Hey all, thanks for all your well wishes over FB, Twitter and Patreon! Things are looking a lot better now. This episode is an emergency episode made by MHV and Justin as I was unable to work on anything. Big thank you to them. If I can I will be streaming this weekend, so make sure to follow me on Twitch: www.twitch.tv/bis18marck70
Xor rd Not much except dodging U boats and air attack. We had enough air fields ,planes. we just needed pilots and supplies. They were necessary against Japan because we needed air fields at the start of the war. We had very little foot holds within the range of the enemy's.
I wake up to a wonderful video but find the Austrian in control of the German channel. And the previous chancellor is missing due to reasons... keeping my eye on this.
Even if the details were wrong, they were correct in seeing the value of massed air power. By comparison, then-mainstream naval thought was that battleships would rule the waves essentially forever, because nothing would ever beat bigger guns and more armour
@@talltroll7092 details is the only thing that matters. If someone in the middle age talk nonsense about how long range weapons would penetrate metal armors but with utterly ridiculous details, that won't count as correctly predicting armed gunpowder. Ranged weaponry was obviously better than melee, but with not so obvious limitations of bow weight and the technology available to go beyond bows. Just like the aviation technology during world wars. Credits are to those who've actually tried and succeed in making aviation works, not to those so called "visionaries" whose only making obvious predictions as if they're the only one who've thought that "flying better, sailing slower, durrr" while being ignorant to the fact that it's just not that good at the time and it requires not so obvious tactics and improvements to make it works while reckless testing straight into the battlefield means a massive loss of human life.
Dive bombing was invented in late WW1 but deemed too dangerous, understandably, the lack of infrastructure and training for the new technique contributed it. But also the fragile planes of the day could not dive at high speed or risk structural damage.
You are correct, I misspoke. I should have said the "maturing of dive bombing, and adaption for naval use." The US was the first to do so, starting in the mid-1920s IIRC.
Indeed. The planes of the day practically collapsed under their own weight when standing still. Attempting dive-runs in such equipment would be suicidal at best. Even the early planes of WWII were nothing to write home about in terms of capability. It wasn't until the latter half of the war that fighter aircraft really started making strides in development. Just goes to show that you go to war with the equipment you have, not the equipment you want.
Torpedo bombers were key for sinking battleships, even latter in the war large dive bomber payloads still struggle to penetrate battleships armour. They are however key for stripping battleships of their air defences.
I've had the luck (I guess; since I'm older than most of you) to interview (Okay, have a beer with) WW2 vets on this and other topics. The USN wasn't willing to give up on BB's completely (even early in the war, older BB's, providing shore bombardment, could put more tons on target than a CV, and in bad weather). That said, a Vet from the USS Pennsylvania said that Enterprise's torp. planes put the kabash on them at the Panama Canal excercises.
@@jameshay7247 that's a bad example. The Japanese navy was useless after the battle of midway. The real reason that the us navy did not lose a battleship is because the Japanese navy did not have the means to destroy them.
Well that's not entirely true. After Midway the IJN was still able to mount attacks with carriers that did significant damage. For example, at the Battles of Santa Cruz and the Eastern Solomons the IJN carriers were able to sink the Hornet and severely damage the Enterprise. Their capability was definitely stunted at Midway but they still posed a very serious threat for the rest of '42 and into '43.
@@jameshay7247 Harder to lose one when their role was relegated to second line service. Fact the only combatant itching for a barrel to barrel shoot out were the Japanese and after Savo Island they never got the chance.
Terrific emergency video. Justin's commentary, firmly based on historical context, has -- in less than 10 minutes -- allowed me shed the "hindsight" mythology debris my poor brain has been dragging around on this topic.
We also tend to forget that the best example of aircraft carriers' dominance were at least partially afforded by numerical dominance. Yamato was not sunk by a single carrier but rather by a combined force of 280 aircraft launched from whole task force of carriers, in 3 attack waves. If there was only a single carrier protecting Okinawa or a fleet of dozen Yamatos attacking, they would have a chance of actually completing their mission. If the US built extra 30 battleships in place of the Essex carriers they would still have a crushing advantage over Japanese in naval power.
Slawomir Chmielewski yes because guns have morerangethan aircraft 30 battleships cost way mor than one aircraft carrier can a battle ship help troops on the ground by hitting a rarget with a ground pounding bomb can it do airsuperiority roles can it do cas can it hit some thing over the horizon and more
Thomas Headley Carriers are actually more expensive for their size than big-gun ships, but their benefits are great enough to more than compensate for that.
*Hey Bismark IF you have been hurt (Car crash??) I am sure I speak for many when I wish you a speedy recovery. You do great work and I subscribe today something I cannot understand why I have not done so earlier as your work is so superb. Get well and soon!*
This was fantastic, I wish the two of you do more colabs. Listening in on the well researched discourse has a strongly cathartic effect. Maybe because it's rare in usual talking, but valued nonetheless.
The Washington Naval Treaty limiting Battleships was a massive catalyst toward Aircraft Carriers... Many of the famous early aircraft carriers were built on Battleship or Battlecruiser hulls that had been laid down already...
You are correct about the lack of effective ship based AAA...until you get to the US development and deployment of the VT fuze in the Pacific. It was a literal game changer.
By the time of Mitchells bombing test the US had already finished it's first prototype carrier the Langley and was experimenting on it's use. The Langley was a pre-great war collier with a flattop welded onto it and rudimentary underdeck hanger space, but was good enough to prove that the concept was viable logistically, while mitchel's test would prove the concept worked as a weapon (Albeit under ideal conditions). Soon after in 1922 the Washington naval treaty limited the construction of new battleships and cruisers, but allowed a small tonnage for carriers. The navy now found itself with 2 unfinished battlecruiser hulls that would violate the treaty if finished. They decided to design a pair of new carriers which could reuse these hulls, much improved over the Langley these 36,000 ton ships were similar to ships the japanese would also build at this time from cruisers for the same reason. By the mid 30's the rise of other powers developing and deploying 'treaty cruiser carriers' possibly spurred the navy to design the lightweight ranger class, then the 3 yorktown and finally the USS Wasp. At the start of WWII the us had a sizable fleet of carriers, but it's 2 largest were obsolete 20's designs from converted battle cruisers and it's 5 remaining were lightweight to stay under washington navay treaty tonnage restrictions. . However During the war all proved their worth, even the Langley served as a plane transport or escort vessel, similar to prototype vessels in the UK. While the others, Lexington, Saratoga, Ranger, Yorktown, Intrepid, Hornet, Enterprise, and Cabot (renamed Lexington before launch after the first lexington was lost in the coral sea) all served with distinction during the war, holding their own under brutal conditions while the midway class were rushed into production.
@@f-35enjoyer59 Yes. That was a pretty bad mistake to make, but I did mean the Essex class, it was lucky they were rushed into service as fast as they were because there weren't many of the others left by that time.
Battle of Taranto. Also, people look at the Fairey Swordfish as being obsolete by WWII because it was a biplane, but that's misleading. Sure, a 109 would have torn it apart, but it was never intended to go up against ground-based aircraft. It was a biplane simply because it needed a lot of lift to carry a heavy torpedo off of a short flight deck, and it was a pretty effective aircraft for most of the war. Surviving gunners from the Bismarck claimed they couldn't shoot it down because it was in fact too slow for their guns to track it effectively.
that's the funny thing about bombers: unlike fighters, they don't need to be _the best_, just good enough. The B-52 is expected to have a service life of 90 years. looking only at years, that's like flying a Sopwith Camel during the Iraq War
It was quite badly obsolete vs other designs that were available when it was used, not because it was a biplane. Other torpedo bombers were both faster and more maneuverable, allowing the enemy both less time to mobilize defenses and the aircraft more flexibility in how they approached the target. Had the Swordfish been used in the Pacific it would have been very quickly removed from service. Bombers need to be able to deal with land-based aircraft and the swordfish had neither the speed to get in and out or the defensive armament to protect itself.
The wisdom of not scrapping Battleships for fear of air attack was proved in amphibious assaults. Who can deny the decisive role played by the 15 inch guns of the RN and the USN in the landings in Sicily, Salerno, Normandy etc?
Sicily and Salerno were cases where destroyers played a much bigger role. Even Normandy saw destroyers actually do better in fire support than battleships (see: Omaha Beach).
@@trauko1388 They did not have much success at all with that all throughout the war despite a shit-ton of opportunities part of the problem was they had zero training or doctrine and they never had that much of an impact. They were shocked because they thought it would be fairly simple even the UK thought it would be easier than it was. The only country that trained and had sound doctrine before the war was Japan and because of their successes everyone thinks it was devastating and it was not at least for ships other than CV who were lightly armored and filled with aviation fuel and many other flammable items not to mention ordinance strewn about.
@@jameshannagan4256 Not really many chances, very scant beyond Crete actually, the rest of the time the time the RN kept well away after the first brushes with the LW, they simply expected their flak to be more effective, they quickly realized it wasnt so they stayed away whenever possible. Quite a few cruisers were sunk by carrier aircraft, battleships were rarely targeted because there were usually carriers around and those were priority. The Germans made rocket-accelerated bombs and those could have easily penetrated any BB armored deck. Just that late in the war they turned away form dive-bombing and went for heacvier radio-guided bombs that required a medium bomber at the least.
Note that the super battleships were only attempted to be used the way they were originally intended in a few engagements (fleet vs fleet heavy gun battles) Mainly they ran away from each other. As portable shore bombardment platforms in support of an invasion they were pretty good.
I just finished reading "The Unknown Battle of Midway" by Alvin Kernan (a member of the VT-6 deck crew - aviation ordinanceman - at Midway) no more than 15 minutes ago - it's a very revealing book from a unique point of view, and doesn't gloss over the widespread incompetence present on the US side at Midway. He considers it a 'miracle victory' not because a smaller force defeated a larger one - but because we won despite ourselves.
The Japanese made their fair share of mistakes as well their plan was overcomplicated and the goal was multiple things and that was not good for Nagumo add their other nistakes and it was not a miracle at all. Both sides make mistakes during engagements almost always.
As a youngin', I was in the Civil Air Patrol. For the uninitiated think Boy/Girl Scouts, but with a strong U.S. Air Force flavor. In the aerospace training we had, we were beaten over our heads how Billy Mitchell was kept down by those stuffy Battleship Admirals. Great video and very informative!
That quote at the end was actually ironically incorrect. By investing their limited resources/industry so heavily into battleships, they suffered from a dearth of fleet carriers when they needed them most. The Yamato-class, in particular, turned out to be a complete waste. If, instead of the Yamato, they had built something like the Taiho, then Japan would have had seven fleet carriers by mid-1942, instead of six. Hell, in terms of cost and resources, fleet carriers were so much cheaper than the behemoths of the Yamato-class. The Hiryu and its derivative class was lightly armored and far lighter than the big battleship.
Wrong- the Japanese always had enough carriers and aircraft. The pilot shortage was the issue. The Yamato was a heck of a lot more effective at the Battle o fLeyte than the IJN's empty carriers. It was a miracle the US landing fleet and and Taffy groups weren't shredded by the Japanese battleships and cruisers of Center Force.
Sorry guys, but I have read the reports about Mitchell's tests and you have made some fairly big mistakes. The testing was stopped and started a number of times for inspections (They were not beating on the target for hours with everything they had. It was only lighter bombs at first). Results were that the first bombs had done only minor to some fairly decent damage that could be controlled. BUT when the Ostfriesland was hit with the brand new 2,000 lb (as in they came almost directly from the manufacture) bombs it sank in 22 minutes after the first bombs hit. And it DID cause a stir in the military of the US. sm
Thank you for the post! I stand corrected on details (this video had literally 10 minutes of prep time and was done in one take, as we were quickly filling in for Bismarck). My overall point still stands. His experiments proved virtually nothing other than dropping bombs on static, obsolete ships with no damage control could sink them. Okay, what about under real conditions? Try hitting them (Level bombing? Good luck, even in WWII). Try finding them. Try coordinating with the fleet. Try even getting within range. Never mind significant improvements in deck armour, torpedo protection, and eventually AA protection. Mitchell, like many air power advocates in the 1920s, overstated his case significantly. Even by the standards of WWII. Again, the navies didn't dismiss aircraft out of hand, provision for carriers was even written into the Washington Naval Treaty. They just acknowledged that aircraft carriers were not ready to form the centre of the fleet in the 1920s. Spotting, recon, winning air superiority, and (starting in the late 1920s) discussion of some offensive use were all being integrated into the fleets. Aircraft were viewed as an important part of the fleet by virtually everyone, but the decision over whether they were capable of forming its offensive core was left unanswered until the war. Once you had enough carriers of sufficient quality, with aircraft of sufficient quality, they were finally capable of forming that core. By that point you are into the late 1930s. Even through WWII surface ships played an important role in a balanced fleet, and aircraft were never as deadly as had been argued among air power radicals in the interwar years. The argument I make also isn't saying one side was "right," or that carriers didn't eventually form the centre of the fleet in WWII (or that land-based air power had to be taken seriously). Just that the typical portrayal of the debate is comically black and white, factually inaccurate, and fueled by hindsight. The doctrine and thinking of navies kept pace with the development of aircraft all the way up to about the mid-1930s. At that point their thought was still progressing, but the capabilities of aviation improved exponentially. There just wasn't the time for the institutions to catch up intellectually before the war.
