But should you do it.
The attack on Pearl Harbor got America into the war. If you attacked and sunk the Japanese attack force before the strike, then the isolationists would say ‘We have this bad ass ship, no one will mess with us. We don’t need to get involved’.
Of course Japan attacked other places on December 7th as well. If they pulled back after seeing the Nimitz, then Germany may never declare war on the USA. What would Europe look like today?
Let’s pretend you’re Gen. Marshall right after the fall of the Philippines and the USS Nimitz has been miraculously put at your disposal (ala Final Countdown). Let’s further pretend that for some reason the nuclear warheads have been disabled (but not the nuclear power plant–it was a very peculiar storm). What’s the fastest way to end the war?
Hunting down the IJN probably takes a while, especially if they start running from you (of course this allows McArthur to start island-hopping immediately but we’re still talking about a few years). Would standing off of Tokyo and shelling the palace get the job done? Having a seemingly invincible warship in Tokyo Bay would make continuing the war look futile. On the other hand the Nimitz isn’t accomplishing any strategic objective.
The Nimitz is a lot less helpful in Europe. The U-boats will be destroyed but that won’t defeat the Germans. I don’t think you can park it off the German coast because you don’t want them to get lucky with a V-1 or V-2 (the V-1s probably aren’t much of a threat but I would think a V-2 could get through the defenses). You can own the Med but by the time you’re done with Japan you’re probably close anyway.
And then there’s the cold war!
Can the nukes be fired without the codes from the President?
My guess is that small “tactical” nukes don’t need firing codes but that’s a guess. I have no idea what kind of nukes the Nimitz has.
Maybe worse. Maybe Hitler would have put off his attack on Western Europe, taken a bit more time to build up his forces, and then taken out the Soviet Union for good.
That leads to the question of what England and France would do with their extra time. If they just dithered around like they did during the Phony War, then Hitler would eventually turned his attention back to them and take them out later.
I’ve seen references to the effect that at least US carriers were equipped with them, and used them on at least some occasions, but you’re correct that they were by no means the standard. And I was wrong to indicate that there absence was the reason for the fragility of Japanese aircraft.
The Japanese fleet wouldn’t really have had the luxury of running. In large measure the point of the Pearl Harbor attack was to cripple the US Pacific Fleet so that it couldn’t interfere in the Japanese invasion of the Dutch East Indies – After the US oil embargo, Japan desperately needed an alternative source of fuel.
So after destroying the Japanese carrier fleet, the USS Nimitz would naturally move on to stop the Japanese fleets invading the Philippines, and its A-6s and A-7s might provide useful support to MacArthur’s troops against whatever Japanese forces might have landed before the Nimitz could get there. The Japanese landings in British Malaya probably occurred too quickly for Singapore to be saved, but it would have been enormously difficult for the Japanese to mount credible invasions of Borneo and Java without securing the Philippines first, particularly with the Nimitz lurking about the region. Without oil, Japan’s fleet, air force, and industry would grind to a halt.
The crew of Nimitz might also have convinced the USN to do something about their screwed-up torpedo detonators a year before they did historically, vastly increasing the effectiveness of the US submarine fleet.
While the Nimitz would have limited ability to influence the land war in Europe, it could neutralize the Italian fleet and cut off Rommel’s supplies in North Africa pretty abruptly, paving the way for an invasion of Italy a year or more early. Alternatively, it could have made the arctic convoy routes to Russia a lot safer, perhaps accelerating the turning of the tide in the east.
Should the Germans hold out into 1944, neither the V-1 or V-2 had any way of hitting a moving, or for that matter less-than-city-sized, target. The biggest threat to the Nimitz in either theater would be a lucky submarine, or perhaps one of the German guided stand-off weapons, like the Hs-293 or the Fritz X, but given that the Nimitz’s defenses were essentially designed to fend off Soviet attacks by more advanced versions of such weapons, I wouldn’t count the Luftwaffe’s chances as good.
Catapults had been around since the Wright Brothers. There were many ships during WWII that had catapult-launched aircraft. Here’s the catch: The catapults were not ‘aircraft carrier catapults’ as we think of them today. They were ‘rails’ positioned amidships on non-carriers that could be traversed to a degree, and were used to launch pontoon-equipped reconnaissance planes. The aircraft carrier catapult as we think of it today was not developed until 1950 on HMS Perseus. Before heavier jet aircraft, there was little need for catapults because the piston-engine aircraft used during WWII were capable of taking off without them.
