44.Roland, Model Research, pp. 5–6; Stein, Torpedoes to Aviation, pp. 178–79, 189; William F. Trimble, Jerome C. Hunsaker and the Rise of American Aeronautics (Washington, DC, and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003), pp. 26–27; and Hallion, Taking Flight, pp. 391–92.
45.Reynolds, Admiral John H. Towers, pp. 77–80; and van Deurs, Wings for the Fleet, pp. 109–10.
46.Reynolds, Admiral John H. Towers, p. 84; John Fass Morton, Mustin: A Naval Family of the Twentieth Century (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2003), pp. 97–98; and Turnbull and Lord, History of United States Naval Aviation, pp. 43–44.
47.Turnbull and Lord, History of United States Naval Aviation, pp. 49, 53; and van Deurs, Wings for the Fleet, pp. 134–35
48.William R. Braisted, “Mark Lambert Bristol: Naval Diplomat Extraordinary of the Battleship Age,” in James C. Bradford (ed.), Admirals of the New Steel Navy: Makers of the American Naval Tradition, 1880–1930 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1990), p. 336; Turnbull and Lord, History of United States Naval Aviation, pp. 50–51; Reynolds, Admiral John H. Towers, p. 92.
49.Turnbull and Lord, History of United States Naval Aviation, p. 46–47.
50.Ibid., p. 55
51.Braisted, “Mark Lambert Bristol,” p. 336; Hallion, Taking Flight, p. 388; and Turnbull and Lord, History of United States Naval Aviation, p. 41.
52.Turnbull and Lord, History of United States Naval Aviation, p. 60; and van Deurs, Wings for the Fleet, pp. 137–39.
53.Morton, Mustin, p. 99.
54.Reynolds, Admiral John H. Towers, pp. 73–74; van Deurs, Wings for the Fleet, pp. 147–53; and Morton, Mustin, pp. 105–6, 108–9.
55.Braisted, “Mark Lambert Bristol,” p. 339.
56.Turnbull and Lord, History of United States Naval Aviation, pp. 52–53, 63–64, 67.
57.Crouch, Wings, pp. 145–48; Herbert A. Johnson, Wingless Eagle: U.S. Army Aviation through World War I (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 2–10; Hallion, Taking Flight, pp. 289, 383–84; Andrew Krepinevich, Transforming to Victory: The U.S. Navy, Carrier Aviation, and Preparing for War in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, 2000); Melhorn, Two-Block Fox; William F. Trimble, Admiral William F. Moffett: Architect of Naval Aviation (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1994), p. 71.
58.Johnson, Wingless Eagle, pp. 23–28, 87–89, 173–75; and Stein, Torpedoes to Aviation, pp. 206–8.
59.Chambers, “Airships and Naval Policy,” unpublished manuscript, Chambers Papers, Box 12.
60.Robert Seager, “Ten Years before Mahan: The Unofficial Case for the New Navy, 1880–1890.” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 40 (1953), pp. 491–512.
CHAPTER 3
Eyes of the Fleet: How Flying Boats Transformed War Plan Orange
Edward S. Miller
Between 1906 and 1941 the U.S. Navy developed War Plan Orange, an offensive strategy to defeat Japan in an all-out war. It was one of history’s most successful war plans, belying the adage that no plan survives the opening guns. It was successfully deployed in its grand themes and many details in World War II. Planners believed carrier aviation would play a key role when war came. This essay, however, will focus on a critical period of the 1930s when Plan Orange was salvaged from doubt and defeatism by arrival of the most successful aircraft type of the era, the long-range, multi-engine flying boat.1
The Captains and Admirals who adapted Plan Orange to air power were among the brightest of the Service. Plucked from seagoing careers, they served two years in a small War Plans Division (WPD), also known as Op-12, under the Chief of Naval Operations. Earlier planners at the Naval War College and on the staff of the General Board had outlined the fundamental strategic themes. Japan’s desire to dominate China would be frustrated by the American Open Door policy to protect China’s integrity and its open markets. Someday Japan would pounce, seize the Philippines and Guam, and eliminate U.S. interference from its ocean flanks. Blue planners, noting the huge disparity in warmaking strength, adopted a goal of completely subjugating Japan (although “unconditional surrender” was not named until World War II). Aware that Japan’s vigorous army had defeated Imperial Russia, planners projected victory through capital-intensive sea power, and eventually air power.
