Three wars, two modernizations, and 27 years of active service.
The name predates the ship you are reading about by 165 years. The first Bon Homme Richard was the former French merchant vessel Duc de Duras, procured for the Continental Navy by Benjamin Franklin while serving as the colonies' Commissioner to France. The French converted her into a warship and rechristened her Bon Homme Richard in Franklin's honor: the phrase is the French idiom for "Poor Richard," as in his famous almanac. She was a tired and weathered Indiaman of 152 feet, with 40 guns mounted in hulls never designed for them.
Captain John Paul Jones took command and made her ready for war. On 19 June 1779 she sailed from L'Orient, France, leading a seven-ship squadron on a mission to harass British shipping lanes off the English and Scottish coasts. For three months the squadron raided and skirmished. On the night of 23 September 1779, off Flamborough Head on the Yorkshire coast, Bon Homme Richard intercepted the powerful British frigate HMS Serapis, commanded by Captain Richard Pearson. The first exchange of broadsides was catastrophic for the Americans: two of Bon Homme Richard's own guns burst, killing their crews, and the newer British frigate held the superior position. Jones' only answer was to close the distance, grappling the two hulls together so the Serapis could not bring her broadside to bear. His Marines took to the rigging and sniped the British gun crews below.
"I have not yet begun to fight."
Captain John Paul Jones, 23 September 1779, in reply to a British demand for surrender
The battle lasted more than three hours in the dark. At its height, with the Bon Homme Richard on fire and taking on water through her shot-opened hull, the British hailed across asking whether the Americans had struck their colors. Jones' reply was defiant and became the most enduring words in American naval history. The Bon Homme Richard and her crew prevailed. The ship was so extensively damaged she was ordered scuttled the following day, sinking with her colors still flying. The surviving crew claimed the Serapis and sailed her to Texel, Holland, arriving 3 October 1779.
The Name Lives On · LHD-6
USS Bon Homme Richard (LHD-6)
A third ship carried the name into the 21st century. USS Bon Homme Richard (LHD-6), a Wasp-class amphibious assault ship, was commissioned on 16 August 1998 at Naval Station North Island, San Diego. She served with the Pacific Fleet for more than two decades, deploying to the Western Pacific and taking part in humanitarian and combat operations. On 12 July 2020, while moored at Naval Base San Diego, a fire broke out in her well deck and burned for four days. The damage was assessed as beyond economical repair, and she was decommissioned on 14 April 2021. Three ships, three centuries, the same name.
Laid down on 1 February 1943 and launched on 29 April 1944, Bon Homme Richard was commissioned at the Brooklyn Navy Yard on 26 November 1944 under Capt. A.O. Rule, Jr., USN. Mrs. John S. McCain, wife of Vice Admiral McCain, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Air, served as her sponsor at the launching. She carried twelve 5-inch guns, ten quad 40mm mounts, and a scattering of 20mm guns as built. The fourteenth of the Essex-class carriers, she was the last of them completed in time to serve in World War II.
Fitting out finished, she ran the degaussing range at Bayonne and reported for duty in mid-January 1945. Shakedown followed with Carrier Air Group Sixteen in the Gulf of Paria off Trinidad, then post-shakedown repairs back at Bayonne. In March she transited the Panama Canal, stopped at San Diego to load aircraft and personnel, and made Pearl Harbor on 5 April. Training continued through May with several air groups rotating aboard. CVG-16 was eventually detached for Saipan, and Bon Homme Richard picked up a new and urgent assignment: Night Air Group CVG(N)-91. The reassignment traced straight back to Okinawa, where a kamikaze had just knocked USS Enterprise, the fleet's only night carrier, out of the fight. Bon Homme Richard was redesignated CV(N)-31 and sailed for Ulithi on 22 May, running night qualifications the whole way across.
She joined Task Force 38 on 4 June 1945 and went straight to work, flying strikes against Japanese installations on Hokkaido, Honshu, and Shikoku through July and August. CVG(N)-91 had already logged 379 night sorties and 113 day sorties just getting to the operating area; the campaign total came to nine confirmed aircraft destroyed, plus two probables. Ensign P.T. MacDonald of VF(N)-91 accounted for a third of that total alone, shooting down three aircraft and damaging two more on a single dusk combat air patrol on 13 August, two days before Japan announced its surrender. He was eventually credited with four kills and an assist, a tally still carried today in the kill markings painted on his aircraft. For the rest of that month her planes flew defensively only, holding station while the surrender terms were worked out.
