Comments by "Gregory Wright" (@gregorywright4918) on "Drachinifel"
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A good list, Drach, with a couple omissions (probably ones out on loan?):
Battle History of the Imperial Japanese Navy (1941-1945), by Paul Dull
Sunburst: The Rise of Japanese Naval Air Power (1909-1941) by Mark Peattie
The Japanese Submarine Force and WW2 by Boyd and Yoshida
The Japanese Merchant Marine in WW2 by Mark Parillo
If your interest is in shipbuilding, there is a good chapter on Japan in:
Naval Shipbuilders of the World by Robert Winklareth
For individual ship focuses, aside from the cheap Osprey series, there is the Legends of Warfare: Naval series, which has Ahlberg & Lengerer doing the Soryus, Kongos, and Fubuki classes and their derivatives, the ShipCraft books, and the Anatomy of the Ship series.
For "what were Japanese thinking", I would add:
The Pacific War 1931-1945 by Saburo Ienaga
Japan 1941 by Eri Hotta
Japan Prepares For Total War by Michael Barnhart
Fading Victory - the Diary of Admiral Motome Ugaki
I did appreciate Japanese Destroyer Captain by Tameichi Hara, but I thought it needed to be taken with a bit of scepticism, not quite as much as Mitsuo Fuchidas books. Saburo Sakai's memoir was good as well, but he was part of the land-based naval air forces (flying a Zero), not the ship-based ones.
Finally, there are some great battle studies, of which the best recently are:
Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway by J Parshall and A Tully
The First Team (2 books) by John Lundstrom
Pacific Crucible (and 2 more) by Ian Toll
Fortress Rabaul by Bruce Gamble
Rising Sun, Falling Skies (and 2 more) by Jeffrey Cox
Islands of Destiny by John Prados
Empires in the Balance (and 2 more) by HP Wilmott
Some of the latter ones focus more on US/Allied actions, but they mix more Japanese perspectives in than books from earlier.
Final question - how do we get a library card for the Drach Collection?
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@rogerwilco2 It's a shame we are so quick to blame everything on "racism" today. Yes, there was underestimation, but it worked both ways - Japanese thought the Americans were "decadent, lazy gaijin" who would be quick to cut their losses and make a deal if they just bloodied their nose a bit - hence, Pearl Harbor. Tokyo's "racism" extended even to other Southeast Asian people groups, particularly the Chinese whom they raped and massacred because they dared to defy the "Children of the Sun".
Regarding the torpedoes, we knew about the British experiments with oxygen-enriching that did not go well. Even so, we should have been able to tell they were using a 24" torpedo to our normal 21" - three extra inches in diameter is going to get you some extended range anyway, and a bigger warhead too. Reminds me of how surprised we were when we got a good look at the MiG 25 Foxbat - steel wings, vacuum-tube avionics, short range and lousy dog-fighting. It looked so much more impressive from a distance.
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@bkjeong4302 Bk, as Hat Trick mentioned, you are judging early-war formations with post-war ideas. Remember the lesson of the Glorious, however stupid her captain was. There are times when the carrier cannot operate her planes - at night, in bad weather, and even when trying to transit in a different direction than the wind. At Coral Sea during the night of May 7-8 the carrier forces may have been significantly less than 100nm apart, depending on whose track you believe. At Midway the US carriers had to turn toward the Japanese to conduct flight ops while the IJN was turning away. Spruance turned away at night despite the hit he would take on range in the morning, knowing that he had no heavies in his formation to battle potential IJN heavies at night (and the Japanese did consider trying to find and fight him that night).
The fast battleship had several reasons for joining the carrier formation. She protected the formation from other fast battleships or heavy cruisers, she acted as a heavy AA escort, she also was a magnet to draw battleship-focused attackers away from the carriers, and she served as a fuel reserve to top off destroyers when the oiler was not close by. Flank speed was very expensive in fuel, even for the very efficient US boilers, so it was only used for flight operations and attacks. Cruising speed of 20-25 kts was much more common and fuel-efficient. But due to the relatively short range of US carrier planes the US carriers had to close in to launch strikes and could not maintain a "several-hundred-mile gap".
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Shipbuilding is a complicated, synergistic practice that requires multiple sources of materials supply, skilled labor and government funding support. Warship building even more so, and the bigger warships require extraordinary effort. It can be built up over time with concerted government-business effort, but it cannot be thrown together overnight. It took the Japanese 20-30 years to build up their own capability to build small ships, and another 10-20 to transfer the advanced building techniques from UK to Japan for boilers, turbines, armor and guns for battleships. Commonwealth countries such as Canada had been encouraged to build commercial ships and small warships, sometimes by supplying vital components like turbines from the UK. Drydocks and naval support yards had been established in Canada, South Africa, India and Australia as well.
The other element of consideration is that the bottleneck items such as turbines, guns and armor plate were being manufactured at a rate that could support the existing building ways in the UK, so there was little excess that could be diverted to supply building ways overseas, and starting new manufacturers of those items would take longer to bring up to speed than the war was likely to last.
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@robertf3479 Speed can be made up in different ways, but they influence the operations you can do. For example, the standard fleet strike operation was the "deck load" launch, in which about half the air group was sited at the rear of the flight deck and launched all at once. If your carrier could not make 30+kts, your planes could still get off by siting a smaller group at the rear, taking up less room and allowing more length of deck for the take-off run. On the little CVEs, the big planes had to be spotted at the very rear of the deck and launched individually or in very small groups, being fed up from the hangar deck as they launched. That works for non-strike missions like ASW patrol, but not for full strike launches (unless you are willing to have the planes circle for a while waiting for others to launch). The other thing that can be done is use of a catapult. I am not familiar with which CVEs had catapults and how often they used them. Ranger had a couple, but I think I read something about them not being used as much.
As far as the battleships, "fleet speed" was usually between 20 and 25 kts, and the fleet direction of advance was often not the same as the wind direction, so carriers would break away from the fleet to conduct flight ops with their faster cruiser and destroyer escorts and then rejoin. The different speeds would be adjusted depending on the wind speed available at the time. Battle formations and speeds under air attack were different from flight ops, and depending on the type of attack the carrier might be steaming in circles or zig-zags.
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@baronungernthebloody553 That was extensively studied and different fleets adopted different air group balances, even changing during the war. The Brits started heavier with fighters, but their fighters were also designed and trained to be light bombers on the side. The USN and IJN started out with only about 25% of the total as fighters, but increased that after the late-42 battles and the US was doing more than 50% late-war (or using fighter-bombers like the Corsair).
The IJN also looked into putting all fighters on one ship of a group of carriers, and having one devoted to dive bombers and one devoted to torpedo bombers. They decided against it due to the issue of combat damage - you lose a whole type of plane if one ship is taken out, better to spread each type across all the decks.
The IJN did develop a multi-ship air strike plan of pairing two carriers together so that one whole squadron of dive bombers from one ship would go on a strike along with the whole squadron of torpedo bombers from the paired ship, rather than half a squadron from each which otherwise would have been the default (the IJN was using a half-group as the standard strike package, because that was how much they could spot on the deck for launch at one time and they did not want to have the first half waiting in the air while the second half was spotted and launched). The USN learned this during 42.
