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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday, July 26, 2023: The Iron Woman

Above we see an air-to-air front view of a Spanish AV-8S Matador (Harrier) in flight over the Spanish aircraft carrier Dedalo (R01), below, in the Mediterranean Sea in the summer of 1988. If you think Dedalo looks much like a WWII light carrier, your hunch is correct, and she entered service under a different name and flag some 80 years ago this week.

“30/30” Ships

In 1942, the Navy had its ass in a bind.

Starting the war with just six large-deck fleet carriers, within the first six months of combat was down to just four, and by the end of the year; just a single one of these (Enterprise) was still afloat and operational.

While the first huge and ultra-modern 34,000-ton Essex-class carriers were building as fast as the riveters could rivet and the welders could chip slag, they would not be able to arrive in numbers until 1944. This put the Big Blue behind the Japanese 8-ball in naval warfare.

FDR, himself always a Navy man (he won a naval warfare essay contest while a teenager and slept with Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History on his nightstand before being appointed Asst. Scty of the Navy during World War One), came up with the idea to convert a bunch of cruisers that were already partially complete at the New York Navy Yard over to flat-tops. Although the Navy balked, FDR was the commander and chief, so guess who won?

The 14,000-ton Cleveland class light cruisers were designed after the gloves came off in 1940 and the U.S. no longer had to abide by the Washington and London Naval treaties of the 1920s and 30s. As such, these were very large cruisers, at just a hair over 600 feet long, and very fast (33 knots). Designed to carry a dozen 6-inch and a supplemental dozen 5-inch guns, they were also heavily armed.

In all the Navy wanted something on the order of 40 of these cruisers to lead destroyer groups, escort convoys, scout ahead of battle groups, and screen carriers and battleships. Well, FDR carved nine whose hulls were nearing completion but did not have decks, guns, or superstructures installed yet.

It was not that hard of a concept. Many of the first carriers were auxiliaries, cruisers, and battleships that had their topside removed and covered with a flat top. Langley, the first U.S. carrier, was a collier. Lexington and Saratoga, the country’s second and third carriers respectively, were originally laid down as battlecruisers.

The first of the class of FDR’s “cruiser carriers,” laid down originally as the cruiser Amsterdam but commissioned instead as the USS Independence, was commissioned on 14 January 1943 and rushed to the fleet. Over the next nine months, eight sisters would join her, roughly one every 45 days on average. They were all constructed in the same yard to keep the program streamlined.

A “30/30” ship, they could make 30+ knots and carry 30+ aircraft while having legs long enough to cross the Pacific and operate on their own for a few weeks before she needed to find an oiler. While they were still much smaller than a regular fleet carrier such as the Enterprise that could carry 80-90 aircraft, they could still put a few squadrons in the air and fill lots of needs.

Simultaneously, they were much faster than the similarly sized quartet of converted oilers that had already been rushed into service and could keep up with a fast-moving battle force. Initially classified as normal fleet carriers (CV), all were re-designated “small aircraft carriers” (CVL) on 15 July 1943.

Worth, in his Fleets of World War II, described the Indys as such:

These were not attractive ships. They had no deck edge elevator, just one catapult, and a small air group (usually 33 planes). Though meant to carry one or two 5-inch DP guns, they never received them. The armor layout provided modest protection, though the first two ships scrambled into service so hurriedly they never got their side armor. In spite of all of this, the design was a success. Not a war winner, it augmented the fleet’s main strength, having sufficient size and speed to bring modern aircraft into battle.

Meet Cabot

The name “Cabot,” after the English-employed Venetian explorer John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto), was one of the oldest in the Navy.

As far back as 5 January 1776, the first Continental Navy squadron under Commodore Esek Hopkins was ordered to sea by Congress to seek the British off coasts of the Carolinas and Rhode Island and in the Chesapeake Bay. The ships under Hopkins’s flag were Alfred, Columbus, Andrea Doria, Cabot, Providence, Hornet, Wasp, and Fly. Sadly, Cabot was also the first Continental naval ship captured by the British, which may be why the Navy waited until 1943 to reissue it.

