World War II Myths, Misconceptions and Surprises Thread

[Max Sinister]

One thing I wasn't really surprised at because I definitely can imagine that they'd do it, but it was new to me: The Japanese forbade the Koreans to speak their mother tongue even in the family, and had a spy network that reported everyone.

Oh, and BTW: Both Germans and Russians had the same weather - but the Russians had more experience with it. Re: such little things as giving their soldiers boots in winter that were one size too big - so they could wear several pairs of socks or such and not freeze their feet off. The Wehrmacht? Not only did their boots fit perfectly, they had iron nails in the soles. The Finns commented that's almost as good as walking barefoot, with the metal conducting the cold pretty well.

[miletus12]

Jun 5, 2022 14:19:29 GMT Max Sinister said:

One thing I wasn't really surprised at because I definitely can imagine that they'd do it, but it was new to me: The Japanese forbade the Koreans to speak their mother tongue even in the family, and had a spy network that reported everyone.

Oh, and BTW: Both Germans and Russians had the same weather - but the Russians had more experience with it. Re: such little things as giving their soldiers boots in winter that were one size too big - so they could wear several pairs of socks or such and not freeze their feet off. The Wehrmacht? Not only did their boots fit perfectly, they had iron nails in the soles. The Finns commented that's almost as good as walking barefoot, with the metal conducting the cold pretty well.

1. This is well known in America where Korean Americans still remember it as a sore point about the Japanese.  They insist of Korean spoken in the home even in this country.

2. THAT is a myth. The Russians were not good at graded manufacture or logistics. This combined two ways. The Russians issued footwear in three or four shoe sizes to say an American dozen. And since Stalinist Russia could not make decent socks, (The Americans finally supplied those through Lend Lease in the late war.) (See next 2a. for why this is a bolo for the Americans. M), the Russians either used leg wraps or STRAW to make their too large boots fit in the early war.

2a. The Germans were short of glue and rubber. They had plenty of leather, wood and steel. Whether tanks or boots, you use what you have and learn the hard way how to make it work. The Germans had sheep and power looms and they could make socks. So... late war while Americans got trench foot and froze their toes off because the quartermaster corps screwed up and did not issue what the Russians got through lend lease, that is rubber over-shoes and thick wool thermal socks, the Germans had hobnailed boots that worked. Socks was the difference. Thick wool ones with deep soles.     
     

[miletus12]

This is a hilarious collection of WRONG!

Let us unpack.

