Comprehensible, imi. But I am afraid the germans have never been much of a seafaring people throughout history…
In the first period the Uboots are working well!
see the Hungarians,we have only a big lake,but we compensate the hungarian girlz 
Yeah, I’d love to see myself on the Balaton on an inflatable mattress peeking out the hungarian girls at the shore. But I guess my wife would not cope at all…
flamethowerguy:therefrom You read the menucard,not sure You will eat 
Yes, something like “Look, but don’t touch…” or “Watch the menu card but dinner is served at home…”.
ill go with the USN also. although out gunned and out manned at the start the tide turned here because of the industrial output of th US (which took time ) to overpower the Japs in quantity and quality. the Doolittle raid was crucial. it proved to American workers going into the war plants that Japan could be attacked with a very minimum of everything.
why the built those carriers with wooden decks is beyond me. best resource available??? well they turned into BBQ pits when Japanese planes hit them. we learned our lesson for our British friend after the war and went with steel or iron decks. we also got the idea of the angled flight deck from the British as well. and it still works today…
(in the pacific) Japan had the advantage for a sshort war but the US was better suited for a long war because it can produce ships better.
Errr… not exactly. The USN went to steel decks postwar for structural reasons (it gets very difficult to physically build big carriers without doing so), while the RN abandoned armoured deck carriers halfway through the war and never considered building them afterwards. It should be noted here that all the RN armoured carriers hit by Kamikazes had to be scrapped as constructive total losses immediately postwar - they were badly warped by the damage, and could not be repaired.
In any case, the armoured deck concept came about because the RN could only get their hands on a very few, poorly performing aircraft prewar so had to design their carriers based around this - and so had to assume they would take a battering. The USN carriers carried about 3 times the air group for the same size carrier - largely as a result of the lack of armour - and were operationally a great deal more effective as a result.
Here are some posts from earlier in this thread concerning the policies of wood vs armored flight decks on carriers:
http://www.ww2incolor.com/forum/showpost.php?p=90493&postcount=19
http://www.ww2incolor.com/forum/showpost.php?p=90607&postcount=22
from the video The Battle of Midway - Prelude to Battle - US Pacific Fleet: Weapons and have transcribed the comments here.
[quote] …All three of the carriers that were to take part in the Battle of Midway were of the Yorktown class. They were the aircraft carriers Yorktown, Hornet and Enterprise. Yorktown carriers were notable for their advanced damage control systems to minimize the risk of fire. Aviation gas [avgas] fuel lines could be filled with carbon dioxide when an enemy attack was imminent. The carrier’s decks were also specially designed for combat conditions. The flight deck was unarmored and constructed with 6-inch planks of teak - more easily repaired than metal and less likely to cause severe splinter wounds to crewmen…
… Where the Americans had a real edge on the enemy was in damage control. Damage control parties were highly trained in their duties, and their ability to deal with fires (the greatest threat to any warship) was unsurpassed. At the battle of Midway the relative damage control skills of each side would prove a key factor in deciding the outcome of the fight.
[/quote]
When a carrier is about to be under attack, USN standard procedure is
1.) Lauch all the aircraft
2.) Flood the JP5 fuel lines with CO2This is carrier ops 101, learned the hardway in World War II.
The Hancock was comissioned in 1944. The flight deck was made of teak wood laid over about 1" thick steel plating. Not armour. The wood on the flight deck was covered [post-war] by an epoxy coating called no-skid.
from reading, the need for the wood flight decks (I didn’t know before) due to the explosive fuel vapors around metal; did these decks wear quickly and how were they cleaned? I imagine the spilled fuel and oil, soaking into the wood could make as volatile of a situation as dangerous as dropping a metal tool on a metal flight deck.
From: The Pacific War Encyclopedia, James F. Dunnigan & Albert A. Nofi, Checkmark Books, 1998, p 20.
The Japanese had a policy of not storing aircraft on deck, a practice that the US Navy adopted before the war, and embraced enthusiastically during it. As a result, US carriers of comparable size usually could operate as many as 65% more aircraft (90-100 as against 55-65). British carriers tended to have smaller aircraft capacity (55-65), due to a decision to provide relatively heavy armor. In compensation, British carriers were much more survivable ships.
