November tenth, nineteen forty-two. Casablanca harbor, French Morocco. Late morning. Tied up against a stone quay sits the newest battleship in the French Navy, Jean Bart. She is unfinished. Only one of her two main turrets has guns in it. But that one turret holds four fifteen-inch guns, and between eleven forty-one and eleven fifty-one, those four guns fire nine two-gun salvos at the American heavy cruiser Augusta, flagship of the whole invasion fleet. Three of those salvos straddle her. Augusta turns away at high speed.

Two days earlier, the American battleship Massachusetts had hit Jean Bart with sixteen-inch shells and jammed that turret solid. The Americans believed she was finished. French dockyard workers had cut away the bent steel and had the turret turning again by twenty-four minutes past five the same evening.

So the job of finishing her fell to a ship most of the United States Navy had stopped counting. A small carrier, under fifteen thousand tons. Judged too slow to run with the fast carrier task forces in the Pacific. Designed without torpedo stowage. Kept in the Atlantic while every other big American carrier went to fight Japan. At three in the afternoon, nine of her dive bombers rolled over Casablanca harbor carrying thousand-pound bombs. Two of them hit. By evening, Jean Bart was settling by the stern, her generators knocked out, and she would never fire on an American ship again.

Her name was USS Ranger. She was the first ship the United States ever built from the keel up as an aircraft carrier, and almost everything about her was a compromise. This is the story of the carrier nobody wanted, told through three days that defined her life. How did a ship the Navy kept out of the main war end up fighting two of its strangest battles?

The first of those days came long before the war. September twenty-sixth, nineteen thirty-one. Newport News, Virginia. Ranger's keel went down on a slipway at the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, on a contract worth fifteen point two million dollars.

The problem that shaped her was a treaty. The Washington Naval Treaty of nineteen twenty-two capped the total tonnage of American carriers. Lexington and Saratoga, converted from unfinished battlecruisers, had already used up most of it. That left sixty-nine thousand tons. At the Naval War College, planners ran war games to decide how to spend it. They could build three carriers of twenty-three thousand tons, four of about seventeen thousand, or five of thirteen thousand eight hundred. The games kept showing the same thing. In a real war, carriers and aircraft would be lost fast. So the college picked the smallest option, because five small hulls carried the most aircraft in total.

Ranger was the first of those five. She was meant to be a pure flight deck with nothing on top, like the old experimental carrier Langley. Her six boilers vented through six small hinged stacks, three on each side aft, that swung down flat during flight operations to keep smoke off the deck. Halfway through construction, the Navy changed its mind and added an island. Rerouting the boiler uptakes into it was rejected as too expensive, so she kept her odd folding funnels for her whole life.

Everything else was cut to the bone. Her flight deck was a light structure sheathed in wood. Her belt armor was two inches thick. Her machinery made fifty-three thousand five hundred shaft horsepower, about half what the Lexingtons carried, and on trials she reached thirty point three five knots. To save money she was designed and commissioned with no torpedo stowage and no torpedo squadron at all.

And yet the War College had gotten one thing right. As built, Ranger carried seventy-six aircraft. That was the same number as Lexington, on roughly half the displacement.

First Lady Lou Henry Hoover launched her on February twenty-fifth, nineteen thirty-three. She was commissioned at Norfolk on June fourth, nineteen thirty-four. Then the fleet started using her, and the verdict came in.

She was too small to handle a modern air group well. She rolled badly in heavy seas, which in the open Pacific or the North Atlantic could stop her launching and recovering aircraft. Her top speed was too low for a carrier that had to keep pace with fast battleships and cruisers. The Navy learned enough from Ranger that it never built another like her. The next class, Yorktown, came out at nearly twenty thousand tons.

When war came, that verdict decided where she went. In April nineteen forty-two, Winston Churchill cabled President Roosevelt and asked for Ranger and the battleship North Carolina to reinforce the British in the Indian Ocean. Admiral Ernest King refused. The only help he would offer was to use Ranger to ferry Army fighters. When Roosevelt answered Churchill, he softened King's reply by playing up Ranger's faults.

So that is what she did. On May tenth, nineteen forty-two, she launched sixty-eight Army P-forty fighters off the coast of Africa, bound for Accra on the Gold Coast and from there toward China. In July she flew off seventy-two more, a complete fighter group, the fifty-seventh, which reached the desert in time to fight at El Alamein. While Lexington, Yorktown and Hornet were fighting the Japanese carriers, Ranger was a delivery van.

Then, in the autumn of nineteen forty-two, the Atlantic needed a carrier that could fight.

