The Dreadnought Effect.

[miletus12]

(COMEDY!), but seriously there could be a lesson here somewhere if one squints hard enough.





By now, one should be familiar with Lazerpig. Despite his NSFW presentations, he does offer insightful and sometimes profound commentary on historical matters from a different (drunken and confused) angle than the usual standard point of view.

He calls it the "Dreadnought Effect". I prefer to identify it as "technological blowback". This is where some institution or cadre or some inept person invents a new tool or type of warfare and then is trounced by the invention or type of warfare, so created, as used against him by his enemy.

The British usually are the exemplar of this blowback effect. 

Examples:
a. Dreadnoughts. Dogger Bank and Jutland. (I blame Beatty. I always blame Beatty.)  
b. aircraft carriers. Indian Ocean Raid 
c. Taranto, okay it was the Americans who were dented by that one, but since the British sort of needed a US Pacific Fleet to make their own defense of Singapore work/work, it still counts as one of their foul-ups, too.   
d. strategic bombing, and who says the AVRO Vulcan is in the same league as the B-47 or B-52? So who cares if one Vulcan "bombed" New York twice in 1962? SAC "bombed" New York hundreds of times. So, there. 
e. tanks! WWII is a whole six years of the British being pummeled by the Germans over that one.  

And so forth. I am sure the Chunnel will bite the British in the buttocks at some point, since they invented it.

 

[miletus12]

This ought to scare you funny.

1. If you are a citizen of Georgia or North Carolina, USA; there are missing nuclear weapons near Savannah and Raleigh Durham.
2. Rota Spain... be worried.
3. Somewhere in Colorado, USA *(Near Boulder, they named a city after a rock, go figure.) there might be a 2.5 megaton surprise waiting.
4. South Carolina, USA has a future, or does it? They found the one that wrecked the farmhouse, but the second one is still missing.
5. The Russians segment of the video has me scratching my head. The Davy Crocket gives a fair idea of just how heavy a small nuclear weapon would have to be *(about 50 kgs.), and the Russians managed to get one into a suitcase? (Gun type bomb design.) It would take a gorilla or two men to heft it.

By the weigh, (Notice the pun?), the Americans have lost at least ten strategic bombers and the Russians five submarines of which I know. ALL of them "potentially" carried at least one and as many as four "special packages", each. The Russians have never admitted how many strategic bombers they lost in their own territory (17), but they have definitely lost them.

6. Did I forget that Norway should be worried?

Publicly known events.

[lordroel]

Jan 10, 2022 3:54:46 GMT miletus12 said:

This ought to scare you funny.

1. If you are a citizen of Georgia or North Carolina, USA; there are missing nuclear weapons near Savannah and Raleigh Durham.
2. Rota Spain... be worried.
3. Somewhere in Colorado, USA *(Near Boulder, they named a city after a rock, go figure.) there might be a 2.5 megaton surprise waiting.
4. South Carolina, USA has a future, or does it? They found the one that wrecked the farmhouse, but the second one is still missing.
5. The Russians segment of the video has me scratching my head. The Davy Crocket gives a fair idea of just how heavy a small nuclear weapon would have to be *(about 50 kgs.), and the Russians managed to get one into a suitcase? (Gun type bomb design.) It would take a gorilla or two men to heft it.

By the weigh, (Notice the pun?), the Americans have lost at least ten strategic bombers and the Russians five submarines of which I know. ALL of them "potentially" carried at least one and as many as four "special packages", each. The Russians have never admitted how many strategic bombers they lost in their own territory (17), but they have definitely lost them.

6. Did I forget that Norway should be worried?

Publicly known events.

Have no problem if you post threads miletus12, but keep them focus on the original post as much as you can as you now have two different topics in one single thread.

[miletus12]

Dreadnought effect explanation.

Atomic weapons were invented by the Americans. They used them. They forgot that a fail-never technology does not and never can exist. One day, their invention will bite them. Inevitable blowback effect.

I do think this is an example of the Dreadnought Effect.

[stevep]

Jan 9, 2022 20:52:19 GMT miletus12 said:

The British usually are the exemplar of this blowback effect. 

Examples:
a. Dreadnoughts. Dogger Bank and Jutland. (I blame Beatty. I always blame Beatty.)  
b. aircraft carriers. Indian Ocean Raid 
c. Taranto, okay it was the Americans who were dented by that one, but since the British sort of needed a US Pacific Fleet to make their own defense of Singapore work/work, it still counts as one of their foul-ups, too.   
d. strategic bombing, and who says the AVRO Vulcan is in the same league as the B-47 or B-52? So who cares if one Vulcan "bombed" New York twice in 1962? SAC "bombed" New York hundreds of times. So, there. 
e. tanks! WWII is a whole six years of the British being pummeled by the Germans over that one.  

And so forth. I am sure the Chunnel will bite the British in the buttocks at some point, since they invented it.

  Let's see.

a)  Some merit but we still won and it was the surrender at Washington that really ruined the RN position here.

b)  So a major force defeats a much smaller one, nothing new there.  Britain had a much smaller force because it had already been fighting a war for 2-3 years by that stage and the success was actually avoided a battle on Japanese terms although some analysis suggests that Somerville came close to a battle on his terms which might have come as a nasty shock for the IJN.

c)  So Britain shouldn't use its initiative in a fight for survival because we should predict that a bunch of total idiots who might just end up as allies would totally screw things up a year or so down the line?  Ignoring for the moment that the USN, manpower aside lost nothing of significance at Pearl and the lack of large numbers of slow BBs probably helped them in the following conflict.  Or that the US would be unable as well as unwilling to actually assist in the defence of Malaya.  Or that its a debated point how much Taranto actually inspired the Japanese.

d)  You think Britain invented strategic bombing?  BIG home goal there.  Imperial Germany got there 1st both with zeppelins and then bombers.

e)  Actually the issue was less tanks than that the Germans developed what Britain for a while forgot, i.e. combined arms operations.  But then the Germans were quite successful at pummeling everyone for most of those 6 years.

  Your xenophobia tends to get in the way of your thought processes too often.  Which is a pity as you do have a good basis of knowledge in many areas but your inconsistency means that you cast doubt on everything you say.

[miletus12]

Jan 10, 2022 13:21:18 GMT stevep said:

Jan 9, 2022 20:52:19 GMT miletus12 said:

The British usually are the exemplar of this blowback effect. 

Examples:
a. Dreadnoughts. Dogger Bank and Jutland. (I blame Beatty. I always blame Beatty.)  
b. aircraft carriers. Indian Ocean Raid 
c. Taranto, okay it was the Americans who were dented by that one, but since the British sort of needed a US Pacific Fleet to make their own defense of Singapore work/work, it still counts as one of their foul-ups, too.   
d. strategic bombing, and who says the AVRO Vulcan is in the same league as the B-47 or B-52? So who cares if one Vulcan "bombed" New York twice in 1962? SAC "bombed" New York hundreds of times. So, there. 
e. tanks! WWII is a whole six years of the British being pummeled by the Germans over that one.  

And so forth. I am sure the Chunnel will bite the British in the buttocks at some point, since they invented it.

