ON JANUARY 30, 1945, the Soviet submarine S-13 torpedoed and blew up the German ship Wilhelm Gustloff, instigating the worst loss of life on a single ship in human history. The Russian crew had written on their deadly torpedoes, “For the Motherland,” “Stalingrad,” and “For the Soviet People.”
The former passenger liner was named for an assassinated prewar Swiss Nazi. As a makeshift converted troop carrier, the Gustloff was evacuating some 10,500 German civilians and military personnel from Gotenhafen (modern Gdynia, Poland) to northern Germany, just days ahead of the arrival of the Red Army into western Poland. The transport was unarmored and only lightly armed—and far too small to hold adequately its vast cargo of refugees and troops. More unfortunate, it was steaming at night in the frigid winter waters of the Baltic Sea without much escort. At least three of the S-13’s torpedoes tore apart the ship. The Gustloff quickly turned over and sank within forty-five minutes. The desperate escape attempt from the Gustloff resulted in 9,400 fatalities, including five thousand children.1
The fate of the Wilhelm Gustloff reminds us of the paradoxes of naval warfare, ancient and modern. Hundreds or even thousands of people, crammed into single vessels, surrounded by often turbulent seas, could find death in seconds. Yet because of the dispersion of fleet strength among numerous ships, and the sheer expense of taking large numbers of people to sea, it was also far harder to kill tens of thousands at sea than on land. So the Wilhelm Gustloff remains the exception rather than the rule of naval warfare. The great one-day jaws of death in World War II were not usually catastrophic ship sinkings but rather the firebombing of cities like Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo. The Tokyo fire raid took ten times more civilian lives than were lost on the Gustloff. There was a Gustloff-sized death toll nearly every day at Auschwitz between April and July 1944. Of the major belligerents—Germany, Great Britain, Japan, Italy, the Soviet Union, and the United States—the fewest fatalities by far were in their respective navies. For all the faces of death at sea, water can still be a refuge from fire, the great killer of people.
History’s most lethal sea encounters in the age of oar and sail—Salamis (480 BC), Ecnomus (254 BC), or Lepanto (1571)—saw only about the same number of deaths as their contemporary land counterparts, for example, at Plataea (479 BC), Cannae (216 BC), or the first Ottoman siege of Vienna (1529). Victorious Athenian, Roman, or Christian sailors could finish off hundreds of enemy triremes and galleys, and put all the defeated to death—especially with the aid of an unforgiving sea against those who could not swim—and still not exceed the death tolls of the far more common infantry battles. Much later at the largest and most decisive sea battles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—Trafalgar (1805, almost 15,000 combined British, French, and Spanish fatalities), Jutland (1916, 8,500 dead), Midway (1942, 3,300 killed), and Leyte Gulf (1944, 15,300 fatalities)—not much had changed: the number of fatalities did not approximate the combined death tolls of contemporary infantry battles such as Napoleon’s defeat at Leipzig (1813, perhaps 92,000 killed and wounded) or at the death throes of the Sixth Army and its affiliated forces at Stalingrad (as many as 1.7 to 2 million dead through January 1943). What was true in ancient times has remained valid in the modern era: the most lethal battles at sea have been nowhere near as deadly as those on land.2
Although hundreds, even thousands of men could be lost in seconds when a ship blew apart or went down—just three of 1,418 crewmen survived when the battle cruiser HMS Hood exploded, apparently hit by a shell from the Bismarck on May 24, 1941—most sailors of defeated fleets in World War II survived. That is the eternal paradox of sea battle: the sea can become both a tomb for a single ship and a sanctuary for an armada.3
Often, violent storms did more damage to a navy than did the enemy. Gales were lethal, partly because normally sound seamanship and caution were subordinated to military risk-taking. Even more important, warships—whether Roman galleys with their clumsy boarding devices like the corvus, or top-heavy American and Japanese carriers and cruisers—were primarily designed to damage other ships. Warships were never engineered for stability or to enhance the chances of cargoes safely reaching port.
With the advent of steel ships, oil-fired engines, and sophisticated navigation, navies no longer needed to fight near land. Often they battled far away from shore and routinely braved the rough seas of the mid-Atlantic and Pacific. In September 1935, for example, during the so-called Fourth Fleet Incident off the Kuril Islands, elements of the Japanese Pacific fleet were caught in a typhoon that severely damaged newly designed heavy cruisers and destroyers, as well as carriers, leading to a revamping of Japanese naval design and construction.4
Typhoon Cobra of December 1944 caught Admiral William Halsey’s Third Fleet operating off Luzon in the Philippines. Despite radar, radio communications, and air reconnaissance, Halsey plowed right into the typhoon of over one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds. The storm killed 793 men, sank three destroyers, and damaged over thirty carriers, battleships, cruisers, and destroyers. The US Navy suffered more loss of life and far more ships damaged from Typhoon Cobra than at either its signature battles of the Coral Sea or Midway. Admiral Halsey was more in danger from a subsequent court of inquiry than from the audit of his controversial but less costly chase of the Japanese carrier arm at the Battle of Leyte Gulf.5
The purpose of investing in navies to win sea battles was not necessarily to kill large numbers of enemy combatants, given that the homeland was usually well guarded by land troops when the fleet went to sea. Rather, the duty of a fleet was to sink and disable expensive merchant ships and warships, kill or drown skilled seamen, and thereby destroy an enemy’s capital investment, while neutralizing an adversary’s ability to move troops by sea and import resources. The loss of a single battleship like the Bismarck was the rough equivalent of the loss of seven to eight hundred Tiger I tanks, or about 60 percent of the entire number of Tigers ever produced.6
Still, even a superior fleet could hardly starve most enemies into submission, at least in any reasonable amount of time. Sea power, like an air force, was always an ancillary to infantry. In the final days of the Peloponnesian War, the Spartans and their growing alliance finally destroyed the Athenian fleet and sailed victoriously into the harbor of Piraeus. Yet even that triumph required a simultaneous hoplite infantry occupation of the Attic hinterland and the omnipresence of the Spartan army outside the walls of Athens. In the American Civil War, the Union blockade sorely crippled the Confederacy and denied it the import of key armaments and the export of cotton, its most valuable commodity, but ultimately General William T. Sherman had to march through the South to defeat Confederate armies and devastate Southern ground on his way to join General U. S. Grant’s Army of the Potomac in Northern Virginia. The British blockades of Germany in both World Wars weakened German resistance, but Imperial Germany and the Third Reich surrendered only once their infantry enemies had shattered German armies. The Americans destroyed the Imperial Japanese Navy fleet, but it was atomic bombs and incendiary attacks that most likely precluded the need for an amphibious invasion of Japan. In sum, once fleets neutralized their maritime enemy counterparts, their goal, even if it were largely to strangle imports and blockade the coasts, was ultimately to enhance land operations.7
Ships can make even the most naturally poor states rich, but only if they control lands and commerce far beyond their own shores. That is why far-off naval defeats for a maritime power can set in motion huge commercial and fiscal tsunamis in mere hours that will eventually cripple the ability to mobilize infantry. The Japanese defeat at Midway and the loss of four fleet carriers meant that just seven months after the Pacific war commenced, Japan was no longer in a strategic position to keep the American fleet out of her vital sea-lanes that linked the newly acquired, resource-rich Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere with Tokyo. Japan had neither the capital nor the labor to quickly replace several lost capital ships that had protected oil deliveries from the Dutch East Indies to Japanese factories. Without naval superiority, mostly defined by 1942 as hundreds of planes ranging unimpeded two to three hundred miles from their carriers, the Japanese could not stop the US Marines and even greater numbers of army forces from cutting off dozens of their forward garrisons while island hopping their way toward the Japanese mainland.8
As with the exercise of air power to achieve command of the air, human conflict at sea always hinged on achieving maritime superiority. Hitler sputtered that what was left of his expensive surface fleet was mostly worthless after 1942, given British air and naval mastery. He threatened to turn his few remaining cruisers and battleships into scrap, given their idleness and uselessness. With superiority at sea, however, a power can send its forces wherever it wishes; without it, a nation is confined only to ground operations—and largely of an enemy’s choosing. It is not impossible for a continental empire to achieve naval superiority—Sparta accomplished that feat in 404 BC with the help of Persian capital, and Rome built a superior fleet in the First Punic War—but it is unlikely. Most imperial land powers—Turkey, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany—always had difficulty subduing their rival maritime enemies whose capital and long traditions of expertise made up for their otherwise inferior manpower.9
Building the wrong kind of ships or not enough of the right kind—especially for a naval power with limited industrial resources—could prove a colossal and sometimes fateful waste of investment. Commander Minoru Genda, perhaps Japan’s foremost expert on naval air power, ridiculed the all-powerful battleship lobby of the Imperial Japanese Navy and its responsibility for the squandered outlay in monster battleships. He scoffed, “such ships are the Chinese Wall of the Japanese Navy.” Genda equated the idea of grand collisions of battleships as “exercises in masturbation.” Despite their formidable guns, the Bismarck, Tirpitz, Yamato, and Musashi were the stuff of prewar romance and collectively achieved relatively little in the war; even Hitler deprecated his mostly useless new battleships as “the last of the knights in armour.” Supposedly, they would blow like kind out of the sea. In fact, the monster, oil-guzzling ships could be bombed, often with near impunity, by planes from either carriers or land bases, and torpedoed as well by far more economical submarines and destroyers.
