Tonto Silerheels wrote:fallsfromtrees wrote:
My understanding of the original US strategy in the Pacific was to use the line of battleships sweeping across the Pacific to engage the Japanese fleet in a determintive battle. That was the Japanese plan as well, which they screwed up by attacking all of the battleships at Pearl Harbor, and missing the aircraft carriers. The eventual US Pacific Strategy was based on the fact that the Japanese had missed the carriers, missed the sub pens, and missed the fuel storage facilities at Pearl. Those submarines and aircraft carriers, burning that fuel, led to the loss of the war by the Japanese.
Before I opine any, let me say that I am by no means an expert on military matters.
Now, with that out of the way, I'll say that my understanding differs slightly from yours. My understanding was that a large contingent of USA Admirals believed that battleships represented the war of the future. A much smaller contingent believed that the day of the battleship had passed, and aircraft carriers represented the navy's future.
In Japan, there was a much greater belief in the aircraft carrier, but battleships were still in high regard. Aircraft carriers had slightly greater prestige (read: reliance). Japan greatly desired to destroy the USA aircraft carriers, and reports from 30 NOV 41 said that three carriers and many battleships were in Pearl Harbor. The Japanese decided to proceed with the planned 7 DEC 41 attack.
In what was surely an oversight on the part of the Americans, they had neglected to inform the Japanese that their carriers had moved out of the harbor in the meantime to participate in unrelated maneuvers. The Japanese attacked the battleships because the battleships were in the harbor, and so were the Japanese (well, they were in the area. They weren't in the harbor). The Japanese missed the carriers because the carriers weren't where the Japanese were.
Initial reports from the attacking force to the task force were that the Americans were taken completely by surprise, and that the battleships had received massive damage. Because of those results the Japanese decided to call off the third (?) wave of attacks as it was felt that they could accomplish very little, and the third wave would face more resistance as the Americans had more time to develop a response. The third wave was to attack the repair facilities and the fuel storage facilities. The fuel storage facilities weren't so much 'missed' as they were declined. I don't remember anything about submarine pens.
Subsequently, as the Americans had aircraft carriers and they didn't have battleships, the pro-carrier contingent amongst the Admiralty won by a sort of a bye. "You think aircraft carriers are the way to fight a war; well, here's your chance."
Now, here's my thoroughly unprofessional opinion: the Japanese would have lost the war even had the aircraft carriers, the fuel storage facilities, and the repair facilities been destroyed.
~Tonto
Actually, Tonto, that’s inaccurate. Your summation of the
popular version of what happened is spot on, but, unfortunately, that doesn’t make it a correct analysis of what
actually happened.
The truth is that the United States Navy had been “carrier-minded” ever since its exposure to the early ship borne aircraft of the Grand Fleet in 1917-1918. The USN pressed for carriers of its own at a very early stage. The USS
Langley commissioned as a carrier in 1922, having been converted from the collier
Jupiter with work beginning two years earlier, less than one year after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles ending World War I (and a year before the first of the great Washington Naval disarmament treaties). Even before then, the Navy had been acquiring scouting aircraft for the battle fleet and championing airships for anti-submarine and long-distance scouting for the surface fleet. As part of the Washington Conference of 1921, the Navy secured the right to convert two of the canceled battlecruisers —
Lexington and
Saratoga — into aircraft carriers, which made them the biggest and fastest carriers (with the largest air complements) of any operational carrier in the world until the commissioning of the first of the
Midways in 1945. (The Japanese
Shinano, converted from a
Yamato-class battleship was larger, but never went operational before being sunk by an American submarine.)
