Check out this beautiful original Kodachrome. Official caption: “Southern France Invasion, August 1944. USS Kasaan Bay (CVE-69) seen through signal flags of USS Tulagi (CVE-72), on ‘D-Day’ off Southern France, 15 August 1944.”
Casablanca-class escort carriers, Kasaan Bay and Tulagi were built nearly side-by-side by Kaiser Co., Inc. in Vancouver under a Maritime Commission contract on freighter hulls. Commissioned by the Navy on 4 December and 21 December 1943, respectively, after workups and moving from the Pacific Northwest around the globe to the Med, the twins were in RADM Calvin T. Durgin’s Task Group 27.7 for the Dragoon landings along the Riviera, just eight months after commissioning.
DANFS on Kasaan Bay’s landing operations:
Kasaan Bay departed Malta on 12 August, and 3 days later arrived in the invasion area off the French Riviera. Planes from the carrier bombed and strafed German positions, destroying hundreds of enemy vehicles and tanks and downing two enemy aircraft over the beach. She completed her assignment on 30 August and departed Oran, Algeria, on 6 September, arriving in Norfolk 12 days later.
DANFS on Tulagi’s Dragoon days:
On D-day, Tulagi steamed in formation 45 miles off the invasion beach; and, at 0546, she launched her first flight of Hellcats. In the next week, aircraft from Tulagi flew a total of 68 missions and 276 sorties, inflicting considerable damage on the enemy. Weather was generally good as carrier-based planes conducted spotting missions and made strikes at various targets ashore, including gun emplacements and railway facilities. On 21 August, Tulagi’s last day in support of Operation “Dragoon,” German forces were in retreat before the Allied thrust. Tulagi’s fliers conducted a devastating attack along the line of march of a German convoy which snarled the roads for miles around Remouline and crowned her achievements of the day by downing three German Ju 52s.
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A U.S. Navy F6F Hellcat fighter of VOF-1 is waved off during a landing attempt on USS Tulagi (CVE-72) after a close air support mission over southern France during Operation Dragoon, D-day, 15 August 1944 (80-G-K-15370).
The remainder of the war for these twins saw them in the Pacific, lending their 500-foot decks and composite air wings on the drive to the Japanese Home Islands, assigned alternately to antisubmarine and direct support activities.
Inactivated in 1946, with one carrier laid up on the Pacific Fleet mothballs and the other on the Atlantic, they were sold for scrap by the 1960s
Tulagi received four battle stars for World War II service while Kasaan Bay, who saw less Pacific action, only received one.