Talk:Escort carrier

Differences?

If a CVE was 60 per cent of the length of a CV, did it have different planes, different procedures, different catapults and tailhooks, or what? What compromises or alterations in practice were made for taking off and landing on these much smaller ships? Ortolan88

Very good questions, never thought about it before. Hopefully somebody who knows will fill out the article, but my guess is that the shorter flight deck was still sufficient to launch and land most carrier plane types, but there was very little spare working room, so your launch/land rates weren't as good. Stan 06:12 Mar 14, 2003 (UTC)

I hope so too, but the chances are slim. Most of those who served on these carriers are now deceased, there is not a single one of those carriers left, and the glory and fame of the big carriers has eclipsed the importance of the jeep carriers. I have the impression sometimes that the lack of celebrity has led to a neglect in the preservation and exploitation of their information resources. I found it easier to get information on LSTs (Landing Ship, Tank or Large Slow Target) than on the CVEs! AlainV 04:20, 2004 May 4 (UTC)

I believe ship speed may also have been significant in the ability to utilize contemporary naval aircraft designs intended to operate off carriers faster than battleships. Grumman Wildcat fighters and Fairey Swordfish bombers successfully operated off the slow CVEs; but Grumman Avenger bombers required 30 knots of wind over the deck to launch; and CVEs couldn't produce that during calm weather.Thewellman (talk) 22:38, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

??? Just plugging "escort carriers" into Amazon turns up at least a dozen volumes, including an "anatomy of the ship" book (none of which I have, thus my lack of details on them). Online material is probably not as good, but then I've come to rely more on books and less on the net in recent months, some comparative study has shown me there is a huge amount of published info that is simply not visible to Google, either not searched or not online. Stan 12:41, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

I did! But I was not willing to invest all the money necessary to buy the dozen or so titles available on the used and new book market. As with other WWII subjects I knew ahead of time that a certain proportion of the books would be rather superficial. I had some of them brought over by inter library loan through a local library, one at a time, and found two at the National Library of Canada. And they were all superficial! My point is that the escort carriers are not as well "covered" as other classes of ships or fighting boats of WW II. There are hundreds of books on hand in libraries and bookstores, which cover these other vessels. AlainV 18:43, 2004 May 4 (UTC)

The F4F Wildcat, the main fighter used by the escort carriers, was a very lightweight plane with a very powerful engine, and on most carriers could take off unassisted (the F6F Hellcat, on the other hand, was much larger and did generally need a catapult shot, even from the big carriers). The CVEs also had a forward catapult, which they used to launch their bigger planes. They were completely inadequate for postwar jets in any role other than transport, which is why they were all out of service by 1948. Iceberg3k 18:36, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Warrilow

Um... so who or what is "Warrilow"? func(talk) 03:03, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)

A reference at the bottom of the article : Warrilow, Betty. Nabob, the first Canadian-manned aircraft carrier. Owen Sound, Ont. : Escort Carriers Association, 1989. --AlainV 03:19, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)

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Maybe it could also use a link or reference of some sort to the Brodie landing system? PML.

Lengths

The stated average lengths for the fleet carrier are inconsistent. 900 feet is closer to 275 meters rather than 300 meters, which is especially notable considering the conversion from 500 feet is given as 150 meters. Then later on the page, the table lists a fleet carrier as 260 meters. Using specific, representative classes as examples might be better than these generic average estimates, which are hard to verify against sources. --BeeBot 16:15, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

World War II

Documentation for the first paragraph? Audacity, acquired Jan-41 commission June 20, 1941. Long Island acquired Mar 1941 and commissioned June 2, 1941. Who was the model for whom? I suspect that neither was the model for either, but that the concept was concurrently pursued by both navies. In any case, the conclusion is highly suspect and POV.--Buckboard 06:20, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

I believe it might be more accurate to state Audacity was the first slow aircraft carrier to be operational in second world war ASW. This article might give more attention to other important roles of the slow carriers, including pilot training and aircraft transport. Friedman's U. S. Aircraft Carriers indicates Admiral Halsey recommended construction of auxiliary carriers for pilot training in 1940, and on 1 February 1941 the United States Navy Chief of Naval Operations recognized the priority of aircraft transport. Early US cargo hull conversions were initiated as much to meet those goals as the more glamorous ASW combat role.