a. Vice Admiral Holland. Losing him was unfortunate, but the RN had a few cruiser captains who could replace him (Vian comes to mind.).
b. Losing trained naval personnel, the HMS Glorious, HMS Courageous and HMS Ark Royal examples. This comes down more to training base incompetence than it does to fatal loss of trained manpower. Also, as much as I regret the loss of a stoker or an aviation machinist mate or a radioman, or DC man, the PRACTICAL loss of pilots and qualified aviation tacticians can be far worse from a cynical warfighting efficiency point of view. In the British and Japanese cases, it was the trained pilot/air leader slaughters that ruined their strike power in the WWII later war years. In the American example, Coral Sea and Midway, saw the trained USN air crew almost annihilated. The air divisions were otherwise intact. It was only the prescient pilot rotation policy and just a large enough teaching cadre, that allowed the Americans to reconstitute their expended pilot cohorts for the Guadalcanal and later Central Pacific naval campaigns. In mid-war they were hurting mainly due to a lack of trained competent pilots. Mechanics and radiomen they could train in weeks by the thousands. Pilots took two years. As a further cynical note, if the navy does not know how to train properly in the first place, how to operate a ship, then maybe killing off the wrong trained crew, too stubborn to learn from experience, and replacing them with the right trained replacements might be a "good thing".
c. Experienced U-boat crew losses... This was not so much the loss of the U-boat crews, which killed the U-boat service, as the incompetence of Oberkommando der U-Boote, specifically the imbecile, Karl Doenitz, who would not listen to his survivor crews about what they encountered and what he needed to change.
d. Losing the people is one thing. NOT learning an expletive deleted thing from how they were lost in the first place is the missed bit for the Japanese, the Germans and the British. It is the most telling difference between winners and losers in war. I call that the Vietnam experience in the case of the Americans who fell into the same error and seem to be stuck there, too.
e. 30 years service excuse for Royal Navy lacklusters in later war. I would suggest that 30 years of wrong tradition and wrong training is 30 years wasted, if the ossified and inflexible cadre had not learned to adapt, modify, improvise and overcome. One could almost weep as one looks at how that almost killed the USN in 1942.  
f. Force Z. An aircraft carrier could have saved it. With the garbage planes and the garbage air tactics the fleet air arm had in 1941, against the Special Attack Kokusai? This was not a case where anything could have saved Force Z, except a wholesale replacement of the idiots in command of it from division chiefs upward to Dudley Pound for that doomed squadron. If Admiral Holland had bad luck, failed recon and the weather against him as legitimate excuses that allowed a pair of idiot naval officers and some good gunnery to sink him at Denmark Strait, then what explains Force Z? There were no legitimate extenuating excuses for disaster. Here locally the criminally incompetent Tom Phillips, the imbecile Brook Popham and the whole ramshackle Malay Settlements setup in an eerie replay of the stupidity that led to the Clark Field disaster in the Philippine Islands, is at work. But you can trace the rot all the way back to London, just as the annihilation of the B-17s at Clark Field north of Manila was a combo of Louis Brereton and Doug MacArthur, but the lack of integrated air defense and competency goes all the way back to HAP Arnold and the bomber barons in Washington, who ignored the USAAF fighter mafia. Material failures started with the human leadership, not the resources allotted. There were enough resources. It was the rot at the top which was the culprit. Example: Churchill wanted to hold Force Z, short at Sri Lanka, which shows he knew how bad things were actually in Singapore despite his later lies about it. Pound talked him out of it. "The man at the spot knows better how things stand." or some such nonsense he told Churchill at their 27 November conference about the Prince of Wales mechanical casualty and layover at Columbo for emergency repairs. Never mind that it was Pound and Phillips who wrote out the stupidly insane plan for Singapore's defense or that they had mismanaged the setup of that defense over British army and RAF objections. Never mind that Churchill knew EXACTLY what the flaws in that incompetent plan were and allowed that plan and the two idiots who architected it to implement it against sound advice. Never mind any of those facts. Just the fact that Churchill bleated to Pound about the material condition and known mechanical defects of the badly designed and built KGV class battleship, HMS Prince of Wales, shows why Force Z was foredoomed. Pound airily breezed even this serious material deficiency aside. In this case, adding HMS Indomitable to the material loss and her crew to the butcher's bill in the sink-ex is like wishing the 1941 USS North Carolina was at Pearl Harbor. The British flattop was almost as defective in training and material condition as the POW. It was lucky she ran aground in her workup and had to go back to the US yards for further work (and training) to fix what her crew screwed up... again  It would have been more glory for Fukedome's flyguys. Until what was human wrong was fixed, or corrected in the chain of responsibility, there was no point to send Force Z at all. Period. The waste of British power and prestige was unnecessary. Let Percival take the hit and organize properly in the Andamans and Burma like Wavell wanted.   But then again...   
g. Disperse the French Marine to Indochina? What and give the IJN access to the Marine? The Marine goes to the US and hides out until de Gaul rallies the French. Only credible alternative history that is possible. Period. 
h. Lord Gort to Malaya? No. It would be Percival with a different name. Unified command? They actually had it and they still screwed it totally up not once but three times in Malaya, in Burma and in the Indian Ocean and then again when Wavell botched the ABDA command. More aircraft carriers? Why? They, the British, Dutch and the Americans had runways ashore enough. What they lacked in place was people who knew what the expletive deleted they were doing (General Slim anybody?). Helfrich, MacArthur and Wavell were symptomatic here. Of the collective imbecility, only MacArthur would get a chance to redeem himself and even today, historians argue about whether or not he hurt the cause or learned from his early mistakes.                
i. Put Americans into Singapore? How would the British military feel about taking their marching orders directly from MacArthur? Ask Blamey about that one. This is what I find hilarious. Plus, what lunatic American was going to look at that geography and at the Dutch and at the incompetent British arrangements in place and suggest to FDR that America do that crazy thing?  Oh, that would be Harold Stark. What happened to him after something like that was tried, to do things the British way in ABDA? FDR FIRED HIM. 
k. The RN had a rough time in the war because they lost the sense of their Royal Navy traditions? No. It was that they clung onto outdated doctrinal battle concepts for far too long as the technology changed the way war at sea worked. Refer to a through j. The incompetents leading the Royal Navy, just like the brass-hats who led the USN in the 1930s, were about a decade behind in the evolution of methods and function effectors and too tactics oriented. They were still gun and torpedo decisive battle Jutlanders who had not absorbed the Battle of the Atlantic 1.0 or Fleet Problems I through XX. In the RN case they were further cursed with the incompetencies of Julian Corbett and the ineptitude of a singular landluibber named Winston Churchill.  The true universals of sea (and air) power as essayed by Alfred T. Mahan were crucially ignored. Use of and denial of use was the sea doctrine ignored in favor of showy tactics only thinking. And even in the surface tactics fixation the British were incompetent and slow to learn. It would take them longer to finally figure out combined arms at sea and how to fight a naval campaign than the Americans. And even then: I credit the Canadians far more for Battle of the Atlantic 2.0 as a success in outcome as the British did not properly prepare and during the war for the first half of the war, did not properly allocate resources either in aircraft, detection systems, ships or anti-submarine effectors to neutralize the U-boat threat. In what way did they flub the dub? Not enough pre-war escorts, ineffective depth charges, not a single decent long range maritime patrol aircraft developed in prototype form, incompetent RAF/RN service cooperation, a completely useless Western Approaches command apparatus, massive signals intelligence failure, the usual stuff the British naval historians (properly) accuse the American navy of flubbing in 1942. The difference is that three years into the war, the Canadians were finally fixing this mess on their end and passing those lessons on to the Americans, while the Americans took a year after Stark was fired for his stupidity, to learn from the Canadians about the nuts of bolts of U-boat hunting. How were the British doing? Still losing in the Mid Atlantic Gap until they adopted dedicated ASW hunter killer groups of trained and dedicated ships to patrol U-boat routes as predicted by game theory.       
l. Were the Alaska and Iowa classes mistakes as built? Forget about which type of 12 inch bore gun or 16 inch bore gun the ships carried or how effective their speeds were. The proper questions were:
--, did it make any economic sense to pour steel and crews into these type ships in 1940 when the 2 Ocean Navy Bill came up? Were these monstrosities necessary when there was a shortage of cruisers and destroyers and aircraft carriers to cover square kilometers of ocean and when the British were LOSING the Battle of the Atlantic because they had poured money into battleships instead of ASW and air patrol assets?  
--, did it make any military sense given what the American navy was going to need to do to control and deny the sea? Here we come to the gun-clubbers versus the fly-guys and the tin-canners versus the big boys. I would have thought that a competent admiralty would have looked at geography, distance, time and resources instead and said to Congress: "more aircraft carriers, more destroyers, more cruisers, many more submarines, a naval air force to handle aerial recon and patrol, and money to fix or develop effectors to sink ships and submarines from aircraft and while at it, to protect ships from submarines and aircraft. Might also want to fortify and prepare defenses in the Pacific Ocean, too. The HALF BILLION DOLLARS wasted on the Iowas and the Alaskas and the 250,000 tons of steel and 15,000 crewmen wasted on those abominations, could have been better spent on paving runways, fixing fleet anti-aircraft guns, installing more radars, bringing improved aircraft into service faster, testing suspected defective weapons to make sure effectors worked as intended. Then one might like to have more oil tankers, ammunition ships, floating drydocks, spare parts and TRAINING MONEY. And do not forget to leave a few things for the Marines like aircraft, artillery, rifles machine guns, mortars and landing craft, crawlers, and troops transports configured for amphibious assaults against enemy fortified coral ringed atolls or the French coasts.  The point is that if you are fixated on "battleships" and Jutland or on cruiser raiders as commerce warfare alone, then you miss the fact that a submarine is more important than a Bismarck, or aircraft carriers and aircraft can do what battleships cannot... sink Yamatos unanswered by the enemy. Does that mean you build nothing in the role of battleships at all? Depends on if a South Dakota or North Carolina was good enough in case you need some heavy metal in a pinch. They were good enough. Would have been still much better to have torpedoes that worked and more light cruisers for AAA defense and to brawl in Iron Bottom Sound and more flattops and destroyers and planes of all types and better trained crews so that the Tokyo Express could have been bombed harder and sooner and wiped out in five surface battles instead of NINETEEN. And to be honest... a light squad machine gun for the Marines that worked, was far more important from a naval point of view than an expletive deleted Alaska.
m. If the Germans and Italians sortie aircraft carriers at the same time pre 1942, what can the allies do? That depends on the British. They proved utterly incompetent at naval reconnaissance. I expect the negative outcome of an aircraft carrier action similar to the Indian Ocean Raid of 1942 or of British bungling off Java in 1944. It will take at least a couple of operations for the British to learn how to sink an Aquila or a Graf Zeppelin. At the same time, it is impossible for the Germans or Italians to achieve competencies that approach Japanese levels of excellence. It takes a decade of operations to learn what aircraft carriers can do. So: we have amateurs on both sides flailing away at sea against each other who achieve nothing at all except waste men, ships and money. It could be... after 1942 that the Americans get a crack at it. The USS Wasp and the USS Ranger were quite good at this aircraft carrier warfare thing. But then again, if Mussolini and the Austrian paper hanger pour all that steel and aluminum into torpedo bait that will last mere hours within reach of an American task force, it would mean at least three panzer divisions out of fuel and supplies on the Russian front in addition to the other wrong choices those military geniuses made. What about the British U-class submarine option? The Italians killed a lot of those deathtraps. 13 of them out of 40 deployed. They were too slow, too vulnerable and too short enduranced to mousehole Italian ports or they would have, Aquila or no Aquila. Hence this presenter clearly has no idea of what he discusses on this topic either. 
n. Admiral Beatty's thinking was sound for pre-war RN plans and operations? ROTFLMAO. I would prefer Backhouse or even that fool, Pound, to Beatty. 
o. Two refitted Renowns instead of Hood at Denmark Strait? Hmmm. I would still prefer the Hood. Now PoW replaced? Still iffy. The numbers game favors 3 on 2 in any configuration. Still prefer the concentration of force argument the presenter argues to any of these ATL nonsensicals. KGV was a piece of junk like PoW. The aircraft carrier would be the game changer, except in that weather it cannot operate. 
p. Henderson plan 1933. Not with this idiot in charge. He was a Beatty man. In summary criticism, like Stark and Leahy in the American navy, he, Hernderson, was fixated on the wrong ships and the wrong roles and missions. Who gives a flying fig about more sloops if there is no acoustics school, no sonars built and the type ship he pushed for the ASW mission is the wrong type of ship for the ASW mission? And that was the only part of the Henderson plan that barely approached being the correct part of preparedness to anticipate the future the RN faced.
q. The Japanese did use slave labor as the Filipinos, Indonesians and Allied prisoners of war can attest. The Japanese may have been as incompetent and inefficient as the Germans, but those Rabaul sub pens and the Burma railroad still got built and the Kyoto coal mines were still exploited. Speaking of which, I remember that the BRITISH used draftee corvee labor to work their own coal mines. A slave is still a slave, even if the working conditions are somewhat better.
r. World of Warships? What crap is this? 
s. Kantai Kessen. This is what happens when a navy misreads Mahan and thinks Tsushima fits all cases instead of being what it was; a freak accident by a navy trained in gunnery versus a navy trained to parade ships in review.  A mere shoot-ex is not applied naval doctrine according to sound military principles. Even the incompetent Julian Corbett figured that much out.  Mahan did cover blockade, convoy, coast defense, defense of trade, and use and denial of the sea for commerce and war. He wrote about NAVAL CAMPAIGNS. It was bumblers who thought he was only about decisive battle. What he wrote was that if the enemy lost his navy, he could not use the sea in peace and war. Decisive battle was just one minor method to bring about the elimination of an enemy navy and therefore deny the enemy the sea.  The IJN being short of cash and resources and unable to offer battle and defend trade at the same time, adopted Kantai Kessen to convince politicians to give them a battle fleet. How did that work out? 