Super-battleships in World War II achieved fame largely by establishing records of being the largest warships ever to sink due to hostile action. The twin Japanese behemoths gulped oil at such a rate that the Yamato (“hotel Yamato”) often stayed in port. Even before the war, the Japanese had fretted that “battleships without oil cannot move,” a worry that soon became reality. It was to the credit of the US Navy that it finally resisted prewar calls to build so-called super-dreadnoughts of some seventy thousand tons, fearful that such behemoths would inordinately drain the naval budget. Proof of the romance of the super-battleship was illustrated by the plans of all the major navies at the outset of the war to build even larger dinosaurs, such as the envisioned American Montana class (about 70,000 tons, with twelve 16-inch guns), the Japanese A-150 class (70,000 tons, with five 20-inch guns), the British Lion class (43,000 tons, with nine 16-inch guns; one ship of the class built), and some of the huge German H class (H-42: 90,000 tons, eight 20-inch guns). All were eventually canceled either because of staggering projected costs or due to the growing evidence of battleship obsolescence during the war, mostly in terms of not being able to protect these huge projected investments from fleets of cheap naval fighter-bombers.10
Even the size and quality of a fleet at the beginning of a war were not always predictive of naval success or failure. Far more critical was a sea power’s ability to expand, improve, and maintain fleets during the course of the war. The sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire usually had more ships in the Mediterranean than its archrival Venice, but it lacked the productive and innovative capacities of the Venetian Arsenal’s shipyards to turn out superior replacement galleys at a far greater rate. Sparta’s eventual maritime alliance of Corinthian, Spartan, and Syracusan triremes at times nearly matched the size of the Athenian fleet. But for decades—until the entrance of the wealthy Persian Empire on the side of Sparta—the Athenian navy could still construct far more triremes, more rapidly, and equipped with better crews than its aggregate enemies.11
Between 1939 and 1941, the German, Japanese, and Italian fleets in their entirety were already inferior to the combined British and American theater fleets. The margin would widen. The Axis powers had a fraction of the shipbuilding capability of the Allies. They also suffered from far less naval experience and were without sure supplies of oil. A Bismarck or Yamato might appear more impressive in 1941 than the Arizona or Pennsylvania. Yet the former capital ships were to be followed by just one more battleship of their class, whereas the latter were forerunners of an entire generation of ten fast modern battleships of the North Carolina, South Dakota, and Iowa classes to appear in 1941 through 1944 (North Carolina and Washington; South Dakota, Indiana, Massachusetts, and Alabama; Iowa, New Jersey, Missouri, and Wisconsin). All had plentiful oil and abundant air support and, most important, performed key roles as floating artillery in support of amphibious landings. Again, the survival of all battleships depended on which side had achieved naval air supremacy; after 1942 it was always the Allies.12
GERMANY AND ITALY never had much of a chance of landing on British, much less American, soil. For all the majesty of Japan’s prewar fleet, it was still inferior to Anglo-American combined naval power and was never able to endanger the homelands of its American or British enemies. Rarely has an existential war broken out that would decide the fate of all nations involved, in which one side so eagerly accepted the impossibility of ever being able to invade the homeland of its main enemy.13
In the war to come, Germany, to the degree that it ever wished even to deploy its troops in the Mediterranean, dreamed that it might rely on the Italian surface fleet to keep the Afrika Korps supplied. Hitler came to know the prohibitive costs of building battleships and cruisers, and thus appreciated Mussolini’s stubbornness (or foolishness?) for squeezing out of a much weaker Italian economy a far larger surface fleet than his own. Likewise, Hitler, with his armies stuck outside of Moscow in December 1941, declared war on the United States after Pearl Harbor for lots of alleged reasons, including his naive assessment that the Japanese might tie down a considerable part of the British and American fleets and thereby curb aid to his British and Russian enemies, a conjecture that showed scant appreciation of Allied shipbuilding or of the full nature of the Soviet-Japanese nonaggression pact. The Pacific war, in that view, would ideally divert US and British warships away from the Battle of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean so that Hitler’s U-boats might finally cut the Anglo–North American umbilical cord.14
Hitler’s fantasies about the Italian fleet were soon dispelled by British admirals. His concerns about easy access to nearby sources of natural wealth—the oil of the Caucasus, Spanish tungsten, Swedish iron ore, Ukrainian grain—illustrate his admission that he had gone to war without an adequate navy to ensure importation of such needed goods from anywhere in the world. Germany’s neglect of a blue-water navy reflected all sorts of decisions beyond just limited shipbuilding resources: financial constraints, Hitler’s preference for a continental and short war, a trust in the greater value of land-based air power, the proximity of Great Britain and Scandinavia to the Luftwaffe bases, the past disappointments and later losses of the Kaiser’s imperial surface fleet, and the late start in shipbuilding due to the limitations imposed by the Versailles Treaty. Yet if Germany was not fully able to exploit Eastern European and Russian sources of oil, to take one example, and if synthetic oil plants proved insufficient, he would not be able to fuel the Wehrmacht if cut off from oil that was imported by sea.15
In desperation Hitler was finally reduced to dreaming of an anti-navy, one that could do damage to other fleets but not in and of itself guarantee advantageous maritime commerce for the Third Reich. A small but well-built fleet of surface ships and a growing armada of submarines, coupled with the Italian navy, might tie down the British fleet in particular key strategic landscapes, choking off sea-lanes to Britain, and complemented by the threat that Japan might eventually siphon off Allied ships to the Pacific. Meanwhile, Hitler would hold on to a huge continental empire from the Volga to the Atlantic, without much need of imported resources. In the contemporary example of a much weaker Chinese navy seeking to deny the much stronger American navy freedom of action at key choke points in the South China Sea, so the small (and hypothetical) German counterforce would negate the ability of Allied warships in the Atlantic to profit fully from naval superiority on the surface.16
Hitler remembered that although the U-boat fleet had failed at just such a strategy in World War I, it nonetheless had terrified the British. Almost half of the U-boats and their crews by late 1918 were lost to British countermeasures, but U-boats had nonetheless sunk a quarter of the world’s entire merchant tonnage, some 5,708 ships. Such a gargantuan effort had still failed to stop Great Britain: the British merchant fleet was larger at the end of World War I than at the beginning. But no matter. Some World War I German strategists pointed to the fact that the Kaiser’s U-boat fleet had done far better than the more costly investments in the dreadnoughts of the Imperial Fleet.17
By late 1941, even disrupting intercontinental sea-lanes, integrating grand strategy with Japan, and invading island nations like Britain or distant powers like the United States were far beyond the abilities of the Kriegsmarine, at least in the manner that both the rival admirals Erich Raeder and Karl Doenitz had once dreamed. On the eve of the war, Raeder had warned Hitler that Germany’s naval rearmament program (the so-called Z-Plan) would not even approach parity with the British for at least five years and not achieve superiority for ten. And prewar German studies had concluded that the U-boat fleet was in no position to change the failed verdict of World War I in the Atlantic, assuming British submarine defenses had the edge in 1939.