Operation Torch was the Allied invasion of French North Africa. The western half of it, the landings in Morocco, was an all-American operation. Task Force thirty-four, one hundred and two ships under Rear Admiral Henry Kent Hewitt, carried about thirty-five thousand soldiers across the Atlantic to land on three stretches of coast around Casablanca. The planners hoped the French would not fight. They had no guarantee. Morocco belonged to Vichy France, and under the armistice with Germany, Vichy was obliged to defend its territory against anyone.

Casablanca was the strongest port on that coast. The El Hank battery had four one hundred ninety-four millimeter guns. In the harbor lay a light cruiser, two flotilla leaders, seven destroyers, eleven submarines, and Jean Bart. Behind the city were French airfields with Curtiss Hawk and Dewoitine fighters.

The air cover for all of it came from five carriers. Four were new escort carriers, converted from oil tankers. The fifth, and the largest carrier in the Atlantic Fleet, was the ship the Pacific had not wanted. Ranger led them. Her captain was Calvin Durgin. When the shooting started, her air group counted seventy-two aircraft that could fly: Wildcat fighters of fighting squadrons nine and forty-one, and Dauntless dive bombers of scouting squadron forty-one.

November eighth, nineteen forty-two. At six fifteen in the morning, in the dark, thirty miles northwest of Casablanca, Ranger began launching. The radio code for opening hostilities came out of baseball. Lieutenant Commander Tommy Booth, leading fighting squadron forty-one, called "Batter up." The ship answered, "Play ball."

The Wildcats went for the airfields first. One fighter flight swept the field at Cazes, southwest of Casablanca, in line-abreast passes. Nine Wildcats struck the fields at Rabat and Rabat-Salé, where the French air command in Morocco had its headquarters. By the Navy's count, they destroyed seven planes at one field and fourteen bombers at the other, without loss. Another flight burned seven more on the ground at Port Lyautey.

The French fighters that did get up were flown by experienced pilots. At seven fifty, they rose to meet the American bombers coming in over the city. The dogfight that followed cost the French seven aircraft and the Americans four or five.

Then the Dauntlesses went for the harbor. This is where the old design argument about Ranger stopped mattering. A Dauntless did not care how fast its carrier steamed or how thin her armor was. It cared that the ship could put it in the air, close to the target, again and again. In the first hour, Ranger's dive bombers, carrying five-hundred-pound bombs, put two hits on Jean Bart. The first damaged her port catapult, started a fire, and flooded her manual steering compartment. The second struck the quay beside her and exploded, and the blast bent the plating on her starboard side.

Bombs from Ranger and the escort carrier Suwannee began falling across the harbor. The French submarines Amphitrite, Oréade and La Psyché were destroyed at their moorings before they could get to sea. Ten merchant ships and liners went down in the port.

Out at sea, Massachusetts and the heavy cruisers Wichita and Tuscaloosa had opened fire. At seven twenty-five, a sixteen-inch shell from Massachusetts plunged through both of Jean Bart's armored decks and burst in a magazine built for her secondary guns. That magazine was empty, because the guns had never been installed. Had it been full, the explosion could have destroyed her. At six minutes past eight, two more shells struck. One drove down the front plate of her only working turret and jammed it. American gunners reported her silenced.

At nine, the French tried to break out. Seven warships of the second Light Squadron came out of Casablanca behind a smoke screen and turned east, toward the troop transports anchored off Fedala. At nine twenty, Ranger's fighters strafed them. Then the cruisers and Massachusetts caught them. The destroyer Fougueux sank at ten forty. Milan was driven onto the beach. Then the light cruiser Primauguet came out with the flotilla leader Albatros and two more destroyers. Ranger's planes went after Primauguet as she cleared the harbor. Two of their bombs hit Albatros and wrecked her forward half. Albatros beached to avoid sinking. Primauguet made it back into port, ran aground, and burned out. Forty-five of her crew were killed.

By the end of the first day, the French squadron that might have reached the transports was gone. Only one French destroyer in Casablanca was still fit to fight.

But the most dangerous ship in the harbor was not gone. That evening, while American officers counted their success, French workmen were cutting the bent steel away from Jean Bart's turret. At twenty-four minutes past five, it turned again. No one in the American fleet knew.

November ninth was a day of surf and confusion. Six-foot waves hammered the landing beaches at Fedala. Nearly half of the three hundred and forty-seven American landing craft had already been wrecked. Troops were ashore without their supplies, and radios were still sitting aboard the transports. Ranger's fighters stayed in the air over the beachhead. Fighting squadron nine shot down five Hawks that day for the loss of one Wildcat.