A second critical factor in carrier effectiveness, and more important than carrier size, was the ship’s capacity to carry avgas (aviation fuel) and fuel, which determined operational endurance. While this was, of course, partially connected to the size of the vessel, once again policy decisions and design were a factor. In consequence, US carriers tended to have greater fuel capacity than either Japanese or British ones, which meant American carriers could generate more missions between trips to the barn.
http://www.ww2incolor.com/forum/showpost.php?p=94173&postcount=32
http://www.ww2incolor.com/forum/showpost.php?p=94174&postcount=33
http://www.ww2incolor.com/forum/showpost.php?p=94220&postcount=34
The second doctrine-based difference was the predominance of the scout/dive-bomber on the American side. This type was unique to the U.S. Navy and could both locate and attack an enemy carrier. The effectiveness of the scout/dive-bomber (particularly the superb SBD, which outflew, outdove, and outbombed the Japanese Val) was proved beyond the shadow of a doubt at Midway.
The SBD wasn´t alone in it´s abilty to scout, it was a question of doctrine more than a question of type. The Japanese did later come to take scouting seriously enough to deploy the only puprpose designed CV based rec. aircraft; The C6N (Myrt, I think). Still the longest ranged single engined aircraft to see service, but it might have been too late to operate from a carrier (Does anyone here know if it did?), it did keep an eye on late war US fleet movements from shore bases.
Carrier questions:
-Been digging in some books after reasons for wooden flight decks, but couldn´t find any. It might well have because a large steel deck area makes the ship very hot in the summer. A ship as “late” as the Iowa class BB´s had wooden deck for that reason.
-The RN armoured carriers were designed as they were not because the RN felt that the aircraft they would carry were inadequate, but because it was foreseen that they would have to endure attacks from land based aircraft, too numerous for a CAP to defend against (in the Mediterranian fx.).
There are obviously many ways to define “best”:
-The major combatants tried to design their navies to fight a war, as they thought the next war would be, within the limitations of treaties and finances.
Guessing right about the equipment, tactics and training for the next war is of some importance to the question of which navy was the best in WWII.
The Italians certainly got it wrong, even though operations was thought to be largely confined to the Med. Relying on shore based air power, but with little in the way of a cooperation between navy and air force, with unrealistic training, ASW not taken seriously and no training in night fighting whatsoever, the navy needed to learn quickly. Their large submarine force turned out to be surprisingly unfit for the realities of WWII. The surface ships were supposed to be able to outrange (by gun) and outrun the enemy and might have done so -on paper, but not in practice. The quest for max speed in individual vessels did not pay off.
The US prepared mainly for a war in the Pacific and preferred large ships with long range. This proved useful, not only in the Pacific (and the US could afford to build large). Prewar planning for sending the fleet to meet the Japanese in the Phillipines, were abandoned with much of that fleet on the bottom in Pearl Harbour, but the emphasis on air defense proved very right and the question of carriers had high priority (The USN never really liked the Saratoga/Lexington conversions -they aimed high…)
The RN had worldwide shipping lanes to protect, while Italy called the Med. “Mare Nostrum”, and a growing German navy would have to be contained, and more ships were needed to do this than could be afforded, resulting in ships that sometimes shrunk to smaller than ideal. Training regimes were good enough to reveal that the fleet was gravely lacking in AA capabilty, but for some reason, little was apparently done to rectify this until war brought the message home again. The emphasis on escorts and ASW was right, the neglect of AA (the potential of dive bombing was recognised quite late) and the relatively low priority given to CV´s and their aircraft was wrong.
The IJN was supposed to meet the USN “Jutland style” and the numerical superiority of the USN was to countered by attacks with aircraft, submarines and even minisub´s before the encounter and by the Yamato´s under construction, thought to be bigger and better than anything the US was likely comtemplate. While aircraft carriers and their aircraft were taken seriously, fleet AA wasn´t enough so. ASW tactics and equipment was thought to be adequate, this was proved wrong, while IJN employment of submarines left much to be desired.
