Lexington (CV 16) - Naval Cruise Book

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proceeded via Eniwetok and Pearl I-Iarbor back to Bremerton, Washington, entering the Puget Sound Navy Yard on March 31, The first leave party dis- embarked the next morning. THE THIRD ROUND During April and the first half of May, 1945, the Lexington underwent extensive overhaul at the Navy Yard. On May 18 the ship left Seattle for Alameda, California. There she took aboard planes and passengers for Pearl Harbor, including Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd, and on May 29 departed for the third time from the United States for combat duty. At Pearl I-Iarbor her new air group, Air Group 94. reported aboard, bringing with them the first squad-e ron of Corsairs to operate from the Lexington. After a week of training exercises off Oahu, the Lexington, as a unit of Task Group 12.4, departed on Iune 13 for Leyte. Intensive training exercises enroute cul- minated in a one-day strike on Wake Island on Iune 20, designed to provide combat experience for the pilots, and to weaken the morale of the isloated Iapanese garrison. The Lexington alone dropped 63 tons of bombs and fired 470 rockets on the feebly resisting sandspit. Shortly after, a Iapanese hospital ship evacuated some 1000 sick and wounded and very defeated Nips. Continuing westward from Wake Island, the ship anchored on Iune 26 in San Pedro Bay, Leyte, Philippine Islands. Tl-IE KNOCKOUT On Iuly l the Lexington departed from Leyte as a unit of Task Group 38.1, one of the three task groups comprising Task Force 38. At that time she could not know that when next she dropped anchor it would be in Tokyo Bay, three days after the sur- render of Iapan. The Task Force moved directly northward for operations against the main Iapanese islands. The first nine days were used in intensive training enroute to the target. On the 10th of Iuly the Task Force struck the Tokyo area. I In certain respects this day set the pattern for the weeks to come. The primary mission was and continued to be the destruction of Iapanese planes in the air and on the ground. On this day, as on all succeeding days, the Iapanese refused to take to the air to protect the I-lomeland. Although on ensuing days half-hearted attacks against units of the Task Force were made by enemy planes, individually and in small groups, no airborne opposition was at any time encountered by our planes, and the ship's guns never opened fire. 4 , - - ' I . . N, X ' . -AX 4 Father E. T. Cope reads the burial service for those who died on November 5, 1944.

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The Lexington tops-off the Ault, one of her screen ot destroyers. This was a matter of routine every two or three days: by the end of the war, task groups were topping oft destroyers within sixty miles of Iapcm.

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