Slitherine

quote:

ORIGINAL: Shellshock

You always hear it said that the loss of the battleline at Pearl Harbor forced hidebound admirals in the US to turn away from battleships, use it's carriers more aggressively and eventually see carriers as the primary weapon of the Pacific War. So, if one or two carriers are sunk and the BBs survive does that lesson still sink in?

quote:

ORIGINAL: Nikademus

in all likelyhood, yes. Especially if Lex and York attacked seperately enough. IJN CAP is often maligned and it's weaknesses endlessly highlighted (to which it should be noted USN CAP wasn't all that either in 42), but in the one battle where 4 or more CV's were present, the IJN CAP accounted for 55 planes shot down over KB. Add to this that the USN escorts would not yet have gotten sufficient warning about the Zero could exaserbate the issue. The great irony of Midway is that of the four major carrier battles, it was this battle that the Japanese put in their best performance CAP wise. There were simply too many attackers coming in one after another. Much would depend on the timing and the weather variables. If the weather is clear enough and the attackers vector is along a largely single axis the IJN CAP was up to the job of causing higgidly piggidy and they'd have a numbers edge over the likely small escort. If the attack is more disjointed (multiple vectors) problems could ensue but then thats true of any CV force beset by angry bees.

Thus....the most important factor in pre 1943 CV combat was getting in the first strike. All it takes is one bomb or torpedo hit to ruin one's day for either side. Case in point....my last AI start using Da Babes.......Halsey indeed attacked a returning KB and given the die rolls that day, managed to trade Enterprise for Shokaku. The latter suffered an ammo explosion which coupled with the long distance from home led to her going glug glug. I was annoyed but what can you do when the gods turn their thumbs down on you?

Other times, its been a slaughter as KB pounces. I always steer well clear on Turn 2. Even if you reduce KB, its not worth the loss of a CV or two because it gives the Japanese an even larger window of initiative. Essex's will come but not for a good long while. Gotta protect the assets and play it like Nimitz did. Only expose if the gains are worth the risk. A situation where a KB isn't fighting with one armed tied behind it's back and there's an assumption of enemy carriers lurking is not what i'd consider good odds if i'm piloting a single carrier. I'd order my boys to evade and live to fight another day with better odds.

Prior Preparation & Planning Prevents Pathetically Poor Performance!

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quote:

ORIGINAL: Apollo11

Hi all,

quote:

ORIGINAL: Nikademus

in all likelyhood, yes. Especially if Lex and York attacked seperately enough. IJN CAP is often maligned and it's weaknesses endlessly highlighted (to which it should be noted USN CAP wasn't all that either in 42), but in the one battle where 4 or more CV's were present, the IJN CAP accounted for 55 planes shot down over KB. Add to this that the USN escorts would not yet have gotten sufficient warning about the Zero could exaserbate the issue. The great irony of Midway is that of the four major carrier battles, it was this battle that the Japanese put in their best performance CAP wise. There were simply too many attackers coming in one after another. Much would depend on the timing and the weather variables. If the weather is clear enough and the attackers vector is along a largely single axis the IJN CAP was up to the job of causing higgidly piggidy and they'd have a numbers edge over the likely small escort. If the attack is more disjointed (multiple vectors) problems could ensue but then thats true of any CV force beset by angry bees.

Thus....the most important factor in pre 1943 CV combat was getting in the first strike. All it takes is one bomb or torpedo hit to ruin one's day for either side. Case in point....my last AI start using Da Babes.......Halsey indeed attacked a returning KB and given the die rolls that day, managed to trade Enterprise for Shokaku. The latter suffered an ammo explosion which coupled with the long distance from home led to her going glug glug. I was annoyed but what can you do when the gods turn their thumbs down on you?

Other times, its been a slaughter as KB pounces. I always steer well clear on Turn 2. Even if you reduce KB, its not worth the loss of a CV or two because it gives the Japanese an even larger window of initiative. Essex's will come but not for a good long while. Gotta protect the assets and play it like Nimitz did. Only expose if the gains are worth the risk. A situation where a KB isn't fighting with one armed tied behind it's back and there's an assumption of enemy carriers lurking is not what i'd consider good odds if i'm piloting a single carrier. I'd order my boys to evade and live to fight another day with better odds.

I think the whole Imperial Naval Staff suffered from that affliction! Don't forget the Leyte plan which was concieved long after Isoruku was room temperature!
Yamamoto did love huge and complex battle plans (with dispersion of force)... IJN paid dearly for it at Midway...