  Let's see.

a)  Some merit but we still won and it was the surrender at Washington that really ruined the RN position here.

b)  So a major force defeats a much smaller one, nothing new there.  Britain had a much smaller force because it had already been fighting a war for 2-3 years by that stage and the success was actually avoided a battle on Japanese terms although some analysis suggests that Somerville came close to a battle on his terms which might have come as a nasty shock for the IJN.

c)  So Britain shouldn't use its initiative in a fight for survival because we should predict that a bunch of total idiots who might just end up as allies would totally screw things up a year or so down the line?  Ignoring for the moment that the USN, manpower aside lost nothing of significance at Pearl and the lack of large numbers of slow BBs probably helped them in the following conflict.  Or that the US would be unable as well as unwilling to actually assist in the defence of Malaya.  Or that its a debated point how much Taranto actually inspired the Japanese.

d)  You think Britain invented strategic bombing?  BIG home goal there.  Imperial Germany got there 1st both with zeppelins and then bombers.

e)  Actually the issue was less tanks than that the Germans developed what Britain for a while forgot, i.e. combined arms operations.  But then the Germans were quite successful at pummeling everyone for most of those 6 years.

  Your xenophobia tends to get in the way of your thought processes too often.  Which is a pity as you do have a good basis of knowledge in many areas but your inconsistency means that you cast doubt on everything you say.

a. The Blowback was that the British did not understand their new weapon system at the user level. The Germans did. From ammunition and propellant storage, to signals and comms and to damage control, the Germans were plainly better trained with better understanding of the mechanicals. Dogger bank showed Hipper was the better admiral than Beatty. Jutland was a pure case of Jellicoe being a superb seaman with prescient situational awareness. Nevertheless; Beatty did his best to lose the battle for Jellicoe by failing to win the merge or accurately report contacts. 

b. Somerville rejected CAST and HYPO intelligence passed to him. FECB gave him the wrong date for Nagumo to show up. Somerville guessed wrong at where the Japanese would launch. Nagumo actually launched 100 nm further west than Somerville assumed. The RAF reconnaissance fan was botched out of Sri Lanka. By pure accident a Canadian PBY found the outer boundary of the Japanese air defense CAP and was shot down. The pilot got off a report and that was the first Somerville knew of Nagumo in the area. When Somerville launched his own search to find Yamaguchi's detached flattops, the search found Yamaguchi but misreported the position by 40 nautical miles north of where he really was. The Albacores, to attack on that contact, were launched and sent on a wrong bearing a La Mitscher at Midway.  Since the ASV fitted to the Albacores at that stage of the war in that latitude and IO weather had a search cone ahead of no better than 15 nautical miles for a capital ship sized target, the strike package missed to the south. The admiral who botched the plan was actually a chap named D. W Boyd. And as usual, the RAF, with radar, and a complete IADS at Colombo, was caught on the ground a day later and wiped out. HMS Hermes which was in the vicinity and had no business being there since Somerville had a full week to get her out of there, based on the HYPO and CAST information, was found fleeing and sunk. The cruisers, Cornwall and Dorsetshire, on detached duty to the southwest of the Colombo attack were an instant Nagumo bonus in that utter debacle. With this complete shambles reported back to him; Somerville did the only thing he could do. He hung around long enough to rescue the survivors off Cornwall and Dorsetshire, in retrospect a huge mistake if Nagumo had found him, since it was likely Indomitable and Formidable would have been hunted down and destroyed. But for some reason nagumo did not fly off a search even thougfh his CAP reported British planes of a carrier borne type in the area. Somerville finished the rescue, retreated west and avoided contact with Nagumo, for his own planes reported their contact with Nagumo's CAP. Somerville eventually retired to East Africa and based there ceding the central Indian Ocean as a no-man's ocean to the Japanese. 

For a bonus, the "slow squadron" of R's was soon sent to Madagascar for Operation Ironwood to cover it, where the amphibious landing was mishandled and the HMS Ramillies was torpedoed by a Japanese minisub in that confusion. 


c. Tom Phillips and his mentor, Dudley Pound, refined the Backhouse plan for empire defense in the South China Sea. They assumed that they would be able to take the units based out of Gibraltar (Somerville's future slow squadron of R class battleships and two Illustrious class carriers), and join it with a battlecruiser force to bodyguard the flattops. With cruisers already assigned to the Indian Ocean and a mixed allied force of American (US Asiatic fleet, Hart) and Dutch ships (Doorman) to make up British shortages in light forces, this Eastern Fleet under British command was supposed to power project into the South China sea and stop a Combined Fleet movement south towards Singapore. The Japanese would be "deterred" if they had the US Pacific fleet on their eastern flank and a flock of B-17s in the Philippines. This "plan" was based on British experience in the Mediterranean campaign in 1939 and 1940. The plan was cooked up at the ABC-1 and ABC-2 conferences and sold to Admiral Harold Stark as an alternative to Plan Orange. He bought it. You can see it in his Plan DOG memo. He sold it in turn to FDR, which in part explains the Pacific fleet move to Pearl Harbor, putting the hitherto out of range Pacific fleet (based at San Diego) into range of the Imperial Japanese Navy strategic weapon, their first mobile fleet which had a tactical reach radius of just 3,700 nautical miles, that is if they brought their tanker support with them. 

The Blowback from Taranto is this: the Japanese knew the Backhouse/Pound/Phillips plan backwards and forwards. To take that plan apart, Yamamoto looked at the Taranto operation and used it to model the neutralization of the American Pacific Fleet. Battleships or carriers, it did not matter as long as Kimmel did not move into the Marianas Islands as planned while the Japanese were entangled in the South China Sea. 

The further Blowback from Taranto was: One does not need aircraft carriers to bomb and torpedo ships. One uses planes with dedicated and highly trained aircrews. The other lesson the Japanese learned was that the Italians had torpedoed British warships using "Hunchbacks". The Spaviero was a slow, utterly obsolete flying piece of junk. The Japanese created a "Special Attack Force" of G3 and G4 bombers trained in anti-ship tactics. Then they moved it into Vichy French held southern Indochina and based that force there. This made nonsense of the British power projection plan and was the reason FDR sent Hirohito a letter on 6 December that amounted to telling the Japanese emperor to remove the presence of those forces or face war. 

To further develop the situation, the British plan to send 2 aircraft carriers, 2 battlecruisers 5 battleships, 3 cruisers and 8-12 destroyers went down the loo when the flattops planned were mission killed in a couple of club runs to Malta. One more carrier ran aground in the Caribbean after finishing repairs in the US. Some of the slow R class battleships were out of service under repair or hurried refit. Hood had been destroyed. Renown was committed so she was unavailable. Prince of Wales was fresh repaired from the Battle of the Denmark Strait and Repulse was free. Indomitable might later join them but she was the bird farm that ran aground as she missed that buoy that marked the channel into Kingston Jamaica.  So Force Z was rumped down to a battlecruiser and a battleship and four destroyers. The British (Phillips specifically) now suggested that the British aircraft carriers be replaced with AMERICAN aircraft carriers and that as agreed, the Asiatic fleet be chopped to Force Z along with the Far East Asia Air Force. (All of those B-17s.).

That was the gist of the meeting Phillips had with Hart at Manila, on 7 December 1941, local time. Phillips fully intended to take command as he assumed the ABC-1 Agreement entitled him to do. 

