USS Saidor (CVE-117) was a Commencement Bay class

Commencement Bay class escort carrier

The Commencement Bay-class escort aircraft carriers were based on the Maritime Commission T3 type tanker hull, which gave them a displacement of approximately 23,000 tons and a length of 557 feet...

 escort carrier of the United States Navy

United States Navy

The United States Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the seven uniformed services of the United States. The U.S. Navy is the largest in the world; its battle fleet tonnage is greater than that of the next 13 largest navies combined. The U.S...

.

Originally named the Saltery Bay, she was renamed on 5 June 1944, was laid down on 29 September 1944 by Todd-Pacific Shipyards, Inc., Tacoma

Tacoma, Washington

Tacoma is a mid-sized urban port city and the county seat of Pierce County, Washington, United States. The city is on Washington's Puget Sound, southwest of Seattle, northeast of the state capital, Olympia, and northwest of Mount Rainier National Park. The population was 198,397, according to...

, Washington; launched on 17 March 1945; sponsored by Mrs. Walter F. Boone; and commissioned on 4 September 1945, Capt. A. P. Storrs in command.

Following shakedown off the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 west coast, she served at Pearl Harbor

Pearl Harbor

Pearl Harbor, known to Hawaiians as Puuloa, is a lagoon harbor on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, west of Honolulu. Much of the harbor and surrounding lands is a United States Navy deep-water naval base. It is also the headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Fleet...

 from 12 December 1945 to 20 March 1946. Sailing via the Panama Canal

Panama Canal

The Panama Canal is a ship canal in Panama that joins the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean and is a key conduit for international maritime trade. Built from 1904 to 1914, the canal has seen annual traffic rise from about 1,000 ships early on to 14,702 vessels measuring a total of 309.6...

, she operated at Norfolk, Va., from 16 April to 22 April, before returning via the Panama Canal to the west coast. Departing San Diego on 6 May, Saidor arrived at Bikini on the 24th to serve as a photographic laboratory for the atomic bomb testing program, Operation Crossroads

Operation Crossroads

Operation Crossroads was a series of nuclear weapon tests conducted by the United States at Bikini Atoll in mid-1946. It was the first test of a nuclear weapon after the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945...

. She processed film, documenting the destructive power of atomic weapons on selected targets at various ranges, during the nuclear explosions of 1 July and 25 July. She departed Bikini on 4 August and returned to San Diego where she remained into 1947, when she began inactivation.

Saidor was decommissioned on 12 September 1947 and berthed with the Pacific Reserve Fleet at San Diego. Reclassified CVHE-117 on 12 June 1955, and AKV-17 on 7 May 1959, she remained in the Reserve Fleet until 1 December 1970 when she was struck from the Navy list. She was sold to American Ship Dismantlers, Portland

Portland, Oregon

Portland is a city located in the Pacific Northwest, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2010 Census, it had a population of 583,776, making it the 29th most populous city in the United States...

, Oreg., for scrapping on 22 October 1971.

External links

• Photo gallery at navsource.org