In the end, the huge German investment in large prestige surface ships—at the war’s beginning, ten modern battleships, pocket battleships, and heavy cruisers, and another seven under construction—brought few returns. Their costly presence helps to explain why Admiral Doenitz began the war with a pathetic fifty-seven deployable submarines. Germany’s dreams of a surface fleet to match Britain’s were comparable to Napoleon’s earlier and similarly expensive fantasies that the French could build better and more powerful ships of the line to overcome British numerical superiority and greater command, ability, and experience.18
The preferable strategic solution for the Third Reich would have been never to go to war at all against the world’s two greatest fleets, given that it was already near financial insolvency by late 1939. The next best alternative would have been to wait until 1944–1945 in the slim hopes that Great Britain and the United States would not have increased their naval assets while Germany quadrupled its own. The only remaining realistic choice would have been to achieve by 1939 Admiral Doenitz’s dream of a huge U-boat fleet of some three hundred submarines, while scrapping all plans to deploy battleships and cruisers. Hitler had rejected all three scenarios and so never had a serious plan to defeat two of his likely enemies.19
JAPAN WAS A different story. It entered the war with a larger surface fleet in the Pacific than the United States or Great Britain. The Japanese possessed the third-largest navy by tonnage in the world. By January 1, 1942, Japan outclassed the United States Pacific Fleet in every category of warship. Right after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese could immediately deploy double the number of US fleet aircraft carriers stationed in the Pacific (6 to 3), though the United States would soon bring over both the Wasp (from the Atlantic and Mediterranean) and the Hornet (from Norfolk). The Japanese had more light carriers (4 to 0). Their surface fleet was far more formidable in battleships (10 to 2), cruisers (38 to 16), and destroyers (112 to 40), the latter ships armed with the dreaded Type 93 Long Lance oxygen-fueled torpedoes.
Although Japan’s carrier fleet was the world’s largest, the Imperial Japanese Navy had put great trust in its battleships as the final arbiter of naval superiority. This reactionary impulse did not arise just from emulation of Western obsessions with large surface ships, but rather also from its own fabled experience in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). Admiral Heihachiro Togo had blown the Russian imperial fleet out of the war in the Battle of Tsushima (May 27–28, 1905), largely because Japan’s smaller number of battleships and greater number of cruisers still had combined superior tonnages, better rangefinders, more guns, and more advanced gunnery. The lessons from the victory were to put faith in more, bigger, and better naval artillery, and in torpedoes fired from smaller destroyers.20
Imperial Japan’s submarine fleet was also the largest in the Pacific, well-designed and equipped with excellent torpedoes. Yet Japan had no serious initial plans to enter Suez and link up with the Axis in the Mediterranean, much less to fight in the Atlantic. It was quite enough for the imperial fleet to fight three Pacific enemies simultaneously—supplying troops in Manchuria and patrolling the Chinese coast; battling the British and Americans in Burma and Malaysia, and threatening India; and stopping American island hopping to Japan.
The Americans—and many Japanese—had thought that any attack on the distant American base at Pearl Harbor was impossible, given the inability of the Japanese fleet to conduct such distant operations due to refueling challenges and the need for radio silence along the long route to Hawaii. The strike on Pearl Harbor was an anomaly, a gamble that would never quite be repeated—a singular example of brilliant seamanship and organization, as well as luck and the fact that the Americans were militarily drowsy, not as vigilant during winter, and not at war. Without peacetime surprise, it would have been difficult for any carrier fleet to have hit its enemy’s distant territory to any great effect before 1943. The Americans later could not quite emulate the earlier Japanese surprise attack. Their Task Force 18, including the Hornet that was to launch the Doolittle raid on April 18, 1942, was detected about 170 miles short of what was planned. As a result, the B-25 bombers took off some ten hours early.21
Even in late 1942, after losses in the Coral Sea and off Midway Island, and suffering attrition at a half-dozen engagements around Guadalcanal, Japan still enjoyed superiority in its total number of carriers, battleships, and cruisers. At one point, after the sinking of the Hornet in September 1942, just one American fleet carrier, the damaged Enterprise, was operating in the Pacific—against eight Japanese carriers carrying five times as many aircraft.
The Imperial Japanese Navy was jubilant over the scorecard of the first six months of the war against the United States, especially the clear-cut victories at Pearl Harbor and Singapore, and in the Java Sea and Indian Ocean. Much of its success was attributable to superb carrier pilots. Japanese analysts felt that “in the first six months of the war, therefore, our naval aviation alone had sunk two aircraft-carriers and seriously damaged a third, sent to the bottom one seaplane tender, either sunk or heavily damaged ten battleships, destroyed four and heavily damaged two cruisers, and sunk ten destroyers.… Compared to the losses sustained by the Allied powers in the Pacific, therefore, we suffered very lightly, indeed.” And they were certainly justified in thinking that Japan had achieved tactical victories, albeit without any guarantees of eventual strategic success: “The tally of the enemy and Japanese ships lost in the first six months of the war was a literal realization of the Navy’s concept of ‘ideal combat conditions,’ to ‘wage a decisive sea battle only under air control.’ For the ten years prior to the Pacific War we had trained our airmen implicitly to believe that sea battles fought under our command of the air could result only in our victories. The initial phase of the Pacific War dramatically upheld this belief.” Taking Manila, Rabaul, Singapore, Malaya, Burma, and their surrounding territories in just six months may have been unprecedented. In such a short period, “Japan took more territory over a greater area than any country in history and did not lose a single ship.”22
Even if the Imperial Japanese Navy could not match US ship production and pilot training, its initial cohort of far more seasoned pilots and carrier crews would have to be killed off before the Allies could achieve parity. Americans, for their part, talked grandly of a tactical win at the Battle of the Coral Sea (May 7–8, 1942) and a strategic blowout at Midway (June 4–7, 1942). But neither battle had yet brought them naval superiority. That goal was not achieved until late 1943, mostly because the Americans built an entire new fleet of capital ships, and ceased losing assets as it had at Pearl Harbor, the Coral Sea, Midway, and off Guadalcanal. It is often forgotten that the American humiliation and defeat off Savo Island in the Solomon Islands in early August 1942—four Allied cruisers sunk or scuttled, against no Japanese ship losses—came two months after Midway. At Savo—a much smaller version of the great Japanese battleship and cruiser victory at the Battle of Tsushima nearly forty years earlier—the Japanese inflicted a twenty-to-one casualty ratio of seamen, ten times greater than the American advantage at Midway.23
The apparent Japanese prewar strategy for winning the naval war was to degrade both American and British fleet strength in a series of surprise attacks throughout December 1941 and early 1942, and then, in a subsequent classic showdown between battleships, cruisers, and carriers, to destroy the hoped-for impulsive Anglo-American response. Japanese naval supremacy would then force the Allies to sue for peace rather than spend the blood and treasure necessary to build entire new Pacific fleets and raise combat divisions necessary to root out the Japanese from their newfound acquisitions in such a distant empire. Yet the Japanese had never envisioned having three naval enemies on their hands by mid-1943: a surviving British fleet (to be vastly expanded by 1944), the sizable remnants of the old prewar US Navy, and a newly built American Pacific Fleet larger than all the surviving navies of the world combined.24
The Imperial Japanese Navy also had little conception of the irrepressible fighting spirit of the US Navy or of its superb officers, especially its admirals of the caliber of Chester Nimitz, Raymond Spruance, William Halsey, and Charles Lockwood, who were in their late fifties and early sixties and had spent a lifetime at sea. There were plenty of incompetent American captains and admirals, which was no surprise, given the huge and sudden expansion of the US Pacific Fleet. But the key decision-making at the top proved consistently superior to that of the Japanese admiralty.
