Bonnie Dick Hits the Water
Some 80 years ago today, we see this great original Kodachrome of the last of the original “short bow” (just 872 feet long versus her later 888 foot sisters) type Essex-class fast fleet carriers, USS Bon Homme Richard (CV-31) sliding down the building ways, as she is launched at the New York Navy Yard, Brooklyn, New York, on 29 April 1944.
Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives, 80-G-K-3888(Color).
Commissioned on 26 November 1944, “Bonnie Dick” was the first ship in the modern Navy to commemorate the name of John Paul Jones’s famous Revolutionary War frigate– and she got in enough licks in during WWII to earn one Battlestar.
Of note, she was a night fighter carrier, equipped with F6F-5Ns of VF-(N)-91 and TBM-3Ds of VT-N-91 for her 8 June-15 August 1945 war cruise.
One of her “Nightcats,” Ensign Phillip T. McDonald, while flying a dusk CAP- one of the last in the war– over one of the task Force “watchdog” radar pickets, west of Mito, on 13 August 1945 shot down two Ki-45 (Nick) and two P1Y (Frances) as well as two more probable, just missing out on earning the double coveted ace-in-a-day and night-fighter-ace monikers (all though he is listed as one of the Top F6F Night Fighters in terms of score). The final score for all of VF(N)-91 was 9-2-0, all occurring between 1820 and 1915 hours.
Her WWII cruise
Bonnie Dick was much more active in Korea, carrying the F9F Panthers and AD-4 Skyraiders of first Carrier Air Group 102 (CVG-102) then CVG-7.
Stretched and given the SCB-125 overhaul in the mid-1950s, BHR was in the thick of the air war off Vietnam from 1964 onward, completing six deployments.
USS Bon Homme Richard (CVA-31) with her crew spelling out Hello San Diego, while en route to San Diego on 9 February 1963. She returned to San Diego, her home port, on 11 February, following a Western Pacific cruise that had begun seven months earlier, on 12 July 1962. Aircraft on her flight deck include three E-1, 11 F-8, six F-3, 13 A-4, and nine A-1 types. Official U.S. Navy Photograph, from the collections of the Naval History and Heritage Command. Catalog #: NH 97343
Two U.S. Navy CVG-21 airwing pilots on the flight deck escalator aboard the aircraft carrier USS Bon Homme Richard (CVA-31). Escalators were added to Essex class carriers during their 1950s modernizations as ready rooms were moved below the hanger deck level for more protection– a lesson from the kamikaze era when hits caused high mortality rates in pilots waiting in ready rooms. Also, pilots had more gear in the jet age than back in the F6F era. U.S. Navy photo from the Bon Homme Richard (CVA-31) 1956-57 cruise book
Completing her last deployment to Yankee Station on 12 November 1970 she was decommissioned the next year and, after spending 21 years on red lead row as a source for potential spare parts for the similarly laid-up but slightly younger USS Oriskany (which the Navy saw as a mobilization asset through the Reagan years), she was scrapped in 1992.
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