Their strategic dilemma was the geography of the Pacific. Vast distances separated the belligerents. There were no developed harbors in the five thousand miles between Hawaii and Manila. Therefore the planners envisioned a three-phase war. In Phase I Japan would swiftly seize America’s Western Pacific islands. In Phase II, the longest of the war, the U.S. Navy with support from the Army would counterattack across the ocean to capture island bases in the Western Pacific. The two fleets would clash in a titanic battle that Blue’s superior numbers would win decisively. Thereafter the enemy would be subdued by a Phase III siege of blockade and bombardment by sea and air forces operating from bases on Japan’s doorstep.
For thirty years the planning staffs divided into two schools of thought about the Phase II offensive. The “thrusters,” as I have named them, were elders steeped in an ethos of offensive audacity, disciples of two Admirals, Alfred Thayer Mahan and George Dewey. They demanded instantaneous mobilization and a naval dash to the Philippines, known as “The Through Ticket to Manila,” to rescue the beleaguered Blue garrison and challenge the Imperial Japanese Navy before Japan could fortify its conquests. The impossibly long cruise from the East Coast to the Philippines, 20,000 miles via Cape Horn, was shortened by the Panama Canal in 1914 and relocation of the fleet to California in 1919. Development of Pearl Harbor, to which the fleet moved in 1940, cut the journey to a still burdensome 5,000 miles. Concerned that the American people would weary of a long war, their plan offered hope of a quick and cheap victory. Its fatal flaw was to risk the entire Navy on one roll of the dice against a potent enemy near its home waters. To reduce the risk, thrusters lobbied to build a grand western base, at Luzon or later at Guam, until the Washington Conference of 1922 forbade bases west of Hawaii. Undaunted, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Fleet (CinCUS) Robert L. Coontz projected a cavalry-like charge of a 551-ship convoy nonstop to Luzon, harassed by the Japanese all the way, to an impromptu base vulnerable to air attack from Formosa (Taiwan). At the end of the decade chief war planner Frank M. Schofield conceded the air threat by adapting a slightly saner policy of steaming to southern Mindanao, to improvise a base screened by narrow straits and Army airfields in the central Philippines. Nevertheless by 1934 the menace of Orange aviation was rising while Blue naval power languished below treaty limits during the Depression, which led Army war planner Brigadier General Stanley D. Embick to call the thrusting strategy “literally an act of madness.”
The alternative planning school, which I labeled “cautionaries,” consisted of younger officers attuned to modern weapons like aircraft and submarines and especially to the tedious study of logistics. Confident that the public would support a long but safer war, they proposed a deliberate step-by-step island-hopping advance to the Far East. Their studies remained curiosities, however, for lack of suitable stepping-stones until 1919. During World War I Japan, siding with the Allies, seized the undefended German islands of the Caroline, Marshall, and Marianas groups. The peace conference awarded them to Japan as demilitarized mandated territories under League of Nations auspices. Thrusters were appalled at Japan’s barricade athwart the Blue attack path. Cautionaries, however, applauded the Mandate as a windfall. Excellent atoll lagoons awaited a stepwise Blue advance, step by step, punctuated with pauses to develop proper oceanic bases. Their moment in the sun arose in 1922 when Article XIX of the Washington Treaty outlawed a prepared western base. Rear Admiral Clarence S. Williams, one of the most astute prewar planners, laid out an attack through the Marshall Islands—specifically via Eniwetok—to Truk in the Caroline Islands, the grandest lagoon in the Central Pacific. There, Blue would pause for eighteen months to build a second Pearl Harbor, then resume the advance to
ward the Philippines or to islands closer to Japan itself. The gradual movement, gaining strength as it went, reduced the risk of catastrophe. It would ensure victory, albeit at the cost of a longer war. New technologies encouraged the advocates of a mid-ocean campaign. The oil-burning fleet had markedly extended its combat range. A vast fleet train of auxiliaries was under design. Within a few years planes from newly launched aircraft carriers would be striking over the horizon.
When Williams departed, the thrusters scrapped his plan and reinstalled the Through Ticket. His cautionary plan also had a fatal flaw: the blindness of a massive Blue fleet based in the vast mid-Pacific. The Navy lacked the means of intelligence of enemy naval whereabouts in a theater where island bases were vulnerable to attack from any point of the compass. Security would depend on aircraft that could search a thousand miles in all directions. Such long-range scouts would also be critical for battle operations in open seas where hostile armadas might close upon each other by five hundred miles overnight. The aircraft carrier had introduced the “frightening possibility” of a superior fleet lost through inferior reconnaissance. The side that remained hidden and launched its planes first might destroy the enemy carriers by an “unanswered salvo” and dominate the skies altogether. Studies of the 1930s indicated that a fleet of two-thirds the opponent’s strength could win a decisive sea-air battle. Victory would depend on the earliest information found by long-range aircraft. The United States needed planes that could fly to Hawaii and concentrate rapidly in the Mandate. No such planes were available in the 1920s. Renaissance of the cautionary strategy had to await a technological breakthrough.