The second Cabot was laid down as light cruiser USS Wilmington (CL-79) on 16 March 1942, by New York Shipbuilding Co. in Camden, then was reclassified to an aircraft carrier (CV-28) and renamed Cabot during her conversion.

Launched on 4 April 1943, she was reclassified to a small aircraft carrier (CVL-28) just before she was commissioned on 24 July 1943– some 80 years ago this week.

Her first airwing was Carrier Air Group 31, made up of the “Flying Meataxers” of Fighter Squadron 31 (VF-31) and Torpedo Squadron 31 (VT-31), which came aboard in November 1943. CAG 31 would remain on Cabot until 4 October 1944 when CAG 29 (VF-29 and VT-29), late of the USS Santee, came aboard. In general, these CAGs would ship out with 9 TBM/TBF Avengers and 24 F6F-3/5 Hellcats, for a total of 33 aircraft.

They were good at their job.

VF-31 would end up with the highest kill ratio per pilot of any squadron in the US Navy, credited with 165.6 Japanese airplanes destroyed in aerial combat.

For a much deeper dive into her war record, please refer to the extensive 120-page War History completed in late 1945 and available in the National Archives.

We’ll get into the high points below.

Shipping out for the Pacific, on 15 January 1944, she joined Task Force 58 and got into the fight for real.

Hitting Truk, the Marshalls, raids on the Palaus, Yap, Ulithi, and Woleai; the Hollandia landings, the famous “Marianas Turkey Shoot,” the liberation of the Philippines, raiding Formosa, Indochina, Hong Kong, Kyushu, and Okinawa, Cabot and her airwing were hard at work.

Just look at this fighting chart chronicling her actions off Formosa 13-18 October 1944.

Divine Wind

The class would take quite a beating from Japanese aircraft. Sister USS Princeton (CV/CVL-23) was destroyed following a bomb hit during the Battle of Leyte Gulf that sparked fires that got out of hand. Likewise, both sisters USS Belleau Wood (CV/CVL-24) and USS Independence (CV/CVL-22) endured significant damage but pulled through.

Cabot had her own turn in the barrel on 25 November 1944, two days after Thanksgiving.

As detailed by DANFS

Cabot had fought off several kamikazes when one, already flaming from hits, crashed the flight deck on the port side, destroying the still-firing 20-millimeter gun platform, disabling the 40-millimeter mounts and a gun director. Another of Cabot’s victims crashed close aboard and showered the port side with fragments and burning debris. Cabot lost 62 men killed and wounded, but careful training had produced a crew that handled damage control smoothly and coolly. While she continued to maintain her station in formation and operate effectively, temporary repairs were made.

From her war history:

Back in the fight

Patched up, Cabot returned to action on 11 December 1944, steaming with the force in support of the Luzon operations.

Ernie Pyle shipped out on Cabot for three weeks and filed reports from her decks on the push to Tokyo.

The only aircraft carrier he ever visited; Pyle publicized the nickname of the “Iron Woman.”

One of his reports from Cabot:

In the Western Pacific–An aircraft carrier is a noble thing. It lacks almost everything that seems to denote nobility, yet deep nobility is there….It doesn’t cut through the water like a destroyer. It just plows…

Yet a carrier is a ferocious thing, and out of its heritage of action has grown nobility. I believe that today every navy in the world has its No. 1 priority, the destruction of enemy carriers.

That’s a precarious honor, but it’s a proud one.

My Carrier is a proud one. She’s small, and you have never heard of her unless you have a son or husband on her, but still she’s proud, and deservedly so.

She has been at sea, without returning home, longer than any other carrier in the Pacific, with one exception. She left home in November of 1943.

She is a little thing, yet her planes have shot down 228 of the enemy out of the sky in air battles, and her guns have knocked down five Japanese planes in defending herself.

She is too proud to keep track of the little ships she destroys, but she has sent to the bottom 29 big Japanese ships.