Here is what Hart knew and what he told Phillips.

1. The British Force Z was not of the strength promised.
2. Prince of Wales was a mechanical casualty unfit for war. Hart had this via the USN consul who reported that PoW was under repair at Colombo for engine problems. Hart was not a fool. More on how this relates to Phillips in a moment.
3. Japanese invasion convoys were at sea already headed for landings on the Kra Peninsula and probably for Lingayen Gulf. American air recon had seen these ships.     
4. Any power projection into the South China Sea was dead, because Japanese airpower was too strong. Hart mentioned Japanese bombers near Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), specifically.                 
5. Hart told Phillips that as the US was not yet in a state of war, the Asiatic Fleet was not going to be chopped to British command at all. What Hart meant was that things had moved beyond the Singapore plan and the Japanese had split the baby by basing in Indochina. All British notions were moot.

================================================

At this juncture, I do not know if Thomas Hart told Phillips to retreat Force Z west to the Andaman Islands, Kolkutta, or Colombo, Sri Lanka; but knowing from the record just what a fireball and irascible man Hart was, I suspect after some strong remonstrations; he would have advised Phillips "to get out of Singapore before he was bombed out". 

I do know from British admiralty records that Winston Churchill knew everything I have just written at least by 1 December about Japanese intentions, including the presence of the "special attack force", because the Americans told him, while his own navy kept mum. He found out about the convoys at sea about 12 hours after the Americans did locally. 

I also know around 1 December that Churchill asked Pound if Phillips should not hold up at Sri Lanka with Force Z instead of pressing on to Singapore. PoW was still undergoing emergency repairs and it would be an excuse Pound could use to order Phillips to hold in place. Pound did not do so. 

British critics like to criticize Ernest King for his subsequent decisions regarding the Royal Navy after FDR fired Stark and appointed him CNO. It was Stark who screwed up the American force dispositions and gave FDR bad naval advice to use the Pacific Fleet at Hawaii as a bluff. Part of that advice was to move Atlantic fleet assets around so the British could create Force Z as the Americans moved toward the Azores and Iceland. Stark agreed with Pound's overall plans, but like Pound, he was very inflexible and lacked the presence of mind to adapt to rapidly changing events.  On the RN side, it was obvious with the available information, that far from being a deterrent to aggression as the Pacific Fleet was not at Pearl Harbor, Force Z would be promptly attacked in a Kantai Kassen exercise in the Gulf of Siam; even if it had been at full strength and that it would be annihilated. All Tom Phillips did, with his doomed sortie, was allow Takagi to hang back out of range and watch the bomb-ex before he, Takagi, led the covering force in to backstop the landings Phillips was far too late to stop.

And the RAF with radars and an IADS in the Malay Settlements was caught on the ground (Brook Popham) with a full day's warning and they were wiped out.  Same thing happened in the Philippines with the Far East Asia Air Force. (Brereton, the guy who screwed up the Ploesti Raid and then Market Garden. Remember him?).  I actually blame MacArthur. Always blame MacArthur when something like that happens in the Southwest Pacific.      

If this reads like an anti-British rant; it is not. It is just to fill in the holes on how Taranto blew back on the British and the Americans, because there was this Italian admiral, Iachino, who told his incompetent boss, that it was a bad idea to park the Regia Marina's main battle fleet at Taranto without air warning facilities, fighter protection and within easy sortie range of a British fleet which was known to have a tactical radius out of Alexandria; Egypt of two thousand nautical miles, to have an aircraft carrier, and which had been observed conducting night fighting exercises. His boss, Mussolini, overruled him. After Taranto, Mussolini pulled back the fleet until the Italians could guarantee a no-repeat performance. (Wait for it.)   

There was this American admiral who had already told his boss the same thing about the Pacific Fleet and Pearl Harbor. Once the Taranto raid lessons (chickens) started to roost in OP-20-G, and Royal Ingersoll's letter started to make the rounds among the senior American commanders (Including Stark, Tower, King and Richardson; then commander of the Pacific Fleet and then his successor, Kimmel, see next...), James O. Richardson became very exorcised over that little lesson learned about not putting one's own fleet out there on a limb. He became so obnoxious that Roosevelt fired him. Enter Kimmel and Pearl Harboe happens. Nimitz goes out and the Pacific Fleet cannot back out because it is sunk. So: salvage in place and build a fortified naval base around it. Before Pearl Harbor, the anchorage and harbor, was being built into a forward staging base, not a true naval port like Bremerton, San Diego or Norfolk. After Pearl Harbor, the salvage in place and base construction to a full fleet base like San Diego happened. Another Taranto blow back lesson assimilated.

===================================================== 
  
The British went after the Zeppelin Sheds and U-boats in Belgium.



e. The Desert Army forgot. The Metro-army (1940 France) had it pounded into them that all arms cooperation was a thing. The Desert Army seems to have picked up bad habits in Egypt, such as jock columns, tank charges into anti-tank gun lines and also into OBVIOUS minefields, fire on the move, leaving the infantry in the lurch, making fortified boxes in the defense; instead of interlocking their mobile battle groups a la Roman maniple tactics as the Germans and Italians, practiced lax radio and cable discipline, conducted sloppy patrolling and possibly worst of all; the Royal Artillery was forming their own club and not paying attention to higher headquarters. So was the RAF for that matter. Close air support? Not for us! 

About my parochialism... as a point of view or my xenophobia.

If one has not picked up on it, I am a fan of Montgomery. He seems to have acquired the French habit of methodical battle, even more-so than the French. He insisted on as thorough preparation as the times and means allowed. He planned battles to a high degree with not one, but several plans. If Plan A was no good, he had a B and a C and even a D. He never panicked like Bradley did at the BULGE, and he never lost his head like Ritchie or Clark or Percival or Wainwright did. I adjudge his arrival in North Africa with a completely changed 8th Army. They learned discipline. Example: Montgomery had trouble with one of the "old hands", General Gatehouse, during the Battle of El Alamein. Off to Washington with Gatehouse. "If the Americans can dump Stark on us, we can dump him on them."  True, absolutely true. Gatehouse was Starked; because he mishandled his division and disobeyed orders during the battle. See Montgomery quote a bit later.

======================================================

Remember Kasserine Pass, that great American fiasco? Eisenhower sent Patton forward to clean house at II Corps, but what one does not usually know, is that Montgomery took a look at the British part of that disaster and black marked Kenneth Anderson for not sorting out Lloyd Fredendall after Ernest P. Harmon had warned him that Fredendall was incompetent and a yellow-belly before the disaster. It got so bad over there, that it percolated up the chains to Marshall and Alan Brooke. While Orlando Ward and Harmon put the boot in on Anderson locally and scoured his name with mud, it was Montgomery who fixed that "gentleman's little red wagon." with London. "I don't think we need him." to quote Montgomery, carried a lot of weight.      

