Game changers!

pbehn said:

I propose the Fairey Swordfish, not so much for its capabilities as an aeroplane but after Taranto and the crippling of the Bismark all of the worlds navies realised that the game had changed. Although an obsolete design it did have the ability to loiter about and carry a RADAR system which is the basis of anti submarine warfare.

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I do like the old Swordfish, but I can't really see IT as the game changer. The vulnerability of ships to air attack was well known, in fact I would argue that as the war progressed navies realised that surface shipping was not as vulnerable as first feared, given certain measures, certainly the British thought so after the Battle of Crete, and Cunningham said so.

The game changers in anti submarine warfare were technological advances, not the aircraft that carried the electronic boxes. There were far better anti submarine aircraft than the venerable Swordfish.

The Swordfish did have one feature which as far as I know no other aircraft had. This was the attachment for the observer, the fantastically named 'anti cavorting chain'. For this alone the Swordfish should be at the top of at least one superlative list

Cheers

Steve

The game changer in aircraft attacking ships had come in 1915 when Shorts 184 aircraft sank several ships using torpedoes. Granted they were small ships but they were using small torpedoes (14in diameter).

This was pretty much the impulse behind carrier aviation. While scouting and spotting were important functions the ability to actually sink other ships with a ship borne aircraft relied on air dropped torpedoes.
Billy Mitchell not withstanding, he use land based twin engine bombers carrying much bigger bombs than any WW I or 1920s carrier based plane could ever hope to carry.
The success at Taranto may have come as a surprise (the extent of the damage vs planes used) but most Navies had their carrier building programs underway when the raid took place. For instance the US already had 11 Essex class carriers on order (even if not laid down) at the time of the Taranto raid.

The Bismark was one of the biggest and best battleships, to be taken out by a biplane with a torpedo changed the game as far as surface raiders went.

Shortround6 said:

The success at Taranto may have come as a surprise (the extent of the damage vs planes used) but most Navies had their carrier building programs underway when the raid took place. For instance the US already had 11 Essex class carriers on order (even if not laid down) at the time of the Taranto raid.

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That is what I meant, the amount of damage that could be done by just a few planes.

Bismarck was destroyed by a Royal Navy task force of considerable size, not a biplane with a torpedo. It took nearly two hours for two battleships, and a couple of heavy cruisers along with Bismarck's own crew to finally sink her. She was damaged in way that would eventually prove fatal by an air launched torpedo strike, but even the British acknowledged this to be fortuitous.

Taranto was a success, attacking enemy fleets at anchor is something of a Royal Navy tradition. It makes the job somewhat easier

Cheers

Steve

stona said:

Bismarck was destroyed by a Royal Navy task force of considerable size, not a biplane with a torpedo. It took nearly two hours for two battleships, and a couple of heavy cruisers along with Bismarck's own crew to finally sink her. She was damaged in way that would eventually prove fatal by an air launched torpedo strike, but even the British acknowledged this to be fortuitous.

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It was very fortuitous, however considering the investment of men and materials the loss was catastrophic, and absolutely no guarantee that another attack against another ship would not have a similar result.

pbehn said:

I propose the Fairey Swordfish, not so much for its capabilities as an aeroplane but after Taranto and the crippling of the Bismark all of the worlds navies realised that the game had changed. Although an obsolete design it did have the ability to loiter about and carry a RADAR system which is the basis of anti submarine warfare.

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Guess the US Navy missed that one.

What they may have missed was that the RN got torpedoes to work in shallow water.
It was assumed that torpedoes dropped from aircraft would plunge too deep and hit bottom before rising back up to normal operating depth. In deeper anchorages it was common to use torpedo nets to help protect against torpedo attack.
Like I said in the Previous post The US Navy had 11 Essex class carriers on order before the Taranto raid took place. They may have been ordering battleships at the same time (actually all six Iowas' were ordered before Taranto) but It doesn't look like Taranto made any difference to US plans and 11 Essex class carriers would carry more aircraft than all the worlds non-US carriers combined.

Not a bad choice Pbehn! Hadn't even thought of the old stringbag.

stona said:

I do like the old Swordfish, but I can't really see IT as the game changer. The vulnerability of ships to air attack was well known, in fact I would argue that as the war progressed navies realised that surface shipping was not as vulnerable as first feared, given certain measures, certainly the British thought so after the Battle of Crete, and Cunningham said so.

