This special looks at the design and fate of the carrier Taiho, or why you should always train your crew as well as build your ship.
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This special looks at the design and fate of the carrier Taiho, or why you should always train your crew as well as build your ship.
Sounds like a poor design. Armored flight deck, sure, but what does a carrier need an armored belt? Or are we talking about torpedo protection?
Carriers need side armour because they might find themselves in surface combat and because bombs can strike the sides of the ship too. Every carrier that was armoured in the first place had some.
Catch is, every bit of armor costs the carrier somewhere else. Apart from the costs, from what I understand, British carriers had significantly smaller aircrafts than comparable US carriers, due to the armor. And side armor, the carrier simply has no place to get caught in surface combat and bombs striking the side seems like something rare enough to not be worth the trade offs.
I don't think bombs striking the sides is such a low probability event that it can be ignored, some bombing tactics specifically sought to put a bomb in the ship's sides (mast height and skip bombing) and dive bombers could make attacks at fairly shallow dives (as Japanese dive bombers tended) which would increase the probability of hitting the sides, as well as allow more favourable striking obliquity.
I would agree that the the sides tended to be overarmoured though. All the wartime fleet carriers were designed before the war and the possibility of them getting caught in surface combat was bit overestimated, even if it's understandable contingency to prepare for. If protecting purely vs. bomb hits you could do with less as the hits on side armour would range from high penetrating power, low probability, high obliquity to low penetrating power, moderate probabiliy, low obliquity. This applies to all fleet carriers, specifically including the US ones: they used side armour like everyone else. Taiho herself does not seem particularly over-armoured with her sides in comparison to contemporaries, in fact her armour for machinery sides and hangar sides was substantially thinner than that of British Implacable and Illustrious classes (in particular Taiho had very thin, even too thin, hangar sides at maximum of 25mm; compare to Illustrious with 114mm hangar side armour intended to protect the hangar vs. cruiser gunfire). I don't get what Drach is going on about there.
You are right that armoured flight deck restricted aircraft complement. Illustrious class is the most visible testament of this as she had to revert to single story hangar from Ark Royal's two story one. The reason why USN carriers had such large air groups was heavily doctrinal, however. Their hangars were actually quite small. Ark Royal (as well as many Axis carriers, even the German Graf Zeppelin) had more hangar floor area than any US carrier before Midway class. But US embraced the concept of deck parking early and their carriers made use of the flight deck as what amounted to a second hangar. They also had roomy flight decks and generous avgas stores to take advantage of that. Other navies' carriers were designed to store their aircraft in the hangars.
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Good points, though if a carrier isn't to be alone ever but always have an escort, I do wonder whether the expense of the side armor is worth it or if you give up too much of something else, be it with the carrier built or with the armor plates being better used elsewhere.
Regard aircraft capacity, do I understand this right, that the British insisted on having hangar space for all aircraft, while the Americans would accept having to store some excess on the decks?
Essentially yes. And when British did adopt large scale deck parking with the late war Pacific Fleet operaring against Japan their air groups went up substantially, around 60%-80% increase over the design. But at the same time the avgas stores, designed for smaller air group and with heavy safety features (that RN had been obsessed with since the loss of the seaplane tender Ben-my-Chree in WW1), became embarassingly small for the enlarged air group.
World of Warships, I have had a lot of shots pass through the empty spaces below decks on USS Langley. You can't hit what isn't there!
Just checked on the Ben-my-Chree on wikipedia, given that she was sunk by coastal artillery, I am surprised that her loss ignited such concerns for aviation gas.
It should be Ben-my-Chree and the wiki entry seems to support a fuel fire, but working off memory (and in no position to verify for couple of weeks) so I might be mixing it with some other WW1 seaplane tender.
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The first USS Lexington was lost, in the end, to explosions that were likely fueled by avgas. The US Navy went to great lengths to develop workable, effective damage prevention for gasoline handling including draining the lines and filling them with inert gas.