In the US... otherwise it was a fairly pointless exercise, everywhere else people had actually taken note and noticed the potential of carrier aviation with the first carriers being constructed by wars end in the RN and KM. If the US missed the bus it was their own local problem, hence why Mitchell was utterly irrelevant
Strange argument: "aircraft were never as deadly..." Now you're saying carriers weren't a war-winning factor? All of this is nonsense: military planners need to be acutely aware of disruptive technology, and Pre-WWII admirals deserve the shame heaped upon them. Many thousands died unnecessarily.
"The doctrine and thinking of navies kept pace with the development of aircraft..." Why didn't aircraft develop faster? Did the navies provide significant funding before the 30s to advance the possibility of a disruptive technology? I don't think so. Easy to say that the conservatives wisely kept pace with development but it's not reasonable to treat that same development as an independent variable. "Kept pace with development" is a true statement but it's hollow. It could be said whether aircraft development were starved or nurtured and still be true. I think that the truth is that development is costly and resources were limited. I think it is also true that a lot of airplane designers and developers were laughed out of business while being starved for resources for years. "I need money to develop this." "That's too risky. Here's a tenth or less of your estimate - take it or leave it." "Ok, I'll try... Oh crap, I ran out of money." _"Good thing I was smart enough to not lose more! I didn't know if it would work, but I took a chance anyway."_ And finally - ragging on hindsight is really specious. History itself is the development of accurate hindsight, subject to refinement and even rewrites as more data are uncovered and more analyses are considered.
Good video :D A little tip for making IL-2 1946 look better, you should in the Video Modes option select the driver to "Open GL" then in Video Options the Landscape Detail to "Perfect". The ground and water will look much better and render distance will increase a nice bit. A bit strange that for the Kate you had that N1K2 mod cockpit... in the 4.12 version (I think) they implemented an actual cockpit for the plane, with all the crew member positions covered, including the navigator/bombardier (it uses the Soviet bombsight in the Pe-2 though).
The Pacific theater seems to show where carriers were taken more seriously by both sides. Pearl Harbor was the wake-up call in this regard. Then it became apparent that a combined torpedo and dive-bomber strategy helped split up or divert the heavy AA fire that'd be more dangerous if it were concentrated in one direction or the other by attacking with just one approach. Then of course Americans considered air power enough threat that the new invention of proximity fuses was kept secret as their counter for it. Then of course Coral Sea and Midway being the icing on the cake in carriers taking the flagship status from the battleships.
To raid Allied shipping, that was the mission of the Kreigsmarine. They knew even tho the British homefleet was aging, it was no contest in blue-water capability. Tho in all reality she probably would have gone the route of the Tirpitz, stuffed up in a Fjord getting bombs dropped on it. She would have had a chance had she been finished early on, lets say late 1939 and into service by 1940 when Germany had some breathing space in the Atlantic, If she could get to open water with her escort intact she would likely have proven a thorn in the side of allied shipping. Tho she probably would have been ambushed as soon as she broke out to the North Sea. That being said, her fast speed would have made her a hard catch.
Graf Zeppelin is probably better to not have been made. Yea carriers can sink traditional battleship much easier than it get sunk by a battleship but the resources required to have a carrier battlegroup is too much for Germany. Battleships while not ideal can operate with a smaller group, mainly a few destroyers and a single cruiser. Where as a carrier is completely defenseless without escorts and needs a lot of them since it carries no meaningful amount of firepower outside of planes. A carrier need the escort to make up for the lack of firepower compared to a battleship. A carrier being less armored meant while a battleship can afford to take a bit of damage(hence don't need as much escorts) a carrier cannot and to operate effectively, it needs 'safe space' which means larger protective ring and even more escort to prevent it being attacked at all. germany odn;t have enough destroyers to spare for that. And Graf Zeppelin have a laughable offensive aircraft complement. The original load out featured torpedo bombers but they were biplanes so easy target for fighters and AAA. That loadout also only have 10 fighters. 10 fighters won't protect the carrier and its attack group. The latter variant only have dive bombers. Dive bombers are incapable of sinking battleships. The complement is too small that the ship have too little attack aircraft. Having even a few shot down will mean they lost a chunk of its firepower. Any remaining might be dodges, wasting that entire wave for nothing. Or Germany opt to have less fighters and be incapable of fending off any attacks or protect its bombers. Unless it engages a carrier of similar size, then it is going to always be at a disadvantage. With the numerical disadvantage, no carrier is better than having a single carrier that won't win. At best they can use it to escort any capital ships with fighter heavy loadout. But this risk concentrating its heavy forces too much. But very useful for cases like the sinking of Bismarck. Doubt it would protect against U-boat raids, flying aircraft around where U-boats are is telling the enemy the location. Patrolling around the coast is pointless since you got land based aircraft and so to the British. Graf Zeppelin have very little military value and understandably abandoned. Unless Germany plan on making more carriers AND destroyers(which they can't) there is no point in having Graf Zeppelin. With how CVs advanced(mainly in the Pacific) by then, her complement were far inferior and useful only as a training ship. It's essentially a light carrier and without already having a sizable force, a light carrier is useless.
Aye, at the end of the day. Was always better to put all that steel into making more U-boats, However I disagree that she would have been totally strategically useless. Had she broken out into the mid Atlantic were land based fighters would be incapable of intercepting her, she would have free reign of the shipping lanes. Her value beyond a commerce raider however, would be negligible.
I heard that certain powers that be did not want Michell to sink that ship. They thought up road blocks such as limiting the number of flights he could make and threatening repercussions if he sunk it. Then a single flight dropped 7 bombs and it sank in 20 minuets. Anyone could see that in a real war situation an enemy capital ship could be attacked at once by a hundred carrier planes, no escape. I also heard that high ranking IJN officers were present at this test.
Not really - Mitchell's problem was that he thought the entire navy could be sunk with heavy bombers (the WORST type to try and sink a ship with). He only succeeded with the 2000-pounders, and that's because they caused tiny cracks in the hull that could easily be patched by damage control in a real fight. And he didn't like fighters or torpedo/dive bombers either. It's a good thing they ignored him, otherwise Pearl Harbour would've been fought with B-17s and biplanes!
@@HowlingWolf518 Added to which, his planes dropped their bombs at point blank range, as can be seen in the film shot at the time. Even with the laughable A/A defences of that period I don't give much for their chances.
20 minutes? It took nearly 4 hours from the start of the raid to the sinking, on a ship that was anchored and had no AA defenses and crew to perform even the most rudimentary damage control. Had the ship been manned, it would not have sunk. Had it been moving, it wouldn't even have been hit. The Navy might just as easily have "proved" the uselessness of aircraft by parking a plane on an airstrip by the shore and having a battleship cruise up to within 1,000 yards and blow the plane up with its main guns. Mitchell's theory utterly failed the test of war - not one capital ship at sea was sunk that way despite hundreds of bombs being dropped attempting to do it.
The reason they were all on the same side... airpower. By 1942 BBs were nearly useless as front-line warships and were only good for shore bombardment.
Tony, nice hindsight fallacy you've got here. Do tell, why first WW2 battle of carrier vs battleship ended up with carrier (Glorious) being sunk with all hands?
@@KuK137 Horrible captaining on the part of the British. No combat air patrol ect. Battleships were still useful imo up until the late war. Even then for shore bombardment.
Bismark, you might want to set up your graphics settings higher when recording in IL-2 1946. The sim in its current state Supports water shaders and higher visibiliy ranges (128 km without the "far" LOD past 32km, which some newer maps don't even have because everyone uses the higher visibility settings anyway). Those are not accessible from the menu but can be set in conf.ini: all you have to do is set GL=Opengl32.dll under [GLPROVIDER] (this will switch to its primary OpenGL renderer - if you're using DX9 and couldn't get better visuals that is the reason - the DirectX renderer is an emergency one, it should only be used if the OpenGL renderer fails for some reason) then in [Render_OpenGL] section set Water=4 and VisibilityDistance=3.
When you consider the performance of the Clevelands and Iowas later in the war you have to consdier that the sinking of PoW and Repulse was more a reflection of their inadequate (or given the inability of its fire control to function in a tropical environment inappropriate) aaa arnament than the step change it it portrayed to be...
I always note the difference in air defense on USN ships at the time of Pearl Harbor and how they were by the end of the war. A look at the AA armaments on Enterprise or one of the raised battleships and it's night and day. Enterprise as I recall started the war with the 8 5" guns, 4 1.1" quad guns and some .50 cal machine guns. By the end of the war, the Big E had improved 5" guns with longer range as I recall and dozens of 40mm and 20mm cannons. The idea of our fleet surviving the war with their pre-Pearl Harbor AA gun loadout during the Solomans campaign let alone the massed kamikaze attacks of 1945 is just unfathomable to me.
Great video. Very objective and well explained. Yes, as the war progressed and aircraft and weapons became more effective it was obvious that ships were vulnerable to air attack but your video pointed out very clearly why in the early war years there was no reason for the naval brass to think that aircraft would be a serious threat to warships given their current capabilities. Even with the attack on Taranto Harbor and even Pearl Harbor, the fact that the battleships has been in port and not maneuvering could still support the belief that aircraft could not pose a serious threat to a fully manned and alert warship.
Good video... Dr. Norman Friedman said that carriers had a hard time getting a "quick kill" against battleships provided the Battleship had a good anti-aircraft system. However, a battleship or cruiser force could quickly kill a carrier. Glorious and Gamber Bay were quickly killed by capital ships. Carriers had to run from night engagements in WWII.
The only carriers I can think of that would have had even a chance in a surface fight were the pre-refit Lexington and Saratoga with their 8" guns. Even then the potential losses outstrip any potential gains.
Well Gambier bay was lost during the Battle off Samar, where Taffy 3 (7 Destroyers and 6 Escort Carriers) accidentally found a Japanese attack force consisting of many battleships and cruisers at very close range. The US was still able to win by carrier aircraft pretending to drop torpedoes and scaring off the Japanese fleet, but both sides still lost several ships with Escort Carrier White Plains credited in the sinking of Heavy Cruiser Chokai by gunfire.
@Infidel, what you wrote is extremely well known about the action of the US carriers off Okinawa. Conversely, properly managed capital ships with a good anti-aircraft system can knock down aircraft in droves. A US Task Force off Guadalcanal destroyed a duplicate of about the same aircraft force that sank the UK's Prince of Wales and Renown. The USAAF B-17 was largely ineffective against ships. Please, tell me something I don't know. Educate me. Don't bore me.
I'm sorry, but you grossly overestimate the effectiveness of ship-mounted anti-air. Especially when you have to remember that at that point of the war most japanese pilots were poorly trained and much of an attack force consisted of Kamikaze aircraft, which are ridiculously easy to shoot down thanks to have a predictable course.
Unless I missed it, one of the things not mentioned was the importance of Night Battles. Because they held Henderson Field, the US could exercise control over the sea around Guadalcanal during the day but at night Japanese surface ships were able to do a lot unless countered by US surface ships. Because of that there were a number of night surface engagements that played a very important role in that campaign.
just saw this - in the Mitchell experiment I believe he was hamstrung by the Navy's restrictions in the test - which required him to bomb from a ridiculously high altitude. It was at the end of the test when Mitchell "cheated" by breaking the rules and bombing from a a lower altitude where he could actually hit the target.
Late to the party; also bear in mind that, in the US Navy at least, the early carriers were regarded as a form of cruiser (CV--Cruiser, V fixed wing aircraft) for scouting and general support of the battleline.
The Fairey Swordfish was 10 years obsolete the day it entered service. Hardly a representative 1936 plane. The Japanese Aichi D3A 'Val' dive bomber was in flight in January of 1938.
I think people also forget that just because carrier aviation has arrived, doesn't mean battleships are automatically obsolete. Battleships were still massively more effective than aircraft for shore bombardment. Heck, the last fire mission for the "Mighty Mo" (USS Missouri) was February 1991.
Also keep in mind the social and economic situation. In the late 1910's through the 1920's and even into the 1930's no one wanted to spend a lot of money on the military. They had just finished what, at the time, was the largest and in some ways the worst war in human history. The League of Nations had been set up to prevent future wars, and most experts felt that war was a thing of the past. From that time on nations would settle things diplomatically. This was why the League of Nations was set up. By the 1930's, when the League failed and the experts started to realize they had been wrong the Depression had started and there just wasn't much money to spend on weapons development. They had to set priorities and looking to the past the obvious choice to prioritize was the battleship.
