WesWorld

Brock and Hood touch upon very important points. It does take time to launch a deck-load strike, and the larger the strike the longer it will take to accomplish. For this reason individual WW2 carrier strikes would comprise only half or a third of an individual aircraft carrier's airplanes.

For example - the first wave of the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor comprised 189 aircraft drawn from six aircraft carriers - an average of 33 aircraft per carrier; the second wave comprised 181 aircraft - an average of 31 aircraft per carrier. Thirty or so aircraft was about the maximum number of aircraft that could be spotted at the aft end of a deck and still allow for sufficient take off space forward. It also was about the maximum time allowable to launch and form a strike without eating into its range too much.

It was, IMHO, this fact of life that drove WW2 carriers to operate in mass - if you bring six aircraft carriers, the Japanese Kido Butai, together - you can launch two hefty strikes while only launching a manageable number of aircraft per carrier.

I tried to illustrate this with the recent Kriegsmarine fleet exercises - with only two available decks the KM was limited in the number of aircraft it could put on the target and its strength was rapidly diminished - with fewer aircraft attacking, losses climbed.

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Originally posted by Hood
The Audacious is effectively the OTL Malta class and it was at the very limit of the slipway and dry dock capacity in Britain (about three drydocks if I remember correctly, most of the them civilian). Here its 4-5th place in size.

But not by all that much - if you compare tonnages as well as length, the Audacious is larger tonnage-wise than the Bucentaure, which is longer but less beamy. Andrea Doria is similarly thinner on the beam. All three are pretty close in tonnage:
- Audacious: 40,313t normal
- Bucentaure: 40,132t normal
- Andrea Doria: 44,435t normal

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Originally posted by Hood
I think this shows the limitations begin faced to get an effective airgroup afloat, but as Brock says even launching 40-60 aircraft takes the best part of an hour or more. That's eating into strike sortie range, not to mention another hour or more before all are landed again.

I think the landing rate is about the same - it depends on how hurried the recovery operations are. But even more than in launch operations, recovery operations face some hard safety margins in regard to time, and are more prone to disruption.

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Originally posted by Hood
Partial angled decks have been introduced waaaay early and probably have alleviated some issues.

Aside from the Australian cruiser-carriers which can be historically justified, who's introduced the angled flight deck? I know RA offered it up on a few occasions, but the drawings in the Italian encyclopedia definitely don't show angled decks - and I can't think of anyone else who's proposed it.

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Originally posted by BruceDuncan
It was, IMHO, this fact of life that drove WW2 carriers to operate in mass - if you bring six aircraft carriers, the Japanese Kido Butai, together - you can launch two hefty strikes while only launching a manageable number of aircraft per carrier.

I think I agree with that opinion.

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Originally posted by Brockpaine
Aside from the Australian cruiser-carriers which can be historically justified, who's introduced the angled flight deck? I know RA offered it up on a few occasions, but the drawings in the Italian encyclopedia definitely don't show angled decks - and I can't think of anyone else who's proposed it.

My bad. I assumed the Italian carriers had angled decks (and I'm sure someone else proposed one some time ago but can't remember who or what ship).
Even so the Andrea Doria Class has a rather offset port catapult (to clear the elevator since those catapults are for twin-engine aircraft and are massive!) but the deck does seem to overhang to port. RA claims the class was designed to enable simultaneous landings and take-offs (not likely if twin-engine types are being used in larger numbers). The Guiseppe Garibaldi Class has that weird angled catapult aft to allow take-offs (in theory) from both ends of the deck at once. It wasn't repeated, RA it seems going for simultaneous capabilities rather than emphasising rapid launching. IC we could infer it didn't work.

Hmmm, I wonder how cost effective having six smaller carriers would be to, say, four super-fleet CVs? More ships means more running costs, more oil fuel needed, more crews, more spread out defensive formations. But you'd probably get an attack up quicker, more aircraft per carrier group and redundancy of flightdecks for security (though that didn't help the IJN at Midway).

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Originally posted by Hood

Hmmm, I wonder how cost effective having six smaller carriers would be to, say, four super-fleet CVs? More ships means more running costs, more oil fuel needed, more crews, more spread out defensive formations. But you'd probably get an attack up quicker, more aircraft per carrier group and redundancy of flightdecks for security (though that didn't help the IJN at Midway).

