USS Enterprise: The aircraft carrier that changed everything turns 50

[ErnstBlofeld]

Daily Press.com/Peter Frost:

Fifty years ago today the largest dry dock in the world filled with water from the James River, setting afloat the world's largest ship and first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.

At 10:30 a.m. on Sept. 24, 1960, Mrs. William B. Franke, wife of the Secretary of the Navy, smashed a bottle of champagne across the bow of the USS Enterprise as the rushing seawater freed it from its last keel block.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Arleigh A. Burke told some 12,000 guests at the christening ceremony that the 1,101-foot Big E was "the largest ship ever built of any kind by any nation," containing the most powerful nuclear power plant ever constructed anywhere in the world

Yard president William E. Blewett Jr. paid tribute to the thousands of workers who "labored with imagination, skill and pride to build a vessel worthy of its name."

Today, the Enterprise sits across the harbor at Naval Station Norfolk, preparing for two final, six-month deployments before it's decommissioned in 2012.

Neither the Navy nor the ship's crew has planned an event to celebrate the milestone, preferring to wait until Nov. 25, 2011, the 50th anniversary of the Enterprise becoming an official member of the fleet.

Nonetheless, when the one-of-a-kind supercarrier was launched that Saturday five decades ago, it cemented Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Co. as the premier shipyard in the United States and positioned it as an indispensable asset even today.

"The Enterprise was seen not simply as the first of a new class of carriers, but a step in the transformation of the entire fleet," said James C. Bradford, a Navy historian and professor at Texas A&M University