Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (51 page)

The greatest battles for command of the skies were actually not over the Gilberts themselves but way to the southwest, where just a
short while earlier Halsey’s TF 38, with the lumbering
Saratoga
and the juvenile
Princeton,
followed a few days later by a three-carrier reinforcement (TF 50.3) from Nimitz’s command, devastated a large number of Japanese cruisers and destroyers at Rabaul and damaged around half of the Japanese carrier-borne planes that had been flown in to reinforce the land aircraft there. When 120 land-based Japanese attackers descended on Task Force 50.3, they were pushed off in less than an hour. Squadrons of air combat patrol Hellcats, plus the deadly proximity fuses of the new 5-inch guns on the carriers, were able to hold their own against massive aerial assault even without battleship and cruiser protective fire.
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Thus by the time the marines battled across the coral reefs of the Gilbert Islands in November 1943, an enormous carrier-borne aerial umbrella was being put in place. The figures are worth recounting, partly because this was the very first of Central Pacific’s coordinated interservice operations, partly because it was the template for operations to come. The landing force for Tarawa was accompanied by three battleships, three heavy cruisers, five escort carriers (for close-in land attacks), and twenty-one destroyers; that for Makin, in the north, by four battleships, four heavy cruisers, four escort carriers, and thirteen destroyers. Most important of all, a group of four fast carrier task forces—thirteen carriers in all—gave protection by prowling around the wider seas, raiding other Japanese bases, and occasionally returning to launch air strikes in support of the landings. The fighting on land was awful, but American naval control was never in doubt.

Command of the air over the Gilberts was ensured, not just because of the American forces massed there, but also because of what had occurred in the Southwest Pacific. MacArthur’s drive past Rabaul and the enormous and painful aerial battles over those islands not only distracted the Japanese admirals and planners but badly cut into the available numbers of their aircraft and (most important) their skilled pilots. The Japanese battle fleet remained gigantic, mainly untouched, and raring to fight, but without airpower, those great latter-day dreadnoughts could not strike decisively. How could they, when Japanese land-based airpower was weakening fast, and when most of the remaining carriers now had inadequate, weakly trained aircrews?

The battle partner to the
Essex
-class carrier was the Grumman F6F
Hellcat, a single-engine fighter of great toughness, speed, and consistency. A fully worked-up fleet carrier would usually go into action with thirty-six fighters (the Hellcats) to support thirty-six dive-bombers (SB2C Helldivers) and eighteen torpedo planes (TBF Avengers), as well as provide aerial defense for the warships if Japanese planes counterattacked.

The dive-bombers and the torpedo bombers have their own important place in the Pacific struggle between 1943 and 1945, but the F6F played a particularly critical role. It was designed by Grumman engineers to replace the earlier F4F Wildcat, itself a tough and reliable fighter that could absorb a good deal of damage and still get back to base. Since every air force by 1941 was ratcheting up the power, speed, and firing capacity of its aircraft—the newer Spitfires, Mosquitos, the 190s, Thunderbolts, Typhoons—it was prudent of Grumman to do the same. Aerial scraps between Wildcats and Zeros in the first year of the war were a real learning experience for the Americans, because the Japanese plane had better maneuverability and a faster rate of climb. But Grumman and the U.S. Navy had moved on even before hostilities: the F6F contract was signed in June 1941, the original Wright engine was replaced by the more powerful Pratt and Whitney Double Wasp engine shortly afterward, and the first aircraft of that type had its maiden flight on July 30, 1942.
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The parallels with the almost contemporaneous story of the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine replacing the less-powerful Alison in the P-51 Mustang (
chapter 2
) are remarkable.

The Hellcat borrowed and improved upon the defensive armor of the Wildcat: the cockpit, the windscreen, the engine, and the fuel tanks were all heavily protected, so it was hard to shoot down. (One aircraft, after heavy dogfighting around Rabaul, flew back to its carrier with two hundred bullet holes in it.) But what was different now was that the newer plane could outclimb, outdive, and outturn any Japanese plane, even the Zero, which was starting to fall behind in the race for airspeed and fighting power. The first Hellcats joined the
Essex
in February 1943 and were able to take advantage of the lull in the Central Pacific to engage in intensive practice and experiment with further improved features. On November 23–24, just as the Gilberts operation was under way, carrier-borne Hellcats claimed thirty Zeros destroyed for the loss of one of their own. This was no fluke; the majority of the Japanese
aircraft later destroyed during the Battle of the Philippine Sea were victims of the Hellcat’s superiority in the air, as were those shot down over Rabaul, the Philippines, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. By this time the Japanese air forces, like the Luftwaffe, had very few experienced fighter pilots left, but the difference in casualty rates remains astonishing. In contrast, American planners in late 1944 were beginning to wonder whether they would actually be receiving
too many
highly trained aircrews.