The problem was that, notwithstanding Billy Mitchell’s lunatic claims, the aircraft of the interwar years were simply incapable of attaining the goals set for them by their most rabid proponents. The USN’s Devastator torpedo plane flew for the first time in 1935 and was a hugely impressive aircraft — the first all-metal naval aircraft, fully enclosed cockpit, hydraulically powered folding wings, retractable landing gear, etc. It did not enter service until 1937, however — only two years before the beginning of World War II and only four years before the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese B5N Kate torpedo bomber (also a monoplane design) entered service the same year, whereas the British Fairy Swordfish (which entered service in 1936) was a fabric biplane with a maximum speed of about 140 miles per hour with torpedo (60 miles per hour slower than the Devastator and less than half the speed of the Kate). The Swordfish could be used under ideal circumstances as a dive bomber, but it was hopelessly inferior in that role to the Japanese Val D3A (introduced early 1940; max speed 267 mph, 500-pound bomb load, 900-mile combat range) or the USN Dauntless SBD (introduced to USN service in the second half of 1941; max speed 255 miles per hour, 2,250-pound bomb load, and roughly 800-mile combat range [increased to just over 1,000 in later variants ]). The Devastator was withdrawn from service (and replaced by the far more powerful, faster, and tougher Grumman Avenger) by the second half of 1942 after the American torpedo squadrons were massacred at the Battle of Midway. The Kate and the Swordfish soldiered on through the end of the war (although in increasingly secondary roles for the Swordfish) simply because their intended successors were either very little better or late in entering production. (In fairness, the Swordfish was also ideal for ASW operations from escort carriers because of its very low takeoff and landing speed requirements.) As far as fighters go, the Japanese Zero (331 miles per hour 1,250-mile range) was introduced in July 1940 and the American F4F wildcat (331 mph, 850-mile range) both substantially outperformed the Fairey Fumar introduced in mid-1940 (260 mph, 780-mile range).
Until the late 1930s (i.e., prior to the Swordfish, Devastator, and Kate), there simply were no naval strike aircraft capable of carrying out the missions the air enthusiasts had staked out for them. Without those aircraft, it was impossible for the carrier to become a decisive weapon of war. In 1921, Billy Mitchell had demonstrated (at least to his own satisfaction) the vulnerability of surface ships to air attack, but his attacks it been carried out on stationary anchored targets, without damage control personnel on board, in perfect weather conditions, using land-based aircraft barely able to stagger into the air with the bombloads they were using (and even then only over very short flights of less than 100 miles), and in shallow water. (The "shallow water" bit is important because much of the damage to the anchored ships was done by near misses, which would have had little or no effect in
deep water.) There was no aircraft in the world which could have attacked ships at sea, under power, successfully at that time or for at least another fifteen years, and carrier aircraft by their very nature had to have stronger (and hence heavier) fuselages and could carry lighter bombloads because of their limited takeoff space. That is, land-based aircraft could be bigger and carry far heavier weapons than carrier-based aircraft could. Until the Navy could be provided with aircraft with a realistic chance of inflicting crippling or lethal damage on the other side’s capital ships, the carrier
could not be considered a capital ship.
Despite that, the USN built every scrap of carrier tonnage it was permitted under the various naval treaties. The
Lexington-class conversions (43,000 tons and 80 aircraft) already mentioned commissioned as carriers in 1927. After eight years of experience with them, the Navy ordered the
Yorktown class (
Yorktown and
Enterprise) in 1935, commissioning in 1937 and 1938 respectively (25,900 tons and 90 aircraft), followed by a third
Yorktown, USS
Hornet, and the somewhat smaller
Wasp (19,500 tons, 90 aircraft) and the
considerably smaller USS
Ranger (17,900 tons, 76 aircraft). During the same interval, the Brits had converted three highly unsatisfactory “light battlecruisers” —
Courageous, Glorious, and
Furious – into aircraft carriers between 1924 and 1929, producing ships of roughly 23,000 tons and carrying 48 aircraft each, followed by
Ark royal in 1938 (28,000 tons and 50-60 aircraft). The Japanese had converted one battleship and one battlecruiser (
Kaga and
Akagi) as the Americans had with
Lexington and
Saratoga (they weren’t true sisters, but they were both in the 38,000-ton range and carried 90 aircraft) followed by
Shokaku and
Zuikaku in 1939 and 1941 (respectively) (32,600 tons, 72 aircraft) and the
Soryu and
Hiryu in 1939 (not complete sisters, but roughly 19,000-20,000 tons and 64 aircraft each).
The main reason for building
Ranger and
Wasp was to maximize carrier platforms within a treaty-mandated overall tonnage limitation. Neither ship was as successful as their larger consorts, but even the smallest of them carried more aircraft than the largest British carrier in commission in 1940. It should also be obvious from the above that there was a significant difference in carrier philosophy between the Pacific powers and the British Royal Navy. The conversions can (to some extent) be disregarded, since they represented ships available for alteration and not vessels designed from the keel up as carriers, but
Ark Royal was deliberately designed with a much more heavily protected flight deck and a smaller aircrew than her American and Japanese counterparts. This is because (1) the RN faced different operational constraints and (2) the RN had not controlled the development of its own aircraft since the formal organization of the Fleet Air Arm in 1924.