Mahan (^^^).  
t. Axis aircraft carriers cause panic? Maybe to the British. The Americans were confident that they could put any enemy flattop down under the waves. How did that turn out? 

Mahan (^^^). 
s. The Graf Zeppelin was almost as bad as the HMS Glorious or HMS Hermes, or even the vaunted HMS Ark Royal as an aircraft carrier design for shipboune aircraft handling. The RMS Aquila was about on a par with the Americanized HMS Indomitable or the USS Wasp. Again: the presenter does not know what he discusses. The German track and catapult system was "iffy" but if it had worked on the Aquila, it would have allowed for Japanese style launch and recovery rates for the Italians with all the advantages that the IJN enjoyed in speed over the Americans with 1/3 the manpower in plane handlers required for moving and arming and fueling. But there is more than speed of launch and recovery cycles that goes into aircraft carrier warfare. Air traffic control, naval reconnaissance and anti-ship strike methods are absolute minimums in knowing how to handle a floating air base. The Italians had no idea how to go about this process. Even the British should have been able to handle the RMS Aquila after a couple of fumbles. And as noted above, the Americans already knew how BEFORE the war.
t. Ugly aircraft carrier?



Sank NOTHING.

Beautiful aircraft carrier?



Killed 2 of her opposites outright, damaged 2; plus damaged a battleship and sank a cruiser as well. Not to mention all of the other assorted damage she did prior to Coral Sea and Midway. BEAUTIFUL ship.               
  
u. Pilot training. It matters that veterans are rotated out and back to pilot training schools, but as American naval historians have noted, incompetent training syllabuses and outdated methods are as bad for replacement pilots as lack of veterans to train them. The British Pacific Fleet in 1945 were stuck on 1942 ways of doing things in the air. This showed up at Okinawa where their fleet air defense was unable to stop half of 400 hundred kamikaze air attacks aimed at 6 British aircraft carriers ALL of which were hit. The Americans with 16 aircraft carriers were attacked by 4,000 kamikazes and splashed 3,000 of them. Only 6 aircraft carriers of the 16 were hit. This is why British naval historians make much of British armored flight decks. It glosses over the magnitude of failed RN fleet air defense and utterly incompetent pilot training by 1945 Japanese or American standards the FAA actually received late war. 
v. Overconfident pilots. There are bold pilots and old pilots and the canard about no old bold pilots. Take a look at u, and add overconfident and too proud to learn from their mistakes as to why the actual top 5% of surviving aces are the ones who also bite their nails and worry and have the shakes and endure nightmares.  They are the ones who think "how did I get out of that last one alive with the stupid mistakes I made?" and review their mistakes and share their experience with their fellows to find out how not to repeat those mistakes.
w. Use the worn out 12 inch bore guns of the Wyomings to arm Alaska type aircraft carrier bodyguard gunships. Note the words "worn out"? And there is the ammunition problem. as in there is nothing left to fit those clapped out guns. To build a new shell line for guns that have to have new tube liners and to introduce new shells for new oversized heavy cruisers... why not build more Baltimores or Clevelands instead?   
x. More Jutland thinking. The US builds Montanas and Iowas and uses a fast slow wings battlelines concept. Why in 1940 would the Americans do this stupidity (Harold Stark)?  Maybe in 1933 this "might" make sense, but by Fleet Problem XVIII (After 1935) the flyguys made the cogent argument that flattops present would cause the side suddenly without flattops to run for their lives. This prediction is what happened. By 1942 it was evident that battleships were a waste of time, money, crews and scarce resources. The Montanas were slowed and then cancelled. The Iowas were only built to bodyguard aircraft carriers. Even then they were recognized as useless.             
y. Russians. They were our anvil. We were the hammer. They were saved by us. Not the other way around. This I KNOW now. 
z. Dutch and tanks? Airplanes would have been more useful. 

Part II tomorrow... 
                                      

[miletus12]

Part II

a. Polish reparation of free Poles to Russia. None of those excuses, the presenter makes, holds up. The British (Churchill) cut a devil's deal with Stalin and fed that mess to the Americans on a manure sandwich and we had to use "Containment" to retrieve Whitehall's colossal mistake and here we are.
b. Help the Dutch in Indonesia. Interesting false read of history there. If the British had not been so busy trying to steal the Dutch oil fields in the 1930s, perhaps the mistrusting Dutch would not have turned to Roosevelt in their hour of need so late? Perhaps if Conrad Helfrich was not so egotistically corrupt and incompetent, the DNEI commissioners could have bought their needed arms much sooner as the USG intended, without his meddling combined with British interference. Perhaps if the British lies and incompetence of WWI (Operation Bullet-stopper comes to mind.) were not so American well-remembered, the Americans (Admirals Hart and later King) would have been more willing to cooperate with the British Eastern Command buffoons (Percival and Phillips) in a mutual defense plan for the South China Sea? Not likely. Not every American was an Anglophile like "Betty" Stark. Not every American was an expletive deleted fool. And as for the Neutrality Act and Congress, well there was that British chicanery of WWI remembered. Not that FDR was not mindful of reality and trying, but really if the faults for mess this lay somewhere, then look first to Whitehall not Capitol Hill or the White House.
c. Losing Hood and Repulse. The battlecruisers are gone. Unless one buys the tactical theory that a fast wing and a slow wing of dreadnoughts are needed for a Jutland type surface engagement in 1942, and the RN in this regard was still stuck on stupid, then I might buy this argument. Except that an aircraft carrier Jutland type engagement was fought in the Coral Sea. No battleships at all. No battlecruisers either. There were by count some 30 surface naval battles in WWII. Only 6 involved battleships. At Second Narvik, it was a miracle that HMS Warspite survived the incompetent British admiral's mishandling of the operation. HMS Glorious, captained by a madman, did not survive The Twins. Admiral Holland was let down by the RAF at Denmark Strait. Somerville yellow-dogged at Teleuda. Cunningham professionally handed Iachino his rump at Matapan, but even that battle had its hairy moments when the FAA and the RAF screwed up and failed Sir Andrew. The Battle of the North Cape was a blindman's bluff which saw HMS Duke of York send-off KMS Scharnhorst with remarkably poor gunnery on the British side of it. There were two American battleship actions, 2nd Guadalcanal and Surigao Strait. 2nd Guadalcanal was a mess, which was only retrieved by good ship handling, good shooting by USS Washington and the fact that Admiral Abe, Lee's opponent was an utter fool. That boob, Abe, should have won easily. He had the numbers, position, the tech advantage and surprise on his side. All Lee had was radar and the USS South Dakota, the Prince of Wales of the USN. The other battleship action was Surigao Strait where Jesse Oldendorf plugged the southern entrance of Leyte Gulf with six old Standard Battleships. The USS West Virginia, King's old favorite tub, volleyed away and might have pasted HIJMS Fuso a bit, but not before