If you check out the damage to the carriers 'Princeton', 'Bunker Hill' and 'Franklin' you can see that Japan was not alone in losing carriers to fires (the last two were not sunk but were effectively out of the war). But US design, with the open-sided hangar deck, did prevent what happened to 'Taiho'.
Side armor doesn't require nearly the tonnage that deck armor does, and it can help limit torpedo damage. Overall, however, good damage control practice and well-trained crews will do more to keep the ship afloat and serviceable, and US damage control was as good as anyone's.
If you check out the damage to the carriers 'Princeton', 'Bunker Hill' and 'Franklin' you can see that Japan was not alone in losing carriers to fires (the last two were not sunk but were effectively out of the war). But US design, with the open-sided hangar deck, did prevent what happened to 'Taiho'.
Side armor doesn't require nearly the tonnage that deck armor does, and it can help limit torpedo damage. Overall, however, good damage control practice and well-trained crews will do more to keep the ship afloat and serviceable, and US damage control was as good as anyone's.
Far superior, and only got better over time in both ship design, crew training, and C&C. Essex, for example, has a plethora of fire control water and foam mains running through the ship using a variety of power sources based on past performance and her aviation gas lines were purged and filled with intert gas when unused. This leads us to USS Franklin, which survived blows and internal explosions that would have destroyed a carrier much earlier in the war and manages to limp from Japanese waters back to a harbor in NYC where it was cut for scrap as it was no longer needed post-war rather than sitting on the bottom of the ocean.
With the caveat that the area of side armour explodes on double-decker armoured flight deck carrier like Taiho or Implacable. A typical battleship might have waterline belt 4-6m tall and deck covering the entirety of the variable beam topping at around 30m or so. The deck weights more for given thickness because it covers a greater area.
A carrier needs more or less regular waterline belt, which on non-AFD carrier extends to the bottom of the hangar(s). That hangar itself is such a massive liability if flooded that it needs to be (preferably well) above the waterline. On AFD carrier you'll be armouring the hangar sides to top of the hull, where they'll join with the armoured flight deck. The minimum height of side armour now becomes regular belt + whatever the hangars that must be above waterline need (typically single hangar deck was 4.3-5.3m high). On double-decker AFD carrier then, rather than 4 meters the side armour becomes more like 14 meters and adding both sides of the ship it's rivalling the deck armour in area covered. It's no great wonder that every carrier like that skimped on thickness of the hangar sides (Taiho apparently the most).
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@Andre Bolkonsky - I agree with your assessment of the 'Essex' and US damage control measures in general. I'm not sure the 'Independence' class CVLs were as well-equipped (tonnage and space) but, really, I don't know one way or the other.
The qualification in my, "US damage control was as good as anyone's" is due to my assessment of the US Navy up through the Battle of Savo Island. It was still a peacetime navy at heart and its ships were full of flammables: paint, linoleum, wood, fabric. Gasoline for scout aircraft was not well stowed in cruiser hangars - so on and so forth. US Damage Control officers and men did heroic work after the Savo clubbing - they almost saved some of those ships - but in general, US preparation for battle and damage control were deficient to, say, the Royal Navy of the same date, whose officers had been learning for two years.
This unpreparedness changed, in the same way any organization changes: stripping for battle and prepping for damage control were made high priorities, the priorities were enforced and taken seriously by officers and men at every level, some of whom had seen the awful cost of having flammables aboard. The men and ships of the US Navy were very different after Savo Island and US damage control steadily improved thereafter. I do think by 1943 it was as good or better than any other navy, but I also think the Royal Navy was very good.