Taking those two points in reverse order, the FAA was a command within the Royal
Air Force which operated the aircraft embarked in the RN’s vessels. This meant that the Air Force, and not the Navy, was responsible for designing and procuring naval aircraft, and that naval aircraft always competed
directly with land-based aircraft for funding, development, and construction priority. More to the point, perhaps, they competed
within the service responsible for presenting budget recommendations to Parliament, which meant the Navy was totally dependent on the RAF’s internal decisions for the aircraft it eventually received. In other words, there was no one to "fight the Navy's corner" in funding debates inside the service community, and certainly not on the floor of Parliament.
In no small part because of that, the RN was fully aware in 1935 when
Ark Royal was being designed and built that any aircraft the carrier embarked would be substantially inferior in performance to the land-based types they might encounter. And, because a British carrier was likely to be operating in “narrow waters” (specifically, the North Sea and the Mediterranean), it was almost certainly going to come under attack by land-based air forces. As a consequence, British doctrine was diametrically opposed to US and/or Japanese doctrine where the defense of the carrier was concerned. British doctrine was to strike the entire air group below to the hangar, protected by an armored flight deck, while the air raid was fought off by the carrier’s (and its escorts’) antiaircraft fire. One consequence of that doctrine was the small air groups embarked.
The Japanese and US navies had a very different perspective. Any war they fought was going to range across the Pacific, where — absent widely scattered island airbases — any aircraft brought to the fight were coming aboard someone’s aircraft carriers. That meant it was going to be far more a war of carrier aircraft-versus-carrier aircraft, not carrier aircraft-versus-land-based aircraft. In addition, both navies controlled the development of their own aircraft (the Fleet Air Arm didn’t pass back under Navy control until 1939, which is one reason British carriers operated so many American carrier aircraft designs after 1942). Because they controlled development, they were able to push superior types, and they both did so, which meant that both Pacific navies were far more inclined to depend upon a carrier's embarked fighters as its first line of aerial defense. It’s certainly arguable that the Zero was the best all round fighter (at least when it was on offense) in service in the Pacific whether operating from a carrier or a land base in 1941-42, but the Wildcat (which was about as fast and much better protected) was a much better match for it than is usually recognized.
Japanese and American naval designers had also placed great emphasis on getting as many aircraft to sea as possible, both as scout planes aboard cruisers and battleships and aboard carriers, from the very early 1920s. By 1930, no admiral in either navy would have considered leaving port for a fleet engagement without carriers in support, although the limitations of the aircraft then available meant that they were more valued for their scouting ability than for their strike ability. (For example, the Dauntless dive bomber mentioned above was called the “SBD,” which meant
Scout Dive Bomber, for a very good reason.) In the design process leading up to the new battleship
North Carolina (commissioned early in 1941), which began in about 1935, there was initially great interest in a ship which would carry 14” guns forward and a hangar deck suitable for floatplane bombers aft. The idea was that the aircraft would serve as scouts prior to contact with the enemy, then as spotters for long-range artillery and, finally, to launch bombing attacks during the gunnery engagement. That feature wasn’t abandoned until fairly late in the process, because up until that point floatplanes — despite the serious drag penalty of their floats — could still compete with purpose-built carrier aircraft. By the time the Devastator, Kate, and their contemporaries entered service, that was no longer true.
Up until that time, however, it definitely was. Note, for example, that the Kate, introduced as late as 1940, was limited to a 500-pound bomb, which was insufficient to deal with a battleship’s deck armor. Even the Dauntless’ 1,000-pound bomb found that a significant challenge. (As a point of comparison, the American 14” armor piercing shell weighed 1,500 pounds and the 16” weighed 2,700. Looked at one way, this meant that a
North Carolina firing two rounds per gun per minute could put the equivalent of one hundred Val bombloads [or fifty Dauntless bombloads] into the air each minute
if the guns could be brought into range of a target.)
