by Orr Kelly
A similar transformation turned the Corsairs into strike fighters. Jury-rigged bomb racks were first used on 26 February 1943, when eight Corsairs of VF-17 attacked a former British officers’ club on Rabaul that had been converted into a brothel for use by Japanese officers.
Together, the Hellcats and Corsairs gave the American carriers the capability of a one-two punch during the final year of the war against Japan. They were able not only to defend the fleet and themselves but to hit enemy ships and targets ashore as well. Years later, as senior admirals, men like Michaelis and Lee were to remember the fighting power those improvised strike fighters had given them. Houser had his own experience with the Corsair as a squadron commander later, during the Korean War.
The Japanese began to build their modern navy in 1895, and by 1941 it had become one of the world’s most formidable fighting forces. But by the fall of 1945, when World War II ended, the Imperial Japanese Navy had, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist.
The U.S. set out to build a great modern navy a few years after the Japanese, and by the war’s end, it was the most powerful naval force the world had ever seen. But it was a force designed to fight a war at sea against another powerful navy. When the war ended, the U.S. Navy was, unlike the Imperial Navy, totally victorious. But it was also without a purpose. With the defeat of the Japanese, there was no other major navy with which the U.S. might conceivably come into conflict.
In the years immediately after the war, the navy struggled to find a satisfactory answer to this basic question: Now that the only hostile fleet capable of challenging American control of the seas had been sent to the bottom, what future role did a big, expensive navy have? To many Americans, the Soviet Union was a dangerous potential foe. But the Russian empire was a great land power with a negligible fleet, not at all like prewar Japan, an island nation with one of the world’s most powerful navies.
The debate over this issue, which has not yet been settled to the satisfaction of all those involved, spawned the most bitter, open battle between two military services in American history.
The air force, newly independent of the army, insisted that a fleet of bombers capable of massive destruction of the Soviet Union was not only the best, but the most economical way to deal with the threat from Moscow. This left little strategic role for the navy and, perhaps of even more practical import, little money for ships, especially big carriers and their fleets of planes and escort ships.
The navy was dominated by the carrier admirals and they favored the construction of a new supercarrier, the U.S.S. United States, big enough to carry bombers capable of direct nuclear attacks on the Soviet Union. For a few months, it seemed there would be enough money for both bombers and the new carrier. In 1948, Congress approved construction of the ship. At 60,000 tons and nearly 1,100 feet long, she would be the largest warship ever built. But in 1949, draconian budget cuts were ordered. The United States was cancelled, the number of heavy carriers was reduced from eleven to eight, and the number of naval aircraft was slashed by forty percent. As the admirals saw it, the nature of the debate had changed. It was no longer a question of the navy’s proper future role, but whether the navy had a future at all.
The issue came to a head in the second week of October 1949, in what quickly became known as the “revolt of the admirals.” Senior admirals, their chests bedecked with ribbons symbolizing their recent great victory at sea, took their places in a congressional hearing room and bluntly condemned air force strategy and tactics. They heaped particular scorn on the air force’s favorite weapon, the six-engined B-36 intercontinental bomber. The admirals may have enjoyed the opportunity to vent their spleen, but the whole affair was a debacle for the navy, culminating in the firing of Adm. Louis Denfield, the chief of naval operations.
Out of this disaster, however, came the strategy that served as the rationale for a large carrier navy. It is the strategy that, in somewhat modified form, was revived in the late 1970s and still defines the navy’s role today. This maritime strategy was largely the brainchild of Adm. Forrest P. Sherman, who sketched its outlines as a senior staff officer shortly after World War II and then put it into effect as chief of naval operations between November 1949, when he succeeded Denfield, and 22 July 1951, when he died unexpectedly during a visit to Naples.
Sherman had wisely avoided involvement in the “revolt of the admirals.” A brilliant and ambitious officer, he honestly disagreed with his fellow admirals in their hard-ball, winner-take-all battle with the air force. He favored unification of the services under a strong defense secretary. He respected the air force’s role in strategic bombing and said that if the B-36 couldn’t do the job, then they should get one that did. But he also championed a broad concept of the navy’s role in any war with the Soviet Union.
In the event of hostilities, he said, carrier task forces should be prepared to strike Soviet targets, both at sea and ashore, in the Far East, in Norway, and in Germany. A vital element of this strategy was naval control of the Mediterranean, from which carrier-based planes could reach targets in the Soviet Union, as well as in other parts of Europe and the Middle East. It was a concept that gave the navy an important worldwide role in any future war, but it also represented an historic shift of the navy’s traditional center of gravity from the Pacific to the European theater, and especially the Mediterranean.
While the Navy was struggling to determine its strategic and political roles in the postwar world, it was also attempting to find solutions to some serious technical problems that might doom it, regardless of the outcome of political battles over its future.
Jet airplanes were clearly the wave of the future. The new technology had been developed by the United States and Britain during the war, and the Germans had actually flown jet planes in combat against the Allied bombers. But flying those early jets from an air base with long, uncluttered runways and flying them from the short, crowded deck of an aircraft carrier were two quite different things.
