Before the war the U.S. laid down six battleships of two classes, the North Carolina class and South Dakota class.
What would have been the effect in WW2 if instead six Yorktown (improved) Class carriers were laid down instead?
After all, the Yourtown class was a 1933 design and the bugs worked out, and the battleships were laid down in 1937 on!
Deaf
I think all the carriers would have been moored in Pearl Harbor when the Japs attacked knocking them out of action for at least a year. With no way to counter the Japanese advance in the Pacific the war there would have been lost.
Why would they have been moored at Pearl rather than being somewhere else? Particularly as the existing US Pacific Fleet carriers were not moored at or even anywhere near Pearl when it was attacked. http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq66-9.htm
Anyway, if the construction of carriers took about as long as the construction of the battleships actually built, they would not have entered service until well after Pearl Harbor, somewhere towards mid-1942.
Six extra carriers in the Pacific after Midway would have given the US an enormous capability beyond what it actually had.
However, could the US have supplied sufficient competent pilots to man the planes on those ships by mid-1942? Without the pilots the ships would have been useless.
Ummm, even without the extra carriers the US actually defeated Japan.
Hey, it was a hypothetical question.
Related to the real events of WWII.
What if a modern supercarrier passed through a strange vortex and went back in time to a point a few days before the attack on Pearl Harbor and had the opportunity to stop the attack.
What if my sister was my mother and I found out that I was really a Tasmanian which would mean that my brother was my father?
FFS!
I remember that movie! Geez…that’s been years!:shock: I always liked that move for its “what if” value.
If they could do it in 1943 I don’t see why it coudn’t be done in 1941. Though I think they stopped these experiments from 1976 to 1980 because I don’t remember anything like that while I was stationed on the AO-98.
That is probably because they wiped your brain.
Come on guys.
Since they would have come online about the same time as the battleships did, would one or two of them be present at Midway? Would we have taken the offence earlier? Keep in mind most of 43 was land battles (New Guinea mainly) because both sides were short of carriers.
Could we have taken Tarawa before the Japanese had time to fortify it (and for that matter alot of the other islands?) Or gone strait to the Philippines a year earlier?
Did we really need those battleshps?
Deaf
Where these would make the difference is in the summer and autum of 1942. Instead of trying to fight the Japanese with one or two, or a few times three carriers, there would have been three or four available for those battles. Also the USN could have risked attacking more often.
Pilot experince would be little different. Two or three extra carriers implies the provision of the appropriate number of pilots long before the war. In any case the real training of the USN & US Army pilots came in the desperate battles over the Solomons and New Guinea, where they learned the appropriate tactics for fighting the Japanese. More pilots fighting in those months means more leassons learned sooner.
The down side is that the Japanese depended on night actions to resupply and attack the Allied positions in the Solomons. Specifically on Guadacannal. The most sucessfull US interceptions of those surface forces were with the battleships Washington and South Dakota. The Indiana arrived just a few weeks after the critical battles and might be considered part of this. If the battleships are not available the US is dependant of either using more crusiers to intercept the Japanese surface groups, or on risking the carriers further forward to intercept the Japanese before nightfall. With fewer US battleships avalble in the SW Pacific the Japanese would have the option of leaving theirs in port and using the fuel to sortie their own cariers into the campaign more often.
Overall I see this as a benefit to the US, but it would cause many changes in the fighting in the SW Pacific in 1942.
Given the obsession by all nations with the battleship as the king of the ocean, how likely is it that the US would have committed the necessary extra resources to training naval pilots before WWII as well as building carriers?
Particularly with the strictures of the hard economic times which faced the US Government then?
I don’t think there was sufficient understanding of the power of air over surface vessels and the might of the carrier in the US, or anywhere else, until at least some early losses to air, such as the Prince of Wales and the Repulse in Malaya in 1941, and more so Coral Sea and especially Midway.
