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Naval Aviation

Hook Down and Homeward Bound The Chance-Vought F4U Corsair was arguably the finest naval aviation fighter of its era. With a kill ratio of 11-to-1 in WWII combat, the Corsair proved superior in the air to almost every opposing aircraft it encountered. Here we see an F4U on final approach to its carrier after another successful mission.

When the worst came at Pearl Harbor, it had but one redeeming feature. The damage to the battleships removed all possibility of what might otherwise have been expected, a demand by the American people that the Fleet at once attack Japan. With the pitifully inadequate protection in the air, this must inevitably have spelled disaster and probably a much longer war. As it was, through the lucky circumstance that the Japanese did not destroy the shops at Pearl, it became possible to rebuild the battleships to be much more powerful than they had been before they were damaged. In the end, protected by adequate aircraft, the Fleet was vastly stronger for the task it had to do.

During those months of repairs the Navy fought delaying actions when and where it could in the Pacific. While a handful of cruisers, destroyers, and submarines did their best to be in half a dozen places at once, the five Pacific carriers, in seven months, steamed 180,000 miles to make raids on targets that ranged from New Guinea to Japan itself. In the four days that began on May 4, 1942, the enemy was stopped in the Coral Sea even though the opposing surface forces never sighted one another. A month later, between June 3 and 6, the enemy was decisively beaten from the air above Midway, and it was these two successes that led to the first limited counteroffensive against the 'Solomon Islands, an operation supported by both carrier-based and land-based planes of the Navy and Marine Corps. During that first year of the Pacific war four of the six carriers engaged were lost and the other two were badly damaged, but they held the front in the air. They made it possible, without losing the war in the interim, to gain time enough to create a fleet in which all units were adequate for their several parts, and it should be noted that the battleships of that fleet had been designed to win World War II, not necessarily to win some future war when aircraft might have become both invulnerable and wholly self-supporting.

In the early stages, aircraft of all types found themselves doing almost anything at any given time, often a job for which they had not been specifically designed. In all the theaters of action harassed commanders frequently broke through theoretical lines of division between what the Army's planes or the Navy's planes were supposed to do; to reach some immediate objective they used anything able to take the air at the moment. In 1942 and in 1943 army planes did valiant service in the Atlantic antisubmarine efforts while the Navy's planes flew many army missions from their Pacific bases.

On distinctly naval missions, the Catalina and Mariner flying boats carried out endless reconnaissance, accompanied invasion forces, and on numerous occasions began their operations from occupied islands before landing fields had even been taken, much less reconditioned. They attacked enemy merchant shipping, handled much of the sea-rescue work, and evacuated large numbers of the wounded. It was only their slow speed and their great vulnerability that led to their being replaced, for antisubmarine and reconnaissance work, by landplanes.

It was the inability of land-based planes to cover enough of the ocean that led to the creation of the small escort carriers and this type very soon made a name for itself. Since larger carriers could not be withdrawn from the Pacific, it was the little ones with the help of the Ranger, that covered the North African and the southern France landings when these were made, doing the aerial spotting for the preliminary naval bombardments which did so much to clear the way for these landings. This was not to the neglect of their original mission, the protection of convoys, for their planes had a large part in the 88 sinkings credited to aircraft among the 174 losses counted against the U-boats. Conspicuous among them were the Bogue and later the Guadalcanal, which fought one U-boat practically hand to hand. After the war Grand Admiral Doenitz declared that his submarines, originally designed to proceed on the surface and dive only to make an attack or to escape one, had been beaten by aircraft equipped with radar. Certainly it was the effectiveness of planes which first drove the wolf pack out into mid-ocean and then forced the Germans to design a submarine able to remain submerged indefinitely and to make high speed underwater.