The utility of both Fleet and Escort Carriers was demonstrated during WW II. Still, when you needed salvos of 9 shells per minute there were the BBs and other capital ships to pour it on all day long.
The mechanics of war is an evolutionary process . And while revolutionary progress is made through technology , it's the tried and true war techniques being used while the newer ones can be phased in .
One could possibly argue that the fact carriers were left out of the naval arms control treaty was a pretty good indication of how naval strategy planners viewed carriers. Also, the fact that carriers were left out gave incentives for cheating the treaty with carriers. The real question is, would those carriers have been built if the naval powers had not been limited by the treaty. That is to say that those resources may have been poured into cruisers and battleships rather than carriers and that would seem to undermine your argument that the production of said carriers was truly a result of farsightedness.
grippercrapper That’s a common myth. Carriers were included in the Washington Naval Treaty, the terms of which were extend through both London Naval Treaties .They were limited to 25,000 tonnes, maximum of 10 heavy guns (over 203mm caliber), and a total carrier that carried for each country. UK: 137k tonnes US: 137k tonnes Japan: 82k tonnes France: 60k tonnes Italy: 60k tonnes As point of reference, 25k tonnes is about the tonnage of the HMS Ark Royal carrier.
Hmm... When I played Hearts of Iron. At least the old versions. It always took a huge amount of time to build a fleet of new battleships and carriers. Any larger ship took a lot of time. This was the main reason why I relied on Subs. While they took time to build to they where far faster to build and cheaper to maintain. Though I never developed a huge naval dominance with this doctrine of relaying on submarines. It at least least me harass the enemy and with a strong core of traditional capital ships I at least had enough striking force be able to push for landings. My strategy was all formed around long term planning and the limitation of I had with slow building of a fleet. The research I did also dictated what path I would take. A lot development in technology I had on the naval front was as a result of other projects that where focused more on improving my army and industry. Towards the end, having nuclear reactors made submarines a lot more viable for example. But that innovation only came to be due to me trying to develop nuclear weapons and improving my industry with nuclear technology. So even in this game I feel that what path you go down when it comes to navel development is a lot more tied in to your capacity now and what your industry is capable off.
I'd like to set the truth straight about a couple of things said. Concerning Mitchell's demonstration. This all occured just three years after WWI ended. Defense spending was slashed and everyone was trying to get what limited money there was available for their projects. So BM convinces the Navy to lend him a few old ships to be scrapped to try on and the Navy reluctantly agrees on the condition that they get to set the rules two of which were a) limit the size of the bombs(I believe it was 250lbs)and b)every couple of hits they observed, they stopped the action to go and physically check what damage was caused for not only future ordinance development but from the ships perspective in future anti-aircraft protection. This took a lot of time. With the bomb restrictions the Navy put on Mitchell, he could've bombed from then till Christmas(it was mid summer)and the Ostfriedland would still be afloat as it was considered unsinkable to begin with. She was a modern for the time battlecruiser and was a war prize. Not anywhere near obsolete. Mitchell though had designed a 2,000lb bomb that he was forbidden to use by the Navy but secretly loaded on six Martin bombers and went back out. Two bombs were direct hits and two bombs were such near misses they caved the Ostfriedland's hull plates in. She sank 21 minutes later. The second is about the effectiveness of land based bombers to sink ships. True at the beginning high and medium level bombing was a joke trying to hit a 35mph ship that knows which way to turn to avoid your bombs cause it just has to react to your bomb release. But when they developed Skip Bombing, that changed overnight.
However skip bombing was only effective against unarmored ships like destroyers and transports. You might do a lot of damage to the unarmored parts of a battleship like that but you'd never sink it. And as it turns out, no battleship was ever sunk that way or by level bombing - the battleships sunk by planes were all sunk by torpedoes, in most cases with help from dive bombers, and for most of them it took quite a lot to do it. What really changed the game was guided munitions. But no one in the 1920s could possibly see that coming and it's well outside the scope of this discussion.
Actually dive bombing made some appearances in WWI with the Sopwith Tabloids as well as orders in some cases for aircraft to dive towards the ground before release: I'm not sure how many of the latter scenario were dropping bombs off of racks or chucking them out the side, but the Tabloids did exactly what I described (absurd as it sounds). The rationale for releasing the bombs after diving was so that they'd be close to the ground at the point of release (which by the way, I've looked at statistics from WWII regarding low altitude level bombing, shallow glide-bombing, and steep-dive bombing, and it seems that the common trend is that the lower the bombs were released, the lower the radial error). Around 1919, the USMC adopted the idea using the Curtiss JN-4 "Jenny" to drop a bomb in a steep dive: It worked quite well. It required care though, because the airplane wasn't really designed for this job. Later on the dive-bombing idea became more popular because the bomb doesn't go through as curved a trajectory on the way down, and instead goes more or less the same way the plane goes.
Great video though I must point out that when talking about the failures of early carrier based aircraft you show a pic of the Fairey Swordfish, which was actually (surprisingly so to be fair) one of the great success stories of World War 2 in fact out lasting several aircraft intended to replace it and sinking (or crippling) a great number of Axis ships. One the other hand a great job better explaining the nuance that's often forgotten in the carrier vs battleship debate before World War 2.
Da Moose Man if there had been competent air defense these would have been useless. The superior Japanese bombers were ripped to shreds. I read the Bismarck's aa guns, which were extensive, were calibrated to hit much faster aircraft which is why they kept missing and got sunk (considering the force they were up against it was a matter of time anyway)
tnix80 true but the same can be said of most bombers/strike aircraft in World War 2. Crippling the Bismarck was not the only success of the Swordfish, the attack on Taranto harbour was another great success. But also it's often a matter of finding a specific aircraft's niche. The Swordfish besides being a carrier scout/bomber, again even outlasting many of the aircraft intended to replace it and sinking many Axis ships, it also contributed greatly to the war effort in the Atlantic, functioning admirably as an anti submarine scout/bomber. I'm not saying the Swordfish is like the best plane in World War 2, or that they single handedly won the war, just saying that they were far more effective than the image of them in this otherwise great video (at least to me) implied, and they did provide an important contribution to the war far beyond what was expected of the design. Actually Swordfish are a bit of an oddball for me since normally I have a strong dislike of biplanes (it's just personal aesthetics) but the Swordfish manages to overcome that in my humble opinion lol Though I would be dishonest to not admit they also have some small connections to my own family history. But I don't think my admitted personal bias changes the fact that they were a successful aircraft of World War 2 and made important contributions to the allied war effort.
"By the end of the war, the Fairey Swordfish held the distinction of having caused the destruction of a greater tonnage of Axis shipping than any other Allied aircraft." (From second paragraph of Wikipedia article on it.) Most thought Swordfish were horribly obsolete even in 1939, but they successfully defended the Siege of Malta and as Moose Man points out, managed to cripple the biggest and most feared battleship of its time.
Da Moose Man I'm not saying it wasn't successful, it's just it was objectively obsolete and a better aircraft, had it been available and used, would have done even better. The element of surprise and poor defenses were very favorable to it's performance record.
I'm sorry, but in what sorry world does shipping ever have adequate AA protection? The answer? Never. They were pretty much a free target for aircraft.
With unguided weapons it took a whole carriers worth of planes to take out a enemy battleship or carrier. Several aircraft carriers where lost to battleships when they where attempted to be used without battleship escorts.
Yes, there was a British test on the effectiveness of aircraft bombing battleships, around 1920. An old German battleship was used as a target. It is reported that British naval officers cried when it was proved that dropping 2000 pound bombs of the battleship would sink it. (Don't remember where I saw that. Long ago.) ("Fall of the Third Republic"? Maybe.)
from what I remember, Japanese started developing experimental CVs just after UK came up with the idea of CVs for the first time. It was from Japanese memorial record that I read somewhere..
BTW: "Flat Pack Bombers" tells the tale of how the first aircraft carrier attack was done by the British Navy in December 1914! The target was the Zeppelin sheds nearest England. The ship was a modified navy ship. It did NOT have a flight deck! The aircraft were biplane, seaplanes, that were lowered over the side, by cranes, after the ship snuck into position off the coast of Bremerhaven (I think.) One plane wouldn't start in the cold. The 3 or 4 others flew off, each alone. One plane got lost and dropped it's bombs randomly. Two planes got over target. Each dropped bombs. Their targeting devices were hopeless. The bombs were too small. One plane was shot down. The other flew back to the aircraft carrier. The damage caused was minimal. BUT: the Germans decided to move their Zeppelin sheds farther away to thwart future bombings. Thus the Zeppelin bombers were required to spend more time in the air, flying to and from bombing missions over London.
I recommand Carrier Glorious by John Winton, where he clearly presents the debats that took place in the Royal Navy during the end of the 20’s and the begining of the 30’s regarding the use and tactics of aircraft carriers. Very interesting!
Billy Mitchell's ship bombing experiment took place on 21st July 1921 and consisted of 7 x Martin B-2 twin engined heavy bombers each carrying the then newly developed 2,000 Pound anti-ship bomb. The target ship was the war reparation ex-German navy battlecruiser "Ostfriesland" anchored in a bay. 2 bombs went wide, 4 were near misses and one was a direct hit. The "Ostfriesland" sank 20 minutes later. The year before the old US battleship "Alabama" had been used in a similar experiment but with existing 116 GP bombs which proved not very effective. The conclusion was that a special heavy deck armour penetrating bomb of some considerable mass would be required. The second experiment in 1921 proved that airpower could effectively sink a capital warship with a single large bomb hit, which meant that raiding enemy warships attacking the US coast could be potentially be hunted down and sunk by land based heavy bombers rather than escape back out to sea.
Using infinitely superior aircraft that still needed to expend vastly greater quantities of ammo. Using those examples makes about as much sense as arguing the 1921 USAF could lay waste to entire cities in an instant because the Enola Gay did it in 1945...
Dive Bombing was initially invented by the USMC in the 1920's. It was quickly adopted by the US Navy. Dive bombers and dive bombing were well developed concepts in the early 1930's. Torpedo planes the problems was sufficient engine power.
Yeah, I remember having to listen to this old drunk guy in a bar rambling about how the US allowed the attack on Pearl Harbor to happen based on the fact that only battleships were destroyed, reasoning that "they knew battleships were obsolete!" Then I'm just sitting there and I said to him "You're drunk, and really misinformed." This was also around the time of that big tsunami in Japan, and they're playing a news story about the US Navy helping with recovery efforts. This sets him off again with him yelling "Why the f^%^ are we helping them? Where the f0)* is the Japanese navy?" Then I said "At the bottom of the Pacific." He just sat there looking confused after that and didn't say much else.
USS Atlanta was a dedicated AA cruiser laid down in April 1940, which meant her design went back several years earlier, meaning the US had full understanding of the power of naval aviation.
Fun fact: The battleship used in Mitchell’s air demonstration was the dreadnought battleship SMS Ostfriesland, a dreadnought of the Helgoland class used by the Kaiserliche Marine during World War 1. Too bad it was sunk in that way, would have been great history. Maybe do a video about the SMS Goeben?
A question i have is, "Why didn't/couldn't Germany impose an air power enforced blockade on Great Britain?" Germany had France. Seems to me, that airplanes could have sunk all merchant ships going to England and Wales. Was this done at all? If not, why not? If so, why did it fail? I just find it odd, that the documentaries never talk about Luftwaffe anti-shipping efforts. I would have thought this would have very useful to Germany. I guess I am wrong. But, why???
I would argue the money wasn't wasted on battleships because they were essentially floating arsenals. Their technology was mature and well understood. It was probably less risky to engage inferior forces with battleships that way. They also required a smaller escort since they had armor. One could imagine for the decisive naval engagements the carriers would win the day, but in the following skirmishes the carriers can't be everywhere.
They can certainly be in more places than battleships. A carrier could project force in a radius of perhaps 250 miles. A BB could project force in a radius of about 20 miles. And regarding 'floating arsenals'... what? The point of warships is to project power, not to hold stores.
I will point out that in previous iterations of Hearts of Iron, I can't speak for 4, ship building, and the problems of it, are pretty well represented by the game. In that, once you build any kind of ship, you're essentially stuck with it in that state forever, with the exception of being able to upgrade AA guns and add Radar/ASW attachments. It actually presents an ahistorical situation for several nations because they *did* upgrade hulls and guns during the later 30's or convert various ships into other kinds of ships, which is not possible to do in the game. I'll also point out that in the interwar period, in the US, and USSR as a result (they wanted to buy the design) there were serious discussions about creating a Battlecarrier, that was essentially a battleship with a carrier deck over top of the gun turrets - nobody ever finished one though :( would've been an interesting sight lol.