As far as Taffy 3 is concerned, keep in mind it was not expecting to have to face an IJN surface force. It's job was air and ground support of the landing. The main battle fleet, TF 38, was supposed to deal with enemy warships. The Taffys had some anti-ship stuff in the magazines, but not on top for easy reloading. A number of planes were launched with anti-sub and anti-ground loadouts because that was how they were armed before dawn. As the battle went on the anti-surface stuff was brought out and loaded as the planes cycled down on the carriers further from immediate danger.
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Regarding the V-1s, they were only first used on June 13th, a week after D-Day, when the Allies were already firmly ashore. They were fired from the Pas-de-Calais area, which is just northeast of Normandy, but they were mostly launched from fixed launchers that were built to aim at London, and they were guided by crude time-and-distance calculations to when their engine cut out and they plunged to earth. So new launchers would have to be built to aim at Normandy, and new forms of guidance developed to improve the dismal accuracy they were getting in hitting a huge target like London. Once Calais was overrun, they were fired from ramps in Holland and Germany, both of which are too far away from Normandy, and air-launched from bombers, which were vulnerable to interception over France and thus often flew very low over the North Sea, again out of range of Normandy.
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Part of the Kantai Kessen doctrine was the assumption that the enemy forces, whether US or UK, would be coming at them with a superiority of forces. The plan to deal with this was the "whittling down" tactics. Subs would start this, so they were positioned way ahead and had to preserve their torpedoes for the major targets like battleships and carriers. Long-ranged land-based naval air units were also a part of the advanced forces, as well as hit-and-run attacks by the carrier forces aimed at the enemy carrier fleet. Training in night operations was focused on the lighter forces so that they could take part in "whittling down" the enemy main fleet before it could get to the critical area, where it would finally be met by the battleship line in Main Battle.
The ironic part of all this is that this is exactly what the US did to the Japanese in the cascading battles around Leyte Gulf - subs and aircraft doing long-range recon and getting early hits in (goodbye flagship Atago), air power being used to whittle down the incoming heavies (goodbye Musashi), then the climactic clash of the battle lines - which sort-of happened at Surigao (there wasn't much left of the Japanese battle line), but not at San Bernardino like it should have, thanks to Halsey's distraction and mis-communications. It was left to the little guys, again, to hold the line until the big ones could come back - but then the enemy lost their nerve, gave up and sailed away.
Which is probably what Kantai Kassen was aiming for, even if they could not "whittle down" the enemy fleet enough to defeat it like at Tsushima. But the single-minded focus on preparing, equipping, and training for this war-winning clash, and the glory gained in making sure your own attack damaged one of the enemy's primary ships, explains a lot of Japanese actions, from the airmen's over-focus on battleships at Pearl Harbor, the sub's over-focus on carriers and battleships around Guadalcanal at the expense of all the smaller supply ships allowed to slip through, to the light-weight construction and lack of armor in Japanese naval aircraft (in order to increase their range and maneuverability). Escorting civilian merchantmen was hardly thought about before the war, despite the stark example of what the U-boats did to their former ally the UK in WW1 and their similarity as island nations needing overseas resources. Vital destroyers could not be spared from their jobs with the fleet, and no one had built any dedicated escorts until they were forced to by increasing losses. Radar and sonar were neglected until they saw how the Allies were using them to defeat their highly-trained forces. And they did not have the training program, particularly for airmen, to replace their losses because they were hoping their pre-war plan would be enough to either bring them a quick, decisive victory or so bloody the enemy that they had to fall back and end up in a stalemate.
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Re the discussion near 02:38:00 about torpedoes blowing off bows vs sterns, if you are talking about ship-launched torpedoes like the Long Lance, the target would most likely be heading toward you, so impact would more often be in the forward part. Plus standard doctrine would be to turn towards an incoming torpedo to "comb the wakes". A sub-launched torpedo is more likely to be coming from abeam and aimed toward the center of mass, but allowing for "leading" the moving target would have a greater chance of striking forward rather than aft. Secondarily, the hull of most warships is narrower up forward, so there is less structure to resist the bending and twisting movements of torpedo explosion, and the water's pressure against the bow as she whips would tend to add to the twist. The stern has a wider structure, and is reinforced to distribute the thrust of the propeller shafts and rudders, so it would be stronger and less affected by the displacement motion of the explosion. Drach's comments on the ricochet motion of the reinforced barbettes adds to the greater forces on the forward sections, particularly since the forward armored bulkhead of the AoN scheme is usually just ahead of the first turret and the hull is usually a bit narrower there.
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Re the question at 39:00, on a warship just about everything in engineering is duplicated, triplicated, or quadruplicated, so first of all a particular problem is powered down and bypassed, with alternates taking up the slack or the ship just having less power. The ship, depending on it's size, carries some spares for frequent problems (such as turbine blades, bearings or shaft seals) which can be swapped in by the engineering crew if they have time to strip down the item once it is cold. Often it has to wait until the ship is not underway, but I've heard of some repairs being done during long cruises. Bigger ships have machine shops where parts can be adjusted, repaired or fabricated. At a port there may be more parts or a machine shop, or the ship might tie up next to a repair tender. If it is serious the ship may be routed to a shipyard where specialized workers and machines can be found. Some things like boilers and gears can be operated without fully repairing the part, they are just less efficient. Other things, like high-speed turbines, are carefully balanced and cannot be run with broken blades, but individual blades can be swapped out as they are identical. If the enclosure or the main shaft is damaged, that is much more serious and would have to wait for shipyard attention.
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@wedgeantilles8575 For the same reason that IJN subs were told not to waste torpedoes on merchant shipping but to focus on the biggest warships they could find. Yes, there is some "honor" part to it, but it is mostly economy - they only had so many weapons, and so much time. As Bk Jeong says, they were also limited in the amount of time they could spend there by the amount of oil they brought (they had some tankers, which they refueled from before the strike, but they had to preserve a margin in case they got into combat). But if you look at the priorities Yamamoto gave the strike planners, battleships were at the top, followed by other warships. The strategic goal was to disable enough battleships that the US would be reluctant to move forward to relieve the Philippines or help defend the Dutch East Indies. Oil tanks were not on the planning list. Weapons were selected and modified for the special situations (shallow harbor, inboard battleships) expected, but no testing or training was done on hitting oil tanks. The Japanese expected that the US had plenty of oil (they did) and could easily rebuild the tanks and refill them if needed (they could; the shortage was in oilers that could do underway replenishment, not in tankers to move oil from land base to land base). Plus the tanks were separated by earth berms to prevent fires from spreading, and had built-in fire suppression systems. Two to three dive bombers would have been required for each tank, wasting a lot of time and weapons that were needed for higher-priority targets.
Then there is the myth of the "Third Wave". The first two "waves" were really each half of the full striking power of the Kido Butai, which could only be launched in two parts because they could not all fit on the deck during the launch cycle. Japanese carriers could not warm up engines in the hangar, so planes were lifted to the flight deck, spotted at the far rear, then the engines were started and warmed up. In order to have enough run for getting off, the foremost planes could not be more than halfway back. Once the first "wave" was off, the second "wave" was lifted from the hangars to the flight deck, spotted, then warmed up and launched. The first "wave" was told not to wait for the second to get airborne, but to proceed to the attack on their own. Each "wave" was made up of a mixture of fighters, dive bombers and torpedo bombers trained to work together. Once the second "wave" was gone, there were no more strike aircraft on the IJN decks - just some fighters staying back for CAP. So in order to have a "third wave", the first "wave" would have to land, be lowered to the hangar decks, refuel and rearm, be brought back up to the flight deck, respot, warm up engines again, take off and fly back to Pearl (about 60-80 minutes away at that point). But the next problem would be that that was the time at which the second "wave" would be arriving back needing to land. This is the same problem they had at Midway, with fatal consequences. By cancelling any follow-up strike, Nagumo unknowingly did not face the dilemma he would confront at Midway six months later.
