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Subject: Ideal World War Two RN
earlm    5/4/2008 3:13:32 PM
With hindsight what should the RN have done to be the best force possible for WW2? 1. Obtain better AA fire control from US. 2. Obtain US carrier based aircraft through lend lease. 3. Introduce a dual purpose 4.5-5" gun. (US 5"/38?) 4. Scrap the R class. 5. Save money on KGV and arm them with R class turrets with higher elevation. 6. Modernize Hood 7. Modernize Repulse
 
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larryjcr    Primary source information   5/13/2008 4:53:50 PM
Above, I've already dealt with the problems of using primary source information without proper assesment.  Such a documant (as the interrogation reports, or Leslie's report) are not, by themselves, conclusive proof.  As I've shown, there are clear, demonstrable errors in them, as well as a tendancy to read into them what you want to see.  There's an old saying in both military intelligence and police work:  If you some hard enough for something, you'll always find it, even if it isn't there.
 
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larryjcr       5/13/2008 5:00:30 PM




In an earlier post I remarked on US subs deliberately attacking escorts in preferrence to cargo ships.  You replied that they only attacked escorts in self defense or to get to the cargo ships.

????????????????????????????



Not so!

I want to read this!



In early 1944 ONI became aware of the shortage of escorts in the IJN.  The target priority list that was part of the orders given sub commanders was altered to reflect the situation.  Escort ships were given priority over cargo ships as targets.  Major warships had first priority in the order CVs, BBs, CAs and CLs, then tankers, then escort ships, with cargo ships having lower priority.

You have that completely wrong.

tankers. ...



Not only were US subs deliberately attacking escorts, that was the policy from ComSubPac.


Nope.

Herald


Yep!  You said you had SILENT VICTORY.  Re-read it.  Also, at the end of the link you post, you'll find an ad for Roscoes' SUBMARINE OPERATIONS (in some editions its titled PIG BOATS).  He covers it in considerable detail. 
By the way, you seem to be upset about SHATTERED SWORD and complain it's inaccurate.  The folks at the US Naval Institute's PROCEEDINGS seem to think pretty well of it, and of Lundstrom's books as well.  That's were I got my copies.
 
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Nichevo       5/14/2008 2:35:25 AM

May I suggest a mental exercise?  The film Midway.  Why don't each of you list the first ten major errors of fact you notice or recall.   I think that could be taken as a baseline of Midway CW at the time of filming.  Both of you offer some surprises that I assume are a function of the latest scholarship.

Larry, tankers' priority is a known (CW) issue.  Naturally, if you are dominant in the sea - a wolfpack vs. a wolf in the folds
 - you would want to take out the escorts first, so you could take your time on the rest.  If you only had one torp, it would go to the tanker.

Herald, in light of the notorious ineffectiveness of land-based bombing, to what do you attribute the primacy of operating under land-based air cover?  In any case naval dive bombers seem to have somehow gotten the job done more than torps at Midway.  Though the Nips were apparently respectful of our torp attacks, they merely dodged them (exploders aside).


You said you'd have to draw off air cover to skip-bomb the IJN.  Just as VT8 drew off the air cover with its sacrifice, the same could have happened to divert CAP from an incoming wave of B-17s or B-25s.  But what I meant was, with my earlier ask about bringing-the-pain, why did you need such big a/c?  Why couldn't say a Corsair or other fighter-bomber skip-bomb?  Why not extend range with a slick hulled bomb casing and maybe a motor?  Guidance - at sea level only one axis of control...
 
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larryjcr    response   5/15/2008 1:48:11 PM


May I suggest a mental exercise?  The film Midway.  Why don't each of you list the first ten major errors of fact you notice or recall.   I think that could be taken as a baseline of Midway CW at the time of filming.  Both of you offer some surprises that I assume are a function of the latest scholarship.

Larry, tankers' priority is a known (CW) issue.  Naturally, if you are dominant in the sea - a wolfpack vs. a wolf in the folds
 - you would want to take out the escorts first, so you could take your time on the rest.  If you only had one torp, it would go to the tanker.

