The 1950s

Pulled out of the reserve fleet and recommissioned on 15 January 1951, Bon Homme Richard sailed for Korea that May with an air group of recalled reservists. She launched her first strike the afternoon she arrived off the coast, and on 6 June flew 149 offensive sorties in a single day. A second deployment in 1952 with CVG-7 struck the North Korean hydroelectric network and earned the ship a Navy Unit Commendation.

Then came the yard. She emerged from Puget Sound in 1955 profoundly changed: steam catapults, an angled flight deck, an enclosed hurricane bow. Most of this decade was not spent at war at all but on peacetime WestPac deployments, and the photographs from these years show it, aircraft that kept getting faster and a crew that kept turning over.