She has weathered five typhoons. Her men have not set foot on any soil bigger than a farm-sized uninhabited atoll for a solid year.

They have not seen a woman for nearly ten months. In a year and a quarter out of America, she has steamed a total of 149,000 miles!

Four different air squadrons have used her as their flying field, flown their allotted missions, and returned to America. But the ship’s crew stays on– and on and on.

She is known in the fleet as “The Iron Woman”, because she has fought in every battle in the Pacific in the years 1944 and 1945.

Her battle record sounds like a train caller on the Lackawanna railroad. Listen— Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Truk, Palau, Hollandia, Saipan, Chichi Jima, Mindanao, Luzon, Formosa, Nansei Shoto, Hong Kong, Iwo Jima, Tokyo…and many others.

She has known disaster. Her fliers who have perished cannot be counted on both hands..She has been hit twice by Kamikaze bombs. She has had mass burial at sea..with dry-eyed crew sewing forty-millimeter shells to the corpses of their friends as weights to take them to the bottom of the sea.

Yet she has never even returned to Pearl Harbor to patch her wounds. She slaps on some patches on the run and is ready for the next battle.

My Carrier, even though classed as “light”, is still a very large ship. More than 1,000 men dwell upon her. She is more than 700 feet long…

She has been out so long that her men put their ship above their captain. They have seen captains come and go, but they and the ship stay on forever.

They aren’t romantic about their long stay out here. They hate it, and their gripes are long and loud. They yearn pathetically to go home. But down beneath, they are proud— proud of their ship and proud of themselves.

And you would be too.

Pyle left Cabot at the end of February 1945 and just six weeks later was killed on Ie Shima with the Marines when a bullet from a Japanese machine gun hit him in the left temple below the rim of his helmet.

Cabot would remain on the line until April 1945 when she was sent to Mare Island for a much-needed overhaul.

But before she left, her air group was able to get in some licks on the ill-fated Japanese super battleship Yamato.

Sailing back to the front lines, her last combat missions were flown against Japanese-occupied Wake Island on 1 August while en route to Eniwetok.

She then joined Task Group 38.3 to support the landings of occupation troops in the Yellow Sea area in September and October.

Embarking homeward-bound men at Guam, Cabot arrived at San Diego on 9 November, then sailed for the east coast.

Cabot earned a Presidential Unit Citation and nine battle stars for service during WWII.

Her end of the war tally sheet, via her War History.

Cabot was placed out of commission in reserve at Philadelphia, Pa., on 11 February 1947.

Korean War Service

Recommissioned on 27 October 1948 after spending just 20 months in mothballs, Cabot was assigned to the nascent Naval Air Reserve training program. Operating first out of Pensacola, then NAS Quonset Point, she would embark NAR squadrons on summer cruises to the Caribbean and make herself available to the training command for carrier deck quals.

It was around this time that Cabot was given a series of quiet upgrades and strengthened flight deck supports that made her both suitable for helicopters and for the weight of larger aircraft such as the F8F Bearcat. The electronics fit was also updated.

One of the young budding Naval Aviators she would qual would be the first man on the moon. Before transitioning to the F-9F Panther jet which he would fly with VF-51 for 78 combat missions over Korea, Neil Armstrong, flying an F8F Bearcat, would make his first six carrier traps on Cabot in March 1950. By August, he had aced his carrier quals.

Cabot even made an operational deployment of sorts, embarking COMCARDIV 14 in January 1952, loading a squadron of short-lived AF-2S/AF-2W Grumman Guardians from the “Duty Cats” of VS-24, adding a det of HUP-1 helicopters from the “Fleet Angels” of HU-2 for liaison work and plane guard roles, then setting out for a Med cruise. 

She returned stateside on 26 March 1952 and went back into the training pipeline for a few more years. 

Cabot was again placed out of commission, in reserve, on 21 January 1955, and was later reclassified to an auxiliary aircraft transport (AVT-3) while mothballed.

Her career in the U.S. Navy had concluded.