Herald, in light of the notorious ineffectiveness of land-based bombing, to what do you attribute the primacy of operating under land-based air cover?  In any case naval dive bombers seem to have somehow gotten the job done more than torps at Midway.  Though the Nips were apparently respectful of our torp attacks, they merely dodged them (exploders aside).


You said you'd have to draw off air cover to skip-bomb the IJN.  Just as VT8 drew off the air cover with its sacrifice, the same could have happened to divert CAP from an incoming wave of B-17s or B-25s.  But what I meant was, with my earlier ask about bringing-the-pain, why did you need such big a/c?  Why couldn't say a Corsair or other fighter-bomber skip-bomb?  Why not extend range with a slick hulled bomb casing and maybe a motor?  Guidance - at sea level only one axis of control...



I'd have to watch the movie again to start.  Been a long time.  May try that next chance I get.

I pointed out that ComSubPac on advice from ONI that the Japanese were badly short of escort ships, encouraged US subs to attack escort ships.  The priority list placed escorts just BELOW tankers, so, yes, if that was the choice, the tanker would get the fish.  But the priority on escorts placed them ABOVE cargo ships as preferred targets.  By early 1945 it had reached the point that US subs would sometimes cruise on the surface in daylight near a port used by Japanese convoys, trying to bait escorts into coming out for a fight.   
 
As for skip bombing at Midway, it would probably have been effective IF the CAP could have been dealt with.  Trouble is that the method wasn't developed until several months later.  Aircraft like the F4U could dive-bomb, or glide-bomb effectively, and didn't need to skip-bomb, but the standard attack methods with heavy or medium bombers (so-called 'horizontal bombing') were almost totally useless, and the a/c were too big to handle the pull out stresses of dive or glide bombing. 
 
Skip bombing was originally developed for night attacks by B17s on ships in the harbor at Rabaul.  At the time, only the heavy bombers could reach the place, and they needed an effective method of attacking ships.  Working at night eliminated the CAP problem, and reduced the effectiveness of the AAA, which, as Herald says, was optically directed at the time.  The system was later used with great success by B25, A20 and Beaufighter a/c against ships at sea in daylight, when the Allies had bases much farther forward.  By then P38s were available to negate the Zeroes, and the B25s and A20 were modified with massed frontal gun batteries to supress the ships' AAA.
 
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Herald12345       5/16/2008 7:31:39 PM
The USN operated several seaplane bases, but didn't attempt to use Tulagi much as it was too exposed. 
Guadalcanal was often raided from the land bases up the slot, but they were unable to knock it out, largely due to the advanced warning provided the the coastwatcher system.  The only carrier raid was the token attack by RYUJO which was no where near serious enough to do any real damage.  A major attack by a couple of carrier air groups, coming in from the north would have smashed the place like an egg.

How does this affect the fact that you don't run your own carriers out from under your own reconnaissance or land based air? Answer: it doesn't, so your long winded discourse is IRRELEVANT.  Misuse of Tulagi is another DAMN HALSEY operational error. 
 
There was nothing magical about land based air.  At Midway, land based air was effective ONLY for scouting.  The carrier a/c did all the killing.  Midway threw its entire air garrison at the Kido Butai and took massive losses to accomplish nothing.  The handful of SBDs on Guadalcanal would NOT be a serious threat to a carrier task force which would always get in the first blow anyway, if handled at all well.  A couple of squadrons of Vals with 20 or 30 Zekes for cover would have turned Henderson into a hole in the mud.

The Midway land-based air wasn't trained for anti-ship work. Train the land-based air for anti-ship work. Again your comments are irrelevant to the central misuse of your resources. Of course I should point out that land-based air, properly trained, won the Battle of the Bismark Sea and also won the battle of Guadalcanal when there was no carrier aviation left after Halsey corked all of our carriers due to his stupidity, to bomb those transports.
 