I agree that some of the ships that survived kamikaze attacks (like 'Franklin': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_F...air_attack_on_19_March_1945_(80-G-273882).jpg ) would have been lost without US damage control prowess. I will say that, in my opinion, there is always a question of how to best use tonnage, which the carrier debates always seem to center upon. It isn't a question of 'do we armor the flight deck or not' it is, more broadly, 'Do we armor the flight deck or use the tonnage for a bigger air group?' Do we armor the sides of the carrier above the waterline, or do we open the doors for better ventilation and light? Do we expose aircraft to the salt spray and elements in a deck park, and if so how does that increase the size or weight of the aircraft? How many elevators, and what size, do we need? Carrier operations in the 20s and 30s were interpreted differently by the three navies, so their carriers featured the things they thought were important. One good example is the extreme high speed of the 'Shokaku' class, with a large percentage of total tonnage devoted to the propulsion plant (more powerful than 'Yamato'). Was that extra two or three knots worth the cost? The Japanese thought so, the other navies did not, and so forth through every design element.
Broadly, I believe the US had the best design for the Pacific and the Japanese carriers were workable, while the British had a good design for Atlantic/Mediterranean confined waters. I have heard - and agree with - the idea that the Allied navies would have suffered had they swapped designs. Post-war, of course, US carriers became enclosed for weather and armored the flight-deck for better protection - at the cost of doubling in size. (Yes, the aircraft got bigger and faster and heavier too.)
@Antediluvian Monster - I take your points but I was, perhaps unclearly, more concerned with classic waterline belt armor and torpedo protection. Were I designing a carrier I would strenuously resist the idea of carrying side armor up to flight-deck level. The chance of being hit by a sideways-traveling bomb is relatively low, so I would fit anti-splinter protection and use the tonnage elsewhere.
Britain had good, serious reasons for building their armored carriers; I'm not really sure what the rationale for 'Taiho' was unless she was a proof-of-concept experiment.
The qualification in my, "US damage control was as good as anyone's" is due to my assessment of the US Navy up through the Battle of Savo Island. It was still a peacetime navy at heart and its ships were full of flammables: paint, linoleum, wood, fabric. Gasoline for scout aircraft was not well stowed in cruiser hangars - so on and so forth. US Damage Control officers and men did heroic work after the Savo clubbing - they almost saved some of those ships - but in general, US preparation for battle and damage control were deficient to, say, the Royal Navy of the same date, whose officers had been learning for two years.
This unpreparedness changed, in the same way any organization changes: stripping for battle and prepping for damage control were made high priorities, the priorities were enforced and taken seriously by officers and men at every level, some of whom had seen the awful cost of having flammables aboard. The men and ships of the US Navy were very different after Savo Island and US damage control steadily improved thereafter. I do think by 1943 it was as good or better than any other navy, but I also think the Royal Navy was very good.
I agree that some of the ships that survived kamikaze attacks (like 'Franklin': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_F...air_attack_on_19_March_1945_(80-G-273882).jpg ) would have been lost without US damage control prowess. I will say that, in my opinion, there is always a question of how to best use tonnage, which the carrier debates always seem to center upon. It isn't a question of 'do we armor the flight deck or not' it is, more broadly, 'Do we armor the flight deck or use the tonnage for a bigger air group?' Do we armor the sides of the carrier above the waterline, or do we open the doors for better ventilation and light? Do we expose aircraft to the salt spray and elements in a deck park, and if so how does that increase the size or weight of the aircraft? How many elevators, and what size, do we need? Carrier operations in the 20s and 30s were interpreted differently by the three navies, so their carriers featured the things they thought were important. One good example is the extreme high speed of the 'Shokaku' class, with a large percentage of total tonnage devoted to the propulsion plant (more powerful than 'Yamato'). Was that extra two or three knots worth the cost? The Japanese thought so, the other navies did not, and so forth through every design element.
Broadly, I believe the US had the best design for the Pacific and the Japanese carriers were workable, while the British had a good design for Atlantic/Mediterranean confined waters. I have heard - and agree with - the idea that the Allied navies would have suffered had they swapped designs. Post-war, of course, US carriers became enclosed for weather and armored the flight-deck for better protection - at the cost of doubling in size. (Yes, the aircraft got bigger and faster and heavier too.)
