Rudy Rodriguez was just 18 in May 1945 when he boarded the aircraft carrier USS Hancock in Pearl Harbor, heading east for the waning days of the War in the Pacific. That deployment lasted five months ...

CV-19 USS Hancock profile: During the 20th century, the U.S. Navy’s Essex aircraft carriers represented the largest ship class across the globe. Throughout the 1940s, two dozen Essex vessels were ...

The USS Hancock was built in 1943 and was almost immediately put to work in the Pacific Theater of World War II. When Japanese foreign affairs minister Mamoru Shigemitsu formally surrendered on board ...