    

  
    

[stevep]

Jan 10, 2022 23:59:18 GMT miletus12 said:

Jan 10, 2022 13:21:18 GMT stevep said:

  Let's see.

a)  Some merit but we still won and it was the surrender at Washington that really ruined the RN position here.

b)  So a major force defeats a much smaller one, nothing new there.  Britain had a much smaller force because it had already been fighting a war for 2-3 years by that stage and the success was actually avoided a battle on Japanese terms although some analysis suggests that Somerville came close to a battle on his terms which might have come as a nasty shock for the IJN.

c)  So Britain shouldn't use its initiative in a fight for survival because we should predict that a bunch of total idiots who might just end up as allies would totally screw things up a year or so down the line?  Ignoring for the moment that the USN, manpower aside lost nothing of significance at Pearl and the lack of large numbers of slow BBs probably helped them in the following conflict.  Or that the US would be unable as well as unwilling to actually assist in the defence of Malaya.  Or that its a debated point how much Taranto actually inspired the Japanese.

d)  You think Britain invented strategic bombing?  BIG home goal there.  Imperial Germany got there 1st both with zeppelins and then bombers.

e)  Actually the issue was less tanks than that the Germans developed what Britain for a while forgot, i.e. combined arms operations.  But then the Germans were quite successful at pummeling everyone for most of those 6 years.

  Your xenophobia tends to get in the way of your thought processes too often.  Which is a pity as you do have a good basis of knowledge in many areas but your inconsistency means that you cast doubt on everything you say.

a. The Blowback was that the British did not understand their new weapon system at the user level. The Germans did. From ammunition and propellant storage, to signals and comms and to damage control, the Germans were plainly better trained with better understanding of the mechanicals. Dogger bank showed Hipper was the better admiral than Beatty. Jutland was a pure case of Jellicoe being a superb seaman with prescient situational awareness. Nevertheless; Beatty did his best to lose the battle for Jellicoe by failing to win the merge or accurately report contacts. 

b. Somerville rejected CAST and HYPO intelligence passed to him. FECB gave him the wrong date for Nagumo to show up. Somerville guessed wrong at where the Japanese would launch. Nagumo actually launched 100 nm further west than Somerville assumed. The RAF reconnaissance fan was botched out of Sri Lanka. By pure accident a Canadian PBY found the outer boundary of the Japanese air defense CAP and was shot down. The pilot got off a report and that was the first Somerville knew of Nagumo in the area. When Somerville launched his own search to find Yamaguchi's detached flattops, the search found Yamaguchi but misreported the position by 40 nautical miles north of where he really was. The Albacores, to attack on that contact, were launched and sent on a wrong bearing a La Mitscher at Midway.  Since the ASV fitted to the Albacores at that stage of the war in that latitude and IO weather had a search cone ahead of no better than 15 nautical miles for a capital ship sized target, the strike package missed to the south. The admiral who botched the plan was actually a chap named D. W Boyd. And as usual, the RAF, with radar, and a complete IADS at Colombo, was caught on the ground a day later and wiped out. HMS Hermes which was in the vicinity and had no business being there since Somerville had a full week to get her out of there, based on the HYPO and CAST information, was found fleeing and sunk. The cruisers, Cornwall and Dorsetshire, on detached duty to the southwest of the Colombo attack were an instant Nagumo bonus in that utter debacle. With this complete shambles reported back to him; Somerville did the only thing he could do. He hung around long enough to rescue the survivors off Cornwall and Dorsetshire, in retrospect a huge mistake if Nagumo had found him, since it was likely Indomitable and Formidable would have been hunted down and destroyed. But for some reason nagumo did not fly off a search even thougfh his CAP reported British planes of a carrier borne type in the area. Somerville finished the rescue, retreated west and avoided contact with Nagumo, for his own planes reported their contact with Nagumo's CAP. Somerville eventually retired to East Africa and based there ceding the central Indian Ocean as a no-man's ocean to the Japanese. 

For a bonus, the "slow squadron" of R's was soon sent to Madagascar for Operation Ironwood to cover it, where the amphibious landing was mishandled and the HMS Ramillies was torpedoed by a Japanese minisub in that confusion. 


c. Tom Phillips and his mentor, Dudley Pound, refined the Backhouse plan for empire defense in the South China Sea. They assumed that they would be able to take the units based out of Gibraltar (Somerville's future slow squadron of R class battleships and two Illustrious class carriers), and join it with a battlecruiser force to bodyguard the flattops. With cruisers already assigned to the Indian Ocean and a mixed allied force of American (US Asiatic fleet, Hart) and Dutch ships (Doorman) to make up British shortages in light forces, this Eastern Fleet under British command was supposed to power project into the South China sea and stop a Combined Fleet movement south towards Singapore. The Japanese would be "deterred" if they had the US Pacific fleet on their eastern flank and a flock of B-17s in the Philippines. This "plan" was based on British experience in the Mediterranean campaign in 1939 and 1940. The plan was cooked up at the ABC-1 and ABC-2 conferences and sold to Admiral Harold Stark as an alternative to Plan Orange. He bought it. You can see it in his Plan DOG memo. He sold it in turn to FDR, which in part explains the Pacific fleet move to Pearl Harbor, putting the hitherto out of range Pacific fleet (based at San Diego) into range of the Imperial Japanese Navy strategic weapon, their first mobile fleet which had a tactical reach radius of just 3,700 nautical miles, that is if they brought their tanker support with them. 

The Blowback from Taranto is this: the Japanese knew the Backhouse/Pound/Phillips plan backwards and forwards. To take that plan apart, Yamamoto looked at the Taranto operation and used it to model the neutralization of the American Pacific Fleet. Battleships or carriers, it did not matter as long as Kimmel did not move into the Marianas Islands as planned while the Japanese were entangled in the South China Sea. 

The further Blowback from Taranto was: One does not need aircraft carriers to bomb and torpedo ships. One uses planes with dedicated and highly trained aircrews. The other lesson the Japanese learned was that the Italians had torpedoed British warships using "Hunchbacks". The Spaviero was a slow, utterly obsolete flying piece of junk. The Japanese created a "Special Attack Force" of G3 and G4 bombers trained in anti-ship tactics. Then they moved it into Vichy French held southern Indochina and based that force there. This made nonsense of the British power projection plan and was the reason FDR sent Hirohito a letter on 6 December that amounted to telling the Japanese emperor to remove the presence of those forces or face war. 

To further develop the situation, the British plan to send 2 aircraft carriers, 2 battlecruisers 5 battleships, 3 cruisers and 8-12 destroyers went down the loo when the flattops planned were mission killed in a couple of club runs to Malta. One more carrier ran aground in the Caribbean after finishing repairs in the US. Some of the slow R class battleships were out of service under repair or hurried refit. Hood had been destroyed. Renown was committed so she was unavailable. Prince of Wales was fresh repaired from the Battle of the Denmark Strait and Repulse was free. Indomitable might later join them but she was the bird farm that ran aground as she missed that buoy that marked the channel into Kingston Jamaica.  So Force Z was rumped down to a battlecruiser and a battleship and four destroyers. The British (Phillips specifically) now suggested that the British aircraft carriers be replaced with AMERICAN aircraft carriers and that as agreed, the Asiatic fleet be chopped to Force Z along with the Far East Asia Air Force. (All of those B-17s.).

That was the gist of the meeting Phillips had with Hart at Manila, on 7 December 1941, local time. Phillips fully intended to take command as he assumed the ABC-1 Agreement entitled him to do. 

Here is what Hart knew and what he told Phillips.