The German navy was caught with the pants down, not anything like equipped for the war it thought it was supposed to fight. In many ways a “new” navy, still with a lot of problems to solve. Submarine numbers were a praction of what was planned for a succesful “Battle of the Atlantic” and remained so until the enemy was so strong that numbers of that those boat classes no longer mattered. The surface fleet wasn´t really fit for service in the Atlantic, DD´s and cruisers being low on range and had fragile machinery. Hopes making ships individually better than the British resulted in unhappy DD´s and the very expensive Hipper class. The amount of air defense needed wasn´t foreseen.
The French navy had few opportunities to show what it could do, but it was mainly planned for fighting the Italians in the Med. and lately, to catch Germans raiders in the atlantic. Generally the fleet would have lacked in range for Atlantic operations and in HA guns for Med.
-Quality of ships and their equipment:
In my opinion the USN:
The only navy with effective HA directors early in the war. The newer DD´s were large enough to carry them and were thus a lot more battleworthy in most WWII environments than the competition. The Yorktown class was about right and showed the way to go. The ships ordered for the 1940 “two ocean navy” were efficient no-nonsense ships that had about what was needed to fight the war they were completed in.
Best: HA fire control, turbine machinery, and late war: the proximity fuse
Worst: The Mk 14 torpedo (defects so grave, they should have been known)
-Doctrines and tactics:
Not so sure about this one…
The US got the place of the carrier about right and seems to have been the only major navy sincerly interested in damage control. Don´t know if the US had formulated a doctrine for their wartime use of submarines prewar, but what they did to the Japanese decided that part of the war.
It was stupid (and an economy measure) by RN to think that DD´s could take care TB´s with their low angle guns and leave the rest to the secondary armament of larger ships (and still the County class cruisers were given 70deg elevation to their 203mm guns, useless, complicated and expensive).
The Italian navy seemed more interested in waging war with submarines and MTB´s than the heavy units, with little enthusiasm for risking to loose the latter or use the vast quantities of fuel that these needed, and Italy didn´t have. The heavy units tried, and achieved very little.
There´s more to this off course, but I´m not that much into it.
-Training:
Perhaps the RN knew best what it could and couldn´t do. Training was serious and seemed to have worked.
The Japanese proficiency at night fighting and the superior naval aviation of course sprung from serious training regimes. I wonder what ASW training they did or didn´t do, but they thought it was good enough.
The Italian navy did not train for realistic naval warfare.
-The abilty to learn and apply the lessons learned:
The IJN seem to have found it difficult to adjust to the fact that the war was being fought differently from what they had contemplated. The IJN never got a replacement for the inadequate 25mm ligth AA weapon or a reasonably effective depth charge mortar, both items in need of improvement from day one of the war. On the other hand, BB construction was wisely abandoned, permissible dropping speeds for airborne torpedoes continued to rise, to far above the capabilty of the carrying aircraft and a “modern” submarine was developed.
In contrast the USN seemed to acquire knowledge and hardware as needed, but surely had a great advantage in the “apply” area due to industrial muscle. Improvements in radar and AA were inroduced fast and ASW lessons teached by the British was quickly put to use. The world first homing (ASW) torpedo was introduced, but that it took nearly 2 years to make the old Mk 14 to work as intended saved the life of many Japanese vessels.
The RN useally kept one step ahead of German submarine developments, which was what mattered most during most of the war, but equipping ships with the newest technology often took a long time. The HA fire deficiences were only solved with US equipment, mainly postwar.
The war left the German navy without a realistic chance to develop a well balanced fleet and it turned to submarines and light forces. Torpedo problems were taken more seriously than in the USN and solved faster, but the RM was never so much in advance of allied developments as to seriously threathen the UK (although this wasn´t realised in the UK, or in Germany at the time). Suspicions surfaced several times that Enigma had been broken, but was discounted, and changes in Enigma were quickly caught up with. It took the RM many years to realise the capabilities of RN HF/DF (high frequency direction finding), and an aswer to this was only ready as the war ended. That a vastly improved submarine was needed and could be built with existing technology was realised too late to make any difference.