Japanese admirals often dreamed up complex naval operations to disperse American warships—evident in their campaigns at Midway and, later, Leyte Gulf—while neglecting the more mundane but far more important tasks of attacking US merchant vessels in the Pacific. Japanese admirals also had a fatal habit of curtailing successful operations at critical moments of near victory, apparently in fear that they might lose their mostly finite and irreplaceable naval assets. Such was the case of inexperienced Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s indecision at Pearl Harbor; Admiral Takeo Takagi’s unwillingness to use the full air fleet of the Zuikaku to destroy the wounded retreating Yorktown after sinking the Lexington at the Battle of the Coral Sea; the sudden withdrawal of Admiral Hiroaki Abe at the successful first naval battle of Guadalcanal; the failure of Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa to use his famous night victory at Savo Island to finish off the American supply ships off Guadalcanal; and Admiral Takeo Kurita’s inexplicable sudden departure from the successful engagement off Samar Island during the Leyte Gulf showdown. Timidity is not a trait we usually associate with the aggressive Japanese Imperial Navy, but it nonetheless was endemic among its admiralty in a way not true of the Americans.25
By January 1945, after just three years of war, the United States not only outclassed the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pacific in every category of naval strength, but had completely overwhelmed it in numbers of deployable fleet carriers (14 to 2), light and escort carriers in service (66 to 2), active battleships (23 to 5), cruisers (45 to 16), and, perhaps most important, a staggering 296 destroyers against the Japanese’s surviving 40. Such lopsided figures, however, were only a part of the equation. Already by mid-1943 American naval fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo planes—Hellcats, updated Dauntlesses, Avengers, and Helldivers—had proven superior to their Japanese counterparts, were far more numerous, and were increasingly more expertly piloted. In fact, the greatest flaw in the operational concepts of the Imperial Japanese Navy was its inadequate training of new carrier pilots. It turned out naval aviators in the mere hundreds each year rather than in the thousands, and after six months of even successful operations was unable to keep pace with its losses. This dearth of experienced carrier airmen to match strategic ambitions was already apparent by the early Battle of the Coral Sea, where Japanese bombing accuracy was dismal.26
Prewar Japanese naval strategy was predicated on an array of unlikely assumptions that were soon rendered little more than fantasies. American commitments to convoy duty and amphibious landings in the Atlantic and Mediterranean theaters did not much hamper the Pacific reach of the US Navy. Prior American isolationism was a result of choice, not of any intrinsic lack of potential to wage war or rearm. There was no evidence that Japanese prewar surface ships and carriers were necessarily superior to American designs. Even Japan’s vaunted carrier dive bombers and fighters—the Val and Zero—were not all that much better than prewar American Dauntlesses and Wildcats. Nor would they be updated and improved as rapidly as their American counterparts. Large fleet carriers like the Lexington and Saratoga, commissioned in the mid-1920s, were comparable or superior to their contemporary Japanese counterparts such as the Kaga and Akagi, and were among the largest and most lethal ships in the world for most of the 1930s.
The Japanese had no realistic plans for the conquest of Hawaii as they did for the Philippines or Malaya, perhaps because of Pearl Harbor’s proximity to the United States and the impossibility of fueling and supplying such an outpost so far from Japan. Even after their auspicious beginning of the Pacific war, the Japanese had no realistic systematic plan to absorb additional strategically important Allied territory such as Midway, Australia, and southern New Guinea. Japanese tankers and freighters had little idea how to conduct the effective convoy system implemented by the British and later the Americans in the Atlantic, and were extremely vulnerable to submarines, mines, surface ships, and bombers.27
The Japanese navy ostensibly started the war with a number of technological and material advantages: experienced naval air forces, effective nocturnal gunnery, excellent destroyers, and intimate knowledge of the Pacific. They built superb submarines and possessed the world’s most lethal torpedoes. The Type 93 Long Lance oxygen-driven torpedo, although flammable and hazardous to use, was superior in every category of performance. It was some fifteen miles per hour faster than its American counterpart, with three times the range, and had three hundred more pounds of explosive. Unfortunately, the Imperial Japanese Navy rarely used its submarine fleet strategically against vulnerable Anglo-American shipping. Too often Japanese submarines were used as ancillaries to the main surface fleet. Just as Hitler was unable to consolidate and exploit the natural and manmade resources of an occupied continental Europe, so too the Japanese were naive in thinking they had enough ships to protect and exploit a far-flung, newly acquired Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, predicated on the invincibility of a navy that had theretofore only been able to bully its inferiors. In characteristic Axis fashion, Japan simply did not have the naval means to match its grandiose strategic ends.28
TO THE DEGREE that Benito Mussolini’s Italy even had a coherent and sustained naval strategy, it was the idea that the Regia Marina could conduct autonomous operations in the Mediterranean. Mussolini assumed that German U-boats would keep the British and later the Americans busy in the North Atlantic, ensuring their absence or weakness in the Mediterranean, which the Italians construed as a Mare Nostrum to connect a new Rome stretching from southern Europe to the Aegean and North Africa. Mussolini’s success in bluffing the far stronger British and French navies in 1934–1935 to allow him access through the Suez Canal for his colonial wars in eastern Africa had further convinced some of the more delusional in Fascist Italy that its superior morale and spiritual fiber could make up for its numerical inferiority and material shortcomings at sea. If the greatest navy in the world had not stopped Mussolini’s aggrandizements in East Africa in 1935, fear of a vastly smaller fleet of Italian battleships must have been the ostensible cause. That the British fleet could easily have blown the entire Italian expeditionary force out of the water before 1940 was a fact ignored.29
Italy never built a carrier force. It apparently relied on air bases in Southern Italy, Sicily, and North Africa to provide cover for its Mediterranean fleet. Still, on paper the Italian navy was impressive. The Regia Marina boasted six battleships, led by the huge flagships Littorio and Vittorio Veneto, each over forty thousand tons and armed with nine 15-inch guns. They were supported by nineteen heavy and light cruisers as well as fifty-nine destroyers and 119 submarines. Without responsibilities in the Atlantic or Pacific, the Italian navy after 1940 became the largest force in the Mediterranean. With the exception of an absence of carriers, the Italians outnumbered the British Mediterranean fleet of Admiral Andrew Cunningham in almost every category of warship, while enjoying greater air support from large Axis bases in Sicily and, after April 1941, Crete.30
But the capital ships of the Regia Marina lacked modern radar. The fleet had little night-fighting capability. It had neither the oil stocks nor material support comparable to the infrastructure of the Royal Navy. The Italian navy had no realistic plans to strike comprehensively at the heart of British sea power in the Mediterranean at Suez, Malta, and Gibraltar. It could not cut off the British from their oil supplies in the Middle East.31
When Italy entered the war on June 10, 1940, its apparent path to victory was predicated on three developments, two of which were largely out of its own control. The first was that the impending German defeat of France meant the end of the rival and superior French Mediterranean fleet, an advantage confirmed by the British destruction of key Vichy French warships in their harbors in Algeria at Mers-el-Kébir and at Dakar in French West Africa. For about five months, Italy therefore enjoyed a flukish Mediterranean preeminence entirely not of its own making.32
Second, Germany, so Mussolini prayed, would continue to focus on Britain in 1940 and 1941, and either invade and occupy the country, or through a U-boat campaign destroy the British ability to import food, fuel, and materiel and bring an island nation to terms. Either way, the Royal Navy would soon be forced to weaken its forces in the Mediterranean. When Mussolini went to war against France and Great Britain, he had no expectations that just weeks after the evacuation from Dunkirk, Britain would survive the Blitz. He also had no real interest in or concern over whether Hitler would invade the Soviet Union in June 1941, a surprise act that eventually diverted German air strength from the Mediterranean.