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@amerigo88 Regarding Kido Butai distance to Midway, the range difference was between IJN aircraft and USN aircraft, not land-based aircraft. Further away would have meant longer transit times, greater danger of damaged aircraft not making it back to the fleet. The ineffectiveness of USA aircraft against ships was evident in the pre-10AM attacks, easily dealt with by CAP. Midway, although "unsinkable", was still small, a single runway, flat and with little shelter. Two or three consecutive strikes, especially if you catch the defending force on the ground refueling like at Wake, would shut it down or denude it of flyable aircraft. It was the codebreaking and Nimitz's bold pre-deployment of carriers that turned the tide. Despite Mitscher's useless contribution.
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3:40:00 Regarding bravery and damage control versus storming a beach, I look at it (with only minimal experience in emergency situations) as a matter of familiarity versus the unknown, in that a man on ship is in his "home" - he is familiar with his ship and it's layout, but someone has attacked and damaged it, and he realizes that he has to fight to preserve it and his friends, but at least he knows his way around and what is available to help fight the damage. Whereas someone about to storm a beach, or go "over the top", he may have seen a picture of the enemy lines, but he has never been there and has no familiarity with it, so to me that would take much more courage to face, especially if he has no protection from enemy fire and has to "charge the guns".
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@readingrailroadfan7683 Availability of the type of ships, speed and size of the ships (you want as close to 20kts as you can from a merchant ship), and enough dockyard space and manpower to do the work. The Clevelands were altered during building, so they did not have to raze an existing ship, but most of the lower hull was kept as it was (it was mostly engine room anyway). The first classes of escort carriers were built on freighter and oiler hulls, also with minimal changes to the lower hulls, with the tanks or holds repurposed for storage of aircraft parts, weapons, and extra crew (one class of oiler kept most of her tanks, and was used to refuel escort vessels as well). The superstructure was cut down to main deck level and a hangar and flight deck built over it, with provision for trunking the engine gasses along the side. A single elevator was added at first, but later, larger purpose-built CVEs had two. The first ones also had no island, but that was found to be a problem so later ones had very small islands added. Aside from the existing armor in the Clevelands, little or no provision for armor was made, except in some which enclosed the avgas tanks in concrete.
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@ 1:41:48 There was NO "Third Wave". After the second wave left around 7AM the only planes left on the Kido Butai flight decks were CAP fighters, I'm not sure how many but I think two chutais or around 18. IJN carrier attack doctrine was the massed strike composed of two parts, each part being half of the attack strength of each carrier, because (simplistically) only about half of the full complement of planes could be fit on the flight deck for a single launch (allowing enough take-off room at the forward end). Carriers were matched in pairs, and each unit would contribute an entire squadron of either dive bombers or torpedo bombers (which doubled as horizontal bombers when needed, particularly for land attacks), sending the other squadron up with the second half of the strike. The fighter squadron was split between escort fighters going with the strike and CAP fighters that stayed back to defend the fleet.
When people theorize about a "Third Wave" what they really mean is a second strike by what was the First Wave, after it flew back, landed, refueled and rearmed, and was spotted and launched again - which would take about 2-3 hours, counting flying time. This was the big problem at Midway - the First Wave was on its way back while the Second Wave was still in the hangars, armed for anti-ship strike in case anything threatening was discovered by recon. The commander of the First Wave called for a second strike on Midway, and Nagumo ordered the rearming of the attack planes with land-attack weapons (swapping torpedoes for bombs), when the first report came in of USN ships in the area. The big problem was what to do then - send off the second wave to hit the ships with the wrong weapons while the first wave circled the carriers, or landing the first wave while rearming the second wave again and then launching the rearmed second wave.
Note also that the original question was pitched as to what the Enterprise could have done on the EVENING of Sunday the 7th, ie after the KB had already started heading north. I don't know if Enterprise could have caught them, particularly since her planes did not have the longer range of the lighter IJN planes and she would be approaching from the southwest at a diagonal.
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@christopherrowe7460 Yes, Friedman's is a vital source for design discussions, but not the only one. I got the impression from somewhere else (going through my library now to try to figure out where, might not be one I have...) that the mood of Congress and the Gun Club in the early 20s was against a large ship for the "air boys", and that the Lex and Sara were very reluctant concessions in order not to waste what had already been built. Remember the Billy Mitchell affair? I thought there was very little chance they could have gotten a 27,000 ton ship (who did propose that at the Treaty anyway?). It sounded like it was most likely they would have gotten another collier conversion, perhaps with an engine rebuild to get a few more knots speed. Remember she was about 13,000 tons, and the deep coal holds were not used much for the air group on the Langley. If they had built one or two bigger ones it would have to have been after several years of lobbying, like the later 20s, when they would have had more experience with one or two Langleys in the Fleet Problems and at NWC. I don't think they learned much from the Langley about deck-load strikes - I thought that came from the Lexingtons. Worth looking into.
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@eemma1781 Tarawa/Betio was the first opposed landing on an atoll in the Pacific, and a lot was learned the hard way. Pre-battle, the concern was not to tip off the enemy that they were coming, so as not to have them pre-positioning subs and aircraft to counterattack the invasion fleet. Planes had bombed the islands over the month before, along with some other islands so as not to look like they were focusing on that one in particular. It was estimated that a couple hours of solid battleship bombardment would smash up as much of the beach defenses as was necessary to let the Marines get ashore, then they could direct further bombardment or bring in their own artillery. The island is less than 2 miles long anyway, so how much could be dug in, and it's only a few feet above sea level, so how deep could it be dug?
Needless to say, they learned they were wrong. As to how the battle could have been changed, look at the battle for Kwajalein for a much longer and better-organized pre-landing bombardment. After that, the nature of the islands being invaded changed (Saipan, Iwo Jima, Okinawa), and improved landing craft were made available based on the lessons of Tarawa. And the Japanese changed their tactics and fortification designs as well, especially on Okinawa.
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@michaelkovacic2608 While both ships suggested are reasonably fast, their overall hull forms are really designed for breadth and stability as heavy gun platforms, not the slimmer form optimized for carriers. Yes, battlecruisers (and at least one battleship) were rebuilt as carriers, but they did not do as well as custom-built designs. The internal arrangements are very different as well - the large spaces reserved for magazines, shell rooms, and barbettes would be ripped out and even the hull framing changed for different stress factors. So if you started with a battleship design to save time, you would end up spending significant time redesigning and recalculating things to repurpose it as a carrier. Notice that the Lexington, on about 36,000 tons and 180,000 shp, carried about the same number of planes at the same speed as the Yorktown, on about 20,000 tons and 120,000 shp.
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@vincentdamienarneo369 Doug covered the problems with the Graf Zeppelin and the Luftwaffe, but in answer to your "if they could have maybe secured oil rich regions basically from the get go", the issue is WHERE? At the time (1930s) the major oil centers were US (TX/OK, southern CA), Venezuela, Romania, Persian Gulf (getting started), Caspian Sea, and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). Places like Libya, Algeria, Alaska and the North Sea had not been discovered yet. I don't see any that a squadron of Graf Zeps could have secured.