A new flag

The Navy had previously transferred two of the remaining eight Indys to France in the 1950s– USS Langley (CVL-27) and USS Belleau Wood (CVL-24), which became La Fayette and Bois Belleau, respectively.

Meanwhile, the Spanish Navy had been chasing the dream of an aircraft carrier going back to their seaplane tender and balloon carrier, Deadalo which was active from 1921 through 1934, even getting in some carrier air raids during the Rif War.

With the general post-WWII rapprochement between a still very fascist Franco and the Western allies, the 1953 Madrid agreements thawed the chill between the U.S. and the country, opening it to military aid in return for basing.

Soon, the country would receive its first modern submarine, the snorkel-equipped USS Kraken (SS-370) (taken in service as Almirante García de los Reyes, E-1), later joined by three Guppy’d Balao-class smoke boats. Five Lepanto-class destroyers– WWII Fletcher-class tin cans– starting with USS Capps (DD-550) in 1957, were transferred. These were soon joined by five more FRAM I Gearing class destroyers, starting with USS Eugene A. Greene (DD/DDR-711) in 1972, as the Churruca class. By this time, the Spanish were also getting five new-made Baleares-class frigates, variants of the Knox class destroyer escort/fast frigates updated with Standard SAM suites.

In many ways, the Spanish fleet by the late 1960s, was very American.

Looking for a helicopter carrier/amphibious assault ship and being rebuffed when they wanted the converted escort carrier USS Thetis Bay (LPH-6), and after taking a look at the laid-up USS San Jacinto (CVL-30) and passing, the Spanish went with Cabot as she had embarked and supported helicopters in the 1950s and had a better sensor and radio fit than just about any other mothballed flattop on the menu.

Cabot was loaned to the Spanish Navy on 30 August 1967, which renamed her Dédalo (R.01). She was then stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on 1 August 1972, and sold to the Spaniards.

In Spanish operations, she would embark 16-24 helicopters in 4-packs starting with H-13 Sioux, H-19 Chickasaws, and Agusta-Bell 204s, then evolving to SH-3 Sea Kings, torpedo-carrying Hughes 500ASW variants, Agusta-Bell AB.212s, and AH-1 Cobras.

By 1972, Spain bought eight British-built Harriers. Designated VA.1 Matadors in Spanish service, they were essentially modified variants of the USMC AV8A/B series and were classified as AV-8S/TAV-8S models.

By 1976, the jump jets were active on Dedalo, providing both air defense and strike capabilities for the Spanish fleet, ultimately buying 13 of the type.

Check out this amazing footage of Dedalo operating with her Matadors off the Canary Islands in 1978, “Defensa de las Canarias” which simulated the repulsion of a Soviet amphibious assault on the chain.

However, with Spain’s WWII-era fleet beginning to show its age in the early 1980s, a refresh was soon underway that saw the Guppy boats traded in for a quartet of new French Agosta-class submarines, the Fletchers and Gearings replaced by a half dozen Santa Maria-class frigates (a Spanish version of the Oliver Hazard Perry-class), and a plan to replace Dedalo.

The planned Almirante Carrero Blanco, built to a modified U.S. Navy Sea Control Ship study, entered service in 1988 as the 16,700-ton Príncipe de Asturias. Equipped with a 12-degree ski jump and powered by GE LM2500 gas turbines that could push the carrier along at 26 knots, the new Spanish carrier would embark and launch the larger and more advanced AV-8B Harrier II, which was produced locally at CASA’s facility in Seville, Spain as the EAV-8B Matador.

The old Dedalo, unneeded, was headed to the breakers, and her old AV-8As were soon resold to Thailand for use with that country’s building HTMS Chakri Naruebet, which was based on the design of Príncipe de Asturias and constructed in Spain.

On 12 July 1989, Dédalo was decommissioned, capping a 46-year career.

A brief reprise

Rushing in to save the day was a group of WWII U.S. Navy vets and their supporters. At the time that Cabot was retired, she was by far the only member of her class still around. In addition to her nine battle stars and Presidential Unit Citation for WWII, there was also her Korean War service, her connections to Neil Armstrong and Ernie Pyle, and her Cold War journey that made her worthy of preservation.