Third, Mussolini declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941, with only vague ideas about the reach of American naval power, an act likely never imagined when it went to war against Britain in June 1940. Given American struggles with isolationism during 1939–1940, he apparently reckoned that the United States either could not or would not deploy in the distant Mediterranean, especially with the huge Imperial Japanese Navy threatening its Pacific interests. Overestimation of the reach of the Japanese fleet would prove a fatal assumption by all the Axis powers.33
In other words, the Italian fleet could supply its expeditionary forces in North Africa only as long as Germany was not at war with Russia, as long as Britain was besieged by the Luftwaffe and U-boats, and as long as the United States stayed neutral or at least was preoccupied by Japan. As early as autumn 1942, all those conditions had mostly altered. Mussolini’s prewar naval hierarchy had focused on cruiser and battleship tonnage, speed, gun size, and armor. In such categories, Italy’s fewer ships on paper were roughly comparable to their British enemies. But in less romantic criteria—night-fighting ability, radar, communications and intelligence, crew training and morale, officer experience, maintenance, and fuel and ammunition supplies—the Italians were woefully inadequate. They could not fulfill key objectives that would have crippled the Allies, such as bottling up the entrance to the Mediterranean, shutting down the Suez Canal, keeping the sea-lanes to North Africa open, or capturing Malta. Most tragic of all for the Italians, their navy—the fourth largest in the world when the war broke out—was ossified. Its huge size had represented an investment of well over two decades’ worth of unsustainable capital and labor expenditure. Italy’s naval experience can be summed up by the fact that it did not start from the keel up, much less finish, a single new major capital ship during its brief war in the Mediterranean. Rarely in military history had such a large powerful fleet played almost no helpful role in a war and disappeared so quickly.34
THE BRITISH BEGAN World War II with the largest surface fleet in the world: twelve battleships, seven carriers, fifty-six light and heavy cruisers, and over 180 modern and older destroyers. They had pioneered the very concept of the modern battleship with their launching of the 1906 HMS Dreadnought and first deployed planes at sea off the converted flattop HMS Hibernia in 1912. As an island power, Britain enjoyed numerous ice-free, deep-water ports that looked out to the North Sea, English Channel, and North Atlantic.
The British assumed, correctly, that with preservation of their naval superiority and air parity in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, German forces could never invade their island nation or even starve it into submission. To the contrary, one day the Western Allies would use a secure Britain as a base from which to land troops on the continent to reach Berlin and end the war. In 1940 Churchill had also assumed that if the USSR were to become an ally, it would siphon off the resources of the Third Reich away from Britain and its interests. Until then, naval superiority and the continued enlargement of the fleet through an extensive shipbuilding industry would allow Great Britain to conduct sea operations from Burma to North Africa and the Mediterranean. Its ships would ensure continued access to overseas resources and its empire, and the ability to land troops on the periphery of Axis-controlled Europe and Japan.
British sea power would seek to neutralize the large, but inexperienced Italian navy, strand the Axis in North Africa, allow amphibious landings anywhere in the Mediterranean, and ensure the end of almost all Atlantic imports into Germany. It would also be able to land troops in Burma and elsewhere in the Pacific because of the lack of coordination between Japan and Germany that was the result not just of Hitler’s megalomania or the incompetence of his diplomatic team, but also of his lack of sufficient ships and easy maritime access to Asia through Suez or around the Cape of Good Hope.
Almost all British strategic maritime objectives of the war were achieved by 1943. The cost was not cheap: over fifty thousand dead seamen (nearly double the number of British sailors lost in World War I), five battleships and battle cruisers sunk, along with eight fleet and light aircraft carriers, an astonishing thirty-four cruisers, 153 destroyers, and seventy-four submarines. By the end of six years of fighting, the Royal Navy had lost nearly half of its prewar warship strength, and almost a third of all ships in its wartime fleet—manpower and ship losses far greater than what was suffered in the four-year experience of what would become a much larger American navy. Nonetheless, the British military, through its reliance on naval and air power, and alliances, had managed to win a much longer and bloodier conflict than World War I while suffering about 40 percent of the aggregate combat fatalities incurred in the earlier war.35
In sum, naval success helps explain why Britain could fight World War II longer than any other warring power and yet suffer the fewest number of combat casualties of the six major belligerents. Churchill and his advisors saw the British navy, the American and Russian armies, and British and American bombers as the best way to avoid another Somme. They were largely proven right. The RAF and the Royal Navy did not guarantee that Britain would win the war, only that it could not be defeated—a key to understanding the course of the war during the critical year between the fall of France and the invasion of the Soviet Union, when Britain had no active allies and lots of enemies. By late 1940, the British position was reminiscent of that described in 1801 by Admiralty First Lord, John Jervis, 1st Earl of St. Vincent, concerning a nearly unstoppable Napoleon’s threats to reach the English coast: “I do not say, my Lords, that the French will not come. I say only they will not come by sea.”36
THE UNITED STATES entered the war after a relatively recent naval rearmament campaign in the late 1930s that had almost achieved naval parity with the Japanese fleet in the Pacific and had ensured—well apart from the British navy—superiority over both the Italian and German fleets. America was worried that should the British navy fail in 1940, then its own naval assets could hardly stop a Kriegsmarine that might have absorbed the fleets of both Great Britain and France, and was allied with Italy and Japan. The American predicament after Pearl Harbor was not that its prewar fleet was too small or had neglected naval air power and submarines. Instead, the challenge was that the ambitious strategic aims of a rearming United States—unconditionally defeating and eventually occupying all three quite distant Axis powers while supplying the Soviet Union and Great Britain—initially outstripped the available means to achieve them. In response, soon after Pearl Harbor America adopted a naval strategy as simple as it was ambitious: keep Great Britain viable by ensuring that the Atlantic remained open to shipping; achieve naval superiority in the Mediterranean to ensure landings on Axis-occupied territory; and hold the Japanese at bay for a year until new ship production would allow the destruction of the imperial fleet and amphibious landings on Japanese-held Pacific islands and eventually the mainland itself.
American naval planners at first struggled with a paradox of priorities. The supposedly lesser enemy, Japan, possessed the far more formidable fleet, had successfully attacked the United States, and therefore posed the greater threat to American-held territory. Yet Tokyo was considered of secondary importance, at least officially, to the European theater by the War Department. It would take at least a year before America’s newly formed Joint Chiefs recognized that a “Germany first” policy did not necessarily apply to the navy in the same fashion it affected the army and air forces. In other words, America could prioritize sending armor, airborne, and motorized divisions and strategic bombers to Europe, while deploying the great bulk of US submarines, surface vessels, aircraft carriers, Marines—along with several crack Army infantry divisions—to the Pacific, where the US Navy would achieve near preeminence quite unimaginable in the European theater.37
After the loss of the Philippines and the British defeats in Malaysia and Burma, short-term US naval agendas in 1942 were aimed at keeping a viable line of supply from Australia to Midway Island and Hawaii without losing entirely the shrinking Pacific fleet to a numerically superior Imperial Japanese Navy. Within two years, new merchant fleet production, a vast expansion in the size of the US Navy, and the attrition of the German and Italian navies in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, with commensurate transfers of American ships to fight Japan, would guarantee American naval superiority in the Pacific and the ability to peel back the concentric layers of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.38
Such American hopes hinged on several assumptions: that naval superiority would allow Marines and eventually over twenty-one Army divisions to be transported and supplied while island hopping to Japan; that cruisers and battleships were not antiquated assets, given that their firepower offered ideal mobile artillery support for island amphibious assaults; that American carriers and submarines would whittle down Japanese warships and render them irrelevant; that new American island bases would allow air forces, along with carrier planes, to bomb and mine the mainland and provide air cover for the growing fleet; and that submarines would destroy the Japanese merchant fleet.
The United States did not fight a single major surface sea battle with either Germany or Italy, and never lost a battleship after Pearl Harbor or a fleet carrier after 1942. By the time America entered the war in December 1941, Britain had already offered preliminary outlines of how to neutralize the German U-boat fleet through the convoy system, superior intelligence, new technology, and air and surface fleet superiority—although for the first six months of 1942 German U-boats were poised to cut off Britain from North America. Despite initial resistance to British strategy, the United States was able to help Britain defeat the U-boats not much more than a year after entering the war. Victory in the Battle of the Atlantic allowed Allied surface ships to ensure the viability of amphibious landings in North Africa, Sicily, and Normandy.39
How the US Navy by just midway through the war had become the world’s largest and most accomplished sea power is a complex story, but the general outlines are clear enough. Early on it had commissioned its first carrier, the converted Langley (11,000 tons) in 1922, and had designed the Ranger (14,500 tons, commissioned in 1934) from the keel up as a carrier. As noted earlier, the carriers Saratoga and Lexington—converted from battle cruiser hulls, commissioned in 1927–1928 at thirty-eight thousand tons, with speeds up to thirty-five knots, and armed with over ninety fighters and bombers—were the prewar navy’s largest and most prestigious ships. Although clumsy, they were perhaps the best carriers in the world at the outbreak of the war. In their long prewar careers, the carriers had helped attract innovative officers to naval aviation, such as future admirals Ernest King, Bill Halsey, and Marc A. Mitscher. Americans had also cultivated a symbiosis between carrier and battleship strategies, as the idea of a carrier battle group was seen as a natural extension of the previous though soon-to-be obsolete practice of massing cruisers and battleships with escorting vehicles. The Americans had more affinity with the British fleet than with those of the Germans, French, or Italians; the latter all had lacked the proven carrier expertise of Great Britain, which had also commissioned the world’s first truly modern aircraft carrier, the Argus, in 1918.