In the end we got the Midways as the definition of battle carrier, massive armored fleet carriers with heavy cruiser grade belt armor, over a hundred planes at max capacity, a top speed of 33 knots, and more 5" and 40mm guns than many battleships.
Even after Pearl Harbor, the Battleship Admirals claimed it couldnt be done against Battleships which were manauvering at sea. Then, the HMS Prince of Whales was sunk and that was that
HMS Prince of Whales and HMS Repusle were sunk by land base bombers & torpedo bombers of the Imperial Japanese Navy they did not have air cover it due to be taken up HMS Indomitable though the plan had to be revised when Indomitable ran aground in the Caribbean Sea
Indomitable didn't have the aircraft to fight off the sheer number of Japanese bombers that went after Force Z, There were 85 Land based bombers present, and indomitable would have been lucky to get even a third of her wing into the air given how poorly the RN prepared for Tropical conditions, and in any case the Japanese would have brought Zeros if they knew a carrier was in the area, and the RN pilots would have been shredded by experienced Japanese combat veterans as they wouldn't know how the hell to fight a Zero their training undoubtedly focused on combating German and Italian planes instead, especially since FAA pilots would have had a sense of racial superiority given how surprised everyone was that the Japanese were making such impressive gains early on despite being 'Asians'. That was assuming she could have made it in time for the operation anyways, especially since it takes a couple months to transit halfway across the globe..
Good video. I tend to first think of things from a British perspective, and it's not just in 1936 that the situation wasn't obvious. Right through to 1941 it was not that clear. So I think of the inability of aircraft to sink the Bismarck, and the tragic attempt by Swordfish squadrons to stop the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, on the one side. As well as Taranto and the sinkings of Prince of Wales and Repulse on the other. German aircraft were able to roam over all the seas to the east and south of the UK, but Britain retained naval supremacy. I know all these cases are complex and beset with ifs and maybes. But still, all the battleships didn't go down as soon as the war started. It's really only with the key technical changes in the generation of aircraft that came available from 1940-41 onwards, and the vast resources of the US to take advantage of them, that things clarified. You can't blame anyone for being unsure of the rate of future technical progress, nor for being unsure of whether the finances would ever be in place to pay for naval air war. Pretty reasonable to wonder, in 1936, whether 10,000 aircraft of the quality of the Avenger, say, would be built before 1950, say. And without 10,000 Avengers, for example, how clear cut would the situation seem.
thisnicklldo did the Bismarck not escape sinking by plane because the more advanced units available to the British had been moved to preempt an escape to the north of the British isles?
Yes, as I say, every one of these episodes is fertile ground for deep debates about what might have happened, if pre-war policy or in-operation command had been different. I'm sure if the British had 4 Essex class carriers in the Noth Atlantic in 1941, each with 18 Avengers on board, the Bismarck would probably have never made it past the Denmark Strait. But you need to have seen what 4 Essex class carriers with a full complement of 1942 vintage aircraft can do, to really know that. I'm only sure, because I know what happpened in the Pacific over the following 2 or 3 years. Planners in 1936 didn't have that luxury, and few of us in their situation would have immediately laid down plans for these ships, on the guess that by the time they were built there would be fantastic aircraft available, using yet to be developed technology, to put on them. My only point is that until there were a lot of carriers, with a lot of very good planes, battleships in fact weren't doomed.
The attempts to sink Scharnhorst and Gneisenau with Swordfish failed not because of anything with the battleships. It was because of the fact they had friendly fighter cover.
I keep trying to tell my dad why the devastation of pearl harbor was so unexpected. US code breakers and diplomats had suspicions that the Japanese were going to attack and also at Pearl harbor, but the US public didn't want war so no preemptive strike was possible. All the US navy was on high alert, but the Japanese attack was revolutionary in speed, inventiveness and effectiveness. So my dad thought that it would be malicious to not warn pearl of the incoming attack, Pearl was warned but the scale and ferocity was not expected.
I play Hearts of Iron with the Modern Day mod. Even though I have later gen stuff, I am still using stuff I had at the start of the game along with captured gen 2 fighters with my gen 4.5. I do this in the vanilla game, too. In the real world there are still countries using the Sherman as their MBT. The F-86 Sabre was still in service with some countries well into the 80s and there were Iowa class battleships firing on Iraqi positions in Kuwait at the start of the Gulf War. Just because something's old doesn't mean you throw it away (to quote Geordi LaForge).
Often it's because you have nothing better to use though, the M4 Sherman is absolutely worthless against a modern MBT except very situationally and any halfwit with an RPG-7 who can aim decently can kill it frontally due to it being made of RHS, the Saber was good for little more than an advanced trainer by the 80's as cheap MiG-19s and their Chinese copy were avaliable, as were cheap western planes like the F-5, Mirage III and Mirage V, in addition to the Soviet export model MiG-23s and MiG-21s, and the Iowas were brought back into service because it would have taken too long to design a new BBGN for Reagan's 600-ship navy initiative.
The curious bit is that the US Government was trying to make Aircraft carriers before there was even an actual airplane flying! (The famous failed experiment by Sam Langley shortly before the Wright Brothers took to the skies for the first time was so bold, that it was being done from a boat on the Potomac)
IIRC Mitchel was limited on bomb loads arbitrarily so low it would never sink the ship despite his protests. Well this in a way leads to his railroading but find out.
re : AAA firepower. Aircraft mounted firepower also increased significantly during the war from rifle-caliber weapons to 20mm cannon and .50" as standard.
Weren't aircraft carriers pushed tp the center of war naval warfare (for the americans) when most of their fleet was disabled or destroyed at Pearl harbour, changing naval tactics? It may be an oversimplification, but there seems to be a distinct difference between naval warfare in the Pacific and naval warfare in Europe -Europe being the more classic / conventional battleship vs battleship
One thing I would like to add is that after WW I the great powers of the world had other problems than to finance their militaries to include their navies. Europe was in a financial downturn after the war which continued into and with the Great Depression. The U.S. had a fake boom in their economy in the 1920s, and didn't care about its military much at that time, then in the 30s it had the Great Depression. Russia, then the U.S.S.R. had internal strife and warfare at first then had to implement its Communist state, then had the Stalin purges. Japan did not have a lot of natural resources and had limited financial ability to fund its military, but it did so to a great degree and the innovation in Japan shows this. Japan had 10 carriers at the start of the war, good torpedos, good planes, very well trained navel and air crews, and very good tactics. The Japanese carrier pilots were the best trained in the world by 1941 with an average of 2000 hours flight time (If I remember correct). But in the world of limited military budgets building carriers was not a priority, maintain the a fleet was the first priority. In fact the Washington Treaty was an attempt to keep military budgets in check because they did not want to have an arms race which would take resources away from other national priorities. So limited funds (carriers being very expensive ships to build), limited building of new ships and little innovation stalled carrier evolution along with the other reasons mentioned in this video. it was not until the new military budgets in the 30s that the U.S. created its first custom built and effective fleet carriers, the Enterprise class. Without WW II the battleship would probably still been the preeminent Navel unit for 20 or 30 more years. I forgot to mention this. Europe did not need carriers as much because there conflicts were based in Europe, where land base aircraft and local support was available. The Carrier came of age in the Pacific, it was there that the benefits of a carriers abilities became apparent. long distances, few or no land based air support, long logistics chains and effective (at least showy) ground based enemy air support vs attacking fleets made the need for carriers paramount. Without the Pacific war the carriers full potential would probably never have been realized.
If you go to the wikipedia page of Billy Mitchell, it says much of what you're saying in this video is wrong. Mitchell was busted from General to Colonel for his backing of airplanes, and nearly court martialed. Here's verbatim: "He antagonized many administrative leaders of the Army with his arguments and criticism and, in 1925, was returned from appointment as a brigadier general to his permanent rank of colonel due to his insubordination. Later that year, he was court-martialed for insubordination after accusing Army and Navy leaders of an "almost treasonable administration of the national defense"[3] for investing in battleships instead of aircraft carriers. He resigned from the service shortly afterward. And on the sinking of the Ostfriesland, you're wrong too. The planes took off with 230, 550, 600, 1200 and 2000 pound bombs. The plans were to try the little bombs first, then go aboard and look at the damage. The reason it took 47 minutes is the Navy observers couldn't get aboard because of rough sea. They never got to try the heavier bombs. Also the rules of engagement the army set up prohibited torpedos. The next day, they dropped three 1100 lb bombs (against the strict prohibet of the Army) and sunk the ship in 22 minutes. Is wikipedia wrong or are you guys?
It wasn't that he backed airplanes, it was his very poor judgment on how to go about it that got him run out of the service. Publicly accusing your superiors of incompetence rising to the level of treason is generally a bad career move.
Yes, but that wasn't because their owners thought those ships would be more effective as carriers, it was because arms reduction treaties meant they had to choose between completing them as battleships and scrapping other existing battleships to stay within the treaty limits, or converting them to carriers.
As a stock trader that observes theories being tested every single day, I consider hindsight to be nearly useless. You can use it to do some of the more basic analysis or what would have been the right or wrong thing to do, but beyond that, the best learning is done in real-time.
Hey all, thanks for all your well wishes over FB, Twitter and Patreon! Things are looking a lot better now. This episode is an emergency episode made by MHV and Justin as I was unable to work on anything. Big thank you to them. If I can I will be streaming this weekend, so make sure to follow me on Twitch: www.twitch.tv/bis18marck70
Bismarck what happened
i take it the squirrels snagged one of your wings again?
Thanks for explaining such a not so well known part of Naval warfare!
Military Aviation History What would happen if America had 4 carriers off the shores of Europe?
Xor rd
Not much except dodging U boats and air attack. We had enough air fields ,planes. we just needed pilots and supplies.
They were necessary against Japan because we needed air fields at the start of the war. We had very little foot holds within the range of the enemy's.
I wake up to a wonderful video but find the Austrian in control of the German channel. And the previous chancellor is missing due to reasons... keeping my eye on this.
Cannonfodder43 this is a disaster. Some would say, the Hindenburg disaster
Cannonfodder43
Hmm remember that kinda Situation 🤔
Huh? Poland?? Sure, a month is plenty!
Didn't this Austrian tried the same thing some years ago in another Chanel. Let's keep an eye on him.
Isn't Bis a Finnish guy? Not that this would change anything he is to us :)
Back in the 20s and early 30s those aviation "visionaries" thought super giant war Zeppelins would level cities in massive bombing raids.
Even if the details were wrong, they were correct in seeing the value of massed air power. By comparison, then-mainstream naval thought was that battleships would rule the waves essentially forever, because nothing would ever beat bigger guns and more armour
Tall Troll don’t give them credit for guesses
@@talltroll7092 details is the only thing that matters. If someone in the middle age talk nonsense about how long range weapons would penetrate metal armors but with utterly ridiculous details, that won't count as correctly predicting armed gunpowder. Ranged weaponry was obviously better than melee, but with not so obvious limitations of bow weight and the technology available to go beyond bows. Just like the aviation technology during world wars.
Credits are to those who've actually tried and succeed in making aviation works, not to those so called "visionaries" whose only making obvious predictions as if they're the only one who've thought that "flying better, sailing slower, durrr" while being ignorant to the fact that it's just not that good at the time and it requires not so obvious tactics and improvements to make it works while reckless testing straight into the battlefield means a massive loss of human life.
Dive bombing was invented in late WW1 but deemed too dangerous, understandably, the lack of infrastructure and training for the new technique contributed it. But also the fragile planes of the day could not dive at high speed or risk structural damage.
You are correct, I misspoke. I should have said the "maturing of dive bombing, and adaption for naval use." The US was the first to do so, starting in the mid-1920s IIRC.
Indeed. The planes of the day practically collapsed under their own weight when standing still. Attempting dive-runs in such equipment would be suicidal at best. Even the early planes of WWII were nothing to write home about in terms of capability. It wasn't until the latter half of the war that fighter aircraft really started making strides in development.
Just goes to show that you go to war with the equipment you have, not the equipment you want.
And even if they make it back, needing to pull the thing apart to figure out what's broken or breaking is not a viable strategy.
Very true.
Torpedo bombers were key for sinking battleships, even latter in the war large dive bomber payloads still struggle to penetrate battleships armour. They are however key for stripping battleships of their air defences.
I've had the luck (I guess; since I'm older than most of you) to interview (Okay, have a beer with) WW2 vets on this and other topics. The USN wasn't willing to give up on BB's completely (even early in the war, older BB's, providing shore bombardment, could put more tons on target than a CV, and in bad weather). That said, a Vet from the USS Pennsylvania said that Enterprise's torp. planes put the kabash on them at the Panama Canal excercises.