Leo "Apollo11"

quote:

As you can imagine, the island natives were pretty awestruck by a bunch of dirty, oily SOB's that spoke funny being deposited on their island. But apparently the native women were quite enamored with their tee-shirts (the men didn't have much else). Only problem was, the shirts didn't fit the better endowed gals, so they cut two holes in them and walked around like that..!! Hmmmm..

quote:

ORIGINAL: wdolson

The US had intelligence that the IJN was likely to hit American targets sometime in early December, but nobody really knew where. I suspect somebody who knew the potential of carriers made sure the USN CVs stayed at sea as much as possible during that window. The big gun admirals held most of the highest command positions within the USN, but Joseph Reeves had just retired.

Reeves was the visionary admiral who established most of the successful carrier doctrines and he ended his carrier as CNO. This is a good biography http://www.amazon.com/All-Factors-Victory-Origins-Carrier/dp/B006G83LRY/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1342826795&sr=8-9&keywords=Joseph+Reeves

One of Reeves' former staff may have been in an important position and made sure the CVs were kept busy.

After PH the USN realized the CVs were not ready for prime time yet and they spent most of the next 5 months on raids to train up the air groups. When the intelligence gave them an opening, they would send in one or two carriers on a raid to give the Japanese a bad day. The most spectacular was the Enterprise's raid on the Marshalls in, I believe February 42. Intelligence firmly place the KB well to the west, so the Enterprise was sent to the Marshalls to see what kind of havoc it could do.

Bill

Member: Treaty, Reluctant Admiral and Between the Storms Mod Team.

Reluctant Admiral Mod:
https://sites.google.com/site/reluctantadmiral/

quote:

ORIGINAL: spence

If the carriers (Enterprise and Lexington) were present at Pearl Harbor on December 7th they would almost certainly have been sunk or severely damaged.
Other than the unlikely chance that their fighter pilots just happened to be hanging around the ready room early on a Sunday morning the carrier's fighters would have contributed nothing to the defense. Even with the same rather ridiculous presumption pertaining to their dive bombers and torpedo planes such bombers as they might have contributed would have approached KB from the most anticipated axis in small groups and probably would have suffered accordingly (a la Torpedo Eight at Midway).

The game system does not appear to me to allow that the bombers from the Enterprise and Lexington approach from a totally unexpected axis with a fighter escort that fully engages the KB's CAP or keeps the Zeroes off the bombers until they have dropped their loads. IRL two major KB ships succumbed to exactly one hit due to the poor damage control organization and doctrine of the IJN. According to US Navy (Air) Doctrine the two U.S carriers had enough squadrons to devote an entire squadron to each of KB's carriers. The game system seems to allow the CAP to engage any first incoming raid at full strength (different percentages pertain according to nationality apparently) with some per cent decrease according to the number of subsequent raids. Such a logical progression is not entirely justified by the doctrine and organization of the IJN which charged and allowed individual pilots with reacting to threats as they saw fit from their individual cockpits. At Midway this resulted in approximately half of the available CAP attacking J Thach's six fighter escort for VT-3 and the other half completely ignoring VB-5 (much to Soryu's detriment) while at the same not detecting VS-6 and VB-6 at all (much to the detriment of Akagi and Kaga). It should also be noted that the KB CAP completely failed to notice or intercept the 9 Blenheims that found KB off of Ceylon until after they dropped their bombs. I am not saying the two U.S. carriers could have defeated the 6 KB carriers on December 7th. I am arguing that the system does not reflect the foibles of Japanese CAP doctrine/organization adequately. Combined with their own total lack of knowledge as to the whereabouts of the U.S. carriers and their generous fuel supply they get to go hunting U.S. CVs or attacking Pearl Harbor on subsequent days with hardly a care in the world. Not at all realistic.

quote:

ORIGINAL: wdolson

I read an article not too long ago about the IJN's failure at PH. The article challenged the claims that it was such a huge victory for the Japanese. The author went into a lot of detail about the plan for the raid and he had charts of where the bombs and torpedoes went. The Vals and level bombing Kates scored very poorly.

Lack of radios forced the strike commander to use flares to tell the formations what to do. One flare meant complete suprise achieved: 1st wave focuses on ship, 2 flares mean the Americans were alerted and the 1st wave Vals should focus on air base targets.