That was the cost of what Ranger was doing, and it showed in her hangar. Wildcats were coming back holed by anti-aircraft fire and French fighters. Some did not come back at all. The ship was too small to carry spare aircraft in numbers. Every plane lost came straight out of the strike she could launch the next morning.

On November tenth, the French made their last push from the harbor. At ten in the morning, the sloops Commandant Delage and La Gracieuse came out to shell American troops on the edge of the city. Augusta and two destroyers chased them back toward the harbor mouth. That brought Augusta into range of the quay, and at eleven forty-one, Jean Bart's repaired turret opened fire.

Nine salvos in ten minutes. The second came close to hitting. Three of the nine straddled the flagship. Augusta was a heavy cruiser with armor built to stop eight-inch shells, and a fifteen-inch shell from a modern French battleship was nearly double that caliber. Admiral Hewitt was aboard. Augusta pulled away at high speed.

Ranger got the call. This time her ordnancemen loaded the Dauntlesses with thousand-pound bombs, twice the weight of the first strike's. Nine bombers went, with eight Wildcats. The fighters went in first, strafing Jean Bart's anti-aircraft guns to keep the gunners' heads down. Then the dive bombers came over from high altitude, pushed over into steep dives, and released low over the quay.

At about three in the afternoon, two of the nine hit. The first tore open her forecastle. The second wrecked a large part of her hull toward the stern. Both started serious fires, and her crew did not get them under control until eight that evening. Water poured into her stern. It flooded the turbo-generator room. The shock of the explosions knocked out her main diesel generators, leaving only the backup diesels to power the ship. Jean Bart settled by the stern against the quay.

French accounts give her losses across the three days as twenty-two killed and twenty-two wounded. In the whole battle she had fired only twenty-five shells from her main guns. Her turret still worked after the last raid, but she had no power to drive it. She never fired at an American ship again.

That afternoon, the French submarine Le Tonnant fired torpedoes at Ranger herself. They missed.

The next morning, November eleventh, Casablanca surrendered.

The record of those three days is in Ranger's own reports, and Robert Cressman set it out in his history of the ship, USS Ranger: The Navy's First Flattop from Keel to Mast. Her aircraft flew four hundred and ninety-six combat sorties. They were credited with more than seventy French aircraft destroyed on the ground and fifteen shot down in the air. Around twenty-one light tanks were stopped and some eighty-six military vehicles destroyed, most of them troop trucks. Sixteen of her seventy-two aircraft were lost or damaged beyond repair. Forty-three more had been hit by anti-aircraft fire or French fighters. The air group lost men too. Three from fighting squadron nine and three from scouting squadron forty-one did not come home.

The small carrier had done exactly what the War College planners of the nineteen twenties had built her for. She put a full air group over a defended coast and kept it there for three days, and she took her losses without stopping.

The Navy's reward was to send her back to ferry duty. In January and February nineteen forty-three she carried two more loads of Army fighters to Casablanca, seventy-five P-forty L's on the second trip alone.

Then, on April twenty-fifth, nineteen forty-three, German radio announced that Ranger was gone. The broadcast credited the U-boat commander Otto von Bülow of U four oh four, decorated by Hitler himself, with sinking the American carrier in the North Atlantic. Ranger had not been touched. Her new captain, Gordon Rowe, later called the story a coward's trick, spreading anxiety and fear among the innocent. Families of her crew had heard it. The Navy issued a denial the next day.

Ranger's answer came that autumn, and it is the third day that defined her.

In August nineteen forty-three, she crossed to Scapa Flow and joined the British Home Fleet. The British had sent their own carriers to the Mediterranean and the Pacific, and the Home Fleet's only carrier, the elderly Furious, was in refit. The American ship nobody wanted in the Pacific was now the striking arm of the Royal Navy's main fleet.

On September twenty-second, British midget submarines crippled the German battleship Tirpitz in her Norwegian fjord. With Tirpitz out of action, Admiral Bruce Fraser could take the Home Fleet onto the attack. Code-breakers reading German signals had found a target. The port of Bodø, in northern Norway, was a gathering point for German coastal convoys. One of the ships in the area was the tanker Schleswig, carrying fuel for the German battle group at Altafjord.

The fleet left Scapa Flow on October second: the battleships Duke of York and Anson, the cruiser Belfast, Ranger, the American heavy cruiser Tuscaloosa, and their destroyers. They were not detected. Before dawn on October fourth, Ranger reached her launch point, about one hundred forty miles off Bodø.

