Comments by "Gregory Wright" (@gregorywright4918) on "The Drydock - Episode 167" video.

The one carrier the RN built for the Pacific, the Ark Royal, looked a lot more like the IJN and USN carriers than the Illustrious class. Well, except for it's vulnerability to torpedoes.
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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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@scipioafricanus6417 Liberty ships were not built for long life, they were built fast and a lot of "polish" was skipped. They often used welding at a time when they were still learning about the weld failures, so some developed significant cracks in heavy seas. After the war many were laid up in reserve fleets where they rusted a lot, and reactivations like Korea and Vietnam showed how they were aging badly. A lot were just scrapped in the 60s and 70s.
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@88porpoise Not to mention the Taiho...
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The USN tested an 18" gun against the 16" gun and decided that the small improvement realized was not worth the increase in weight and handling time. So all their 30s designs focused on optimizing arrangements of 16" guns.
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I would recommend the John W. Brown as well...
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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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Japan developed some decent advanced airframes, but suffered from too slow evolution of aircraft engines and low production rates. Most often they sacrificed airframe durability and pilot/engine protection to maximize range and agility.
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@johnshepherd8687 I would not say the UK developed nothing, just that what they developed was usually outclassed and outbuilt by what was pouring out of the unbombed US, so it was easier to use those. Note that the Lancaster was probably the best 4E bomber of the war - it could carry the A-bomb without modification, while the B-29 had to have some serious changes. The UK did do a lot with evolution of designs, although they did not have the longer ranges needed as the front moved further from their island and out into the Pacific.
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If Nelson wasn't wearing a distinctive uniform - he would not have been Nelson. Vanity and risk were part of his nature, and showing himself emboldened his officers and crew.
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In the 20s and 30s they were kicking around plans to increase the width of the locks in the Panama Canal. When WW2 broke out it was too late, but several designs (like Midways) were too big. We learned to live with it.
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@redchopsticks4539 Range is important in a fighter because CAP is only one of their jobs. Strike escort is the other, and the carrier should not be forced to come in close. "Let someone else do the escort" is saying you are only good at one thing, which is not how a carrier is supposed to work. But the operational picture in the Pacific is different from the Med, where it is more about absorbing incoming strikes rather than dealing them out.
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The RN was looking at operating close to enemy land-based aircraft, whether North Sea or Mediterranean, and expected they would have a performance advantage (their crappy RAF/FAA designs didn't help). They expected to get hit, and wanted to still be able to get home to a nearby repair port. The IJN and USN expected to be further out in the expanse of the Pacific, and planned to survive by being the first to hit the other with as big a strike as could be launched. All three were aware of the strike-spotting issue in the 30s, but each designed their 2nd and 3rd generation ships and air groups around different ways to face it. And then radar came along and blessed those with more space. During the war the Illustriouses experimented with outrigger sponsons to increase the deck park in calmer Pacific waters, but their biggest limitation was the size of the hanger decks, whose sides were armored almost as well as their tops. They were designed with the assumption that the air group was kept below for protection. Neither the RN nor the IJN could warm up planes on the hanger deck, so strikes had to be spotted on the flight deck before warming up. The USN open hangars allowed warming up below, so spotting could be followed directly by launch. I don't know if the Illustriouses could rearm and refuel on the flight deck as designed.
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@toddwebb7521 In the 20s and early 30s, the UK government, and hence the RN by necessity if not desire, was desperately trying to promote and then hang on to limitations in armaments due to the belief that armaments were the cause of wars. Their initial proposals in 1930 were to bring DOWN the size and caliber of battleships and further restrict everything else they could, and so they forced their own navy to act as an "example of restraint" by limiting appropriations and vetoing expansions or improvements in design. The US also suffered from a pacifist group in it's Congress that could only be persuaded to vote for naval appropriations in the early 30s as a jobs program during the Depression.
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@robg9236 I had forgotten about the older engines used on the Liberties. Good point.
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@lukedogwalker The Panama Canal was protected by extensive fortification and distance from Japanese attack. Just getting to Pearl was a stretch for the Japanese fleet, which is partly why they could not stick around. Panama would have been more than twice as far, with much of that time in well-traveled waters where they were much more likely to have been spotted. The USN DID redeploy significant assets from the Atlantic via the Canal, including several battleships and aircraft carriers as soon as they could be stocked. Without the Canal they would have had to steam around South America, adding a couple weeks to the transit, but not making it the multi-month endurance challenge that the Russians did since all of the ports along the way were fairly friendly. As far as the Japanese "pressing forward for a Decisive Battle", their Kantai Kessen strategy was based on holding back and letting the enemy wear themselves down coming to them, using subs and aircraft to whittle down the main battle fleet till they could be faced with nearly even odds. The expected area of confrontation had been moved outward from Japanese/Korean waters to the Philippine Sea area, but they did not have any shipyards further south so they did not want to have the battle any further out. Where are you thinking they might be willing to do that - Oahu? the West Coast? In those cases the IJN fleet would be past their own logistical limits and suffering from similar problems as the arriving US fleet, which would probably head for San Diego for a short refit and reorg before it started across the Pacific proper (which is what the Yorktown and New Mexicos did in fact on their redeployments).
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The Brits solved that design problem with the Ark Royal in the mid 30s. Then they went on to figure out night carrier ops and carrier fighter control. Then they figured out armored flight decks (though they went a little overboard and put armored hangar sides on too, which constricted the hangar and prevented warming up engines). All of which we copied from them, while they borrowed some of the planes we developed while they were busy trying to save the French and the Russians. Give them a break - they had to contend with the RAF all during the 20s and 30s...
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@DeCasoU1 Seems to me the basic UK strategy was "bombers first"...
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