Needs to be upvoted.
Excercises were just that- excercises. The US Navy did not lose a battleship after Perl Harbor- and not for lack of trying by the Japanese!
@@jameshay7247 that's a bad example. The Japanese navy was useless after the battle of midway. The real reason that the us navy did not lose a battleship is because the Japanese navy did not have the means to destroy them.
Well that's not entirely true. After Midway the IJN was still able to mount attacks with carriers that did significant damage. For example, at the Battles of Santa Cruz and the Eastern Solomons the IJN carriers were able to sink the Hornet and severely damage the Enterprise. Their capability was definitely stunted at Midway but they still posed a very serious threat for the rest of '42 and into '43.
@@jameshay7247 Harder to lose one when their role was relegated to second line service. Fact the only combatant itching for a barrel to barrel shoot out were the Japanese and after Savo Island they never got the chance.
Terrific emergency video.
Justin's commentary, firmly based on historical context, has -- in less than 10 minutes -- allowed me shed the "hindsight" mythology debris my poor brain has been dragging around on this topic.
We also tend to forget that the best example of aircraft carriers' dominance were at least partially afforded by numerical dominance. Yamato was not sunk by a single carrier but rather by a combined force of 280 aircraft launched from whole task force of carriers, in 3 attack waves. If there was only a single carrier protecting Okinawa or a fleet of dozen Yamatos attacking, they would have a chance of actually completing their mission.
If the US built extra 30 battleships in place of the Essex carriers they would still have a crushing advantage over Japanese in naval power.
I bet 3 CAs cost less than the Yamato. And they were infinitely more flexible.
Slawomir Chmielewski the yamato was taken out by 280 planes which all in all cost les than an 8tn of the yamato so who lost that battle seriously
Slawomir Chmielewski yes because guns have morerangethan aircraft 30 battleships cost way mor than one aircraft carrier can a battle ship help troops on the ground by hitting a rarget with a ground pounding bomb can it do airsuperiority roles can it do cas can it hit some thing over the horizon and more
Numerical dominance will kick your ass everytime.
Thomas Headley
Carriers are actually more expensive for their size than big-gun ships, but their benefits are great enough to more than compensate for that.
*Hey Bismark IF you have been hurt (Car crash??) I am sure I speak for many when I wish you a speedy recovery. You do great work and I subscribe today something I cannot understand why I have not done so earlier as your work is so superb. Get well and soon!*
Glad we heard the "Naval strategy is build strategy" quote. Should turn that one into a t-shirt!
This was fantastic, I wish the two of you do more colabs. Listening in on the well researched discourse has a strongly cathartic effect. Maybe because it's rare in usual talking, but valued nonetheless.
The Washington Naval Treaty limiting Battleships was a massive catalyst toward Aircraft Carriers... Many of the famous early aircraft carriers were built on Battleship or Battlecruiser hulls that had been laid down already...
Wow i was wrong in how i understood carriers. Thank you for this video
I AM ANTI-AIRCRAFT! CUZ I GOT A BOFORS!!
What is it that you now understand?
@@JeanLucCaptain I got F4U corsair.
@@alchemist6819 AA is surface to air. corsair is Air to air Lol.
@@JeanLucCaptain I said that F4U corsair was a fighter and was a better choice than AA GUNS due to being more effective and flexible.
You are correct about the lack of effective ship based AAA...until you get to the US development and deployment of the VT fuze in the Pacific. It was a literal game changer.
By the time of Mitchells bombing test the US had already finished it's first prototype carrier the Langley and was experimenting on it's use. The Langley was a pre-great war collier with a flattop welded onto it and rudimentary underdeck hanger space, but was good enough to prove that the concept was viable logistically, while mitchel's test would prove the concept worked as a weapon (Albeit under ideal conditions). Soon after in 1922 the Washington naval treaty limited the construction of new battleships and cruisers, but allowed a small tonnage for carriers. The navy now found itself with 2 unfinished battlecruiser hulls that would violate the treaty if finished. They decided to design a pair of new carriers which could reuse these hulls, much improved over the Langley these 36,000 ton ships were similar to ships the japanese would also build at this time from cruisers for the same reason. By the mid 30's the rise of other powers developing and deploying 'treaty cruiser carriers' possibly spurred the navy to design the lightweight ranger class, then the 3 yorktown and finally the USS Wasp. At the start of WWII the us had a sizable fleet of carriers, but it's 2 largest were obsolete 20's designs from converted battle cruisers and it's 5 remaining were lightweight to stay under washington navay treaty tonnage restrictions. . However During the war all proved their worth, even the Langley served as a plane transport or escort vessel, similar to prototype vessels in the UK. While the others, Lexington, Saratoga, Ranger, Yorktown, Intrepid, Hornet, Enterprise, and Cabot (renamed Lexington before launch after the first lexington was lost in the coral sea) all served with distinction during the war, holding their own under brutal conditions while the midway class were rushed into production.
This is a very old comment- but the midways weren’t in service until after the war- you mean the Essex class carriers
@@f-35enjoyer59 Yes. That was a pretty bad mistake to make, but I did mean the Essex class, it was lucky they were rushed into service as fast as they were because there weren't many of the others left by that time.
Did you really not mention the USS Enterprise?
@@Walker_Bulldog That's a hell of an over site on my part.
@@Marc83Aus Well I see that you fixed it with an edit; no harm, no foul.
Is MilitaryHistoryVisualized replacing Bismarck? Is Austria replacing Germany? Is impromptu content replacing planned content? Etc.
#illuminati #conspiracy #weknow #bigbrother #omgwheredidalltheorcasgo
the Austrian Anschluss of germany XD
Are MHV replacing Bismarck jokes replacing half in the bag replacing plinkett jokes?
Dingdingdingdingding! I thought I would take the opportunity to do some fishing with a dated RLM meme to see if someone would pick up on it. :P
Tsar hoho that made me laugh more than it should have lol
Good collaboration with you and Justin, thanks for another interesting show.
It's always surprised me how quickly the aircraft carrier fought the bad press and usurped the Gun Club once Japan started expanding into the Pacific.
You mean - after Pearl Harbor?
.
I learned years ago that Mitchell really hedged his bets by having the battleship rigged with a scuttling charge in case he couldn't effectively sink.
And yet just four years after that British report, they sank a capital ship and damaged others with nothing but biplanes...
RonJohn63 underrated comment here^^
The Bismarck? *johnny horton intensifies*
Battle of Taranto. Also, people look at the Fairey Swordfish as being obsolete by WWII because it was a biplane, but that's misleading. Sure, a 109 would have torn it apart, but it was never intended to go up against ground-based aircraft. It was a biplane simply because it needed a lot of lift to carry a heavy torpedo off of a short flight deck, and it was a pretty effective aircraft for most of the war. Surviving gunners from the Bismarck claimed they couldn't shoot it down because it was in fact too slow for their guns to track it effectively.
that's the funny thing about bombers: unlike fighters, they don't need to be _the best_, just good enough. The B-52 is expected to have a service life of 90 years. looking only at years, that's like flying a Sopwith Camel during the Iraq War
It was quite badly obsolete vs other designs that were available when it was used, not because it was a biplane.
Other torpedo bombers were both faster and more maneuverable, allowing the enemy both less time to mobilize defenses and the aircraft more flexibility in how they approached the target.
Had the Swordfish been used in the Pacific it would have been very quickly removed from service. Bombers need to be able to deal with land-based aircraft and the swordfish had neither the speed to get in and out or the defensive armament to protect itself.
The wisdom of not scrapping Battleships for fear of air attack was proved in amphibious assaults.
Who can deny the decisive role played by the 15 inch guns of the RN and the USN in the landings in Sicily, Salerno, Normandy etc?
Warspite ate a Fritz X there, without air superiority the LW would have had a field day with those ducks... I mean, ships.
@@trauko1388
Fair point.
Sicily and Salerno were cases where destroyers played a much bigger role. Even Normandy saw destroyers actually do better in fire support than battleships (see: Omaha Beach).
@@trauko1388 They did not have much success at all with that all throughout the war despite a shit-ton of opportunities part of the problem was they had zero training or doctrine and they never had that much of an impact. They were shocked because they thought it would be fairly simple even the UK thought it would be easier than it was. The only country that trained and had sound doctrine before the war was Japan and because of their successes everyone thinks it was devastating and it was not at least for ships other than CV who were lightly armored and filled with aviation fuel and many other flammable items not to mention ordinance strewn about.
@@jameshannagan4256 Not really many chances, very scant beyond Crete actually, the rest of the time the time the RN kept well away after the first brushes with the LW, they simply expected their flak to be more effective, they quickly realized it wasnt so they stayed away whenever possible.
Quite a few cruisers were sunk by carrier aircraft, battleships were rarely targeted because there were usually carriers around and those were priority.
The Germans made rocket-accelerated bombs and those could have easily penetrated any BB armored deck. Just that late in the war they turned away form dive-bombing and went for heacvier radio-guided bombs that required a medium bomber at the least.
Note that the super battleships were only attempted to be used the way they were originally intended in a few engagements (fleet vs fleet heavy gun battles)
Mainly they ran away from each other.
As portable shore bombardment platforms in support of an invasion they were pretty good.
YOu guys did a really great job! And filling in for a friend like that is a very nice thing.
I just finished reading "The Unknown Battle of Midway" by Alvin Kernan (a member of the VT-6 deck crew - aviation ordinanceman - at Midway) no more than 15 minutes ago - it's a very revealing book from a unique point of view, and doesn't gloss over the widespread incompetence present on the US side at Midway. He considers it a 'miracle victory' not because a smaller force defeated a larger one - but because we won despite ourselves.
"Random factors seem to have operated in our favor." - Spock "In plain non-Vulcan English, we've been lucky." - Kirk
The Japanese made their fair share of mistakes as well their plan was overcomplicated and the goal was multiple things and that was not good for Nagumo add their other nistakes and it was not a miracle at all. Both sides make mistakes during engagements almost always.
As a youngin', I was in the Civil Air Patrol. For the uninitiated think Boy/Girl Scouts, but with a strong U.S. Air Force flavor. In the aerospace training we had, we were beaten over our heads how Billy Mitchell was kept down by those stuffy Battleship Admirals.
Great video and very informative!
That quote at the end was actually ironically incorrect. By investing their limited resources/industry so heavily into battleships, they suffered from a dearth of fleet carriers when they needed them most. The Yamato-class, in particular, turned out to be a complete waste. If, instead of the Yamato, they had built something like the Taiho, then Japan would have had seven fleet carriers by mid-1942, instead of six. Hell, in terms of cost and resources, fleet carriers were so much cheaper than the behemoths of the Yamato-class. The Hiryu and its derivative class was lightly armored and far lighter than the big battleship.
Wrong- the Japanese always had enough carriers and aircraft. The pilot shortage was the issue. The Yamato was a heck of a lot more effective at the Battle o fLeyte than the IJN's empty carriers. It was a miracle the US landing fleet and and Taffy groups weren't shredded by the Japanese battleships and cruisers of Center Force.
Totally awesome...you guy's done an excellent job on this..Thank you so so much for your videos and everything you do...
Heh, 'Get out of my safe space'
Bloody love this channel!
thumbs up for putting sources in your description!!!
Sorry guys, but I have read the reports about Mitchell's tests and you have made some fairly big mistakes. The testing was stopped and started a number of times for inspections (They were not beating on the target for hours with everything they had. It was only lighter bombs at first). Results were that the first bombs had done only minor to some fairly decent damage that could be controlled. BUT when the Ostfriesland was hit with the brand new 2,000 lb (as in they came almost directly from the manufacture) bombs it sank in 22 minutes after the first bombs hit. And it DID cause a stir in the military of the US. sm
Thank you for the post! I stand corrected on details (this video had literally 10 minutes of prep time and was done in one take, as we were quickly filling in for Bismarck). My overall point still stands. His experiments proved virtually nothing other than dropping bombs on static, obsolete ships with no damage control could sink them. Okay, what about under real conditions? Try hitting them (Level bombing? Good luck, even in WWII). Try finding them. Try coordinating with the fleet. Try even getting within range. Never mind significant improvements in deck armour, torpedo protection, and eventually AA protection. Mitchell, like many air power advocates in the 1920s, overstated his case significantly. Even by the standards of WWII.