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Geoff, sorry about your uncle. My great-uncle joined the Death March in 1942, but survived.
Problems Navy officers faced:
1. MASSIVE fleet expansion from '42 to '44, which required
2. HUGE numbers of recruits that had never seen the ocean before, and
3. Deploying to South Pacific after barely a shakedown cruise, so
4. Backlog in training, both officers and men, because
5. New weapons & tech like radar without operational experience so
6. Learn-as-you-go for equipment and tactics, because
7. Japanese night tactics and torpedoes are a surprise, since
8. Naval intel worried more about Congress and the Brits (but they did break Purple, and JN25 in '42).
As far as politics goes, there was incessant penny-pinching by Congress, but the President was a Navy man. Then again, he was a Democrat...
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If you are interested in an idea that predated Habakkuk, check out a movie made in 1932 called "F.P.1 Doesn't Answer", with Conrad Veidt, Jill Esmond, and Leslie Fenton. A naval engineer has a great idea for a Floating Platform in the middle of the Atlantic, acting as a relay base for shorter-range planes flying from Europe to America and back. His friend an aviator stages a break-in to get publicity for his plans, and a shipyard agrees to build the platform. A love triangle develops (oh, no, did "Pearl Harbor" get the idea here?), while "secret interests" attempt to stop the building, and then try to sabotage the platform before it can open. The design of the platform is quite interesting, reminds us of the giant platforms build much later for deep water oil drilling, or the Mobile Offshore Base plans. Anyway, it is playing this month for free on Amazon Prime. The audio is awful, so keep the subtitles on.
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Zimm covered that issue in his "Attack on Pearl Harbor", chapter 10 "Assessing the Folklore". The IJN 14" shells weighed about 1,500 lbs, and the 16" shells weighed about 2,200 lbs. The Kate, which doubled as both a torpedo bomber and a level bomber, could carry about 1,800 lbs, which was one 18" torpedo, one "special" AP bomb which was machined down from a 16" AP shell, or two or three (?) of the 250kg/550lb GP bombs. But the Kate could not dive bomb, which was much more accurate that level bombing (hitting the Arizona's magazine was a fluke). The Val could only take one 250kg/550lb GP bomb, so it could not even take the 14" shell/bomb. This would have to be in a "third wave", which would take place about three hours later, when US opposition would be MUCH greater and counter-attack more risky. The tanks were surrounded by fire berms and had fire-suppression systems as well. And the big problem for USN was specialized at-sea oilers, not general tankers - there was a good sized fleet working out of the southern California area. Resupplying Pearl would have taken a couple of months, and the underground fuel storage caverns were nearly ready to begin operations as well.
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There's a reference in one or two works to them being based on the SS Bremen, just scaled down, but that could explain the high-pressure boilers. Most works I've seen say they were replaced with Kampon boilers, the standard IJN set. Would be interesting to see design sheets for the original cruise liners. Laid down 30 Nov. 1939, sold to IJN while building 10 Feb. 1941, launched 24 June 1941, commissioned 31 July 1942. The time from sale to launch was only 4 months, so they were probably not converted very much before launch, just finished for hitting the water, but that is usually when the boilers and engines are sealed in. Might be enough time to upgrade the boilers. That would make some sense as it would mean the boiler staff would be familiar with Kampons. The longer time from launch to commissioning would be the changes to rip out the cruise liner fittings and install hangar deck, flight deck, island and gun sponsons. Of the XCV you listed, the Leviathan had the same speed but was much bigger (and German-built, with higher-pressure boilers), while the other two were similar sized but only about 20 knots.
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That might be a little extreme. They learned the battle side of things fairly well, and trained their men exhaustively. They believed more in the "metaphysical" side of conflict, the "spirit" over the "steel". That may stem from believing that they were an Empire descended directly from a god. They had pretty good advisors in the Germans and Brits, so they learned about staff work and planning as well as battle tactics. What was "broken" (or never worked right) was the necessary subordination of the military to the civil government, and the consequent objective analysis of whether it was "worth it" to pursue a military solution to insolvable problems. The Kwantung Army kept thrusting ahead in China, even despite Army higher-ups back in Tokyo telling them they could not afford it. Reading pre-war memoirs, it seems everyone knew that taking on the US and the UK was a bad idea due to the economic disparity, but no one could break out of the self-made whirlpool of events and national pride. Even on a "total war" footing (which they entered with rationing and restrictions on civilian production in 1937) they never had a realistic chance.
As to their leadership, that may also have been influenced by their "spiritual" background. They believed in ancestor worship and group consensus, so there was less of a "meritocracy" that recognized and promoted those who performed better over those who were older and in the traditional line of seniority. Nagumo got to command the Kido Butai not because he was an outstanding aviator or air theorist, but because he was next in seniority to command. He did not like the Pearl Harbor plan, but got stuck with it. Several times lower-ranked officers showed initiative or criticized plans from higher ranks (like Tanaka and Hara), but they were then shunted into side jobs to quiet them. Yamamoto was the only one with the seniority and leverage to promote "out of the box" thinkers like Genda, but he also had to be careful not to push too much change, and once he was gone there was no one with the same leadership.
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@vikkimcdonough6153 The UK suffered the problem you asked of, deforestation, but not from wildfire or disease. Farm and grazing land expansion caused more and more forest to be cut down, and the demands of their fleet meant that the old-growth, tallest trees were more valuable and thus cut down first. Part of the reason for the UK attacking the Danes in the Baltic was to secure the route to the upper Baltic, where the Swedes were supplying taller, old-growth trees from their forests. The American colonies were also looked toward as suppliers of these kinds of trees, until they got upset and declared independence. Building fewer ships was out of the question, but the UK did learn how to layer and stagger shorter, narrower pieces of wood to build up a larger piece such as a keel or mast. Eventually the switch to iron and steel obviated the need for such work, which has become a lost art.
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Usually the ship would not go to full speed and turn into the wind until flight operations are about to commence. But it would be a known amount of time, so the engineering crew would be making preparations - lighting off extra boilers, rerouting steam lines, etc. This was particularly important when the fleet direction was not into the prevailing wind, like during Midway. You are correct that American carriers had an advantage that they could warm up planes in the hangar deck, but they would then have to launch fairly soon after being spotted on the flight deck or they would cool down again. Both British and Japanese carriers had to spot on the flight deck first, then warm up, then launch. Warm-ups were usually done by deck crews, not the pilots. And yes, all the navies used the tactic of having the fighters take off first, because they did not have bomb loads and had more powerful engines so they could take off in less deck length.
Lundstrom covers a lot of this in his good series The First Team.
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Modular building was used in WW2 - eg., some ships were built in sections in Denver and carried by train to Mare Island for assembly (the dimensions and weights were carefully proscribed). It was used somewhat inter-war, but mostly "sections" being built in shops at the builders yards and craned on-board. Your idea of #2 would take a LOT of storage space on or near a yard, and you would have to deal with preservation from rust and weather effects. It would be hard to hide, so the WNT or LNT would be able to count it. Then there is the time to put it together, test it out and crew it. The Japanese solution was simpler - build a ship to one stated goal, then shortly before you start a war, rebuild it or rearm it to a more desired one (Mogami, Zuiho, Hiyo, etc).