1. The British Force Z was not of the strength promised.
2. Prince of Wales was a mechanical casualty unfit for war. Hart had this via the USN consul who reported that PoW was under repair at Colombo for engine problems. Hart was not a fool. More on how this relates to Phillips in a moment.
3. Japanese invasion convoys were at sea already headed for landings on the Kra Peninsula and probably for Lingayen Gulf. American air recon had seen these ships.     
4. Any power projection into the South China Sea was dead, because Japanese airpower was too strong. Hart mentioned Japanese bombers near Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), specifically.                 
5. Hart told Phillips that as the US was not yet in a state of war, the Asiatic Fleet was not going to be chopped to British command at all. What Hart meant was that things had moved beyond the Singapore plan and the Japanese had split the baby by basing in Indochina. All British notions were moot.

================================================

At this juncture, I do not know if Thomas Hart told Phillips to retreat Force Z west to the Andaman Islands, Kolkutta, or Colombo, Sri Lanka; but knowing from the record just what a fireball and irascible man Hart was, I suspect after some strong remonstrations; he would have advised Phillips "to get out of Singapore before he was bombed out". 

I do know from British admiralty records that Winston Churchill knew everything I have just written at least by 1 December about Japanese intentions, including the presence of the "special attack force", because the Americans told him, while his own navy kept mum. He found out about the convoys at sea about 12 hours after the Americans did locally. 

I also know around 1 December that Churchill asked Pound if Phillips should not hold up at Sri Lanka with Force Z instead of pressing on to Singapore. PoW was still undergoing emergency repairs and it would be an excuse Pound could use to order Phillips to hold in place. Pound did not do so. 

British critics like to criticize Ernest King for his subsequent decisions regarding the Royal Navy after FDR fired Stark and appointed him CNO. It was Stark who screwed up the American force dispositions and gave FDR bad naval advice to use the Pacific Fleet at Hawaii as a bluff. Part of that advice was to move Atlantic fleet assets around so the British could create Force Z as the Americans moved toward the Azores and Iceland. Stark agreed with Pound's overall plans, but like Pound, he was very inflexible and lacked the presence of mind to adapt to rapidly changing events.  On the RN side, it was obvious with the available information, that far from being a deterrent to aggression as the Pacific Fleet was not at Pearl Harbor, Force Z would be promptly attacked in a Kantai Kassen exercise in the Gulf of Siam; even if it had been at full strength and that it would be annihilated. All Tom Phillips did, with his doomed sortie, was allow Takagi to hang back out of range and watch the bomb-ex before he, Takagi, led the covering force in to backstop the landings Phillips was far too late to stop.

And the RAF with radars and an IADS in the Malay Settlements was caught on the ground (Brook Popham) with a full day's warning and they were wiped out.  Same thing happened in the Philippines with the Far East Asia Air Force. (Brereton, the guy who screwed up the Ploesti Raid and then Market Garden. Remember him?).  I actually blame MacArthur. Always blame MacArthur when something like that happens in the Southwest Pacific.      

If this reads like an anti-British rant; it is not. It is just to fill in the holes on how Taranto blew back on the British and the Americans, because there was this Italian admiral, Iachino, who told his incompetent boss, that it was a bad idea to park the Regia Marina's main battle fleet at Taranto without air warning facilities, fighter protection and within easy sortie range of a British fleet which was known to have a tactical radius out of Alexandria; Egypt of two thousand nautical miles, to have an aircraft carrier, and which had been observed conducting night fighting exercises. His boss, Mussolini, overruled him. After Taranto, Mussolini pulled back the fleet until the Italians could guarantee a no-repeat performance. (Wait for it.)   

There was this American admiral who had already told his boss the same thing about the Pacific Fleet and Pearl Harbor. Once the Taranto raid lessons (chickens) started to roost in OP-20-G, and Royal Ingersoll's letter started to make the rounds among the senior American commanders (Including Stark, Tower, King and Richardson; then commander of the Pacific Fleet and then his successor, Kimmel, see next...), James O. Richardson became very exorcised over that little lesson learned about not putting one's own fleet out there on a limb. He became so obnoxious that Roosevelt fired him. Enter Kimmel and Pearl Harboe happens. Nimitz goes out and the Pacific Fleet cannot back out because it is sunk. So: salvage in place and build a fortified naval base around it. Before Pearl Harbor, the anchorage and harbor, was being built into a forward staging base, not a true naval port like Bremerton, San Diego or Norfolk. After Pearl Harbor, the salvage in place and base construction to a full fleet base like San Diego happened. Another Taranto blow back lesson assimilated.

===================================================== 
  
The British went after the Zeppelin Sheds and U-boats in Belgium.



e. The Desert Army forgot. The Metro-army (1940 France) had it pounded into them that all arms cooperation was a thing. The Desert Army seems to have picked up bad habits in Egypt, such as jock columns, tank charges into anti-tank gun lines and also into OBVIOUS minefields, fire on the move, leaving the infantry in the lurch, making fortified boxes in the defense; instead of interlocking their mobile battle groups a la Roman maniple tactics as the Germans and Italians, practiced lax radio and cable discipline, conducted sloppy patrolling and possibly worst of all; the Royal Artillery was forming their own club and not paying attention to higher headquarters. So was the RAF for that matter. Close air support? Not for us! 

About my parochialism... as a point of view or my xenophobia.

If one has not picked up on it, I am a fan of Montgomery. He seems to have acquired the French habit of methodical battle, even more-so than the French. He insisted on as thorough preparation as the times and means allowed. He planned battles to a high degree with not one, but several plans. If Plan A was no good, he had a B and a C and even a D. He never panicked like Bradley did at the BULGE, and he never lost his head like Ritchie or Clark or Percival or Wainwright did. I adjudge his arrival in North Africa with a completely changed 8th Army. They learned discipline. Example: Montgomery had trouble with one of the "old hands", General Gatehouse, during the Battle of El Alamein. Off to Washington with Gatehouse. "If the Americans can dump Stark on us, we can dump him on them."  True, absolutely true. Gatehouse was Starked; because he mishandled his division and disobeyed orders during the battle. See Montgomery quote a bit later.

======================================================

Remember Kasserine Pass, that great American fiasco? Eisenhower sent Patton forward to clean house at II Corps, but what one does not usually know, is that Montgomery took a look at the British part of that disaster and black marked Kenneth Anderson for not sorting out Lloyd Fredendall after Ernest P. Harmon had warned him that Fredendall was incompetent and a yellow-belly before the disaster. It got so bad over there, that it percolated up the chains to Marshall and Alan Brooke. While Orlando Ward and Harmon put the boot in on Anderson locally and scoured his name with mud, it was Montgomery who fixed that "gentleman's little red wagon." with London. "I don't think we need him." to quote Montgomery, carried a lot of weight.      

 a)  Both sides made mistakes but I stand by my previous statement.  The British GF proved fit for purpose despite some shortcomings which should have been noticed earlier but were rectified  in the next year or so.  The HSF was basically a disaster for Germany at the strategic level and proved a waste of resources as well. 

 b)  Somerville did what he could given the forces available.  That Britain had been tied up for the last 2+ years and hence was unable to mobilize enough forces to defend the Malaya region on its own. 

c)  There was no plan to commit the bulk of the US Pacific fleet to the defence of the SE Asia region any more than they intended to try and protect the Philippines, which they had given up on before the war started.  That the USN and political leadership failed to guard against a Japanese attack was NOT Britain's fault. 

