mdiehl
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Joined: 10/21/2000
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quote:
Well, firstly ( unlike some views held here) they could get off of , back to and land on the carriers at night. Radio frequency navigation was part of that ( used at Pearl Harbour ).
Quite so, although operational losses were higher at night. The problem is that the only radio frequency navigation used to get to a TARGET was in the ETO/N. Africa. Oh it may also have been used in some of the USAAF raids over Japan in 1945 too. It wasn't used by the Japanese to navigate to a TARGET ever by my recollection, much less one in the South Pacific or Pearl Harbor. It was exclusively used to direct returning a.c. to friendly CVs and, in practice, pretty much only very useful during the daylight. The only time the Japanese "sort of attempted it" (a late-daylight strike during the Coral Sea battle), the strike never found it's target and substantially did not return to their originating base either. Instead they suffered huge operational attrition for no gain of any kind.
quote:
As to the rest, Night OPS were done ( albeit not from carriers ), so why night carrier OPS cannot be done I don't know.
They didn't do it from carriers for a couple of reasons. First, even when you could find both the target and afterward your originating CV, operational attrition was greater at night simply because it was and is much more difficult to land on a CV at night than during daylight. Second, land based a.c. were better at navigation because they had dedicated navigators with sextants, and always knew where their home destination would be; in contrast, it was rather difficult for night flying CV based pilots to find their originating CVs, even with radio direction to assist them on return flights.
At Coral Sea, the only Japanese a.c. to find their targets during the disastrous late-daylight strike confused Yorktown with a Japanese CV and attempted to land on the American CV rather than bomb it. That doesn't inspire alot of 20/20 confidence in IJN CV-crew night navigation skills because it shows not only that they did not know where their target was but they also had no useful idea where their own CVs were.
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Didn't we have this conversation already?
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RE: unrealistic air combat... - 
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