Bon Homme Richard dropped anchor in Tokyo Bay on 16 September 1945, seventy-eight consecutive days after leaving port. On 20 October, after nearly seven months away, she passed back under the Golden Gate Bridge, her own air group and USS Yorktown's flying escort overhead. That autumn she made two Magic Carpet runs to Japan and Guam, carrying 7,817 troops home for separation before being decommissioned at Puget Sound on 9 January 1947. She was laid up in the 19th Reserve Fleet at Bremerton alongside five of her sisters: USS Essex (CV-9), USS Yorktown (CV-10), USS Ticonderoga (CV-14), USS Lexington (CV-16), and USS Bunker Hill (CV-17).
Less than three weeks after North Korean forces crossed the 38th Parallel in June 1950, the Navy began pulling ships from the reserve fleet. Bon Homme Richard was recommissioned on 15 January 1951, with Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz delivering the keynote address, under the command of Capt. Cecil B. Gill, USN. Her new air group, CVG-102, was assembled from recalled reserve squadrons gathered from bases across the country: F9F Panthers, F4U Corsairs, and AD Skyraiders, with composite detachments for night attack and early warning.
She sailed from San Diego on 10 May 1951, arrived off Korea on 29 May, and launched her first strike that afternoon: four Panthers on an armed reconnaissance of the highway and rail corridor from Wonsan toward Songjin, hitting truck and rail traffic along the way. One aircraft went down on that first launch; the pilot was recovered. For the next seventeen days her aircraft hit rail lines, bridges, supply dumps, and troop positions up and down the North Korean coast, with her Corsairs and Skyraiders also spotting naval gunfire for the battleship USS New Jersey. On 6 June, Bonnie Dick flew 149 offensive sorties in a single day, the high mark for the cruise.
Four line periods followed through the autumn. The toll was nine aircraft lost to enemy action, three pilots killed, four injured, one missing; over 4,600 sorties were flown in the final month-long period alone. On 27 November, Skyraiders and Corsairs flying rescue cover for a downed Essex pilot northeast of the parallel were jumped by MiG-15s. No kills on either side; one AD came back with damage. It was Bonnie Dick's first look at the Russian-built jets.
She returned to San Diego for the holidays, then a yard period at Bremerton, before sailing again on 20 May 1952 with a new air group, CVG-7. Her second Korean deployment opened with a target the Navy had held back from for political reasons: North Korea's hydroelectric network, the same plants that fed power north into Manchuria. Bad weather scrubbed the first strike, but by afternoon the skies cleared enough for her Skyraiders, Corsairs, and Panthers to join aircraft from three other carriers and the Air Force against the Kyosen No. 2 plant, with a second flight taking out Fusen No. 2 the same day. Both were reported permanently out of commission. The campaign against the hydro complex continued through the summer, alongside strikes on rail yards, warehouses, and troop barracks up and down the Wonsan valley.
Capt. Paul W. Watson relieved Capt. Gill that April as the ship prepared for the deployment. In late July, her aircraft joined a combined strike on Pyongyang itself, flying flak suppression alongside squadrons from the Air Force, Marines, and Royal Australian and Royal Navy air arms, while her Skyraiders kept up close support for front-line troops. That October brought the "Kojo Amphibious Feint": for four days, four attack carriers and two escort carriers hammered a twenty-five-mile stretch of coast around the town of Kojo as though preparing an invasion, drawing enemy strength away from the front while truce talks dragged on. Landing craft ran to within a thousand yards of the beach on 16 October before turning back, the deception complete. Navy pilots flew a reported 700 sorties that single day, the most of the war to that point.
