The Mighty Moo The USS Cowpens and Her Epic World War II Journey from Jinx Ship to the Navy’s First Carrier into Tokyo Bay

The Mighty Moo is the tale of how a scrappy little World War II aircraft carrier and its untested crew earned a distinguished combat record and beat incredible odds to earn 12 battle stars in the Pacific.

The USS Cowpens and her crew weren’t your typical heroes.  She was a flattop that the US Navy initially didn’t want, with a captain nearly scapegoated for the loss of his last command, pilots who self-trained on the planes they would fly into combat, and sailors that had been in uniform barely longer than the ship had been afloat.  Despite their humble origins, Cowpens and her band of second-string reservists and citizen sailors served with distinction, fighting in nearly every major carrier operation from 1943 to 1945, including the Battles of the Philippine Sea and Leyte Gulf.  Together they faced a deadly typhoon that brought the ship to the verge of capsizing, and at war’s end there was only one US aircraft carrier in Tokyo Bay to witness the Japanese surrender—The Mighty Moo. 

In the years to follow, Cowpens’ service has become the wellspring for a remarkable modern tradition, both within the US Navy and the small Southern town that still celebrates her legacy with a festival every year. The Mighty Moo is a biography of a World War II aircraft carrier as told through the voices of its heroic crew—a “Band of Brothers at sea.”

Nathan Canestaro is a professional intelligence officer whose research on his grandfather’s service in World War II led to a decade-​long effort to uncover the story of Cowpens and her crew. Currently on assignment to the National Intelligence Council, Nathan has twenty-​five years of experience writing about military operations for policymakers in the US government. He has graduate degrees from the University of Tennessee,
Georgetown, and Yale, and lives outside Washington, DC, with his family. This is his first book.