Armoured Carriers Channel.

[miletus12]

For those students of the Fleet Air Arm this is the channel for you. First up, the Fairey Swordfish crack some dams. 

[miletus12]

The Fairey Fulmar. For a plane that traces its antecedent to the Fairey Battle, it turned out much better than its predecessor.



It was not very maneuverable, nor did it have much endurance aloft. It would bring its crew back alive if it survived an FW190 firing pass or an A6M's cannon fire. This was a plane that still served very well until the FAA achieved Sea Hurricanes and Seafires.

[lordroel]

Jan 16, 2022 4:11:33 GMT miletus12 said:

For those students of the Fleet Air Arm this is the channel for you. First up, the Fairey Swordfish crack some dams. 

Nice miletus12 , always toughed of adding this one to the list of YouTube channels i wanted to post here, but as i already have several that i am doing, nice to see somebody else also doing it instead.

[oscssw]

When speaking of WW II carriers we have to look at the IJN. IJN carriers armored deck was the hangar deck like the USN. However, unlike the USN, the IJN hangar deck sides were armored with very few, very small openings. The uSN hangar sides were not armored and had numerous large openings. When hit by a bomb, USN carrier vented a lot of the explosion overboard. The Japanese armored hangar sides forced the explosive force down, through the armored deck to the ship's vitals. See how few hits it took to sink an IJN carrier. US carriers were more likely to be sunk by the IJN's superb torpedoes, rather than bombs.

Brit carriers chose to materially decrease the size of their Air Group (no Deck Park)reducing their offensive punch in favor of greater protection which paid huge dividends against the Kamikaze but would not have been the right decision for most of WW II. We needed every aircraft we could carry in the early to mid war period to destroy the IJN and spearhead the battles across the wide Pacific.

Post war the armored flight deck coupled with much, much larger carriers, allowed support of a large air group.

A strong case could be made for the armored flight deck as a key factor in the survival of Forestall and Enterprise.

Oriskany CV-34 also suffered a major fire. She had a "massively" reinforced flight deck to handle large jet air craft. I am not sure if this replaced her hangar armored deck or not. I would think it would given the weight of the massively reinforced flight deck but am not sure.

Here is a very vivid account of her fire off Nam.

by Don Hollway
August 2020

To ignore Murphy’s Law—“anything that can go wrong will go wrong”—while conducting flight operations on an aircraft carrier is a capital offense. As 30-ton jets hurtle off the bow, controlled-crash landings are made on the stern and exhausts blaze, the slightest misstep or malfunction can be fatal.

In October 1966, the USS Oriskany in the Gulf of Tonkin off the North Vietnamese coast met disaster when a burning magnesium flare was tossed into a locker filled with flares and rocket warheads. Misfortune befell the USS Forrestal, also in the Gulf, in July 1967, when a rocket under the wing of a parked fighter burst on a crowded flight deck. In January 1969, a rocket aboard the nuclear-powered USS Enterprise off the coast of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was subjected to the heat of a jet engine starter, cooked off and sparked a chain reaction of explosions. In those three incidents, 206 American sailors died and 631 others were injured.

Government safety engineers had believed that strict safety and storage procedures on U.S. carriers would make explosive accidents merely a remote possibility. However, carelessness combined with unforeseen series of events meant that the possibility still remained. “There are 14 carriers in the fleet and I bet they have several fires a day when at sea,” estimated Lt. Cmdr. John Donnelly, executive officer of the U.S. Navy Damage Control Training Center, in a 1974 Popular Mechanics article. The Philadelphia facility was responsible for training sailors in damage control, including firefighting. “Fires have to be expected on a carrier,” Donnelly continued. “You can’t escape that fact—not with the overwhelming amount of fuel and explosives involved, mixing with carelessness and chance [with] 5,000 people living together in a relatively confined area.”

The Oriskany, dubbed “Mighty O,” was no stranger to accidents at sea. Off the coast of Korea in March 1953, an F4U-4 Corsair fighter landed with a bomb that fell off and exploded on touchdown. Pieces of shrapnel pierced several parked F9F-5 Panther jet fighters, whose punctured wingtip tanks poured burning fuel onto the hangar deck. Two sailors were killed and 15 wounded. However, firefighting crews prevented the flames from reaching any stored ordnance.

During the Oriskany’s second cruise off the coast of Vietnam, which began in July 1966, the carrier launched its five combat squadrons on nearly 8,000 sorties over four months. When Defense Secretary Robert McNamara noted after an Oct. 1 visit that crew members were exceeding Pentagon guidelines designed to prevent fatigue, Capt. John Iarrobino replied that mission demands forced him to disregard the guidelines. Just a few weeks later, the ship was about to sail for Hong Kong to give its crew a rest when the effects of overwork caught up with the Oriskany.