Captain Coward's destroyers blew HIJMS Fuso and HIJMS Yamashiro into sinking halves. Battleships were not needed there. Destroyers were quite good enough. So, what really was the point of battleships? Most of the surface actions that mattered were cruiser / destroyer brawls with the torpedo being the decider in WWII. Otherwise: it was aircraft and submarine warfare at sea. as in the Battle of Samar where the battleships got their biggest chance ever against aircraft carriers and the aircraft carriers TROUNCED THEM. 
d. Dark year 1942. The British RN might have panicked, but the USN was not having a jolly time of it, either. In addition to the Pearl Harbor Salvage that was a dog's breakfast and the British bungling in the Battle of the Atlantic and in the war at sea in the Mediterranean, here are a few things that happen:
-- the senior command of the USN is FIRED. Not just Husband Kimmel is beached, but Harold Stark and his crew are sent to the showers. This rearranging of deck chairs on the Titanic happens behind an FDR generated bureaucratic smokescreen of lies and misdirection that even now escapes casual notice. 
-- Pound is lying to this man right up to moment that he, Pound, mercifully kicks off and clears the way for a better man.  All through 1942 Pound tells King how things in the Battle of the Atlantic are dire and that he, King, needs to swing the USN completely around to help hold down the U-boat menace. Never-mind that King hates the RN's stinking guts, there is a practical element at work here. ABDA has collapsed, Somerville of Teleuda fame has bungled the British side of the Easter Day Follies...



and the Japanese are about to hang the Pacific Fleet out to dry if King does not change things around quickly. The Battle of the Atlantic has to wait. It can wait until the Pacific Ocean crisis is stabilized. British naval historians keep missing this point. King has his own tracking room keeping an eye on the U-boat war which is how he knows the difference between the exaggerated false tonnage loss numbers the RN feeds the USN and the REAL numbers. Do not lie to the USN, especially ONI. It never works out well for you. King thinks he has six months pad to cushion for time while he stops the Japanese. 
-- There comes in short order, Coral Sea, Midway and Eastern Solomons. Then this hero suffers a concussion, and we have defeat at Santa Cruz. Savo Island happens because the USN still has the Stark legacy wrapped around her neck like an albatross.  This all has to be sorted out clear into 1943. King has miscalculated how fast he can fix it, but he still has a pad. It appears that maybe by March 1943, things he started in June 1941 as Lantfleet Actual will finally bear fruit. These are things the Royal Navy should have done but did not for three years.     
-- Then there is the torpedo crisis in the USN and that overcautious submarine captain problem.
-- 1942 does not see the RN doing the heavy lifting.  Somerville has run for east Africa and is hiding out near Kenya, until the Pacific Fleet tears the guts out of Kido Butai. Up north, the Alexandria Raid of December 1941 has rather well shackled Cunningham's options for 6 months. He does his best, but he is functionally out of the war until he can get reinforcements.
-- How about the two wasted Club Runs the USS Wasp made to Malta? Do you think the USN was happy to see a very precious American flattop risked as a mere plane ferry only to see those Spitfires she delivered arrive at Malta and be destroyed upon landing because of stupid British op-sec incompetence? She will be wasted later because another expletive deleted fool thought it was a good idea to park in the middle of a Japanese submarine infested happy hunting ground and swan about in circles without rhyme or reason. 
-- I suppose the British howled when King told them to go to Hades in September of 1942 when he adjudged, he could not risk any more cruisers and destroyers for the Arctic Convoys considering the losses Ghormley racked up in his bungled operations off Guadalcanal. 
1942 was a year to make an American CNO go mad from pulling his hair out. A global naval war with a one ocean navy riddled with hitherto hidden command problems and with sudden discovered material defects and saddled with an incompetent army for a partner, and a sputtering LYING ineffectual naval ally who does not have its stuff together at all either, is a very tough naval war to fight. 
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e. Building this in Canada and Australia...

       

Why? The countries named had no experience with barbette mounts and machinery design and integration and could not build them at all.    
f. ATL speculation. This presenter has insufficient knowledge to credibly pull it off. See the hilarity above and below for why. 
g. Use of fleet carriers for ASW and other missions which were not for what they were intended. This was the argument the Lords of the Admiralty gave to the landlubber Churchill. Winnie believed in battleships. He prioritized the KGVs over the Indomitables.  What the British admirals should have argued was that aircraft carriers covered ocean with naval reconnaissance so that British battleships could quickly find enemy battleships. Flattops could then use planes to bomb enemy battleships and spot British battleship gunfire and allow British admirals a top-down view of how the naval fight went.  That was actual British naval tactical doctrine for aircraft carriers and dead wrong, but then they had not run Fleet Problems X-XX and they were still stuck in WWI. At least what they thought they knew made more sense than what they did which sank the HMS Hermes, HMS Glorious, HMS Courageous, HMS Ark Royal, HMS Eagle etc., etc., for no useful return at all. Maybe the RAF knew something about the FAA that we overlook? When the FAA were finally given a chance to design requirements and have industry produce their own aircraft, what did they generate?

Fulmar. Clay pigeon for Zeros and not too good at recon either.

Albacore, worse than the Swordfish she replaced. 


Firebrand. A pilot killer and underpowered deathtrap.
Seafire. Worse than the Spitfire Mark V which was her base model. More Zero bait. 

This is why Avengers, Corsairs, Wildcats (Martlets) and other American birds cluttered British flattop decks...

     
Notice the Avengers?    
h. Canada. Russia had a largish navy that mass murdered and committed war-crimes and atrocities, but otherwise in WWII was just militarily useless. How about Canada?   



Count all the Canadians... 

Bedford Basin, on the shores of Halifax, was the main convoy assembly point for merchant ships destined for the United Kindom. Above, ships awaiting sailing orders.


Exploit example.


 Whaler from H.M.C.S. CHILLIWACK alongside captured German submarine U-744.

Canadians never get enough credit. 