Guess I´m not quite done, but I´ve managed to bore myself witless, and I don´t want that to happen to you people, so I just quit it now
actually George, on 2nd thought, it made no diff if they were wooden or metal. the Japs used armour piercing bombs. in the case of the Franklin these bombs went several decks down ripping her insides apart. as their designed to do. the Franklin was lucky 1 of these bombs didn’t hit her magazine or fuel tanks. she would have went down. here’s a time line for the Franklin:
[link](http://navysite.de/cv/cv13.htm)
video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTAViMX-w6c
note the last 2 entries. when she returned to NY she still had issues:
June 21, 1945 New York Harbor USS FRANKLIN suffers a boiler room fire during decoration ceremonies. Damage is slight.
May 14, 1946 Brooklyn Naval Shipyard, New York USS FRANKLIN leaks carbon dioxide fumes while at the Brooklyn Naval Shipyard, killing two.
as far as the Forrestal goes we were to far away to help. but she had no damage control team. they all died at the beginning when the bombs cooked off. the Navy made a training film of this and called it 'learn or burn". the deck crew stepped in to try and put out the fire but they had no damage control training and they picked up the wrong hose’s. instead of foam the sprayed water which just spread the fire and caused more bombs to cook off.
>
the damage to the Forrestal and the big E were caused by the very same thing. the Zuni rocket. it took the Navy years to figue out why the Zuni launched itself on the Forrestal.
investigation:
Although investigators could not identify the exact chain of events behind the carnage, they revealed potential maintenance issues including concerns in circuitry (stray voltage) associated with LAU-10 rocket launchers and Zunis, as well as the age of the 1,000 pound “fat bombs” loaded for the strike, shards from one of which dated it originally to the Korean War in 1953.[3]
Safety regulations should have prevented the Zuni rocket from firing. A triple ejector rack (TER) electrical safety pin prevented any electrical signal from reaching the rockets but it was known that high winds could sometimes catch the attached tags and blow them free. The backup was the “pigtail” connection of the electrical wiring to the rockets pod. Regulations required they be connected only when the aircraft was attached to the catapult ready to launch. The Navy investigation found that four weeks before the fire the Forrestal’s Weapons Coordination Board had a meeting to discuss the possible problem of a faulty pigtail delaying a mission while the aircraft was removed from the launcher. The board ruled that in the future the crew could ignore protocol and connect the pigtails while the aircraft were still queued. Though never made official, the crew immediately acted on the ruling. The inquiry found that the TER pin was likely blown free while the pigtail was connected and that the missile fired due to a power surge when the pilot transferred his systems from external to internal power. This incident also led the U.S. Navy to implement safety reviews for weapons systems going on board ships (whether for use or for shipping). Today, this evaluation still exists as the Weapon System Explosives Safety Review Board.[8]
I can confirm the age of the ammo. I saw the manufacture dates on them. some were dated as far back as 1937.
who ever is in power at that moment will always hav the biggest best army
so i would hav 2 say usa.
If the battle of the Atlantic wasn’t won, then you could wave goodbye to operation’s Torch & Overlord and hand victory to Germany. The “best” of that theatre were mainly the RN, RCN, Coastal Command and Bletchley Park.
The USN may have had the bigger, faster carriers but would they have been as good without all the pre & post-war developments that originated from British boffins?
The (What I rate as the best) Carrier-borne fighter of the war, the F4 Corsair, would not have made it to sea with the USN because they didn’t know how to land it on their carriers without the danger of an accident. It was up to the Fleet Air Arm to show them how to do it.
Being “the best” means quality. Not quantity.
Dont forget germany,I would say Germany was up there with Briton 1939-1943
While the German U-boat arm of the navy was formidable, the rest was far too small in numbers to be of any real threat to Britain’s Royal Navy
By war’s end in 1945, the United States Navy had added hundreds of new ships, including 18 aircraft carriers and 8 battleships, and had over 70% of the world’s total numbers and total tonnage of naval vessels of 1,000 tons or greater.