On the morning of Oct. 26, two apprentice airmen—George James, 18, and James Sider, 17—stowed 117 3-foot-long, 25-pound, cylindrical Mark 24 Mod 3 parachute flares. Neither man had been trained in the procedure nor supervised. Suddenly a flare’s safety lanyard snagged and detached, igniting the bright flare. Panicking and blinded by the in-tense, dazzling light of the burning Mark 24, Sider flung the flare into its storage locker, possibly hoping the lack of air in the case would smother the fire.

Unfortunately, the locker contained about 650 flares and 2¾-inch air-launched rockets, each containing a warhead of about 6 pounds. Within minutes the locker’s interior blazed at 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Explosions inside caused the steel bulkheads to sag and buckle. The hatch blew off.

Successive explosions scattered burning magnesium everywhere, filling the hangar bay with toxic smoke. Two parked helicopters caught fire as the 20 mm cannon ammunition in a nearby A-4 Skyhawk fighter started to burn. A looming threat was the multitude of bombs staged for loading around the hangar. As the fire intensified, the paint on the bombs blistered and peeled, and their fuze inlets started smoking. Firemen poured water over the bombs until they could be rolled overboard. “If the bombs had gone off,” an officer later told Life magazine, “we would have lost the ship.”

Water proved useless against the fire itself. Water breaks down into oxygen and flammable hydrogen in a heat of over 3,000 degrees. Magnesium burns at up to 5,600 degrees. Due to hydrogen in the air, the hoses of firefighters and automatic sprinklers literally fed the flames. Iarrobino headed Oriskany into the wind to blow the smoke clear, while trying not to feed the fire. He flooded the carrier’s magazines to prevent ordnance from exploding.

Down in the carrier’s bowels, men fought for their lives against insufferable heat and smoke. Exhausted pilots were asleep in their quarters when the air system pumped toxic fumes inside and asphyxiated them. Others failed in attempts to escape through smoky, flaming passageways.

Trapped in his quarters, Lt. Cmdr. Marvin Reynolds wrapped a wet blanket around himself and fumbled in the noxious dark for a wrench to open his porthole. “Now just take it easy,” he said to himself. “If you let this wrench slip and lose it in the smoke, you’ve bought the farm.” He put his head through the porthole for air until a sailor above passed a breathing mask and fire hose to him.

Cmdr. Richard Bellinger, leader of fighter squadron VF-162 and survivor of two dogfights with MiG fighters, ripped out his stateroom’s air conditioning unit mounted on the skin of the ship to get outside and escape the inferno, but then discovered that he had to strip naked before he could squeeze through the 18-inch opening onto the catwalk. According to some reports, he borrowed a flight suit or uniform and helped put out the fire.

Firemen poured water over the edges of the flames in the flare locker to keep them from spreading until the fire burned out, around mid-morning. Two flares in the locker never lit. Two others, and their wood packing crates, survived intact. So much water had been pumped aboard that scuba teams were required to rescue men trapped in the bottom of the ship.

[miletus12]

The book on the Seafire is that:

a. The British FAA pilots originally learned their landing technique of coming around to trap onto a flight deck land-on in a port turn over the fantail in the Seafire and the Sea Hurricane. The long noses of the British planes required the British naval aviators to learn this technique to keep their batsman (landing signal officer or paddle man) in clear view all the way in their final turns and drops onto the deck. So: the FAA pilots did not develop this technique for the Corsair. It was the technique they already used out of habit to handle planes totally unsuited for the lined up along the flight deck axis come in straight in and chop power to drop onto the fantail approach learned by the USNAS. That the British pilots later bragged about "we sorted out the Corsair for you yanks" is a myth. The truth is that they had to develop the technique for their own planes and they transferred it from the Seafire to an American plane that exhibited the same long obscuring nose and blind spots that required that dangerous turning approach.

b. The Seafire had very few minutes aloft time.
c. The Seafire had the characteristics of a long flat glide into landing and tended to "float" down. To a lesser extent, this was also true of the Sea Hurricane as well. One will see in these videos, the common theme of FAA pilots as they recall in Fulmars, Seafires, Sea Hurricanes and to a much lesser extent from those who flew Albacores or Swordfish, about how hard it was to put British planes down onto an aircraft carrier fantail and catch a wire than it was to trap with American birds. It was / is almost as if the FAA pilots were terrified of and obsessed about traps. As well they should have, because it is astonishing that more FAA pilots were killed or maimed in aircraft carrier landings than were killed or maimed in air-to-air combat or shot down by AAA (including their own ships.) in the various naval campaigns in which they fought.
d. One thing not covered in the video was the surprisingly poor showing the Seafire had against the Zero. When one comes across FAA pilots or RAF pilots as they discuss their experiences against the A6M in a later video in this series, the FAA pilots mention that they could not outclimb the Zeke or turn with it, though the British pilots, in later marks of the Spitfire, or in the Corsair finally inherit planes that can hang on the prop longer in the vertical and learn how to take the Zero into a vertical fight at high speed and kill its pilot at the top of a loop or a climbing rolling scissors. Even then, too many British pilots tried to apply the tricks learned to fight Germans, against the IJNAS pilots. Those were the British pilots lost in air-to-air combat.

