An escort or “jeep” carrier acquisition program was first recommended to the U.S. Navy by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940. The Navy initially typed the projected ships as APV (Special Escort Ship) and then, on 2 June 1941, as AVG (Aircraft Tender, General Purpose). The first 54 ships, 38 of which were transferred to the United Kingdom under the Lend-Lease program, employed standard Maritime Commission merchant ship hulls and were conceived as being equally useful as aircraft transports and convoy escorts. At a meeting with Navy leaders on 8 August 1942, Roosevelt requested an additional 50 escort carriers be built exclusively for U.S. Navy use to a design specifically intended for the purpose under the management of the Maritime Commission at a yard operated by the industrialist Henry J. Kaiser. The first ship of the class was originally intended to be delivered only eight months later, with follow-on ships delivered at the rate of eight per month.
All the Navy’s jeep carriers had their type classification changed to CVE (Escort Carrier) on 15 July 1943 in recognition that the carriers were primarily combatants and not naval auxiliaries. Designed by Gibbs & Cox and all constructed at Kaiser’s Vancouver, Washington, shipyard, the first, CVE-55, was originally to have been named Ameer and later Abzon Bay; she was given the name Casabbnca on 3 April 1943. Laid down on 3 November 1942, the escort carrier was launched on 5 April 1943 and commissioned on 8 July of that year, at that time a prodigious feat of industrial management and productivity. The final ship of the class, the Munda (CVE-104, ex-Tonowek Bay) showed the results of the steady growth in the yard’s productivity. Laid down on 29 March 1944, she was launched on 8 June and commissioned just one month later.
The CVE-55 design had both significant improvements over the previous C-3 merchant cargo ship adaptations and a few disadvantages. The most important feature was an improvement in sustained speed of 2 knots to a nominal 20.3 knots. That small speed advantage was of critical help in the southern Pacific region, where prevailing winds were lower than in the Atlantic: Torpedo-armed TBF/TBM Avenger aircraft needed 30 knots over the deck to be launched safely. Another important advantage was the twin-screw propulsion plant, which gave the ships an improved tactical diameter of only 450 yards at 15 knots. The longer CVE-55 flight deck allowed more aircraft to be parked forward of the landing barrier and gave an extra 6 feet of landing run at its after end. The normal combat air group of a dozen Avenger torpedo bombers and 16 Wildcat fighters could be parked between the two centerline elevators, each of which had a capacity of 14,000 pounds. In the aircraft ferry role, the ships could carry up to 93 F6F Hellcat, 89 F4U Corsair, 54 P-38 Lightning, 68 P-39 Airacobra fighters, or 60 Avengers. The hangar deck, while smaller than that of the merchant-hull CVEs, was flat, while the earlier ships’ hangar decks had both sheer and camber and frequently required the use of winches to move aircraft about.
Disadvantages of the mass-produced Kaiser ships were the lack of space for underwater protection in their narrower hulls abreast the magazines and fuel tankage, and a roughly one-third reduction in fuel oil capacity, along with a similar reduction in the amount of aviation fuel they could carry. Still, the Casablanca and her sisters enjoyed a range of 10,200 nautical miles at 15 knots and 7,000 nautical miles at 19 knots. Also criticized was the concentration of accommodations forward for the up to 749 personnel on board, the poor arrangements for alongside refueling of other ships, the fitting of a single, lower-capacity Mk HII-1 catapult, poor magazine and bomb stowage access, inadequate propulsion machinery damage-control features, and the lack of steam line cross-connections (although the ships did have two separate combined boiler and engine rooms as compared to the single engineering space in the previous escort carriers).
The Casablanca class had a standard displacement of 9,570 tons and a fullload displacement of up to 10,982 tons. The ships were 512-feet overall (490 feet on the waterline) and had a hull beam of 65 feet 3 inches and a full-load draft of 20 feet 97-4 inches. The flight deck was 474 feet long by 80 feet in useful width. The unusual propulsion plant employed four Babcock & Wilcox 2-drum D-type boilers to provide steam at a modest 285 pounds per square inch and 577° Fahrenheit to two sets of 4,500 indicated-horsepower Nordberg-made Skinner Uniflow 5- cylinder single-expansion reciprocating engines. Electric power was provided by three 250-kilowatt turbogenerators; there were no diesel emergency sets.
The 55 Casablancas saw wide and varied service in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters during the final two years of World War II. Five were lost in combat: the St. Lo (CVE-63) and Gambier Bay (CVE-73) in heroic circumstances to a kamikaze and Japanese gunfire on 25 October 1944, the Liscombe Bay (CVE-56) on 24 November 1944, the Ommaney Bay (CVE-79) on 4 January 1945, and the Bismarck Sea (CVE-95) on 21 February 1945.
Postwar, the ships were rapidly decommissioned. Eleven were quickly disposed of to the Maritime Commission, and all but one of the others had been stricken by the end of the 1950s. Unlike many of the earlier merchant-hulled CVEs, only one of the Casablanca class was adapted for civilian use, the Attu (CVE-102), whose conversion to carry refugees from Europe to Israel was halted before her completion. During the opening years of the Korean War, five of the class were reactivated as aircraft transports: the Corregidor (CVE-58), Tripoli (CVE-64), Sitkoh Bay (CVE-86), Cape Esperance (CVE-88), and Windham Bay (CVE-92); they were again deactivated between 1954 and 1959.
During 1948, experiments conducted with the Commencement Bay-class escort carrier Palau (CVE-122) showed that helicopters held promise as a means to bring Marine Corps troops quickly to a beachhead. By 1952, the Marines had requested the allocation of no fewer than a dozen Casablancas and four of the later, larger Commencement Bay-class escort carriers to the assault helicopter carrier role. A single Casablanca, the Thetis Bay (CVE- 90), was converted to test the concept, initially under the classification CVHA- 1. Recommissioned on 20 July 1956, she was redesignated LHA-6 on 28 May 1959. The converted Thetis Bay was intended to accommodate 20 Sikorsky HRS (H- 19) helicopters, 38 Marine officers and 900 enlisted Marines, and 75 tons of combat cargo. To move the helicopters from the hangar deck to the flight deck and its five air operations “spots,” the flight deck’s after end was cut away, the after elevator lengthened, and the 5-inch gun on the fantail removed; the ship also received new radars and communications facilities. Never considered more than an experimental platform, the Thetis Bay was decommissioned and stricken on 1 March 1964, the last of her class, although her success spawned today’s series of assault carriers.
While they were too small and too slow to operate postwar Navy and Marine Corps fixed-wing combat aircraft, the Casablanca-class carriers provided a remarkably successful and rapidly built force that proved vitally useful in service. They were a testament to the innovation, dedication, and forceful personality of Henry J. Kaiser, for whom the current Military Sealift Command replenishment oiler T-AO-187 is named.