The Pacific carrier designs
did not emphasize armored flight decks for several reasons, but the most important was the designers’ emphasis on the largest possible air groups. It was accepted by both Japanese and US designers that it was impossible to build a carrier as resistant to air attack as a battleship and that the nature of a carrier’s armament — which required large quantities of gasoline and little things like bombs and torpedoes — meant that a carrier was automatically a more vulnerable proposition once it was damaged. Accordingly, both sides independently arrived at the progenitor of what is today called the “alpha strike.” During World War II it was called — in US practice, at least — a “deckload strike.” The idea was that whoever side got through to the
other fellow’s carriers first would win in a carrier engagement. If he didn’t succeed in destroying his opponent’s carriers outright, he would almost certainly succeed in crippling their
flight decks, inflicting a “mission-kill” which would be almost as good as their total destruction. Because of that, doctrine was to throw every strike aircraft aboard at the enemy the instant the enemy was detected in hopes of overwhelming the enemy carriers at the outset. And that, in turn, required the biggest possible strike groups and an emphasis on the offense, not the defense, in designing the ships to carry those strike groups. The
Essex, commissioned in December 1942, was a direct follow-on from the
Yorktown class at 36,000 tons and 100 aircraft, plus spares. The
Midway, commissioned in September 1945, incorporated war experience and was to carry 145 aircraft, plus spares, and had an armored flight deck. In practice, 145 proved to be an impractically large air group and she actually carried roughly 100 during World War II and Korea.
Now, the reason all of this is significant to the point under discussion is that it indicates that the United States Navy
as an institution was deeply committed to the development of carrier aviation for roughly two decades before World War II. Until only a few years before Pearl Harbor, however, the ability of carrier
aircraft to deliver powerful strikes was not simply unproven but nonexistent. When critics of US preparedness in 1941 talk about the war games which had simulated attacks on both Pearl Harbor and the western terminus of the Panama Canal, they usually fail to mention that the aircraft involved were dropping 100-150-pound beanbags to
simulate nominal 500 and 1,000-pound bombs carried by
nominal (as in, not yet existing) aircraft and that no US naval aircraft had ever successfully attacked an enemy vessel with an air-dropped torpedo. The British attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto clearly demonstrated that even Swordfish could inflict lethal or crippling damage on
anchored warships, taken by surprise, and attacked under conditions of low visibility (thus hampering any antiaircraft fire severely) and without a protective combat air patrol. The writing was on the wall, and the US and Japanese both recognized that, but the actualization of that capability was a very, very recent phenomenon,
and the decision-makers in the various navies had a profound responsibility to be conservative in their acquisition and operational policies. Clearly there is a point at which conservatism becomes a vice if it equates to blindness, but those charged with questions of national defense have an overriding obligation to avoid embracing panaceas until a new weapon system is proven to work. As one of the USN’s pre-World War I naval constructors observed, a battleship represented too significant a portion of the nation’s defensive assets to be regarded as an experiment. If that’s true of a single battleship, it is even more true of a navy’s entire operational doctrine.
It is significant to note that the
Essex-class carriers were designed
before World War II broke out and that one of the major factors in building the
Iowa-class battleships — and investing an additional 10,000 tons of displacement (or roughly a 25% increase) in them solely in order to buy a 5-knot advantage over the preceding
South Dakota-class — was to give them the speed to accompany carriers. For that matter, at the time they were designed, the
North Carolinas and
South Dakotas were considered “fast” ships (by US battleship standards) at 27 knots, largely because the need to stay up with the carriers was a factor in their own design. That, I think, is a pretty conclusive indication of the fact that the “battleship admirals” were fully aware of the manner in which the tactical and strategic matrices were changing.
The revolution in aircraft capabilities between 1914 and 1941 was at least as profound as the revolution in battleship design between 1887 and 1914, and admirals and generals in all nations had to adapt to those changes. To their credit, the majority of them — not all, certainly, but the
majority — recognized that the rate of change was
increasing and that traditional yardsticks were being steadily invalidated even before 1939. It was, however, a period of
transition, and the USN was a
lot further along in recognizing and making that transition than the “everybody knows” version of history would suggest.
