page_title: Casablanca-class escort carrier
section_title: Service
hierarchical_section_title: Casablanca-class escort carrier / Service
caption_attribution_description: The U.S. Navy escort carrier USS Gambier Bay (CVE-73) is straddled by fire from Japanese surface ships during the Battle off Samar.
context_page_description: The Casablanca-class escort carrier were a series of escort carriers constructed for the United States Navy during World War II. They were the most numerous class of aircraft carriers ever built. Fifty were laid down, launched and commissioned within the space of less than two years – 3 November 1942 through to 8 July 1944. These were nearly one third of the 151 carriers built in the United States during the war. Despite their numbers, and the preservation of more famous and larger carriers as museums, none of these modest ships survive today. Five were lost to enemy action during World War II and the remainder were scrapped.
  Casablanca was the first class to be designed from keel up as an escort carrier. It had a larger and more useful hangar deck than previous conversions. It also had a larger flight deck than the Bogue class. Unlike larger carriers which had extensive armor, protection was limited to splinter plating. Their small size made them useful for transporting assembled aircraft of various sizes, but fighters were limited to smaller and lighter aircraft such as the Grumman F4F Wildcat.
context_section_description: Although designated as convoy escort carriers, the Casablanca class was far more frequently used in large fleet amphibious operations, where speed was less important and their small airgroups could combine to provide the effectiveness of a much larger ship.  Their finest hour came in the Battle off Samar, when Taffy 3, a task unit composed of six of these ships and their screen of three destroyers and four destroyer escorts gave battle against the Japanese main force. Their desperate defense not only preserved most of their own ships, but succeeded in turning back the massive force with only aircraft machine guns, torpedoes, depth charges, high-explosive bombs, and their own 5"/38 caliber guns. Tasked with ground support and antisubmarine patrols, they lacked the torpedoes and armor-piercing bombs to tackle a surface fleet alone. Taffy 3 was to be protected by Admiral Halsey's Third Fleet with carriers and battleships. But the Third Fleet had left the scene to pursue a decoy carrier fleet, inadvertently leaving Taffy 3 the only force between the massive Japanese fleet and undefended landing forces at Leyte Gulf. The lightly armed vessels each had only one 5-inch/38 cal gun mounted aft, yet two of their number, St. Lo (ex-Midway) and Kalinin Bay, became the only US aircraft carriers to ever record a hit on an enemy warship by its own guns. St. Lo hit a Japanese destroyer with a single round and Kalinin Bay damaged a Myōkō-class cruiser with two hits.  Recent evidence suggests that six 5-inch shells fired from USS White Plains struck the cruiser Chōkai. One of these rounds was reported to have impacted amidships on the starboard side, causing a large secondary explosion (probably from one of Chōkai's own torpedoes) that proved fatal to the heavy cruiser.  The White Plains gun crew claimed to have put all six 5-inch rounds into Chōkai from a range of 11,700 yards (10,700 m), near the maximum effective range for the 5-inch/38 gun. However, this claim is not supported by Japanese sources, which report this damage as resulting from an air attack.
  Another noteworthy achievement of the Casablanca class was when USS Guadalcanal, under command of Captain Daniel V. Gallery, participated in the first capture-at-sea of a foreign warship by the US Navy since the War of 1812 when a crew of volunteers from USS Pillsbury boarded German submarine U-505 after Gallery's Guadalcanal-centered hunter-killer group forced it to the surface with depth charges. Guadalcanal also earned the distinction of being the only aircraft carrier in history to conduct flight operations with a captured enemy vessel in tow.
caption: USS Gambier Bay under fire at Samar, 1944
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