US Aircraft Carrier Sunk 1964
USS Card Mined in Saigon Harbor During the Vietnam War
The USS Card was mined by sappers of a Vietnamese underwater demolition team while docked in the heavily defended Saigon Harbor, then capitol of South Vietnam.
The USS Card was originally laid down as a Type C3-S-A1 merchant cargo ship some six weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor. By 1942 she had been completed as a Bogue-class escort aircraft carrier with the designation pennant number CVE-11. These small carriers, about a third the size of the large fleet carriers, were derided as being 'baby-flattops' or "jeep carriers'. Their designation (CVE) was even said to stand for "Combustible, Vulnerable, and Expendable" When fully commissioned the USS Card was a 495 foot vessel with a full load displacement of 9800 tons. Her two boilers drove a single engine and screw that drove the ship at a slow but reliable 16 knots. Her 800 man crew manned a pair of five inch guns, some forty 40mm and 20mm AAA mounts, and flew as many as 24 sub-hunting aircraft.
She sailed carrying troops to Casablanca, then undertook her WWII sub-hunter career. Forming the center of a hunter killer task force she scoured the North Atlantic and Caribbean for Nazi U-boats. Between 1943 and 1945 she conducted five patrols in which her escorts and aircraft sank no less than eleven confirmed German submarines including five in a single cruise. For these acts the USS Card was the first of several "Jeep Carriers" to be awarded the Presidential Unit Citation and three battle stars. After the war she was placed in mothballs until 1955 when she was reactivated for experiments with helicopters. By 1959 she was reclassified as an auxiliary aviation transport ship. In this role she carried no attached warplanes, was disarmed and her naval crew replaced by civilian merchant mariners. Her pennant number changed for a final time to AKV-40 to reflect this.
In her role as an aviation transport the now-USNS Card carried helicopters and aircraft from one place to another. While docked in the shallow Saigon harbor, in the Republic of Vietnam she was attacked at 0500 May 2, 1964 by a naval mine which holed her. Five of her civilian crewmen were killed and the ship settled in the mud of the harbor. She was easily raised two weeks later and quickly returned to service. It should be noted that she was attacked some three months before the Gulf of Tonkin incident. After this incident the harbor was reinforced to protect the moorings. Floating logs and mooring buoys held aloft razor wire nets to entangle Vietnamese combat swimmers. Thousands of small depth charges and grenades were dropped randomly into the harbor. The US Navy’s Marine Mammal program’s controversial harbor defense dolphins were an offshoot of these efforts. Today’s US Coast Guard Port Security Units use the attack on the USNS Card as a model of what to defend against.
The USNS Card continued her role as a transport until 1970 when she was finally retired after almost thirty years of service. She was unceremoniously broken up for scrap the next year. Her attackers in Saigon have never been identified. More than 55 US merchant mariners were killed in Vietnam in nearly a hundred attacks on some fifty US flagged vessels. They are not mentioned on the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington DC
Sources
The sinking and refitting of the USS Card John McDonald
Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships (US Naval Historical Center, 1959-1991).
USS Card Foundation website.
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