They weren’t the first. In the U.S. Navy, the U.S.S. Langley (named after aircraft pioneer Dr. Samuel Langley), a converted collier, had preceded them.
During World War I, the British had experimented with aircraft carriers. The H.M.S. Furious had a flight deck, but it was too short and located behind the funnels, which created too much turbulence. Furious could handle only amphibian planes that landed in the water and had to be winched aboard the ship.
In the U.S. Navy, cruisers and battleships had been carrying seaplanes on catapults since 1912. These aircraft, too, landed on the water and were hauled up to the deck. The British then built the H.M..S. Argus, which had an unbroken flight deck, but Argus was not commissioned until after the war. Meanwhile, the Japanese had not been idle. Japan commissioned its first ship designed from the start to be an aircraft carrier in 1922. That ship, Hosho, entered the Imperial service 12 years before Ranger, the first purpose-built American carrier, was commissioned.
Aircraft carriers required specialized planes and highly skilled pilots because they provided such limited take-off and landing space. Arresting gear helped to slow landing planes, and carriers built during World War II had catapults to help their planes become airborne. Still, to a high-flying pilot, his carrier was a tiny dot that might be moving faster than most craft on the ocean.
And if he were flying any kind of bomber, his target was usually even smaller.
Carrier-based bombers were considerably smaller than their land-based coun-terparts. There were three kinds — high-level bombers, dive bombers, and torpedo bombers. Bombs dropped from high altitude had more penetration than those released at a lower level, but if dropped on ships that were under way, their chances of scoring a hit were extremely small. The U.S. Navy invented dive bombing so its planes could hit those small, fast-moving targets. Dive bombing was dangerous, because, to a gunner on the surface, the plane appeared immobile, only getting bigger as it approached the ship. Even more dangerous was torpedo bombing, because the plane appeared equally immobile while flying just above the water.
Aircraft carriers were now firmly established in the world’s navies, but they weren’t considered capital ships. Until 1937, the world’s navies concentrated on rebuilding their old battleships — even battleships those that weren’t so old.
When the Japanese battleship Nagato was commissioned in 1920, she was the most powerful battleship in the world. Nagato’s armor was increased, raising her displacement by 6,000 tons. Her speed stayed the same, because she received new engines. And the range of her 16-inch guns was increased by allowing them greater elevation. In 1937, limitations on capital ships ended and all naval powers resumed building battleships. The United States built the most, but Japan built the most powerful. Musashi and Yamato were two monsters each carrying nine 18-inch guns and displacing 72,908 tons when fully laden.
Naval historian Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison wrote that the two ships “would have inaugurated a new standard for battleship construction — as H.M.S Dreadnought had done 40 years earlier.”
But that was not to be. This was, to a large extent, because of something the proud owners of these super ships did December 7, 1941.
On that day, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku carried out the attack he had planned over the opposition of the Naval General Staff — a surprise attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. The Naval General Staff, the part of the Japanese navy responsible for plans, had no faith that mere airplanes could successfully cripple a whole battle fleet. But Yamamoto believed that immobile ships crowded into a harbor would make good targets. He called in specialists to develop shallow-running torpedoes, armor piercing bombs and tactics suitable for operations in a constricted space such as Pearl Harbor. Then he created the First Air Fleet — six aircraft carriers escorted by two battleships and a number of cruisers and destroyers.
At the last moment, the Naval General Staff ordered Yamamoto to send three of his carriers to the naval force about to begin operations in Southeast Asia. Yamamoto said that if he had to do that, he and his whole staff would resign. The Naval General Staff backed down. The First Air Fleet sailed under the command of Admiral Nagumo Chuichi, an old battleship admiral who was not convinced he could accomplish his mission.
Fortunately for the United States, all the aircraft carriers in its Pacific Fleet were elsewhere. Nagumo could hardly believe his success. His planes had sunk or crippled every battleship in the U.S. Pacific Fleet as well as many other smaller ships and a large number of land-based planes — most of them caught on the ground. From that day on, he was a fervent supporter of air power.
The U.S. Pacific Fleet was suddenly at war without battleships. Admiral Ernest J. King, commander-in-chief of the United States fleet, was hoarding all the newest battleships in the Atlantic, in line with the official policy that major enemy was Germany. It only gradually dawned on King that battleships were useless against Germany but would be most helpful fighting Japan. Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Fleet, and his staff had to improvise. They created a new tactical formation, the carrier task force. It was modeled on Yamamoto’s First Air Fleet. It was built around one or more carriers which were escorted by cruisers and destroyers.
The new formation got its first big test in the Battle of the Coral Sea, when American and Japanese fleets slugged it out without ever coming to within sight of each other. All the action was done by airplanes. The battle was a tactical draw but a strategic U.S. victory, because it turned back an attempted Japanese invasion of the south coast of New Guinea, which would put Japanese troops in place for an invasion of Australia. The heaviest American loss was the end of “Lady Lex,” the big old U.S.S. Lexington.
The second test was the Battle of Midway. This was Yamamoto’s attempt to finish off American power in the Pacific. The Japanese plan was complicated. A diversionary attack on the Aleutians was supposed to draw off the American ships. Meanwhile, a task force under Nagumo, which included all four of the large Japanese carriers now operational, would attack American forces on Midway Island. Then the main Japanese fleet, commanded by Yamamoto himself from his flagship, the enormous Yamato, would wipe out the American ships returning from the north and invade Hawaii.
The Americans didn’t go to the Aleutians, because they had decoded enough of the Japanese radio transmissions to know that the Aleutians attack was a feint. They did not know, however, where the fleets of Nagumo and Yamamoto were. Scout planes then spotted Nagumo’s ships about the time they launched their first aerial attack on Midway. Admiral Raymond Spruance launched the planes from his carriers, Enterprise and Hornet, in an attempt to get the Japanese carriers while their planes were refueling. Meanwhile, Nagumo had changed his course. The American planes could not find the Japanese ships. While they were searching, the Japanese planes returned and refueled. Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, aboard the U.S.S. Yorktown, launched his planes.