The first jet engines were, by modern standards, seriously underpowered. Jet-propelled planes were much faster than those powered by conventional engines. But the new engines were so unresponsive that they gave the pilot little room for error as he approached a carrier deck. He had to get “in the groove” at the proper position astern the carrier and then fly a flat path toward the ship.
A landing signals officer stood near the stern and guided the pilot in by waving large colored paddles. It was a colorful, dramatic process, but it was also subject to human error, especially at the faster approach speeds of the jets. Almost as soon as the pilot turned onto his final approach to the carrier, the officer manipulating the paddles had to decide whether to permit him to land or wave him off. (The Japanese had used a different system, which relied entirely on the judgment of the pilot. He had only a steam jet to indicate the direction of the wind across the deck, a row of lights to indicate the centerline of the deck, and another string of lights on the edge of the deck to help him judge his height.)
With the early jets, the navy festooned the deck with eleven arrester cables, and then erected a thirty-two-foot-high web barrier across the deck to protect the parked planes. If the pilot failed to catch one of the cables with his tailhook, he didn’t have enough power to clear the barrier. With luck, the barrier would stop him with relatively little damage. But the plane might also burn or, even worse, break through the barrier into the other aircraft lined up on the deck.
At the other end of the process, the navy also faced serious problems operating jets aboard carriers. One concern was that when the early jet engines were started, they spat out a plume of flame hot enough to ignite other planes. Before engines were started, the planes were doused with water and carbon tetrachloride to prevent fires.
Getting the new planes into the air was also a problem. In the first few moments of takeoff, a jet engine moves less air over the wing than the big fan of a comparable prop plane. This meant the jets had difficulty building up flying speed in
the short distance available on a carrier deck. By that time, the carriers had catapults, but they were operated by gunpowder. In effect, the plane was shot into the air like some giant missile. These older catapults proved unsatisfactory for the new planes.
“We went through a very difficult period. We were very goosey about our future,” says Admiral Michaelis. “The Brits pulled our fat out of the fire with the angled deck, the mirrored landing system, and the steam catapult.”
The angled deck was first proposed in 1951 at a conference of the British Royal Aircraft Establishment. The following year, a portion of the deck of the U.S.S. Antietam was widened so planes could land at an eight-degree angle to the centerline of the ship. With this system, if a pilot failed to catch an arresting cable, he was able to take off and go around again. It is now standard procedure for a pilot to push his throttles full forward as he hits the deck so he will be able to leap back into the air if he fails to catch the cable. Four thousand successful landings on the Antietam proved the new system and it was quickly adopted for all American carriers.
A British officer was also responsible for a new catapult system in which steam from the ship’s boilers is used to drive a piston. The plane is attached to the piston through a slot in the deck, and the steam pressure is adjusted to match the weight and flying speed of the plane. The steam catapult proved capable of taking any plane aboard the carrier from a standing start and hurling it into the air in a couple of seconds. The first of the new catapults was installed on the U.S.S. Hancock and tested in June 1954.
The third improvement suggested by the British at this time was a system of mirrors reflecting a beam of light along the approach path as a plane comes in for a landing. By keeping his eye on this light—the “meatball”—set off to the left side of the deck, the pilot can tell whether he is high or low and adjust his approach. Landing systems officers still monitor each landing, but they no longer wave paddles, and often they don’t even have to talk to the pilot as he comes aboard.
The navy later credited the angled deck and the new system of landing lights with cutting in half the number of accidents involved in carrier landings.
Adoption of the angled deck and steam catapults also had another beneficial effect. On the old straight-deck carriers, planes landed at the rear of the ship and parked at the bow end. Then they had to be moved to the other end of the ship in preparation for launch. Now, planes can often be left where they were originally parked, so long as they are not on the narrow portion of the angled deck actually used for landings. Then they can be moved directly to the catapults and launched in rapid-fire order. This makes possible the navy’s “flex-deck” system in which the ship is prepared to launch or recover planes at any time.
With new carriers incorporating these vital improvements and with the older carriers modified to accept them, the navy by the mid-1950s had solutions to the three technical problems that had threatened its ability to continue to operate an effective carrier fleet.
While the navy worked to overcome its technical problems, the new strategy was being put into effect. The navy’s center of gravity shifted heavily toward the Atlantic, and especially the Mediterranean. But Sherman, although he was the father of this strategic shift of forces, remained deeply worried about the scarcity of American naval forces in the wide expanses of the Pacific. He personally saw to it that the U.S.S. Valley Forge, one of the fifteen carriers then in service, was assigned to the western Pacific. When North Korea attacked South Korea on 25 June 1950, the Valley Forge, the only American carrier in those waters, was in Hong Kong. Eight days later, her planes joined with aircraft from a British carrier to attack the North Korean capital of Pyongyang.
The Korean War shifted the focus of American naval power from the Mediterranean, where Sherman thought it should be, back to the Pacific. But it also permitted the carriers, with their planes striking from both sides of the Korean peninsula, to demonstrate once again the value of sea-based air power. Within months of the outbreak of war, Congress and the Truman administration approved the construction of the U.S.S. Forrestal, the first of a new class of modern, angled-deck carriers designed to handle the new jets coming into service.