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i. Black Sea WWII. What should the minor naval powers do? Cower in port.
j. 2015 - 2025 and the Anglo nations. Everybody English speaking and not US should rally behind the UK and create a unified naval command. I thought that was the whole point of AUKUS. To create a unified naval alliance, except that the US is in it and Canada is not. RATS! it did not work out as intended? Too bad.
k. The US / Japan tonnage race in 1940 and 1941. Why was Japan outbuilding the US in warship tonnage? Three reasons...
--, The Japanese committed to their maximum effort in 1937 and the keels were just sliding down the weighs by 1940-1941 and that includes the Zuikakus and the Yamatos. 
--, The Americans had their warship construction facilities tied up repairing damaged British warships. Politics had little to do with this little side help, except that FDR kept it quiet. 
--, US warship construction yards were being activated from standby status to full mobilization. The presenter is confusing the Kaiser program with reactivation of New York, Philadelphia, Newport News, Boston and San Francisco. 
l. Japan and anti-aircraft missiles. Hunh? What was the unrotating projectile?
an unsuccessful British invasion of the Dodecan unsuccessful British invasion of the Dodecanese Islands in 1943.anese Islands in 1943
View of operator cabin. IWM photograph A9384.to an unsuccessful British invasion of the Dodecanese Islands in 1943

Just to be clear, the Germans tried to build a whole series of land-based missiles that used optical or radio beam steer guidance or heat detection to signal chase aircraft. These did not work at all.  The British fired volley rockets at aircraft. These did not work. The Japanese tried giant shotgun shells out of cruiser and battleship main gun armament. These did not work. The Italians tried barrage balloons. Those did not work. The Americans used radar steered and directed gunfire from AAA autocannons. They were the first to do so successfully. That worked. It still does.        
m. British 14 inch guns in quad mounts never worked. The reasons range from British inability to design paired electric hoists to an inability to solve the mutual shell interference in flight problem, but it was not bleeding edge technology. The French got it to work on the Dunkirks and the Richelieus. The British just screwed it all up. Occam's razor. Keep it simple Susan.     
n. Bletchley beat Doenitz. No. Doenitz beat Doenitz. He was an idiot. The allies were quick to exploit his perceived incompetence and inflexibility to their own initiatives when he kept doing the same stupid routines over and over like his insistence on long detailed radio reports again and again daily each same exact moment of the day from his U-boats. How easy was it to plot U-boats by radio-direction finding and maneuver convoys around them? It was not like the Japanese who would run convoys and task forces radio silent and would have to have American subs listening for their screw noises, close, detect and report them on their way to Guadalcanal as they left Rabaul or Truk was it?   No. The Germans thought they would administer their U-boats like they did their surface fleet. Yak. Yak. Yak.  Plot, plot, plot. Sink, sink, sink. Another exploit is the air to surface centimetric radar. Doenitz's own technical experts warned him the British had a radar that could spot U-boats at night from aircraft. Doenitz refused to believe it was possible and lost about 100 U-boats that way before his own captains took him to a sit-down and gave him a come to reason intervention moment. Then he bungled the snorkel as an answer to this threat not realizing that a submerged U-boat using a snorkel could be heard by US DIPPING SONARS (Thank you US Coast Guard weather buoys!) from 200 nautical miles away. That was a cork puller. 
o. Crete. The place could not be held. It was too close to Luftwaffe mainland air bases. Any speculation otherwise ignores local air logistics and supply issues. Churchill will repeat this mistake when against US advice he commits to an unsuccessful British invasion of the Dodecanese Islands in 1943.  Winnie had his heart in the right place, but when it came to war making he was no FDR.  
p. Global Fortress Program. For once I agree with the Presenter. A string of fortified and owned naval bases within say 2,000 nautical miles of each other (Like the Chinese do now... M.) would make sense. Just not next to a coast where the enemy can mass 4x your airpower. Crete and Singapore do not meet the criteria.  Do not use the execrable 5.25 inch guns for AAA because these do not work. Mosquito aircraft and seawater do not like each other. 
q. Japanese ASW sloop program? But they did. Why do you think US submariners killed over 100 of them along with about 100 destroyers or destroyer equivalents, not to mention thousands of ocean going sampans?  *(The Japanese claim more than 10,000 junks destroyed by US subs. US submariners do not claim anything like these numbers, more like 2,000 or so "barges". M.) 
r. Sloppy signals security. Everybody had this problem. The Germans tapped FDR's phone calls to Churchill. MacArthur yakked too much to Kruger. Halsey's forces never could stay off the radio. New Zealanders blew at least two Alamo Force ops by radio chatter. USAAF intruder raids could not stay off the radio so the Luftwaffe RDFed them to Schwinefurt ... twice.  The Russians blew Operation Saturn with their signal chatter. It was not just the Germans...
s. Hart versus Wavell or Hart versus Doorman or Hart versus MacArthur, or Hart versus (insert idiot's name here.). Unless it is Nimitz or Glassfoid or Slim, or Fletcher or Spruance or Eichelberger or Kenney, always go with Thomas Hart. He became very unpopular because he would not lie with grace. He had no use for fools, and that especially included the imbecilic Tom Phillips who he told to go to the devil just after that fool asked him to join forces and oppose the Japanese in the South China Sea. 
t. Final question. Who would I see for a week and what two books would I time travel back to what year?           
--- June 1933
--- U.S. Submarines Through 1945

An Illustrated Design History

By Norman Friedman
--- World War II at Sea: A Global Histor
by Craig L. Symonds |
---FDR

Points I pound home are the following.
-- Congress is not going to spend the money and the naval treaties are still in effect; but what can and should be done with what time and money that is available is to...
--------------------work on radar and sonar.
--------------------train crews.
--------------------fix the torpedoes.
--------------------get rid of MacArthur, Leahy, Stark, Pye, Kimmel,  Adolfus Andrews, Richmond Turner, Louis Brereton, Arthur Carpendar, Robert English, James Fife, Thomas Withers (especially incompetent.), John Wilkes (ditto), Brett and anybody and everybody currently fouling up in Bu-Nav, C and R and Bu-Ord. Fire Cordell Hull too.     
--------------------release the Philippine Islands and stand them up as a Commonwealth or TAKE THEM INTO THE UNION and dare the Japanese to just try and attack sovereign US soil. 
--------------------concrete runways do not constitute "fortifications". Pour them everywhere American planes can touch down on American Pacific islands.
--------------------build a set of fast oil tankers which can be flat-topped in a hurry. Call them oil tankers for shipping in Venezuelan oil. But build them. 
--------------------build submarines with snorkels and destroyers with ahead throw ASW mortars. 
--------------------figure out how to build fast ocean liners that can be converted into flattops quickly. 
--------------------fix the 1.1 inch gun or failing that license the Bofors in 20 mm and 40 mm from Sweden. 
--------------------buy or steal German universal machine guns before the Nazis catch on. Failing that, buy or steal the Czech heavy and medium machine guns that are the antecedents to the BREN and the BESA. 
--------------------scale the Browning up to an autocannon in the 20 mm range. Congratulations, you have your universal aircraft armament. 
--------------------train pilots now. Thousands of them. 
--------------------if Brewster Aircraft comes sniffing around, arrest the management and nationalize the company. 
--------------------ditto Curtiss Aircraft and Wright Engines. 
--------------------Get Lockheed and Boeing going. 
--------------------Do not cancel the Pratt Yellow Jacket. The USAAF needs a liquid-cooled 1500 kWatt engine. Otherwise it is nothing but Allisons and those Merlins. That is a lot of money down the drain and it still was not watts enough for the underpowered P-40s, P-39s and P-38s. 
--------------------the USN needs a heavy escort. The light cruiser at 6,000 tons with 5 by 2 x 5 inch 38s (Like a twin turreted Fletcher class DD) and at least a dozen AAA autocannons and a dozen torpedo tubes is a good fit for either aircraft carrier defense or for "trade protection", whatever lie Congress will buy, so lang as there are enough when Iron Bottom Sound becomes a thing.      
--------------------swallow pride and talk to the French. Both of us could use each other's help in the Depression. 
--------------------best be cautious of the British. *(See above for why.)
--------------------Christie for torpedoes and Christie for tanks. If you can get John Valentine Carden to defect to Rock Island, all the better. 