The wartime commissioning of twenty-four Essex-class carriers—the most sophisticated aircraft carriers of the war—was the natural evolution from the Lexington and Saratoga. It is often forgotten that the American fleet that broke the back of the Imperial Japanese Navy in 1943–1944 was largely designed and approved for construction before Pearl Harbor, and mostly through the efforts of one naval visionary, Congressman Carl Vinson, chairman of the House Naval Affairs Committee, who from 1934 to 1940 pushed through five successive landmark bills to expand and reconfigure the US Navy. The novelist and Guadalcanal veteran James Jones once wrote of the emergence of the new huge American fleet, “in 1943 alone the war effort at home had brought into service: 2 fast battleships; 6 fleet carriers; 9 light carriers; 24 escort carriers; 4 heavy cruisers; 7 light cruisers; 128 destroyers; 200 submarines.… If the Japanese naval staff could have seen the list they would have shuddered.”40
The United States did not devote its submarines just to attacking warships, as the Japanese largely did, but also to focusing on merchant shipping. In this regard, it gained invaluable knowledge and operational know-how from the long British antisubmarine experience. Unlike the Japanese, American submariners operated nearly autonomously in hunting down enemy merchant convoys, and thus cutting off the Japanese mainland from its newly acquired territory in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Both the Gato and Balao classes of American submarines became the finest of the war to be built in large numbers. Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood, the head of the US Submarine Force Pacific Fleet, was the most innovative submarine admiral of the war, primarily because he gave great latitude to his commanders, ensured they had superb ships and (eventually) torpedoes, and urged them to take risks to concentrate on curtailing Japanese supplies to its far-flung empire. By 1943, after initial problems with prewar torpedoes were worked out, the subs went on to all but destroy the Japanese merchant fleet.41
The Americans also found ways to employ otherwise ossified battleships and heavy and light cruisers that transcended classic shootouts between capital ships. Their four Iowa-class battleships were the fastest and best-designed of the war. Although many of the twenty-four American battleships successfully fought at least two major battles against their Japanese counterparts—off Guadalcanal (November 14–15, 1942) and the Philippines (October 25, 1944)—the United States more often deployed such capital ships as floating artillery platforms, in a manner that the Germans, Italians, and Japanese never quite could.
New Baltimore-class heavy cruisers (displacing over 14,000 tons) bristled with nine 8-inch (over 200 mm) and twelve 5-inch (127 mm) guns. Superb light cruisers like those of the Cleveland-class (12,000-ton displacement, twelve 6-inch guns and twelve 5-inch guns) ensured that at every major American amphibious invasion after 1942—Sicily, Italy, Normandy, and southern France, as well as the far more numerous island assaults in the Pacific—American surface ships provided critical pre-landing bombardment and targeted enemy artillery during the assault. Their huge main batteries were usually far larger than any Japanese or German land counterparts, even if naval gunfire sometimes lacked the necessary trajectories for direct hits on the vulnerable roofs of reinforced concrete and coral fortifications. Still, with ranges of well over twenty miles, American battleship guns could pound the invasion beaches and rear areas while staying immune from most counterfire. The 14-inch (350 mm) and 16-inch (approximately 400 mm) guns of American battleships were far larger than the US Army’s own heavy 240 mm howitzers (short-barrel artillery pieces that lobbed shells at high trajectories). Sometimes the Navy was faulted for firing hundreds of shells at fortified Japanese positions without eliminating resistance when Marines and Army units hit the beaches. But the point of such barrages was never to eliminate Japanese positions entirely, but to enhance ground advances. All ground troops complained of the inadequacy of naval fire; none suggested that it was irrelevant to their success.
In sum, Axis ships like the Bismarck, Tirpitz, Yamato, Musashi, Roma, or Vittorio Veneto were majestic examples of nautical engineering, but they remained largely wasted assets and were never utilized in amphibious operations in the fashion of the Tennessee or New Jersey.42
THE SIZE OF the Soviet Union, and its almost complete self-sufficiency in oil, ores, and coal, allowed the Russians to believe they could fight both offensive and defensive wars without much of a need to transport many Red Army troops by sea or to ensure steady maritime imports—if food could be imported somehow to make up for the possible wastage and loss of croplands. Thanks to Allied naval superiority, such assumptions in large part proved correct. The huge size of the Red Army was proof that the Soviet navy—and for that matter Russia’s strategic air forces—did not compete with its ground forces for resources as did American naval (3.4 million servicemen, with half a million in the Marines) and air (2.4 million) investments. By the beginning of the war with Germany in 1941, the Soviets had no carriers and only three aged battleships. By 1944 the Red Fleet’s allotment had been reduced from prewar levels even further to only about 6 percent of the Soviet defense budget.43
The Soviet Union, for all its talk of worldwide communist expansion in the 1920s, did not prepare for it militarily, focusing instead on the defense of the motherland. Privately, Soviets assumed that they would have to deal with the armies of Japan to the east and Germany to the west—or another possible intervention from the Western powers—while conducting offensive ground operations against their own immediate land neighbors, such as Poland and Finland. Given such strategic objectives and its self-sufficiency in oil, food, and ores, it made less sense to invest in a navy comparable to its enemies or allies, especially after postponing earlier ideas of promoting worldwide communist expansion by force. While Russia entered the war with the largest numbers of submarines, for instance, it had the smallest surface fleet of the six major combatants.
Given poor weather in the Baltic and North Seas, and given that Germany did not often bring what was left of its fleet into Russian waters, there was to be no major battle between the German and Russian northern fleets. The other two Soviet naval forces—in the Black Sea and the Pacific—played small roles in the Allied victories. The Japanese remained loyal to the terms of their nonaggression pact with the Soviets to such a degree that almost half of US Lend-Lease materiel was shipped safely from West Coast ports on Soviet vessels directly to Russia at the port of Vladivostok. This alternate so-called Pacific Lend-Lease route of Russian merchant vessels became one of the safest transit paths of the entire war. Russian submarines by 1944 were sometimes sinking Axis freighters and small surface ships in the Black Sea and eastern Baltic, but no Russian (or German) warship altered the course of Operation Barbarossa. When Russia finally piled on Japan days before the ending of the Pacific war, it had to borrow over 250 small ships from the United States just to occupy Sakhalin Island and a few Japanese islands in the Kuril archipelago.44
Before the USSR was invaded in June 1941, Stalin looked fondly on the idea of German U-boats tying down Britain and slowly starving it into submission. After Operation Barbarossa, Stalin flipped, hopeful that the British navy would nullify the German fleet, interrupt scheduled supply convoys for Germany’s Army Group North, and supply the Soviet Union with war materiel. After December 7, 1941, Stalin further assumed that the British and American fleets would consume Japanese naval attention, thus precluding both a second Axis ground front against the Soviet Union and the need for Russia to conduct a two-theater offensive war. There would be plenty of time, after the war, when Soviet ambitions turned global, to invest in a blue-water fleet to promote Russian imperial expansionism.45
AS EARLY AS 1939, strategists had warned their publics that the looming war would be fought on all fronts far differently than was World War I. Such apprehensions largely arose because of new medium strategic bombers and the use of reliable, fast tanks that might turn static warfare into a conflict of mobility and encirclement. Whereas observers expected U-boats once again to seek to strangle Great Britain and isolate it from its overseas suppliers, while breaking the blockade of Germany, almost no naval expert foresaw the predominant role that aircraft carriers were almost immediately to play. America’s war began with a devastating attack of enemy carriers on “Battleship Row” at Pearl Harbor. Yet almost all senior American naval officers sighed relief that the three Pacific theater carriers—Enterprise, Lexington, and Saratoga—were out to sea at the time of the attack. Rarely in military history had an iconic asset—the battleship—metamorphosed so rapidly from an irreplaceable emblem of national maritime strength into an ossified anachronism. There may not have been a prewar “Carrier Row” at Pearl Harbor, but if there had been, and if it were severely damaged, there would not have been a sigh of relief that at least the Japanese had missed three battleships out to sea.