e. More observations about the Seafire and tangentially the Sea Hurricane, I discovered in the video, is that RAF and FAA administration and ground support, by pilot testimony, is absolutely bonkers incompetent. What good is it to send pilots to an aerodrome or airstrip if they arrive without planes or maybe with the planes and no spare parts, and no mechanics or ground establishment? On the other hand: when the ground establishment showed up late and the mechanics finally did arrive, the clapped-out planes fitted with the wrong air filters and with the wrong wing geometry for Pacific air conditions were hastily modified to improve in the air performance (or land-on trapping characteristics). This was a British approach to problem solving that the more doctrinaire USN in its Bureau of Aeronautics strait-jacketed administration under the incredibly incompetent and very stupid John Tower could have emulated. One will note in the later Wildcat video, some harsh things I will note on the USN side of sheer buffoonery.
f. For all that it was a bodge, for all that it was a land plane never designed for use aboard ships, for all that it was a fragile bird difficult to fly and operate in a naval environment, the Seafire, as true with its Spitfire antecedent was / is praised for its aerobatic qualities. The final tally being that as a turning dogfighter it was not the plane to take into battle against a Zero, is not an indictment. It is a result of that same British adaptability that sought to pragmatically take what was / is in the larder and "get on with the job, thank you very much."

[miletus12]

Jan 16, 2022 16:52:16 GMT oscssw said:

When speaking of WW II carriers we have to look at the IJN. IJN carriers armored deck was the hangar deck like the USN. However, unlike the USN, the IJN hangar deck sides were armored with very few, very small openings. The uSN hangar sides were not armored and had numerous large openings. When hit by a bomb, USN carrier vented a lot of the explosion overboard. The Japanese armored hangar sides forced the explosive force down, through the armored deck to the ship's vitals. See how few hits it took to sink an IJN carrier. US carriers were more likely to be sunk by the IJN's superb torpedoes, rather than bombs.

In the mass-scuttlings of IJN carriers at Midway, at Eastern Solomons and the damaged mission kills at Coral Sea and Santa Cruz, the common ship ruining agent was "fire". The same cause accounts for the scuttled Lexington, the Yorktown and the Hornet. In each case the flattop proved to be deemed no longer combat worthy when heat ruined the frame rigidity and hull plate temper of the ship. Scuttling US aircraft carriers required that the pass throughs and manholes be opened and that the float bubble be heavily compromised so air could vent and water could intrude.

If one discusses the first big four IJN fleet flattops and the Ryujo and the Hosho, one cannot suggest that these bird-farms had the armored box hangers of the wartime British Indomitables. What the Japanese did, was build their first bird-farms like armored cruisers, with side belt armor below the armored hanger decks. The later Hiyos and their sister ilks and the converted seaplane tenders and passenger liners, instead, had some hanger deck armor, some armored magazines and a Japanese version of water insulation around some of the av-gas storage tanks. These aircraft carriers, otherwise, had no armor at all. Nor were their volatiles tanks or piping and pumps shock mounted. Most of the Japanese flattops had elevator / lift wells that bottomed out and intruded into the aircraft carrier bilges making for void paths that would allow gasoline vapors to accumulate below the hanger deck low and deep inside the ships via the ventilation piping which had no blocks or cutoffs. This would generate an aerosol bomb condition of surprising size and result either in blow-torching (Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, Hiryu), or blowing the bottom out, (Shokaku and Shoho, Taiho maybe, and several other Japanese aircraft carriers such as Chiyoda and maybe Junyo.)

This design mistake was never corrected in Taiho, which WAS an armored boxed hanger aircraft carrier . That was why a single US torpedo was her death knell. The Taiho's gasoline mains were shattered by shock, the av-gas vaporized and this vapor was not vented by openings in the hanger sides. The crew in desperation cut out plating and smashed porthole glass to create vent paths. Meanwhile the incompetent damage control officer ordered forced draft ventilation of the intruded spaces, while not dropping the elevators to mid-well depth to seal off the hanger from the decks below and then there was a spark. Boom. End of Taiho. Shokaku took up to four submarine torpedoes into the belly. While she did not have an armored box hanger, the same shock, the same elevators not dropped mid-well, the same forced draft venting and boom she goes off. Like her sisters at Midway, she would burn down and sink. The fuel-air explosion opened up badly repaired bow damage she took originally at Coral Sea and she plow flooded and sank like a rock.

Jan 16, 2022 16:52:16 GMT oscssw said:

Brit carriers chose to materially decrease the size of their Air Group (no Deck Park)reducing their offensive punch in favor of greater protection which paid huge dividends against the Kamikaze but would not have been the right decision for most of WW II. We needed every aircraft we could carry in the early to mid war period to destroy the IJN and spearhead the battles across the wide Pacific.