One reason for that is that the “brown shoe admirals” (USN aviators were allowed to wear brown shoes, not the traditional black) (1) honestly believed they had been discriminated against and/or been “voices crying in the wilderness” in the interwar years and (2) had a very powerful vested interest in proclaiming that
they had been right all along and that
they had won the war. While not attempting to denigrate the monumental contribution of naval aviators like Marc Mitscher and John Towers in any way, it was non-aviators like Fletcher and Raymond Spruance who most effectively commanded
fleets, including their carrier components, during World War II. Despite Bill Halsey’s reputation, he was demonstrably inferior to Spruance as a fleet commander and certainly arguably inferior to Fletcher. I suspect that it’s partly because the “brown shoes” found themselves still under the command of “black shoe” admirals in the decisive naval engagements of the Pacific that they felt such a compulsion to denigrate those non-aviators’ accomplishments.
For example, Spruance was bitterly criticized in the aviation community for adopting a defensive stance in the Battle of the Philippine Sea (a.k.a. “The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot”) because he refused to disregard the possibility of the Japanese surface fleet doing an “end run” around him to get at the invasion fleet and its transports because he considered the protection of that invasion fleet (and the thousands of Marines and Sailors aboard its ships) to be his primary and overriding responsibility. In the event, although it was not recognized (or accepted) by the naval aviators at the time, he gutted Japanese carrier aviation for a second time (he’d already done it once at Midway), at a point in the war which meant there would be no time to train and equip replacement carrier groups before the end. In addition, US submarines sank
Shokaku and
Taiho (37,800 tons, 65 aircraft, and an armored flight deck) and aircraft sank
Hiyo (23,700 tons, 50 aircraft; converted from a passenger liner), all in return for noncritical damage to a single US battleship and less than 125 US aircraft.
Despite all of that, two Japanese fleet carriers and four light carriers had escaped destruction, and the carrier admirals — Halsey among them — were bitterly critical of Spruance for his “overcautious” failure to finish off the IJN’s carrier force. Which is a major part of the reason Halsey later made a potentially catastrophic blunder at the Battle of Leyte Gulf when he allowed himself to be decoyed away from the San Bernardino Strait and allowed Admiral Kurita’s powerful force of battleships and heavy cruisers to pull off exactly the sort of “end run” Spruance had been determined to avoid in the Marianas.
I think it’s fair to say that naval officers who went into aviation as early as Mitcher and Towers truly were visionaries and undoubtedly did find themselves fighting against the dead weight of inertia as they proclaimed the future of naval aviation. By 1935-1936, though, that battle had been largely won, even if the aircraft to make it possible were only then beginning to be designed and ordered. One reason that “brown shoe” officers found promotion slow and hard to come by during the interwar years, however, was that naval aviation itself was still very new and up until about 1927 (when the
Lexington-class conversions became available) embryonic, to say the very least. Even after 1927, there were simply very few naval aviation command slots to go around, and battleships were given construction priority in part because of what I believed to have been a healthy conservatism on the part of the Navy’s General Board but also because the naval treaties (which the US officially considered itself bound by) permitted
battleship construction as the USN built up to its treaty limitations while it had already used up all of its treaty-mandated
carrier tonnage. In addition, of course, battleships took longer to build and were therefore “long lead” building projects. Because of that, there were fewer aviation-specific command slots into which naval officers could be promoted, which meant promotion in that branch offered fewer opportunities for advancement. From the perspective of individuals who'd made the military their career (as well as their calling), the inevitable slowness of promotion probably felt a lot more like deliberate (or at least willful) prejudice than it actually was.
I am not trying to argue from the above that the destruction and/or immobilization of the 23-knot battle line at Pearl Harbor didn’t have a significant impact on how quickly and how thoroughly the emphasis shifted to unescorted or lightly-escorted carrier operations in the first half of 1942. Those operations, however, should be recognized for what they were — a desperate series of raids and counterattacks by a fleet which had been knocked back on its heels by a devastating series of reverses not just at Pearl Harbor but in the Philippines, Java, Sumatra, and most of the rest of the Western Pacific. In other words, they should not be confused with a deliberate or desirable operational doctrine. The Battle of Midway has been called an “incredible victory” many times, because that’s exactly what it was. Without the American cryptographers’ success in providing Nimitz, Fletcher, and Spruance with the Japanese operational plan, it wouldn’t have happened. Those same cryptographers had sent Fletcher to the Coral Sea, which had removed a pair of Japanese carriers from the Midway operation in return for a single American carrier, making the odds at Midway only 4-to-3, rather than 6-to-4. Even so, without knowing the Japanese plans, it's probable that four veteran Japanese carriers could have defeated three much less experienced American carriers. For that matter, even after Midway, the next year and a half saw incredibly bitter fighting in the Southwest Pacific. It wasn’t until proper fleets of the new aircraft carriers — escorted by the new
battleships — began coming to the front in late 1943 that the preponderance of combat power shifted unambiguously to the United States.