Out in the Pacific the effect of building became greater week by week. By the middle of 1943, when the total number of planes had risen to 16,691, the pilots to 26,651, ground officers to 23,377, and enlisted men in aviation ratings to 156,836, the increase in carriers was impressive. There were then 12 large ones including the 27,000-ton Essex class and the 10,000-ton Independence class. Incidentally, the latter class went back to a size rejected in 1925 and used, for its hulls, the designs made for the Cleveland class of cruiser. By this same period there were 17 of the escort carriers available, with as many more due to be commissioned within another six months. Their increasing usefulness was evident as soon as they began to appear in the Pacific as the only available carrier defense against enemy carriers in the Solomons; later they were almost everywhere. Towers, relieved by McCain as Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics and put in command of the Air Force, Pacific Fleet, used the carriers in the Gilbert landings, and their success at Tarawa and Makin resulted in their continuous use for landings after that. They could defend themselves, just as had been predicted by the board studying the bombing tests of 1921, when naval observers declared that the best defense against aircraft was to operate better aircraft. Their planes, with navy or marine pilots, achieved a great degree of accuracy in pin-pointing revetments, pillboxes, and gun emplacements that were opposing a landing, an accuracy directly traceable to training methods developed from exercises in amphibious landings conducted years before and especially by the marines. To be sure, the little escort carriers supporting these planes were themselves extremely vulnerable, but since only five were lost in the Pacific it appears that they were not often hit, even though they were present at all the landings from the Gilberts through the Philippines to Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

Between the day in 1929 when Admiral Pratt had sent the Saratoga on her lone-hand "bombing" of the Panama Canal, and the Marshall Island strike in February, 1942, Naval Aviation had moved a long way. Yet, even then, it was still held that carriers should act independently, to evade the enemy, and that even as many as two carriers in company represented a great risk. Only a month later, however, the Lexington and the Yorktown together raided Salamau and Lae in New Guinea, and the effectiveness of their coordinated attack was not lost upon such observers as Capt. (later Vice Adm.) Frederick Sherman, commanding the Lexington. His reports and recommendations combined with others to produce a revision of carrier tactics. By the fall of 1943, when the carrier numbers had increased to those given above, a fair-sized fleet of them was assembled for the Gilbert landings; 11 carriers, in four groups, all under the command of Rear Adm. C. A. Pownall, at this writing the Governor of Guam. As a matter of history, those ships formed the first actual Fast Carrier Task Force, each group with its own screen of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers. With planes and heavy gunfire to protect them, it was these task forces which later, under Mitscher and McCain, led the way across the Pacific. Their dive bombers, equipped with self-sealing tanks and with armor, proved far less vulnerable than had been expected, while their accuracy became proverbial. Torpedo planes justified Fiske's old prediction - luckily while he was still alive to see the day - for, although they had to be protected by fighter squadrons, they too built up an impressive record of hits.

These were the planes that became famous, but behind them those of the Utility Wings and the Naval Air Transport Service were doing everything that an aircraft is mechanically able to do or a pilot humanly able to think of doing. At one time or another they flew anything anywhere. To keep them in the air without neglecting the fighting planes had been, from the very first, a most important factor in the Fleet's ever-growing problem of logistics. Personnel must be where it was needed, fuel and oil must be instantly available, and not a plane must be idle for lack of upkeep and repair.

As early as February, 1942, Admiral Nimitz had reorganized the Pacific Command, abolishing the titles Battle Force and Scouting Force, but at that time he had left the planes divided into Patrol Wings, Utility Wings, and Carriers, each organized separately, as was the Fleet Marine Force, with its planes dependent upon supplies from the Navy's sources. After the battle of Midway, however, he saw that it was impossible to continue dealing with two supply offices in San Diego and two more at Pearl Harbor, while at least three aviation commands had a hand in logistics ; the only possible course was the creation of what had been proposed as long before as 1928, a single type command for all aircraft. In September, 1942, this became the Air Force, United States Pacific Fleet, at first commanded by Vice Adm. A. W. Fitch and later by Towers. It was this command which organized pilots and ground officers, airmen and ground crews into operating units where they could be trained for combat, and at the same time supervised the distribution of all aviation personnel as well as the maintenance and repair of all planes and all ships in aviation. Under the two commanders named, the force became so efficient that it was copied in the Atlantic in 1943, the force on that side being successively commanded by two veteran fliers, Rear Adm. A. D. Bernhard and Bellinger, by this time a vice admiral. Something of what this type command had to do may be inferred from the size of the Fleet's aviation forces by the end of 1944, when there were 36,721 planes, 55,956 pilots, 32,707 ground officers, and 312,146 enlisted ratings, with 25 larger or CV and CVL carriers and 65 of the CVE or escort types.

