None of your comments addresses the fact that both the Germans and the Japanese employed almost no system of pilot rotation and simply used them up in air combat. Furthermore, the prewar and early war Japanese pilot selection and training standards (particularly in the IJN) were so high as to insure only a small trickle of replacement pilots reached the fleet every year. The allies, OTOH, set up sophisticated systems of selecting, training and rotating pilots to maximize their experience and “shelf life” (if you will.)
If rotating pilots made so much difference in wartime (as the evidence indicates), then it was not a “luxury” but a necessity; a necessity which Germany and Japan failed to learn, to their extreme disadvantage…thank goodness.
As to the assertion that if Japan “could have had 2-3 times more
fully manned AC to begin with, and that the Pacific war would have been
consequently prolonged,” I think history does not support this conclusion. At the beginning of the war in the Pacific, Japanese numbers, training and operational experience were sufficient to do massive damage to the Allied forces in the Pacific areas. The problem for the Japanese was not their initial striking power, but their staying power. This in turn reflected their “quick victory” approach to starting the war in the first place. They did not prepare for a prolonged war where they would need not hundreds, but thousands of effectively trained pilots every year. At the end of the war, Japan had many hundreds of combat-effective aircraft available - but very few capable pilots to operate them any more.
I agree. The IJN already had as many pilots and planes as they could muster, in fact the carriers at Midway weren’t completly full. More carriers would just have meant more targets.
Assuming the IJN would have all those extra planes, pilots and carriers would have to assume a radically different way of thinking for the entire Imperial Japanese military- which likely means they wouldn’t have attacked the USA.
However, pilot rotation has nothing to do with Japanese naval aviation potential
for the start of the war if all the resources dedicated to Yamato and Musashi had
been available for AC. This increased potential would have been ongoing after the
war began, although attrition and relative lack of personnel and resources would
have led to diminishing returns.
We are only talking about ~150 more pilots (for two additional AC) to ~300 more
pilots (for four additional AC) for the start of the war. The US may have had
500,000 men with the aptitude to be pilots. If so then Japan would have had well
over 200,000 itself.
By reducing its standards to select “only” the best 10% for naval aviation could surely
have produced enough good, well-trained pilots to continue manning 2-4 more AC
provided it was not devoting resources to new BB.
You are playing quibbly little word games, and Germany and Japan did not
“fail to learn” because the advantages of rotation are too obvious to miss.
Rather, Germany and Japan were so heavily engaged in so many sectors
and had such a small pool from which to draw replacements that they could
not spare their veterans from combat duty.
Obviously they could have done more damage with more AC.
We have already discussed Midway in this regard. The same might be said
for Coral Sea and the numerous Solomon Island engagements. And it occurs
to me that with two more AC at Pearl Harbor someone might have thought
to dedicate a few fighters and dive bombers to the US oil storage which was
a sitting duck and miraculously untouched in the actual event. Without that
fuel the USN might have had to retreat to the mainland because it would not
have been able to conduct even defensive operations for every long.
This is close enough to being true that I have no quarrel with it.
However, OP asks how the course of the war might have differed with a different
emphasis on AC. I made a case for Japan devoting all its capital ship resources to
AC with US allocations being unchanged.
It should also be noted that the IJN carriers had many technical problems, and were poorly designed:
-they did not have the modern “island” structure, with a tall stack to carry away exhaust smoke(Japanese carriers vented smoke at deck level, obscuring the landing and takeoff surface)
-there was very little thought given to damage control-once fires broke out in the hangers, their carriers were doomed
-no provision for sea rescue of downed pilots
Plus, almost no upgrading of carrier aircraft-the little Zero was a fine plane in 1941, but hopelessly obsolete by 1944.
The newly commissioned carrier “Shinano” sank with all hands after two torpedo hits-because the crew forgot to shut off severed gasoline lines (fumes built up and an internal explosion sank the ship).
Given the premise of the OP, I believe the USA would have still out built the Japanese and won the war. Once the US torpedoes were working, a Japanese carrier was sunk on the way to pick up it’s first aircraft.
A couple of nitpicks (sorry, I’m feeling pedantic today):
First, the IJN did give considerable thought to damage control. The problem was that compared to the USN, the crew of an IJN ship was more “compartmentalized” (for want of a better word). There was less cross-training, and roles were more specialized. In particular, while the USN trained and drilled the entire crew in at least the basics of damage control, in the IJN it was more the province of specialists. It would seem that most of these were killed or incapacitated in the initial explosions at Midway, and the rest was . . . history.
Second, it was the Taiho, not the Shinano, that sank — hardly with all hands — due to internal explosions well after the ship was hit by one or two torpedoes on the way to the Marianas. While faulty damage control undoubtedly played a large part in her loss, there were other problems: her avgas bunkerage was poorly designed, and she was loaded with an unusually volatile type of fuel oil (she was in Borneo when the US attacked the Marianas). Had either of these been different, the ship may have survived.