Prewar carriers mostly were fashioned from converted ocean liners, battle cruisers, or battleship hulls—sometimes an ironic reaction to the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty’s restrictions on battleship tonnages—with no consensus on optimum designs, armament, speed, or size. While post-treaty ships like the Akagi, Kaga, Lexington, and Saratoga were undeniably large, their designs were not emulated by later models that were conceived from the hull up as carriers. Early naval biplanes were neither fast nor reliable enough to place their ordnance consistently on targets, in a way that would ensure that enemy surface ships (in the age before radar) could not sneak up and blast vulnerable carriers out of the water. As a result, many early carriers were armed with 8- and 5-inch gun batteries. Perhaps it was more tolerable for the battleship interests to envision prewar carriers as veritable battle cruisers with an array of turret batteries in addition to a flight deck.
The maximum ranges of most battleships’ main batteries—14-, 15-, 16-, or even 18-inch guns—varied from sixteen to twenty-five miles, depending on the size of the charge, type of projectile, elevation of the gun, and velocity of the shot. The shell’s destructive power was not just determined by the caliber of the gun but depended on additional factors such as velocity and the payload, which in turn were also predicated on the quality and length of the barrels. The 16-inch guns of an Iowa-class battleship, for example, were probably as destructive as the Yamato’s 18-inch batteries due to the former’s heavier and faster-moving—but smaller-diameter—projectiles. Most World War II guns could fire salvoes every thirty-five or forty seconds, and keep that rate of fire up either until their ammunition was depleted or the barrels began to wear out (somewhere between 150 to 400 shots, depending on the nature of the shell, the size of its propellant, and the quality of the ship’s barrels). Battleships were the masters of the seas—in their tiny radiuses of about twenty miles.46
A standard fleet carrier, in contrast, might easily send off three or four sorties of thirty or forty bombers and fighters per day against an enemy two hundred miles away (over an hour’s flight, depending on weather conditions), with the high likelihood that some of its dive- and torpedo-bombers would place ordnance on the target, while the vigilant mother carrier stayed out of range of an enemy’s big guns. The problem with battleships was not that they could not do more destructive damage to ships and shoreline installations than carriers—and at a cheaper cost and in less time than a carrier’s planes—but that they lacked naval aviation’s range and were far more vulnerable to counterattack. A torpedo hit from a carrier plane was usually more likely to damage a battleship than was a barrage from another surface ship.
Carriers, then, could also offer a far greater array of techniques for damaging a ship, from strafing to dive-bombing to aerial torpedo attacks. Naval fighter screens offered far better defenses against air attack than those of a battleship’s anti-aircraft batteries, and with good radar naval aircraft could spot potential attacks and prepare for them with sophisticated air patrols. Aircraft carriers were also cheaper to build, a flight deck costing less capital and labor than a battleship’s massive and intricately machined gun turrets. The new Iowa-class battleships that entered the Pacific in 1943–1944 each cost about $20 million more than the late-model Essex-class fleet carriers, and required almost as many crewmen (nearly 3,000) as carriers. Their nine 16-inch guns could theoretically fire collectively over a thousand huge shells an hour (each weighing nearly 3,000 pounds) at targets well over twenty miles distant. But they had no ability to hit anything two to three hundred miles away, as could the ninety to one hundred planes on a new Essex carrier. Anything a battleship could do—blow up surface ships, bombard shore positions, show the flag—a carrier could usually do better and almost as cheaply.
In the six years of World War II, on only three occasions did a battleship sink, or even help to sink, a carrier. During the Norway campaign, the obsolete and relatively small HMS Glorious (converted to a carrier in the late 1920s) was surprised on June 8, 1940, and sunk by the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, due to the utter incompetence of the captain, who had failed to provide customary air patrols. Likewise, the small escort carrier Gambier Bay was destroyed on October 25, 1944, by the Japanese heavy cruiser Chikuma and the battleship Yamato. The Japanese converted light carrier Chiyoda was finished off in the Battle of Cape Engano (October 25, 1944) by American cruisers after suffering damage from aerial attack. In contrast, carrier aircraft during the war sank well over a dozen battleships as well as hundreds of cruisers, destroyers, and submarines. The Axis’s four largest and most expensive battleships—Bismarck, Musashi, Tirpitz, and Yamato—were all sunk, or severely damaged, by naval aircraft.
Battleships proved an evolutionary dead end in World War II, and after a century of preeminence gradually disappeared from most of the world’s fleets in the postwar era. The firepower of the grand ships of “Battleship Row” that were put out of commission at Pearl Harbor—most of them first deployed during and right after World War I—was not all that different from that of their modern successors of 1943. Until the age of guided missiles, it was difficult for a conventional World War II surface ship, given problems of accuracy, to consistently hit another ship at ranges much over fifteen miles. Yet the mystique of battleships still prevailed for a while—a two-centuries-old romantic image of British and French men-of-war lining up to blast each other apart at close ranges during the Napoleonic Wars. Battleships were beautiful, “sacred” vessels. Their size and guns were a testament to national power. Rare though battleship duels were, there was something about such raw, unambiguous displays of lethal force that captivated admirals and tended to cloud their judgment about the cost-to-benefit values of such majestic dinosaurs.47
What preserved the idea of a postwar surface cruiser was the introduction of guided missiles in the 1960s. For the first time, they gave larger surface ships the ability to hit targets at ranges of hundreds of miles, comparable to carriers’ air fleets. And while we assume that cruisers and battleships are now long-obsolete notions, today’s new American Zumwalt-class “destroyers” in reality are pocket battleships of a sort, displacing some 14,500 tons, larger than most World War II heavy cruisers.
In contrast to World War II surface ships’ more-or-less fixed armaments, naval aircraft were upgraded constantly and often radically so. By 1943 American Hellcats, Helldivers, and Avengers were qualitatively different planes from their earlier counterparts. Both battleships and carriers often shared the same basic hull substructures. Yet the latter updated its offensive reach in a way impossible for the former’s guns. The limits of a battleship’s gun range, whether it was of the North Dakota or the newer Iowa class, were static. In contrast, in 1942 a standard carrier torpedo plane’s theoretical total range was about 450 miles (e.g., the Douglas TBD Devastator), with a combat radius of about half that distance. Yet just a year later most carriers could deploy torpedo bombers with a range of a thousand miles, when equipped with auxiliary tanks, and an active combat radius of almost four hundred miles (e.g., the Grumman TBF Avenger). In other words, carriers could double their targeting range without substantially modifying their hulls, engines, or decks. Had Germany and Italy finished a carrier for each of their battleships and battle cruisers—for example, a Graf Zeppelin–class carrier carrying twelve or so modified Bf 109s and perhaps thirty adapted Ju 87 Stukas—they would have had a far better chance of winning the battles for the Atlantic and Mediterranean.48
THE SECOND GREAT revolution in naval warfare was under the sea. Even early model submarines, especially German U-boats—had proven deadly in World War I. They could be built and manned far more cheaply than cruisers and battleships, and yet had the potential to be far more lethal to merchant shipping, especially until the Allies developed effective mines, depth charges, convoys, and air patrols. Quick dives by U-boats usually were better defenses against air attack than were a surface ship’s anti-aircraft batteries.