In August, moored at Yokosuka, she was recalled to the line on short notice to cover for USS Boxer, sidelined by a serious fire; on 11 August her aircraft knocked out five enemy gun emplacements in a single strike. A third phase of operations that autumn hit the industrial district and rail yards at Puryong, and a jet reconnaissance flight sank a 130-foot enemy vessel with rocket fire. She patrolled the East China Sea through December, guarding against any buildup while truce talks continued, before heading home in early January 1953. She and CVG-7 received the Navy Unit Commendation for the deployment. Four months later she was decommissioned at San Francisco for one of the first major SCB-27C conversions carried out on an Essex-class carrier, a rebuild that would take more than two years and add her angled deck and hurricane bow.
One of only three Essex-class carriers modernized simultaneously under the SCB-27C program, Bon Homme Richard came out of Puget Sound a different ship. Steam catapults replaced the old hydraulics, a 10-degree angled flight deck was installed, the bow was enclosed in the new "hurricane bow" configuration, and nuclear weapons handling facilities were added below decks. Displacement climbed to 42,600 tons, overall length to 888 feet. She was redesignated CVA-31 and recommissioned on 6 September 1955.
Five peacetime WestPac deployments followed over the next eight years, each with a different air wing and a changing aircraft inventory. Her first postwar cruise, in 1956, brought aboard the radical twin-engine F7U-3 Cutlass, an aircraft she would fly only that one time. On the second, in 1957, two of her F8U Crusaders made the first non-stop, coast-to-coast carrier launch-and-recovery in Navy history, crossing the country in three hours twenty-eight minutes to land aboard USS Saratoga off Florida while President Eisenhower watched from Saratoga's deck. That same cruise she became the first Essex-class carrier to operate the F4D-1 Skyray and the A3D Skywarrior, and passed her 9,000th arrested landing while hosting a visit from Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in the Formosa Strait. Beginning in 1958, she flew six straight deployments with Carrier Air Wing 19, carrying the partnership into her first Vietnam cruise.
Notable Operation · 1964
The First Concord Squadron
On 31 March 1964, Bon Homme Richard led Task Force 90 out of Subic Bay and through the Strait of Malacca, becoming the first U.S. naval force to patrol the Indian Ocean since the mid-1950s. The task force was designated the First Concord Squadron. Over forty-seven days the group called at Diego-Suarez (Madagascar), Mombasa (Kenya), and the Port of Aden, and made a scheduled visit with the Shah of Iran before returning to Subic Bay on 16 May. Accompanying vessels were USS Frank Knox (DD-742), USS Blue (DD-744), USS Shelton (DD-790), and the oiler USS Hassayampa (AO-145).
Within two months of her return to Subic Bay, Bon Homme Richard was ordered north to the Gulf of Tonkin.
She was partway through what was meant to be a goodwill cruise when the war caught up with her. In the spring of 1964 she'd led the "Concord Squadron" through the Strait of Malacca and into the Indian Ocean, the first U.S. task group to patrol those waters in nearly a decade, calling at ports in Madagascar, Kenya, and Aden along the way. She was back at Subic Bay that August when North Vietnamese patrol boats attacked USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy in the Gulf of Tonkin. Bon Homme Richard was ordered to the area within days and stayed on Yankee Station for forty-five straight days, the opening stretch of what became a ten-month deployment, the longest of her career. She would go on to complete six Vietnam combat deployments in all, more than any other carrier in the fleet, cycling through three air wings over the course of the war: CVW-19 on the early cruises, CVW-21 through the middle deployments, CVW-5 on the final three.
Her second Vietnam cruise ran through the back half of 1965 and into January 1966, after which she entered Long Beach Naval Shipyard for what was, at the time, the largest overhaul ever performed on a carrier without decommissioning her: a ship-wide air-conditioning system, an automatic data processing center, and an aluminum-clad flight deck landing area. She left San Diego for her third combat cruise on 26 January 1967 with Carrier Air Wing 21 embarked, bound for the Red River Valley and North Vietnam's major cities.
