After the Doolittle Raid, President Roosevelt concealed the bombers' launch point by joking that they had come from Shangri-La. The name referred to the fictional place made famous by the novel Lost Horizon. The U.S. Navy later applied that answer to an Essex-class aircraft carrier, USS Shangri-La. The naming story preserves both operational secrecy and wartime humour as institutional memory in the fleet.
Notable Point · 2:13:22-2:13:51
How the Doolittle Raid gave USS Shangri-La its name
Roosevelt's joke that the Doolittle bombers came from the fictional Shangri-La became the name of a later Essex-class carrier.