  I don't think that even the USN had any idea of the range and performance of the Japanese a/c at the time so that's a dubious argument. 

[miletus12]

Jan 11, 2022 18:56:20 GMT stevep said:

c)  There was no plan to commit the bulk of the US Pacific fleet to the defence of the SE Asia region any more than they intended to try and protect the Philippines, which they had given up on before the war started.  That the USN and political leadership failed to guard against a Japanese attack was NOT Britain's fault. 

I recommend this thesis by Andrew Boyd.

Worthy of better Memory: The Royal Navy and the defence of the Eastern Empire 1935 - 1942 Volume 1 of 2

Worthy of better Memory: The Royal Navy and the defence of the Eastern Empire 1935 - 1942 Volume 2 of 2

Everything I wrote, he covers in exhaustive detail. Especially that part where He notes that Phillips and Pound tried to get the Americans to launch a surprise air raid on the Japanese a la Taranto.

That was ABC-2.

The rest of that story is from British and American official records covering ABC-1 and ABC-2.

Some accounting, from Hyperwar, is given here, but Boyd covers it better along with who actually suggested the Pearl Harbor type raid on the IJN primary anchorage.

One asked if it was Britain's fault that Stark and Kimmel were not qualified and were not removed before they made their mistakes? No, they were fired once they failed to perform in war. Was it Britain's fault that Tom Phillips and Dudley Pound were unqualified and not removed before their mistakes lost the British their empire? Perhaps, not, but it can be shown that their actions and plans did not result in positive outcomes. Pound, like Charles Portal of the RAF, was not relieved when he was clearly medically unfit. Tom Phillips, possibly imitating Sir George Tryon, went down with HMS Prince of Wales, rather than face his music.

As for Thomas Hart's assessment of Phillips and his attempt to implement his, Phillips' plan at that famous Manila meeting? Hart told him, Phillip, that he, Hart, would not allow his fleet to be put under Phillips' command. That was about the only correct decision that was made in the Pacific Ocean on the allied side in the month of December. The Asiatic fleet was thus saved to become the nucleus of the future 7th Fleet.

There was enough blame to spread among the allied navies, but the British navy recommendations for dealing with the Japanese were the first cause for FDR to move the Pacific fleet westward into IJN reach. And yes, the British expected the Americans to move west into the Mandates to threaten the Japanese in that quarter prior to movement to the Philippine Islands, because that was the American plan they were shown.

We will disagree. That is okay. We should. The only thing to remember is; that the recent evidence shows that it was not all only American mistakes or even mainly American mistakes that created the British Eastern Command disasters.

[miletus12]

Jan 11, 2022 18:56:20 GMT stevep said:

I don't think that even the USN had any idea of the range and performance of the Japanese a/c at the time so that's a dubious argument. 

About that warplan?

From: Commander-in-Chief, U. S. Pacific Fleet. To: Distribution List for WPPac-46. Subject: WPPac-46.

The Through Ticket to Manila was abandoned in 1935. The phased approach warplans began with Orange 35.

About the

Jan 10, 2022 23:59:18 GMT miletus12 said:

c. Tom Phillips and his mentor, Dudley Pound, refined the Backhouse plan for empire defense in the South China Sea. They assumed that they would be able to take the units based out of Gibraltar (Somerville's future slow squadron of R class battleships and two Illustrious class carriers), and join it with a battlecruiser force to bodyguard the flattops. With cruisers already assigned to the Indian Ocean and a mixed allied force of American (US Asiatic fleet, Hart) and Dutch ships (Doorman) to make up British shortages in light forces, this Eastern Fleet under British command was supposed to power project into the South China sea and stop a Combined Fleet movement south towards Singapore. The Japanese would be "deterred" if they had the US Pacific fleet on their eastern flank and a flock of B-17s in the Philippines. This "plan" was based on British experience in the Mediterranean campaign in 1939 and 1940. The plan was cooked up at the ABC-1 and ABC-2 conferences and sold to Admiral Harold Stark as an alternative to Plan Orange. He bought it. You can see it in his Plan DOG memo. He sold it in turn to FDR, which in part explains the Pacific fleet move to Pearl Harbor, putting the hitherto out of range Pacific fleet (based at San Diego) into range of the Imperial Japanese Navy strategic weapon, their first mobile fleet which had a tactical reach radius of just 3,700 nautical miles, that is if they brought their tanker support with them. 

Reiterated. The range of the Japanese G3 and G4 bombers were known to the Americans.

Chennault could work calipers.

[stevep]

Jan 12, 2022 22:15:23 GMT miletus12 said:

Jan 11, 2022 18:56:20 GMT stevep said:

c)  There was no plan to commit the bulk of the US Pacific fleet to the defence of the SE Asia region any more than they intended to try and protect the Philippines, which they had given up on before the war started.  That the USN and political leadership failed to guard against a Japanese attack was NOT Britain's fault. 

I recommend this thesis by Andrew Boyd.

Worthy of better Memory: The Royal Navy and the defence of the Eastern Empire 1935 - 1942 Volume 1 of 2

Worthy of better Memory: The Royal Navy and the defence of the Eastern Empire 1935 - 1942 Volume 2 of 2

Everything I wrote, he covers in exhaustive detail. Especially that part where He notes that Phillips and Pound tried to get the Americans to launch a surprise air raid on the Japanese a la Taranto.

That was ABC-2.

The rest of that story is from British and American official records covering ABC-1 and ABC-2.

Some accounting, from Hyperwar, is given here, but Boyd covers it better along with who actually suggested the Pearl Harbor type raid on the IJN primary anchorage.

One asked if it was Britain's fault that Stark and Kimmel were not qualified and were not removed before they made their mistakes? No, they were fired once they failed to perform in war. Was it Britain's fault that Tom Phillips and Dudley Pound were unqualified and not removed before their mistakes lost the British their empire? Perhaps, not, but it can be shown that their actions and plans did not result in positive outcomes. Pound, like Charles Portal of the RAF, was not relieved when he was clearly medically unfit. Tom Phillips, possibly imitating Sir George Tryon, went down with HMS Prince of Wales, rather than face his music.

As for Thomas Hart's assessment of Phillips and his attempt to implement his, Phillips' plan at that famous Manila meeting? Hart told him, Phillip, that he, Hart, would not allow his fleet to be put under Phillips' command. That was about the only correct decision that was made in the Pacific Ocean on the allied side in the month of December. The Asiatic fleet was thus saved to become the nucleus of the future 7th Fleet.

There was enough blame to spread among the allied navies, but the British navy recommendations for dealing with the Japanese were the first cause for FDR to move the Pacific fleet westward into IJN reach. And yes, the British expected the Americans to move west into the Mandates to threaten the Japanese in that quarter prior to movement to the Philippine Islands, because that was the American plan they were shown.