  

[miletus12]

Honestly: I do not know if Doctor Alexander Clarke just regurgitates internet history he has superficially glossed somewhere or if he is actually as stupid as he sounds to me.

He goes on about the French navy and he suggests the following...

Put 15 inch bore guns into the Dunkirks and build 7 of them.

Here is a bit of a shocker, professor, but a Dunkirk CANNOT take the shock of a 15 inch bore gun mount. The French, being much better naval architects than the British, put the best firepower combination into the smallest hull their technical base could manage to deal with the German panzer ship / pocket battleship problem. Now I would argue that they goofed this solution up, in that the correct answer to a panzer ship was a heavy cruiser like the Algerie, whose 8 inch bore guns would Swiss-cheese a Deutschland at the same battle ranges that the badly designed German could engage an Algerie, but that comes down to correct technical analysis and getting the right admirals to make the right build decisions in light of the analysis. The French are not the only ones who will make this wrong call. The Americans will build the Alaska class as their own mistake in response to supposed Japanese super cruisers based on imitating the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. These would not exist. Thye Japanese would in turn design answers to the Alaskas. Keeping up with the Joneses is an old naval comedy. \\

The Dunkirks or something like them, built to 15-inch bore armed standards would have been more like the Repulse or the Renown. These would have been no match for a Vittorio Veneto or a Bismarck. The French had to build Richelieus.

Building an aircraft carrier was a luxury that the French could not afford. The Bearn was a mistake. Another case of me-tooism. I would suggest that the French had no experience with this type of ship. Having the British technically advise the Marine National on how to convert a Normandie class battleship into a flattop was almost as comical as having the British advise the Americans on how to build battlecruisers (The Lexingtons.). Of course L’Abomination was going to not work properly. It is interesting that the French came up with an idea based on what they found wrong in the Bearn for their own native grown designs.



It would have been interesting to see a pair of these turkeys bobbing around at the time of the fall of France. Would they have been useful as adjuncts to the British effort in the Battle of the Atlantic? That is assuming that these had been built in place of say 4 French heavy cruisers?

I can state categorically that their elevators would have to be reworked and their arrestor gear arrangements would need to be fixed. That is a year in a shipyard.

The claim that the French aviation industry could have easily supplied air groups for both flattops is nonsense. The British aviation industry was better organized than the French and those people could not even develop or supply proper aircraft in numbers or types for their own smallish naval air force.

The clear and only fix for the Marine National pre-WWII was to develop a bug-out strategy for their ships and crews after the army inevitably screwed up.

It would take a political leap of faith by the French admiralty in the British to save the Marine National from the Toulon Scuttle. And given what happened before Huntziger screwed up at the Meuse, between the British and the French, and which the French admirals knew, this was not in the cards even before Dakar and Mers el Kebir.

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Fixing the Royal Navy...

Taking the Nelrod suggestion at face value, that is taking an HMS Nelson and tearing the engines out and replacing them with more powerful engines and voila 27 knot battleships. I have to shake my head at the sheer STUPIDITY of this suggestion by Doctor Clarke.

First; the ONLY nation on Earth with the super high pressure turbine plants who could attempt such an idiocy are the Japanese. The Americans will attempt something like it with a re-designed North Carolina class in the South Dakotas but look at what design alterations to hull form and power train and clutching and gears and screws they had to perform to obtain a compactified shorter North Carolina with thicker armor, a beamier hull, and slightly slower speed? Second, why pour money and time into a piece of junk? Those un-maneuverable, unstable flatirons, armed with execrable main artillery that even the British call the worst guns ever installed on a British battleship before the incompetently designed and built guns on the KGVs, were not cost effective to modernize. The RN, for once, not being complete ninnies, kept the modernization costs to the absolute minimum to keep that garbage viable in the slow squadron to which they were assigned, along with the R-class battleships.
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The KGVs, the bloody awful KGVs, should have been halted and rethought on the stocks. Talk about selling triple turret designs to the French for the Dunkirks? After the Nelrod fiascos, the British should have come to the Americans and begged pretty please, can you help us design some triple turrets for our KGVs? The French would not have made a dog's breakfast of the quadruple 14 inch bore gun mounts the British messed up. (See illustration.) Barbettes and gun house assembles with feed paths, elevate and slue and gun service routes are rather complex. You should start from what you know. The British knew the 4 x 2 layout and they knew the 15-inch bore guns. They built HMS Valiant to it and it worked like a futbol goalie on meth. There was a lesson there...



The French turned that (^^^) on British advice into this.



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The British, as the good doctor suggests, should have scattered escort building around the old empire, having Australia and Canada and South Africa and India build sloops and corvettes. He waxes eloquent about turbine production and expanded shipyards. Well, guess what? The British tried that idea in reality. What happened? It turns out that cutting turbines to tolerances is HARD. It took the Americans until 1914 to get it reliably right and then they had to go back and fix all their newly built turbine powered Standard battleships when they did.  Cutting the gears for a geared ratioed power train is even HARDER. The same Americans did not figure that one out until 1930 which is when they abandoned turbo-electric drive for geared ratioed drive. The Canadians could do the turbine with geared ratioed drive (Its called a TRANSMISSION.), because Westinghouse and General Electric and Babcock and Wilcox are just a border away. How about the other dominions? Here's a hint... if you cannot build a tank transmission (Australia) and have to import it from America because the British one you selected and tested is no good, then you might have a little trouble building even a small turbine-powered sloop in the late 1930s.

Here is another hint for our good doctor... The Flower class escort which is what I think he has in mind... used a triple expansion double action direct drive steam engine. That's the kind of engine that goes katonka, katonka, click, click, katonka, katonka click click, and makes your asdic .... useless when it is running at quarter turns on the shaft.  That is what the British built and that is what they had the Dominions who could, build.  

Wonder why the Americans were laughing at the British? (^^^). 

More aircraft carriers? What kind of aircraft carriers? Armored box hanger ones that could only operate 35-40 aircraft like the Indomitables and which are ruined after 1 bomb twangs the hull out of true and warps the drive shafts because those builders on the Clyde have not heard of shock mounting and proper shaft strutting? Or go for a British version of a Yorktown, except that it is shorter, and much more top-heavy, and cannot ride stable in heavy weather, and cannot take a torpedo and it wants to sink if you look at it funny like the HMS Ark Royal?     

Look I am not haranguing the Royal Navy here, (*Well I* am but you get tired of how perfect the WWII Royal Navy was and how stupid the Americans were in that war. M.), but if you really want to suggest how the RN could have improved in WWII, then credit them for what they got right and try to see if they could have done more of it and sooner. 