Again, the navies didn't dismiss aircraft out of hand, provision for carriers was even written into the Washington Naval Treaty. They just acknowledged that aircraft carriers were not ready to form the centre of the fleet in the 1920s. Spotting, recon, winning air superiority, and (starting in the late 1920s) discussion of some offensive use were all being integrated into the fleets. Aircraft were viewed as an important part of the fleet by virtually everyone, but the decision over whether they were capable of forming its offensive core was left unanswered until the war. Once you had enough carriers of sufficient quality, with aircraft of sufficient quality, they were finally capable of forming that core. By that point you are into the late 1930s. Even through WWII surface ships played an important role in a balanced fleet, and aircraft were never as deadly as had been argued among air power radicals in the interwar years. The argument I make also isn't saying one side was "right," or that carriers didn't eventually form the centre of the fleet in WWII (or that land-based air power had to be taken seriously). Just that the typical portrayal of the debate is comically black and white, factually inaccurate, and fueled by hindsight. The doctrine and thinking of navies kept pace with the development of aircraft all the way up to about the mid-1930s. At that point their thought was still progressing, but the capabilities of aviation improved exponentially. There just wasn't the time for the institutions to catch up intellectually before the war.
In the US... otherwise it was a fairly pointless exercise, everywhere else people had actually taken note and noticed the potential of carrier aviation with the first carriers being constructed by wars end in the RN and KM.
If the US missed the bus it was their own local problem, hence why Mitchell was utterly irrelevant
Strange argument: "aircraft were never as deadly..." Now you're saying carriers weren't a war-winning factor? All of this is nonsense: military planners need to be acutely aware of disruptive technology, and Pre-WWII admirals deserve the shame heaped upon them. Many thousands died unnecessarily.
"The doctrine and thinking of navies kept pace with the development of aircraft..."
Why didn't aircraft develop faster? Did the navies provide significant funding before the 30s to advance the possibility of a disruptive technology? I don't think so.
Easy to say that the conservatives wisely kept pace with development but it's not reasonable to treat that same development as an independent variable.
"Kept pace with development" is a true statement but it's hollow. It could be said whether aircraft development were starved or nurtured and still be true.
I think that the truth is that development is costly and resources were limited. I think it is also true that a lot of airplane designers and developers were laughed out of business while being starved for resources for years.
"I need money to develop this."
"That's too risky. Here's a tenth or less of your estimate - take it or leave it."
"Ok, I'll try... Oh crap, I ran out of money."
_"Good thing I was smart enough to not lose more! I didn't know if it would work, but I took a chance anyway."_
And finally - ragging on hindsight is really specious. History itself is the development of accurate hindsight, subject to refinement and even rewrites as more data are uncovered and more analyses are considered.
@@ejt3708 Post World War II, Halsey noted that the submarine was more responsible for the defeat of Japan than was the aircraft carrier.
This view of battleship versus carriers from a historical perspective was certainly enlightening. Thank you.
Good video :D
A little tip for making IL-2 1946 look better, you should in the Video Modes option select the driver to "Open GL" then in Video Options the Landscape Detail to "Perfect". The ground and water will look much better and render distance will increase a nice bit.
A bit strange that for the Kate you had that N1K2 mod cockpit... in the 4.12 version (I think) they implemented an actual cockpit for the plane, with all the crew member positions covered, including the navigator/bombardier (it uses the Soviet bombsight in the Pe-2 though).
Thanks for letting us know, good work!!!
The Pacific theater seems to show where carriers were taken more seriously by both sides. Pearl Harbor was the wake-up call in this regard. Then it became apparent that a combined torpedo and dive-bomber strategy helped split up or divert the heavy AA fire that'd be more dangerous if it were concentrated in one direction or the other by attacking with just one approach. Then of course Americans considered air power enough threat that the new invention of proximity fuses was kept secret as their counter for it. Then of course Coral Sea and Midway being the icing on the cake in carriers taking the flagship status from the battleships.
If the Graf Zeppelin was finished, what and where would they use it? Protecting U-boats from patrols? Anti shipping against the British?
/M0ther_bra1ned/ i make a wild guess and say they has no real idea
If it was it would be taken out very easy unless they put every ship they had to protect it and still I think it would still get sunk
To raid Allied shipping, that was the mission of the Kreigsmarine. They knew even tho the British homefleet was aging, it was no contest in blue-water capability.
Tho in all reality she probably would have gone the route of the Tirpitz, stuffed up in a Fjord getting bombs dropped on it.
She would have had a chance had she been finished early on, lets say late 1939 and into service by 1940 when Germany had some breathing space in the Atlantic, If she could get to open water with her escort intact she would likely have proven a thorn in the side of allied shipping. Tho she probably would have been ambushed as soon as she broke out to the North Sea.
That being said, her fast speed would have made her a hard catch.
Graf Zeppelin is probably better to not have been made. Yea carriers can sink traditional battleship much easier than it get sunk by a battleship but the resources required to have a carrier battlegroup is too much for Germany. Battleships while not ideal can operate with a smaller group, mainly a few destroyers and a single cruiser.
Where as a carrier is completely defenseless without escorts and needs a lot of them since it carries no meaningful amount of firepower outside of planes. A carrier need the escort to make up for the lack of firepower compared to a battleship.
A carrier being less armored meant while a battleship can afford to take a bit of damage(hence don't need as much escorts) a carrier cannot and to operate effectively, it needs 'safe space' which means larger protective ring and even more escort to prevent it being attacked at all.
germany odn;t have enough destroyers to spare for that.
And Graf Zeppelin have a laughable offensive aircraft complement. The original load out featured torpedo bombers but they were biplanes so easy target for fighters and AAA. That loadout also only have 10 fighters. 10 fighters won't protect the carrier and its attack group. The latter variant only have dive bombers. Dive bombers are incapable of sinking battleships.
The complement is too small that the ship have too little attack aircraft. Having even a few shot down will mean they lost a chunk of its firepower. Any remaining might be dodges, wasting that entire wave for nothing. Or Germany opt to have less fighters and be incapable of fending off any attacks or protect its bombers. Unless it engages a carrier of similar size, then it is going to always be at a disadvantage. With the numerical disadvantage, no carrier is better than having a single carrier that won't win.
At best they can use it to escort any capital ships with fighter heavy loadout. But this risk concentrating its heavy forces too much. But very useful for cases like the sinking of Bismarck. Doubt it would protect against U-boat raids, flying aircraft around where U-boats are is telling the enemy the location.
Patrolling around the coast is pointless since you got land based aircraft and so to the British. Graf Zeppelin have very little military value and understandably abandoned.
Unless Germany plan on making more carriers AND destroyers(which they can't) there is no point in having Graf Zeppelin. With how CVs advanced(mainly in the Pacific) by then, her complement were far inferior and useful only as a training ship. It's essentially a light carrier and without already having a sizable force, a light carrier is useless.
Aye, at the end of the day. Was always better to put all that steel into making more U-boats, However I disagree that she would have been totally strategically useless. Had she broken out into the mid Atlantic were land based fighters would be incapable of intercepting her, she would have free reign of the shipping lanes. Her value beyond a commerce raider however, would be negligible.
Royal Navy: eh we just lost some money. no biggy
Parliament: YOU LOST WHAT!
I heard that certain powers that be did not want Michell to sink that ship. They thought up road blocks such as limiting the number of flights he could make and threatening repercussions if he sunk it.
Then a single flight dropped 7 bombs and it sank in 20 minuets.
Anyone could see that in a real war situation an enemy capital ship could be attacked at once by a hundred carrier planes, no escape.
I also heard that high ranking IJN officers were present at this test.
Not really - Mitchell's problem was that he thought the entire navy could be sunk with heavy bombers (the WORST type to try and sink a ship with). He only succeeded with the 2000-pounders, and that's because they caused tiny cracks in the hull that could easily be patched by damage control in a real fight.
And he didn't like fighters or torpedo/dive bombers either. It's a good thing they ignored him, otherwise Pearl Harbour would've been fought with B-17s and biplanes!
@@HowlingWolf518 Added to which, his planes dropped their bombs at point blank range, as can be seen in the film shot at the time. Even with the laughable A/A defences of that period I don't give much for their chances.
20 minutes? It took nearly 4 hours from the start of the raid to the sinking, on a ship that was anchored and had no AA defenses and crew to perform even the most rudimentary damage control. Had the ship been manned, it would not have sunk. Had it been moving, it wouldn't even have been hit.
The Navy might just as easily have "proved" the uselessness of aircraft by parking a plane on an airstrip by the shore and having a battleship cruise up to within 1,000 yards and blow the plane up with its main guns.
Mitchell's theory utterly failed the test of war - not one capital ship at sea was sunk that way despite hundreds of bombs being dropped attempting to do it.
Capital ships were still useful through World War 2. It would have been more apparent if most of them were not on the same side.
The reason they were all on the same side... airpower. By 1942 BBs were nearly useless as front-line warships and were only good for shore bombardment.
Or carrier escorts.
Tony, nice hindsight fallacy you've got here. Do tell, why first WW2 battle of carrier vs battleship ended up with carrier (Glorious) being sunk with all hands?
@@KuK137 Horrible captaining on the part of the British. No combat air patrol ect. Battleships were still useful imo up until the late war. Even then for shore bombardment.
Bismark, you might want to set up your graphics settings higher when recording in IL-2 1946. The sim in its current state Supports water shaders and higher visibiliy ranges (128 km without the "far" LOD past 32km, which some newer maps don't even have because everyone uses the higher visibility settings anyway). Those are not accessible from the menu but can be set in conf.ini: all you have to do is set GL=Opengl32.dll under [GLPROVIDER] (this will switch to its primary OpenGL renderer - if you're using DX9 and couldn't get better visuals that is the reason - the DirectX renderer is an emergency one, it should only be used if the OpenGL renderer fails for some reason) then in [Render_OpenGL] section set Water=4 and VisibilityDistance=3.
I was just loling at how there was a King George V BB escorting a Japanese CV in the video.
As always well balanced and informative. Thank you both.
When you consider the performance of the Clevelands and Iowas later in the war you have to consdier that the sinking of PoW and Repulse was more a reflection of their inadequate (or given the inability of its fire control to function in a tropical environment inappropriate) aaa arnament than the step change it it portrayed to be...
Plus a serious lack of damage control expertise and experience.
I always note the difference in air defense on USN ships at the time of Pearl Harbor and how they were by the end of the war. A look at the AA armaments on Enterprise or one of the raised battleships and it's night and day. Enterprise as I recall started the war with the 8 5" guns, 4 1.1" quad guns and some .50 cal machine guns. By the end of the war, the Big E had improved 5" guns with longer range as I recall and dozens of 40mm and 20mm cannons. The idea of our fleet surviving the war with their pre-Pearl Harbor AA gun loadout during the Solomans campaign let alone the massed kamikaze attacks of 1945 is just unfathomable to me.
Great video. Very objective and well explained. Yes, as the war progressed and aircraft and weapons became more effective it was obvious that ships were vulnerable to air attack but your video pointed out very clearly why in the early war years there was no reason for the naval brass to think that aircraft would be a serious threat to warships given their current capabilities. Even with the attack on Taranto Harbor and even Pearl Harbor, the fact that the battleships has been in port and not maneuvering could still support the belief that aircraft could not pose a serious threat to a fully manned and alert warship.
Good video... Dr. Norman Friedman said that carriers had a hard time getting a "quick kill" against battleships provided the Battleship had a good anti-aircraft system. However, a battleship or cruiser force could quickly kill a carrier. Glorious and Gamber Bay were quickly killed by capital ships. Carriers had to run from night engagements in WWII.
The only carriers I can think of that would have had even a chance in a surface fight were the pre-refit Lexington and Saratoga with their 8" guns. Even then the potential losses outstrip any potential gains.
Well Gambier bay was lost during the Battle off Samar, where Taffy 3 (7 Destroyers and 6 Escort Carriers) accidentally found a Japanese attack force consisting of many battleships and cruisers at very close range. The US was still able to win by carrier aircraft pretending to drop torpedoes and scaring off the Japanese fleet, but both sides still lost several ships with Escort Carrier White Plains credited in the sinking of Heavy Cruiser Chokai by gunfire.
Carrier-aircraft took down the largest battleship ever built, dude.
@Infidel, what you wrote is extremely well known about the action of the US carriers off Okinawa. Conversely, properly managed capital ships with a good anti-aircraft system can knock down aircraft in droves. A US Task Force off Guadalcanal destroyed a duplicate of about the same aircraft force that sank the UK's Prince of Wales and Renown. The USAAF B-17 was largely ineffective against ships. Please, tell me something I don't know. Educate me. Don't bore me.
I'm sorry, but you grossly overestimate the effectiveness of ship-mounted anti-air. Especially when you have to remember that at that point of the war most japanese pilots were poorly trained and much of an attack force consisted of Kamikaze aircraft, which are ridiculously easy to shoot down thanks to have a predictable course.
Unless I missed it, one of the things not mentioned was the importance of Night Battles. Because they held Henderson Field, the US could exercise control over the sea around Guadalcanal during the day but at night Japanese surface ships were able to do a lot unless countered by US surface ships. Because of that there were a number of night surface engagements that played a very important role in that campaign.
just saw this - in the Mitchell experiment I believe he was hamstrung by the Navy's restrictions in the test - which required him to bomb from a ridiculously high altitude. It was at the end of the test when Mitchell "cheated" by breaking the rules and bombing from a a lower altitude where he could actually hit the target.