(The Shinano, BTW, was a Yamato-class superbattleship hull that had been converted to a carrier. She was sunk while being moved to the Inland Sea for fitting out — ironically, to protect her from air attack. Her loss can be ascribed to the fact that many of her watertight doors had not even been installed, and to the fact that she had less of a crew [in the usual sense] than a ferry contingent.)
I wouldn’t think the location of the funnel would really matter much, considering carriers typically turn into the wind to launch planes. Wouldn’t all the smoke be blown backward, away from the flight deck? Also, I had heard the omission (or minimizing) of an island on many IJN carriers was because they believed it helped minimize the carrier’s profile on the horizon. I guess they never really grasped stuff like radar and whatnot when making these design choices- even their carriers that DID have islands, they looked pretty dinky compared to US carriers like the Yorktown or Lexington.
Its true any changes wouldn’t have made a difference in the outcome of the war, but they may have affected how hard fought it was. Regarding the Japanese pilot skills, I definitely agree they would’ve been better off trying to keep their experienced pilots around to train newer generations of pilots. I noticed that in pitched battles between carriers, such as Coral Sea and Midway, even when you are fighting at full strength/training/equipment, against a prepared opponent you are going to suffer losses. For every US carrier the Japanese managed to sink with their carrier aircraft, they lost a TON of planes- in Coral Sea one of their carriers couldn’t participate in Midway because it lost so many planes/pilots. So attrition seems to be a really big factor for carriers, because I never heard the decisicive factor of surface combatants being the level of training of the crews (for surface combatants, it seems to be raw numbers, intelligence, and/or dumb luck).
Did any British carriers square off against Japanese carriers? I know their carriers used a very different design principle- they put most of their armor on the outer deck, kind of like an armored ‘box’, which sounds great in theory but was apparently a big liability against kamikazes. However, aside from suicide craft, I’m curious how the British did/would do against Japanese carriers. Most of what I know about the British carriers is stuff in the Mediterranian sea, and facing land-based aircraft from Italy I think.
I know history has 20-20 hindsight, but I find it pretty ironic that the Japanese seemed to embrace carrier warfare in theory- I mean, no other nation besides the US seemed to build as many flattops as they did nor deploy them the way they did. And yet they had to scramble to convert Yamato hulls into carriers (the Shinano being one of them) and make some weird battleship-carrier hybrids out of a pair of Ise-class battleships (how the hell were the planes supposed to land on that flight deck? Its in the STERN!).
So the key to carrier warfare in the 40s seems to be having a large corps of experience pilots, the ability/capacity to innovate, good damage control, and good intel. I’m curious how much more effective Japan’s navy would have been if we weren’t reading their mail at every turn- some critics say their navy kind of sucked for all the numbers and force it seemed to have (paper tiger?). Even against Taffy 3(?) what should have been a slaughter turned out to be a missed opportunity, not to mention the David and Goliath matchup of US Destroyers knocking out IJN Heavy Cruisers. Not to mention a light carrier force not even really tooled to deal with surface ships (I heard many of them were meant for antisub work, and in desperation to turn the Japanese back they were dropping depth charges at the Yamato just to scare it off. Torpedoes ended up making it pretty much flee the battle.
Building Aircraft Carriers instead of Battleships wouldn’t have significantly shortend the war in the Pacific, which ended shortly after the use of the Atomic “gadgets”. It probably would have changed the outcome of some of the sea battles and slowed the Island-hopping campaign.
The U.S. Navy had 8 aircraft carriers when it entered WWII and launched 31 more before the end of the war.
The Imperial Japanese Navy had 13 carriers in 1941 making it the largest carrier fleet in the world. They only managed to launch 12 more before the end of the war.
There was supposed to have been a 3rd air attack at Pearl Harbor which would have targeted the fuel bunkers. The IJN didn’t know where the U.S. carriers were, or more to the point, didn’t know if the U.S. carriers were currently steaming towards the IJN. It was decided to cancel the 3rd attack, keep their aircraft on board for possible defense, and head for home.
Okay, English is obviously not your first language, so I won’t give you too much flak for the unintelligibility of the above paragraph. Smiling Bandit is completely correct in his critique though. My guess is that you’re writing from a mobile device, and you’re cutting your line lengths down so that you won’t have to scroll horizontally. The problem with your posts is that the short line length is a pain in the ass to read on any proper monitor, which in turn makes your posts a pain in the ass to read. But hey, if that’s how you enjoy debating, go wild.
That’s actually how you land, then and now. A plane landing on a carrier wants to come in at minimal speed without stalling, so the carrier will turn into the wind and planes will land from the stern. Way easier to land with the wind giving a bit of extra lift and your runway not moving in the opposite direction.