F6F Hellcats flew more than 66,000 combat sorties during the war, almost all from the decks of carriers, and destroyed 5,163 enemy aircraft at a cost of a mere 270 of their own. There was nothing like it elsewhere in the war. According to one statistician, Hellcats accounted for 75 percent of all aerial victories recorded by the U.S. Navy in the Pacific. This tough, adaptable fighter—of which 12,275 were built in total—thus proved to be a perfect fit in the package of weapons systems put together to defeat the Japanese Empire.
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So was set the scene for the next, intermediate operations of 1944—those through and around the Marshall and Caroline island groups—before the climactic assault upon the Marianas themselves.
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It is interesting to note that the more the American advances took place via these remote Micronesian atolls (as distinct from the campaigns in the more enclosed waters of the Southwest Pacific), the less interrupted they were by Japanese airpower. None of Japan’s land-based planes could go very far into the vastnesses of the Central Pacific, and attempts by their carrier-based aircraft to disrupt American amphibious operations faced the obvious hazards—depletion by lurking U.S. submarines, and heavy counterattacks from flocks of aircraft operating from a dozen or more enemy carriers.

The apotheosis of the U.S. fast carriers’ decisive role in the Pacific War was the June 19, 1944, clash between the Japanese and American fleets way to the west of Saipan, on whose beaches the amphibious forces were unloading and fighting their way inland. It is known officially as the Battle of the Philippine Sea, but more colloquially to the carrier pilots as the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.”
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This battle of long-distance naval airpower was a reaffirmation of Midway, and of the U.S. Navy’s strategic decision to push across the Central Pacific with carriers and amphibious forces. Both at the time and afterward, the
American commander Admiral Raymond Spruance was harshly criticized for adopting far too cautious a tactical plan—like Jellicoe at Jutland, as one critic has put it—by ordering his fleets westward of the Marianas during the day, then pulling them back and closer to the islands overnight.
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This seems hardly fair, since protecting the American amphibious forces on Saipan (where Spruance hastily landed his reserve division when intelligence informed him that Japanese naval forces had left their bases) was his first priority,
not
sinking an enemy battleship or three; that could wait.

In the enormous aerial attacks and counterattacks that followed, the Japanese navy’s surface vessels were again mauled by Mitscher’s four fast carrier groups. Overall, Japan lost around 480 planes, or about three-quarters of those deployed. The imbalance was by now amazing: the Japanese suffered air losses ten times those of Task Force 58. The loss of trained pilots, in addition to those already killed around Rabaul, was beyond repair, and Japan’s great battle fleet looked like more and more of an anomaly. Yamamoto’s dream of punishing America and forcing it into accepting a Japanese East Asian domain was no more. That extraordinary cadre of naval airmen, who had ravaged Pearl Harbor and sent the
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
to the bottom of the ocean in a few hours, was now itself shattered.

It could indeed be argued that this June battle by the carriers was more significant strategically than Leyte Gulf itself (October 1944), although an even greater number of warships and aircraft would be involved on both sides there, but for a less significant position. Although this book’s analysis falls away after the capture of the Marianas, it is worth noting that the Japanese entrapment plan for repulsing U.S. forces from any invasion of the Philippines—the Sho-I plan—rested upon Admiral Ozawa’s carrier force decoying the far larger American carrier task forces to the north, and thus away from the great battleships picking their way through the various straits to surprise and eliminate the U.S. amphibious landings at Leyte. And Ozawa’s force was a true decoy, for by November 1944 it possessed barely a hundred planes and scarcely any trained aircrews. Probably the Japanese navy’s battleship admirals did not mind making a tethered goat out of Ozawa’s vessels, for if the decoy plan worked well, they would at last have a decisive victory. As it turned out, although the Americans (especially Halsey) were
initially fooled by the gambit, they had enough resources to hurt the Imperial Japanese Navy on all fronts; Ozawa’s four carriers went to the bottom, as did three battleships and nine cruisers. It was now October 1944, and the Japanese position was crumbling.