I think that the advantages of cycling strikes off the deck, the larger strikes that could result from more decks available and the redundancy of decks would offset the running costs etc. Having more potential targets also splits the attackers.

The Kriegsmarine deliberately chose to go with smaller carriers for several reasons, only one of which had to do with redundancy and flight-deck cycle times. The primary reason was building times for enormous aircraft carriers.


And remember Midway was a very lucky situation for the USN, and a very unlucky situation for the IJN. The whole timing of strikes and the cycling of aircraft on and off the decks of the IJN carriers was crucial to the outcome.

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Originally posted by BruceDuncan
And remember Midway was a very lucky situation for the USN, and a very unlucky situation for the IJN. The whole timing of strikes and the cycling of aircraft on and off the decks of the IJN carriers was crucial to the outcome.

Indeed. At risk of parading one of my favorite hobby horses around, Shattered Sword really does a great job of digging into all of the reasons events happened as they did - and why the way carriers operate their aircraft was so crucial to the way the battle transpired as it did. There's most of a chapter where the authors explain all of the events that take place as a carrier crew arms, fuels, and spots a strike, and then launches it for combat.

Regarding small versus large CV I think one has to keep in mind larger hulls allow to operate A/C in weather conditions where smaller carriers may roll and pitch and render use of airplanes impossible. Larger carriers usually are also more resistant against damage. They may survive where smaller ones succumb to attacks (though CV are generally ticking avgas bombs).

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Originally posted by Brockpaine
Bruce is correct in saying simultaneous recovery and launch operations are not something generally done in this period. There might have been a few very rare occasions where doctrine was violated, but they would be pretty extreme aberrations - I don't know of any off the top of my head. Doctrine opposed this since landing accidents were rather more commonplace: if a landing aircraft jumped the wire and the crash barrier, then it could threaten to hit fully-armed and fueled aircraft placed forward, with obviously disastrous consequences. Once the angled deck is a factor, though, a failed recovery simply means the plane either continues flying, or crashes in the sea, with less threat to the ship. There's actually a Wesworld example of this which cogently explains the dangers: when the Nordish carrier suffered her big accident and fire, the French and the Chileans just had to shake their heads in dismay. The Nordish were recovering fighters at the same time they were warming up a strike. I guess the French reaction was, well... "What do you expect to happen when you do that? We thought you guys were professionals! What were you thinking?" (Answer: "Clearly, we were thinking we would get away with it...")

I tend to think that the incoming plane had suffered a mechanical casualty of some sort - forcing a choice between recovering it right then or fishing the pilot out of the water after ditching. Obviously, Orn's captain chose poorly.

Although obviously the meta-reason for things to happen the way they did was that my understanding of carrier ops was even shakier at the time than it is now.

Glad to have provided an object lesson for the teachers, though.

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Originally posted by Valles
I tend to think that the incoming plane had suffered a mechanical casualty of some sort - forcing a choice between recovering it right then or fishing the pilot out of the water after ditching. Obviously, Orn's captain chose poorly.

Perhaps, although I don't believe it was stated as such; so my reaction is based on the information that is available. *Shrug.* If the recovery was caused by a mechanical casualty, as you say, then the Nordish captain is guilty only of violating doctrine, rather than the Nordish Navy itself having a stinky doctrine. He probably still got court-martialed, though...

IIRC the movie, "Men of the Fighting Lady" has a scene where a damaged jet has to land on its carrier. The movie is set in Korea, with F9Fs operating off a straight-deck Essex.

The damaged aircraft is of course the last to land, and the forward deck is crowded with aircraft that have already landed but not yet struck below decks (only one elevator available). The crash barrier is stung out and a couple of tractors (used to help move aircraft around the deck) parked behind it to help protect the landed aircraft.

Naturally, the jet is caught by the barrier just before it hits the parked tractors. It is a movie after all.

Some of those old classics are valuable visual sources.

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Originally posted by Brockpaine
Perhaps, although I don't believe it was stated as such; so my reaction is based on the information that is available. *Shrug.* If the recovery was caused by a mechanical casualty, as you say, then the Nordish captain is guilty only of violating doctrine, rather than the Nordish Navy itself having a stinky doctrine. He probably still got court-martialed, though...

He could've been clean as driven snow and blameless as Ensign Mary Sue and a court-martial still would've been called. I suspect that the verdict in this case was less favorable than if that had been so.

The mechanical issue is more of an author's saving throw, though, you're right.