Old Warship Fights One More Battle, This One for Her Survival

The Hornet, an aircraft carrier that helped the United States win World War II, is due for a rendezvous with the scrap heap this month, but volunteers are fighting to save her and turn her into a museum about life and death between sky and water.

The Hornet is one of only four ships remaining among the 24 Essex-class carriers that served the nation during the war. She has been out of service since 1970, when a later generation of carriers, built for jets, made her obsolete.

The ship was scheduled to be scrapped earlier this year, but Capt. Jim Dodge, commander of the Alameda Naval Air Station, won a reprieve in May that allowed him to bring her here from a San Francisco shipyard for a few months of display.

The Hornet's stay of execution ends on Oct. 23. But a group that calls itself the Aircraft Carrier Hornet Foundation has recruited about 50 members and is hoping that enthusiasm generated by the Fleet Week festivities at the base this weekend will help keep her in one piece.

"We want to see the Hornet turned into the premier air, sea and space museum on the West Coast," said the foundation's project coordinator, Bob Rogers.

The Hornet, whose planes and guns destroyed 1,410 Japanese planes and sent more than 1.2 million tons of enemy shipping to the bottom, rests at Pier 2, once home to an even more famous namesake.

The first Hornet set sail from the pier in March 1942, carrying 16 B-25 Mitchell bombers for Lieut. Col. Jimmy Doolittle's bombing raid on Tokyo.

The Japanese never got over the sting of that attack. They zeroed in on the carrier and destroyed her at the Battle of Santa Cruz on Oct. 26, 1942.

So badly did the Navy want to avenge that loss that it changed the name of a carrier then under construction to the Hornet. The crew was rushed through a shakedown cruise of only 14 days, instead of the usual four to five weeks, and the new carrier went on to earn seven battle stars and a Presidential Unit Citation.

She was also the recovery ship for the spacecraft that traveled to the moon on the Apollo 11 mission.

Only three of the Hornet's Essex-class sister ships have been preserved: the Intrepid, in New York; the Yorktown, in Charleston, S.C., and the Lexington, in Corpus Christi, Tex.

Touring the Hornet here the other day, Master Chief Petty Officer Norma Bishop said she was glad about the volunteers' effort and was amazed at the amount of sprucing-up they had done since the carrier arrived from the shipyard in San Francisco. Before that work, "there were dead sea gulls all over the place," she said.

Mr. Rogers said he too was amazed, at the well-preserved state of the "real working guts of the ship."

"It wouldn't take all that much," he said, "to get it ready to sail again."