Mike Weeks,

Workups ashore by the Air Group are a bit different than readying the ship itself for deployment. The former can happen (and in this case, apparently did) without the latter necessarily happening. In addition, an Air Group could be easily shifted to another deck, if absolutely needed.

Sidebar Sea Story:

Any veteran of predeployment refurbishment dets can personally attest to the variations between ship readiness and squadron/air wing readiness. A big part of ship readiness can vaguely be defined as the "habitability" of the spaces assigned to the Air Wing. Depending upon (a) the ship's general material condition, (b) the conditions of the prior cruise (war, peace, greater than 10 months, etc.), (c) "town/gown" relations between ship's company and "passengers, and similar factors, you could find things pretty nice or a complete wreck.

VA-95 was lucky. Our "habitability" challenge aboard CORAL SEA, preparing for its 1973 cruise, consisted mainly of scraping off all of the "Semper Fi" tags and painting over all the red/gold areas left by our predecessor A-6 squadron, VMA(AW)-224. g

--
Mike Kanze

"I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are. If I killed them all there would be news from Hell before breakfast."

-- General William Tecumseh Sherman

"Mike Weeks" wrote in message ups.com...

Mike Kanze wrote:
Bunker Hill was put back into service between Sept 1945 and January 1946 as a unit of TG 16.2 returning veterans from the PTO

Point taken. However OPERATION MAGIC CARPET duty was a far cry from the demands of even normal peacetime operations. You don't need much material refurbishment to bring redundant forces home.

However repairs didn't stop when the war ended. According to the a/c
allocation list of 7 SEP 1945, CVG-13 was assigned to Bunker Hill, and
they were working up preparing for deployment. Had the war continued I
don't think there's any doubt she would have been part of TF38 / 58 for
the final push on Japan.

MW