On 1 May 1967, over Kep Airfield in North Vietnam, Lt. Cdr. Ted Swartz of VA-76 rolled in on a MiG-17 in an A-4C Skyhawk and fired a pair of unguided Zuni rockets. The MiG came apart on the runway. Swartz became the first Navy pilot to destroy a MiG from an attack aircraft and the first in any service to do it with an unguided weapon. That same morning, two more MiGs went down in aerial combat and five were destroyed on the ground. By the time CVW-21's last combat sortie landed aboard at the end of the deployment, the cruise total stood at 14 MiGs destroyed, nine in aerial combat and five more on the ground, plus a dozen further damaged, across a record 73 major strikes. Bon Homme Richard had become the Navy's first "Ace Carrier" of the Vietnam War.
Three further deployments followed with Carrier Air Wing 5, returning to the ship after more than a decade away. The first, beginning February 1968, coincided with the siege of Khe Sanh: her Crusaders and Skyhawks flew close air support against North Vietnamese forces ringing the Marine garrison, destroying or damaging some 750 trucks, 600 waterborne supply craft, and 93 bridges over the course of the cruise, and adding three more MiG kills that brought her wartime total to seventeen, the most of any carrier in the war. Cdr. Lowell "Moose" Myers of VF-51 got the first of the three, downing a MiG-21 near Vinh on his 181st combat mission. "I've been training for it for twelve years and practiced it a thousand times," he said afterward. "It was the biggest thrill of my life." Weeks later Cdr. Guy Cane of VF-53 splashed another, describing the dogfight as pure "old fashioned WWI donnybrook." A joint kill by two more VF-51 and VF-53 pilots followed within the week. Her next deployment, in March 1969, was extended into Korean waters after North Korea shot down a Navy EC-121 reconnaissance plane. Her sixth and final Vietnam cruise got underway in April 1970, making her the first carrier to deploy six times to the war, and wrapped that October, by which point no carrier in the fleet had flown more missions against North Vietnam.
USS Bon Homme Richard was decommissioned on 2 July 1971 at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. She was the only carrier to serve as an attack carrier through three separate wars, with seventeen confirmed MiG kills, the most of any carrier in the Vietnam War, fifteen overseas deployments, and six Vietnam combat cruises to her name. She was the Biggest Deck in WestPac.
Stricken from the Naval Vessel Register in 1989 and sold for scrapping three years later. An A-4 Skyhawk that flew from her decks is on display at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. In 1993, Gladstones 4 Fish on the Pacific Coast Highway in Los Angeles installed tables, chairs, serving carts, and bar tops cut from her flight deck planking.
Before the breakers finished the job, the recycling yard in Long Beach held an open house, letting former crew back aboard one last time. By several accounts, the ship had sat mostly powerless and dark for months by then; for the open house the yard workers got the hangar bay lights and passageway lighting running again, and the old carrier briefly felt like herself. A group of veterans held an informal memorial there for shipmates who had died aboard her. Within days, the crews began taking her apart for good.
The guest speaker at the decommissioning ceremony was Rear Admiral George S. Morrison, who had commanded Bon Homme Richard from 23 November 1963 to 25 November 1964, a tenure spanning the First Concord Squadron and the ship's initial movement toward Vietnam. RADM Morrison is better known today as the father of Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors. Jim Morrison died in Paris the following morning, 3 July 1971. Bremerton runs nine hours behind Paris; the two events unfolded within a few hours of each other.
One relic predates the ship entirely. Aboard the preserved carrier USS Yorktown (CV-10) at Patriots Point in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, visitors who make it down to the keel will find a plaque designating the ship as USS Bon Homme Richard. The Yorktown's keel was laid under that name in 1941; when USS Yorktown (CV-5) was lost at Midway in June 1942, the Navy transferred the name forward, and the Bon Homme Richard designation passed to the next available hull: the ship that became CV-31.
The section title "The Last CVA" is borrowed from Lt. Pete Clayton's account of the decommissioning, published in The Hook (Tailhook Association), Winter 1998. CVA was the Navy's hull classification for attack carrier. By 1971 all remaining Essex-class ships had been redesignated CVS or decommissioned; Bon Homme Richard was the last of them to carry the CVA designation.
Sources: Decommissioning Ceremony Program, USS Bon Homme Richard CVA-31, 2 July 1971 · Lt. Pete Clayton, USN, "The Last CVA," The Hook (Tailhook Association), Winter 1998 · USS Bon Homme Richard CV/CVA-31 Cruises and Air Wing Records.