What Halsey at Leyte did not, and could not know, is that Ozawa's force didn't have enough a/c to represent a threat.  He HAD to assume that it did, and that made it the PRIMARY threat, as it was the one threat that Seventh Fleet lacked the resources to meet itself.  It's easy for you (or me for that matter) to make airy comments about ignoring orders, but for someone in authority to actually, deliberately ignore the orders of his superior is another sort of thing.  Montgomery once told Patten: "If you don't like an order, just ignore it.  That's what I do."  Patten replied: "That's NOT what we do in the US Army."  Or the US Navy.  Anyway, going after the carriers would be his instinctive reaction.  I don't say Halsey's decision was right.  But I do say that it wasn't unreasonable.  It was well within his orders and probably requried by his orders.

Why did EVERYONE BUT HALSEY AT THE TIME make the correct call WITH THE INFORMATION AVAILABLE AT THE TIME? Come on, Larry. Don't be ridiculous.
 
Actually it WAS his call to make.  Third Fleets job was to provide cover for the Seventh Fleet's landing operations.  The Taffys ended up fighting Kurita because nobody did the night search, and they were caught by surprise.  They had a search range of about 300 miles, Kurita's was about 25 miles.  If they had know he was coming, they could have easily kept out of his way and made strikes from a distance.  Seventh Fleet had the resources to handle Kurita, but failed to scout and as a result, failed to deploy effectively aginst him.  Against a force of fast carriers and their a/c the Taffys and their FMs would be totally outclassed.
 
The Taffy's didn't scout because they were busy Quote    Reply

Herald12345       5/16/2008 7:44:01 PM
If no bomb hit the KAGA's island, what exactly, killed virtually all the ships senior officers??  Not the bomb that hit just forward.  It went off in the hanger deck below.  When the attack by McClusky's force was over, the island was smashed and the Captain and virtually his entire command staff were dead.  Magic?? 
You say that there are many fact wrong in SHATTERED SWORD.  What is your proof.  The interrogation reports??

The magazines forward EXPLODED and wrecked the island.  The Interrogation reports will do as a start point on this as a contradictor, the erroneous claims made about the US submarine war, also.

As I said, Shattered Sword has a lot of problems.

Herald
 
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Herald12345       5/16/2008 7:53:50 PM

Above, I've already dealt with the problems of using primary source information without proper assesment.  Such a documant (as the interrogation reports, or Leslie's report) are not, by themselves, conclusive proof.  As I've shown, there are clear, demonstrable errors in them, as well as a tendancy to read into them what you want to see.  There's an old saying in both military intelligence and police work:  If you some hard enough for something, you'll always find it, even if it isn't there.

Since you don't understand what is happening in the battle-spaces we discuss, or can keep the chronologies straight or even WHY the admirals fought the way they did historically, I'd be interested to see how you can even make that claim, Larry?

The interrogations were made first hand as soon as possible and cross-indexed with the best information that the US had.

Subsequen evidence proved the interrogations were ACCURATE: Let's take the Kaga example again shall we?

Kaga wreck....

Aircraft Carrier - KAGA

Wreckage clearly belonging to a Japanese carrier was found & photographed in the Midway battle-site in May and September 1999. Subsequently, this chunk of wreckage was confirmed to be part of the aircraft carrier KAGA in the spring of 2000 by a research analyst team comprised of the author, Jon Parshall, and David Dickson.

Condition: The fragment is just that, transpiring to be the starboard gun tub of the KAGA, its positive identification on 14 February 2000 was made possible by the landing array arrangement attachment unique to her of the four unlocated Midway carriers. Since it is a fragment, it is of course next to impossible to tell anything of the condition of the main wreck, or even if it is immediately adjacent. However, according to eyewitness testimony in the last hour of KAGA afloat and as she sank, the carrier's hull remained intact, but a good section of all but the aft and forward ends of the hangars and flight deck and side completely blown out and missing. She went down stern first at a very shallow angle, and presumably descended in such a way to the ocean floor. However, as further exploration has been repeatedly postponed due to changing conditions, any further details are purely speculative.

