"The Decrepit": USS Intrepid's Nine Lives

Sailors on this aircraft carrier moored ahead on the Hudson used to call her the Decrepit, a bitter joke about how many times she limped home for repairs. The USS Intrepid earned that nickname the hard way, surviving five separate kamikaze strikes and a torpedo hit during World War Two in the Pacific.

The first kamikaze found her on October twenty ninth, nineteen forty four, killing ten men at a gun position. Barely a month later, on November twenty fifth, two Japanese pilots crashed into her within minutes of each other, setting the hangar deck ablaze and killing sixty nine sailors. Months before either attack, in February of nineteen forty four, a torpedo plane had already put a torpedo into her stern, fifteen feet below the waterline, jamming her rudder and killing eleven more men. A final kamikaze tore through her flight deck in April of nineteen forty five, killing eight and wounding twenty one.

Each time, the Intrepid sailed or was towed back to port, patched up, and sent back to the fight. That pattern, damage followed by repair followed by damage, earned her a reputation among her own crew as a jinxed ship, with nicknames like Decrepit and the Dry I for all the time she spent sitting in dry dock.

She survived the war anyway and served for decades afterward, including as a recovery ship for NASA space capsules. In nineteen eighty two she was saved from the scrapyard and turned into the floating museum docked here today, her flight deck now lined with retired fighter jets instead of battle damage. The same hull that kamikaze pilots and a torpedo could not sink now welcomes visitors walking the same decks where dozens of her sailors once died defending her.