Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (50 page)

It was not easy for the army. A whole generation of its officers and NCOs whose focus had been upon European-style fighting had to start thinking about using landing craft rather than battalions of heavy tanks. Some units had begun to experiment with amphibious warfare techniques in the late 1930s (chiefly crossing rivers), but it was nonetheless hard for an army officer to think that he had to learn from the marines, or borrow equipment, or on some occasions be under a U.S. Marine Corps general. And the army’s expansion in numbers after December 1941 was so much larger than that of any other service in absolute terms that it was bound to have lots of raw divisions fighting alongside, say, the marines’ more experienced 1st or 2nd Divisions (as in the Marianas campaign). But the army learned fast at this challenge
of fighting across coral reefs. The apotheosis probably came at the great battle for Okinawa, where on April 1, 1945, two marine and two army divisions (covered, it might be noted, by more than forty aircraft carriers of different types) came ashore together near the small village of Hagushi. To the Japanese defenders, it made no difference which of the oncoming battalions, debouching from similar landing ships into similar landing craft, belonged to which enemy service. The invaders were all part of a vast amphibious force coming from the sea to the land.
²⁹

All sorts of aircraft contributed to the increasing American control of the skies over the Western Pacific from 1943 onward, and it would be wrong not to acknowledge the importance of the squadrons of P-38 Lightnings, P-47 Thunderbolts, B-25 Mitchell medium bombers, B-24 Liberators, and so on. Yet it is fair to argue that the two greatest contributions to gaining aerial supremacy over Japan in those vast spaces west of Hawaii and north of New Guinea—a distance much larger than that from Ireland to Ukraine—were the
Essex
-class aircraft carriers and the F6F Hellcat fighters designed for work from those warships. They tipped the balance partly because they came into full service in that critical year of mid-1943 to early 1944, just when the American counterattack was building up speed, but also because they complemented each other, the Hellcat being a great defender of the carrier system that had launched it, as well as a terror to the enemy.

The story of the evolution of the U.S. fast carriers goes back to the early 1920s. American observers had been deeply impressed by the Royal Navy’s original action of converting certain older vessels, such as halfway-built battle cruisers, from gunships into flattops—vessels stripped of their entire superstructure to become horizontal takeoff and landing ships that would release fighters, high-altitude bombers, torpedo bombers, and dive-bombers, which could fly several hundred miles to hurt the enemy’s ships and then return to the mother craft. The renowned Admiral William Sims, generally regarded as the father of the U.S. carrier service, told a congressional committee as early as 1925: “A Fleet whose carriers give it command of the air over the enemy fleet can defeat the latter.… [T]he fast carrier is the capital ship of the future.”
³⁰

While the Royal Navy’s carrier service fell behind during the interwar years, in Japan and America—neither of which had an independent air service as a “third force”—the fleet air arm advanced, despite the usual prejudices of pro-battleship senior admirals. The endless miles of ocean beyond their coastal cities fueled this need to have carriers and their aircraft on the high seas for long-range protection of their respective homelands. In the early to mid-1930s, worried about a surprise attack out of the blue, some elements in the Japanese navy pitched the case for the universal abolition of carriers, fearing that this revolutionary weapons system could inflict more damage upon their country than it could inflict upon others—as indeed turned out to be the case. But the notion was rejected in the international naval disarmament negotiations of the 1920s, and so Japan felt it had little else to do but build more carriers and better aircraft.

The Japanese naval air arm and their designers were extremely good, and their capacity to take a Western design and improve on it was remarkable. By 1930 their shipyards had produced the 60-plane
Akagi
and the 72-plane
Kaga,
both extremely fast and capacious; there was nothing like them in the West, though the United States was catching up. At the end of that decade those early but still effective prototypes were being reinforced by the
Soryu, Hiryu, Shokaku,
and
Zuikaku;
and more carriers were to come. The ultra-efficient head of the navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics, Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto, and the dynamic air wing commander Minoru Genda (who would later lead the Pearl Harbor attack) pushed for the carriers to be liberated from their original, static, homeland-defense role into a much more aggressive, freewheeling one. Yamamoto also pushed for increased production of newer Japanese aircraft, especially the formidable Mitsubishi Zero. By early December 1941, when its six large carriers struck at Pearl Harbor, it was the best naval fast carrier force the world had ever seen.
³¹