1. The existent British flattops were shorter, much shorter than their American and Japanese equivalents, often by as much as 30 to 35 meters. The flight deck was smaller. Sometimes narrower, too, as either the fine battle cruiser hulls of the "Curiosities" meant short flight decks and narrow ones. The armored box hangers, otherwise, on early war British aircraft carriers put too much top weight high and made them very very unstable and incapable of flight operations in weather US and Japanese aircraft carriers shrugged off. Those flattops rolled and shimmied from side to side. This topweight made for a similar short in length, but in the iteration of the Indomitables, a beamier hull and width to length flight deck that was still much smaller in area than a Yorktown or an Akagi or a Soryu or a Wasp. The safe pathways needed for traps and takeoffs proportionally were much larger percentages of the flight deck on a British aircraft carrier, especially the WWI and interwar types. The hardstand space was therefore small, or non-existent. Whether a British aircraft carrier carried a small air group BEFORE the armored box hangers, had nothing to do with the presence or lack of a boxed hanger. It had to do with flight deck size in area.

The one large British prewar aircraft carrier, which did not have an armored flight deck or armored box hanger and which was intended for Pacific Ocean operations, the HMS Ark Royal, did have a largish air group, did use hard stand space and still sank like a rock when the excessive top weight rolled her over and turtled her. I believe her topweight issue was the same as afflicted other British carriers, the side armor was carried too high as anti-surface ship gunfire protective measures. It was just a fact of life that top heavy aircraft carriers rolled on their beams and went down faster than less top-heavy ships. It mattered not who built them. In Ark Royal's case, she hung on like a Yorktown because she was built like a Yorktown; just shorter and a bit beamier, hence a smaller air group due to flight deck size.

Jan 16, 2022 16:52:16 GMT oscssw said:

Post war the armored flight deck coupled with much, much larger carriers, allowed support of a large air group.

A strong case could be made for the armored flight deck as a key factor in the survival of Forestall and Enterprise.

2. The way that the Maltas were planned and the Midways were originally built shows that the British had not quite got the plot, yet. Or maybe the Americans, it depends on the point of view. What was important was to keep the explosion out of the hanger and the water intrusion from typhoons out.

The British intention was to plate and frame up to the armored flight deck and still make the armored deck as part of the overall hull framing. The Americans plonked that armored deck as a "bridge" structure atop the strength deck; but overlaid the structure with STS and Class A plate to bounce off bombs or kamikazes or Henschel type glide bombs. The Maltas were more weather intrusion resistant, shorter and so forth, so the Britishisms of their aircraft carriers would have persisted unto the Cold War and did. Smaller air groups persist down to the current Queen Elizabeths and it is a function of flight deck area and safe pathways to launch and trap.

Jan 16, 2022 16:52:16 GMT oscssw said:

Oriskany CV-34 also suffered a major fire. She had a "massively" reinforced flight deck to handle large jet aircraft. I am not sure if this replaced her hangar armored deck or not. I would think it would given the weight of the massively reinforced flight deck but am not sure.

3. The Oriskany retained most of her armored strength deck. Some of her side armor was removed when she was angled and dangled. She was bulged to accept the added topweight. This same trick was applied to the Midways when they were sponsoned out and angled. The end result was... not too good. They were driven down two meters deeper in draft, the flight deck mass was too high up and they beam rolled dangerously in a seaway. Does this seem familiar? Air operations in Sea State 6 were peacetime restricted for safety reasons.

The Oriskany Fire as provided by oscssw: 

Jan 16, 2022 16:52:16 GMT oscssw said:

Here is a very vivid account of her fire off Nam.

by Don Hollway
August 2020

To ignore Murphy’s Law—“anything that can go wrong will go wrong”—while conducting flight operations on an aircraft carrier is a capital offense. As 30-ton jets hurtle off the bow, controlled-crash landings are made on the stern and exhausts blaze, the slightest misstep or malfunction can be fatal.

In October 1966, the USS Oriskany in the Gulf of Tonkin off the North Vietnamese coast met disaster when a burning magnesium flare was tossed into a locker filled with flares and rocket warheads. Misfortune befell the USS Forrestal, also in the Gulf, in July 1967, when a rocket under the wing of a parked fighter burst on a crowded flight deck. In January 1969, a rocket aboard the nuclear-powered USS Enterprise off the coast of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was subjected to the heat of a jet engine starter, cooked off and sparked a chain reaction of explosions. In those three incidents, 206 American sailors died and 631 others were injured.

