Comments by "Gregory Wright" (@gregorywright4918) on "Drachinifel"
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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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@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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