Aircraft speed, altitude, ruggedness, and armament were important, but for ocean reconnaissance the vital characteristic was range. A thousand-mile-radius plane could survey ten to twenty times the area of a small shipborne type. The only aircraft suited to the task were flying boats, known in the Navy as VPs—V for heavier than air, P for patrol—formed in 12-plane squadrons called VProns. The flying boat had been pioneered before World War I by the American genius Glenn H. Curtiss whose twin-engine biplanes with notched wooden hulls outperformed pontooned seaplanes. During the war the United States and Great Britain flew hundreds of Curtiss F-5Ls on anti–U-boat patrols out to four hundred miles (larger NC boats that crossed the Atlantic in 1919 proved too fragile for naval service). The sturdiness of the Curtiss boats retarded innovation until they wore out, grew waterlogged, and wore out in the mid-1920s. With progress stagnant the Joint Army-Navy Board in 1923 recommended a force of only 84 VPs (414 in wartime), just 4 percent of all military planes. In 1925 the scouting fleet had 14.
The Consolidated PBY or Catalina had a 1,000-mile range. By 1941, the U.S. Navy had 330 in service.
A craving for aerial scouts escalated when arms treaties limited cruiser construction. The Navy yearned for VPs that could accompany the fleet “in all waters of the globe,” especially in the Pacific where airfield sites were scarce. In the second half of the decade the Naval Aircraft Factory in Philadelphia tinkered with improved types with air-cooled radial engines and hulls of the alloy duralumin. The “flying forest” of struts between the biplane wings was thinned out. Yet each model disappointed and few were put into service. VPs of the late 1920s, supposedly capable of surveillance flights of six hundred to eight hundred miles’ radius at one hundred knots, actually covered four hundred miles in maneuvers, scarcely better than the boats of 1918. To fight in the mid-Pacific the Navy needed a plane of twenty-four-hour endurance that could take off at midnight and begin searching at dawn halfway along a thousand-mile radial line. It would need a large crew and autopilots for relief, and of course reliable radios. Engineers of the Bureau of Aeronautics (BuAer) tried again with the P2Y design of 1932–1933, sesquiplanes with stubby underside wings. They were able to exercise at U.S. atolls up to seven hundred miles from Oahu but they still suffered the “eternal problems” of poor performance and short range that constrained operations with a long-legged fleet.
Landplanes, in contrast, were booming ahead in performance and range, dramatized by Lindbergh’s flight of 1927. Not surprisingly, the Army’s coast artillery function expanded to overwater flights for defense of U.S. shores including naval bases. In 1931 Chief Naval Officer (CNO) William V. Pratt signed a pact with Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur that barred the Navy from acquiring large-wheeled aircraft. Naval aviation was to be based on the fleet and move with it, “confining it to single-engine planes for carriers and the Marines, and to seaplanes and flying boats.” On 1 April 1933 Pratt detached the feeble VProns from the Battle and Scouting forces, the power centers of the fleet, and banished them to a new command, Aircraft, Base Force, for stodgy defensive patrolling. Beyond their shriveled search arcs the carriers and catapulted floatplanes would have to cover the fleet. The disgrace of the lumbering geese was reflected in the Vinson-Trammel Act of 1934, which funded most naval aircraft generously but authorized only thirty VP aircraft a year through 1941.
To some desperate airmen dirigibles seemed a credible alternative. In the 1920s the Navy experimented with airships that had ten times the range of VPs at triple the speed of cruisers. Their backers, including Rear Admiral William A. Moffett, the Chief of BuAer, argued that they could reconnoiter far out at sea beyond range of Orange planes, observe ships while hovering beyond gunfire range, and peek at the supposedly unarmed Pacific Mandate Islands. At worst, a timely sighting of the enemy fleet would justify loss of a machine costing no more than a destroyer. Two great dirigibles commissioned in the early 1930s were capable of seven-thousand-mile round-trips carrying small planes launched and recovered from a trapeze slung beneath the mother airship. Each unit could sweep a wider swath than four cruisers. Op-12 wished to base them in Hawaii but they were unstable in bad weather and were frequently “shot down” in maneuvers. The fleet refused to have them. In 1933 the Akron crashed, with Moffett among the dead. In 1935 the Macon fell. By then the Navy could buy twenty-six VP aircraft for the price of a dirigible. The “Flying Aircraft Carriers” were finished.