Government safety engineers had believed that strict safety and storage procedures on U.S. carriers would make explosive accidents merely a remote possibility. However, carelessness combined with unforeseen series of events meant that the possibility still remained. “There are 14 carriers in the fleet and I bet they have several fires a day when at sea,” estimated Lt. Cmdr. John Donnelly, executive officer of the U.S. Navy Damage Control Training Center, in a 1974 Popular Mechanics article. The Philadelphia facility was responsible for training sailors in damage control, including firefighting. “Fires have to be expected on a carrier,” Donnelly continued. “You can’t escape that fact—not with the overwhelming amount of fuel and explosives involved, mixing with carelessness and chance [with] 5,000 people living together in a relatively confined area.”

The Oriskany, dubbed “Mighty O,” was no stranger to accidents at sea. Off the coast of Korea in March 1953, an F4U-4 Corsair fighter landed with a bomb that fell off and exploded on touchdown. Pieces of shrapnel pierced several parked F9F-5 Panther jet fighters, whose punctured wingtip tanks poured burning fuel onto the hangar deck. Two sailors were killed and 15 wounded. However, firefighting crews prevented the flames from reaching any stored ordnance.

During the Oriskany’s second cruise off the coast of Vietnam, which began in July 1966, the carrier launched its five combat squadrons on nearly 8,000 sorties over four months. When Defense Secretary Robert McNamara noted after an Oct. 1 visit that crew members were exceeding Pentagon guidelines designed to prevent fatigue, Capt. John Iarrobino replied that mission demands forced him to disregard the guidelines. Just a few weeks later, the ship was about to sail for Hong Kong to give its crew a rest when the effects of overwork caught up with the Oriskany.

On the morning of Oct. 26, two apprentice airmen—George James, 18, and James Sider, 17—stowed 117 3-foot-long, 25-pound, cylindrical Mark 24 Mod 3 parachute flares. Neither man had been trained in the procedure nor supervised. Suddenly a flare’s safety lanyard snagged and detached, igniting the bright flare. Panicking and blinded by the in-tense, dazzling light of the burning Mark 24, Sider flung the flare into its storage locker, possibly hoping the lack of air in the case would smother the fire.

Unfortunately, the locker contained about 650 flares and 2¾-inch air-launched rockets, each containing a warhead of about 6 pounds. Within minutes the locker’s interior blazed at 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Explosions inside caused the steel bulkheads to sag and buckle. The hatch blew off.

Successive explosions scattered burning magnesium everywhere, filling the hangar bay with toxic smoke. Two parked helicopters caught fire as the 20 mm cannon ammunition in a nearby A-4 Skyhawk fighter started to burn. A looming threat was the multitude of bombs staged for loading around the hangar. As the fire intensified, the paint on the bombs blistered and peeled, and their fuze inlets started smoking. Firemen poured water over the bombs until they could be rolled overboard. “If the bombs had gone off,” an officer later told Life magazine, “we would have lost the ship.”

Water proved useless against the fire itself. Water breaks down into oxygen and flammable hydrogen in a heat of over 3,000 degrees. Magnesium burns at up to 5,600 degrees. Due to hydrogen in the air, the hoses of firefighters and automatic sprinklers literally fed the flames. Iarrobino headed Oriskany into the wind to blow the smoke clear, while trying not to feed the fire. He flooded the carrier’s magazines to prevent ordnance from exploding.

Down in the carrier’s bowels, men fought for their lives against insufferable heat and smoke. Exhausted pilots were asleep in their quarters when the air system pumped toxic fumes inside and asphyxiated them. Others failed in attempts to escape through smoky, flaming passageways.

Trapped in his quarters, Lt. Cmdr. Marvin Reynolds wrapped a wet blanket around himself and fumbled in the noxious dark for a wrench to open his porthole. “Now just take it easy,” he said to himself. “If you let this wrench slip and lose it in the smoke, you’ve bought the farm.” He put his head through the porthole for air until a sailor above passed a breathing mask and fire hose to him.

Cmdr. Richard Bellinger, leader of fighter squadron VF-162 and survivor of two dogfights with MiG fighters, ripped out his stateroom’s air conditioning unit mounted on the skin of the ship to get outside and escape the inferno, but then discovered that he had to strip naked before he could squeeze through the 18-inch opening onto the catwalk. According to some reports, he borrowed a flight suit or uniform and helped put out the fire.

Firemen poured water over the edges of the flames in the flare locker to keep them from spreading until the fire burned out, around mid-morning. Two flares in the locker never lit. Two others, and their wood packing crates, survived intact. So much water had been pumped aboard that scuba teams were required to rescue men trapped in the bottom of the ship.

The main threat to an aircraft carrier, or any ship at sea, is ... fire.   

Addendum. The USS Enterprise CVAN-65 had a hole blasted in her flight deck in her incident. The fires reached the hanger.  

