of
VF-80 on
Ticonderoga in June 1944
Ticonderoga remained at Norfolk for almost two months outfitting and embarking
Air Group 80. On 26 June 1944, the carrier shaped a course for the British West Indies. She conducted air operations and drills en route and reached
Port of Spain, Trinidad, on 30 June. For the next 15 days,
Ticonderoga trained intensively to weld her air group and crew into an efficient wartime team. She departed the West Indies on 16 July and headed back to Norfolk where she arrived on 22 July for post-shakedown repairs and alterations. On 30 August, the carrier headed for Panama. She transited the
Panama Canal on 4 September and steamed up the coast to
Naval Base San Diego the following day. On 13 September, the carrier moored at San Diego where she loaded provisions, fuel, aviation gas, and an additional 77 aircraft, as well as the
Marine Corps aviation and defense units that went with them. On 19 September, she steamed for Hawaii where she arrived five days later.
Ticonderoga remained at
Pearl Harbor for almost a month. She and conducted experiments in the underway transfer of aviation
bombs from
cargo ship to aircraft carrier. Following those tests, she conducted air operations – day and night landing and antiaircraft defense drills – until 18 October, when she exited Pearl Harbor and headed for the western Pacific. After a brief stop at
Eniwetok,
Ticonderoga arrived at
Ulithi in the Western Caroline Islands on 29 October. There she embarked
Rear Admiral Arthur W. Radford, Commander,
Carrier Division 6, and joined
Task Force 38 (TF 38) as a unit of Rear Admiral
Frederick C. Sherman's
Task Group 38.3 (TG 38.3).
Ticonderoga then returned to normal operations along the East Coast until 4 November when she departed
Naval Station Mayport, Florida, and headed for Europe. She relieved
Intrepid at
Gibraltar 10 days later and cruised the length of the
Mediterranean during the following eight months. On 2 August 1956,
Ticonderoga returned to Norfolk and entered the shipyard to receive an
angled flight deck and an enclosed hurricane bow as part of the
SCB-125 program. Those modifications were completed by early 1957, and in April she got underway for her new home port – Alameda, California. She reached her destination on 30 May, underwent repairs, and finished out the summer with operations off the California coast. On 16 September, she sailed out of
San Francisco Bay and shaped course for the Far East.
En route, she stopped at Pearl Harbor before continuing west to
Yokosuka Japan, where she arrived on 15 October. For six months,
Ticonderoga cruised the waters from Japan in the north to the Philippines in the south. Upon arriving at Alameda on 25 April 1958, she completed her first deployment to the western Pacific since recommissioning. The aircraft was being rolled from a hangar bay onto an elevator. The aircraft had mounted on it a
B43 nuclear bomb. The pilot, Lieutenant JG Douglas Webster, the A-4E Skyhawk, BuNo
151022, of Attack Squadron
VA-56 "Champions", and the nuclear weapon were all lost. No public mention was made of the incident at the time and it would not come to light until a 1981
United States Department of Defense report revealed that a one-megaton bomb had been lost. Japan then asked for details of the incident.
1966–1967, 1967–1968 deployments Following repairs she steamed out of San Diego on 9 July to begin a normal round of West Coast training operations. Those and similar evolutions continued until 15 October, when
Ticonderoga departed San Diego, bound via Hawaii for the western Pacific. The carrier reached Yokosuka, Japan, on 30 October and remained there until 5 November when she headed south for an overnight stop at
U.S. Naval Base Subic Bay, Subic Bay in the Philippines on 10–11 November. On 13 November,
Ticonderoga arrived in the Gulf of Tonkin and began the first of three combat tours during her 1966–1967 deployment. She launched 11,650 combat sorties, all against enemy targets located in North Vietnam. Again, her primary targets were logistics and communications lines and transportation facilities. For her contribution and that of Air Wing Nineteen to
Operation Rolling Thunder,
Ticonderoga was awarded her second Navy Unit Commendation. She completed her final line period on 27 April 1967 and returned to Yokosuka, from which she departed again on 19 May to return to the United States. Ten days later, the carrier entered San Diego and began a month-long, post-deployment stand-down. At the beginning of July, she shifted to
Bremerton, Washington, where she entered the Puget Sound for two months of repairs. Upon the completion of yard work, she departed Bremerton on 6 September and steamed south to training operations off the coast of southern California. On 28 December 1967,
Ticonderoga sailed for her fourth combat deployment to the waters off the Indochinese coast and arrived on Yankee Station in January 1968.