Slow aircraft carriers successfully completed combat roles supporting the amphibious invasion of North Africa in November of 1942, and proved remarkably capable in the Pacific until the Essex class became available to replace combat losses of pre-war fast carriers. The US identification change in July 1943 to CVE from earlier AVG and ACV designations recognized the slow carriers as combatants rather than auxiliaries. These ships were very similar to fleet carriers built two decades earlier. Perceived limitations of the slow carriers were largely in terms of contemporary naval aircraft designed to operate from faster ships able to consistently create high launch airspeeds under calm wind conditions. Aircraft designs might have emphasized better STOL performance if carrier doctrine during naval exercises between the world wars had not relied on the converted battle cruisers' ability to outrun battle fleets.

In the absence of objections, I propose to revise this article's perspective to reflect wider uses of slow carriers.Thewellman (talk) 22:39, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

130 escort carriers were built

Okay, I now am satisfied that the number 130 is correct, if you include all 19 Commencement Bay class vessels. However it involved a lot of digging and fixing typos in this and other articles to get there, so I'm happy for someone else to check my logic. In particular the List of escort aircraft carriers of the United States Navy and List_of_aircraft_carrier_classes_of_the_United_States_Navy and List of escort aircraft carriers of the Royal Navy all had flaws and could do with some tidying up. I think they are consistent now.

Basically, changes I made were:

- I think there were only 45 Bogue class vessels, not 49. That what all the pages about the individual vessels say - 21 in the first batch {10 US, 11 RN} and 24 in the second {1 US, 23 RN}. I don't know where the other numbers came from. If you have different information then go for it ...

- There were 19 Commencement Bay vessels TOTAL. 17 were commissioned and 2 were not commissioned but accepted by the Navy after the war and held in reserve. 4 additional ones were cancelled. It probably stetches accuracy a little to say they were all launched during the war though {Sept 1945?}.

- The USS Charger was very briefly in RN service as HMS Charger, and had AVG-4 and CVE-30 numbering. The other three vessels were RN only.

- So 2 Long Island + 45 Bogue + 4 Sangamon + 4 Charger + 50 Casablanca + 19 Commencement Bay + Audacity, Activity, Campania, Pretoria Castle, Nairana, Vindex gives a total of 130! —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Dave w74 (talk • contribs) 09:30, 7 February 2007 (UTC).

Japanese Escort Carriers

The German article about escort carriers also mentions some Japanese Carriers. You can find a list at http://www.hazegray.org/navhist/carriers/ijn_cv.htm if you like to include them to your article.

- The above is true. Not only did the IJN operate escort carriers, but also the Japanese Army had even more than the Navy. The opening of the article should include the Japanese in addition to USN and RN.

As for the article in general, I think whomever put this together did a formidable job considering the wide range necessitated by the subject matter. Well done.

The only thing that is glaring, from an inaccuracy standpoint, is "Later carriers were built using the hulls of Liberty Ships not yet finished but already in various stages of construction." which is not the case. The Liberty hull, or EC2 was never the foundation for any CVEs built in the US. I think this might have been easily confused with the Maritime Commission's standard type with a very similar name - the C-3, which was the basis for all Todd/Sea-Tac built CVEs. To avoid any further confusion, nor were there any CVEs built upon VC2 hulls either - the hull for the Victory ships. Working backwards, the latest CVEs were the big (for escort carriers) Commencement Bays based on heavily modified oiler hulls of the Cimmaron class, not too much different than the first four CVEs using oiler hulls - Sangamon, Santee, Chenango and Suwanee. The Kaiser CVEs had the most unique hull shape of all the CVEs. It was based on the standard Maritime Commission P1 hull - which was the smallest of four (P1, P2, P3, and finally P4 the largest) transport (read: passenger ship in peace time) designs made by the commission prior to US entry into the war. The P1 was designed for coastal passenger service between San Francisco and Seattle, which explains why they had such little draft - a factor that also made the Casablancas so tender in any sea greater than a moderate sea state. xl_five_lx 21:31 30 July 2007