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@ElectroAtletico I thought the 500 lbers were HC (HE), and the 1,000 lbers were SAP. Still, the Fliegercorps dropped 1,000 and 2,000 lbers on Illustrious in the Med and barely defeated her 3.5" armor. A BB's 5-6" deck armor should be proof against most dive bomber weapons. It took Kates dropping modified 16" AP shells weighing around 1,800 lbs to get through the Arizona's deck armor, and she was anchored. Yes, a 500 or 1,000 lb SAP will go through most CVs decks, but we were talking about Bismarck here.
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@bkjeong4302 There is an element to "national character" as well that figured in those decisions. The Germans made highly-engineered tanks, with tight tolerances. They expected that there would be a "teething time" when problems would be worked out, but in the rush of '42-'43 when they needed SOMETHING to counter the T-34 & KV-1, that time was sacrificed. They actually did have the ability to recover and repair tanks, but that depended on them winning the battles so they could recover the breakdowns. Once they started retreating that went out the window.
The other part of their strategy of dominating the enemy was they expected to be on the offensive and to have the better doctrine and tactics. Once the Russians recovered from the shock and rebuilt their Stalin-decimated officer corps and doctrines, that was evened out.
For the Japanese, their "national character" was putting everything they could into the first strike, hitting the hardest and the fastest at the longest range. Their aircraft sacrificed armor and self-sealing tanks in order to get more range and maneuverability, making them "Ronsons". Their ships were fast and hard-hitting, but weaker on armor, self-maintenance and crew comfort. Their torpedoes were big and had great range, but if hit when still aboard could sink the ship. They were great when on the offense, but their grand strategy was to expand, build a defensive perimeter, and then go on the defense. That second phase was were their lack of defensive capabilities cost them. Plus the lack of a good long-range pilot training program.
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@themightynanto3158 Define "impactful"...
Lexington: first lost, biggest, worst explosion, learned most about gas fume damage control;
Yorktown: second lost, discouraged pursuit of fleeing IJN at Midway, learned more about poor CAP control, proved value of CO2 in fuel lines, damaged beforehand (Coral Sea);
Wasp: third lost, 5,000 tons less that fleet carrier so had minimal torpedo protection, lesson- keep the subs away...;
Hornet: last lost, took amazing damage and still would not sink, proved DC lessons and continuing CAP control weaknesses, left US with only 1 damaged and 1 repairing fleet carrier till mid-43.
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@bkjeong4302 Unfortunately (or, to us, fortunately) the IJN never saw Star Wars, so their existing strategy of surprise was all they had to go on. As it happened, even the US was not sure what size they were until well into 1944, and thought they could handle them with an Iowa or two. What they did know in 1941, when they were near commissioning, was that the US was ramping up with a truly gargantuan building program that would put them way behind by 1944. And that was also before the big airpower lessons of late '41 and mid-'42. I don't see the "buying time for IJN to build up" with their building plans at that time - the US was building at 2 to 3 times the rate of IJN, and learning their size might have made things worse. Keeping the secret preserved the element of surprise, unfortunately (or, to us, fortunately) they never used them to do anything until they were hopelessly outclassed in airpower by 1944. They could have made a difference if used at Guadalcanal, for example.
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@LeCharles07 No. Japan's shipbuilding was at it's limit in the late 30s, partly due to Yamatos but also partly due to yard and worker limits. The number they took were the ones with the longest legs (most steaming radius, though only 2 of them could make it all the way, so there were tankers along and they struggled to refuel in stormy December North Pacific seas). The Shokakus were just commissioned and still working up, their air groups were considered "green". The other carriers available were light or escort, some that could not handle the North Pacific and all with much less steaming radius.
As to "the strike group didn't utilize every attack wave they could have", take a look at Zimm's book on the Pearl Harbor attack. The first two waves were EVERY attack plane on all six carriers - only a few fighters were kept back for CAP. There was no "third wave" - it would have been made up of planes from the first wave, recovered, repaired, rearmed and refueled. Same problem as at Midway - they were struck below when the second wave returned, and the second was more damaged than the first. No third wave could have been launched until around 11AM at best, but at that point there was a need to rescout the area for the missing US carriers. Nagumo ordered anti-ship loadouts and high-tailed it north.
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@calebshonk5838 Good plan, but the devil is in the details. The B-17s were Army Air Corps, and their pilots were trained to bomb. Recon training was a different pipeline. The Army hated the idea of using their "best" bomber for recon. The communication path for getting sighting reports from the plane to the fleet was also a problem - it had to go back to the base, then up to the regional AAC commander, then to a liason to the Navy, then back to the regional Navy commander, then out to the relevant fleet unit or air group. Oh, and recon above a decent height (10,000?) wouldn't be able to see much, so you could not use the 30,000+ height of the plane for that (did they even have enough oxygen onboard for more than a couple hours at that altitude?). Plus I don't think they had a removeable bomb-bay fuel tank for the B-17 at that point. I think that was developed for the B-24 later, like 1943.
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@Noble713 Theoretically, upgrading the Fusos and Ises by pulling the midships turrets for engines would have made them faster, but at the cost of a loss of four battleships from the battle line, which had few to begin with. I doubt they would have gotten them up to 30 kts, more likely 27-28. The other issue is the use you propose. The Guadalcanal campaign was a meat-grinder, and it was chewing up cruisers and destroyers. There was air power on both sides to deal with, narrow passages with uncharted reefs and not a lot of sea room for long-range gunfire. The IJN was loathe to commit battleships or battlecruisers into that maelstrom. They finally did it because they were getting desperate and did not expect the Americans to respond with their own heavy ships (hence the Kirishima's surprise). But doctrinally they still tried to keep their battle line prepared for the Decisive Battle. And the cost of the effort in the 30s would come at a time when they were gathering resources for their super-killers, the Yamatos. Plus these new BCs would eat up a LOT more oil to get to the higher speeds, which is what they were most short of. As has been stated before, if the IJN HAD thrown their battle line into the Guadalcanal campaign, it might have made a difference, but then the USN would have countered and it probably would have evened out (or produced the Decisive Battle in Iron Bottom Sound without all the preliminary whittling-down that the IJN wanted).
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@alexanderoverton2723 The Fusos were started before WW1, and completed during it. Their designs did not take advantage of any of the WW1 improvements in naval tech. In particular, her armor could not protect from her own guns, she used coal instead of oil, the torpedo defense system was minimal, and the secondary armament was in casements. She also had a minimal fire control system. The QEs and Rs had bigger guns, a better arrangement (no mid-ships guns), more engine power, a better torpedo defense system, and better fire control system. Yes, they were all modernized in the 30s, including adding a torpedo bulge and new engines, but they still had major issues with the alternating engine rooms and magazines amidships, the main belt was still weak and the secondary and AA armaments were not much upgraded.
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Zimm makes some discussion of this. It was not in the existing plan, or in the mindset of the Japanese aviators who even overlooked sitting duck cruisers in the harbor to concentrate on the Nevada when she tried to sortie, despite their 250kg bombs not being capable of doing much damage to her vitals. They wanted battleships (or carriers), not oil tanks. Hitting the oil tanks would have taken a different training regimen months before, because they are spread out in several sections between the Navy Yard and Hickam Field (not on Ford, only avgas there), each large tank in a separate berm that would contain any rupture, with built-in fire suppression systems. This would have required a third strike, which meant a delay for returning to the ships, rearming and refueling, and then returning to Oahu and fighting through much increased AA and fighter cover - probably around 3 hours. And then, there was TONS of oil available in the LA area of California, the only issue would have been shipping it over which would take a week or two, and it could have been stored temporarily in the tankers until the almost-completed underground storage was finished. It would not have paralyzed the fleet any more than it already was. Their biggest problem at the time was lack of specialized tankers configured for underway refueling.