The game changers in anti submarine warfare were technological advances, not the aircraft that carried the electronic boxes. There were far better anti submarine aircraft than the venerable Swordfish.

The Swordfish did have one feature which as far as I know no other aircraft had. This was the attachment for the observer, the fantastically named 'anti cavorting chain'. For this alone the Swordfish should be at the top of at least one superlative list

Cheers

Steve

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not many were better than the swordfish. It was unquestionably obsolete as an aircraft, but its ability to operate from CVE platforms, in the most attrocious weather conditions, carrying a wide array of weapons and detection systems, make it a standout platform for hunting submarines in the atlantic. It major shortcoming was its short range, but against this it had the ability to stay airborne for long periods....high endurance and short range, due to its slow speed.

it took time to come to the conclusion that carrier borne aircraft were critical in the protection of convoys against uboats, and the swordfish was at the very forefront of that. it was the perfect aircraft for the proof of concept stage, the perfect aircraft for the conditions the RN was forced to fight under, the perfect aircraft in terms of ease of maintenance, strength and durability

So perhaps the Royal Navy's torpedo was the real game-changer in this case...

no other carrier borne strike aircraft was capable of undertaking what the Swordfish achieved at Taranto and later against the Bismarck, at least in the timeframe of the historical strike. at Taranto, the slow speed of the stringbag allowed the pilots to drop to the very low launch heights that allowed most of the torps to avoid hitting the bottom (coupled with the box tails which the IJN copied for PH). the attack at Taranto required some very precise flying at a very low speed so that the torpedoes could be set so as to pass under the protective torpedo netting but above the harbour floor....a window of about 6 feet. it makes Luke Skywalkers destruction of the Death star look like a walk in the park really.

At Bismarck, agin, any other aircraft, in the pitiful numbers available would have failed miserably against the wall of flak the BISMARCK was capabale of putting into the air. The aircraft flew so slowly as to fool the german predictors, and dip and climb between the wave creast as they approached the target. Its a peculiar way of achieving the status of game changer, but it was a game changer nevertheless. a successful sortie by the Bismarck could have utterly wrecked the Nth Atlantic defences and it was here, in 1941, that the crucial battle wwas being fought.

The Swordfish is the unsung hero of the naval war for the allies. its importance ought not be judged on its obvious obsolescence.

Shortround6 said:

This was pretty much the impulse behind carrier aviation. While scouting and spotting were important functions the ability to actually sink other ships with a ship borne aircraft relied on air dropped torpedoes.

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Actually it goes back even further than this; the Italians were the first to drop a torpedo like object from an aircraft, although it wasn't an actual torpedo and the RNAS did it the same year, 1914 in June - Arthur Longmore, an Aussie (Oi oi oi!) was piloting the Short seaplane, and senior RNAS and Admiralty staff, including and at the forefront of enthusiasm for the idea, Winston Churchill, who was First Lord at the time. The first proposals for ships carrying torpedo carrying aeroplanes came about in discussions held in 1914 at the time Longmore made his torpedo drop, Churchill even coining the term 'seaplane' as opposed to 'hydro-aeroplane', which was a lot more cumbersome and in use at the time. This is where the navy's use of fast picket steamers for carrying aeroplanes came about and at the outbreak of war, the RN had a number of seaplane tenders that were designed for carrying offensive as well as observation aircraft.

At Christmas time in 1914, the RN launched a raid against German facilities at Cuxhafen using seaplane tenders - although not an entire success, the raid was the first combined air and sea op, which was let down by technology rather than the concept. The aircraft used were Short Folder seaplanes, so called because, well, you work it out... Which was the same type used by Longmore to drop the torpedo, although they were used as bombers, not for carrying torpedoes.

Edmonds, who was the first person in history to sink a ship at sea with an air launched torpedo took part in the Cuxhafen raid and the captain of the tender HMS Ben-My-Chree, which carried the Short 184s in the Dardanelles, Cecil L'Estrange Malone was also at Cuxhafen.

In 1914 the first proposals for sinking the German High Seas Fleet at anchor in Wilhelmshafen were also written. Churchill (there he is again with extraordinary foresight) suggested removing the floats from a seaplane and fitting wheeled undercarriage to lighten the aircraft and enable them to carry a heavier torpedo to be carried aboard the ships, but his idea was shot down as being impracticable, although in 1915 and 1916, letters were written expressing the same idea and from these came the world's first aircraft carrier based warplane with a conventional undercarriage - odd, because the first aircraft carrier as we know it hadn't been built at that time, the Sopwith Torpedoplane, named the Cuckoo after the Armistice.