@Antediluvian Monster - I take your points but I was, perhaps unclearly, more concerned with classic waterline belt armor and torpedo protection. Were I designing a carrier I would strenuously resist the idea of carrying side armor up to flight-deck level. The chance of being hit by a sideways-traveling bomb is relatively low, so I would fit anti-splinter protection and use the tonnage elsewhere.
Britain had good, serious reasons for building their armored carriers; I'm not really sure what the rationale for 'Taiho' was unless she was a proof-of-concept experiment.
This is the kind of topic where my opinion has been swinging back and forth over the years. I´d agree broadly that it´s best the Western Allies did not swap their carrier fleets around as they were, but with the caveats that I find many of the British carriers suboptimal anyway and that Americans would have themselves benefitted from an armoured flight deck (notably, the standard Japanese dive bomber D3A had light bomb load at 250 kg max, relatively easily fended off with AFD). For Japanese the Taiho was supposed to be a forward deployed carrier more likely to come under attack (and only the first of many to come) and given that what happened at Midway would have been avoidable or at least mitigated with AFD there is overall at least a decent case for AFD for Japanese.
More generally, I used to agree with D.K. Brown's opinion that Ark Royal was the ideal template for closed hangar carrier and that the AFD carriers afterwards were a mistake. Since then I have come more to the opinion that if you are going for a weather-proof closed hangar anyway (as everyone except USN did) you should be going straight for armoured flight deck too. Many of the problems associated with the AFD carriers (lack of ventilation, lack of lifts, vulnerability to bomb explosions in the hangars) come as set with the internal hangar design already (meaning the hangar is encased within the ship's loadbearing hull, as hangars on Ark Royal and all British and Japanese AFD carriers were). AFD did reduce the air group somewhat, but it clearly did not need to be as exaggerated as in Illustrious as both British and Japanese were able to eventually work in a second hangar there. The avgas issues seem independent from internal hangar or AFD, as Taiho was apparently supplied with double stowage of it to total capacity of 1.000 tons or nearly 1.400.000 litres which is about 50% more than Essex and 3 times what the larger British carriers had (Taiho also had somewhat larger hangars in total area than the slightly lighter Essex, illustrating the previous point). A closed superstructure hangar (ala the Akagi and Kaga, admittedly rebuilds) is worst of both worlds and not worth consideration over the more focused alternatives for purpose built carriers: it would have needed heavier hull structure (more dead weight) than internal hangar and still not had the benefit of ventilation of the USN style open hangars.
The purpose of the AFD would not be to defeat AP bombs (they tended to be heavy and penetrate 5+ inches), or defeat everything thrown towards the carrier but defeat GP bombs, at least lighter SAP bombs and actually force the enemy planes to use those AP bombs. The latter would result in less explosives being thrown towards the carrier since AP bombs had smaller explosive fillers. At longer ranges with enemy bombers forced to use lighter bomb loads to extend their range the AFD carrier would have also benefitted from more substantial protection (e.g. Dauntless flying with single 500 lb bomb would not have had bomb capable of defeating 3" deck armour as no such bomb of that size existed in any of the major navies).
That is, I think the ideal WW2 carrier was, in broad design concept if not necessarily in design detail, either something like Taiho or Implacable; or something like Essex and Yorktown. And nothing in between. It's essentially trade-off between protection (including protection against adverse weather) and smoother air-ops and different kinds of fire safety considerations (closed internal hangar is worse ventilated than open one, but it can be hermetic and better subdivided against flash and fires). And I think you can make case for AFD carrier for all navies, though for British with Atlantic and North Sea weather considerations closed hangar was at very least more desirable than to the others.
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@Antediluvian Monster - broadly, I agree with you; reasonable and well reasoned.