At six eighteen, she began launching the Northern Attack Group: twenty Dauntlesses and eight Wildcats. In the lead aircraft flew a Norwegian navigator from the Royal Air Force's three hundred thirty-three squadron, to guide them through the islands. They flew low across the sea until they sighted Myken lighthouse, then turned north and climbed. The weather was clear. Two Dauntlesses broke off to bomb the eight-thousand-ton German freighter La Plata.

At seven thirty, the main group found a convoy: the steamer Kerkplein and the tanker Schleswig, escorted by the minesweeper M three sixty-five. Eight Dauntlesses dived on Schleswig and two on Kerkplein, and both ships were badly damaged. Schleswig's crew ran her aground to keep her from sinking. The remaining eight bombers went on into Bodø roadstead. They sank the ore carrier Rabat and badly damaged Cap Guir. Anti-aircraft guns on shore and on the ships shot down two Dauntlesses. One crew ditched and was captured. Lieutenant junior grade Clyde Tucker and his gunner, Stephen Bakran, were killed.

At seven oh eight, the Southern Attack Group had launched, ten Avenger torpedo bombers and six Wildcats, aimed at shipping off Sandnessjøen. They set the Norwegian cargo ship Topeka on fire and forced her onto the shore. They sank the coastal steamer Vaagan. They caught La Plata again and drove her aground on Rødøya, where the ammunition aboard her exploded. They bombed the troopship Skramstad, carrying about eight hundred fifty German soldiers, and left her beached and burning. One Avenger was shot down. Only its pilot, John Palmer, survived. By just before nine, the survivors were landing back aboard.

At about two that afternoon, three German reconnaissance aircraft came looking for the fleet. Ranger's combat air patrol shot down a Junkers eighty-eight twenty-two miles out and a Heinkel one fifteen floatplane thirteen miles out. The third escaped.

German and Norwegian records, and the German naval historian Jürgen Rohwer, list five ships destroyed: La Plata, Rabat, Skramstad, Topeka and Vaagan. For sixty percent of the aircrew, it was their first combat mission. Stephen Roskill, the British official naval historian, called the raid an outstanding success. The British Ministry of Economic Warfare judged it the main reason that iron ore shipments out of Narvik fell fifty-eight percent that October.

Captain Rowe's report was blunter about his own side. He wrote that the Navy should not ask its pilots to fight in obsolete aircraft when better types were available. He was describing the Wildcats and Dauntlesses that had just done the job, flown from a carrier the Navy had already written off.

It was the only offensive operation the United States Navy carried out in northern European waters in the whole war, and Ranger was the ship that carried it out.

She never fought again. In December nineteen forty-three, Admiral King approved a full modernization: a stronger flight deck, new elevators, catapults, a bulged hull, more anti-aircraft guns. The Bureau of Ships objected that the work would delay new carriers on the building ways. The plan was shelved in April nineteen forty-four. She got a strengthened flight deck, catapults and new radar instead, and became a training carrier. She made one last ferry run to Casablanca with seventy-six P-thirty-eight fighters, then went through the Panama Canal to the Pacific. There she trained night fighter pilots off Hawaii and new air groups off California. When Japan surrendered, the carrier that had been judged too slow for the Pacific had still never fought there.

Of the seven carriers the United States Navy had before Pearl Harbor, four were sunk in battle: Lexington, Yorktown, Wasp and Hornet. Ranger, Saratoga and Enterprise survived. Ranger was decommissioned at Norfolk on October eighteenth, nineteen forty-six. On January thirty-first, nineteen forty-seven, she was sold for scrap to the Sun Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company of Chester, Pennsylvania, and broken up. No museum took her. Nothing of her was kept.

Go back to the quay at Casablanca, November tenth, nineteen forty-two, three in the afternoon. The newest battleship in France, one turret, four fifteen-inch guns, had just driven off the flagship of an American invasion fleet. A sixteen-inch battleship had already hit her and failed to stop her for more than a few hours. What stopped her was nine Dauntlesses, two thousand-pound bombs, and a carrier of fourteen and a half thousand tons that the Navy had kept out of the war with Japan because she was too slow, too small, and too lightly built.

All of those judgments were correct, and none of them mattered over Casablanca. What mattered was the decision the War College made in the nineteen twenties: more flight decks, more aircraft, accept the weak hull. Ranger was the only ship of her class ever built. On November tenth, nineteen forty-two, she put her bombs on the one ship in Casablanca harbor that could still hurt the invasion.