New role sounds very much like original role

The article contains the two following pieces of text:

Originally developed at the behest of the United Kingdom to operate as part of a North Atlantic convoy escort rather than as part of a naval strike force, ... As convoy escorts, they were used by the Royal Navy to provide air scouting, to ward off enemy long-range scouting aircraft and, increasingly, to spot and hunt submarines.

and

Meanwhile the US discovered their own use for the escort carriers. In the North Atlantic, they would supplement the escorting destroyers by providing air support for their anti-submarine warfare.

Err. 'Spotting and hunting submarines' sounds pretty well the same thing as 'providing air support for anti-submarine warfare' to me. I think we either need more detail on how the US Navy usage in the North Atlantic differed from the Royal Navy usage in order to justify the 'discovered their own use', or perhaps we should move that phrase so it just applies to the Pacific, where it does sound like there was a genuine difference in usage. -- Chris j wood (talk) 11:55, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

The Escort Carrier was originally devised as a means of providing a convoy with air cover while beyond the reach of Allied land-based aircraft. The problem at the time was the German long-range Focke-Wulf 200 Condors that were attacking ships in the Mid-Atlantic gap.

The original aircraft complement was Martlets (Wildcats) with a few Swordfish, but after the Fw 200 threat had been eliminated the Swordfish's role as an anti-submarine aircraft took over. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.150.100.255 (talk) 10:30, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

Added cleanup tag

Fascinating as the description of derivation of the phrase gedunk bar is, do we really think that a description of a ships ice-cream vending belongs alongside and before a description of its role!. I've added the cleanup tag. -- Chris j wood (talk) 12:00, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Funnel

For those who don't know what a "funnel" is: From Chimney: Chimneys may be found in buildings, steam locomotives and ships. In the US, the term smokestack (colloquially, stack) is also used when referring to locomotive chimneys. The term funnel is generally used for ship chimneys and sometimes used to refer to locomotive chimneys. - BillCJ (talk) 18:53, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Sea Control Ship

I added the section below but it was removed. It is consistent with the information cited in the articles refereed to. Comments please. "The United States designed Sea Control Ship to serve a similar role, whilst non where actually built HTMS Chakri Naruebet and Italian aircraft carrier Giuseppe Garibaldi (551) and Spanish aircraft carrier Principe de Asturias where all based on the concept. The United Kingdoms Invincible class aircraft carriers is somewhat large but design to do a similar task."--Kitchen Knife (talk) 23:27, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

Your English spelling, grammar and punctuation are poor. The links to the ships should be piped or templated so that only their names show, in italics. Your paragraph included no references, so what articles are you referring to? Binksternet (talk) 23:39, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

The Wikipedia articles refereed to are the references. The spelling is fine as far as I can tell and any bad spelling, grammar etc are reasons to change rather then delete.--Kitchen Knife (talk) 23:42, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

CVE

"United States classification revision to escort aircraft carrier (CVE)"

What exactly does CVE stand for? CVE doesn't map directly to "escort aircraft carrier".

The United States Navy hull classification symbol for an aircraft carrier is CV. The C is for cruiser, since the earliest aircraft carriers were used as part of the scouting force for the battle fleet; and the V (from the French verb voler) designated fixed wing aircraft (rather than balloons, blimps and dirigibles). The E suffix designates the escort function (similar to the contemporary DE for destroyer escort).Thewellman (talk) 16:15, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

Why no museum escort carriers?

Why didn't any escort carrier become a museum ship? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Clrichey (talk • contribs) 01:32, 3 June 2021 (UTC)