I think there is something to be said for that.
Would Nelson win no matter what ship he was on?
HMS Victory was certainly a powerful ship for its time. Maybe the most powerful. But was Trafalgar won because of Victory or Nelson?
I would argue it was Nelson but the two are very much attached.
FTR:
I am NOT trying to minimize the bravery and efforts of anyone on any ship here. I am old enough that my dad and uncles served in WWII (two in the navy, one in the air force).
Everyone did their part. All were important.
I agree, it was Nelson.
Was there anything special about CV-6 in design or implementation? Or was it simply in the right place with the right crew and used in the right manner? If the Hornet had survived the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands and the Enterprise was sunk, could the Hornet have fulfilled the same role in the war?
Agree that Enterprise was for a good span there early in the war literally the only kid with his finger in the dike holding back the Japanese.
But, e.g. had the Battle of Midway ended with Yorktown surviving and Enterprise sunk, and no other changes then how much different do you (any you) expect the rest of USN’s participation would have been in WWII? “Not very” is my answer.
Enterprise was one of several substantially identical ships. They were all led and manned pretty similarly. Enterprise was lucky enough to survive a couple of crucial junctures. Not due to its Enterpriseness, nor due to the Captaining of Captains Murray, Davis, et al. Both ship & leadership acquitted themselves well to be sure.
Yes, you have to finish the race to win the race. Enterprise did while e.g. Yorktown did not.
So while I will grant that it was one of the most decisive single ships of certainly the 20th century if not all time, a lot of that comes down to being in the right place at the right time. If that is to be the measure of merit, the Big E wins.
But if you (any you) are going dismiss e.g. SSN-571 Nautilus as “It happened to be the first nuke boat; if not for it, there would have been others.”, then it seems to me you have to apply a similar discount to CV-6 Enterprise.
Not to disparage the Enterprise and her crew, but a catastrophic US defeat at Miday wouldn’t have changed the course of the war, or likely extended it by even a single year, much less multiple years. Combinedfleet.com did a breakdown of just how hopelessly outmatched Japan was during WWII by examining this exact scenario, an alternate Midway with a reversed outcome where Japan gets the jump on the US and sinks every single US carrier in the battle while losing none of their own - actually an even better than reverse outcome as the US lost Yorktown at Midway. There’s a tabular breakdown of what this would look like starting about halfway down the page here:
So America had an advantage; so what? Well, as an example, let’s take a moment to consider the importance of the Battle of Midway. Midway is often cited as the ‘Turning Point in the Pacific’, the ‘Battle that Doomed Japan,’ and a string of other stirring epithets. And there’s no question that it broke the offensive capability of the Japanese Navy. The question I ask is: what difference would America’s economic strength have made if the Americans had lost badly at the Battle of Midway? Let’s take the worst case scenario (which, incidentally, was very unlikely, given our advantage of strategic surprise) in which a complete reversal of fortune occurs and the U.S. loses Enterprise , Yorktown , and Hornet , and Japan loses none of the four carriers which were present. After such a hypothetical battle, the balance of carrier forces available for Pacific duty would have looked like this:
The question is, would losing Midway really have mattered? How long would it have taken America’s shipyards to make good the difference and dig us out of the hole? Let’s find out. We’ll take the table just presented above and extend it out until the end of the war (in 6-month increments). Here are the assumptions I’ll use while doing so:
[Assumptions cut for brevity]
In other words, even if it had lost catastrophically at the Battle of Midway, the United States Navy still would have broken even with Japan in carriers and naval air power by about September 1943. Nine months later, by the middle of 1944, the U.S. Navy would have enjoyed a nearly two-to-one superiority in carrier aircraft capacity! Not only that, but with her newer, better aircraft designs, the U.S. Navy would have enjoyed not only a substantial numeric, but also a critical qualitative advantage as well, starting in late 1943. All this is not to say that losing the Battle of Midway would not have been a serious blow to American fortunes! For instance, the war would almost certainly have been protracted if the U.S. had been unable to mount some sort of a credible counter-stroke in the Solomons during the latter half of 1942. Without carrier-based air power of some sort there would not have been much hope of doing so, meaning that we would most likely have lost the Solomons. However, the long-term implications are clear: the United States could afford to make good losses that the Japanese simply could not. Furthermore, this comparison does not reflect the fact that the United States actually slowed down its carrier building program in late 1944, as it became increasingly evident that there was less need for them. Had the U.S. lost at Midway, it seems likely that those additional carriers (3 Midway -class and 6 more Essex -Class CVs, plus the Saipan -class CVLs) would have been brought on line more quickly. In a macro-economic sense, then, the Battle of Midway was really a non-event. There was no need for the U.S. to seek a single, decisive battle which would ‘Doom Japan’ – Japan was doomed by its very decision to make war.
