The U.S.S. Rangers

Yup, that's a plural.  As I explained in the post, "Carrier Planes," the Navy assigns a name to a particular class of ship, and then they may reuse that name over and over as one is decommissioned and a newer, more modern version comes off the line.

The sixth U.S.S. Ranger (U.S.S. = United States Ship) (H.M.S. = Her Majesty's Ship), CV-4, was commissioned in 1934, the very first air craft carrier to ever be built from the keel up, as opposed to taking an existing ship and making a "flattop" out of it.  Her design was commissioned in 1922, the keel was laid in 1931 at the Norfolk Navy Yard by Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, and seventeen months later, at a cost of just over $2 million, she was floated and loaded with aircraft.

She was named after the American colonial fighting men, the Rangers, "who knew the habits of the enemy and could serve effectively as scouts or combatants behind enemy lines."

Her first plane was an SBU-1 Bi-plane fighter.  (A BI-PLANE?!?)  She also carried a Grumman J2F Duck Bi-seaplane.  America focused on larger carriers; Japan built smaller, faster carriers.  Her shake-down cruise took her down the east coast to South America, Rio, Buenes Aires, Montevideo and back to Norfolk for a tune-up.  Then she steamed through the Panama Canal to San Diego which became her first home port.  For the next four years she patrolled from Alaska to Peru to Hawaii and back.  In January, 1939 she headed for Guantanamo Bay and proceeded to patrol our East coast from Bermuda to Newfoundland.

On December 7, 1941, when Pearl Harbor was attacked, the Ranger was headed to Norfolk (arriving the next day).  By March, 1942 she received her first top-secret radar equipment and brand new Grumman Wildcat fighters and Curtiss P-40 Warhawk pursuit fighters.  Within a month she was off of the Gold Coast of Africa.  There, the very first Army carrier planes were flying off of her decks.


After participating very successfully in a battle in the Casablanca area, Ranger CV-4 operated mostly in a support capacity and survived the entirety of World War II.  She was decommissioned in October of 1946 and sold for scrap.

CV-61, her replacement, was commissioned in 1957, operated mostly in the Pacific, earning 13 battle stars for combat during the Viet Nam War, but also served in the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf.  She appeared in several movies:  Top Gun, Star Trek IV The Final Countdown, and Flight of the Intruder.  She also appeared in the television shows, Baa Baa Black Sheep and The Six Million Dollar Man.  (How fun is THAT?) 

CV-61 was decommissioned in 1993 and is currently in storage at Bremerton, Washington.  A group, the Ranger Foundation, made a proposal to Congress to turn her into a museum, but the proposal was declined, so she is to be scrapped in September, 2014 unless something else is done.  So sad.