Another what-if scenario along those lines is presented in Zipang – published both as a manga series and as an anime series. A Japanese Self-Defense Force destroyer (the Mirai – Japanese for “future”) is thrown 60 years back into the middle of an Imperial Japanese Navy fleet just before the Battle of Midway.
The captain of the Mirai decides to try not to change history: he evades the IJN fleet, sits back while the U.S. Navy wins at Midway (though they save one IJN officer, who rather complicates things), then spends the rest of the series trying to evade both the Imperial Japanese Navy and the U.S. Navy – both of which are, of course, very interested in this strange warship carrying the Japanese flag, and obviously using very advanced technology.
In the movie:[spoiler]It’s 1980. The USS Nimitz is on a routine patrol with its escort group. A mysterious storm is detecting. The escorts are sent off to safety but the Nimitz holds in place becuase it needs to land a plane. The mysterious storm arrives and somehow sends the Nimitz back in time.
The crew on the Nimitz doesn’t immediately realize this but they figure it out within a few hours. It’s December 6, 1941, the day before the Pearl Harbor attack. They know the Japanese plans and the location of their fleet from their history books. They decide it’s their duty to defend the United States and ready an attack on the Japanese fleet.
Then just as their attack is flying out to blow up the fleet, the storm returns and transports them back to 1980.[/spoiler]
Wouldn’t flying by a WWII aircrarft at super sonic speeds just tear it apart? Besides get the carrier in close enough and let the CWIS take everything out?
At doesn’t the Nimitz carry some “special” tomahawks? Nuking Japan and Germany early on might make the war easier
Timming would be the thing. If the attack happened before the early morning take off the Pearl is saved. If after the Planes are on the way. Think of the IJN with 6 less of their fleet carriers. And after sinking the carrier battle group they could turn towards the main fleet. Add in the cruse missles and a direct hit on the main Islands.
With over 300 planes in the air if the Japaneese attack the Nimitz some may get through, but even if the Nimitz is sunk the war would be over except mop up.
This senerio would mean later in the war Yorktown not sunk by carrier planes, nor the Hornet or Wasp.
Japanese carrier aircraft were of particularly light construction, enabling them to take off without using catapults, so this might well work in theory, but the jet would likely have to get so close as to risk collision. A somewhat more distant pass might toss a lightweight plane around, but their maneuverability would probably allow them to recover. Using guns or missiles would be vastly preferable. Just a couple of 20mm hits would shatter a Zero, and the gatling cannon carried by US fighters would be likely to land more than just a couple hits.
Back in the '80s I’m sure the Nimitz routinely carried some nuclear ordnance, though probably just aircraft bombs. US carriers have no Tomahawk launchers themselves, that’s a job for the cruisers in their battlegroup. In the post-Cold War era I think less nuclear ordnance is held on ships (not counting the ballistic missile subs), though there’s still the possibility.
There might be a problem with that solution, more of a technical thing actually. Any cruise missiles, would have been carried by the escorts, nuke or conventional, as well I don’t think the cruise missile had come into service at the time the movie had come out.
So your limited to harpoon anti ship missiles, standard surface to air missiles, I believe they had a limited surface to surface attack mode and gravity bombs, both nuclear and conventional.
So here you are, you just defeated the IJN and this question comes up, we can end the war now,FDR is the duly elected president and he gives a valid order to git r done.
If we go the simple route, all the ship has are nuclear gravity bombs or depth charges, who has the unlock codes for the PAL’s. If all that happens in real life is that the carrier battlegroup gets a flash message that says break out the canned sunshine, then the codes are on board the carrier.
If not, they are simply paper weights until general groves can reverse engineer them, that is if admiral king does not start a major turf war cause they are strictly speaking navy weapons.
:smack: What time did I make my last post? Hm. I’d been awake for a while and had had coffee. But I still totally misread the quote as ‘Wouldn’t flying a WWII aircrarft at super sonic speeds just tear it apart?’
A Corsair once got a “kill” on a Zero by flying through it and chopping it into little bitty pieces. Wake turbulence, while not having quite the same effect as a massive 4 bladed prop, might still do the trick.
I would assume that the Nimitz, after gathering some WWII-era submarine screens and a few cruisers, could park itself inside Tokyo bay and demand unconditional surrender. I wouldn’t think prop planes could get close enough to do any damage so the biggest threat would be land-based artillery and subs. Any surface ship that got close enough to be a threat would be blasted.
Nobody’s carrier aircraft used catapults at that time.
Question: if Nimitz was at dock, would it even be able to launch? IIRC, I’ve read somewhere that loaded carrier planes need a decent headwind to launch into, that catapults alone aren’t enough.
That’s some damage to that 4 bladed propellor, looks like one blade broke off and the other three got rotated around a bit, fortunately it appears they moved by just the right amount to balance things out, could have been tricky otherwise.
Or as a Revell model kit said when I was a kid, Corsairs ‘shot down 1,399 Japanese planes, and sawed down one.’
Subsurface, too. Nimitz carries Helicopter Anti-Submarine Squadron Six (HS-6). If we’re doing 1980, then Nimitz carried S-3 Viking antisubmarine aircraft. (The S-3 was retired in 2009. Its role has been assumed by P-3 Orions, SH-60 Sea Hawks, and F/A-18E/F Super Hornets.)
Squadrons join the ship at sea, and fly to their land base before the ship returns to port. I assume the cats are powerful enough to launch an aircraft in zero-wind, as that would be a useful capability if the ship is disabled. I have some 8mm footage my dad shot c.1965 of an A-4 Skyhawk being launched from a carrier that appears to be docked in port.
Extreme nitpick: the Wasp was sunk by a submarine. As was the Yorktown (though admittedly the I-168 would never have gotten close enough had the carrier not been disabled by air attack).
We now return you to the regularly scheduled discussion.
)