Shortly before Christmas of 1940, on board the heavy cruiser Tuscaloosa (CA-37), President Franklin Delano Roosevelt brooded over a missive from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. An appended table showed how U-boats had seriously impeded the flow of supplies from America—the “Arsenal of Democracy”—to Britain. How could the New World help the Old if much of that arsenal’s output lay at the bottom of the Atlantic?
Auto-gyros (small airplanes with low landing speeds), Roosevelt reasoned, could operate from partial flight decks on a vessel moving at less than 15 knots. Such an expedient might be the answer. On 7 January 1941, the President told Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Harold R. Stark to discard any plans for ship-to-carrier conversions that “would take more than about three months.” Roosevelt believed that needed carriers could be “thrown together quickly by some foreman . . . not worried about stability.”
Given the President’s passionate personal interest, the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (OpNav) and the Bureau of Ships (BuShips) narrowed the immediately available vessels to two single-screw C-3 freighters. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox directed BuShips on 10 January 1941 to acquire one and make the conversion the “highest priority.” Admiral Stark signed the conversion order inside of two weeks, assured by the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company that it could transform the ship within the presidential mandate. BuShips soon began work, and within a month’s time conversion plans were drawn.
The freighter chosen was the Mormacmail. Laid down under a U.S. Maritime Commission contract on 7 July 1939 by the Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Company of Chester, Pennsylvania, she was launched on 11 January 1940. Part of the Moore-McCormack shipping line, she had carried cargo and livestock in four voyages between South America and the United States before the Maritime Commission acquired her on 6 March 1941.
A representative of the Fifth Naval District accepted the Mormacmail on 18 March 1941 at Newport News. Large painted U.S. flags, proclamations of neutrality, remained on each side of her hull. During the ensuing weeks, the process of fashioning plowshare into sword moved at a breakneck pace, as Newport News workmen, leaving the amidships superstructure largely intact, fabricated a 360-foot by 70-foot flight deck of Douglas fir planked over a framework of girders.
Designated an aircraft escort vessel (AVG-1) on 21 March 1941, the Mormacmail was renamed the Long Island (for the body of water, not the land mass) on 31 March. Her crew began forming at the Receiving Station at Norfolk, while Naval Air Station, Norfolk, served as the base for the aviation unit tapped to operate from her deck—Scouting Squadron (VS) 201. Planners originally envisioned an air group consisting of ten Curtiss SOCs (wheeled versions of the planes that had equipped battleship observation squadrons) and six Curtiss SBC-3s (two-seat biplane scout-bombers that had equipped carrier units). In time, while the complement of aircraft continued to include SOCs, the SBCs were replaced with Brewster F2A-2s. The wings of neither the SBC nor the F2A could be folded.
No “island” took shape above the flight deck. Workmen built a pilothouse beneath its forward end, and a hydraulic catapult—a Type “H” Mk. 2 earmarked for future use in Lexington-class carriers—was installed diagonally to launch aircraft at a 30-degree angle to port. The only place to install an elevator was aft, but the cross-deck pendants of the arresting gear stretched across the elevator when it was in the “up” position, requiring the pendants to be relocated so the elevator could move between the hangar deck and the flight deck.
For a battery, the ship mounted a 5-inch/51-caliber gun on the fantail and a pair of 3-inch/50-caliber antiaircraft guns forward at the forecastle break, one to port and one to starboard. A pair of .50-caliber Browning machine guns was fitted into a small gallery on the port side of the flight deck, aft, and one was placed on each side of the forward end.
The Long Island was commissioned in a short ceremony at the Norfolk Navy Yard on 2 June 1941, five days ahead of schedule, Commander Donald B. Duncan in command. In the ensuing weeks, workmen fitted out the ship. Among the installations: crew-pleasing standee bunks with comfortable cotton felt mattresses and double mattress covers. Each Sailor had his own locker—no ditty boxes or bags on the Long Island. Cafeteria-style messing meant getting rid of china dinnerware, aluminum platters, and tureens, replaced by a generous supply of six-compartment metal trays.
The Long Island began flight operations on 1 July. Before the end of the year she also participated in a major amphibious exercise, performed for Roosevelt off Nova Scotia; conducted one neutrality patrol almost to the Cape Verde Islands; and saw her flight deck lengthened.
Diesel engines provided her propulsion. While adequate for merchant service, they were not optimum for an aircraft carrier, where frequent changes of speed were the norm. Lieutenant Hugh W. Lindsay, the Long Island’s chief engineer, was known to a Naval Academy classmate as one whose “Philippics against fate and the higher-ups” could make the “puny pessimisms of Schopenhauer seem as gay and buoyant as a flute solo.” The temperamental Busch-Sulzers power plants clearly pushed him to the limit. As a wardroom messmate recalled: “Sweat streaming down his face,” Lindsay would “come out of the engine room after an operation and declare that the engines . . . would never last another one.”
Yet last they did. Reclassified as an auxiliary aircraft carrier, ACV-1, on 20 August 1942—the same day she ferried the first Marine Corps planes to Guadalcanal (31 Grumman F4F-4 Wildcats and Douglas SBD-3 Dauntlesses)—and then as CVE-1 (an escort carrier) on 30 July 1943, the Long Island proved the feasibility of a concept. She trained pilots and ferried planes to advance bases all across the Pacific. After carrying troops home in Operation Magic Carpet at war’s end, the Long Island was decommissioned at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard on 26 March 1946; her name was stricken on 12 April. After several changes in ownership, she ended her active days as a floating dormitory. Ultimately she was reduced to scrap at Ghent, Belgium, in 1977.
The operations the Long Island had pioneered led to the deployment of scores of CVEs in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Mediterranean theaters; they escorted convoys, proved the scourge of Axis submarines, supported amphibious landings, and in emergencies, proved plucky adversaries.
Captain Claud A. Jones, in BuShips, had scrawled on a routing sheet in September 1941 that the Long Island was “a good vessel for what she was built to do but no good when forced out of her class.” Jones’ assessment in hindsight seems too harsh: Realistically, no one expected the Long Island to be anything other than an experiment.
A more accurate perspective, perhaps, comes from one of her first aviators: “Captain Duncan gathered the officers together in the mess at the start of our operations,” then-Lieutenant Marcus W. Williamson recalled, “and stated ‘We have been chosen by the Navy to make this ship work. And we will.’ There was no thought of failure.”