All the fighters were Type 0’s. Those Zeroes, Model 21’s, could carry a pair of 60kg bombs but were not carrying them on that mission and seldom did. Later in the war, Zeroes were sometimes used as fighter bombers against US ships with larger bombs (besides their use as suicide planes carrying bombs) because relatively harder to intercept than dedicated strike types.
However in PH raid all the bombs and torpedoes were on strike a/c. The Zeroes did a lot of damage to US a/c on the ground by strafing but posed no serious threat to ships. So again even in a real world scenario, and considering other early Pacific War real scenario’s, the main reason for US fighters to attack Zeroes was to prevent the Zeroes destroying them, and as campaigns settled into attrition also the consideration of just inflicting losses to reduce the enemy’s strength for next time. But if defending a critical value target with a fighter fast enough to evade the Zeroes, it wouldn’t really make sense to go after the Zeroes, or not as priority.
In the event the few US fighters that got off the ground attacked what they saw first, and none of them were enough faster than Zeroes to ignore them, nor did they know much about their adversaries anyway. The P-36’s saw Zeroes from Soryu strafing, and achieved an unusual success for the first several months of the Pacific War by Allied fighters of actually shooting down more Zeroes than they lost to Zeroes in a combat. The P-40’s saw unescorted strike a/c and attacked, but AFAIK nobody has ever unraveled what their exact success really was whereas the P-36 v Zero combat is clearly recognizable in Soryu’s records. Anyway even closer to reality, say moving the P-38’s operational debut up by months to make them available at PH, and in an organized defense, they would have done best to prioritize attacks on strike a/c and evade Zeroes with superior speed.
Why waste time and material on aircraft retreating to carriers that no longer exist? As noted upthread, they can still put out enough random-ish fire to possibly take down one of the jets.
I’m just mean that way when I’ve been sneak-attacked.
And also so everybody gets a chance to earn an Air Medal and have a story to tell their grandchildren.
If you mean a current air wing configuration, there are over 40 F/A-18s, so in theory they could take out 480 aircraft – just using missiles. That of course assumes 100% aircraft readiness and missile success rate.
Six Phoenix missiles could be ripple-fired and guided simultaneously to six separate targets and this was tested:
The aircraft would be guided by the E-2C Hawkeye which can simultaneously track 600 targets at up to about 200 mile range: Grumman E-2 Hawkeye - Wikipedia
The threatening Japanese aircraft were the Nakajima B5N bomber and the Aichi D3A bomber. Combined, there were a total of 140. Their cruise speed was about 200 knots, max. Additional there were 43 A6M Zeros used for for air-to-air and strafing. There were only about 140 aircraft in the 1st wave capable of doing major damage to surface targets.
The E-2C could have detected the Japanese planes 200 miles away, but they were launched only 100 miles off shore, which is laughably close by modern standards. However the E-2C can also detect surface targets at great distances, so in a true “Final Countdown” scenario, the incoming carriers would have likely been detected and sunk before their aircraft were even launched.
Nobody has mentioned what the Nimitz would do about the IJN submarines. Without the support (re: antisubmarine) ships the subs would probably be the most dangerous threat to the carrier (although perhaps the carrier can steam at top speed at all times). The first thing the Nimitz wants to do is account for them. Could it try to interdict the subs the night before when they are most likely to be surfaced?
Japanese subs of the period probably would NOT be any sort of threat. Note the Queens Mary & Elizabeth crossed the Atlantic at top speed numerous times, with no escorts, and no incidents.
Thanks for that correction – it makes sense they’d be more than 100 mi. away. However at 230 nm (265 statute miles) this only improves the chances of modern carrier air power. It means the slow, prop-driven incoming aircraft have about 1.5 hr before landfall. Their cruise speed was about 160 mph.
Since they’d be detected by an E-2C at full range, either F-14s or F/A-18s could fly out, fire missiles (and if needed) come back, reload and go again – while the slow prop planes gradually trudge toward their target.
In the modern era, fighter planes rarely use guns. In Desert Storm there were 39 U.S. air-to-air kills. Of those 25 were from the heat-seeking Sidewinder, and 11 from the radar-guided Sparrow, or 92%. The A-10 got two gun kills.
Since then, the much more capable AIM-120 AMRAAM has been deployed. Whether the “Final Countdown” movie scenario used naval air forces from 1980 or 2017, it seems unlikely they would use guns except as a last resort.
This would not make a very exciting story, so movies aren’t written that way.
The Japanese weren’t in the Atlantic, the Germans were. I don’t know whose submarine service was better, or had the better torpedo, I just wanted to nick pick.
Sidewinders also accounted for most of the Royal Navy’s Sea Harrier kills of Argentine aircraft during the Falklands War of 1982, just two years after the Nimitz’s fictional trip back to 1941.
And the I-19 sank the USS Wasp, the USS Albacore sank the Taiho, the U-81 sank the HMS Ark Royal, etc. The point John DiFool was making about the Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary was that they were at almost no danger from U-boats because they traveled at top speed the whole way crossing the Atlantic alone, any anti-submarine escort would have slowed them down and made that impossible. A destroyer could cross the Atlantic at cruising speed with no problems; it would have run out of fuel trying to keep pace with the liners doing 29kts the whole way. The Nimitz being all alone and powered by nuclear reactors could do much the same thing and enjoy pretty much the same near invulnerability to submarines. Note how the Shinano was sunk:
The ground is a highly lethal adversary. The planet is much bigger and more damage-resistant than any aircraft. Everybody who flies close to it respects that, whether you’re driving a helo, a heavy, or a fast-mover.
Scraping an enemy off on the rocks is a tried and true tactic. It doesn’t work all that often. But when it works, it works 100%.
Another option would be for the Nimitz to drop nukes on the Japanese task force. It could be done at night, prior to the scheduled attack, so the entire raiding force simply disappears without a trace before any opportunity to send a warning back to Japan.
The appointed time come, and they hear nothing. And then more and more nothing. No news about the attack on American radio but no distress calls from their ships.
That would leave an interesting alt-history scenario. What should they do next?
