From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Casablanca class of escort aircraft carriers was the largest class of this type ever built. Fifty of these were laid down, launched and commissioned within the space of a year, 1943 and 1944.

USS St. Lo (CVE-63), a Casablanca-class ship

They were built by the Kaiser Shipbuilding Company in Vancouver, Washington on the Columbia River.

The hull numbers are consecutive, from CVE-55 (Casablanca) to CVE-104 (Munda). Although designated as escort carriers, the Casablanca class was far more frequently used in fleet operations, where their light wings of fighters and bombers could combine to provide the effectiveness of a much larger ship. The shining moment of the class came in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, when a task force composed of these ships and a group of Destroyer Escorts gave battle against the Japanese main force and succeeded in turning them back. One of their number, St. Lo (ex-Midway), is the only aircraft carrier to ever record a hit on an enemy warship by its own guns, when she hit a Japanese destroyer with a single round from her aft-mounted 5"/38cal heavy antiaircraft gun.

Unlike virtually every other warship since HMS Dreadnought, the Casablanca class ships were equipped with reciprocating engines instead of turbine engines. This was done in view of bottlenecks in the gear-cutting industry, but greatly limited their usefulness after the war. Some ships were retained postwar as aircraft transports, where their lack of speed was not a major drawback. Some units were reactivated as helicopter escort carriers (CVHE and T-CVHE) or utility carriers (CVU and T-CVU) after the war, but most were inactivated and placed in reserve once the war ended, stricken in 1958-9 and scapped in 1959-61. One ship, USS Thetis Bay, was heavily modified into an amphibious assault ship (LPH-6).

Originally, half of their number were to be transferred to the Royal Navy under Lend-Lease, but instead they were retained in the US Navy and the Batch II Bogue-class escort carriers were transferred instead as the HMS Ameer class (the RN's Batch I Bogues were the HMS Attacker class).