The cold and quiet of the South Pacific at 17,500 feet

USS Hornet (CV-8) at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii Territory, probably in June or July 1942. Note the pattern of her Measure 12 (Modified) camouflage

Best known for her role in the Doolittle Raid just weeks after Pearl Harbor, the Yorktown-class aircraft carrier USS Hornet (CV-8) was the seventh such vessel to carry the storied name for the U.S. Navy, going all the way back to 1775.

Commissioned 20 October 1941, her career was all too brief, ending in a hail of torpedoes as part of the Battle of Santa Cruz Island in the Solomons on 26 October 1942, aged just two years and six days. She took 140 of her 2,200-man crew to the bottom with her.

“With the loss of Hornet and serious damage to Enterprise, the Battle of Santa Cruz was a Japanese victory, but at an extremely high cost,” said retired RADM Samuel Cox, director of…