The U.S. Navy History Podcast

The world's first nuclear aircraft carrier, USS Enterprise (CVN-65), is being towed from Newport News, Virginia, to Mobile, Alabama, to be scrapped, and Dale and Christophe use her last voyage to trace the whole 250-year line of the name. Benedict Arnold captures a British sloop on Lake Champlain in 1775. The schooner Enterprise fights the corsair Tripoli and sets up Decatur's raid. William Burrows and Samuel Blyth are buried side by side. CV-6 earns 20 battle stars and is still sold for scrap. Dale, a former Machinist's Mate on USS George Washington, explains what eight reactors meant compared with two. Ships come and go. The name keeps coming back.

On February 23, 1942, early in World War II, the Japanese submarine I-17 surfaced off Ellwood near Santa Barbara, California, and shelled an oil field while FDR spoke to the nation by radio. It was the first enemy shelling of the American mainland in the war. Commander Nishino Kozo's gunners fired seventeen rounds and did about $500 in damage. The panic did far more. The next night, the Battle of Los Angeles left five dead. Dale follows I-17 from Pearl Harbor to her sinking by HMNZS Tui off Noumea, and asks what twenty minutes of bad gunnery really cost.

On November 29, 1944, off the coast of Honshu in the Pacific War, the submarine USS Archerfish sank the Japanese supercarrier Shinano, the largest warship ever sunk by a submarine. Shinano was built on a Yamato-class battleship hull in total secrecy, and she sailed unfinished, with watertight doors missing and compartments never tested. Commander Joe Enright, who had once asked to be relieved for being too cautious, chased her through the night and fired six torpedoes at 3:17 a.m. Captain Toshio Abe kept steaming. Dale, a Navy Machinist’s Mate, goes below decks to show how she was really lost.

The Battle of the Eastern Solomons, the World War II carrier clash fought north of Guadalcanal in the South Pacific in August 1942, was the third carrier battle in history, and almost nobody remembers it. Dale and Christophe follow Vice Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher’s Saratoga and Enterprise against Nagumo’s Shokaku and Zuikaku. Commander Harry Felt sinks the light carrier Ryujo, three bombs tear into the Big E, and Chief Machinist William Smith saves her jammed rudder in a 170-degree compartment. Then a B-17 finally hits a ship. It’s the battle that kept Henderson Field American and started the Tokyo Express.

Is the aircraft carrier the next battleship? Dale tests the 2026 drone swarm threat against the battleship's fall, from Billy Mitchell and Prince of Wales to the kamikazes off Okinawa. Black Sea drone boats, the Red Sea, the 2026 Iran war, and China's anti-carrier swarm plan all get red-teamed. The verdict: drones won't sink a carrier, but in the Western Pacific she stands at the battleship's edge.