Supporting the carriers in all these campaigns were the ships and crews of the support squadrons. Just as Caesar needed his cook in the conquest of Gaul, the fast and wide-ranging flotillas that surged out of Pearl Harbor needed their modern equivalent, the superbly equipped fleet train of supply ships and especially the speedy and specifically designed oil tankers without which Spruance, Halsey, Mitscher, and the others would have had a much more restricted radius of action. Mini-convoys of tankers, heavily screened by destroyer escorts, were always at sea, a relatively short distance behind the major battle forces. They rarely get much attention from military historians, but these tankers, as much as any other jigsaw piece, contributed to defeat the tyranny of distance. To the embarrassment of the Royal Navy, it found that when it finally dispatched its modern battleships and carriers to the Far East in 1944–45, it had a very “short-legged” navy by comparison. Their raids on Japanese installations in Burma and the Dutch East Indies went fine, but their lack of refueling capacity (and hence their need for U.S. help) for wider operations in the Pacific allowed Admiral King to veto their operations in those waters until very late in the war. The Admiralty had, after all, designed warships to fight off the coasts of Norway and in the Mediterranean, while the Americans had been planning for wide, oceanic war—and had got that right.
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The seizure of the Marianas would not have meant so much in the Pacific War had it not been for that separate but linked American endeavor, the development of the greatest of the Allied long-range strategic bombers, the B-29 Superfortress. This extraordinary plane was the apotheosis of the Mitchell-Trenchard belief that “the bomber will always get through,” now not because it would fight its way against hostile fighters to chosen targets, as in Europe, but because it would fly higher and faster than any Japanese defending aircraft could reach. The B-29 weighed about twice as much as the B-17 or the Lancaster and, with a
pressurized cabin, its crew could fly at very high altitudes at a speed of 350 mph—just catching up with it would exhaust a defense fighter’s fuel tanks—and then unload a terrible retribution of heavy, splinter, or incendiary bombs upon the hapless population below. It was not an even fight, as in the Battle of Britain; it was, rather, brutal aerial devastation. The B-29s’ most historic acts involved dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that finally induced the hard-necked Japanese military leadership to surrender, but their most destructive act was the low-flying firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 that killed 130,000 people, shortly after the Anglo-American bombers had inflicted a similar number of casualties at Dresden. Between 1940 and 1942, often standing beside a row of burned-out houses in East London, Winston Churchill had warned the Axis powers that their turn would come. But even he, with his immense imagination, had no idea of the size of the future aerial devastations.

Where did the B-29 come from?
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The specifications for this enormous aircraft had already been issued in 1938–39—just like so many of the weapons systems we associate with the middle years of the war: Lancaster bombers, Spitfires, Sherman tanks, landing craft, and T-34s, all of which needed time for testing and development before full deployment. By the Second World War, heavy bombers were steadily taking over the role of battleships and cruisers in placing economic pressure upon the enemy, but they were also, awkwardly, taking almost as long as a major warship to be designed and constructed. The story of the Superfortress is an example of this disturbing but natural law: the more sophisticated the instrument being built, the greater the number of teething troubles.

The B-29’s enormous wingspan of 141 feet and huge takeoff weight of 120,000 pounds had implications for air base design and runway breadth and length. Most airfields, including all those in Europe, were simply too small to take it, so it could only be deployed on the new, artificial grounds that were being erected on Pacific atolls. But those engineering challenges for building the tarmacs did not compare with the task of constructing the beast itself. To get such a weight off the ground and then up to 35,000 feet required extraordinary technical devices—almost all untested—and stretched the ingenuity of even Boeing’s superb design and development teams. (And they were teams,
dozens and dozens of them; no single super-clever designer here, like Barnes Wallis for the Wellington.) For example, how exactly did one construct a pressurized cabin for so lengthy an aircraft when it had crew in both the nose section and in the rear, but an extended central bomb bay section that should not be pressurized? It is not difficult to understand why it took a long time to figure out the compromise solution, a long pressurized “crawl tunnel” over the bomb bays. How did one perfect the revolutionary central fire control system (CFCS), directed by an analog computer that corrected for wind, gravity, airspeed, and so on?
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