The WW II USS Lexington Was America’s First Supercarrier

A ship with a history like no other. 

Sebastien Roblin [2]

On March 4, 2018 an expedition funded by philanthropist Paul Allen discovered the shattered remnants of the carrier USS Lexington two miles below the ocean’s surface in the Coral Sea. The first full-sized fleet carrier to serve in the U.S. Navy, the Lady Lex had sunk to its watery grave nearly seventy-six years earlier, fighting the first, frenetic carrier-on-carrier battle in history.

The Lexington was the fifth U.S. Navy ship to be named after the opening battle of the American Revolution. It and its sister ship the Saratoga were originally designed to serve as battlecruisers, a type of battleship that sacrificed armor in favor of speed. However, construction was delayed during World War I, then impeded by the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty, which placed steep restrictions on the size and number of capital ships.

Rather than scrapping the vessels a quarter of the way into their construction, the Navy decided to reconfigure the two ships into aircraft carriers, at a total project cost of $28 million per ship. At the time, the newfangled carrier had seen limited action during the Great War [3], and the treaty permitted each nation two carriers displacing no more than thirty-three thousand tons.

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