How the Navy Brought 8 Million WWII Troops Home

By September 1945, the fighting was over, but millions of American service members were still scattered across the Pacific and Europe with no way home. The ships built to win the war would now be repurposed to finish the job properly: bringing every one of them back.

A Fleet Built for War, Repurposed for Peace

In the Pacific, the task fell to the U.S. Navy under a mission code-named Operation Magic Carpet, launched within days of Japan's formal surrender. Troops in Europe were already heading home aboard converted cargo ships.

Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King authorized nearly 370 Navy warships in the Pacific to switch from combat duty to ferry duty. Aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, and hospital ships all joined transports built specifically for troops.

It was, by scale, the largest sealift the Navy had ever attempted.

Bunks Stacked Up to Five Tiers High

Aircraft carriers made ideal troop ships for one simple reason: their hangar decks. The same wide-open space normally used to store and repair fighter planes could just as easily hold people.

Crews welded temporary bunks into those decks, stacking them three to five tiers high to fit as many men as possible. A crewman aboard USS Monterey later recalled workers at the Brooklyn Navy Yard installing bunks on the hangar deck five high, then building a steel platform over the top just to store gear.

The Ship That Carried the Most

No ship in the operation brought home more men than the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga.

Over the course of her Magic Carpet service, the Saratoga ferried a total of 29,204 Pacific War veterans back to the United States, more than any other single vessel in the entire fleet.

Eight Million People, One Year

Operation Magic Carpet ran for about a year, from the fall of 1945 into the fall of 1946, moving more than 22,000 troops home every day on average.

December 1945 was the busiest stretch, with nearly 700,000 people arriving back in the United States in a single month, as the Navy raced to get as many families reunited by Christmas as it could.

By the time the operation wound down, it had carried more than 8 million American service members home. For most of them, that crowded flight deck was the last stop between the war and their front door.