In the Ise-class this seems to have been irrelevant however, because Wiki mentions that they were unable to recover aircraft other than their sea planes. I’m guessing that this is due to the flight deck being too short.
Ha ha. I have to admit this part is pretty decent snark. However,
I am a good enough judge of good writing to confidently give my own
high marks. (Provided I take the trouble to carefully proof read,
and use spell check)
This part trails off a bit in snark quality. It possesses no other quality.
Smiling Bandit could not even come up with the right word:
paragraph length is an example of formatting, and not, as he
and you would have it, “punctuation”.
Wrong. Desktop.
The advantage of shorter lines is that you do not have to scroll your eyeballs as far horizontally.
My 13x10 monitor is >10 years old. I keep putting off buying one of
those new-fangled ones which appear to be ~50% longer.
I am confident you would appreciate the shorter lines if you got used
to them. Have you ever read a poem?
I thought a big part of the reason the Japanese embraced aircraft carriers was the aforementioned Washington Naval Treaty. The treaty sharply limited Japan’s battleship and cruiser forces, but for whatever reason, did not mention or restrict aircraft carriers. Several nations converted partly-completed battleship and cruiser hulls to carriers in order to avoid having to scrap them, but the Japanese seem to have decided that fleet carriers offered a way around the treaty’s limitations on their naval strength, and explicitly set out to build the largest and most advanced fleet air arm in the world.
Well, in older battles, crew quality was considered critical. It’s always been regarded as a reason the British did so well against the French in the Age of Sail, and even at Jutland, the decision to ignore the turret-trunk safety rules exposed several battlecruisers to catastrophic loss – perhaps not exactly crew “quality” issue, but human error moreso than design error.
But in general, one reason aircrew training is so important is that an airplane in that era fought almost alone. Everyone in the battleship went where it was steered, and operating the guns was a massive joint effort, but one decision by an individual alert dive-bomber pilot could make a huge difference in a battle’s outcome. So picking the right people and training them was critical.
That sounds like you might have it backwards – I’ve heard that the British carriers’ armored decks were a huge help against kamikaze attacks. Wikipedia says:
While the “soft” bunkers were pretty strong, my understanding is that the American casualties were made substantially worse at Tarawa by a command decision to deliberately ignore advice they’d been given about the tides. The attack coincided with a tidal phenomenon that lowered the water level over the surrounding reef, turning it into a barrier against the landing craft and swimming vehicles.
No mention is made in Wikipedia, here’s a citation regarding the advance warning the Americans received but ignored. A Royal Australian Navy Lt. Commander, and a Major who had been headmaster of a school on the island for twenty years and kept tidal records, were attached to the planning staff and indeed warned the Americans.
My point is that to a certain extant, the casualties at Tarawa were higher because of this fluke event and not necessarily a function solely of the Japanese defensive preparations.
[COLOR=black]Thank you for providing the lists I know they must have taken quite bit [/COLOR][COLOR=black]of effort to compile.[/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]I have truncated and edited the lists above for AC commissioned 1942 and earlier.[/COLOR]
Fleet AC serving as of 1/1/43 are highlighted in bold black.
New ship 1942 commissioning dates for Fleet AC available for duty by the end of 1942
are highlighted in bold black. Although Essex is included, note its 12/31 date of
commissioning compared to Junyo and Hiyo commissioned 5/3 and 7/31.
All AC sunk as of 1/1/43 are in bold red.
In the actual event IJN AC strength on 1/1/43 was:
[COLOR=black]4 Fleet AC[/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]4 Escort AC[/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]USN strength on 1/1/43 was:[/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]4 Fleet AC (Including Ranger although it was considered unfit for duty vs other AC, and spent the entire war in the Atlantic)[/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]I do think you should consider that if Japan had had 2 more carriers on 12/7/41, [/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]and used them specifically at Coral Sea and Midway then the US might have ended [/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]the year without a single AC in the Pacific facing 6 IJN fleet AC, and facing an[/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]enemy in secure possession of Midway, the Outer Aleutians, the Solomon Islands,[/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]New Guinea, and possible even Darwin Australia.[/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]That would have left the US with starting points thousands of miles further east,[/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]and would have made it unlikely that the Japanese home islands could be reached[/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]by the USAAF before 1946 at the earliest. [/COLOR]
The advantage of resizeable windows is that you can make the lines you are reading as short as you like by resizing the window, but if someone’s entered a post where they insisted on manual linebreaks because they’re still thinking this is the 1970s and the thing in front of them is a typewriter, your audience doesn’t have this option.
The claims that there was supposed to be a 3rd wave of planes attacking Pearl Harbor are disputed. It is dubious as to whether the carrier fleet would even have been able to launch a third wave of planes, and there is disagreement as to whether the notion was even raised at the time rather than being something proposed after the fact.