But the war had just begun and the Americans would be coming back with carrier forces in such numbers as defied the imagination. The U.S. Navy, too, like the British and the Japanese, had been grappling with what turned out to be the largest technical-logistical-material problem of all, namely, if the power, speed, size, and shape of
all
aircraft in the 1920s and 1930s were exploding upward, as they were, far larger decks for the carriers’ tops were needed, far larger storage space to put
the aircraft below, far more fuel holdings for eighty or more aircraft, far bigger antiaircraft protection systems, far more room for a vastly expanded crew, and so on. What was needed was a ship that was at least 850 feet long and had a propulsion system powerful enough to move the giant vessel at high speeds (over 30 knots) for days, even weeks. Designers would have to think through the challenges of creating a hull and a landing/takeoff deck that would be stable in all weather conditions and when fully laden with well over 5,000 tons of aircraft and fuel. Finally, the enormous losses suffered by the Royal Navy to Luftwaffe attacks in the Norway and Crete campaigns were a wake-up call to admiralty designers everywhere to double or even treble the number of antiaircraft guns (and crews) on board ship. All this made for very complex and highly expensive weapons systems.

The American navy was therefore asking the president and Congress to give it an enormous injection of funds for a vast expansion of military-naval-aerial muscle. And by the end of the 1930s the worried political machine responded, slowly but surely, as the clouds of war drew closer. It wasn’t too difficult for the service to suggest that fast carriers, independent of the slower battle fleet, could keep hostile forces a long way away from the homeland; even American isolationists bought that argument. With all the new money being poured into aircraft and ships, the productive capacity of an entire continent started to come out of the Depression, and did so, fortunately, with very large reserves of raw materials, capital, and skilled labor. Thus, an entire new class of larger aircraft-carrying warships would be built, as late entrants into the war—but not too late.

Usually two of the navy’s seven fleet carriers were stationed in the Atlantic before and even after Pearl Harbor; the
Wasp,
on a brief loan in 1942, helped the British by steaming eastward from Gibraltar and flying Spitfires to reinforce Malta. The other five were in the Pacific and, when not in West Coast ports, normally operated out of Pearl—fortunately, they were absent on December 7, 1941. With five battleships sunk at their moorings, and others damaged, the remains of the big-gun navy were pulled back to California. The early clashes in the Pacific War were therefore borne on the American side by those prewar carriers, whose names are now saluted in history:
Lexington, Saratoga, Yorktown, Enterprise,
and
Hornet.

These ships certainly blunted the Japanese advances, but at a terrible cost. The
Lexington
sank after sustaining heavy damage in the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942, and the
Yorktown
was destroyed in the aftermath of the great carrier clash at Midway a month later. Shortly afterward, the
Wasp
was torpedoed while on escort duty to Guadalcanal, the
Hornet
was torn apart by Japanese bombers during the Battle of Santa Cruz, and the
Enterprise
was worn out by all the steaming and fighting and sent home for a refit. For some time in early 1943, therefore, the U.S. Navy had only one carrier operating in the Pacific, the USS
Saratoga,
until it was reinforced, remarkably, by the new British fast carrier HMS
Victorious
—a nice compensation for the American loan of the
Wasp
to Mediterranean convoy duty. The two boats worked well together, with their aircraft interchangeably using either deck.
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But change was coming. There were and are many claimed “turning points” in the Pacific War, ranging from Midway and Guadalcanal to Leyte Gulf, but a strong if less well-known contender is May 30, 1943, the day that USS
Essex
steamed through the entrance to Pearl Harbor. She was the first of the brand-new, tough, powerful, and sophisticated carriers that were to put an enormous stamp on the nature of this wide-ocean war. The new
Yorktown
(following the U.S. Navy’s tradition of transferring to a newly launched craft the name of a ship lost in battle) arrived in late July, along with the first few of the new light carriers. But it was the
Essex
-class carriers that were to command the scene.
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Given that this was the first boat of a near-revolutionary design (radar-controlled gunnery and detection systems, armored hangars, side elevators to save space, enormous turbines to power a speed of over 30 knots, and 90 to 100 aircraft), the designers and shipbuilders had worked miracles. Her keel was laid down in April 1941, she was launched in July 1942, and commissioning took place in December 1942. Thirty-one others in this class, the later ones with improved facilities, were on order, with twenty-four gigantic naval shipyards mobilized to produce America’s new navy.
^d
This reinforcement came just at
the right time. The new
Yorktown
had arrived at Pearl Harbor less than four months before the Gilberts operation.

