 by the Japanese destroyers Makigumo and Akigumo, which fired four Type 93 Long Lance torpedoes into her. She sank at approximately 01:35 on 27 October 1942 at 8°38′S 166°43′E, in approximately 5,400 metres of water. She had been in commission for twelve months and six days.

The Legacy

USS Hornet (CV-8) was the last American fleet carrier in Pacific waters at the moment of her loss. For four days between her sinking on 27 October 1942 and the return to service of USS Enterprise (CV-6) after emergency repair on 31 October 1942, the United States Navy had no operational aircraft carriers in the entire Pacific Ocean. The Pacific War had, for four days, no American carrier defence at all. The Japanese failure to exploit this moment is attributed by American historians to the damage suffered by Zuikaku and Shōkaku at Santa Cruz, and to Japanese logistical strain in the Solomons. Had Japanese intelligence correctly identified the American carrier gap, the Guadalcanal campaign might have taken a very different course.

The four-day carrier gap was closed by the commissioning of USS Essex (CV-9) on 31 December 1942, the first of the new Essex-class carriers whose mass production would ultimately dominate the Pacific War. The American response to the loss of Hornet was not to replace her with a single ship but with 24 Essex-class carriers over the following three years. The Essex-class design incorporated lessons from Hornet, Lexington, and Yorktown specifically: improved damage-control systems, better aviation-fuel safety, additional anti-aircraft armament, and stronger structural subdivision.

The wreck of USS Hornet (CV-8) was located on 12 February 2019 by Paul Allen's research vessel Petrel, at a depth of 5,400 metres in the Solomon Sea. She lies approximately upright, her starboard torpedo hits visible, her flight deck largely intact. The Petrel survey cameras identified her hull number and individual aircraft on her hangar deck. She is a protected American war grave and will not be disturbed.

The name USS Hornet has been carried by four subsequent American warships: CV-12 (the Essex-class carrier that served through the Pacific War and recovered the Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 astronauts from the Pacific, now a museum ship at Alameda, California); and the future USS Hornet (CVN-82), a Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier laid down in 2024. The USS Hornet (CV-12) museum at Alameda maintains the memorial roll of both CV-8 and CV-12, with the 140 dead of CV-8 given particular prominence in the commemoration. She was the ship that launched the Doolittle Raid; her construction was twelve months old when she sank; she was the longest-serving American carrier to be lost and the shortest-serving American carrier whose name is still remembered.