Note: For further details on the 1999 discovery and the 2000 identification process, see:

Identifying (part of) KAGA's ...

Her magazines went off.

Herald 



 
 
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Herald12345       5/16/2008 8:13:54 PM




Yep!  You said you had SILENT VICTORY.  Re-read it.  Also, at the end of the link you post, you'll find an ad for Roscoes' SUBMARINE OPERATIONS (in some editions its titled PIG BOATS).  He covers it in considerable detail. 

By the way, you seem to be upset about SHATTERED SWORD and complain it's inaccurate.  The folks at the US Naval Institute's PROCEEDINGS seem to think pretty well of it, and of Lundstrom's books as well.  That's were I got my copies.

I could care less.  Proceedings also carries this book:

Admiral Halsey's Story....

Also referred to as Admiral Halsey's  ALIBI.
Just because you bought it there makes it true, accurate, or RELEVANT.


Herald
 
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Herald12345       5/16/2008 8:55:06 PM
May I suggest a mental exercise?  The film Midway.  Why don't each of you list the first ten major errors of fact you notice or recall.   I think that could be taken as a baseline of Midway CW at the time of filming.  Both of you offer some surprises that I assume are a function of the latest scholarship.

1. Wrong carriers shown for American standins.
2. Japanese ship models structurally inaccurate the girders were punched oval not truss girder box framed..
3. Wrong Japanese torpedo bombers shown taking off Hiryu.
4. Glen Ford played a horrible Spruance.
5. Submarine model was the wrong model- Not Gato: but Argonaut class was the Nautilus.
6. The Enterprise Bombing 6 sequence is BACKWARDS.
7. None of the American torpedo planes ran straight in on the Japanese. They had to make circle chase attacks as the Japanese carriers put over hard aport. Also they were Devastators: NOT Vindicators.
8. The "captain" was not shot up in an attack on a Japanese cruiser. The actual US historic loss was due to a Japanese DESTROYER.  Also the USN didn't have Panther jets at Midway.
9. AFAIK there was no twin-engined US land-based aircraft that attacked the Japanese carriers at all-certainly not within the slant range of Japanese 25 mm guns.
10.  US fleet flags as shown in Nimtz's office didn't exist at that time in WW II.

Larry, tankers' priority is a known (CW) issue.  Naturally, if you are dominant in the sea - a wolfpack vs. a wolf in the folds
 - you would want to take out the escorts first, so you could take your time on the rest.  If you only had one torp, it would go to the tanker.

Herald, in light of the notorious ineffectiveness of land-based bombing, to what do you attribute the primacy of operating under land-based air cover?  In any case naval dive bombers seem to have somehow gotten the job done more than torps at Midway.  Though the Nips were apparently respectful of our torp attacks, they merely dodged them (exploders aside).

Fighter cover [P-38s] to begin with if you can get it . The Japanese were able to  turn out of our  launch vectors .     We needed a torpedo  plane  that could circle chase in a bank and launch at 200 knots at 1500 feet at a range of at least 2000 yards. We got it in the AVENGER. Too bad the Mark 13 took forever to fix.

You said you'd have to draw off air cover to skip-bomb the IJN.  Just as VT8 drew off the air cover with its sacrifice, the same could have happened to divert CAP from an incoming wave of B-17s or B-25s.  But what I meant was, with my earlier ask about bringing-the-pain, why did you need such big a/c?  Why couldn't say a Corsair or other fighter-bomber skip-bomb?  Why not extend range with a slick hulled bomb casing and maybe a motor?  Guidance - at sea level only one axis of control...

The Zeke was just that good. You had to draw it off so that you could set up a low level bomb run.  You needed the bigger aircraft because you are dropping a STICK,  the bombs you use are 500 or 1000 pounders, the  airframe Has to be STRONG  and you want to release from an internal bomb bay at HIGH SPEED to obviate TUMBLE.