Lets not forgot the full complement of marines on board with 1980s weapons and training.
Ok, there’s some odd information about Yorktown class carriers, including the Enterprise (the WWII version, CV-6), and catapults. Here is one site that mentions it, but I found several that say the same thing. According to these sites, Enterprise had 3 catapults, two on the flight deck and one on the hangar deck. On another site this was specified as the exact same piece of equipment.
I have never heard of any carrier, anywhere or anytime, launching planes from within the hangar deck. Can anyone shed light on this?
It just occurred to me that Adm. Chester Nimitz is going to be rather bemused to have a giant aircraft carrier named after him show up to save the day.
I’m sure he would be, but he wasn’t put in charge of the Pacific fleet until later, after a round of blame games and finger pointing.
Ooh, interesting… if the Nimitz shows up and saves Pearl Harbor, maybe the senior admirals aren’t cashiered, and Admiral Nimitz doesn’t get put in charge of the fleet, and never gets famous… so there is never a carrier built that is named after Nimitz.
A full complement of 1980 Marines on an aircraft carrier wouldn’t have been of significant impact in a war fought by millions of soldiers with effectively the same infantry weapons.
All that matters in the scenario is that Nimitz carries nuclear weapons and the ability to deliver them on any target it feels like sailing close to.
Somewhere upthread there was a ruling the the storm disabled the nuclear weapons, but not the reactors. Go figure!
And the marines may not have mattered, but their personal weapons could probably have been copied. That could make a BIG difference.
Nuclear weapons would not be necessary. The regular ordnance can be delivered with precision that was lacking when dive bombers used the TLAR sight.
How many bombs are kept aboard? No refills, right?
Your Rodentine Majesty, you have made my evening! Thanks very muchly sire, I have immediately upon reading your post ordered the three books in question. I love alternate history, and absolutely loved theFinal Countdown when I saw it at the age of 12 with my Dad. I can still see those zeros being shot down with missiles, and the engine block of the jap planes emerging from the resulting fireball, with almost road-runner-like physics. I remember there was a couple, out for a romantic outing in a little rowboat off a secluded Hawaii beach, who were buzzed by a two ship Tomcat team.
Breathless 80’s girl: “What *were *those?”
Studly 80’s guy: “I don’t know, but they had our markings…”
Whoohoo! [fist-pump]
My google-fu is not mighty tonight. I can’t seem to find how much ordnance a Nimitz-class carrier has onboard.
But the aircraft should be able to handle any bombs that were available to the Navy in WWII. Heck, during the Vietnam war one Skyraider dropped an actual toilet on a target.
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Yeah, they could probably load up witth dumb bombs. I’m guessing that it would have taken years to copy the smart weapons technology.
Most aircraft carriers through the end of World War II were designed on an “open bow” pattern, where the flight deck was considered part of the superstructure, and the hangar deck was the main structural deck. The front of the hangar deck on such ships was generally open to the elements.
In the '20s and '30s, when the aircraft carrier concept was being refined, there were a number of schemes to use the open front of the hangar deck as a “flying-off deck”. This would theoretically increase the rate at which planes could be launched and form up for a strike, and I think was also rationalized as allowing single reconnaissance or liaison aircraft to be launched without disrupting flight deck operations.
The idea rapidly proved impractical – launching from two levels simultaneously was obviously just asking for a collision, and launching from the lower level gave less margin for error in getting airborne. I don’t know of it ever being done operationally, but apparently the Yorktowns were built with the capability.
There’d be no refills for precision-guided munitions, which in the '80s would have included laser-guided and TV-guided bombs, and Harpoon missiles. I’m not sure whether the Navy had deployed its version of the Maverick missile by then.
I don’t think it would take much modification to carry WWII-era “dumb” bombs on the Nimitz’s planes, though, and these would still benefit from 1980s bombsights and ballistic computers. Moreover, with the assistance of the Nimitz technical team, I would think that engineers of 1941 would fairly quickly be able to produce some rudimentary radio-guided bombs along the lines of what the Germans historically were using by 1943, and the US by 1944.
Not quite correct. The V-1 and V-2 did both have one way of hitting a moving, sub-city-sized, target: Dumb luck. The odds would probably be well against it (how many V-2s are the Germans willing to spend on the effort?), but when you’ve got the choice between taking almost no risk (as a modern aircraft carrier could do, under the circumstances) or taking a very small risk, you choose the no risk.