The debate over the value of carriers has continued, especially when difficult budget decisions have to be made. But every postwar president from Truman to Bush has called on the carrier force to back up his policies, most often in a modern version of the old “gunboat diplomacy.” One study in the 1970s found that, of 215 incidents in which the U.S. used military power for political purposes between the end of World War II and 1975, almost half involved the movement of carriers.
The longest and most frustrating war for naval aviators was Vietnam. Carriers were first stationed off Indochina in the 1950s but, despite a plea from the French, did not send planes to aid the French troops surrounded at Dien Bien Phu, which fell to Vietnamese forces on 7 May 1954. Later in the 1950s and early 1960s, carrier-based planes flew frequent intelligence-gathering flights over Vietnam. The American carriers became involved in direct combat operations in mid-1964 and continued until the American withdrawal from Vietnam, in 1972.
Perhaps the most shocking lesson of the Vietnam War to those aboard the carriers was the realization that their planes were not equipped to fight the war in which they were involved.
Political control from Washington resulted in the most rigid rules under which any Americans had ever fought. Pilots were ordered not to fire on enemy planes until they had made visual identification. And yet the navy had designed its planes for an entirely different kind of war in which the enemy would be picked up on radar and, if everything went right, killed by a missile before he ever came in sight. The navy’s first-line fighter, the F-4 Phantom, in fact, did not carry a gun until the plane was hastily redesigned to conform to the realities of this new kind of warfare.
It was also during this period that the officers who, in the next few years, would be in a position to shape the navy’s future, confronted the problems of decks jammed with different types of aircraft, and the excruciating lack of reliability of many of their planes, electronic gear, and weapons. As American involvement in the war drew to a close, they returned to Washington prepared to make some changes.
CHAPTER THREE
“Holy Moly! We Are in Trouble!”
Thomas V. (“Tom”) Jones had a dream. Looking out from the hushed grandeur of Jones’s wood-paneled, nineteenth-floor office suite in the new Century City section of Los Angeles in the early 1970s, other equally ambitious men might have dreamed of building skyscrapers, making movies, or seeking high political office. But Jones had a singular dream: he wanted to be the one to supply the world’s vast market for new fighter planes.
Nearly everywhere he looked among America’s friends, old planes were reaching the end of their useful life, if they had not already become dangerously obsolete. In Jones’s dream, his company, the Northrop Corp., would design and build a new fighter and then sell a thousand or more.
For Jones, it was not an idle dream. Once before, Northrop had produced a fighter plane so good—and so cheap to buy and operate—that it had become the standard in more than two dozen countries throughout the free world. Why not do it again on an even vaster scale?
To be sure, other aerospace chieftains saw the same market. But they had a cautious, conventional approach to capturing their share. First, they would sell a new plane to the U.S. Air Force or Navy and then, with the backing of the U.S. government, they would sell it to American allies throughout the world. Jones took a more daring approach. He proposed to design, build, and sell a new fighter as a straight commercial venture. He would take the risks, but he would also garner the rewards.
A similar system had worked well with the F-5 Freedom Fighter. Developed in the mid-1950s by Northrop, the F-5 was adopted by the defense department as the plane to be provided to smaller nations under heavily subsidized terms, as part of the U.S. military assistance program. When production of the F-5 and the T
-38 trainer version finally ended in mid-1989, Northrop had sold more than 3,800 planes over a thirty-year period.
There was, of course, no guarantee that the new fighter Jones had in mind would receive a similar assist from the government, so there was considerable risk involved. That such a bold approach would have its birth in the anything-goes atmosphere of southern California is not surprising. What is somewhat surprising is that executives of General Electric’s fighter engine plant in the staid New England community of Lynn, Massachusetts, agreed to join with Jones and commit their company’s money to this ambitious and risky venture. But the two companies had long worked together and each had faith in the technical competence of the other. And GE had shared in the phenomenal sales Jones had racked up for the Freedom Fighter. Jones was the world’s greatest fighter plane salesman, and GE counted on him to deliver the market for the new plane.
Jones was also intimately involved in the design of the plane. Described by one aide as “the last of the breed of designer-CEO’s”—Jones preferred to go to the aircraft division rather than have his engineers come to corporate headquarters several miles away. He worked closely with the late Lee Begin, who was responsible for many of the innovative features of Northrop planes. Begin, an intuitive designer with little formal education, used to tell associates, “If it looks right, it will fly right.”
Work began in the mid-1960s and by the early 1970s, after 4,000 hours of wind tunnel tests, the new plane was beginning to look like a sure winner. Viewed from the front, with the cockpit looming over the nose, it resembled a cobra, and that quickly became its name. Designing such a plane involved a sizeable investment. But it would cost some $100 million more to build a couple of prototypes, test them, and prepare for production. Jones came up with a novel scheme: He proposed to a number of the smaller NATO allies of the U.S. that they agree to buy the Cobra and, in return, share in the production. The new plane would truly be an international fighter.