I do think you have perhaps overlooked one point that helps explain British, American and Japanese carrier designs, and that is tonnage restriction by treaty or economics. All of the carriers at the start of WW2 were either small or experiemental (or both), or restricted in size. This limitation can be somewhat overcome by careful design and construction - the Enterprise, Yorktown and Hornet are, in my opinion, as good or better carriers than Lexington and Saratoga - but if you want to have a serious air group and good protection, you need size. This is how and why late-war/post-war designs like Midway and Malta seem to converge (the Maltas sacrificed protection for a larger airgroup while the Midways got enhanced flight-deck protection) whereas the Essex and Implacable are very different and much smaller designs. In the Japanese case, their post-Shokaku designs tend to be smaller for economic reasons (Taiho excepted) rather than treaty restrictions, but the same laws of physics control them: if you want to add protection you must reduce the airgroup or increase overall size.
In short: large size permits the advantages of both armored flight-deck and large air group to be used; smaller size means you must choose.
The Royal Navy attempted to armor-up but could not foresee that aircraft would improve and bomb-weight grow so dramatically; those carriers were not well-protected against the 1000-lb bombs which were in use as early as the Malta battles and could be damaged by smaller bombs. The US Navy's impulse toward all-or-nothing armor is on full display in the Essex class, but given the practice of deck-parking aircraft, and the kamikaze habit of popping up out of seeming-nowhere, it does appear to me that a modest increase in flight-deck armor would have gained them nothing in terms of combat-effectiveness while the larger air group did help shatter enemy air groups and sink his ships. By 'nothing in terms of combat-effectiveness' I mean that every US carrier damaged from mid-1943 on would still have been damaged if its flight-deck were moderately armored, but a - say - 25% reduction in airgroup size would have had profound effects from the Philippine Sea to the end of the war.
I see the attraction of DK Brown's opinion re: Ark Royal, and in many ways I agree with it. My personal preference has always been to defend my property from someone else's real-estate, or at least to do so at as great a distance from home-base as I can, so I tend to favor a large air group with a heavy percentage of fighters. I think the AFD carriers proved their worth during the Malta battles but I cannot see that they were of any greater use than a more conventional design in other battles or campaigns - indeed, their small airgroups of outdated planes (a result of a political decision) reduced their combat-effectiveness in most cases. (Not taking anything away from the men of the Royal Navy - just saying that they were hobbled by a lack of aircraft quality and quantity, a lack only slowly made up).
My belief and understanding are that the armored flight deck design was made at least partly in response to the Navy losing control of the fleet air arm. The uncertainty that caused, in terms of not knowing what type or number of aircraft would be available, would have led me to make the carrier well-defended with systems I could control - IE, armor, damage control and AA. What the Royal Navy really needed, in my opinion, was to have kept full control of the Fleet Air Arm, and to have equipped its Ark Royal-style carriers with large numbers of modern aircraft manned by navy-trained pilots... but if wishes were horses, we'd all spend our lives mucking out.
So, as you put it, the ideal WW2 carrier was a combination of British and American designs, built on a size to permit the good qualities of both, with room to manage larger, faster aircraft, too. They just had to jump up the tonnage by 50% or so in order to achieve it - and none saw real combat service in WW2.
I do think you have perhaps overlooked one point that helps explain British, American and Japanese carrier designs, and that is tonnage restriction by treaty or economics. All of the carriers at the start of WW2 were either small or experiemental (or both), or restricted in size. This limitation can be somewhat overcome by careful design and construction - the Enterprise, Yorktown and Hornet are, in my opinion, as good or better carriers than Lexington and Saratoga - but if you want to have a serious air group and good protection, you need size. This is how and why late-war/post-war designs like Midway and Malta seem to converge (the Maltas sacrificed protection for a larger airgroup while the Midways got enhanced flight-deck protection) whereas the Essex and Implacable are very different and much smaller designs. In the Japanese case, their post-Shokaku designs tend to be smaller for economic reasons (Taiho excepted) rather than treaty restrictions, but the same laws of physics control them: if you want to add protection you must reduce the airgroup or increase overall size.