The Hornet, The Enterprise and the Yorktown were pretty interchangeable. All were surprisingly tough. All were the same class.
But the Big E was the one that survived and did it all.
More than any other ship ever has I think.
I don’t think this argument counters my projection that the Enterprise cut at least a year off the war. If Japan took Midway and etc. There would have been that much more to take back.
What does it mean to be important? If it has little to do with the design and build of the ship, is it simply a matter of luck?
Good question. I listed 4 options earlier.
I’m going with success and accomplishment.
The Big E was more that luck. The Yorktowns were pretty sturdy ships. Hell, even the Yorktown almost survived Midway.
The crews were well trained and very good at damage control.
The leadership was excellent.
The ability to do rapid repairs were largely unmatched in history.
This thread motivated me to do a little reading on the Enterprise. I was surprised to see that for the entirety of the war, it had a new captain every year or so. I would have expected the same person the entire time. Why was that?
Any subs been mentioned?
Captains of successful ships get promoted. Or they get shuffled to shore based duty.
My first Captain on the USS Ranger CV61, got promoted off the ship. Admiral Davis was one of our first Black Admirals if I remember right.
Again with all due respect to the bravery of the sailors and airmen who served on the Enterprise, it was one ship in a very, very large war. Attributing to it and it alone shortening the length of the single largest war in human history by over/at least a year is a very extraordinary claim that requires some extraordinary evidence. The scenario posited at combinedfleet.com is an even bigger loss by the US than you posit; in addition to the Enterprise being lost, it also posits Hornet being lost about four months sooner than historically happened, and the Kido Butai emerging from Midway entirely intact.
The Saratoga and Enterprise were the only two Pacific capable carriers that survived the war, aside from Ranger every other pre-war carrier in the US Navy was lost, all of them in 1942. If you look at the table I linked earlier its visibly evident where the parity that the US would still have reached by September 1943 and the two-to-one superiority the US would have enjoyed shortly after came from; it was the Essex-class fleet carriers and Independence-class light carriers ordered pre-war starting the tidal wave of commissioning and forming the backbone of the fast carrier task forces that destroyed the Japanese Navy, covered distant amphibious landings, and raided Japanese anchorages and airfields. This would still have happened had Enterprise been sunk or not, and as noted in the article the US actually slowed down carrier construction in 1944 because it was evident just how much of an embarrassment of riches the US was enjoying in carriers and that what was still kept in construction was already overkill.
Additionally, the submarine war was going to be strangling Japan’s economy and sinking both its navy and merchant marine regardless of the status of the Enterprise, the US was going to be drowning Japan in aircraft production in both numbers and quality, Japan wasn’t going to be able to turn out properly trained pilots to replace its losses, it was still going to be subject to its cities being burned to the ground as soon as the US switched B-29s to night firebombing tactics, and in the end was still going to have Hiroshima and Nagasaki subjected to nuclear attacks in August 1945 regardless of the fate of the Enterprise.