[miletus12]

USS "Robin"





The HMS Victorious was assigned to the American 3rd Fleet as a companion to the USS Saratoga. Both navies had a lot to learn from each other. British fighter director setup was superior. Four channel radio was superior to the American single channel. The British had to learn American air traffic control and plane maintenance, because in these areas the RN FAA was hopelessly outdated. USS "Robin" adapted quickly. One observes that the British still used hammocks for sleeping arrangements and for a reason that is not so obvious. Bed bugs. USN used bunks and mattresses. They were supposed to air mattresses and delouse the things WEEKLY. This did not happen aboard the USS Saratoga. Whole crew got crabs.

British pilots, unfamiliar with the crappy Wright engines supplied to their Wildcats, did not chop and brake when the R1820s would choke out, so several British pilots dunked over the side and lost their planes.

Pearl Harbor was an eye popper for the RN sailors. HMS Victorious when she berthed at Pearl Harbor on her second visit, had her Royal Marine band playing and that almost ends in disaster, since the silent approach drill was not followed. That comedy was avoided.

British personnel did not understand the concept of "the master arm safety" aboard American warbirds. Twas not funny at all, when the British injured themselves when they had not been taught correct operating procedures by USS Saratoga armorers. The British sent one pilot home who strafed his own deck on landing approach to stand a courts martial. A British armorer faced Captain's mast. As for the Americans responsible for screwing up the training syllabus, I suspect that they would have wished they were in the RN. The USN in those days did not mess around.

The British in transiting the Panama canal found their outriggers that they had adopted for hard-standing Seafire and Sea Hurricane fighters aboard their flight decks had to be sliced off to pass through the locks.

Additionally, once in the USN, the British flattop was as much as possible flame proofed, re-radared and festooned with AAA to American standards. The plane complements were swapped out to Wildcats and Avengers. I imagine that the British elevators had to be modified to take the heavy Avengers.

As for the USS "Robin's" stay, the HMS Victorious spent her half year in 3rd Fleet playing decoy and willow o' the wisp. There was air support of the New Georgia landings, so it was not all hide and go seek. The British sailors and aviators who commented about this deployment seemed to be under the illusion that they were there to draw the IJN south to fight. Not so. The BLUFF was to convince the IJN to stay north in Chu'uk and not bother the Allies in the Solomons, because the IJN had the numbers of flattops, gunships and aircraft on 3rd Fleet and could have kicked Halsey's posterior any time they wanted to try. The "dance" and a fuel shortage kept the IJN at bay until American reinforcements arrived in late 1943.

One final comment, as regards deck accidents. That British armorer who accidentally discharged the Wildcat's guns into the HMS Victorious' "armored" flight deck, either demonstrated the armored flight deck was worthless or it must have been a portion of the flight deck that in reality was aft of the rear lift / elevator which on a British armored box hanger was not armored as was also true of the forward take off run ahead of the forward / lift elevator. I write that because a 0.50 inch bullet should not have spalled a 50 mm face hardened steel armor plate. Yet, the aviator who relates the incident claims he was showered with spall and that a mate was taken to sickbay with spall fragment wounds from that machine gun fire from the accident.

[stevep]

Jan 16, 2022 16:52:16 GMT oscssw said:

When speaking of WW II carriers we have to look at the IJN. IJN carriers armored deck was the hangar deck like the USN. However, unlike the USN, the IJN hangar deck sides were armored with very few, very small openings. The uSN hangar sides were not armored and had numerous large openings. When hit by a bomb, USN carrier vented a lot of the explosion overboard. The Japanese armored hangar sides forced the explosive force down, through the armored deck to the ship's vitals. See how few hits it took to sink an IJN carrier. US carriers were more likely to be sunk by the IJN's superb torpedoes, rather than bombs.

Brit carriers chose to materially decrease the size of their Air Group (no Deck Park)reducing their offensive punch in favor of greater protection which paid huge dividends against the Kamikaze but would not have been the right decision for most of WW II. We needed every aircraft we could carry in the early to mid war period to destroy the IJN and spearhead the battles across the wide Pacific.

Post war the armored flight deck coupled with much, much larger carriers, allowed support of a large air group.

A strong case could be made for the armored flight deck as a key factor in the survival of Forestall and Enterprise.

  oscssw,

  A smaller air group resulted in part due to the armoured deck, which was considered a good idea in the period when the ships were designed because of the lack of radar and the closed seas in which they might have to operate plus the low numbers of actual FAA pilots and a/c due to service infighting.  Coupled with fairly heavy losses throughout the war and events elsewhere they were never really made up until the last stages of the war.

  That plus the lesser deck size of the RN carriers were factors in the lack of a deck park most of the time but I think the primary driver was that the RN was often operating in waters, such as the N Atlantic, N Sea and Arctic Ocean where the weather made it impractical much of the time.

  As such I think they were definitely useful in the early part of the war.  Less in the mid part when Japan got involved but then with commitments elsewhere carrier based a/c other than by night attack possibly, were never going to be strong enough to take on the IJN at its height.  What Britain needed was more modern land and land based air to defend the crucial areas, i.e. Malaya and DEI but unfortunately with the demands elsewhere this was not done in time.