A U-boat fleet for a rearming Germany offered a fast-track method of attacking British shipping, without the expense of seeking parity with the Royal Navy’s huge surface fleet. For most of World War I—before and after the Battle of Jutland—the Germans had parked their surface fleet, but their submarine fleet had attacked the Allies all over the globe and sunk over five thousand ships. By 1939, the promise of improved submarines seemed to guarantee greater success in World War II, given superior ranges, speeds, depths, and armament.
German submarines accounted for far more sunken enemy merchant shipping and warships—well over fourteen million tons worth—than all the battleships, cruisers, air power, and mines of the Third Reich combined (7 million tons). The cost-to-benefit ratios of submarines versus large surface ships explained why subs proliferated and battleships became calcified, and why the Germans soon regretted diverting precious resources from submarine construction to their surface fleet. When the Bismarck went down in May 1941, so too did an investment of some 200 million Reich marks and 2,200 sailors. Its sister ship, the slightly larger Tirpitz, may have been even more expensive; one thousand German seamen were lost when British bombers finally blew up the battleship in a Norwegian fjord in November 1944. The combined but paltry efforts of the two huge battleships resulted in one destroyed British battle cruiser, the iconic HMS Hood, some damage to a British battleship and a few cruisers, and on one occasion the shelling of British installations on the island of Spitsbergen. The Tirpitz never fired its main battery at any seagoing vessel—nearly similar to the experience of the wasted assets of the even bigger Japanese white elephant Musashi. Yet submarines sank some seventeen aircraft carriers in World War II, far more than the three carriers lost to salvos from surface ships. Years after the war, Admirals Doenitz and Raeder, while together as inmates of Spandau prison, still argued over naval allotments, with Doenitz blaming his onetime superior for shorting the U-boat fleet to build glamorous but otherwise relatively “bloated” surface ships.49
In defeat in the Battle of the Atlantic, Germany’s expense in U-boat construction and service was about a tenth of the costs that the Allies lost in sunken cargoes, ships, and investments in antisubmarine warfare. The Kriegsmarine suffered horrendous losses (781 of over 1,100 U-boats built, entailing about 33,000 of some 40,000 deployed U-boat crewmen). Nonetheless, this was less than Allied lives lost on merchant ships and warships (approximately 72,000). All German losses from U-boats—men and equipment combined—proved a fraction of what was consumed in a number of major land battles. Yet German submariners came closer than any of the Wehrmacht’s air or land forces to curtailing the war effort of Great Britain.50
German submarines could easily have been even more astutely deployed. The Kriegsmarine sank some 14.5 million tons of American, British, and Russian shipping (or 18,565 tons sunk for each U-boat lost). In contrast, the American submarine fleet in the Pacific lost just fifty-two boats while sinking 5.2 million tons (about 102,000 tons sunk for every submarine lost). While German submarines sank almost nine million aggregate tons of shipping more than did the American submarine fleet, the U-boat force was also nearly four times larger and fought almost two years longer. The reason for the superior efficiency of the American submarine fleet lay in the Allied ability to conduct antisubmarine operations far more effectively than either the Japanese or Germans. But additionally, American submarines were larger, with superior radar, and were better suited for the conditions of the Pacific than were U-boats for the Atlantic. Most important, German U-boat operations were micromanaged by Admiral Karl Doenitz in a way untrue of his American counterpart in the Pacific, Admiral Charles Lockwood.51
Prior to World War II, the prevailing naval logic dictated that all surface ships should become more deadly as they became larger, given the greater number of 14- to 16-inch guns they mounted and the increases in their armor belts. More utilitarian submarines and destroyers were customarily an afterthought in prewar assessments of naval power. The average early twentieth-century destroyer—of about 1,200 to 1,500 tons of displacement, four to six 4-inch guns, and speeds over thirty knots with ten to twelve torpedo tubes—originally came into modern use just prior to World War I to protect the fleet by screening more valuable ships from surface or submarine attack. Destroyers also served as scouts that could radio back information on enemy positions. They were especially valuable in patrolling enemy shorelines, sinking merchant craft, and deterring attacks from fast torpedo boats. During World War I, destroyers had come into their own as the antisubmarine ship of choice, which could be built in great numbers, and whose depth charges and light guns could escort a convoy at far less cost than cruisers.52
Destroyers’ 3-, 4-, or 5-inch guns were considered too small to do much damage to larger surface ships. Their torpedoes could sink battleships and cruisers but they were usually too vulnerable to get within accurate torpedo range. In the interwar period, the size of individual destroyers grew. In part, they were not, as were cruisers, subject to the initial limitations of ship class tonnage in various naval agreements, at least until the London Naval Limitation Treaty agreements of the latter 1930s. But for reasons of economy it soon made more sense to expand upon a cheaper destroyer hull than to downsize a light cruiser. In terms of a cost-to-benefit analysis of comparative naval tonnage required for patrolling the seas, it would have made far greater sense, for example, for the German Kriegsmarine to disperse twenty versatile destroyers across the Atlantic than to send out the single battleship Bismarck.
World War II revolutionized the use of the destroyer. Equipped with radar and sonar, better torpedoes, and far more anti-aircraft guns and multiple depth-charge throwers, destroyers were by war’s end the most versatile vessels. By cramming such diverse weapons systems into such a small and inexpensive ship, the destroyer became essential in escorting convoys, hunting down and screening the fleet from submarines, and serving as radar pickets posted on the circumference of a fleet to ward off air attacks, both conventional and kamikaze. The small size of destroyers made them hard-to-hit targets. And because as “tin cans,” destroyers had thin metal skins, often huge armor-piercing shells from cruisers and battleships went right through their infrastructures without exploding, as in the engagement off Samar (October 25, 1944) during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. In contrast, on rare occasions, destroyer torpedoes sank enemy cruisers and battleships, such as the Japanese battleship Fuso that was probably torpedoed by the American destroyer Melvin at the Battle of the Surigao Strait (October 24–25, 1944).
As in the case of fighter aircraft and tanks such as the French Dewoitine fighter and the Char B1 tank, a navy’s theoretical technological superiority did not necessarily equate to maritime efficacy. In the prewar period, the French, who deployed some of the most impressive cruisers and battleships on the seas, had also redefined the ideal destroyer with the six ships of its pathbreaking Le Fantasque–class: displacing 2,600 tons, reaching incredible speeds of over forty miles an hour, and equipped with five 5.4-inch guns. Yet French command, organization, experience, and morale did not match French nautical engineering skill, and French industry never turned out late-model ships and planes in sufficient numbers. Like the rest of the French fleet, most of the Le Fantasque–class destroyers sought refuge in North African ports and became irrelevant after June 1940.53
In total, 490 destroyers were sunk during the war, more than all other classes of surface ships combined. The United States alone lost sixty-eight destroyers—but not a single battleship after Pearl Harbor or a fleet carrier after October 1942. Building hundreds of destroyers instead of dozens of battleships or carriers spread risk, protected the greater investment of larger ships, and allowed an American naval presence in areas of marginal concern. The British, desperate for help in the Battle of the Atlantic in September 1940, had traded basing rights in the Caribbean and Newfoundland to the Americans in exchange for fifty old US destroyers—not in hopes of receiving a battleship or two or a dozen cruisers. From the first to the last year of the war, it was the destroyer that proved the most economical investment in terms of cost to build and man versus the benefits that accrued.54
When the war was over, the contours of postwar fleets were established for the next seventy years, anchored by submarines, destroyers, and carriers. Battleships and World War II type cruisers all but vanished from the seas.
IN THE NEXT two chapters concerning sea battles in the Atlantic and Pacific, six years of naval warfare in World War II are defined by three constant themes. First, the Axis powers before the war did not build enough ships of the sort that might have saved them, especially superb German U-boats and Japanese fleet carriers. Instead, they invested in far too many expensive battleships and heavy cruisers that brought them little advantage. Second, the victorious British and American navies were authentic two-ocean fleets, with the ability to send warships equally against the Japanese, Germans, or Italians and supply vessels around the globe; the Axis armadas, in contrast, rarely ventured beyond their respective seas. Third, Great Britain and the United States both started and ended the war with the world’s largest navies for logical reasons: sustained naval supremacy rested on the less-romantic advantages of industrial capacity and policy, accumulated experience, and the ability to train quickly and competently thousands of naval officers and sailors.