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In the early 30's Britain was waking up from the "no war likely for 10 years" policy to recognize that Japan (even before Germany) was making warlike moves and upsetting the balance in the Far East, and Britain had given a "moral promise" to send a fleet to cover her colonies there if things got serious. Moves were already underway by '35 to make up for the weaknesses that had been allowed to grow by over a decade of neglect, but that was easiest to do with army forces, moderately harder to do with air forces, and required the longest lead time for naval forces ("Naval Policy Between The Wars, Vol II" by Roskill). While Joseph Kennedy supported Chamberlain's appeasement policies, JFK seems more to be taking the "buying time" position, which is probably closer to what was really happening. What we did not know until after the war was how much of Germany's mid to late 30's apparent strength was actually staged propaganda, and how stretched their economy was with Hitler's orders for armaments. The ironic side benefit of his early arms building compared to Britain's later arms building is that a lot of his earlier equipment was becoming obsolete by the beginning of the war, like the Panzer I and IIs. Excellent training and tactics covered up for that early on, but meeting the T-34 and KV-1 was a shock.
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Yes, they had all those in theory and had practiced peace-time maneuvers, but they did not adapt very well when confronted with problems in real battle. Their multi-carrier task groups turned into "every ship for himself" when under air attack, their only opposed amphib landing at Wake Island was an unmitigated disaster (and their second landing was just a copy of the first, but they had more forces and control of the air), they did well at first in night fighting but did not adapt to USN improvements, and their submarine force, despite a few big successes (Saratoga, Yorktown, Wasp) was too fixated on supporting the Main Battle so did not adapt tactics to exploit Allied supply weaknesses. Plus other elements of their tactical plans, like sowing mini-subs across the axis of advance of the US fleet to attrit them, consumed large attention and effort despite being demonstrably useless.
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@ThumperE23 Franklin was the eighth Essex class laid down. After the Essex at Newport News, two were laid down at Fore River - the Lexington and the Bunker Hill. Then two more were laid down at Newport News, the Yorktown and Intrepid. Then the Wasp at Fore River, and then the Hornet at Newport News, in the same slipway just vacated by the Essex. The Franklin was in a new slipway, and was laid down the same month as the Bennington at Brooklyn. Newport News was the lead yard and drafted the detail plans, but then shared them with Fore River, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Norfolk.
Essex was not commissioned till December of 42, same time Franklin was laid down. Many of the "kinks" were worked out between launch and then, but they were in such a rush that they had several nearby complete before Essex did sea trials. I think the first group of six was authorized by the naval act of 1940, while the second bigger group was authorized by the Two Ocean Navy act of 1941. Friedman's US Aircraft Carriers Design History has a good chapter on this, plus a lot on their postwar modernizations.
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BHR was around 40,000 tons, the Essexes were about 30,000. But the other point is that the ship was in the yard, so many systems shut down, including the fire suppression system, the yard work left trash and flammables around the ship, fire watches were reduced, some crew were ashore, and response was delayed. It was a serious bungling, but more of a yard loss than an at-sea loss.
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Tom, the inter-war formations were not presuming the most vulnerable asset was the aircraft carrier. The overriding consideration was to preserve the true "capital ship", the battleship, from harassment by smaller enemy ships, subs, and aircraft. The carrier was either on detached scouting duties or in the "fleet train" behind the battleships, with enough room to maneuver for air ops but primarily tasked with air cover over the battle fleet. The UK was using a similar formation with the carrier near but behind the heavy ships (at least into '41-'42, judging by their ops in the Med). The Japanese were also prioritizing the battle line, but when they experimented with all-carriers in mid-'41 they had two parallel lines of pairs a short distance apart at the center. When attacked by air, they would open the "cover" formation up to give the carriers more room to dodge, but no escorts would stick close to them. The escorts main job was anti-sub and anti-surface defense.
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I think you mean APDs, not ADPs (AP for Assault Personnel and D for Destroyer-conversion). But these were optimized for landing troops, not cargo. They had no freight cranes and relied on the troops manhandling any supplies they needed into the landing craft. They would not do much good in the Med resupplying Malta or Crete, which needed large quantities of food, fuel, and ammo.
There was another special class of high-speed transport, the pre-war high speed ocean liners, which were converted for war service by ripping out all the fancy furnishings and installing floor-to-ceiling bunks for troops. Hundreds of thousands of troops were transported this way at sustained speeds of greater than 30 kts, far faster than U-boats could track or shoot at. But again, very little cargo could be carried that the troops did not bring on and off themselves. Some of them had small fore and aft holds, but they needed dockside cranes to load and unload.
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@deonmurphy6383 The UK had multiple colonies & commonwealth allies around the world, from Canada to South Africa, India, and Australia, plus handfuls of small bases like Bermuda, Jamaica, the Falklands and Ceylon. Backup plans were already in place, and Churchill had given FDR assurances that the RN would "never surrender". A secret plan was already underway in 1940-41 to move all the tangible wealth of the UK to Canada (lookup Operation Fish) as well as that which was in their possession from the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway and France. The US was also supplying and repairing RN ships in 1941, as well as building new ones for transfer.
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The UK had significant commitments in Asia - the Persian Gulf, India/Pakistan, Burma, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand, all of which it owed some measure of naval & military protection to. Yes, the homeland was in Europe, but it planned, budgeted and allocated forces to all of those areas in addition to the Atlantic and Mediterranean theatres. The fact that so many of it's military and naval assumptions (in particular, the continued contribution of France) went wrong in 1940 forced it to pull back forces from Asia to cover gaps back home. As tensions increased in Asia it was beginning to swing some forces back, but "too little too late" was an ongoing problem. Another erroneous assumption was the impregnability of the fortress of Singapore, whose fall in early 1942 laid bare the lack of alternatives and forced the fall back to India.
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The time period you list covers the latter Solomons, the New Guinea, the Gilberts , Marshalls and Aleutians campaigns, plus stuff like the raid on Truk. All had significant destroyer and cruiser level engagements, plus lots of daily air battles. I gather by "major" you mean battleships and carriers. Both sides were low on carriers, and the Japanese were on the defensive, while the US launched the Essexes and Independences and trained the invasion fleets. The IJN recognized that the ongoing battles in the Solomons were not "critical" to homeland defense, and they were rebuilding the carrier air squadrons which had been decimated by being fed in piecemeal for long-distance flights. In the Pacific the Allies were not "saving it for D-Day", they actually launched a parallel major invasion of the Marianas in June '44. Japan did not "try something" because her strategy was defensive, to try to hold what she had taken (principally the Dutch East Indies with their oil) and make the Allies pay badly enough that they would accept a negotiated peace. They also knew that they could lose everything else up to the Marianas and Philippines and still survive, but once that line was breached they were doomed.
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Just like Japan in WW2, China is dependent on imports for many crucial resources, particularly oil. The difference for the US is that it has strong bases close to China, in the form of Korea, Japan, and Guam. There are also a number of friendly allies such as Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines (sometimes), and Australia. The classic naval strategy of blockade would serve well again, with the US fleet using submarines to get in close to hunt the Chinese fleet while the CVBGs stand off till air and missile power is reduced. Unlike the Chinese fleet, the US fleet can sustain itself at a distance, and US SLOCs are far enough away that they will not be threatened by Chinese forces unless they use ICBMs.