  Steve

[oscssw]

Jan 16, 2022 9:24:31 GMT miletus12 said:

The Fairey Fulmar. For a plane that traces its antecedent to the Fairey Battle, it turned out much better than its predecessor.



It was not very maneuverable, nor did it have much endurance aloft. It would bring its crew back alive if it survived an FW190 firing pass or an A6M's cannon fire. This was a plane that still served very well until the FAA achieved Sea Hurricanes and Seafires.

Got to take my hat off to the CAM pilots in the North Atlantic and especially the Murmansk convoys.   IMO, very brave kids.

According to John Elkington, a surviving CAM pilot.

1. Of the 35 CAM ships 12 were sunk.

2. Our training included 3 launches from a ground catapult, air to air firing, dinghy drills in the local pool, radio control by the FDO and range tests on our allotted aircraft.

3. They worked with embarked RN Fighter Direction Officers with no mention of radar.  

The Admiralty considered the CAM program a success despite the fact only 7 German aircraft were shot down, at the cost of over 25 Hurricanes in total.

[miletus12]

I consider the Pedestal Convoy to be Britain's "Midway" in results and in importance. El Alamein would be impossible if the RN had lost this battle. Matapan does not even come near it, in importance.

[miletus12]

The good old "my aircraft carrier is better than your aircraft carrier", debate.



Fanboys usually ignore the following.

The aircraft carrier has to cycle launches and traps rapidly to put up a strike package as rapidly as possible. The aircraft have only so many minutes aloft (Typical British aloft time was about 160 minutes. The Americans tried for 200 minutes.). The rule of thumb was 1/3 of time aloft to form up and fly out, 10 to 15 minutes of combat over the destination battlespace, then 1/3 of time aloft to flyback and land-on to the home aircraft carrier.

It turns out that this requirement calls for the use of a minimum of three lifts / elevators, and an air group of not less 50 aircraft for aircraft carrier versus aircraft warfare in the WWII era. One torpedo squadron and one dive bomber with a fighter squadron for attack and one for defense. Each squadron would consist of three flights of four aircraft each, or 12 aircraft per squadron, that is 48 aircraft in the group and two spares.

The armored flight deck would be useless against torpedo attack and it would be expected that in that era; where, British armored deck and armored box hanger aircraft carriers functioned with about 45-50 aircraft each, and where the armor was rated for 500 pound mass armor piercing bombs, the British aircraft carriers could possibly meet the minimum requirements, except the Japanese Kates were known to be able to drop 1,500 pound bombs that could punch through battleship deck armor.

The armored deck argument becomes a better one when one considers impacts by Japanese aircraft that carry current in inventory Japanese 500 to 550 pound bombs. When one contemplates the rocket propelled Baka aerial torpedo? Things for the British case become very dicey. The side impact of one of those into an armored box hanger could be very .... unpleasant.

Specification of an Okha guided rocket propelled bomb.

The only operational Ohka was the Model 11. Essentially a 1,200-kilogram (2,600 lb) bomb with wooden wings, powered by three Type 4 Model 1 Mark 20 solid-fuel rocket motors, the Model 11 achieved great speed, but with limited range. This was problematic, as it required the slow, heavily laden mother aircraft to approach within 37 km (20 nmi; 23 mi) of the target, making them very vulnerable to defending fighters. There was one experimental variant of the Model 11, the Model 21, which had thin steel wings manufactured by Nakajima. It had the engine of the Model 11 and the airframe of the Model 22.

The bomb saw very limited production and very limited use. It was the Japanese equivalent of the US Bat antiship glide bomb.

Addendum.

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Operation C. (Indian Ocean Raid) as described from the British point of view, still remains a sad affair and it has not changed my opinion on British inexperience in the naval operational art with aircraft carrier warfare. Somerville, as described, is not going to be very good when I measure him against titans like Fletcher and Spruance, and I find him wanting. Doctrine was wrong and Somerville turned toward it. Sending out Harwood, the man who totally screwed up River Plate and sent Force Z to its doom as the acting DCNS to Pound... to be Somerville's chief of operations...is one completely nuts? Also D.W. Boyd his, Somerville's alleged aircraft carrier expert on the scene; it cannot be stressed too strongly here was an utterly incompetent officer, the Mark Mitscher of the Royal Navy.

The overestimate of British night torpedo capability and the ASV radar is massively WANKISH. The Americans executed a successful night torpedo attack on the Midway invasion convoy. It was hellishly difficult for the PBYs involved and I estimate that the Catalinas would have been the functional equivalent of the Fulmars. Japanese optics and AAA, and ship handling was good enough to neuter any attack effort. 

Cunningham, and Vian in place of Somerville? I think they would have done some damage, first, and then danced away as Somerville did. But I still see the catastrophe unfold as the Japanese counter-punch the Eastern Fleet.

