USS Yorktown

Feel the deck beneath your feet. It is steel and wood, warm in the sun, scarred by decades of boots and tyres and the hooks of landing aircraft. A salt wind comes off Charleston Harbor and pulls at your clothes. Somewhere below, a hatch clangs shut, and the sound travels through the whole ship like a dull bell. You are standing on an aircraft carrier that went to war, and the ship still feels like a working machine.

This is the USS Yorktown, an Essex-class carrier. The Essex class was the backbone of the American carrier fleet in the Pacific during the Second World War. These ships were built fast and built in large numbers, because the war demanded it. Yorktown was constructed at Newport News, in Virginia, and she joined the fleet in 1943. Today she rests at Patriots Point, in Mount Pleasant, across the harbor from Charleston's old church steeples.

Here is the first surprise. This ship was not supposed to be called Yorktown at all. When work began, she carried a different name — Bon Homme Richard, after the ship of the Revolutionary War captain John Paul Jones. Then, in June 1942, an earlier carrier named Yorktown was lost at the Battle of Midway. The Navy wanted that name back at sea. So this new hull took it, and carried it into the war that had claimed her namesake.

She soon earned a nickname — the Fighting Lady. The name became famous through a wartime documentary film of that title, shot largely aboard this ship. The film followed the crew and the pilots through combat in the Pacific, and it won an Academy Award. For many Americans at home, it was the first time they saw what carrier war looked like... the launches, the waiting, and the empty spaces when planes did not return.

Yorktown fought across the Pacific in the long campaign toward Japan. Her aircraft took part in major actions, including the Battle of the Philippine Sea and the fighting around Okinawa. For her service in the Second World War, she received eleven battle stars, a mark of how often she was in the thick of it. Think about that as you walk the deck. Every square metre here was once crowded with aircraft, fuel lines, ammunition carts and young sailors moving at a run.

Now look at the shape of the flight deck. If you follow its line, you may notice that it does not run straight from bow to stern. Part of it angles off to one side. That angled deck was not there in 1943. It was added in a modernisation during the 1950s, when the jet age arrived. Faster, heavier jets needed a safer way to land, and the angled deck let a pilot who missed the arresting wires simply power up and fly off again.

That modernisation means the ship you see is a layered thing. It is a Second World War carrier wearing Cold War clothes. In later years, Yorktown shifted to anti-submarine work, hunting for submarines rather than launching strike fighters. She also served during the Vietnam War. So the decks and compartments around you hold the marks of three different eras of naval history, sometimes side by side in the same passageway.

Here is the second surprise, and it reaches far beyond the sea. In December 1968, Yorktown was the recovery ship for Apollo 8. That was the first crewed mission to travel to the Moon and orbit it. When the capsule splashed down in the Pacific, it was this ship that brought the three astronauts home. A vessel built to fight a world war ended up as the welcoming party for people who had just seen the far side of the Moon.

The ship also has a small place in film history beyond her own documentary. Around the time of the Apollo mission, she was used in the making of the war film Tora! Tora! Tora!, about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Film crews used her deck to stand in for carriers in the story. It is a strange twist — a ship that fought Japan later played a role in retelling the war's opening day on screen.

Yorktown was decommissioned in 1970. A few years later, in the mid-1970s, she was towed to Charleston to begin a new life as a museum ship. She has stayed here ever since, and she is now a National Historic Landmark. Nearby at Patriots Point, you can also visit the destroyer USS Laffey, a much smaller warship that survived a fierce air attack off Okinawa. Seeing the two together gives a sense of scale.

And scale is something you feel most when you go inside. Below the flight deck is the hangar deck, a long, high space where aircraft were stored, fuelled and repaired. Today it holds exhibits and restored aircraft. Further in, the ship becomes a maze of narrow ladders, steep steps and doorways with raised edges you must step over. Watch your head and your shins. The crew lived in these tight spaces, often thousands of people at a time.

Take a moment in the mess areas and sleeping quarters if they are open on your route. The bunks are stacked close, with very little room between them. There is no privacy here, and almost no quiet. Imagine the heat of the Pacific, the smell of fuel and food and machine oil, and the constant noise of engines and aircraft. For many of the sailors, this ship was not a symbol. It was simply home, and a crowded one.

Before you leave, walk back up into the open air and find a spot near the edge of the flight deck. Look out across the water toward the Ravenel Bridge, with its pale cables rising over the harbor. Watch the light move on the waves, and listen to the gulls and the wind in the rigging. The guns are silent now. The aircraft will not fly again. But as you step off the deck and onto the pier, notice how small the ship's shadow makes you feel... and how quiet the harbor is, now that the Fighting Lady is at rest.