The new carriers were going to Nimitz’s Central Pacific Command, not to the Southwest Pacific, to the dismay of Admiral Halsey, who possessed a fleet quite solid in battleships and cruisers but still weak with carrier airpower as he strove to render support to the army/marine drive through the Bismarcks and New Guinea. Overall, though, the relative hiatus in fighting in the Central Pacific gave the American admirals and planners at Hawaii time to experiment with a different tactical carrier doctrine. Eschewing the rule that U.S. carriers (each, of course, with escorts) should operate singly—to avoid a cluster of them all being sunk in one fell swoop, as had happened to the Japanese at Midway—the more ambitious and aviation-minded officers argued that it was precisely in clustering those warships that the navy’s punch would be greatest. Hundreds of aircraft from many carriers could deal a much bigger blow to an enemy stronghold or battle fleet than could a single carrier, and they would reinforce each other in beating off any Japanese aerial assault.

This change of doctrine was to be tried out first in hit-and-run raids on smaller targets rather than going at a major enemy force or a big base such as Rabaul. This was smart, since the carriers and most of their crews were new and untested, as were the Hellcats and most of their pilots. Just as with the Duke of Wellington’s cautious early movement in the campaign to reconquer Spain in 1808–14, so Nimitz also wanted to move ahead cautiously across the Pacific, with plenty of space to fall back. On August 31, 1943, Task Force 15 (TF 15), built around the new
Essex
and
Yorktown
and the light carrier
Independence,
and protected by a fast battleship, two cruisers, and ten destroyers, dealt heavy blows to Japanese airfields and installations on Marcus, a small island base much closer to Japan than to Hawaii. The attacks were not pressed through after the first morning’s raids and the force commander pulled his ships back to Hawaii as swiftly as possible, but that was the point: hit, then run. On September 1 another battle group built around two light carriers attacked Baker Island, east of the Gilberts, with the air strikes being followed by an occupation and the construction of an American air base. Those two light carriers (
Princeton
and
Belleau
Wood
) then joined the new
Lexington
in a re-formed TF 15 and struck at Tarawa in the Gilberts on September 18.

The latter attack was not so successful: enemy camouflage on Tarawa frustrated most of the bombing attacks and caused Imperial General Headquarters to realize that they had another problem to deal with apart from warding off MacArthur’s advance on the great base at Rabaul. The Gilberts garrison was ordered to be defended to the death, which was ominous for the invading marines, especially since aerial photography had spotted neither Tarawa’s reefs nor the many hidden defensive emplacements. Overall, these small-scale raids were useful trial operations for American troops, officers, and staff planners, and also confirmed the larger argument that advancing toward Japan along two axes was, at least for the next while, the best way to go. The final experiment, a six-carrier aerial assault on Wake Island on October 5, 1943, designed to force the resident Zeros to rise to give battle and then be shot down by the new Hellcats, also allowed TF 14’s commander to experiment with working all six carriers together or splitting them into subgroups.
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The Gilbert Islands battle for Tarawa and the smaller Makin in November 1943 is rightly remembered as a Marine Corps endeavor, but it might have been far worse for the leathernecks without the actions of the carrier groups in covering these amphibious landings. Land-based airpower, which worked so well for MacArthur and Halsey’s thrusts along the northern shores of New Guinea, couldn’t be that effective in Micronesia, for there simply weren’t enough islands that could be converted into workable bomber bases, and the distances between them were so immense. The fast carrier groups therefore had to assume the main responsibility for aerial protection, and not just for the Gilberts operation but for the later attacks upon the Marshalls, Carolines, and Marianas as well; the carriers, the great historian of the Pacific War writes, were “the cornerstone” of operations.
³⁵
By this stage, a half dozen
Essex
-class carriers and another half dozen
Independence
-class light carriers had arrived in the Pacific. It is amazing: in January the U.S. Navy had had only a single carrier effective in these seas, yet by November it had an armada. The tide was now turning very rapidly.