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@tomdolan9761 Shinano's watertight doors were not fitted or tested when she was sunk because she was on her way from Yokosuka to Kure, where she was supposed to be completed and have all the doors and seals tested.
If you look at the pace of her construction, the IJN put her work on pause from December 1941 to July 1942, due to the apparent fragility of battleships after Force Z was sunk. They were working with a reduced force only hard enough to get her ready to leave the drydock. Then they picked it up after Midway, but left many of the battleship features like the barbettes in place (though they did not fit the whole armored belt). They were expecting to finish her by April 1945, but put a rush on it after Philippine Sea in June 1944.
If you look at build dates, Yamato took 33 months to launch and 49 months to be ready to commission at Kure, and Musashi took 32 months to launch and 52 months (and a week) to be ready for commissioning at Nagasaki. Shinano was laid down at Yokosuka in May 1940. Since it was a different shipyard I would not expect "builders efficiencies" to accrue, so say around 33-34 months to launch and around 52-54 months to be ready to commission. That is a launch date around March 1943 and a commissioning date around September 1944, presuming they did not pause her work after Force Z went down. As I recall, Yamato was not "ready to fight" after commissioning, requiring another three to four months for completion and training. Musashi is recorded as still receiving secondary guns and radar after her commissioning, not being considered ready for another four months. So I don't think Shinano could have made Leyte Gulf, even if she had been pushed forward as a battleship like her sisters.
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I believe Norman Friedman's book on US Cruisers gives detail on fuel load and "projected" range, but that depends heavily on what speeds she makes. The Omaha class was designed for high speed (>30kts), and at that speed she will eat through her fuel very quickly. They actually had a higher "cruising" speed than others due to the design of the high speed turbines, so they were a little less efficient at cruising speeds that other ships preferred. As to refueling underway, that is also a "depending on speeds made" and also depending on what she was doing. Cruising across the Pacific would require planned stops or underway refueling, but cruising from port to port in the South Atlantic would usually not.
Drach has addressed the light-off boilers question in several places, from his video on boilers to a few Drydocks. The basic issue is what state they are in to begin, since most ships keep at least one lit to provide steam for generators for the "house load" when in port. If she is tied to dock doing maintenance (with shore electrical supply) or in drydock, she will douse all boilers, but then she is hardly likely to get an emergency sortie order there. In general it takes several hours to get a cold boiler ready to provide steam, but a smaller ship like an Omaha may be able to get underway on a single boiler as the others are being lit off.
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@able34bravo37 The six calculation was if they stuck with the 15,000 ton limit for each, but they realized as they gained experience with the Lexingtons that size and speed was a big issue and the Ranger design had not enough of either. The Yorktowns were already in the design stage at around 20,000 tons, so they just moved on and left the Ranger as a one-off.
The question of what you could do for Ranger is really "at which stage"? If you could interfere early in the design stage, push them to add another 5,000 tons. If you are locked into the 15,000, then suggest they upgrade the boilers to higher pressures while leaving space and weight margins for adding armor once war threatens and the treaty is annulled. If you could convert six 15,000 ton Rangers into six 20,000 ton Yorktown-equivalents in 1939-40, that would be much more useful than three Yorktowns and two Ranger/Wasps. In a sense, the Soryus were sort of like that, but you don't need 34.5 kts. Cut that down to about 31 and you're probably cutting the plant in half.
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@emersonschwarz1364 Somerville had two advantages, radar and night-trained air attack squadrons, and the third advantage of surprise as the IJN did not know how close he was. The IJN had a great advantage in daytime air combat, but they would have to survive the night first. IF Somerville had gotten one or two night torpedo strikes in, prioritizing the carriers, things might have been evened up and a surface battle later or early in the morning would have been a possibility. IJN night surface doctrine was at least equal to or better than the UK, though the UK had the advantage of radar (and knowledge of how to use it, unlike the USN at that point). The UK 5 BBs outweighed the IJN 4 BCs, but the Type 93 torpedo might have been a nasty surprise.
Had the IJN won, things probably would not have been much different than historical, since the IJN "won" the Indian Ocean raid anyway when the UK declined combat.
However, IF the UK had won that night, the Kido Butai would have been crippled, which would have seriously hamstrung the IJN and prevented operations like Coral Sea, Midway and the Solomons campaign from being considered. Japan would have withdrawn to its existing ring of newly-conquered islands to build up land-based air defenses as it tried to rebuild the IJN carrier force.
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Drach did one video on the WNT, with some commentary on "enforcement" and followups. At the time (1921), the politicians were enamored with the "Great War To End War" idea, along with the idea that it was the naval arms race that caused the Great War. The UK was drifting towards serious pacifism among certain influential groups, and finances were tight at a time that all the navies wanted to build build post-war ships embodying all the "Lessons of Jutland". So the national politicians were the first tier of "enforcement", as they reined in the building proposals of their own navies, often by the power of the purse. The two top-tier navies, the UK and US, were democracies that held parliamentary debates over navy budgets, so not much was able to be kept secret about ship plans. But the treaties did not have an enforcement mechanism besides public exposure, and when they collapsed in the mid-30s it was not about cheating but about Japan's wanting to get a jump on everyone else by building the Yamatos.
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@Kerndon What matters most is the relative speed of the ships versus their sisters in the same task force. Both the cruise speed and the "flank" speed of the Ranger were several knots slower than her "sisters" like the Lex's, Yorktowns, and Essexes. She was also built lighter, as they were experimenting with trying to pack a 20,000 ton carrier into 15,000 tons so they could get more ships within the London Naval Treaty limits. The cruising speed of the Kaga was closer (but still not the same) to her sisters, so there was some limiting of the Kido Butai's "speed of advance" due to the Kaga, but they were often imposing limits anyway due to fuel concerns. When launching or recovering aircraft the other ships did throttle back a bit on "flank" speed to keep her in formation, but when under attack it was often "every ship for herself" so it did not matter.
The Ranger was tasked before the war to support the Neutrality Patrol and work with the Brits, so she had some knowledge of those operations that would have been lost or needed to be transferred to other ships if she was sent to the Pacific. It just seemed better to keep her in the Atlantic, while the other Yorktowns and Wasp were sent west. Later in the war she did re-deploy once the need for her decreased, but she was kept out of the main fleet because the other ships were all rated for the same speed and better protected.
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@UNSCForwardontodawn Neither, actually, since their primary duty is aircraft carrier and an 8" exchange is going to wreck their flight and hangar decks. It does matter which year you are thinking, since the Kaga was rebuilt in the early '30s with all-casement 7.9" guns (slightly smaller than the Lex's, 240 lb. shell vs 260 lb.). So after that she could only fire 5 guns on each beam, and none fore and aft, while Lex could fire 8 guns on the beams and 4 guns fore and aft (at least till early '42, when she landed her 8"ers). Note also that Kaga's guns were rated to about 24,000 yards while Lex's were rated to about 32,000. Plus, Lex was about 5 kts. faster, and her fire director was much higher. Then again, Kaga had a much smaller island so would be less visible on the horizon (assuming we're talking long-range daylight engagement).
