1940. France surrendered on June 21st. Before that, the British evacuated their expeditionary force, which left most of its equipment on the beach.
The German Blitzkriegs were wars of movement, as far removed from the stalemate of the Western Front as could be imagined. The Blitzkrieg had to be modified, however. New weapons, the anti-tank land mine, infantry rocket launchers like the U.S. “bazooka,” recoilless guns and fighter-bombers armed with rockets all ended the comparatively carefree life of the tankers. But tanks permanently changed warfare and are still a most important part of any army.
Chapter 37
Air Power on the Sea: The Aircraft Carrier
Before the First World War, relations between Britain and Germany became strained when the two countries engaged in an arms race. The Germans felt that a great power had to have a great navy as well as overseas colonies. The British felt that survival on their islands required that they have a navy superior to any other in the world. So each began building more and better battleships.
Battleships, floating steel fortresses carrying guns far more powerful than any that could be used by a field army, were symbols of military might. They were called “capital ships.”
The arms race ended with World War I. At the end of the war, the mighty German High Seas Fleet — which spent most of the war in the Baltic and never reached a higher sea than the North Sea — was no more. Britain had more battleships than any other country, but many of her “battle wagons” were old, slow and had only 12-inch guns. A new threat to British sea supremacy was shaping up far from Europe. Two Pacific powers, the United States and Japan, decided to build new battleships. Unlike Germany in the previous naval arms race, neither country was thinking about Britain. The Japanese worried about the Americans, and the Americans about the Japanese.
In 1915, Japan announced a program to build 16 battleships and battle cruisers. The battle cruiser was a ship, pioneered by the British and the Germans, that looked like a battleship but had thinner armor. It was faster than a battleship but carried the same heavy armament. The U.S. Congress passed a law authorizing creation of a navy “second to none.” The United States began building 10 new battleships which, like those of the new Japanese ships, would carry 16-inch guns. In response, the British began building four enormous — 48,000-ton — battle cruisers and started designing battleships with 18-inch guns. A new, three-runner naval arms race was beginning.
At this point, the United States took advantage of two facts. First, Britain was broke and exhausted by the late war and could not hope to out-build the American shipyards. Second, Japan just didn’t have the industrial capacity to compete in an all-out arms race. The United States called on the other countries to join in a naval arms limitation treaty. The treaty, the Washington Treaty of 1921, imposed a moratorium on capital ship building and set limits for the world’s major naval powers. Britain and the United States were allowed to have the largest navies, Japan, the next largest, and France and Italy somewhat smaller fleets. France and Italy, like Britain, had been impoverished by the war and were happy to have an excuse for not spending a lot of money on battleships.
Japan, which had been one of the Allies, but which was untouched by the war, was less happy. The Japanese saw the terms, which let them have less than the Americans or British, as evidence of Anglo-American racial prejudice. They were right. But they couldn’t hope to compete with the Americans in an arms race. So they accepted the treaty, and the long-simmering Japanese-American rivalry grew hotter.
When the treaty was signed, the United States was building two battle cruisers, which would be the first such ships in the American navy. Both battleships and battle cruisers were considered capital ships. To keep from exceeding its capital ship quota, the United States altered the construction of two battle cruisers to make them into a new type of ship — aircraft carriers. The projected battle cruisers would make excellent aircraft carriers because they were so big and so fast. Size was important, because the larger the ship, the more space planes would have to take off and land. There was no way a ship could be built that was as big as the average air field, so all navy planes but the big patrol bombers had to be constructed to have a maximum of lift. That was also why speed was important. During take-offs, the carrier headed into the wind and proceeded at full speed to enhance the plane’s own take-off speed. The two former battle cruisers became the U.S.S. Lexington and the U.S.S. Saratoga, which for many years were the world’s biggest, fastest, and most powerful aircraft carriers.
They weren’t the first. In the U.S. Navy, the U.S.S. Langley (named after aircraft pioneer Dr. Samuel Langley), a converted collier, had preceded them.
During World War I, the British had experimented with aircraft carriers. The H.M.S. Furious had a flight deck, but it was too short and located behind the funnels, which created too much turbulence. Furious could handle only amphibian planes that landed in the water and had to be winched aboard the ship.
In the U.S. Navy, cruisers and battleships had been carrying seaplanes on catapults since 1912. These aircraft, too, landed on the water and were hauled up to the deck. The British then built the H.M..S. Argus, which had an unbroken flight deck, but Argus was not commissioned until after the war. Meanwhile, the Japanese had not been idle. Japan commissioned its first ship designed from the start to be an aircraft carrier in 1922. That ship, Hosho, entered the Imperial service 12 years before Ranger, the first purpose-built American carrier, was commissioned.
Aircraft carriers required specialized planes and highly skilled pilots because they provided such limited take- off and landing space. Arresting gear helped to slow landing planes, and carriers built during World War II had catapults to help their planes become airborne. Still, to a high-flying pilot, his carrier was a tiny dot that might be moving faster than most craft on the ocean.
And if he were flying any kind of bomber, his target was usually even smaller.
Carrier-based bombers were considerably smaller than their land-based coun-terparts. There were three kinds — high-level bombers, dive bombers, and torpedo bombers. Bombs dropped from high altitude had more penetration than those released at a lower level, but if dropped on ships that were under way, their chances of scoring a hit were extremely small. The U.S. Navy invented dive bombing so its planes could hit those small, fast- moving targets. Dive bombing was dangerous, because, to a gunner on the surface, the plane appeared immobile, only getting bigger as it approached the ship. Even more dangerous was torpedo bombing, because the plane appeared equally immobile while flying just above the water.
Aircraft carriers were now firmly established in the world’s navies, but they weren’t considered capital ships. Until 1937, the world’s navies concentrated on rebuilding their old battleships — even battleships those that weren’t so old.
When the Japanese battleship Nagato was commissioned in 1920, she was the most powerful battleship in the world. Nagato’s armor was increased, raising her displacement by 6,000 tons. Her speed stayed the same, because she received new engines. And the range of her 16-inch guns was increased by allowing them greater elevation. In 1937, limitations on capital ships ended and all naval powers resumed building battleships. The United States built the most, but Japan built the most powerful. Musashi and Yamato were two monsters each carrying nine 18-inch guns and displacing 72,908 tons when fully laden.
Naval historian Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison wrote that the two ships “would have inaugurated a new standard for battleship construction — as H.M.S Dreadnought had done 40 years earlier.”
But that was not to be. This was, to a large extent, because of something the proud owners of these super ships did December 7, 1941.
On that day, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku carried out the attack he had planned over the opposition of the Naval General Staff — a surprise attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. The Naval General Staff, the part of the Japanese navy responsible for plans, had no faith that mere airplanes could successfully cripple a whole battle fleet. But Yamamoto believed that immobile ships crowded into a harbor would make good targets. He called in specialists to develop shallow-running torpedoes, armor piercing bombs and tactics suitable for operations in a