Late to the party; also bear in mind that, in the US Navy at least, the early carriers were regarded as a form of cruiser (CV--Cruiser, V fixed wing aircraft) for scouting and general support of the battleline.
While talking about the history of naval aircraft, YOU GUYS TRIED TO SINK THE BAUXITE QUEEN AKAGI!!!!!
Thanks guys for standing in !!
The Fairey Swordfish was 10 years obsolete the day it entered service. Hardly a representative 1936 plane. The Japanese Aichi D3A 'Val' dive bomber was in flight in January of 1938.
The latter Applecore was certainly the worst offender...
Thankyou for the many good stories you deliver ( to be honest I only saw 2 of your stories until now ) based on facts and not on BS
Excellent team work guys :)
I think people also forget that just because carrier aviation has arrived, doesn't mean battleships are automatically obsolete. Battleships were still massively more effective than aircraft for shore bombardment. Heck, the last fire mission for the "Mighty Mo" (USS Missouri) was February 1991.
Also keep in mind the social and economic situation. In the late 1910's through the 1920's and even into the 1930's no one wanted to spend a lot of money on the military. They had just finished what, at the time, was the largest and in some ways the worst war in human history. The League of Nations had been set up to prevent future wars, and most experts felt that war was a thing of the past. From that time on nations would settle things diplomatically. This was why the League of Nations was set up.
By the 1930's, when the League failed and the experts started to realize they had been wrong the Depression had started and there just wasn't much money to spend on weapons development. They had to set priorities and looking to the past the obvious choice to prioritize was the battleship.
The utility of both Fleet and Escort Carriers was demonstrated during WW II.
Still, when you needed salvos of 9 shells per minute there were the BBs and other capital ships to pour it on all day long.
The mechanics of war is an evolutionary process . And while revolutionary progress is made through technology , it's the tried and true war techniques being used while the newer ones can be phased in .
One could possibly argue that the fact carriers were left out of the naval arms control treaty was a pretty good indication of how naval strategy planners viewed carriers. Also, the fact that carriers were left out gave incentives for cheating the treaty with carriers. The real question is, would those carriers have been built if the naval powers had not been limited by the treaty. That is to say that those resources may have been poured into cruisers and battleships rather than carriers and that would seem to undermine your argument that the production of said carriers was truly a result of farsightedness.
grippercrapper That’s a common myth. Carriers were included in the Washington Naval Treaty, the terms of which were extend through both London Naval Treaties .They were limited to 25,000 tonnes, maximum of 10 heavy guns (over 203mm caliber), and a total carrier that carried for each country.
UK: 137k tonnes
US: 137k tonnes
Japan: 82k tonnes
France: 60k tonnes
Italy: 60k tonnes
As point of reference, 25k tonnes is about the tonnage of the HMS Ark Royal carrier.
Hmm... When I played Hearts of Iron. At least the old versions. It always took a huge amount of time to build a fleet of new battleships and carriers. Any larger ship took a lot of time. This was the main reason why I relied on Subs. While they took time to build to they where far faster to build and cheaper to maintain. Though I never developed a huge naval dominance with this doctrine of relaying on submarines. It at least least me harass the enemy and with a strong core of traditional capital ships I at least had enough striking force be able to push for landings.
My strategy was all formed around long term planning and the limitation of I had with slow building of a fleet. The research I did also dictated what path I would take. A lot development in technology I had on the naval front was as a result of other projects that where focused more on improving my army and industry. Towards the end, having nuclear reactors made submarines a lot more viable for example. But that innovation only came to be due to me trying to develop nuclear weapons and improving my industry with nuclear technology. So even in this game I feel that what path you go down when it comes to navel development is a lot more tied in to your capacity now and what your industry is capable off.
CV hippie virgins vs based BB chads
1920s and 30s
I'd like to set the truth straight about a couple of things said. Concerning Mitchell's demonstration. This all occured just three years after WWI ended. Defense spending was slashed and everyone was trying to get what limited money there was available for their projects. So BM convinces the Navy to lend him a few old ships to be scrapped to try on and the Navy reluctantly agrees on the condition that they get to set the rules two of which were a) limit the size of the bombs(I believe it was 250lbs)and b)every couple of hits they observed, they stopped the action to go and physically check what damage was caused for not only future ordinance development but from the ships perspective in future anti-aircraft protection. This took a lot of time. With the bomb restrictions the Navy put on Mitchell, he could've bombed from then till Christmas(it was mid summer)and the Ostfriedland would still be afloat as it was considered unsinkable to begin with. She was a modern for the time battlecruiser and was a war prize. Not anywhere near obsolete. Mitchell though had designed a 2,000lb bomb that he was forbidden to use by the Navy but secretly loaded on six Martin bombers and went back out. Two bombs were direct hits and two bombs were such near misses they caved the Ostfriedland's hull plates in.
She sank 21 minutes later.
The second is about the effectiveness of land based bombers to sink ships. True at the beginning high and medium level bombing was a joke trying to hit a 35mph ship that knows which way to turn to avoid your bombs cause it just has to react to your bomb release. But when they developed Skip Bombing, that changed overnight.
However skip bombing was only effective against unarmored ships like destroyers and transports. You might do a lot of damage to the unarmored parts of a battleship like that but you'd never sink it. And as it turns out, no battleship was ever sunk that way or by level bombing - the battleships sunk by planes were all sunk by torpedoes, in most cases with help from dive bombers, and for most of them it took quite a lot to do it.
What really changed the game was guided munitions. But no one in the 1920s could possibly see that coming and it's well outside the scope of this discussion.
Those damn trees are more dangerous than ground fire.
Bob Bobson you should fly over the enemy airfield in war thunder. Turns out they had surface to air missiles in ww2!
Actually dive bombing made some appearances in WWI with the Sopwith Tabloids as well as orders in some cases for aircraft to dive towards the ground before release: I'm not sure how many of the latter scenario were dropping bombs off of racks or chucking them out the side, but the Tabloids did exactly what I described (absurd as it sounds).
The rationale for releasing the bombs after diving was so that they'd be close to the ground at the point of release (which by the way, I've looked at statistics from WWII regarding low altitude level bombing, shallow glide-bombing, and steep-dive bombing, and it seems that the common trend is that the lower the bombs were released, the lower the radial error).
Around 1919, the USMC adopted the idea using the Curtiss JN-4 "Jenny" to drop a bomb in a steep dive: It worked quite well. It required care though, because the airplane wasn't really designed for this job.
Later on the dive-bombing idea became more popular because the bomb doesn't go through as curved a trajectory on the way down, and instead goes more or less the same way the plane goes.
Great video though I must point out that when talking about the failures of early carrier based aircraft you show a pic of the Fairey Swordfish, which was actually (surprisingly so to be fair) one of the great success stories of World War 2 in fact out lasting several aircraft intended to replace it and sinking (or crippling) a great number of Axis ships.
One the other hand a great job better explaining the nuance that's often forgotten in the carrier vs battleship debate before World War 2.
Da Moose Man if there had been competent air defense these would have been useless. The superior Japanese bombers were ripped to shreds. I read the Bismarck's aa guns, which were extensive, were calibrated to hit much faster aircraft which is why they kept missing and got sunk (considering the force they were up against it was a matter of time anyway)
tnix80 true but the same can be said of most bombers/strike aircraft in World War 2. Crippling the Bismarck was not the only success of the Swordfish, the attack on Taranto harbour was another great success. But also it's often a matter of finding a specific aircraft's niche. The Swordfish besides being a carrier scout/bomber, again even outlasting many of the aircraft intended to replace it and sinking many Axis ships, it also contributed greatly to the war effort in the Atlantic, functioning admirably as an anti submarine scout/bomber.
I'm not saying the Swordfish is like the best plane in World War 2, or that they single handedly won the war, just saying that they were far more effective than the image of them in this otherwise great video (at least to me) implied, and they did provide an important contribution to the war far beyond what was expected of the design.
Actually Swordfish are a bit of an oddball for me since normally I have a strong dislike of biplanes (it's just personal aesthetics) but the Swordfish manages to overcome that in my humble opinion lol
Though I would be dishonest to not admit they also have some small connections to my own family history. But I don't think my admitted personal bias changes the fact that they were a successful aircraft of World War 2 and made important contributions to the allied war effort.
"By the end of the war, the Fairey Swordfish held the distinction of having caused the destruction of a greater tonnage of Axis shipping than any other Allied aircraft." (From second paragraph of Wikipedia article on it.) Most thought Swordfish were horribly obsolete even in 1939, but they successfully defended the Siege of Malta and as Moose Man points out, managed to cripple the biggest and most feared battleship of its time.
Da Moose Man I'm not saying it wasn't successful, it's just it was objectively obsolete and a better aircraft, had it been available and used, would have done even better. The element of surprise and poor defenses were very favorable to it's performance record.
I'm sorry, but in what sorry world does shipping ever have adequate AA protection? The answer? Never. They were pretty much a free target for aircraft.
"Bismarck hit a tree in a ground attack mission" damn lol
With unguided weapons it took a whole carriers worth of planes to take out a enemy battleship or carrier. Several aircraft carriers where lost to battleships when they where attempted to be used without battleship escorts.
Yes, there was a British test on the effectiveness of aircraft bombing battleships, around 1920. An old German battleship was used as a target. It is reported that British naval officers cried when it was proved that dropping 2000 pound bombs of the battleship would sink it. (Don't remember where I saw that. Long ago.) ("Fall of the Third Republic"? Maybe.)
from what I remember, Japanese started developing experimental CVs just after UK came up with the idea of CVs for the first time. It was from Japanese memorial record that I read somewhere..
BTW: "Flat Pack Bombers" tells the tale of how the first aircraft carrier attack was done by the British Navy in December 1914! The target was the Zeppelin sheds nearest England. The ship was a modified navy ship. It did NOT have a flight deck! The aircraft were biplane, seaplanes, that were lowered over the side, by cranes, after the ship snuck into position off the coast of Bremerhaven (I think.) One plane wouldn't start in the cold. The 3 or 4 others flew off, each alone. One plane got lost and dropped it's bombs randomly. Two planes got over target. Each dropped bombs. Their targeting devices were hopeless. The bombs were too small. One plane was shot down. The other flew back to the aircraft carrier. The damage caused was minimal. BUT: the Germans decided to move their Zeppelin sheds farther away to thwart future bombings. Thus the Zeppelin bombers were required to spend more time in the air, flying to and from bombing missions over London.
I recommand Carrier Glorious by John Winton, where he clearly presents the debats that took place in the Royal Navy during the end of the 20’s and the begining of the 30’s regarding the use and tactics of aircraft carriers. Very interesting!
Note to self: perhaps the Fairey Swordfish is a plane I should use in my story.
Billy Mitchell's ship bombing experiment took place on 21st July 1921 and consisted of 7 x Martin B-2 twin engined heavy bombers each carrying the then newly developed 2,000 Pound anti-ship bomb. The target ship was the war reparation ex-German navy battlecruiser "Ostfriesland" anchored in a bay.
2 bombs went wide, 4 were near misses and one was a direct hit.
The "Ostfriesland" sank 20 minutes later.
The year before the old US battleship "Alabama" had been used in a similar experiment but with existing 116 GP bombs which proved not very effective. The conclusion was that a special heavy deck armour penetrating bomb of some considerable mass would be required.
The second experiment in 1921 proved that airpower could effectively sink a capital warship with a single large bomb hit, which meant that raiding enemy warships attacking the US coast could be potentially be hunted down and sunk by land based heavy bombers rather than escape back out to sea.
As the pointed out, assuming the ship was not moving, unmanned, with no watertight doors shut. Somehow I doubt raiding ships would fit that status
the fact that the ship is moving does not really change the matter.
Umm, yes it does, by a considerable amount. Not only is a moving target harder to hit, a moving target can also evade. Y'know, like they did in WW2?
Yeah, Like Repulse and Prince of Wales. Like 19Koty96 said: It does not really change the matter.
Using infinitely superior aircraft that still needed to expend vastly greater quantities of ammo. Using those examples makes about as much sense as arguing the 1921 USAF could lay waste to entire cities in an instant because the Enola Gay did it in 1945...
Dive Bombing was initially invented by the USMC in the 1920's. It was quickly adopted by the US Navy. Dive bombers and dive bombing were well developed concepts in the early 1930's. Torpedo planes the problems was sufficient engine power.
