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During the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the Japanese managed to lure off the main US carrier force leaving the landings defended only by surface vessels and some small escort carriers. Two significant Japanese surface forces attempted to attack from the north and the south. The southern force was detected and caught in an ambush by US forces including battleships and essentially annihilated.The norther force appeared to have been driven off by air attacks but circled back and was within striking distance of the landings with only a few escort carriers, destroyers and destroyer escorts in their way. These forces put up such a ferocious fight that the overwhelmingly stronger Japanese force lost heart and turned away.In the course of the fight the destroyers and destroyer escorts essentially sacrificed themselves to save the small carriers and the transports in the landing zone. In one incident, the crew of an American vessel that sank were in the water as a Japanese destroyer approached at speed. They figured that they were coming in to finish them off. They were shocked as the ship plowed past them to see the Japanese officers on the bridge all standing at attention saluting them.There is a great book on this battle by James Hornfischer called “Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors”.As a side note, Samuel Elliot Morrison records in his history that after the war a senior US Admiral was discussing with the man who commanded the escort carrier group the official Japanese account of the action in which the Japanese commander observed that the escort group fled south at 22 knots. He remarked to his colleague, “I knew you were scared. I just did not know you were that scared.” Max speed of an escort carrier was 17 knots.

In a phase - industrial capacityThe 151 number is a little misleading …The United States ordered 24 Essex-class carriers but only 17 were completed before the war ended. It built 125 escort carriers of various classes, 39 of which were transferred to the Royal Navy under Lend-Lease, one of those vessels was returned to the US Navy and commissioned as USS Charger (CVE-30). There were 9 Independence-class light carriers commissioned during the war. The United States also ordered 3 Midway-class carriers, but none were completed before the war ended.The real tally of carriers designed for combat against enemy carriers and major surface combatants that were commissioned during the war was 26 (17 fleet carriers and 9 light carriers).The escort carriers, while pressed into service to combat the Japanese battle line at Leyte Gulf, were never intended for fleet combat. They were designed with limited air groups to serve as anti-submarine platforms. During the war, the most effective way to find and prosecute a submarine was to initiate contact from the air. A region of the mid-Atlantic was too far from bases to allow land-based aircraft to loiter in support of a convoy for a meaningful length of time. The escort carriers were the answer to the ‘mid-ocean gap.’ During Operation Torch, the landings in North Africa, and in the island hopping campaign across the Pacific, escort carriers were used for close air support.The escort carriers were produced in such large numbers because they were easier to build. They were, in essence, merchant ship hulls fitted with flight decks. While this made for swift construction, it made these vessels susceptible to catastrophic damage from almost any weapon. Sailors manning these ships were said to regard the designator - CVE - as standing for Combustible, Vulnerable, Expendable.The measure of the industrial capacity of the United States is more than just the aircraft carriers, of whatever type. Its shipyards produced 274 destroyers of the Fletcher, Allen M. Sumner, and Gearing classes, 355 destroyer escorts of various classes, 12 heavy cruisers, 15 light cruisers, 8 anti-aircraft cruisers, 8 battleships over 3,500 merchant ships (Liberty, Victory, and T-2 tankers, as well as a limited number of other designs), and thousands of landing ships and landing craft. In 1943 alone, the United States produced more aircraft than did Japan between 1939 and 1945 …Paul Kennedy, in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), quotes a contemporaneous think tank assessment. In 1937, based on population, natural resources, industrial plants, and financial resources, each of the seven great powers was assessed. In aggregate, they represented over 90 percent of the war-making potential of the world. Germany and the Soviet Union each weighed in at a little over 14 percent of the total. The British Empire represented a little over 10 percent. Japan, France, and Italy combined for a little over 10 percent …The United States represented 41.7 percent of the total war-making potential of the world, in 1937, when the financial resources of the country were at the lowest point during the depression.That is how the United States completed construction and commissioned or transferred to Britain 151 aircraft carriers during the war.

A fleet carrier was a full sized carrier, a naval warship and built to naval warship standards. Compartmentalization, damage control, the works.The carrier could hold about 80–90 planes.The Escort carrier was a carrier done on the cheap. It was a downsized, cheaply built, mini-carrier built to civilian merchant standards, not military naval standards.Because of this lesser damage control and lack of compartmentalization, one of the nicknames of the Escort carriers was Kaiser Coffins, after the shipyard which came up with the plans for them. They were built in the same fast manner as the Liberty ships. Modular and slapped together.They could be built fast and cheap.You could build three of them for one full sized fleet carrier and if you lost one, you only lost a third of the planes, not the whole lot of them.USS Liscome Bay was a Casablanca class “Kaiser Coffin".During the invasion of the Gilbert Islands, Liscome Bay along with several other ships in formation was off Makin Island when she was struck by a single torpedo in the aft end.The torpedo was able to detonate the main bomb storage magazine and the entire carrier just when WHOOOM! in a massive fireball that rained debris for two and a half miles around where the vessel used to be. One sailor on another nearby carrier was struck by a fire extinguisher from Liscome Bay. More that 800 sailors were killed, and still today is the single greatest loss of life and carrier in US Naval History.One of those killed in the disaster was a hero of Pearl Harbor. Dory Miller.