CV-16 USS Lexington Blue Ghost Patch

Japanese radio reported USS Lexington sunk more than once, and every time CV-16 came back to the fight. The fleet called her the Blue Ghost, and that name is stitched across the bottom of this patch. She was laid down as Cabot at Fore River in Quincy, Massachusetts, in July 1941 and renamed in June 1942 to carry on the name of CV-2, the first carrier Lexington, lost at the Battle of the Coral Sea. Commissioned on February 17, 1943, under Captain Felix Stump, she was an Essex class carrier built for the fast carrier war in the Pacific. When she retired in 1991 she was the last Essex class carrier still in commission.

On the night of December 4, 1943, off Kwajalein, a torpedo hit her starboard side, killed nine men and knocked out her steering, and she made Pearl Harbor on a hand-operated emergency steering unit. Her F6F Hellcats were in the middle of the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot during the Battle of the Philippine Sea on June 19 and 20, 1944. At Leyte Gulf that October her aircraft helped sink the battleship Musashi in the Sibuyan Sea, and off Cape Engano her planes alone sank the carrier Zuikaku. On November 5, 1944, a kamikaze crashed near her island, killing 50 and wounding 132, and her crew had the fires under control in about 20 minutes and resumed flight operations. She came out of World War II with 11 battle stars and the Presidential Unit Citation.

The patch is 5 inches wide by 4 inches tall, a white-bordered circle with the carrier's flight deck running out past the rim on the right, and the cut edge follows that outline. U.S.S. LEXINGTON arcs across the top in blue on white and BLUE GHOST across the bottom, inside a gold ring. Her gray profile rides over a light blue sky and a dark blue sea, with CV-16 above the flight deck. Over the hull number sits a ribbon in blue, gold and scarlet, the colors of the Presidential Unit Citation, with a single blue star at its center, under an arc of eight red stars and with five more red stars below the ship. The backing is iron-on, and it can be sewn on as well.

Her designations tell the postwar story: CVA-16 in 1952, CVS-16 in 1962, the training carrier CVT-16 in 1969 and AVT-16 in 1978. For nearly 30 years she worked out of Pensacola, and a long line of naval aviators made their first carrier landings on her deck. In 1980 she became the first U.S. carrier with women stationed aboard as crew. She was decommissioned on November 8, 1991, and became a museum ship in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1992. She was named a National Historic Landmark in 2003.

It belongs in a shadow box with your cruise book or a photo from her flight deck in Corpus Christi, or on the vest you wear to reunions. It also makes a good gift for the naval aviator who made his first trap on her deck in the Gulf of Mexico off Pensacola. She was reported sunk more than once, and she is still afloat.