It goes without saying that among so many officers and men many who had joined the Navy, as their fathers had done in 1917, to fight in the air never had a chance to do it. Instead, they found themselves at some rear-area base or at a desk in Washington, Chicago, or San Francisco, at the everlasting job of administration. Since 1921 aviation had spoken through the Bureau of Aeronautics or, when there was one, through the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Air. Twenty years later, with a war to be won, these offices could not adequately handle, for the Chief of Naval Operations, aviation's share of logistics; new offices became essential.

In August, 1943, Admiral King was furnished with a Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Air under whom were presently grouped all divisions of King's office concerned with aviation as well as those divisions in the Bureau of Aeronautics concerned with planning, training, flight, and distribution of personnel, all of which had become too big for the bureau itself. Vice Admiral McCain, who had been Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics since October, 1942, turned that post over to Rear Adm. (now Adm.) D. C. Ramsey, and moved up to the new one. From it he and his successors could speak directly in the name of Admiral King and thus deal far more effectively with every element of logistics.

The office spread through numerous subordinates. During its first year a special board headed by Rear Admiral Radford produced the so-called Integrated Aeronautic Program for Maintenance, Material, and Supply under which it became possible to deliver fully equipped planes just where they were needed, use them for a stated period, then dispose of those unfit for combat and bring the rest back to be repaired and used for training. Later, turning its attention to bases, the deputy's office found ways to save taxpayers' money by transferring equipment from a base which the course of the war made unnecessary to a base that was still active. Similarly, the three types of training, primary, advanced, and operational, were finally grouped under a Chief of Naval Air Training, who later also administered the Technical Training Command. Personnel, for the obvious reason that no one could guess how long the war might last and how many men might be needed to win it, remained a problem, but another board under Rear Adm. (later Vice Adm.) H. B. Sallada by the summer of 1945 completed a plan to meet such problems as the one created by testing young men, enrolling them, and then weakening their morale by bidding them await a call to active duty. All these were intricate matters since, by that time, the figures had again expanded. Naval Aviation came to V-J Day with 41,272 planes, 60,747 pilots, 32,827 ground officers, and 344,424 enlisted men. Afloat, there were 28 larger, 71 smaller carriers.

There it stood when thousands of young men must be demobilized, when tons of equipment must be sold or scrapped, old plane models destroyed, and new ones, along with the carriers, laid up not in lavender but in cellophane. That was almost half a century after Theodore Roosevelt had listened to the story of Langley and then, without even Towers looking over his shoulder, written his historic memorandum. Theodore Roosevelt was dead and so, too, was Franklin Roosevelt, another who had been Assistant Secretary of the Navy and then President. Congressmen such as Frederick Hicks of New York and others too numerous to name, who had authorized the Bureau of Aeronautics and voted money to sustain it, were long gone. Administrators like Chambers, Bristol, and, above all, Moffett, had not lived to see what they had built stand the test. Ellyson and Rodgers, Bronson, Saufley, Chevalier, and all the honored men of two wars, had paid for their devotion with their lives, leaving only a handful who had known the beginnings. Only they could know the long road from the moment when it had been suggested that the Navy try the machine "on a scale to be of use in war." All could know, however, that this war, like every important war in history, had been won by sea power, but this time with a difference. Sea power could no longer be effective by controlling the waters of the earth on and under their surface. It must henceforth have one mighty arm reaching high into the air.

Archibald Turnbull and Clifford Lee Lord. . Yale University Press, New Haven. 1949.

Dauntless Marine Joseph Sailer, Jr. was widely considered to have been one of the most effective dive-bomber pilots of WWII - he was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross for leading his squadron in numerous attacks on Japanese naval forces during the 1942 battle of Guadalcanal. Drawing on personal papers, interviews with surviving squadron members, and research in military archives, this is the first full-length account of war hero Sailer, Jr.

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