One Hundred Years of U.S. Navy Air Power (9 page)

The alternative planning school, which I labeled “cautionaries,” consisted of younger officers attuned to modern weapons like aircraft and submarines and especially to the tedious study of logistics. Confident that the public would support a long but safer war, they proposed a deliberate step-by-step island-hopping advance to the Far East. Their studies remained curiosities, however, for lack of suitable stepping-stones until 1919. During World War I Japan, siding with the Allies, seized the undefended German islands of the Caroline, Marshall, and Marianas groups. The peace conference awarded them to Japan as demilitarized mandated territories under League of Nations auspices. Thrusters were appalled at Japan's barricade athwart the Blue attack path. Cautionaries, however, applauded the Mandate as a
windfall. Excellent atoll lagoons awaited a stepwise Blue advance, step by step, punctuated with pauses to develop proper oceanic bases. Their moment in the sun arose in 1922 when Article XIX of the Washington Treaty outlawed a prepared western base. Rear Admiral Clarence S. Williams, one of the most astute prewar planners, laid out an attack through the Marshall Islands—specifically via Eniwetok—to Truk in the Caroline Islands, the grandest lagoon in the Central Pacific. There, Blue would pause for eighteen months to build a second Pearl Harbor, then resume the advance toward the Philippines or to islands closer to Japan itself. The gradual movement, gaining strength as it went, reduced the risk of catastrophe. It would ensure victory, albeit at the cost of a longer war. New technologies encouraged the advocates of a mid-ocean campaign. The oil-burning fleet had markedly extended its combat range. A vast fleet train of auxiliaries was under design. Within a few years planes from newly launched aircraft carriers would be striking over the horizon.

When Williams departed, the thrusters scrapped his plan and reinstalled the Through Ticket. His cautionary plan also had a fatal flaw: the blindness of a massive Blue fleet based in the vast mid-Pacific. The Navy lacked the means of intelligence of enemy naval whereabouts in a theater where island bases were vulnerable to attack from any point of the compass. Security would depend on aircraft that could search a thousand miles in all directions. Such long-range scouts would also be critical for battle operations in open seas where hostile armadas might close upon each other by five hundred miles overnight. The aircraft carrier had introduced the “frightening possibility” of a superior fleet lost through inferior reconnaissance. The side that remained hidden and launched its planes first might destroy the enemy carriers by an “unanswered salvo” and dominate the skies altogether. Studies of the 1930s indicated that a fleet of two-thirds the opponent's strength could win a decisive sea-air battle. Victory would depend on the earliest information found by long-range aircraft. The United States needed planes that could fly to Hawaii and concentrate rapidly in the Mandate. No such planes were available in the 1920s. Renaissance of the cautionary strategy had to await a technological breakthrough.

Aircraft speed, altitude, ruggedness, and armament were important, but for ocean reconnaissance the vital characteristic was range. A thousand-mile-radius plane could survey ten to twenty times the area of a small shipborne type. The only aircraft suited to the task were flying boats, known in the Navy as VPs—V for heavier than air, P for patrol—formed in 12-plane squadrons called VProns. The flying boat had been pioneered before World War I by the American genius Glenn H. Curtiss whose twin-engine biplanes with notched wooden hulls outperformed pontooned seaplanes. During the war the United States and Great Britain flew hundreds of Curtiss F-5Ls on anti–U-boat patrols out to four hundred miles (larger NC boats that crossed the Atlantic in 1919 proved too fragile for naval service). The sturdiness of the Curtiss boats retarded innovation until they wore out, grew waterlogged,
and wore out in the mid-1920s. With progress stagnant the Joint Army-Navy Board in 1923 recommended a force of only 84 VPs (414 in wartime), just 4 percent of all military planes. In 1925 the scouting fleet had 14.

The Consolidated PBY or Catalina had a 1,000-mile range. By 1941, the U.S. Navy had 330 in service
.

A craving for aerial scouts escalated when arms treaties limited cruiser construction. The Navy yearned for VPs that could accompany the fleet “in all waters of the globe,” especially in the Pacific where airfield sites were scarce. In the second half of the decade the Naval Aircraft Factory in Philadelphia tinkered with improved types with air-cooled radial engines and hulls of the alloy duralumin. The “flying forest” of struts between the biplane wings was thinned out. Yet each model disappointed and few were put into service. VPs of the late 1920s, supposedly capable of surveillance flights of six hundred to eight hundred miles' radius at one hundred knots, actually covered four hundred miles in maneuvers, scarcely better than the boats of 1918. To fight in the mid-Pacific the Navy needed a plane of twenty-four-hour endurance that could take off at midnight and begin searching at dawn halfway along a thousand-mile radial line. It would need a large crew and autopilots for relief, and of course reliable radios. Engineers of the Bureau of Aeronautics (BuAer) tried again with the P2Y design of 1932–1933, sesquiplanes with stubby underside wings. They were able to exercise at U.S. atolls up to seven hundred miles from Oahu but they still suffered the “eternal problems” of poor performance and short range that constrained operations with a long-legged fleet.

Landplanes, in contrast, were booming ahead in performance and range, dramatized by Lindbergh's flight of 1927. Not surprisingly, the Army's coast artillery function expanded to overwater flights for defense of U.S. shores including naval bases. In 1931 Chief Naval Officer (CNO) William V. Pratt signed a pact with Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur that barred the Navy from acquiring large-wheeled aircraft. Naval aviation was to be based on the fleet and move with it, “confining it to single-engine planes for carriers and the Marines, and to seaplanes and flying boats.” On 1 April 1933 Pratt detached the feeble VProns from the Battle and Scouting forces, the power centers of the fleet, and banished them to a new command, Aircraft, Base Force, for stodgy defensive patrolling. Beyond their shriveled search arcs the carriers and catapulted floatplanes would have to cover the fleet. The disgrace of the lumbering geese was reflected in the Vinson-Trammel Act of 1934, which funded most naval aircraft generously but authorized only thirty VP aircraft a year through 1941.