Ultimately, she was brought to New Orleans triumphantly in August 1989 when she still looked amazing– having only left Spanish naval service the month prior. Within months, she was designated a National Historic Landmark by the National Park Service.

Then, sadly, the successive efforts to preserve her all tanked for one reason or another, typically money-related (or lack thereof) and she sat along one dock or another in the Crescent City for eight years, suffering marine collisions, looting, and neglect.

Being a warship nerd in my 20s at the time, I snuck through a series of fences to get a snapshot of her tied up on a foggy morning near the Mandeville docks.

By 1997, with her time all but gone, she was towed to Texas, where she would soon be involved in a confusing series of lawsuits and seizures by the U.S. Marshalls for debts owed. Slowly scrapped there over the next several years, she disappeared by August 2001.

As summed up by WWII After WII, who covers her tragedy in detail:

The USS Cabot fiasco was a sad, but in some ways foretelling, end to the boom of WWII warship museums in the United States. From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, these seemed to proliferate – however, with a few exceptions (USS Intrepid in NYC being particularly successful) they were extremely difficult to keep financially sound after opening. To display a P-51 Mustang fighter or M4 Sherman tank ashore doesn’t take a whole lot beyond the purchase cost, but afloat decommissioned ships are “financial zombies” in that even when dead, they require constant money just to stay above the waterline, let alone be profitable, and this only increases as the ship continues to age – the USS Texas saga being a good example. Often visitor admission fees just aren’t enough.

Anger was directed at the original Foundation, who were portrayed in veteran’s circles as idiots, grifters, or both. This is not fair as the original intentions were good; and in fact, much of the early fundraising was done by veterans at a VFW post in Louisiana on their own time. It might be better to say that they had no idea what they were getting into and quickly found themselves in way over their head.

Epilogue

Several echoes of Cabot endure.

There is, of course, the USS Cabot Association.

The National Museum of the Pacific War has a plaque honoring her as well as CAG 29 and 31.

The National Archives has her plans, diaries, and logs on file.

At the National Naval Aviation Museum, their center floor display includes a replica of the wooden flight deck and island superstructure of Cabot. Assisted by his son, the same sailor who painted the original scoreboard highlighting the combat record of the ship and its embarked air groups duplicated his work for the museum.

Meanwhile, the Spanish Navy’s AH-1G Cobras that flew from Dedalo proved a time capsule for the U.S. Army and are now gems in the collection of the Army Aviation Museum in Alabama, as most of their type in U.S. service were either scrapped or converted to updated models.

A few years ago, scale model maker Amo released an AV-8S Matador kit (AMO-8505) that features box art by Valery Petelin that includes Cabot/Dedalo cruising below.

Of Cabot’s sisters, besides USS Princeton (CV/CVL-23) which was lost in 1944, USS Independence was extensively damaged in the Crossroads tests and then, filled with radioactive material, was scuttled off the coast of California in deep water in 1951.

Langly/ La Fayette and Belleau Wood/Bois Belleau, after operating with the French off Indochina and Algeria, were returned to the Navy in the 1960s and scrapped, replaced in French service by the new domestically built Clemenceau-class carriers which were twice as large and were built from the keel up to operate jets.

USS Bataan (CVL-29), who added seven Korean War battle stars to the six she earned in WWII, was scrapped in 1961.

USS Cowpens (CVL-25), laid up after the war, was reclassified as an auxiliary aircraft transport (AVT-1) while in mothballs and was scrapped in 1960.

USS Monterey (CVL-26), on which the future president Gerald Ford served aboard in WWII, served as a training carrier (AVT-2) during the Korean War then was decommissioned in 1956 and scrapped in early 1971.

USS San Jacinto (CVL-30) would be the last in U.S. Navy possession, sold to the breakers in December 1971 after sitting on red lead row for 24 long and unkind years.

The Indys earned a total of 81 WWII battle stars, and it is a crying shame that none remain.

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Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

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