The Royal Navy tradition of attack, attack, attack is not just unique to the Royal Navy.   

Operation C WAS the end of the British Empire. Counterfactual presented is not credible.      

(I might start a thread on Operation C at some point. There is some recent scholarship on that sad subject.)    

One of the things I take away from the video is that when it came to aircraft carrier tactics and operational art... the Royal Navy was not exactly on the beam. If they had tried what they planned against the IJN, they would have been slaughtered.

Also: the claim that the RN were developers of multi-carrier operations ignores that it was the AMERICANS who handed over their lessons from Midway and Coral Sea, which the British used for their in-war fleet training in multi-carrier operations which they ran as a dress rehearsal under USN tutelage just before Pedestal.  

[oscssw]

I have the utmost respect for the RN and Merchant Navy (who crewed SS Ohio) who pressed through, despite very high losses, the Pedestal Convoy.

I agree keeping Malta functioning as an offense base was of major strategic importance.

Not sure I would compare it with Stalingrad, Normandy and Midway but it sure is up there.

Reading accounts of WW II, it amazed me at how tough tankers were to sink.

[miletus12]

British air defense was not what it ought to have been. The armored deck was somewhat effective as a passive defense.

The survivor's comments are interesting. Notice the emphasis on the fighter and the fighter director and radar system fusion as a defense? Why the RN put to sea without ANY fighter defense is beyond me.

British defense against dive bombing was worthless. This was not to change much throughout the war, as their AAA and CAP drill never did improve to the degree necessary to face off against massed alpha strikes. Flieger Korps X was a rude awakening. Fortunately, the armored deck did bounce the lighter bombs or pre-detonated some. Still the HMS Illustrious was mission killed by rather sloppy bombing.

Several British ships were in precursor incidents to the main event.

The alert five drill was botched. AAA lost the plot. "Repel aircraft.", sounds a lot like British GQM as described, and was not well executed as the survivors reported their mass confusion in how the HMS Illustrious went to her crewed action posts. The US method of the time was to sound bells over the MIKE 1 master intercom circuit throughout the ship with the Chief or the XO announcing the alarm and giving verbal direction to what kind of action was imminent / expected, "Battle stations, air action port." or "Battle stations, surface action forward." Depending on the report and instruction the crew was supposed to deploy accordingly. In the case of the USS Chicago, as the US exemplar of how not to do it in the Battle of Rennel Islands under air attack, this never happened, and she was promptly sunk.

I am amazed that the British aircraft carrier was not buttoned up and her Yoke Condition was not set as soon as radar warned of inbounds. 

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General impressions of the video.

1. British had no fighters aloft. NONE. This surprised me.
2. The Germans attacked in single plane dives. This was not like the Japanese or the Americans who would come at you in a stick or serial of planes one after another, all following each other nose to tail to serially dive bomb the target so as to prevent the maneuvering ship any chance to avoid the cascade spread of bombs aimed at it and around it. This was akin to salvoes or shot ladders that were intended to bracket the ship and guarantee a % of assured hits out of the serial that attacked the ship. Obviously, the Luftwaffe thought their land attack technique would work here? It was inefficient and wasted sorties. 
3. The HMS Illustrious did not put her rudder over to S-turn. This was a common US and Japanese defensive move that actually was effective to throw bomb aim off. 
4. The Stuka pilots released bombs too high and came abeam instead of fore and aft as a proper bomb run should have been conducted. Whoever trained them must have been incompetent. 
5. Bomb punched through the after lift / elevator and exploded in the hanger. Must have been a small bomb, because the survivor lived to report he survived it. Think about that one for a moment. Maybe the armored flight deck pre-detonated or damaged the bomb as it plunged through?  Once again, the manholes were not secured or dogged down in this area of the hanger and lift well and the fire curtains not shut in the middle of the battle so the fire induced spread when it should have been firewalled off. 
6. The damage, seen, shows that the armored deck failed completely. Nice big hole dedecks and mission kills HMS Illustrious The after elevator was blown off its mount and there was fire and smoke in the hanger. British damage control parties seemed to have things completely backwards. Tend to the ship first and secure the wounded AFTER the ship is safe. If you lose your ship, then you might lose everyone aboard her. That's the damage control logic as it must be followed. The forward lift was bent out of frame and jammed. Useless. Any flight operations would have to be flight deck restricted until the forward elevator was unstuck. She was done. As to the damage overall, no wonder it took six months to repair her at Norfolk.
7> What "I" found most shocking was that HMS Illustrious' companion ships FLED and left her to fend for herself. THIS is not USN practice. The escorts and bodyguard ships stay with the flattop and defend her to the death.  

 
 
    

[miletus12]

Outflank. The Book on this one is not as claimed.









Summary: the oil fields were barely scratched. The exchange ratios between the FAA and the IJAAS was about equal in a one for one air combat ratio. This still gave the FAA a good introduction to Pacific War operations.