It was in the human factors at the middle levels where that the RN shined. They had some incredibly good ASW tacticians who took their lousy gear, terrible ships and an impossible situation, applied a bit of what we now know as the Monte Carlo matrix and stretched their too few ships and lousy asdics to the limits and managed to hold the line in the Battle of the Atlantic 2.0 long enough for better escorts and better gear to arrive in late 1942 and early 1943.   
       
Whether it was the Canadians who developed the two-destroyer creep drill in wartime or the British, who cares? The basic hunt drill for how to prosecute a submarine up to 1943 is 100% British/Canadian. It could have been worked out pre-war with ASW exercises instead of taken a whole year to develop.

Aircraft borne radar? Royal Navy. Can we have more of that sooner? 

Special operations and commando stuff. This is the Royal Marines. It would have helped at Narvik. 

But really... the pre-war thing that would have improved the Royal Navy the most; was keep Churchill away from it, have the junior admirals READ MAHAN or attend a US Naval War College course and GUT OUT fools like Pound and Phillips and promote Ramsey, Vian, Holland, especially Cunningham and maybe find a posting for Somerville where his good fleet  administration and bad judgment in battle help and do not hurt the Royal Navy.        

On the material side, there are a few things the RN can do as quick fixes. 

I suggest this notion of taking Hood, Renown and Repulse into hand and applying an upgrade to fit them as British equivalents to the Kongos as fast aircraft carrier bodyguard ships. Unlike the Japanese who did not arrange command facilities and an air director, I would like a rationalized pom-pom fit for close AAA to break up torpedo plane attacks, the 4 inch as high-angle AA for dive bombers and limited dual purpose, and a FIGHTER DIRECTOR installed with existent British air and surface search radar of the period.  These ships would be the CAP directors as well as flak traps.

The Courageous, Glorious and Furious would get similar AAA makeovers and would be all fighter equipped or mostly fighter equipped to provide fleet air defense in the two areas where the British can expect to use aircraft carriers...  the Mediterranean against the Italians and the Bay of Bengal against the Japanese.       

If the British build repeats of the Ark Royal, then be prepared to adopt the American superstructure flight deck, double rudders to tighten the turning circle, and bulge those bird farms' hulls to resist G7As and Type 95 and 93 torpedoes.

More pre-war Flower corvettes, sure, but enclose the pilot house better, adopt better bilge keels, install a decent kitchen, put an ASW mortar into them earlier and try to get the Americans to make an expletive deleted towed hydrophone array sooner than they did in 1944 after all the shooting was mostly over.

The torpedoes need to be tested.
  
The KGVs should be Valiants or built with 3 x 3 American pattern three gun turrets with either a British 15/42 or American 14/50 selected for the barrels. Secondary shouldf be British 4 or 4.5 if it can be developed (It will be the 4/50 because the 4.5 does not get solved until postwar. In 1939 the US 5/38 is out of reach as the USN is slapping it on anything that floats.). 

Or the KGVs, not too far along, should be wartime converted on the slips into flattops. Think about the Midways which started as Iowas reworked on paper. 
    
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British tactics on paper looked good until stacked up against the Japanese. One example...  British nightime use of floatplanes and flares was the inspiration for Japanese backlighting their enemies with artificial sunlight as they did to the Americans at Savo Island and to the ABDAfloat fleet at Java Sea, but the Japanese went further. They turned the floatplane into their primary recon asset and used it to scour the oceans to find the enemy. Their emphasis on the recon element of naval warfare paid enormous dividends. They built specialist seaplane cruisers with admiralty facilities and fleet staff control as well as large seaplane complements to gain a situation awareness advantage. The Americans went the specialist scout squadron aircraft element and air recon staff aboard an aircraft carrier route, but the point is that the British had NOTHING like this function either for surface or aircraft carrier battle drill.     

Tovey had to fumble and flail about to find Bismarck by shore-based RDF support. His aircraft carrier did not find Lutjens. Lutjen's BIG MOUTH found Lutjens. I remark with SARCASM that the RAF did not track Bismarck through the North Sea and that it was not until an American teaching an RN crew how to use a Lend lease PBY to plan search that the British knew Lutjens was coming when and where so that the Southhampton could radar track the German and steer Holland toward him. 

Procedures in recon as in lack of, cost the British 3 battleships, 3 aircraft carriers and a dozen cruisers. Incompetence in fleet air defense as a result further cost them 1 more battleship and 40 other warships before Pearl Harbor ever happened to the Americans.    
    
There is a lesson there...

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The Americans in 1939. 

1. Radar is a thing. The Americans have it by now and they know it works. It should be their highest priority. But in the real history, they dithered and delayed, and it bit them hard when they had not gone operational.  They had three years to outfit the existent capital fleet and their cruisers and they only had 12 working air search sets aboard ships by 1942  January. 

2. The 2 Ocean Navy Bill is a 1940 piece of legislation. It should have come earlier.  When the Japanese walked out of the London Naval Talks in 1935, what was wrong with the FDR administration that it did not push for it as part of the National Recovery?



3. This stupid Unreconstructed Confederate racist sack of manure was part of the reason.   

Claude Swanson became the 45th Governor of Virginia, serving from 1906 until 1910. He was known as a progressive: reducing railroad rates and reorganizing the new State Corporation Commission, adding more capable school superintendents from his position on the State Board of Education (and funding their salaries), and building roads, schools and a tuberculosis sanatorium, reorganizing the state Board of Health, and establishing a Board of Charities and Corrections with later became the Department of Public Welfare.[9] However, this was also an era of increased racial polarization in Virginia, and under Swanson and his lieutenant governor James Taylor Ellyson, African American schools received far fewer funds, and the state's eugenics program would flower in the 1920s.

Forced sterilization and unequal treatment of citizens was his legacy as a governor of Virginia state. He was a Woodrow Wilson democrat who brought this same "progressivism" to the American navy. This expletive deleted individual maladministered the American navy during the same years when Harold Stark and William Leahy maladmiralled their navy bureaus. 

But he died in July of 1939. He was succeeded by the rapscallion son of Thomas Edison who pushed for the construction of the Iowa class battleships for vote getting reasons. The stupid voters of New Jersey thought he would make a good governor, so he quit in June of 1940... HAH! He was a zilch as that, too. 

3. Who comes in... ?

   
 
Frank Knox.

You have to love this man, except that he advocated the illegal roundup of Japanese origin American citizens and that they be put in concentration camps.  I could write that the News of Pearl Harbor warped his normally clear and moral judgment, but wrong is wrong and evil is evil. It is a major blemish on his sterling record.       

From June 1940 onward he pushed the correct programs and correct people in the correct order as he became aware of all the manure that Claude Swanson left him. 

As for the suggestions, that Dr. Clarke suggests, for the American navy to undertake. Well, he missed the big material one about radar.  He did not mention the biggest human factors one that should have been addressed, which was the urgent necessity to clean out the rotten Navy Bureau system as well as fire a whole slue of admirals for incompetence and arrange court martials for others for clear dereliction of duty.  

4. I could make the following material suggestions only possible after June 1940. 

The oil tanker aircraft carriers. Build them out in the open as many and as fast as possible.    

Rush these into service. Bad planes are better than worse planes. 
 
1. Consolidated XP4Y Corregidor
2. Lockheed Hudson
3. Lockheed P-38 Lightning
4. Vultee BT-13 Valiant

Class of 1939.

How about 1940?