Well if they had the money for carriers, then I guess they would have got the pilots. After all, those carriers are not cheep and they knew the only good they would be is if they had the pilots and planes (as the Japanese found, at great cost, in '44.)
But really, they could have built any combination. Say 3 carriers, 3 battleships.
One of the things that saved us was we were building new ships, better ships, even before the start. Lucky for us we had six battle wagons to replace the losses at Pearl. Even better would have been six carriers to replace the losses we had in '42.
Deaf
I think RS was right. Hindsight shows that resources would have been better allocated towards building carriers instead of battleships but before the sinking of the Italian Fleet at Taranto in 1940 and Pearl Harbor in 1941 very few people realize the impact carriers would have during World War II. The battleship was still viewed as the queen of the ocean and they were the real power projectors of their time.
I wouldn’t argue with that. 
I ignored those two events because I was thinking of carriers used in action at sea rather than against moored ships, but you are correct that they both proved the capacity of aircraft and carriers against battleships.
They also proved the often temporary benefit of attacking moored ships in shallow harbours as the targets were often just grounded and later salvaged and returned to service rather than sunk beyond salvage like ships at sea. There is an excuse for the British at Taranto failing to allow for this as there was no precedent, but not for the Japanese at Pearl who modelled their attack on Taranto. Still, if you can take a few major ships out of action for most of a year or more then that might be the difference between winning and losing some later engagement. As it could well have been for the Japanese if things had played out differently in the early Pacific naval battles.
Perhaps that had to do with the understandable and accurate belief that an armour belted floating gun platform with guns of great accurate range and immense power was the most powerful single weapon on the planet at the time, which it was. After all, gunboat diplomacy had worked rather well for the major naval nations, notably and ironically by the black ships of Commodore Perry intimidating the Japanese sufficiently to open their medieval nation to the West, so that Japan could rush into the modern world and flog the Russians about 50 years later and the American navy less than 90 years later.
But, on a value for dollar basis measured by tonnage sunk, the submarine rather than the aircraft carrier might have been the best naval vessel to build within a fixed budget. Although perhaps not the most effective weapon tactically as it could not confront or defeat a massed naval surface force in the same way that another massed naval surface force could.
Ha! I didn’t think you would
True. In the Coral Sea we took out Shōkaku (by damage) and Zuikaku’s air crews. If we had not have done that, at Midway there might have been six carriers, not four.
And the Japanese did us the favor when they converted the Ise and Hyūga. They took them out of commission themselves for a year or so.
I agree so far as battleships tonnage .vs. submarine tonnage, but subs can’t torpedo much on land, and the carriers did strke many a base and city with airpower. The carrier’s power is more than just to sink ships. Anything inside the aircrafts 200+ mile radius of action was fair game, something a battleship or sub cannot do.
Just like Germany, most countries should have spent their money on subs and carriers (and support ships for those two.) Hindsight really is 20/20.
Deaf
There were elements of the USN who did not understand the full potential of carrier airpower, but the battleship adherents lost a lot of sway after Pearl Harbour.
While a new urgency to build carriers swept through the USN, the new and modernized battleship construction was very important just for the fact of increased AA firepower the battle wagons provided for the carrier groups.
Even had the carriers been built, the several hundred pilots plus needed to equip them would not have been available until mid to late 1942. This was when American air power began to be felt.
digger
Adm. Nimitz was one hop ahead of Yamaoto throughout the MIDWAY campaign. Thanks to Cmdr Rochfort and his legendary HYPO team, they had it down to the dates for when the harbormaster was supposed to report.
Six combined fleet carriers? Sure, but if 4 got their bottoms blown out, you think they would have committed the rest if they didn’t know where the rest of the US fleet was at? I doubt that. Their nerve would have been broken by then and Yamaoto would have called for a withdrawl instead of committing the rest to what he might have perceived as a meeting engagement.
In such an action, it would have been nothing but a slaughter with more and more assets thrown at it, only to see them get destroyed.
Besides, the Aleutians were invaded and he had to maintain a supply line to them.