On September 2, 1945, Japan signed the instrument of surrender aboard USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. Eight days later, on September 10, in Virginia, the Navy commissioned a new aircraft carrier named for the battle that had turned the Pacific war three years earlier. The war she was built for was already over. USS Midway would spend the next 47 years finding out what the Navy needed instead.
She was enormous for her time. At about 972 feet long, Midway was the largest ship in the world for a decade, and her beam was too wide for the locks of the Panama Canal. That one fact shaped her life. A ship that cannot take the shortcut between oceans has to be committed to one of them, and Midway would end up committed to the Pacific more deeply than any carrier before her.
Carriers age faster than most warships because the aircraft change under them. The propeller planes Midway was designed for gave way to jets, and the jets grew heavier and faster every few years. Over her career the Navy rebuilt her more than once, adding an angled flight deck and stronger catapults and elevators so she could keep launching the aircraft of the day. The hull stayed the same. Almost everything on top of it was replaced.
Inside that hull lived a small city. With her air wing aboard, Midway carried a crew of about 4,500. They cooked, slept, stood watch and repaired aircraft in spaces built in the 1940s, and generations of sailors passed through the same passageways.
Midway went to war off Vietnam, and her aircraft left marks in the record. In June 1965, F-4 Phantoms from her air wing shot down two North Vietnamese MiG-17s, and those pilots are credited with the first American air-to-air victories of the war.
Her best-remembered day in that war had nothing to do with combat. In late April 1975, as Saigon fell, Midway was offshore for the evacuation, taking aboard helicopters crowded with people leaving the country. A South Vietnamese Air Force officer, Major Buang Ly, appeared overhead in a small two-seat Cessna Bird Dog carrying his wife and their five children. He had no way to land on a carrier deck crowded with helicopters, and after several passes he dropped a handwritten note asking the crew to clear a space. The ship's commanding officer ordered it done. Sailors pushed helicopters worth millions of dollars over the side into the sea, and Major Ly brought the little plane down on the open deck with his family aboard. The aircraft is preserved today at the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida.
In 1973 the Navy did something new with Midway. It based her overseas, at Yokosuka, Japan, near the mouth of Tokyo Bay, with her crew's families living in Japan alongside the ship. She stayed until 1991. For eighteen years the carrier commissioned in the week of Japan's surrender made her home on the same bay where the surrender was signed, and she worked from there as the forward edge of American naval power in the western Pacific.
Her last war came near the end of that posting. In the 1991 Gulf War, Midway was the flagship of naval air operations in the Persian Gulf, an old ship leading carriers that were decades younger. Later that same year, after Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines, she helped carry American military families away from the ash-covered bases there.
Midway was decommissioned in 1992. Her 47 years made her the longest-serving American aircraft carrier of the twentieth century. She went into storage in the reserve fleet, and for a while her future was the usual one for old warships: waiting, and then probably scrap.
San Diego had other ideas. A group of local backers spent years working to bring her south as a museum, and after the Navy agreed, she was towed down the coast and moored at Navy Pier, on the downtown waterfront. On June 7, 2004, she opened to the public as the USS Midway Museum. It now draws more than a million visitors a year and ranks among the most visited ship museums in the world. Many of the people walking her hangar deck and flight deck are veterans who served aboard her, and some of them volunteer as docents, explaining the catapults and the ready rooms to visitors who were born after she retired.
Most people meet Midway from the pier side, but she was built to be seen from the water, and that is still the best way to understand her size. Coming up the bay past Point Loma, North Island and its active carriers, then Harbor Island, a sailor sees her gray flight deck rise above the downtown waterfront at Navy Pier, not far from the Star of India at the Maritime Museum. JADA, a 65-foot wooden yacht launched in 1938 and older than the carrier herself, sails these waters from Harbor Island, and passing Midway at deck level gives a measure of 972 feet that no photograph manages. The San Diego Bay history sail passes her on the way up the bay.
Sources: USS Midway Museum; Naval History and Heritage Command, Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships; National Naval Aviation Museum; Wikipedia articles "USS Midway (CV-41)", "Operation Frequent Wind" and "USS Midway Museum".
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