I hate to pick nits, but Nimitz was a man during WWII, and Coral Sea was a battle. Are you sure your friends weren't talking about some other war?
Hanks should've kept his mouth shut for this interview - if anyone is counting on him as a historian, they will be sadly misled.
But wait. It’s seared in his memory.
I really didn’t want to know how ignorant Hanks was of history. I know there’s a lot I don’t know, but please... And I really, really enjoy Apollo 13. (sigh)
There's a 1980 movie called "The Final Countdown" in which the USS Nimitz is time warped back to December 6, 1941. Charles Durning plays a US Senator who is rescued at sea and brought aboard the Nimitz and asks that very question, "What is a US Navy ship doing named after a serving Admiral?" The story line is kind of hoakey, but like "Top Gun" a few years later, was a good show of US Navy firepower.
Had it not been for the A-Bomb, there's a good chance the USS Coral Sea would have played a role. It along with the Midway and FDR were a new class of super-carriers that totally outclassed the Essex class flat tops that carried the bulk of the war in the Pacific, and arrived just a little too late. Like the A1 Skyraider they were to carry, they all proved their worth well into the Viet Nam war and beyond.