That is the carrier body number. It is a fairly early carrier, so well may not have had the serial number on the front armour, but rather had the info on a data plate located on the right front fender. That number should be fairly close to the serial number of the carrier. Early production did not seem to have the wide variance like the later carriers, which could vary numbers by 500 or so between the body, serial, and hull numbers. You should have another number on the left rear angle iron behind the rear armour.
Somewhere in this mess of papers I have the numbers off a carrier in the 500 serial range, and all the numbers were within a dozen of each other.
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