She is the fourth US Navy ship to bear the name. Decommissioned shortly after the end of the war, she was modernized and recommissioned in the early s as an attack carrier CVA , and then eventually became an antisubmarine carrier CVS. In her second career, she served mainly in the Atlantic, but also participated in the Vietnam War. She was the recovery ship for a Mercury and a Gemini space mission. Because of her prominent role in battle, she was nicknamed "the Fighting I", while her frequent bad luck and time spent in dry dock for repairsβshe was torpedoed once and hit in separate attacks by four Japanese kamikaze aircraftβearned her the nicknames "Decrepit" and "the Dry I".
She was launched on 26 April , the fifth Essex -class aircraft carrier to be launched. She was sponsored by the wife of Vice Admiral John H. On 16 August , she was commissioned with Captain Thomas L. Sprague in command before heading to the Caribbean for shakedown and training. She thereafter returned to Norfolk, before departing once more on 3 December, bound for San Francisco. She proceeded on to Pearl Harbor , Hawaii, arriving there on 10 January, where she began preparations to join the rest of the Pacific Fleet for offensive operations against the Imperial Japanese Navy.
The three carriers' air group destroyed all 83 Japanese aircraft stationed on Roi-Namur in the first two days of the strikes, before Marines went ashore on neighboring islands on 31 January in the Battle of Kwajalein.
That morning, aircraft from Intrepid attacked Japanese beach defenses on Ennuebing Island until ten minutes before the first Marines landed. The Marines quickly took the island and used it as a fire base to support the follow-on attack on Roi. From 17 to 19 February, the carriers pounded Japanese forces in the lagoon, sinking two destroyers and some , GRT of merchant ships.
The strikes demonstrated the vulnerability of Truk, which convinced the Japanese to avoid using it in the future. The torpedo struck 15 ft 5 m below the waterline, jamming the ship's rudder to port and flooding several compartments. Sprague was able to counteract the jammed rudder for two days by running the port side screw at high speed while idling the starboard screw, until high winds overpowered the improvised steering.
