70 THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINE • March/April 2018 TheCoastalBend.com Coastal BendTour Guide top-left: USS Lexington departs an icy Boston Harbor on Feb. 17, 1943. right: Torpedo bombers on the flight deck, at war in the Pacific. lower-left: Pilots planning their at- tack on the deck of the Lex. right: Ship commanders in the chart room, World War II. Seventy-five years after being commissioned the U.S. Navy’s fifth U.S.S. Lexington, the world’s oldest aircraft carrier is today a thriv- ing tribute to America’s Greatest Generation. The aircraft carrier Cabot was under construction at the Bethlehem Steel Company in Quincy, Massachusetts, in June, 1942, when one of the Navy’s first two flat-deck carriers, the U.S.S. Lexington (CV-2) was lost in the Battle of the Coral Sea. The Navy secretary ordered that the Cabot would be renamed in honor of the lost ship, and on February 17, 1943, the U.S.S. Lexington (CV-16) departed the Fore River Shipyard via the icy, winter waters of Boston Harbor. The new Lexington made news on June 2, 1943, before entering the war, when Nile Kinnick, the University of Iowa football hero who won the 1939 Heisman Trophy, was lost on a training flight off the coast of Venezuela. After passing through the Panama Canal, the Lex joined the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on August 9, 1943. The carrier’s first action in the war was the raid on Japanese naval forces at Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, in which her pilots and crew sank a cargo ship, damaged two cruisers, and destroyed thirty-two aircraft. Despite its success, the ship’s captain gave a near-fatal order to hold anti-aircraft fire at night for fear of giving away their position. The Lexington was stuck by a Japanese torpedo in an attack that caused major damage, and cost the lives of nine sailors. The crew saved the ship by welding shut the damaged starboard compartments that were taking on water, even as she began circling to port while billowed smoke from