To add to that above, it was the Japanese who were the first to use ship launched aircraft with an offensive purpose; the seaplane Tender Wakamiya carried licence built Farman aeroplanes, which carried bombs for sinking German ships during the Tsingtao campaign in September 1914. The aeroplanes were largely unsuccessful as bombers, but still managed to sink a German torpedo boat.

On the subject, the Whitehead locomotive torpedo was certainly a game changer in naval warfare.

While the Swordfish certainly did many amazing things and did affect the direction of the war at times (change of balance of power in the Med,etc) it wasn't a "game changer" in sense of:

1. MAN, we need some of those Biplanes like the British got, how soon can we build some!!!!

2. Crap, they hit us again, how can we stop them?? More AA guns? different fighters? We are defenseless!!!

A bit of an exaggeration but I hope you get the idea. True game changers would require the enemy to at least come up with some sort of counter measure. Different weapons or tactics or both to counter the threat. They also at times spur development of similar weapons/aircraft in allies and enemies alike, sometimes in the fear of being left behind rather than an real tactical need in some forces.

Changing the low speed setting or range of adjustment on an anti-aircraft predictor isn't really a game changer.

Shortround6 said:

Changing the low speed setting or range of adjustment on an anti-aircraft predictor isn't really a game changer.

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I have always been suspicous of the claim that the predictors wouldnt work on such a slow speed aircraft. When Bismark was laid down all carrier navies and most Air Forces had torpedo bombers capable of about 100mph flat out when carrying a torpedo and anyone who didnt allow for a current aircrafts attacking speed is an idiot even if the aircraft on the drawing board were meant to be faster.

I have read that the predictors would only work down to 140mph which is an odd speed of 225.3 kilometers per hour. Even if it was said the predictors only went down to 200kph (124.2mph) which seems a more believable figure because human brains tend to prefer round numbers I would still be suspicous as any gunnery officer worth his salt would know the speed of a Stringbag and allow for it. Maybe its not as easy to hit a slow moving aircraft as we think or maybe the Bismarks gunners werent quite as good or well trained as the internet would have us believe.

Shortround6 said:

While the Swordfish certainly did many amazing things and did affect the direction of the war at times (change of balance of power in the Med,etc) it wasn't a "game changer" in sense of:

1. MAN, we need some of those Biplanes like the British got, how soon can we build some!!!!

2. Crap, they hit us again, how can we stop them?? More AA guns? different fighters? We are defenseless!!!

A bit of an exaggeration but I hope you get the idea. True game changers would require the enemy to at least come up with some sort of counter measure. Different weapons or tactics or both to counter the threat. They also at times spur development of similar weapons/aircraft in allies and enemies alike, sometimes in the fear of being left behind rather than an real tactical need in some forces.

Changing the low speed setting or range of adjustment on an anti-aircraft predictor isn't really a game changer.

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The Germans came up with a new and novel idea, the Tirpitz was kept in a fjord lol

gjs238 said:

Guess the US Navy missed that one.

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I think the US Navy took note but since war had not been officially declared they were taken unawares. I know from living and working in Japan that the Japanese saw the oil embargo as a de fact declaration.

pbehn said:

The Germans came up with a new and novel idea, the Tirpitz was kept in a fjord lol

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Not from fear of Swordfish!

If Swordfish were a game changer then so were the X-Craft which did more damage to Tirpitz than did Swordfish to Bismarck.

I think a more stringent definition of game changer might be needed

Cheers

Steve

stona said:

Not from fear of Swordfish!

If Swordfish were a game changer then so were the X-Craft which did more damage to Tirpitz than did Swordfish to Bismarck.

I think a more stringent definition of game changer might be needed

Cheers

Steve

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Steve I said in my original post that it wasnt so much the aircrafts capabilities but what it achieved, wiping out a major part of the Italian fleet and crippling a major battleship at sea. Basically it showed that the theory of air power at sea was a reality. For the Germans the Tirpitz was probably better in a fjord, the British spent enormous resources trying to destroy it and keeping a battle fleet at readiness should it put to sea.