For this post, I thought I would share some of the history that I learned onboard Intrepid, particularly relating to its sinister nickname in WWII, the Ghost Ship. Intrepid first saw combat in 1943, with one of those early battles being the raid on Turk. Turk was the Japanese equivalent to Pearl Harbor, a forward operating naval and air base that allowed the Japanese to seriously enhance the reach of their navy. Intrepid arrived with the rest of Task Force 58 to attack the Turk Lagoon, launching small bomber planes to completely destroy the base (although the US never landed on the island, just insuring it was no longer a viable threat). After completing those operations, the ship was secured for general quarters around midnight, meaning most men were relieved of their duties and released to go sleep. Just as this happened, a Japanese torpedo bomber spotted the ship and fired a torpedo right at it. Spotting the plane too late to shoot it down, Intrepid took evasive maneuvers. The ship was in a full rudder left turn when the torpedo struck the aft of the ship, completely jamming the rudder. The ship was so severely damaged that it completed too full rotations (almost crashing into the sister ship Essex just a few miles next to it), before they finally regained control of the ship by running two propellers in reverse. The ship would limp back to Pearl Harbor, at one point requiring a sail in the then open forecastle to keep the ship from drifting too far. This was just one of the 6 major attacks Intrepid would suffer. The next would be during the Battle of Leyte Gulf (the biggest battle in naval history) when the Intrepid would suffer 3 Kamikaze attacks. The first (which also happened to be the first time a Kamikaze hit a “capital” ship) hit gun tub 10. Gun tub 10 was one of the very few stations on Intrepid operated by black sailors during the war. The crew was tied into the guns (as all crews were at the time) when the Kamikaze came barreling towards them. This Gun Tub was equipped with 20mm guns, and while the crew was able to knock off one of the wings, this was not enough to stop the plane from hitting the tub. The ensuing fire would kill 10 soldiers. Intrepid, however, remained operational, and just under a month later, a Japanese airstrike would land 2 consecutive Kamikaze attacks on Intrepid. The first hit the flight deck and caused a fire in the hangar deck, and large amounts of damage. Repair crews rushed in to extinguish the flames. About 8 minutes later the second Kamikaze attacked almost the exact same spot, killing 69 men who had rushed in to fight the damages from the first fire. The ship had to return to San Francisco for repairs. After these repairs the ship would be hit by two more Kamikaze attacks. One blew up off the side of the ship and poured flaming gasoline all over the flight deck (killing no men). The second landed a direct hit on the flight deck killing 8 men. Miraculously, repair crews were able to extinguish the fires and launch planes again in under 3 hours. These battle scars earned the Intrepid many nicknames. In the US, it was called the Fighting I, in the Japanese Empire, the ghost ship.