5. Bell XFL Airabonita
6. Boeing 307 Stratoliner (C-75)
7. Consolidated PB2Y Coronado
8. Grumman F4F Wildcat
9. Martin Maryland
10. North American P-64 (NA-50/NA-68)
11. Republic P-44 (Rocket)

Other material quick fixes include 
--- Mousetrap, which was a long delayed USN designed rocket boosted ahead thrown depth charge launcher.
--- PT boats.
--- Amtracs and Higgins boats.
--- 

--- and this...
   


I am not as concerned with CB battalions as I am with lack of infantry weapons for the Marine Corps.  

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If it has not been mentioned yet, I would have liked Sr. Clarke to have addressed the biggest USN shortcoming before WWII.  

U.S. Navy Surface Battle Doctrine and Victory in the Pacific Trent Hone

There were about 30 major surface gun and torpedo fleet actions in WWII, the most of any war in human history. 19 of those were fought by the United States Navy against the Imperial Japanese Navy. The Americans lost ten of those fights disastrously. The other allies never won ANY of the other 5 actions against the Japanese. 
 
Does that tell you something? 

The Americans could have done some better work in aircraft carrier warfare, too. There were 6 aircraft carrier on aircraft carrier engagements (not counting Rennell Island) The British were trounced in their 1 attempt. The Americans and Japanese fought 5 . The record is 3 wins 1 defeat and a draw (I count Coral Sea as an actual win, the way the British count Jutland as a win. We lost more tonnage, but the Japanese lost the war there at sea.) for the USN. The defeat at Santa Cruz was inexcusable. Leigh Noyes should have been court martialed and sent to prison for his incompetence for his part in mishandling USS Wasp and failing to follow Kincaid's orders. Miles Browning should have been flat out executed on the spot for his part in that debacle after he repeated the same exact mistakes he made at Midway. 

Concussion or no concussion, I would have kept this Jolly Roger in there pitching.



He is Frank Jack Fletcher. He "won" at Coral Sea, won at Midway and at Eastern Solomons. He gained the 3 vital victories in 1942. 

As for flattops. 

I think that an armored flight deck aircraft carrier was a wrong idea. The whole aircraft carrier is a floating bomb. The chief danger to it from above is "fire". The chief danger from below is the torpedo. Nothing is going to keep a 500 kilogram bomb or 8 inch naval shell outside the hanger where all the explody stuff is most vulnerable to ignition. And if you do not have compartmentation below the hanger *(and the British did not), you are going to turn turtle from that very armored flight deck that failed you and sink. What the designer of an aircraft carrier has to do, is contain the intrusion of fire and water and accept holes and explosions and a lot of people are going to die at damage control efforts so that the ship might live. 

So... four Yorktowns? Yes. But a dozen Sangamons, too.   


     

[miletus12]

The Netherlands Navy and their submarines.



The Dutch were the most efficient submariners of the years 1941-1943 in the Pacific War.

[miletus12]

Trash army in 2023, is the same trash army in 1943: THE RUSSIANS.



Myth 1. Bottomless manpower. There were a lot of them. The Russian command's incompetence killed a lot of them. They were running out of infantry by mid 1943.
Myth 2. The Red Army destroyed the Panzerwaffe at Kursk. That would explain all those German tanks the British faced outside Caen and that the Americans destroyed in Operation Cobra?
Myth 3. Blocking detachments or what Americans call "file closers". First: they did exist. Second, they were supposed to prevent front line units from retreating. HOWEVER, when Red Army units broke and ran for the rear, the blocking detachments, filled with cowards and secret police types, were the first to run. Second: Blocking detachments never accounted for most of the summary executions in the field. Whether NKVD or Red Army, the blocking detachments usually chivvied panicked units back into line. The massive numbers of soldiers shot for cowardice and desertion, were instead shot within their own units by their own comrades. Furthermore, the penal troops were processed the same way. THIS BEHAVIOR has reappeared in the Ukraine War.
Myth 4. Human wave assaults. The Russians were led by poorly trained officers at the lower unit level. They still are, but in 1943, and as we see now after a year of the Ukraine War, battle has a tendency to teach the survivors the right way to take ground is to let artillery hammer away and then try to swamp the enemy with a first echelon (Russians) zerg assault, in the hope for the second echelon breakthrough forces can exploit. THOSE are current American tactics with the substitution of artillery shock for infantry assault to blast open that hole. The Russians used meat then, and meat now, because they did not and do not know how to conduct combat logistics.
Myth 5. Operation Barbarossa was a spoiling attack to disrupt a Russian aggression planned against the Hitlerite regime. That Stalin would if he could, is a given, but the various spurious historical "proofs" melt in the actual records we have of Stalin's incomprehensible stupidity, cowardice and imbecility, combined with practical Red Army incompetence and inability to conduct even local operations without MASSIVE foreign technical and logistical assistance and expertise. The Russians were praying that the British and Americans would soon occuppy the Hitlerite regime's attention so they could march into Europe as fake liberators after the western powers had ground each other to bits. THAT was what Stalin wanted and what he functionally got. It just turned out that the crafty FDR made sure it was the RUSSIANS who were chopped up, not the Americans as Europe was liberated.
Myth 6. General Winter stopped the Wehrmacht. One: based on the fighting experience in the West, weather was an equal opportunity delayer and killer, that still did not remove the requirement for human beings to be present to stop an attacker. Example: Battle of the Bulge. American troops were as unprepared for a Belgian Winter 1944 (worst in a century) as the Germans had been for a Russian winter in 1941. Second: the defenders had to defend despite the snow and the cold. The Russians in front of Moscow, incompetent, died in their tens of thousands while the Germans sliced through them like a dull knife through hard cheese. The Germans had a logistics failure in that there were more Russians than effectors to neutralize them. The Germans ran out of gas and their equipment froze up. During the Bulge; the Americans adapted, still suffered cold casualties, but did not rout and they were still in supply. And they were still in the way. The Germans had a logistics failure in that the Americans had more than enough assets to shoot them up: plus the usual Germans ran out of gas and their equipment froze up.
Myth 7. Lend lease: Sokolov is right and Glantz is wrong. I used to be in the Glantz camp but now the Ukraine War has changed my mind. The Russian army today is the same as the one of 80 years ago. It needs HELP from Mainlander China and various stooge states to stay in the fight. It gets that help from CHINA and tacitly from India, Iran and several other tyrannies. In the Second World War it was the Anglo Americans who were the difference.

[miletus12]

The A6M Zero was superior to the F4F Wildcat? Was it?

1. Thw Wildcat served as the main USN frontline fighter until September 1943 which means it was the fighter that at sea bore the brunt of the burden of seizing USNAS air superiority from the IJNAS. It was not the Hellcat as is commonly hiostorically taught. It still formed up to 40% of USNAS fighter strength down to the end of WWII.
2. See chart.


Radios, tactics, training and fuel. You see a gradual exchange ratio shift as American tactics improve, pilot training hours increase, and pilot experience advantage shifts. The A6M had better flight characteristics, but was a lousy teamwork plane (no radio), had a distinctly inferior high speed corner turn inferiority and was fragile.

That accounts for the initial 1.5 Wildcats to 1 Zero ratio (1942), dropping to 1 Wildcat to 1 Zero (1943) and finally finishing at 1 Wildcat to 6 Zeroes ratio (1944 forward.).

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Make no mistake, the Hellcat and the Corsair were still wanted, but like the P-40, another "garbage" American fighter; the Wildcat could get it done during the rotten times.