In short: large size permits the advantages of both armored flight-deck and large air group to be used; smaller size means you must choose.
The Royal Navy attempted to armor-up but could not foresee that aircraft would improve and bomb-weight grow so dramatically; those carriers were not well-protected against the 1000-lb bombs which were in use as early as the Malta battles and could be damaged by smaller bombs. The US Navy's impulse toward all-or-nothing armor is on full display in the Essex class, but given the practice of deck-parking aircraft, and the kamikaze habit of popping up out of seeming-nowhere, it does appear to me that a modest increase in flight-deck armor would have gained them nothing in terms of combat-effectiveness while the larger air group did help shatter enemy air groups and sink his ships. By 'nothing in terms of combat-effectiveness' I mean that every US carrier damaged from mid-1943 on would still have been damaged if its flight-deck were moderately armored, but a - say - 25% reduction in airgroup size would have had profound effects from the Philippine Sea to the end of the war.
I see the attraction of DK Brown's opinion re: Ark Royal, and in many ways I agree with it. My personal preference has always been to defend my property from someone else's real-estate, or at least to do so at as great a distance from home-base as I can, so I tend to favor a large air group with a heavy percentage of fighters. I think the AFD carriers proved their worth during the Malta battles but I cannot see that they were of any greater use than a more conventional design in other battles or campaigns - indeed, their small airgroups of outdated planes (a result of a political decision) reduced their combat-effectiveness in most cases. (Not taking anything away from the men of the Royal Navy - just saying that they were hobbled by a lack of aircraft quality and quantity, a lack only slowly made up).
My belief and understanding are that the armored flight deck design was made at least partly in response to the Navy losing control of the fleet air arm. The uncertainty that caused, in terms of not knowing what type or number of aircraft would be available, would have led me to make the carrier well-defended with systems I could control - IE, armor, damage control and AA. What the Royal Navy really needed, in my opinion, was to have kept full control of the Fleet Air Arm, and to have equipped its Ark Royal-style carriers with large numbers of modern aircraft manned by navy-trained pilots... but if wishes were horses, we'd all spend our lives mucking out.
So, as you put it, the ideal WW2 carrier was a combination of British and American designs, built on a size to permit the good qualities of both, with room to manage larger, faster aircraft, too. They just had to jump up the tonnage by 50% or so in order to achieve it - and none saw real combat service in WW2.
While we are on WWII aircraft carriers, may I ask about the German Graf Zeppelin class? According to wiki, displacement was to be 33.500 tonnes and a complement of 43 aircraft. By comparison, the HMS Ark Royal had a displacement 22,000 t (tonnes?) and 50-60 aircraft (and originally designed for 70). If the roles were reversed, I would chalk it up to overoptimistic planning, but here we have a design that was to be larger than an older design yet was planned to carry fewer aircraft. What gives?
More simply put, British carriers expect to operate in range of large numbers of land based aircraft and survive while operating in the North Sea, the Med, and along the coastline of Europe. Defense was vital. The Pacific is an afterthought.
The US were building super fast carriers to cover the vast expanses of the Pacific, as well as fast capital and escort vessels to ensure they acheived their mission. Speed and air wing size were vital.
From there, the process evolves and both sides contribute to the conversation. But the US carrier force is simply awe inspiring by the sheer volume of legendary, high quality, well trained fighting units it produces to create The Big Blue Fleet what wsa covered by the Big Blue Blanket of US air superiority.
At the end of World War II Hollywood and the Navy produce a movie called 'Task Force' that tracks the evolution of the US Fast Carrier Task Force from Langley through the surrender of Japan using real combat footage. It should be required viewing for anyone trying to understand the concept of US airpower in the Pacific.