One flare also freed up the Zeros to attack the air fields. The strike commander fired one flare, but the Zeros didn't see it. The Vals did. He fired a second flare to get the Zeros attention, but the Val commander thought the 2nd flare meant he should concentrate on the air fields instead of ships and went after the air fields.

As a result the air fields got more attention from the 1st strike then they should have and the ships got less attention.

The 2nd wave Vals wasted a bunch of bombs trying to sink the USS Dale in the ship channel. They dropped something like 18 bombs and only succeeded in doing some light damage to the Dale.

The IJN high command did not think the US carriers as much of a threat as the BBs, and wanted the strike to focus on the BBs. Against orders the commander who did the detail planning for the strike tasked a fair number of Kates to go after the carriers. These Kates ended up seeking out secondary targets like the Utah when their primary targets were not there.

The article was in World War II magazine about 4 months ago. Very interesting and in the same vein as Shattered Sword in the type of exhaustive detail.

Bill

quote:

ORIGINAL: aether59

Just a note on this discussion, not that I'm an expert or anything.

My father was a chief gunnery officer on the CV-2 Lexington on PH day and he went in the water when she was sunk in the battle of the Coral Sea. His job in the tower was to watch his quadrant of the radar and call out the incoming plane coordinates to the gun crews. The RCA CXAM radar were new then, and not very capable. From Wikipedia on that radar system, it says the Lex spotted incoming Zero's at 68 miles at Coral Sea, which is about at most 10 minutes warning. My father said the radar stunk at and was unreliable with altitude, and they called the antenna the "rotating bed mattress", because that's what it looked like.

Had they been at PH, and if there had been radar men, gun crews and pilots at quarters early that Sunday morning, how many planes can you scramble in 10 minutes?

He said the men were told, as to the reason they were steaming away from PH on Dec. 5th, 1941 was the Admiral thought they were getting lazy, and needed to go out on maneuvers. Makes sense on hindsight, I guess, since her and the Enterprise missions were secret for two reasons: Not to alert the Japs that the CV's were missing from PH and to keep the 12 planes on each a secret about being delivered to Wake and Midway.

Always seemed to me that would be an awful small job for such large carriers, but I guess they felt those planes were really needed on the islands.

I got the sense from him, as has been mentioned on this board, that the men were pretty green...after all, the Coral Sea was the first carrier to carrier combat. My father always said that it was fuel lines leaking that did the Lexington in, but the official report points more toward gas fumes erupting in the air ventilation system than the fuel supply lines.

Like most battle hardened vets, he never spoke much at all about the war...it took 40 years to get these few tid-bits out of him.

Though I do remember him talking about the Zero pilot who smiled and saluted to the men in the tower as he roared past. After the men were collected from the Coral Sea waters, the Navy dumped them on an island called Tonga-Tapu for a few weeks, because they were still in dangerous waters and the Navy couldn't spare a ship(s) to ferry them back stateside.

As you can imagine, the island natives were pretty awestruck by a bunch of dirty, oily SOB's that spoke funny being deposited on their island. But apparently the native women were quite enamored with their tee-shirts (the men didn't have much else). Only problem was, the shirts didn't fit the better endowed gals, so they cut two holes in them and walked around like that..!! Hmmmm..

Jon

My grandfather was a Navy Corpsman aboard the Lexington. Like your dad he really didn't talk about it much. He left the ship with his uniform and his Corpsman handbook. I have it in our lock box at the bank, water stained and everything.



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(in reply to aether59)

quote:

ORIGINAL: wdolson

I read an article not too long ago about the IJN's failure at PH. The article challenged the claims that it was such a huge victory for the Japanese. The author went into a lot of detail about the plan for the raid and he had charts of where the bombs and torpedoes went. The Vals and level bombing Kates scored very poorly.

quote:

ORIGINAL: wdolson



After Coral Sea the USN started purging fuel lines with CO2 after fueling of aircraft was complete and it probably saved some carriers throughout the war.

Bill

quote:

With hindsight it doesn't seem like much of a victory at all. Only 2 relatively obsolete battleships permanently lost. I think the way PH is commonly perceived in most people's consciousness is that the Japanese destroyed the whole American fleet. I remember reading somewhere that the Japanese would have been better advised to go after the oil storage farm and the port facilities and that would have knocked the US out of the fight for a longer period of time than hitting the battleships actually did.