USS Midway (CV-41)

USS Midway (CVB/CVA/CV-41), "Midway Magic" · USN · 1961-1992

Commissioned 10 September 1945, eight days after Japan's surrender, Midway was then the largest warship in the world and the first American carrier too broad to transit the Panama Canal. This shield-shaped ship's crest — adopted in 1961, when she carried the attack-carrier designation CVA-41 — pairs a sword with an aircraft-over-warship device evoking the 1942 battle that gave the ship her name. Her aircraft scored the Navy's first MiG kills of the Vietnam War on 17 June 1965, and during the fall of Saigon in April 1975 her deck took aboard a Cessna O-1 flown by a South Vietnamese major with his family crammed inside. Forward-deployed to Yokosuka from 1973, she launched the opening carrier strikes of Operation Desert Storm on 17 January 1991 and decommissioned on 11 April 1992 after 47 years in commission.