by Paul Kennedy
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.32
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.33 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.34
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.
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 th
e 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.36
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, 1942.37 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.38
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.39 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.”40 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.41 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 it
self 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.