[10] The Essex-class carriers were designed with little space reserved for radar and the additional systems added while under construction contributed to the general overcrowding of the crew and the cramped island of the ships.

[12] The ship did not return to any naval base in Hawaii or the West Coast until July 1945 when she arrived at San Francisco, California, for repairs for her typhoon damage, so it is unlikely that any major modifications were done before then.

[14] The Chief of Naval Operations had ordered three Essex-class carriers on 10 May 1940 in anticipation of Congress passing the Two-Ocean Navy Act,[15] although the ship that later became Hornet originally had the name Kearsarge with the hull number of CV-12.

[1] Hornet worked up off Bermuda before departing Norfolk, Virginia, on 14 February 1944 to join Task Force 58 at Majuro Atoll in the Marshall Islands where she arrived on 20 March.

To block the exits from Kossol and trap all of the ships inside the lagoon, the torpedo bomber squadrons from Hornet and her sisters Lexington and Bunker Hill had trained on aerial minelaying.

Bad weather and a heavy overcast prevented the Americans from gaining complete air superiority until the mid-afternoon, but they were able to severely damage the naval base's infrastructure over the next two days.

Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher, commander of the task force, decided to move the air strikes forward to 11 June, hoping to catch the Japanese off guard.

A picket line of destroyers was stationed between the carriers and Guam and they controlled interceptions by the task group's fighters of about a dozen reconnaissance and attack aircraft that afternoon.

[24] The new commander of the Combined Fleet, Admiral Soemu Toyoda, was uncertain if the Americans were merely attacking the Japanese facilities in the Marianas until the fast battleships escorting Task Force 58 were detached to make a preliminary bombardment of Saipan on 13 June.

Even before he received the report of the bombardment, he ordered the 1st Mobile Fleet to move forward to Guimaras Island to start training their inexperienced aviators in a more protected environment.

To take advantage of this window of opportunity to destroy Japanese aerial reinforcements gathering in the Bonin Islands, Spruance ordered Task Groups 58.1 and 58.4 to rendezvous on the 14th, attack the airbases there the following day and return in time to concentrate for the battle that he expected on the 17th.

At nightfall on the 17th his ships were spotted by an American submarine some 900 nmi (1,700 km; 1,000 mi) west of Saipan, although Spruance did not receive its report until the early morning of 18 June.

[38] In a strategy conference in Pearl Harbor in July, President Franklin Roosevelt agreed with General Douglas MacArthur that the Philippines, an American territory, would be liberated and they set the date for 20 December.

Halsey, coupling this information with the weak resistance put up by the Japanese during his raids on the Philippines, believed that most of the preliminary attacks planned before invading Luzon on 20 December, could be skipped and suggested to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the landing date be moved forward to 20 October.

Bad weather forced the cancellation of most of the airstrikes planned for the second day, but Halsey decided to attack Coron Bay in the Calamian Islands instead, an anchorage often used by Japanese oilers, on the other side of the Philippines with TGs 38.1 and 38.3.

TGs 38.1 and 38.2 attacked targets in Luzon on the 25th, sinking the crippled heavy cruiser Kumano and a few smaller ships, and claimed to have shot down 26 Japanese aircraft and destroyed 29 on the ground.

The task force was unable to refuel on the 17th due to worsening weather and another attempt the next morning also failed before Halsey sailed unwittingly into the path of Typhoon Cobra later that day.

With his obligation to cover the Lingayen Gulf area until the landings were done, Halsey's ships entered the South China Sea during the night of 9–10 January in search of the two Ise-class battleships that had been partially turned into seaplane carriers and had been mistakenly reported at Cam Ranh Bay.

En route back to Ulithi, TF 38's planes flew reconnaissance missions over Okinawa on 22 January to aid the planned invasion of that island while also attacking Japanese positions.

TF 58's pilots claimed to have shot down 341 aircraft and destroyed 190 on the ground; attacks on industrial targets were not very effective and little shipping was sunk, with the most notable example being the recently completed Imperial Japanese Army escort carrier Yamashio Maru.

The following day, TG 581.1 reconnaissance aircraft spotted a convoy that consisted of two troop transports, an ammunition ship and five escorts off Amami Ōshima headed for Okinawa; an 112-aircraft airstrike from Clark's carriers sank them all.

[66] Clark ordered that the damaged sisters steam backwards at 18 knots (33 km/h; 21 mph) and launch their aircraft over the stern on 7 June as they provided the CAP over the task group.

[68] Her repairs and refit were complete by 13 September, after which she was assigned to Operation Magic Carpet that had her ferry troops home from the Marianas and Hawaiian Islands, returning to San Francisco on 9 February 1946.

[68] "Hornet was recommissioned on 20 March 1951, then sailed from San Francisco for the New York Naval Shipyard, where she was decommissioned on 12 May for conversion to an attack aircraft carrier CVA-12, under the SCB-27A upgrade program.

Hornet helped to cover the evacuation of Vietnamese from the Communist-controlled north to South Vietnam, then ranged from Japan to Formosa, Okinawa, and the Philippines in readiness training with the 7th Fleet.

[70] "In the following years, Hornet was regularly deployed to the 7th Fleet for operations ranging from the coast of South Vietnam, to the shores of Japan, the Philippines and Okinawa";[68] she also played a key part in the Apollo program, as a recovery ship for uncrewed and crewed spaceflights.

[71] On 6 March 1965, a Sea King helicopter took off from Hornet in San Diego and flew to the aircraft carrier Franklin D. Roosevelt, off Naval Station Mayport, Florida, without refueling or landing.

After the North Koreans shot down a Lockheed EC-121 Warning Star AEW aircraft on 14 April over international waters, Hornet was ordered to reinforce the American ships gathering in the area in what became a pointless show of force.

[79] Hornet recovered the three astronauts (Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin) and their command module Columbia from the first Moon landing mission, Apollo 11, after splashdown about 900 miles southwest of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean on 24 July 1969.

[80] President Nixon was on board to welcome the returning astronauts back to Earth, where they lived in quarantine aboard Hornet prior to transfer to the Lunar Receiving Laboratory at Houston.