We will disagree. That is okay. We should. The only thing to remember is; that the recent evidence shows that it was not all only American mistakes or even mainly American mistakes that created the British Eastern Command disasters.

a)  I thought much of it was lost in the attempted defence of the DEI?

b)  That's a different thing from the USN directly aiding the defence of Malaya and the DEI.  Possibly you meant only such raids, which weren't greatly affected by the loss/damage of slow and elderly BBs, in which case we were at cross purposes.  Other losses of curisers and DDs were probably more important in that effect.

c)  I'm not aware of anyone saying the entire disaster was the US's fault.  Just been pointing out that without the advantage of hindsight its doubtful that Britain could have done much more than it did with the losses and problems it had suffered from 2+ years of war and the defeat of allies.  Some better decisions could well have been made [not just by Churchill] but saving Malaya and the western DEI, the key areas in the Far East which would have greatly shortened the war against Japan was always going to be difficult.

[stevep]

Jan 12, 2022 22:39:13 GMT miletus12 said:

Jan 11, 2022 18:56:20 GMT stevep said:

I don't think that even the USN had any idea of the range and performance of the Japanese a/c at the time so that's a dubious argument. 

About that warplan?

From: Commander-in-Chief, U. S. Pacific Fleet. To: Distribution List for WPPac-46. Subject: WPPac-46.

The Through Ticket to Manila was abandoned in 1935. The phased approach warplans began with Orange 35.

About the

Jan 10, 2022 23:59:18 GMT miletus12 said:

c. Tom Phillips and his mentor, Dudley Pound, refined the Backhouse plan for empire defense in the South China Sea. They assumed that they would be able to take the units based out of Gibraltar (Somerville's future slow squadron of R class battleships and two Illustrious class carriers), and join it with a battlecruiser force to bodyguard the flattops. With cruisers already assigned to the Indian Ocean and a mixed allied force of American (US Asiatic fleet, Hart) and Dutch ships (Doorman) to make up British shortages in light forces, this Eastern Fleet under British command was supposed to power project into the South China sea and stop a Combined Fleet movement south towards Singapore. The Japanese would be "deterred" if they had the US Pacific fleet on their eastern flank and a flock of B-17s in the Philippines. This "plan" was based on British experience in the Mediterranean campaign in 1939 and 1940. The plan was cooked up at the ABC-1 and ABC-2 conferences and sold to Admiral Harold Stark as an alternative to Plan Orange. He bought it. You can see it in his Plan DOG memo. He sold it in turn to FDR, which in part explains the Pacific fleet move to Pearl Harbor, putting the hitherto out of range Pacific fleet (based at San Diego) into range of the Imperial Japanese Navy strategic weapon, their first mobile fleet which had a tactical reach radius of just 3,700 nautical miles, that is if they brought their tanker support with them. 

Reiterated. The range of the Japanese G3 and G4 bombers were known to the Americans.

Chennault could work calipers.

a)  Which was basically what I said.  That the USN had no intent to make a major [i.e. fleet sized] effort to defend the Philippines, let alone the DEI/Malaya.

b)  As the article mentioned Chennault passed on details about the Japanese a/c and others were apparently lost with the Panay.  - Which does suggest that possibly Japanese intelligence might somehow have gained knowledge of this and the gunboat was deliberately sunk to destroy that information.  However it also mentioned that the US military overall if not totally ignored that information.  As such its doubtful that any US military figures outside his people in China knew of those capabilities and I very much expect that hence none of this information was available to British forces in defence of SE Asia.

  I will mention as an aside that someone on another site I know to be extremely knowledgeable on WWII in the region has said at least once that the AVG's claims were vastly overrated.  Possibly this was something to do with the fact that the pilots were getting a bonus for kills and also of course air kills were generally overstated throughout the war.  I didn't ask for more information at the time as it was a side issue on what was a naval board although I can't remember anyone questioning it.  However from what Chennault says he did manage to develop a very effective non-radar system for gathering information on incoming Japanese raids against Chinese targets.  Then he had to set up an intelligence network to make bombing of Japanese targets worthwhile when Stilwell was a major barrier to gathering such information so he had to circumvent him.  Sounds like a very impressive character.

[miletus12]

A1. The British still assumed the Pacific Fleet would be headed west.
B1. One should read Boyd. He deals with FECB, which was aware of it; and which was incredibly incompetent about it.
B2. Chennault also sent it by diplomatic courier. It reached the United States. It was lost in the USAAC bureaucracy.
B3. Chennault carried the knowledge in his head. He returned to the United States and taught it at the Fighter Tactics School before he was pulled to form the Flying Tigers / AVG and sent back to China.\

=======================================================

Just because the Hollywood treatment has turned the AVG into legends, one should not assume that the AVG was immune to human error and exaggeration.

www.cia.gov/static/94bf6caa6473683acfdbe5e17678011d/Claire-Lee-Chennault.pdf

On 30 April 1937
Chennault retired from the US Army Air Corps; the next morning he sailed for China on a three-month contract to make a confidential survey of the Chinese Air Force (CAF). He interrupted his journey to make a side trip through Japan that would illustrate his far-sightedness, his great interest in intelligence, and the almost natural feel he had for its acquisition.

Billy McDonald was waiting on the dock at Kobe, Japan, when the liner President Garfield docked. McDonald was one of the other two pilots on the Flying Trapeze. Chennault had recommended him and several others to the Chinese, and McDonald was now working at the CAF flight school at Hangchow. Had the Japanese known that, they would not have granted McDonald a visa or, as Chennault put it, “ensured the ubiquitous little fellows of the secret police on our trail.”

But McDonald somehow managed to get himself listed as an assistant manager of a troupe of acrobats that was touring Japan and passed through
passport formalities unnoticed. He stayed with the acrobats while they appeared at several theaters, then left them in Osaka to be on the dock when
the President Garfield arrived. In his passport, Chennault was identified as a farmer. What followed was like the excellent adventure of two young operations officers on a field training exercise. They hired an open car and tried to look like tourists as they “set off to see the country through the eyes of experienced airmen gauging potential targets.” They hid cameras and binoculars under their topcoats and, with “an unhealthy interest in
harbors and airfields,” toured Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe, then sailed the inland sea where they tried to identify shipping routes and islands where new
war industries were being established. Chennault said nothing in his memoirs about planning for this trip, but he must have done a good deal of it. There was the matter of his identity and McDonald’s “cover,” and the itinerary, which took the two through industrial districts, near construction sites, and to “areas where industry seemed to be expanding with the suspicious speed of a military enterprise.”

The trip was very successful, Chennault thought. They took photos of potential targets and “filled notebooks full of data.”

“Much to my surprise,” he wrote, “I found out four years later that our notebooks and pictures contained more information on Japanese targets
than the War Department Intelligence files.” This Japanese interlude gives an excellent insight into Chennault’s thinking at a time when America had virtually no experience in covert collection. It showed the value he set on intelligence and its role in the Pacific war
he knew would come—and that he could find ways to get it.

Kind of shows that Americans were getting the data and how they got it.

Intelligence was now a major concern. Within the US military establishment, “current intelligence on the Orient just didn’t exist,” he wrote. He looked for ways to learn about his enemy, and what he learned he shared with the US embassy. From Japanese airplanes that crashed during the first air battles he salvaged equipment and sent the best of the materiel to the US naval attaché. With the
Japanese advancing on Nanking, the attaché secured it in the safest place he knew, aboard the US gunboat Panay. Two days later the Panay was attacked by the Japanese and sent to the bottom of the Yangtze. With it went Chennault’s collection of Japanese
military equipment.