Finally, the fact of the Pearl Harbor Raid itself has been taken as proof of the USN’s lack of “air awareness.” In fact, one of the main reasons that US admirals discounted the possibility of an attack on Pearl Harbor is that as early as June of 1941
it couldn’t have been carried out even by the Japanese. The Kido Butai (First Air Fleet) of the Imperial Japanese Navy wasn’t organized until that month. Prior to April 1941, no one had ever combined six aircraft carriers into a single striking force (especially
without battle fleet support) for several reasons, including the fact that nobody had that many carriers to put in one place. The Japanese were making up an entirely new strike doctrine as they went along, and taking much of their inspiration from the British night attack at Taranto the previous November. Taranto wasn't the only thing to suggest the possibility of the Pearl Harbor attack to Admiral Yamamoto, because the Japanese were as aware of the geography of the Pacific as the Americans were and had already begun a war (less than forty years previously) with a “sneak attack” on an anchored fleet at Port Arthur. Taranto did, however, suggest that it would be possible to use torpedo aircraft even in the relatively shallow waters of Pearl Harbor. (Of course, it required that the torpedoes be fitted with special fins to keep them from diving deeply when they hit the water. And remember what I said above about the weight of bombs available? In order to provide bombs heavy enough to penetrate the US battleships' armored decks, the Japanese fitted 16" armor piercing shells with fins to create 2,000-pound bombs which were dropped not by dive bombers but by
horizontal [i.e., Kate] bombers.)
Despite Taranto's evidence that the attack was tactically feasible, however, Yamamoto faced the problem at it was 4,000 miles from the Japanese home islands to Pearl Harbor,
which placed Pearl Harbor beyond practical attack range. The carriers and their escorts — especially their escorts — simply didn’t have the range to reach Pearl Harbor and the IJN had not developed the ability to refuel underway, a point of which American naval intelligence was well aware. What ONI
didn’t know was that the Japanese were busy
figuring out how to improvise a refueling capability or that the Japanese admiralty was prepared to send six carriers — effectively, it's entire carrier fleet — to a target 4,000 miles from home with an escort of only 12 destroyers, one light cruiser, two heavy cruisers, and the battlecruisers
Hiei and
Kirishima. The Americans didn’t expect it because up to no more than four months or so before the attack
the Japanese couldn’t have pulled it off. That was one of the primary reasons the US anticipated an attack in the Philippines, possibly even on Wake Island, but not on Pearl Harbor. It was also the reason that Husband Kimmel and Walter Short were focused upon preventing sabotage rather than on resisting a mass air attack on the morning of December 7. I suppose it’s not all that surprising that no one pointed that out officially in face of the pursuit of scapegoats following the attack, and — in fairness — it’s only become evident fairly recently just how thoroughly the Japanese were making it up as they went along in 1941.
While I don’t think it’s fair to argue that the American “black shoe admirals” were a bunch of ossified relics standing in the way of their progressive, air minded “brown shoe” intellectual superiors, it certainly
is fair to argue that the Japanese in 1941 had taken the concept of carrier operations to a level of sophistication unmatched by their American counterparts. In fact, it was unmatched by the American
“brown shoes”. There were those on the American side who were reaching toward the same level of sophistication, but they were a year or so behind the Japanese, and I suspect it’s comforting to the “carrier Mafia” (if I may coin the term) to point to “battleship admirals’” obstructionism as a way to divert attention from the fact that
they were lagging behind the curve, as well.
In the end, American carrier doctrine, and not just American output of matériel, proved superior to that of the Japanese. In that sense, the USN — whatever the color of its shoes — overtook and fairly rapidly surpassed the IJN. But for that brief period between June of 1941 and June of 1942, the Japanese stood supreme as practitioners of carrier warfare.
