The USS Yorktown in Charleston Never Fought at Midway. It Was Named for the Carrier That Sank There.

More than 300,000 people a year visit Patriots Point in South Carolina, where the centerpiece is the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown. It is easy to assume you are standing on the carrier that fought at Midway.

That ship is more than 16,600 feet (5,100 m) down in the Pacific. In April 2025, NOAA’s cameras went inside its hangar deck for the first time and found Dauntless dive bombers and what looks like a 1941 Ford station wagon.

There were two carriers named Yorktown, and their stories are tied together on purpose. Here is which is which, what each one did, and why the name has no ship today.

Which USS Yorktown Sank, and Which Is in Charleston?

USS Yorktown (CV-5) is the one that sank. She was commissioned in 1937, fought in the first six months of the Pacific War, and went down on June 7, 1942, three days after Japanese aircraft crippled her at the Battle of Midway.

USS Yorktown (CV-10) is the museum ship. She was being built as Bon Homme Richard when the Navy renamed her Yorktown on September 26, 1942, in honor of the carrier lost at Midway. She fought from 1943 to 1945, served until 1970, and has been a museum at Patriots Point in Mount Pleasant, near Charleston, since 1975.

	Yorktown (CV-5)	Yorktown (CV-10)
Class	Yorktown	Essex
Commissioned	September 30, 1937	April 15, 1943
Length	809 ft 6 in (246.7 m)	872 ft (265.8 m)
Displacement	19,800 tons	27,100 tons
Aircraft	81 to 85	80+
Fate	Sunk June 7, 1942, Battle of Midway	Museum ship, Patriots Point, since 1975

The First Yorktown Fought Three Campaigns in Six Months

CV-5 was the lead ship of the Yorktown class, built at Newport News, Virginia. In the first weeks of 1942 her planes raided Japanese bases in the Marshall and Gilbert Islands, and on March 10 they flew across New Guinea’s Owen Stanley mountains to attack Japanese forces at Lae and Salamaua.

In May came the Battle of the Coral Sea. Aircraft from Yorktown and USS Lexington sank the Japanese light carrier Shoho, the victory one Lexington pilot announced by radio as “Scratch one flattop.”

The next day, Japanese aircraft found the American carriers. Yorktown dodged eight torpedoes, but one bomb went through her flight deck and exploded below, killing or seriously injuring 66 men.

The 72-Hour Repair Was a Patch, Not a Fix

Yorktown reached Pearl Harbor on May 27, 1942. The Navy’s own history says experts estimated she needed at least three months in a shipyard, and Rear Adm. Aubrey Fitch, who was aboard, put it at 90 days.

Adm. Chester Nimitz knew from codebreakers that Japan was about to strike Midway. His answer was “We must have this ship back in three days.”

More than 1,400 shipyard workers went at her around the clock in Dry Dock No. 1. Honolulu had rolling blackouts so the yard had enough power, and on the morning of May 30 Yorktown sailed with workers still aboard finishing the job.

What the Yorktown Did at Midway

On the morning of June 4, Yorktown’s air group was the only one at the Battle of Midway to launch a coordinated strike, with torpedo planes, dive bombers and fighters arriving almost together.

Seventeen SBD Dauntless dive bombers of Bombing Squadron 3, led by Lt. Cmdr. Max Leslie, went after the carrier Soryu. Leslie and three others had accidentally jettisoned their bombs on the way, but they pressed on anyway to draw fire, and Soryu took three direct hits from 1,000-pound (450 kg) bombs.

The cost fell on the torpedo squadron. Torpedo Squadron 3 lost 10 of its 12 Devastators without scoring a hit. Above them, Lt. Cmdr. John Thach, flying a Grumman F4F Wildcat, improvised the beam defense that became the Thach Weave and shot down three Zeros.

Around noon, the one Japanese carrier still able to fight, Hiryu, struck back. Yorktown’s Wildcats shot down most of the incoming dive bombers, but the seven that got through scored three direct hits and two near misses.

Her crew put out the fires and got her moving again. When Hiryu’s torpedo planes arrived that afternoon, Yorktown looked undamaged, and their leader attacked her as if she were a fresh carrier. Two torpedoes hit her port side.

Thirty-five of her crew had been killed in the two attacks. When her list reached 26 degrees, Capt. Elliott Buckmaster ordered the crew off the ship.

She did not sink that night. A salvage party of 29 officers and 141 men went back aboard on June 6, with the destroyer Hammann alongside.

That afternoon the Japanese submarine I-168 fired four torpedoes. One broke Hammann in half, killing 81 of her 251 crew, and two hit Yorktown. At 7:01 a.m. on June 7, 1942, she rolled over onto her port side and sank, her battle flags still flying.