I'd have to watch the movie again to start.  Been a long time.  May try that next chance I get.

???????????????????????
I pointed out that ComSubPac on advice from ONI that the Japanese were badly short of escort ships, encouraged US subs to attack escort ships.  The priority list placed escorts just BELOW tankers, so, yes, if that was the choice, the tanker would get the fish.  But the priority on escorts placed them ABOVE cargo ships as preferred targets.  By early 1945 it had reached the point that US subs would sometimes cruise on the surface in daylight near a port used by Japanese convoys, trying to bait escorts into coming out for a fight.  

The reason the US subs tried to bait the escorts to come out was to try to kill them so they could get at THE FREIGHTERS cowering inside. It had nothing to do with the escorts being a higher priority. THE ESCORTS WERE 
 
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larryjcr       5/17/2008 12:01:47 PM





The USN operated several seaplane bases, but didn't attempt to use Tulagi much as it was too exposed. 
Guadalcanal
was often raided from the land bases up the slot, but they were unable
to knock it out, largely due to the advanced warning provided the the
coastwatcher system.  The only carrier raid was the token attack by
RYUJO which was no where near serious enough to do any real damage.  A
major attack by a couple of carrier air groups, coming in from the
north would have smashed the place like an egg.

How does this affect the fact that you don't run your own carriers out from under your own reconnaissance or land based air? Answer: it doesn't, so your long winded discourse is IRRELEVANT.  Misuse of Tulagi is another DAMN HALSEY operational error. 

 

There was nothing magical about land based air.  At Midway, land
based air was effective ONLY for scouting.  The carrier a/c did all the
killing.  Midway threw its entire air garrison at the Kido Butai and
took massive losses to accomplish nothing.  The handful of SBDs on
Guadalcanal would NOT be a serious threat to a carrier task force which
would always get in the first blow anyway, if handled at all well.  A
couple of squadrons of Vals with 20 or 30 Zekes for cover would have
turned Henderson into a hole in the mud.

The Midway land-based air wasn't trained for anti-ship work. Train the land-based air for anti-ship work. Again your comments are irrelevant to the central misuse of your resources. Of course I should point out that land-based air, properly trained, won the Battle of the Bismark Sea and also won the battle of Guadalcanal when there was no carrier aviation left after Halsey corked all of our carriers due to his stupidity, to bomb those transports.

 

What Halsey at Leyte did not, and could not know, is that Ozawa's
force didn't have enough a/c to represent a threat.  He HAD to assume
that it did, and that made it the PRIMARY threat, as it was the one
threat that Seventh Fleet lacked the resources to meet itself.  It's
easy for you (or me for that matter) to make airy comments about
ignoring orders, but for someone in authority to actually, deliberately
ignore the orders of his superior is another sort of thing.  Montgomery
once told Patten: "If you don't like an order, just ignore it.  That's
what I do."  Patten replied: "That's NOT what we do in the US Army." 
Or the US Navy.  Anyway, going after the carriers would be his
instinctive reaction.  I don't say Halsey's decision was right.  But I
do say that it wasn't unreasonable.  It was well within his orders and
probably requried by his orders.

Why did EVERYONE BUT HALSEY AT THE TIME make the correct call WITH THE INFORMATION AVAILABLE AT THE TIME? Come on, Larry. Don't be ridiculous.

 

Actually it WAS his call to make.  Third Fleets job was to
provide cover for the Seventh Fleet's landing operations.  The Taffys
ended up fighting Kurita because nobody did the night search, and they
were caught by surprise.  They had a search range of about 300 miles,
Kurita's was about 25 miles.  If they had know he was coming, they
could have easily kept out of his way and made strikes from a
distance.  Seventh Fleet had the resources to handle Kurita, but failed
to scout and as a result, failed to deploy effectively aginst him. 
Against a force of fast carriers and their a/c the Taffys and their FMs
would be totally outclassed.

 
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