Hypothetical battle, somewhere at a mythical Pacific island group between two of the first carriers built from the keel up as carriers. Figure the battle occurs during the late Nineteen-Twenties or as late as Nineteen-Thirty. Air groups will be as per this time

This battle is between the carriers Hosho and Hermes. Each will have an escort of a current cruiser (probably a light cruiser) and a pair of destroyers.

Each starts at around 300 nm from each other and they know that the other is in the general area with some escorts (Neither captain knows the exact composition of escorts of the other side)

What exactly is the point? Neither side engages the other in anything but few aerial skirmishes unless one commander feels lucky and sends his escorts to attack the opposing fleet IMO.

The point is to see if either side could effectively hurt each other or if it would come down to a battle of the escorts.

Who wins? Whichever side has the fewest dud torpedoes.

Very likely they will fail to make contact of any sort. If they manage to locate and launch, there is no shipkilling ordnance for the carrier aircraft, nor is it likely the strike would find a target.

Does illustrate how far they yet had to go in CV warfare.

I have heard people say that "With the introduction of carriers and aircraft, battleships became obsolete" and it seems that this is anything but the case,

Well, by early 30s it was a bit of exaggeration, sorta vision of things to come... by the next decade. So not that much off the mark

Yeah, only off by a decade or two. Hector Bywater's fictional epic of the next Pacific War was all battleline stuff. Battleship admirals ran all navies through WWII, except for the USN -- EJ King did it all [by contrast it is not until Mountbattan 1956 that the RN has a non-BB man as 1st sea lord]. One might say that the BB is the measure of sea power through 8Dec41. Had the Italians or Germans had carriers, their BBs would still have been the priority targets in 1940-41. By the time the RN gets it together in CV war, there is no longer an enemy to face at sea. Almost every tactical and technical initiative is US or IJN, until the British came up with the angled deck and the hurricane bow post-WWII.

I think that in general that statement is an oversimplification.
It should read more like: Against CV's, BB's were largely obsolete as the primary engagement platform upon which to base a fleet action.

WWII in the pacific shows pretty clearly how important conventional gun-ships were though. The carriers couldn't be everywhere, particularly in '42 and early into '43.

By 1945 when there were CV's by the score, battleship's day had come, true, but the idea that on December 8th 1941 battleships magically became useless liabilities is silly.

"Obsolete" doesn't mean always "poof! You have no use now, go away immediately". The general consensus is that the advent of assault rifles made MSGs obsolete, yet the police and spec forces still use them...

If it was going to be a true 'fight to the death' both carriers make maximum use of the airgroups to find the other and perhaps try dropping what bombs that they had. Hosho had more aircraft (26 to Hermes 20) but both sides were probably using Gamecocks or their variants as fighters. Neither side had bombers with great ranges - maybe an hour each way at about 90mph.

The aircraft may have been useful to keep the other side's escorts busy, and for spotting.

However I would suggest that the engagement would be settled in the old fashioned way: Hermes 6 5.5in and 3 4in guns against Hosho's 4 5.5in and two 80mm guns. Hosho had a displacement of around 9,000 tons, Hermes had 11,000 tons, but had the advantage of a three inch armoured belt and a one inch armoured deck over magazines and machinery. Hermes should have been able to deliver greater firepower and absorb more punishment. Hermes was laid down using cruiser principles, Hosho was a converted oiler design.

So forget the aircraft, this would have been a fight between a light cruiser (Hermes) and an armed oiler (Hosho).

Hermes wins.

OTOH I believe that the war experience with converted oilers CVLs showed them to be pretty well compartmentalised and resistant to torpedo and Kamikaze damage, then again that was US experience, maybe Japanese oilers were built differently.

I guess you are writing to yourself.

Maybe you can explain why there is not a single operational Allied battleship within steaming range of Japanese forces at the end of 8Dec41, yet not a single major caliber gun had been fired?

Well, none on the US Battleships were at sea, have proper water tight conditions set, or have anti-aircraft batteries manned?

FFS Ken, the date of 08/12/41 is to indicate post-Pearl Harbour (You know, the Solomons, Leyte...)

But I guess expecting a bit of common-sense from Tank-Net's Official Contrarian #2 is just too much...

A bit pedantic but the Prince of Wales and the Repulse were operational and within steaming range at the time and would be for the next day and a half.

Hunt up a copy of US Navy Plan Orange by Avalanche Press, the whole game is based on the premise that naval war between Japan and the US starts in the March 1930.

It does? In what language.

And yes, you can say 10 December Tokyo time; big deal. Sheer pedantry. Anybody grasp the concept yet?

Perhaps I am the only one confused but you have two nots in one sentence and they seem to contradict each other.

Carriers and their aircraft were originally considered to be scouting assets. The large US and Japanese BB/BC conversion carriers were outfitted with 8" guns, because they were expected to get into gun fights with enemy scouting force cruisers. Navies still needed battleships to fight the battles that carriers and other scouting forces set up. It was only late in the 1930s, with the improvement in aircraft speed, range, and bomb load, that the carrier realistically became an offensive asset.

One might note that WW II had been going on for 2 years before Pearl Harbor and land based air power had had a rather notable lack of success against seagoing battleships up until that time. This was changed by the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse. But it took how many twin engine bombers to do it?