Regarding Midway, had Japan won the naval engagement, even as decisively as the article linked posits, actually taking the Island would have been much more problematic for them. The size and strength of the US defenses on Midway compared to the hubristically small size of the Japanese landing force (which incidentally relied on the same Ichiki detachment slaughtered at the Tenaru River later at Guadalcanal) had all the signs of it turning into a repeat of the first Japanese landing at Wake island.
The composition of Enterprise’s own air group in the last nine months of the war is demonstrative of the overwhelming superiority that the US enjoyed over Japan. She was turned into the Navy’s first CV(N), the N in this case not standing for Nuclear but for Night, the US could afford to take an entire fleet carrier and use it to embark a reduced size air group (34 F6F Hellcats and 21 TBM Avengers) to provide night CAP and strike capabilities rather than embarking her full normal complement of ~85 aircraft.
The most important navy ship of all time may have been an Athenian trireme at Salamis.
An analysis that only takes into account U.S. shipbuilding capacity overlooks a critical factor.
In 1942, there was still substantial feeling among U.S. military leaders, strongly supported by the British, that U.S. strategy in the Pacific should be largely defensive, to allow most of the American buildup to take place in the European theater, aimed at defeating Germany first.
If the U.S. had lost the battle of Midway decisively, that would likely have doomed the Guadalcanal operation and made it more likely that the U.S. would in fact have put Pacific offensive operations on hold for an extended period, thus substantially prolonging the war against Japan.
See my subsequent post on the matter, it was not shipbuilding capacity; it was construction that was actively underway and had been prior to the US entry into the war authorized under the Two Ocean Navy Act. If anything, a defeat at Midway would have accelerated naval construction, it certainly wouldn’t have slowed it down, and all of those Essex and Independence class fleet and light carriers were of no use in Europe in the war against Germany and Italy. The failure to launch a counteroffensive at Guadalcanal in August 1942 is already noted and posited in the combinedfleet article positing a catastrophic US loss at Midway.
There was in fact an even stronger feeling amongst US military leadership, particularly and unsurprisingly in the Navy, though in the Army as well (see MacArthur and others) and especially amongst the US public that the Europe first strategy shouldn’t come at the cost of prosecuting the war against Japan. The actual reality* was that despite the proclamation of a Europe first strategy in December 1941 soon after the US entry into the war, the US actually sent more to the Pacific early in the war and continued to do so until 1944. A catastrophic defeat at Midway would likely have the effect of further reinforcing this actual, as opposed to declared prioritization of resources.
Europe first, also known as Germany first, was the key element of the grand strategy agreed upon by the United States and the United Kingdom during World War II. According to this policy, the United States and the United Kingdom would use the preponderance of their resources to subdue Nazi Germany in Europe first. Simultaneously, they would fight a holding action against Japan in the Pacific, using fewer resources. After the defeat of Germany—considered the greatest threat to the UK and the Soviet Union[1]—all Allied forces could be concentrated against Japan.
At the December 1941 Arcadia Conference between President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Washington, shortly after the United States entered the War, the decision for the “Europe First” strategy was affirmed. However, U.S. statistics show that the United States devoted more resources in the early part of the war to stopping the advance of Japan, and not until 1944 was a clear preponderance of U.S. resources allocated toward the defeat of Germany.
I saw what you did there.
How about that Russian submarine that came within a hairs breadth of using a nuclear weapon during the Cuban missile crisis.
I guess my point is that all those Revolutionary War ships had impacts far beyond their actual exploits, because they set the stage for what the Navy would become, how it would fight, and how it was expected to perform. In short, they started the tradition of fighting excellence that the Navy has.
Enterprise only added to that tradition. I’d argue that a large part of why Enterprise was so amazing was because of the example and tradition set by those early ships. And someday there’ll be another ship that does amazing things because it’s inspired by the example of those old ships AND the Enterprise.
I’d say that makes the older ships more important overall when looking at the nearly 250 year history of the Navy.