The Wreck Is More Than 3 Miles Down

Robert Ballard’s expedition, run with the U.S. Navy and National Geographic, found the wreck on May 19, 1998. It sits more than 16,600 feet (5,100 m) down, with many of its anti-aircraft guns still pointing up.

Ocean Exploration Trust’s ship Nautilus filmed it in detail in September 2023, the first close look in 25 years. That same year, the Navy designated the wreck a Site of Extraordinary Character.

On April 19 and 20, 2025, NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer sent its vehicle into the hangar deck for the first time. It found at least three Dauntless dive bombers, which NOAA called the first aircraft ever found on the Midway battlefield that fought in the battle.

One lies upside down with a 500-pound (227 kg) bomb still attached. Another carries Bureau Number 4581, an SBD-3 from Bombing Squadron 6 on USS Enterprise, not Yorktown.

The team also found a mural about 42 by 12 feet (13 by 3.7 m) charting Yorktown’s cruises and a car that NOAA tentatively identified as a 1941 Ford Super Deluxe “Woody” station wagon. Part of its front plate reads “SHIP SERVICE,” followed by a gap, then “NAVY.”

The Second Yorktown: The Fighting Lady

CV-10 was the second Essex-class carrier laid down, on December 1, 1941, six days before Pearl Harbor. Patriots Point says Newport News built her in a record 16 and a half months, and she was commissioned on April 15, 1943, under Capt. Joseph “Jocko” Clark.

Her air group fought across the central Pacific. She earned 11 battle stars and a Presidential Unit Citation in World War II, and the nickname “The Fighting Lady.”

That nickname came from a Navy documentary filmed mostly aboard her. The Fighting Lady won the Academy Award for best documentary feature of 1944.

A few weeks before Apollo 8, she spent late November and early December 1968 as a film set for Tora! Tora! Tora!, the Pearl Harbor epic.

Where Is the USS Yorktown Now?

CV-10 was towed to Charleston in June 1975 and dedicated as a memorial on October 13, 1975, the Navy’s 200th birthday. Patriots Point opened to visitors on January 3, 1976, and she became a National Historic Landmark in 1986.

Patriots Point lists 27 aircraft across the museum, and most sit on Yorktown’s flight deck or in her hangar bays. They run from World War II types like the F6F Hellcat, SBD Dauntless and TBM Avenger to the F-14 Tomcat. The Medal of Honor Museum is also aboard.

Keeping an 83-year-old steel hull afloat is the hard part. A clean-up that finished in November 2025 took two years and about $31 million, pumping out roughly two million gallons (7.6 million liters) of toxic waste and nearly 20,000 pounds (9 tonnes) of asbestos.

Patriots Point also shows the destroyer USS Laffey. Its next plan is a $5 million renovation that moves the ship’s entrance and redesigns all three hangar bays.

Five Ships Named Yorktown, and None in Service Today

The name honors the 1781 siege at Yorktown, Virginia, the climactic battle of the American Revolution. Five Navy ships have carried it, and the two carriers are only the third and fourth.

The first was a sloop of war commissioned in 1840, wrecked on an uncharted reef in the Cape Verde Islands in 1850 without losing a man. The second was Gunboat No. 1, in service from 1889 to 1919.

The fifth was the Ticonderoga-class cruiser USS Yorktown (CG-48), commissioned on July 4, 1984. On February 12, 1988, she was in the Black Sea with the destroyer Caron, asserting the right of innocent passage 7 to 9 miles off the Soviet coast, when the Soviet frigate Bezzavetny shouldered her aside.

No one was hurt. After further talks, the two governments adopted a joint statement in September 1989 agreeing that warships may make innocent passage without notice or permission.

CG-48 made headlines again in September 1997 as a Navy “Smart Ship” test bed. A zero entered in a database field made her computers try to divide by zero, and she was dead in the water for about two hours and 45 minutes.

The cruiser was decommissioned in December 2004 and towed to Brownsville, Texas, for scrapping in 2022. Since then no ship has carried the name.

That could change. In March 2026, Rep. Rob Wittman of Virginia urged the Navy to name the future carrier CVN-84 USS Yorktown for the nation’s 250th anniversary. In April the Navy secretary replied that the idea would get “full and earnest consideration,” and as of October 2026 no name had been announced.

So the Yorktown you can visit is not the one that fought at Midway, but it was built to carry that ship’s name back into the war. The next time you stand on her hangar deck, the other one is 16,600 feet (5,100 m) under the Pacific with its own hangar deck and Dauntlesses still in it.