USS Lake Champlain (CV-39)
1944 Ticonderoga-class aircraft carrier
USS Lake Champlain (CV/CVA/CVS-39) was one of 24 Essex-class aircraft carriers completed during or shortly after World War II for the United States Navy. She was the second US Navy ship to bear the name, named for the Battle of Lake Champlain in the War of 1812.
Commissioned on 3 June 1945, Lake Champlain did not participate in World War II combat operations. She served as a transport, bringing troops home from Europe as part of Operation Magic Carpet. Like many of her sister ships, she was decommissioned shortly after the war but was modernized and recommissioned in the early 1950s. Redesignated as an attack carrier (CVA), she participated in the Korean War before spending the rest of her career in the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Mediterranean. In the late 1950s, she was redesignated as an antisubmarine carrier (CVS).
Lake Champlain was the prime recovery ship for the first crewed Project Mercury mission (Freedom 7), the second uncrewed Gemini mission (Gemini 2), and the third crewed Gemini mission (Gemini 5).
Lake Champlain had a unique modernization history. She was the only Essex-class ship to receive the SCB-27A modernization program conversion, which involved a rebuild of the superstructure, flight deck, and other features, but did not also receive the SCB-125 conversion for an angled flight deck and hurricane bow.
The public source identifies “USS Lake Champlain (CV-39)” as 1944 Ticonderoga-class aircraft carrier. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Lake, Champlain and CV-39.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2342475. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1812 and 1945.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “USS Lake Champlain (CV-39)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.