Yorktown, USS

Yorktown, USS
1. CV-5 the third ship with the name, a carrier commissioned at Norfolk, Virginia on September 30, 1937. After participating in Fleet Problems XX and XXI—wargames that would characterize future warfare in the Pacific Theater, the carrier remained off the west coast of the United States until U-boat depredations on British merchant vessels in the Atlantic required the United States to transfer a large force to the Atlantic, including the Yorktown, a division of battleships, and cruisers and destroyers. After the Japanese bombing of the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor (1941), the Yorktown was transferred back to the Pacific as the flagship for the newly created Task Force (TF) 17, where it participated in the first U.S. attack on the Marshall and Gilbert Island groups. It was lost at the Battle of Midway in 1942.

2. an Essex-class aircraft carrier commissioned in 1943. The second of its class, it replaced its namesake, lost in 1942, and its aircraft inflicted heavy losses on the Japanese at Truk and the Marianas, and supported U.S. troops in the Philippines and at Iwo Jima and Okinawa (1944). After serving in the Korean War, the ship was modified for antisubmarine warfare and sent to Vietnam. It was decommissioned in 1970 and is now part of a fleet of ships at Patriots Point and serves as host to several carrier memorials.

3. a Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser that carries two SH-2 Seasprite multipurpose helicopters instead of the SH-60s carried on ships of this class built later.