Chennault continued to collect everything he could about the Japanese Air Force, but his efforts made little impression back in Washington. In 1939, the Chinese captured an intact Japanese Type 97 “Nate” fighter. Chennault had it flown in extensive tests against comparable British, American and
Russian aircraft and compiled a thick dossier on the Nate’s construction and performance. He believed it was one of the best acrobatic airplanes ever built— “climbs like a skyrocket and maneuvers like a squirrel”— and turned the dossier over to US military intelligence.

In time Chennault received a letter from the War Department. It said that “aeronautical experts believed it was impossible to build an airplane
with such performance… with the specifications submitted.”

In late 1940, he visited Washington and brought with him data on the first model “Zero.” That information was never disseminated. “American pilots got their first information on its performance from the Zero’s 20-mm. cannon a year later over Oahu and the Philippines.”6

So; the information did get back.

How do we know this?

The XF5F began in 1935, but really took off in 1938.

The Skyrocket’s only outstanding feature was its 4,000 ft/min (20.32 m/sec) rate-of-climb. The rate of climb of the XF4U-1was 2,660 ft/min (13.51 m/sec) and the Bell XFL-1 was 2,630 ft/min (13.36 m/sec). With a slower overall speed, that was even slower than its heir apparent, the single-engine F6F Hellcat.

Now who screwed that program up? Bu-Air's John Tower. Same bozo who fumble-dorked the F4U.

Who buried Chennault's data in the USAAC? Rufus Bratton screwed that one up. He was ably assisted in his mistake by the incredibly incompetent George H. Brett.

The Blowback Effect from Brett, the bomber baron, is that he hated Chennault's guts.  He was also worried that if the USAAC technical branch started to sidetrack funding into fighters' development, he would not get his massed bomber fleets.

But somebody paid attention.  

[miletus12]

Why send battleships to their doom? Were the British really that stupid?

Backhouse's Plan. Why did it fail?
a. Intelligence failures.
b. European conflict distraction.
c. British force allocation was bollixed.
d. British ideas about Japanese strength were helped by the fact that the British had HELPED the Japanese build that strength through naval and air cooperation, and a couple of British traitors who worked for the Japanese and were caught and to save their lives spilled their guts on what they did and knew.
e. What the British did not know was just how good Japanese naval aviation was. And that ignorance, coupled with the arrogance, stupidity, and racism of some British admirals, such as Tom Phillips who dismissed the Japanese as incapable, set up the recipe for disaster.
f. And of course the battleship mania still held in the RN long after the USN had started to go all aircraft carrier.
g. Indochina was NOT considered as Drachinfel claimed. The British did not understand long ranged antiship strike.
h. Force H redeployed as Phase I.
i. US Lantfleet would cover the British areas of Atlantic responsibility. This British assumption was arrogant.
j. USN planning was much BETTER. The RN was never good at this aspect in WWII.
k. Musical chairs with ships, was Italian bollixed. Several QEs were wrecked in Alexandria.
l. Revised Backhouse plan was now devised as the ABC-2 plan. This Tom Phillips concocted garbage was in direct contravention to Plan Orange.
m. The two-phase plan was finally cobbled together. This was a first fast squadron to be followed by slow squadron. The timetable was fixed to reach of the full strength (Force Z.) by March 1942. Add the British thought their Mediterranean experience would allow the small Force Z fast squadron, to meet the "expected" weak Japanese antiship strike forces.
n. The lie was that British admiralty advised Phillips to retreat from Singapore. We KNOW this never happened. How? Churchill wanted Pound to order Phillips to stay at Sri Lanka where the defective and badly built and incompetently crewed HMS Prince of Wales was undergoing emergency engine repairs. Pound refused, telling the prime minister that the man on the scene was in the best position to know what was what. In recent Admiralty documents this meeting between Churchill and Pound came to light.
o. Phillips did not understand what the G3 and G4 bombers could do or their incredible range. These were not Spavieros. They were much better antiship strike aircraft.
p. British assessment of the IJN deployment plan was not at all accurate as Drachinfel implied. The three committed IJN squadrons were deployed in three taskings, the Kra Ithsmus, the Philippine island of Luzon, and the Pearl Harbor Raid Force. The FEAC section, the intelligence unit of Eastern Fleet, screwed this intelligence estimate totally up.
p. The meeting between Hart and Phillips is not properly mentioned and what Drachinfel claimed NEVER HAPPENED. This is where Hart told Phillips that the Americans were not going to join the British and allow themselves to be destroyed by an incompetent British admiral's mad schemes. He did send four destroyers as per agreement, but Hart was taking his forces SOUTH. The "intentions" the British assumed were never going to hapopen. This was to get Hart into considerable political hot water, immediately with FDR and with the incredibly imbecilic CNO Harold Stark, the WORST US admiral of the war next to Richmond Turner, though Marc Mitscher, as an incompetent, is in there, neck and neck, with those two for first place among the fools.
(If I wax eloquent about this history, it is because I have pulled this information about Force Z. from "The Royal Navy in Eastern Waters: Linchpin of Victory 1935-1942" by Andrew Boyd. It is an incredible tale of British adaptation to disaster after "Tom Thumb" goofed the Backhouse Plan up completely. For Mitscher, Turner, and the rest of the Americans, "Black Shoe Carrier Admiral: Frank Jack Fletcher at Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal by John Lundstrom. M.)
q. The things of 7 December happened, and Tom Phillips sortied anyway.
-- element of surprise.
-- weather cover.
-- light bombers and inaccurate high altitude bombing.
r. The Japanese reacted to Phillip's sortie.
s. The Japanese botched the first search. The British swanned around and then headed for home. The Japanese circus around Chokai happened and then a confluence: Kwantun report came in. Phillips went after this phantom report. The Japanese discovered him (I-58) and the Japanese chased after the contact.
t. The attack on HMS Tenedos happened. The Japanese got lucky and they found Phillips. Phillips misinterpreted an advisory from the RAF. Then a third contact, and the attacks begin. The first attacks were light bombs from high altitude on Repulse. Then comes the attack on HMS Prince of Wales. Golden BB doomed her. What happened... happened. Incompetent damage control and incompetent design in the ship itself, doomed the Prince of Wales.
HMS Repulse sent a signal asking for air cover. And the third attack comes in. By now Prince of Wales was doomed. The further incompetence of the damage control hastened the end. HMS Repulse was doing well except for that last pincer (Herringbone in USN parlance.). Repulse was lost.
u. Both capital ships were eliminated.
v. So that was the end of the RN forever.
w. Drachinfel tries a counterfactual. He was optimistic. If not the Konoye Special Attack Force, KONDO's surface force would have annihilated Phillip's force as he was closing on the reported Force Z position.

That is the Dreadnought Effect.

Miletus12

[miletus12]

This is too funny to ignore. Dueling ocean liners. One inept German and one incompetent British.

Stupid is as STUPID DOES.

They do each other proper. And as they screw up and finally turn to ram each other, a third party runs out to distract them. The distraction works. The two ram attempts fail; and it degenerates into an opposite course merge firing pass. The Cap Trafalgar sinks with the Germans swimming for it. And the British in RMS Carmenia almost join her; but a last-minute rescue by a British cruiser saves those guys. 

That sums up WWI at sea right there.