Comments by "Vikki McDonough" (@vikkimcdonough6153) on "US Navy Fleet Problems - Now its time to play with carriers (VIII-XII)" video.

  1.  @martinkirk3810  Lucky in timing (they were hit right when they had fuel-and-bomb-laden aircraft rearming on their hangar decks), not in location. And it didn't happen consistently; the four IJN CVs at Midway were the only defended, maneuvering aircraft carriers to be destroyed by bombs in the entire war (and, even then, the burning wrecks only actually sank when they were scuttled). Every single other case of a defended, maneuvering aircraft carrier being sunk throughout all of World War II involved the carrier being killed (or at least mission-killed badly enough to necessitate scuttling) by torpedoes (which accounted for the vast majority, including a couple helped along by explosions resulting from poor damage control), either aerial or submarine-launched, or, for a few, by surface gunfire, kamikazes (and the two sunk by kamikazes were a light carrier and an escort carrier, both of them breeds much thinner-skinned than fleet carriers), and, in one case, the explosion of a sinking destroyerfull of depth charges right next to the carrier acting as a gigantic mine.
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  2.  @fluffly3606  Even with the improvements in aircraft performance in the late 1930s, carrier-borne aircraft still had a fairly-weak offensive strength during WWII; piston-engined aircraft without torpedoes simply couldn't, while staying light enough to successfully take off from a WWII-era fleet carrier, carry heavy-enough bombs to reliably kill capital ships unless they got in a very lucky hit, like happened with Arizona at Pearl Harbor or the Japanese carriers at Midway. (Torpedo bombers could, and did, frequently put down capital ships, but torpedoes were long since a known quantity, and quite a bit of their success can be put down to the capital ships of basically every navy in WWII having deficient torpedo protection.)
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  3.  @mahbriggs  How so? Even a cursory examination of capital-ship losses in WWII will reveal that aerial bombing by carrier aircraft was usually ineffective at killing capital ships unless combined with torpedo attack.
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  4.  @mahbriggs  All those carriers were scuttled because poor damage control allowed fires to go out of control and burn the carrier to the point of unsalvagability. The hits were survivable, given better damage control than what actually was achieved; the fact that the Japanese carriers at Midway didn't survive them does not change that fact.
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  5.  @Cailus3542  If you want to be pedantic, Tirpitz only got hit by the second most humongous conventional bomb of WWII; the British came up with something even more humongous after they sank her.😄 Overall, given working torpedoes and working means of delivering same, it seems that a torpedo strike is much more likely to outright sink a carrier than a bomb strike is, but that, for carriers without armored flight decks, a nonfatal bomb strike is somewhat more likely to knock the carrier out of action than a nonfatal torpedo strike is. (Carriers with armored flight decks are about as vulnerable to being put out of action by aerial bombs as battleships are, which is to say, not very barring a lucky hit.)
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  6.  @Cailus3542  Still, even if you damage a carrier badly enough that it can't continue flight ops, it can be repaired and sent back out for you to have to fight over and over again (like with Enterprise, Shokaku, or - initially - Yorktown). Also, at least one fleet carrier (Hiyo) was sunk where the fatal damage was all torpedo-induced, and the damage (cracked avgas tanks) that led to Lexington's huge secondary explosion at Coral Sea was the result of an aerial torpedo, not a bomb (I'm not counting this as a pure aerial-torpedo kill because it wouldn't've been fatal were it not for abysmal damage control on the part of the carrier's crew).
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  7.  @Cailus3542  They weren't entirely ineffective; they did take a number of carriers temporarily out of action for repairs, and managed to fatally damage the four Japanese carriers at Midway to the point where they had to be scuttled (although that was due in considerable part to a combination of lucky timing and poor Japanese damage-control doctrine) - and at Midway specifically, they were the best anti-carrier weapon the Americans had, since they had a good dive bomber to deliver them (the SBD), whereas their torpedo bomber (the TBD) was hopelessly obsolete by that point in the war and became easy prey for the Japanese defenses (and the other main torpedo-delivery-against-carrier method, submarines, was effectively taken out of the equation until long after Midway by the U.S. submarine fleet's defective torpedoes). However, for putting carriers (or other capital ships, for that matter) down permanently, torpedoes were much more lethal than aerial bombs. (I'm working on tabulating the exact numbers at the moment.) EDIT: By my count, out of a total of 40 bomb/kamikaze attacks (I'm lumping in kamikazes here because the damage caused is essentially the same as with plain old bombs) which scored hits on U.S. and Japanese fleet carriers in WWII, a total of 5 were fatal (a case fatality rate of 12.5%); of these, 0 of 26 (0%) successful bombings of U.S. fleet carriers were fatal, while 5 of 14 (37%) were fatal to Japanese fleet carriers (this encompassing the four carriers bombed out at Midway as well as the bombing and sinking of Amagi at anchor in 1945). In contrast, 9 of 18 successful torpedo attacks on U.S. and Japanese fleet carriers were fatal (a case fatality rate of 50%), with 3 of 9 successful torpedoings (33%) of U.S. fleet carriers being fatal and 6 of 9 successful torpedoings (67%) of Japanese fleet carriers being fatal. One additional fleet carrier was sunk by something other than bomb or torpedo attacks (Yorktown, which was finally sunk by the mass explosion of a sinking destroyer's depth charges close to the carrier's hull).
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