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@Charlie-fk4ly The US had significant forces on the islands, from heavy B-17s to destroyers, subs and PT boats. Combined the forces were a threat to the flank of the Japanese thrust into the "Southern Resource Area", today's Malaya and Indonesia. Even with Japanese bases around the Philippines, aircraft and subs could have been reinforced and supplied from Australia for several months.
There were two naval bases in the main northern island of Luzon, Cavite and Subic Bay, with enough infrastructure to supply and maintain ships up to cruiser size (hence the Asiatic Fleet having ships up to that size). Subic Bay had a floating drydock that could take ships up to about 15,000 tons. There were also destroyer and submarine tenders. Should larger forces be sent, they would have to bring their own service craft, or make a deal with the UK to use the dockyard at Singapore (at least, until that fell). Hence the realization in the 30s that a fast thrust to the Philippines by the Pacific Fleet was not a good idea.
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US PacFleet before PH: 3 carriers, 8 battleships, dozen cruisers, couple dozen destroyers and subs, versus Eastern Fleet when, April '42? 2 newer carriers, one older, one modernized QE and 4 unmodernized Revenge-class battleships, a half dozen cruisers, a dozen destroyers and subs? Doesn't sound that fair, at least Brits have working torpedoes and limited night air ops...
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1. The initial stacks on Akagi and Kaga were an attempt to solve the smoke problem on flat-deck Hosho, their first carrier. Akagi tried the downward-curving stack (with a smaller vertical stack behind it), while Kaga tried big tubes leading to rear exhaust. Neither solution dealt with the problem of smoke at low level drifting back into the ship - only tall stacks did, and they were trying to keep the flight decks clear. Kaga was later rebuilt with the downward-curving stack, but the gun stations abaft it had to be enclosed. Plus when the weather got bad or the ship listed it was possible for a wave to cover the opening. Note that the Hiyos, the Taiho, and the Shinano all had island funnels, while the Unryus went back to the downward side stacks of the Hiryu design.
2. On Akagi, the rebuild put a small island on the port side, since the stack exhaust was on the starboard. A right-handed pilot would have a tendency to pull the stick to the right, causing starboard drift. The problem (at least with single-propeller planes) was the plane itself tended to pull to the left due to propeller torque. The Brits found the solution first with starboard islands and the rest copied them. There was some discussion about whether the IJN carrier-pairs (Akagi-Kaga and Hiryu-Soryu) were designed with alternating islands so they would be facing each other as they steamed alongside, but I have not seen that verified. The Shokakus both had it to starboard.
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Musashi was sunk by air attack the day before; if TF34 had stayed, the lineup would have been Yamato, Nagato, Kongo, and Haruna versus Iowa, New Jersey, South Dakota, Alabama, Massachusetts, and Washington. That is assuming Halsey would permit the stripping of all his battleships from the carriers (and note that Halsey himself was aboard New Jersey). After TF34 was turned south to help Taffy 3, the Iowa and the New Jersey were formed into a high-speed detachment (+3CA+8DD) and sent on ahead, but missed Kurita by a couple hours.
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@w8stral What Drach was doing with this video was calculating from numbers of planes on deck how the doctrine and strategies of the air commanders were changing in 1942. The problem with this is that sometimes the numbers of planes on deck is not indicative of doctrine, but rather just whatever could be scratched up for an operation after extensive combat and operational losses. This is part of the question around the TB squadrons after Midway. Both sides had production issues with some planes in 1942. The US had discontinued making the Devastator in favor of the Avenger, and the IJN was unable to ramp up production quickly after early losses. The switch from a non-folding wing on the Wildcat to a folding wing may also be why more fighters were aboard in the fall of 1942, rather than a doctrinal change. Or perhaps we could say that it ENABLED a doctrinal change.
In any case, the issue of scouting was a big part of the difference in USN vs IJN air doctrine, and one that was undergoing change in 1942. Both sides had extensive land-based patrol squadrons, but expected only general locations from them while relying on fleet-based aircraft for immediate strike guidance. The difference is that the IJN started out relying on battleship and cruiser floatplanes for most of that, while the USN had a squadron on each carrier whose primary designation was scouting. Over time and in the heat of combat the VS squadrons became more like the VB squadrons, while the IJN tasked more carrier-borne aircraft to scouting as they discovered the failures and limitations of relying on off-carrier floatplanes.
As far as modern operations, for the USN take a look at what they are trying to do with unmanned platforms, whether aerial drones or unmanned surface or underwater vehicles. I agree it does not replace a master like the S-3, but there are other sources like satellites, Global Hawk, and forward-deployed subs that can also feed data back. The problem is that the AWACS is the only one the CBG commander directly controls.
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@ijnkako5326 I've said this before, but if you look at it a bit, Leyte Gulf (in totality) WAS a fair approximation to the IJN plan for "Decisive Battle" - only the USN was playing the part of the IJN in "their" plan. They started with subs and long-range air recon, with the subs "whittling down" the incoming forces, then attacks by naval air forces and light surface forces "whittle down" the heavies a bit more, especially at night (Surigao Strait), then the battle line finally confronts whatever is left over. But wait, Halsey screwed the ending up by dragging the heavies with him to go after the "decoy" carriers because he thought the Center force had turned around (not that he was doing much recon to confirm that). Oh, well, the little guys will just have to cover for the heavies again.
In terms of "granting the enemy their preferred battle", this is the LAST thing a competent leader wants to do. Fight with your strengths against his weaknesses, don't play by his plan. The USN strength was in naval air and subs in '44, while the only remaining strength of the IJN was in battleships and surface combat. To do otherwise is to allow the enemy a greater chance of killing more of your own men. Real war is not a fair draw in the middle of the street.
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Another note in addition to Frank's is that the Treatys applied to their signatories, the UK, US, Japan, France, and Italy, and were extended by agreement with the UK to Germany, but other nations were not obliged to follow it. So a hypothetical "smaller economy" referring to someplace else like Spain or Argentina could and did do what they wanted (or more accurately could afford). The question would be how the projected "hybrid" design would deal with a Treaty cruiser, which in most cases except the Arethusas were built up close to (or over) the 10,000 ton limit. But if the local situation was that they did not have Treaty-nation competitors, they could build (or have built for them) what they felt could handle the projected local threats.
You might have a look at the Leander and Arethusa classes of light cruiser (or maybe the older Omahas) to see if their design principles are along the same lines as you are thinking.
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@champagnegascogne9755 US Army Air Corps bombers were a very different story from US Navy bombers. Though they had a large load, it was mostly HE bombs, and dropped from at least 20,000 feet was not very accurate. They made up for that by flying hundreds of bombers in tight formations.
That said, I think only the B-29 could make it to Japan until the summer of 1945 when Okinawa became available. The standard USAAC bombs were 500 lb, 1,000 lb, and 2,000 lb. I've heard of a US 1,600 lb AP bomb, but that may have been a US Navy bomb. The B-29 required months of modification in the factory to be able to carry and drop the A-bombs which were about 10,000 lbs, and there was only two squadrons of those planes until 1946.
The B-29s flew very high, such that their drops were affected by the jet streams and sometimes landed miles from their targets. This is why their tactics were changed to night attacks at low altitudes with incendiaries. The unique nature of Japanese cities (crowded into narrow areas, construction of paper and wood, less-mechanized fire-fighting equipment, etc) made them more vulnerable to these tactics. But neither tactic would be effective against a Yamato.
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