Ticonderoga was on Yankee Station for the beginning of the 1968 Tet Offensive. Nearly coincidental with the
Tet Offensive, the
siege of Khe Sanh began and , an American spy ship, was seized by the North Koreans and taken to Wonsan harbor. The aircraft carrier was immediately deployed to the coast of North Korea, beginning
Operation Formation Star. Approximately a week later,
Ranger was relieved off Korea by
Ticonderoga and returned to Yankee Station. joined
Ticonderoga and strikes were planned against seven
MiG airfields with approximately 200 MiGS. These strikes were never executed and
Ticonderoga returned to Yankee Station to resume her role in the Tet Offensive. Between January 1968 and July 1968,
Ticonderoga was on the line off the coast of Vietnam for five separate periods totaling 120 days of combat duty. During that time, her air wing flew just over 13,000 combat sorties against North Vietnamese and
Viet Cong forces, most frequently in the continuing attempts to interdict the enemy lines of supply. Between line periods, she regularly returned to Subic Bay and
Naval Air Station Cubi Point for rest and replenishment. She also made port visits at Singapore and Hong Kong. On 9 July, during her fifth line period,
LCDR John B. Nichols claimed
Ticonderogas first MiG kill. The carrier completed that line period and entered Subic Bay for upkeep on 25 July.
Ticonderoga then proceeded for her homeport in Naval Air Station North Island,
Coronado, California arriving on 17 August 1968 after a one-day delay in the fog off San Diego in the San Clemente Channel. Shortly thereafter,
Ticonderoga moved to the
Long Beach Naval Shipyard for repairs and certain conversions to handle the A-7 Corsair attack jet and to prepare for her fifth combat cruise in February 1969.
Final deployments During the first month of 1969,
Ticonderoga made preparations for her fifth consecutive combat deployment to the Southeast Asia area. On 1 February, she cleared San Diego and headed west. After a brief stop at Pearl Harbor a week later, she continued her voyage to Yokosuka where she arrived on the 20th. The carrier departed Yokosuka on 28 February for the coast of Vietnam where she arrived on 4 March. Over the next four months,
Ticonderoga served four periods on the line off Vietnam, interdicting Communist
supply lines and making strikes against their positions. During her second line period, however, her tour of duty off Vietnam came to an abrupt end on 16 April when she was shifted north to the
Sea of Japan.
North Korean aircraft had
shot down a Navy reconnaissance aircraft in the area, and
Ticonderoga was called upon to beef up the forces assigned to the vicinity. However, the crisis abated, and
Ticonderoga entered Subic Bay on 27 April for upkeep. On 8 May, she departed the Philippines to return to "Yankee Station" and resumed interdiction operations. Between her third and fourth line periods, the carrier visited Sasebo and Hong Kong. The aircraft carrier took station off Vietnam for her last line period of the deployment on 26 June and there followed 37 more days of highly successful air sorties against enemy targets. Following that tour, she joined TF 71 in the Sea of Japan for the remainder of the deployment.
Ticonderoga concluded the deployment—a highly successful one, for she received her third Navy Unit Commendation for her operations during that tour of duty—when she left Subic Bay on 4 September.
Post-Vietnam service crew arrive aboard
Ticonderoga on 19 December 1972
Ticonderoga arrived in San Diego on 18 September 1969. After almost a month of post-deployment stand-down, she moved to the Long Beach Naval Shipyard in mid-October to begin conversion to an antisubmarine warfare (ASW) aircraft carrier. Overhaul and conversion work began on 20 October, and
Ticonderoga was redesignated
CVS-14 the next day. She completed overhaul and conversion on 28 May 1970 and conducted exercises out of Long Beach for most of June. On 26 June, the new ASW support carrier entered her new home port, San Diego. In July–August, she conducted refresher training, refresher air operations, and carrier landing qualifications. She operated off the California coast for the remainder of the year and participated in two naval exercises-HUKASWEX 4–70 late in October and COMPUTEX 23–70 between 30 November and 3 December. USS
Ticonderoga made an all but brief appearance in the Movie
Tora! Tora! Tora! which was being filmed in 1970, Ticonderoga Flight Deck Number 14 briefly appears in shot, while playing Admiral William (Bull) Halsey's Flagship USS Enterprise (CV-6). During the remainder of her active career,
Ticonderoga made two more deployments to the Far East. Because of her change in mission, neither tour of duty included combat operations off Vietnam. Both, however, included training exercises in the Sea of Japan with ships of the
Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force. The first of these two cruises also brought operations in the Indian Ocean with units of the
Thai Navy and a transit of Sunda Strait during which a ceremony was held to commemorate the loss of the cruisers and in 1942. In between these two last deployments, she operated in the eastern Pacific and participated in the recovery of the
Apollo 16 Moon mission capsule and astronauts 215 miles SE off
Christmas Island during April 1972. The second deployment came in the summer of 1972, and, in addition to the training exercises in the Sea of Japan,
Ticonderoga also joined ASW training operations in the South China Sea. That fall, she returned to the eastern Pacific and, in November practiced for the recovery of
Apollo 17. The next month,
Ticonderoga recovered her second set of space voyagers near American Samoa at decimal -17.88, -166.11. The carrier then headed back to San Diego where she arrived on 28 December. On 22 June 1973,
Ticonderoga recovered the
Skylab 2 astronauts near San Diego.
Ticonderoga remained active for nine more months, first operating out of San Diego and then making preparations for inactivation. On 1 September 1973, the aircraft carrier was decommissioned after a board of inspection and survey found her to be unfit for further naval service. Her name was struck from the Navy list on 16 November 1973, and arrangements were begun to sell her for scrap. She was sold for scrap 1 September 1975. ==Awards==