Going back to the originial question a couple of dozen 400-500hp aircraft were going to need magic BB's to have any real hope of influencing a fleet action of any size aside from scouting.

Are you trying to appear dense or just plain disagreeable?
If you can't recognise a commonly used conversation tool (Just like 'in a minute', 'Thirty seconds after' and others not to be taken literally) that is your problem Ken, not mine.

I'll play...


..because surprise is, and has always has been, a decisive force-multiplier in the attack, and there is no greater degree of surprise than to sneak attack an enemy's fleet before declaring war? "Day of infamy" and all that. How well do you think carriers would have fared, tied up, power plants cold, water-tight doors open, no guns manned, etc? And while "not a single major caliber gun had been fired", you conveniently leave out the fact that the armor-penetrating bombs were, in fact, major calibur gun shells - just dropped from a plane instead of fired from a gun.

As I've posted before, I don't think the battleship (or the gun cruiser, for that matter) became obsolescent as a surface action asset until the 1950s. Until aircraft technology advanced sufficiently to permit night/all-weather strikes, the carrier remained a daylight-only asset and could be threatened by surface ships if operating without proper escort. Although, limited night/poor weather capability existed prior to the mid-1950s, it had not reached a level that would permit a naval battle to be fought under these conditions. It is an oft-repeated contention that the battleship was obsolete at the start of the war, or after 07 Dec 41, or even, as is sometimes seen in print, after Mitchell's testing in the early '20s, but examination of the technical capabilities of the equipment tends to point to a different conclusion. If the aircraft had achieved complete superiority, why were there so many major surface actions--including the various battles around Guadalcanal, in the Atlantic, in the Aleutians, at Leyte Gulf, etc.? Air power was notably absent during the engagement at Surigao Strait, just as it had proven relatively ineffective in stopping the night attacks of the Tokyo Express in the Slot.* The sensors & targeting equipment just wasn't ready to take on the difficulties of night attacks until much later.

The real reason why it is so easy to proclaim the battleship as obsolete before the mid 1950s is the annihilation of the Axis navies as a threat. The Soviet Union did not have a large conventional navy to oppose NATO surface warfare units until after the aircraft was ready to take on the night/all-weather strike duties. And there was the little doodad called the Atom Bomb that diverted development attention away from conventional strike warfare... The other factor is that social-political factors also shifted strategy away from the battleship as a distinct surface warfare combatant. The naval treaties so hamstrung design and build that cruisers ended up filling in for battleships and destroyers for cruisers. When the restrictions finally came off, we ended up with ships like the Iowas, Montanas, Des Moines, Alaskas, and Worcester--with all except the last weighing in heavier than HMS Dreadnought or any modern cruiser.

*Mentioning Leyte Gulf, TF34 was nearing engagement range of Ozawa's forces when it was turned back--too late--to intercept Kurita's Center Force. This would have been a daylight engagement, which would have been interesting. Perhaps another what-if thread that might prove interesting would be to discuss various surface actions and discuss the outcome if we replaced the heavy units on one side or another with equivalent carriers (say, substitute Independence class CVEs for Callahan's cruisers at Guadalcanal)?

Not that any of this has much to do with the original topic post...

Douglas

Tradition is maintained, you do us proud!

OK, make it two sentences, thus:

"Maybe you can explain why there is not a single operational Allied battleship within steaming range of Japanese forces at the end of 8 [edit] 10Dec41. Yet not a single major caliber gun had been fired."

In other words, the BBs by this point were targets but not settling the issues of the day, and they certainly were not in action against like ships.

The Solomons were not healthy for BBs, as the loss of two Kongos and close call for WA and SD proved. BBs served otherwise for bombardment of isolated islands and fast BBs cas CV escorts for the rest of the war.

I'd say you are the one appearing dense and disagreeable. What sense can one really make out of:



If in doubt, try a 6th grade effort at diagraming your sentence. I don't think you know what is "a commonly used conversation tool."

Jesse Oldendorf would be surprised to hear that. And the lack of a surface, daytime gun action at Leyte was due to Halsey's stupidity*, not the ersatz obselescence of the BB.

*Specifically, relying on air power to have done what it could not yet accomplish.

Any action by OBBs at Leyte was a result of failures on the part of USN carrier air power and the refusal of Halsey to pay attention to his primary mission, covering the landings and specifically 7th Fleet. Spruance had admittedly been criticised for staying too close to the invasion forces at Saipan/Phil Sea, leaving a long chase to catch Ozawa and sink one Hiyo. Still, there was no serious IJN CV air threat for the rest of 1944 and Halsey had no need to seek daylight surface actions with anybody, just leave one CV TG at San Bernadino.

Kurita would be surprised to 'hear' that USN air power could not accomplish defeat of the IJN surface forces. He turned away at Sibuyan Sea and at Samar in fear of just that.

Except that he turned back, didn't he? USN air power did NOT accomplish the defeat of the IJN surface forces. If all of TF 38 was unable to finsih the job, why do you think that one TG would have been able to?

Heck, how many sorties, how much of the fleet was tied down just to sink Yamato and a coupla tin cans?