To some desperate airmen dirigibles seemed a credible alternative. In the 1920s the Navy experimented with airships that had ten times the range of VPs at triple the speed of cruisers. Their backers, including Rear Admiral William A. Moffett, the Chief of BuAer, argued that they could reconnoiter far out at sea beyond range of Orange planes, observe ships while hovering beyond gunfire range, and peek at the supposedly unarmed Pacific Mandate Islands. At worst, a timely sighting of the enemy fleet would justify loss of a machine costing no more than a destroyer. Two great dirigibles commissioned in the early 1930s were capable of seven-thousand-mile round-trips carrying small planes launched and recovered from a trapeze slung beneath the mother airship. Each unit could sweep a wider swath than four cruisers. Op-12 wished to base them in Hawaii but they were unstable in bad weather and were frequently “shot down” in maneuvers. The fleet refused to have them. In 1933 the
Akron
crashed, with Moffett among the dead. In 1935 the
Macon
fell. By then the Navy could buy twenty-six VP aircraft for the price of a dirigible. The “Flying Aircraft Carriers” were finished.

Reappraisals of War Plan Orange in the second half of 1933 brought to a head the destiny of the flying boat. Rear Admiral Joseph “Bull” Reeves, a faithful believer in the type, insisted that the fleet could not enter Philippine waters nor even loiter in the Marshalls without a security umbrella of five to seven VProns. Op-12 dutifully incorporated them in the first attack wave. They could fly to the Marshalls via Johnston Island but would have to travel onward to Mindanao as deck cargo. Mobilization tables reserved space aboard all ship classes, yet many of the big planes were to be lashed precariously on minesweepers under tow. The absurdity of the “eyes of the Fleet” wallowing blindly along the dangerous passage helped discredit the “Through Ticket” once and for all.

In October 1933 the credibility of a mid-ocean campaign suddenly brightened. An excellent VP prototype had emerged from successful commercial types “flying down to Rio.” The Navy placed orders for the plane that evolved into the most-produced flying boat of all time, the Consolidated PBY, later dubbed Catalina for an island near the factory in California—a British practice of naming planes. The aerodynamically clean, high-winged monoplane soon achieved the long-sought 1,000-mile range—1,500 in some wartime models. War planners could look forward to delivery within three years of flocks of far-winging scouts for an ocean offensive.

Rebirth of the cautionary campaign plan after 1933 owed much to enchantment with the graceful Catalinas. Yet their arrival touched off four disputes among the war planners, operating commanders, and the naval bureaus as to their roles. Three of the disputes were decisively settled before war in the Pacific erupted. Confusion over the fourth had much to do with the tragedy of 7 December 1941.

The Honorable Frank Knox, Secretary of the Navy (right), with Rear Admiral C. C. Bloch, Naval Air Station, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, September 1940
.

The first dispute concerned whether the Navy should acquire as many Catalinas as possible as the workhorses of the fleet, or strive for even larger, more proficient aircraft. Projected numbers of flying boats for a Treaty Navy were modest: 184 operating with the fleet in 1935, with 30 added per year to reach a peak of 330 in 1941. But aeronautical science was advancing rapidly. The Navy funded design studies of what became the two-engine Martin Mariner, which surpassed the Catalinas in speed and altitude and usurped the key scouting role midway through the war. Giant Sikorsky and Martin civilian flying boats operated by Pan Air, and German and British models inspired the four-engine PB2Y Coronado, ultimately built in smaller numbers. In the extreme, the monstrous Martin Mars, an eight-thousand-mile range “flying dreadnought” was supposedly capable of a Hawaii-Tokyo round-trip. Only a handful were built late in the war.

In 1935 the CNO skeptically inquired whether planes of, say, five- to six-thousand-mile ranges were needed. They required long, smooth waters for takeoffs. They consumed much more fuel. They could not be carried aboard ship and cost was a major consideration. He preferred “mid-sized” Catalinas capable of haul-out on primitive shores on their own beaching gear, for service by small tenders, or carried as deck cargo or disassembled to Mandate's lagoons beyond their range. The Commander of Aircraft Base Force thought the ideal to be a two-engine craft of 3,000 nautical miles range at 175 knots, 20,000-foot ceiling, takeoff in less than 2.5 miles of taxi lane. CinCUS Reeves and Chief war planner, Rear Adm. William S. Pye, hoped for 3,500-mile range and thirty-hour endurance. Rear Admiral Ernest J. King, Chief of BuAer, who usually championed the most excellent aircraft, agreed quantity over “utmost” quality in this case. Why was extra range needed when no naval battle had ever been fought more than a thousand miles from land? Besides, bigger planes would not be available in masses for three or four years.

There the matter rested until 1940. In February 1941 PBYs were in service (all earlier types having been retired) with 200 PBY-5s on order for rapid delivery. Only 21 PBM Mariners were on order. The General Board declared for only a few giant boats for a few extraordinary missions. Rear Admiral John Towers felt that a dozen four-engine giants would suffice; at a cost of $926,000 the Navy could procure 9 Catalinas or 4 Mariners (albeit the newer planes had not achieved cost benefits of volume production). The final prewar word was pronounced by Rear Admiral Richmond K. Turner, Chief of the WPD, in November 1941. The war in Europe showed that seaplanes could not match landplanes in range, ceiling, maneuverability, speed, or self-defense. For long-range patrolling the Navy needed big landplane bombers, 25 percent immediately and 50 percent ultimately.