Yeah, I remember having to listen to this old drunk guy in a bar rambling about how the US allowed the attack on Pearl Harbor to happen based on the fact that only battleships were destroyed, reasoning that "they knew battleships were obsolete!" Then I'm just sitting there and I said to him "You're drunk, and really misinformed." This was also around the time of that big tsunami in Japan, and they're playing a news story about the US Navy helping with recovery efforts. This sets him off again with him yelling "Why the f^%^ are we helping them? Where the f0)* is the Japanese navy?" Then I said "At the bottom of the Pacific." He just sat there looking confused after that and didn't say much else.
USS Atlanta was a dedicated AA cruiser laid down in April 1940, which meant her design went back several years earlier, meaning the US had full understanding of the power of naval aviation.
Those proved to be great ships.
The fairey swordfish still holds the record for most tons of ship sank
Fun fact: The battleship used in Mitchell’s air demonstration was the dreadnought battleship SMS Ostfriesland, a dreadnought of the Helgoland class used by the Kaiserliche Marine during World War 1. Too bad it was sunk in that way, would have been great history. Maybe do a video about the SMS Goeben?
Justin needs to have a channel
I am buggering him probably for more than a year nöw :D
Good for you, guys. Or maybe you meant "bugging"? Then it's good for us. ;-)
lol just looked it up :D well, the connection between Canada and Austria isn't strong enough for buggering
"Buggering" does not mean anything like "bugging". It means, well..."having same sex relations".
A question i have is, "Why didn't/couldn't Germany impose an air power enforced blockade on Great Britain?" Germany had France. Seems to me, that airplanes could have sunk all merchant ships going to England and Wales. Was this done at all? If not, why not? If so, why did it fail?
I just find it odd, that the documentaries never talk about Luftwaffe anti-shipping efforts. I would have thought this would have very useful to Germany.
I guess I am wrong. But, why???
Goes from north?
I played HOI4 once, a games.
I bombed the southern to bone, but they just shift north or america just came and smash my airforce.
I would argue the money wasn't wasted on battleships because they were essentially floating arsenals. Their technology was mature and well understood. It was probably less risky to engage inferior forces with battleships that way. They also required a smaller escort since they had armor. One could imagine for the decisive naval engagements the carriers would win the day, but in the following skirmishes the carriers can't be everywhere.
They can certainly be in more places than battleships. A carrier could project force in a radius of perhaps 250 miles. A BB could project force in a radius of about 20 miles. And regarding 'floating arsenals'... what? The point of warships is to project power, not to hold stores.
I will point out that in previous iterations of Hearts of Iron, I can't speak for 4, ship building, and the problems of it, are pretty well represented by the game. In that, once you build any kind of ship, you're essentially stuck with it in that state forever, with the exception of being able to upgrade AA guns and add Radar/ASW attachments. It actually presents an ahistorical situation for several nations because they *did* upgrade hulls and guns during the later 30's or convert various ships into other kinds of ships, which is not possible to do in the game. I'll also point out that in the interwar period, in the US, and USSR as a result (they wanted to buy the design) there were serious discussions about creating a Battlecarrier, that was essentially a battleship with a carrier deck over top of the gun turrets - nobody ever finished one though :( would've been an interesting sight lol.
In the end we got the Midways as the definition of battle carrier, massive armored fleet carriers with heavy cruiser grade belt armor, over a hundred planes at max capacity, a top speed of 33 knots, and more 5" and 40mm guns than many battleships.
worth noting that at the demo the japanese and germans took note of billy's advice on dive bombing.
Even after Pearl Harbor, the Battleship Admirals claimed it couldnt be done against Battleships which were manauvering at sea. Then, the HMS Prince of Whales was sunk and that was that
HMS Prince of Whales and HMS Repusle were sunk by land base bombers & torpedo bombers of the Imperial Japanese Navy they did not have air cover it due to be taken up HMS Indomitable though the plan had to be revised when Indomitable ran aground in the Caribbean Sea
Indomitable didn't have the aircraft to fight off the sheer number of Japanese bombers that went after Force Z, There were 85 Land based bombers present, and indomitable would have been lucky to get even a third of her wing into the air given how poorly the RN prepared for Tropical conditions, and in any case the Japanese would have brought Zeros if they knew a carrier was in the area, and the RN pilots would have been shredded by experienced Japanese combat veterans as they wouldn't know how the hell to fight a Zero their training undoubtedly focused on combating German and Italian planes instead, especially since FAA pilots would have had a sense of racial superiority given how surprised everyone was that the Japanese were making such impressive gains early on despite being 'Asians'.
That was assuming she could have made it in time for the operation anyways, especially since it takes a couple months to transit halfway across the globe..
'clobbering a video together'? 'cobbling a video together'
Good video. I tend to first think of things from a British perspective, and it's not just in 1936 that the situation wasn't obvious. Right through to 1941 it was not that clear. So I think of the inability of aircraft to sink the Bismarck, and the tragic attempt by Swordfish squadrons to stop the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, on the one side. As well as Taranto and the sinkings of Prince of Wales and Repulse on the other. German aircraft were able to roam over all the seas to the east and south of the UK, but Britain retained naval supremacy. I know all these cases are complex and beset with ifs and maybes. But still, all the battleships didn't go down as soon as the war started.
It's really only with the key technical changes in the generation of aircraft that came available from 1940-41 onwards, and the vast resources of the US to take advantage of them, that things clarified. You can't blame anyone for being unsure of the rate of future technical progress, nor for being unsure of whether the finances would ever be in place to pay for naval air war. Pretty reasonable to wonder, in 1936, whether 10,000 aircraft of the quality of the Avenger, say, would be built before 1950, say. And without 10,000 Avengers, for example, how clear cut would the situation seem.
thisnicklldo did the Bismarck not escape sinking by plane because the more advanced units available to the British had been moved to preempt an escape to the north of the British isles?
Yes, as I say, every one of these episodes is fertile ground for deep debates about what might have happened, if pre-war policy or in-operation command had been different. I'm sure if the British had 4 Essex class carriers in the Noth Atlantic in 1941, each with 18 Avengers on board, the Bismarck would probably have never made it past the Denmark Strait. But you need to have seen what 4 Essex class carriers with a full complement of 1942 vintage aircraft can do, to really know that. I'm only sure, because I know what happpened in the Pacific over the following 2 or 3 years. Planners in 1936 didn't have that luxury, and few of us in their situation would have immediately laid down plans for these ships, on the guess that by the time they were built there would be fantastic aircraft available, using yet to be developed technology, to put on them. My only point is that until there were a lot of carriers, with a lot of very good planes, battleships in fact weren't doomed.
The attempts to sink Scharnhorst and Gneisenau with Swordfish failed not because of anything with the battleships.
It was because of the fact they had friendly fighter cover.
Oh boy a video about the pacific part of WWII! Instant like.
MHV Has new Red bubble merch, go buy it, it is good.
Billy Mitchell wanted to use 2000 pound armor piercing bombs but the navy limited his plane to 500 pound bombs.
Well that was just out godamn standing. Nice work.
I keep trying to tell my dad why the devastation of pearl harbor was so unexpected. US code breakers and diplomats had suspicions that the Japanese were going to attack and also at Pearl harbor, but the US public didn't want war so no preemptive strike was possible. All the US navy was on high alert, but the Japanese attack was revolutionary in speed, inventiveness and effectiveness. So my dad thought that it would be malicious to not warn pearl of the incoming attack, Pearl was warned but the scale and ferocity was not expected.
I play Hearts of Iron with the Modern Day mod. Even though I have later gen stuff, I am still using stuff I had at the start of the game along with captured gen 2 fighters with my gen 4.5. I do this in the vanilla game, too. In the real world there are still countries using the Sherman as their MBT. The F-86 Sabre was still in service with some countries well into the 80s and there were Iowa class battleships firing on Iraqi positions in Kuwait at the start of the Gulf War. Just because something's old doesn't mean you throw it away (to quote Geordi LaForge).
Often it's because you have nothing better to use though, the M4 Sherman is absolutely worthless against a modern MBT except very situationally and any halfwit with an RPG-7 who can aim decently can kill it frontally due to it being made of RHS, the Saber was good for little more than an advanced trainer by the 80's as cheap MiG-19s and their Chinese copy were avaliable, as were cheap western planes like the F-5, Mirage III and Mirage V, in addition to the Soviet export model MiG-23s and MiG-21s, and the Iowas were brought back into service because it would have taken too long to design a new BBGN for Reagan's 600-ship navy initiative.
The curious bit is that the US Government was trying to make Aircraft carriers before there was even an actual airplane flying! (The famous failed experiment by Sam Langley shortly before the Wright Brothers took to the skies for the first time was so bold, that it was being done from a boat on the Potomac)
IIRC Mitchel was limited on bomb loads arbitrarily so low it would never sink the ship despite his protests. Well this in a way leads to his railroading but find out.
re : AAA firepower. Aircraft mounted firepower also increased significantly during the war from rifle-caliber weapons to 20mm cannon and .50" as standard.
The question was settled at the bottom of Pearl Harbor in several pieces.
Weren't aircraft carriers pushed tp the center of war naval warfare (for the americans) when most of their fleet was disabled or destroyed at Pearl harbour, changing naval tactics?
It may be an oversimplification, but there seems to be a distinct difference between naval warfare in the Pacific and naval warfare in Europe -Europe being the more classic / conventional battleship vs battleship
The sheer amount of space alone made CV king in the Pacific.
One thing I would like to add is that after WW I the great powers of the world had other problems than to finance their militaries to include their navies. Europe was in a financial downturn after the war which continued into and with the Great Depression. The U.S. had a fake boom in their economy in the 1920s, and didn't care about its military much at that time, then in the 30s it had the Great Depression. Russia, then the U.S.S.R. had internal strife and warfare at first then had to implement its Communist state, then had the Stalin purges. Japan did not have a lot of natural resources and had limited financial ability to fund its military, but it did so to a great degree and the innovation in Japan shows this. Japan had 10 carriers at the start of the war, good torpedos, good planes, very well trained navel and air crews, and very good tactics. The Japanese carrier pilots were the best trained in the world by 1941 with an average of 2000 hours flight time (If I remember correct). But in the world of limited military budgets building carriers was not a priority, maintain the a fleet was the first priority. In fact the Washington Treaty was an attempt to keep military budgets in check because they did not want to have an arms race which would take resources away from other national priorities. So limited funds (carriers being very expensive ships to build), limited building of new ships and little innovation stalled carrier evolution along with the other reasons mentioned in this video. it was not until the new military budgets in the 30s that the U.S. created its first custom built and effective fleet carriers, the Enterprise class. Without WW II the battleship would probably still been the preeminent Navel unit for 20 or 30 more years.
I forgot to mention this. Europe did not need carriers as much because there conflicts were based in Europe, where land base aircraft and local support was available. The Carrier came of age in the Pacific, it was there that the benefits of a carriers abilities became apparent. long distances, few or no land based air support, long logistics chains and effective (at least showy) ground based enemy air support vs attacking fleets made the need for carriers paramount. Without the Pacific war the carriers full potential would probably never have been realized.
Naval strategy is build strategy. If aircraft aren't mature enough to supplant a battleship there's little justification to make them your main arm.
If you go to the wikipedia page of Billy Mitchell, it says much of what you're saying in this video is wrong. Mitchell was busted from General to Colonel for his backing of airplanes, and nearly court martialed.
Here's verbatim: "He antagonized many administrative leaders of the Army with his arguments and criticism and, in 1925, was returned from appointment as a brigadier general to his permanent rank of colonel due to his insubordination. Later that year, he was court-martialed for insubordination after accusing Army and Navy leaders of an "almost treasonable administration of the national defense"[3] for investing in battleships instead of aircraft carriers. He resigned from the service shortly afterward.
And on the sinking of the Ostfriesland, you're wrong too. The planes took off with 230, 550, 600, 1200 and 2000 pound bombs. The plans were to try the little bombs first, then go aboard and look at the damage. The reason it took 47 minutes is the Navy observers couldn't get aboard because of rough sea. They never got to try the heavier bombs. Also the rules of engagement the army set up prohibited torpedos.
The next day, they dropped three 1100 lb bombs (against the strict prohibet of the Army) and sunk the ship in 22 minutes.
Is wikipedia wrong or are you guys?
It wasn't that he backed airplanes, it was his very poor judgment on how to go about it that got him run out of the service. Publicly accusing your superiors of incompetence rising to the level of treason is generally a bad career move.
all you guys remember there were a lot of battleships/battle-cruiser hulls that were converted the early aircraft carriers
Yes, but that wasn't because their owners thought those ships would be more effective as carriers, it was because arms reduction treaties meant they had to choose between completing them as battleships and scrapping other existing battleships to stay within the treaty limits, or converting them to carriers.
As a stock trader that observes theories being tested every single day, I consider hindsight to be nearly useless. You can use it to do some of the more basic analysis or what would have been the right or wrong thing to do, but beyond that, the best learning is done in real-time.