Named for a Mythical Land to Fight Against Japan, This Carrier Barely Functioned off Vietnam

A U.S. Marine stands guard at Shangri-La, Maryland after President Franklin D. Roosevelt, rested and tanned after a four week vacation at the 23,000-acre presidential retreat, returned to the White House.  His residence was a guarded secret until he was safe back in Washington, all traces of his bronchitis from which he suffered during the winter months having disappeared, May 7th, 1944.  Roosevelt gave the property its name shortly after its opening in 1938, but after President Dwight David Eisenhower renamed the retreat, officially known as Naval Support Facility Thurmont, Maryland, in 1953 after his grandson, it has been known as Camp David.  (Office of War Information Collection 208-PU-Folder 3/ National Archives and Records Administration via NHHC Photo Curator/Flickr)

By M.C. Farrington
HRNM Historian
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was particularly enamored of the name Shangri-La, the mysterious Himalayan kingdom that sprang from the fertile British imagination of James Hilton in his 1933 book Lost Horizon.  Roosevelt named his retreat northwest of Washington, now known as Camp David, after it shortly after its opening in 1938.  In the wake of the successful Doolittle Raid in April 1942, FDR made the tongue-in-cheek claim to a reporter that the 16 B-25s that had humiliated the militarists in Tokyo had been launched from Shangri-La. 

During USS Shangri-La's launching ceremony at Norfolk Navy Yard (now known as Norfolk Naval Shipyard), Portsmouth, Virginia, sponsor Mrs. Josephine Doolittle, wife of Major General James Doolittle, christens the Essex-class carrier as Rear Admiral Felix X. Gygax, commandant of the yard, strains to hold a radio microphone close to capture the sound of the champagne bottle breaking against the ship's bow.  (Hampton Roads Naval Museum file)

Of course USS Hornet (CV 8), the true source of the raid, was sunk by the Japanese only about six months later, but her home shipyard, Newport News Shipbuilding, quickly replaced her by renaming what was to have been USS Kearsarge, launching the new Hornet (CV 12) on August 30, 1943.  But a movement was already afoot to bring FDR's mythical launching place to life.  And so it was that USS Shangri-La (CV-38) became the first (and only) US Navy aircraft carrier with a completely made-up name.  She was launched on February 24, 1944, and commissioned on September 15 of the same year.  

From an assortment of commissioning-day photographs contained in E.G. Hines' book Shangri-La to Bikini in the Hampton Roads Naval Museum files, (upper right) Rear Admiral Felix X. Gygax, USN, Commandant of the Norfolk Navy Yard, congratulates Captain James D. Barner upon becoming the carrier's first commanding officer.

Shangri-La also had the distinction of being the first carrier made from the keel up at Norfolk Naval Shipyard (then known as Norfolk Navy Yard), over two decades after the collier Jupiter was converted there into the US Navy’s first aircraft carrier, USS Langley (CV 1).  She was the twelfth of 24 Essex-class carriers and the first of three that would slide down the ways into the Elizabeth River from Norfolk Naval Shipyard, as well as the only one of the three to take part in combat operations against the Japanese before the war ended.

USS Shangri La (CV 38) off Fort Monroe, ¾ view of stern of the aircraft carrier at an altitude of 500 feet. Photographed by Naval Air Station, Norfolk, Virginia, November 5, 1944. (U.S. Navy photograph 80-G-2898781/ National Archives and Records Administration via NHHC Photo Curator/Flickr)

Vought F4U Corsairs are loaded aboard Shangri-La at Naval Operating Base Norfolk (now known as Naval Station Norfolk) just before her maiden voyage to the Pacific in January 1945.  An assortment of Navy and even Army aircraft, including a P-51 Mustang and B-25 Mitchell bombers, were tested on her flight deck while underway in Chesapeake Bay in November 1944. (From the book Shangri-La to Bikini in the Hampton Roads Naval Museum files)

After making it all the way back to Hampton Roads after the war, Shangri La was recalled to the Pacific to take part in Operation Crossroads, the Able and Baker atomic tests at Bikini Atoll in July 1946, principally by launching radio-controlled F6F Hellcat drones on missions over the testing area to collect radioactive particles. "The planes were intensely radioactive but their survival of the extreme heat and electromagnetic disturbances was almost phenomenal," wrote journalist E.G. Hines, who covered Shangri-La's first two years of operations. 

After an extensive conversion at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in the 1950s, Shangri La became the first carrier with an angled deck for jet operations. 

The word Shangri La has for four score and six years held a place in the Western lexicon, as one wikipedian put it, as “synonymous with an earthly paradise” and “a permanently happy land, isolated from the world.”  By the time the quarter-century-old carrier took part in the Vietnam War, however, those who served aboard what was then simply known as the "Shang" would only have agreed with the "isolated from the world" part.

USS Shangri-La (CVS 38) cruises toward Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico, on February 11, 1970. Known to her crew as the "Shang," the anti-submarine carrier was working up for her last deployment before her decomissioning.  Her last cruise, with assigned Carrier Air Wing 8 (CVW-8), was to Vietnam and the Western Pacific from March 5 to December 17, 1970. Although nominally redesignated as an anti-submarine carrier (CVS) on June 30, 1969, the Shang still operated as an attack carrier (CVA).  (Wikimedia Commons)

“Nothing worked but the crew,” recalled HRNM docent Jim Reid, who served aboard Shangri La as the ship's aircraft handling officer in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1970. 

He elaborated:

It was either cry or laugh, when someone in the crew had a cruise patch made up titled "CASREP-70," listing the major casualties that were reported during the cruise: Lost a screw while launching strikes; Dead in the water; Evaporators never able to provide enough water; Reefers burned up losing all perishable food; Lost steering while in a turn (prompting the recommendation that we fire off two aircraft each time we passed through the launch heading); Port catapult cold cat shots; Liquid oxygen plant inoperable; Contaminated jet fuel; Aircraft elevator cables parted; TACAN[the system giving carrier range and bearing to aircraft] failure; and one story that the radar antenna fell and landed on Primary [Flight Control].   

Lieutenant (Junior Grade) William Belden ejects from his Douglas A-4E Skyhawk attack aircraft (Bureau # 150117) as it rolls into the carrier's port catwalk after suffering a brake failure following recovery on July 2, 1970. Lt. j.g. Belden ejected safely and was rescued by Shangri-La's helicopter. (Naval History and Heritage Command image)

"On one wild afternoon," wrote Reid in a short memoir, "an A-4E landed, on fire, [someone] having forgotten to put on a fuel cap. All of the yellow shirts worked to put out the fire after pulling the burning craft clear of the landing area.  A second A-4 landed, experienced brake failure and taxied over to the port side of the cat walk[sic].  The aircraft hung over the side but the pilot ejected into the water.  The safety photographer on the bridge took a series of shots that made Stars and Stripes as well as newspapers around the world." Reid added that "the tail of the A-4 that hung over the side and the nose of the one that was on fire were joined to make one good A-4." 

After, to put it mildly, a very challenging deployment to Yankee Station, Shangri La returned to Mayport, Florida, where she was based for over a decade, and was later taken to Boston and decommissioned on July 30, 1971.