Reappraisals of War Plan Orange in the second half of 1933 brought to a head the destiny of the flying boat. Rear Admiral Joseph “Bull” Reeves, a faithful believer in the type, insisted that the fleet could not enter Philippine waters nor even loiter in the Marshalls without a security umbrella of five to seven VProns. Op-12 dutifully incorporated them in the first attack wave. They could fly to the Marshalls via Johnston Island but would have to travel onward to Mindanao as deck cargo. Mobilization tables reserved space aboard all ship classes, yet many of the big planes were to be lashed precariously on minesweepers under tow. The absurdity of the “eyes of the Fleet” wallowing blindly along the dangerous passage helped discredit the “Through Ticket” once and for all.
In October 1933 the credibility of a mid-ocean campaign suddenly brightened. An excellent VP prototype had emerged from successful commercial types “flying down to Rio.” The Navy placed orders for the plane that evolved into the most-produced flying boat of all time, the Consolidated PBY, later dubbed Catalina for an island near the factory in California—a British practice of naming planes. The aerodynamically clean, high-winged monoplane soon achieved the long-sought 1,000-mile range—1,500 in some wartime models. War planners could look forward to delivery within three years of flocks of far-winging scouts for an ocean offensive.
Rebirth of the cautionary campaign plan after 1933 owed much to enchantment with the graceful Catalinas. Yet their arrival touched off four disputes among the war planners, operating commanders, and the naval bureaus as to their roles. Three of the disputes were decisively settled before war in the Pacific erupted. Confusion over the fourth had much to do with the tragedy of 7 December 1941.
The Honorable Frank Knox, Secretary of the Navy (right), with Rear Admiral C. C. Bloch, Naval Air Station, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, September 1940.
The first dispute concerned whether the Navy should acquire as many Catalinas as possible as the workhorses of the fleet, o
r strive for even larger, more proficient aircraft. Projected numbers of flying boats for a Treaty Navy were modest: 184 operating with the fleet in 1935, with 30 added per year to reach a peak of 330 in 1941. But aeronautical science was advancing rapidly. The Navy funded design studies of what became the two-engine Martin Mariner, which surpassed the Catalinas in speed and altitude and usurped the key scouting role midway through the war. Giant Sikorsky and Martin civilian flying boats operated by Pan Air, and German and British models inspired the four-engine PB2Y Coronado, ultimately built in smaller numbers. In the extreme, the monstrous Martin Mars, an eight-thousand-mile range “flying dreadnought” was supposedly capable of a Hawaii-Tokyo round-trip. Only a handful were built late in the war.
In 1935 the CNO skeptically inquired whether planes of, say, five- to six-thousand-mile ranges were needed. They required long, smooth waters for takeoffs. They consumed much more fuel. They could not be carried aboard ship and cost was a major consideration. He preferred “mid-sized” Catalinas capable of haul-out on primitive shores on their own beaching gear, for service by small tenders, or carried as deck cargo or disassembled to Mandate’s lagoons beyond their range. The Commander of Aircraft Base Force thought the ideal to be a two-engine craft of 3,000 nautical miles range at 175 knots, 20,000-foot ceiling, takeoff in less than 2.5 miles of taxi lane. CinCUS Reeves and Chief war planner, Rear Adm. William S. Pye, hoped for 3,500-mile range and thirty-hour endurance. Rear Admiral Ernest J. King, Chief of BuAer, who usually championed the most excellent aircraft, agreed quantity over “utmost” quality in this case. Why was extra range needed when no naval battle had ever been fought more than a thousand miles from land? Besides, bigger planes would not be available in masses for three or four years.
There the matter rested until 1940. In February 1941 PBYs were in service (all earlier types having been retired) with 200 PBY-5s on order for rapid delivery. Only 21 PBM Mariners were on order. The General Board declared for only a few giant boats for a few extraordinary missions. Rear Admiral John Towers felt that a dozen four-engine giants would suffice; at a cost of $926,000 the Navy could procure 9 Catalinas or 4 Mariners (albeit the newer planes had not achieved cost benefits of volume production). The final prewar word was pronounced by Rear Admiral Richmond K. Turner, Chief of the WPD, in November 1941. The war in Europe showed that seaplanes could not match landplanes in range, ceiling, maneuverability, speed, or self-defense. For long-range patrolling the Navy needed big landplane bombers, 25 percent immediately and 50 percent ultimately.
One Hundred Years of U.S. Navy Air Power Page 6