SMS Ostfriesland and Billy Mitchell

I did research at the ASM on this topic.

1. Actually, in that era the US was the world leader in torpedoes. Not until they established a govt-owned and operated torpedo factory with the main objective of protecting govt civilian jobs did things go to hell.

2. Mitchell had special bombs made, 4000 lb, and instructed his pilots to drop them next to the ships, not on them. That massive explosion next to the hull was like getting hit by several torpedoes in the same spot, caving in the sides.

3. Wash Times screamed that billions had been wasted on battleships and airplanes could do the job instead, but the sober consensus was that battleships needed airplanes to protect them from air attack. As a result the USN built aircraft carriers.

4. In the mid-30's, when the YB-17's intercepted the liner Roma far out at sea, the USN was quite upset. When the Y1B-17 flew a month later and exhibited the same top speed as their new F2A but 10,000 ft higher, they knew the jig was up. The Navy panicked, secured an Army agreement to not allow bombers far from shore and insisted that the new F4F be a high altitude fighter. The F4F design revision saved our butts in the Pacific.

The Basket said:

If I get 3 disagrees from Soulezoo do I won a prize or something? That would be a bigger achievement than sinking the Ostfriesland.

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Here is another one for you...

We are again confusing a bunch of things. most especially time.

The Basket said:

Did high altitude bombing of ships actually hit anything?

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Define high altitude? The Japanese scored several hits from around 10,000ft on the Prince of wales and the Repulse. Granted the bombs were small and didn't do a lot to sink the ships.

The Basket said:

Didn't American battleships protect carriers from air attack as massive flak batteries?

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Yes they did but but they had a much better AA suite than than Prince of Wales and some US destroyers had a better AA suite than the Repulse.

The Basket said:

Obviously they didn't get Mitchells message that battleships were vulnerable.

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If nobody got the message why was so much effort and tonnage being devoted to AA guns and fire control?
It was 24 years from Mitchells tests until the sinking of the Yamato, planes, bombs, torpedoes, AA guns (both light and heavy) fire control and AA ammunition had all made big changes which swung the argument back and forth.

The Basket said:

Japanese carriers were also vulnerable. Look at the beating Yamato took compared to Kaga or Akagi.

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Gee, compare a converted battleship of one generation to a battleship that was not only over 50% larger but of the next generation for starters. Then ignore the differences in ammunition storage, flammable fuels/vapors and other aspects of damage control.

The Basket said:

Could the Iowa on its own survive the attack which sank the PoW and the Repulse?

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The Iowa as designed or the Iowa of 1945?
What a difference a few years make.

Iowa was laid down in June of 1940. Plans (blueprints) which could be and were changed, had to have been mostly completed in original form at this time.
While the Iowa had the same 10 twin 5/38 armament of the earlier fast battleships the secondary AA would change from 4 quad 1.1 AA guns (16 barrels) and 12 or so .50 cal machine guns to 20 quad 40mm mounts (80 barrels) and dozens of 20mm guns, 40 something to around 70 depending on the month
The 5 in guns also got proximity fuses for the shells. the 40 mm guns got local gun directores.
The 40mm bofors guns had hundreds of yards more effective range than the British 2pdr pom-pom.

Part of the reasons for the success of the late war attacks (and a reason for the success of the Japanese against the Prince of Wales and the Repulse) was to overwhelm the defences with more aircraft than the defences can possibly engage, let alone shoot down.


We also have to separate out what was "possible" (could you sink a battleship with bombs) for what was "probable" What were the chances of such an attack working (1in 10 or 1 in hundred) .

The results of the 1921 test are mixed, Mitchell had claimed he could sink ships under "war conditions" which with stationary ships, no AA (which would have been about four 3in guns in local control at the time) and no damage control was an obvious fail. On the other hand the ship/s did sink.
More tests were done in 1923 and the Pre-dreadnought New Jersey and Virginia were both sunk.

considering that this was the aircraft used.

ANd it was lucky it could hit 100mph without any bombs on board let alone large ones slung underneath, allowances for future improvements in both aircraft and bombs would also have to be made.

The loss of the Dorsetshire and Cornwall and Hermes in 1942 were to me just as shocking.

The IJN was truly astonishing before Midway.

Prior to 1914, Battleships were considered the gold standard for measuring the power of a nation on the seas. Battlefleets were considered the means of carrying out the mahanist theories of warfare.

An American naval officer, Mahan argued that navies existed to protect friendly commerce and interrupt that of their enemies. The way to do both was to gain command of the sea. And you did that with a prominent and overwhelming control of the oceans, achieved mainly with battle fleets. Even today this is called "sea control"

Submarines, small torpedo craft, mines, surface raiders were not sea control weapons. You cannot "control" the oceans using such light forces. Sea control means your merchant traffic has freedom of movement whilst your opponents do not. Fleets lacking the power to dominate the oceans because they were small, or obsolete were often relegated to the role of "sea denial"...….not trying to clear a path for your own shipping, but also making it cost prohibitive for your opponent to use his merchantmen on those oceans. Even before WWI it recognised that using a battlefleet in a sea denial role was a waste of manpower and resources. Submarines and mines were a far more effective means of sea denial, but they suffered a huge mobility problem. If you could locate the submarine or minefield, said submarine or minefield could be avoided.. Surface fleets operating in the guerre de course role always risked being hunted down, cornered and sunk by the larger forces controlling the oceans. this is precisely what happened to the germans in WWII, and almost happened to them at Jutland.

For Mahan, the essence of naval strategy was to mass one's navy, seek out the enemy navy, and destroy it in a decisive naval battle. In practice this proved a difficult task as the enemy often would seek to evade the dominant force and could use the vastness of the ocean to do that. Aircraft were found necessary to locate the enemy. Smaller forces were usually faster and/or more long ranged than the pursuers, so a later addition to the role of airpower at sea was to strike at an enemy so as to slow it down. It was realised at some point that fighters to protect a fleet from the prying eyes of enemy a/c

With the enemy's navy at the bottom of the ocean - that is, with command of the sea - your merchantmen were free to sail where they pleased, while the enemy's merchantmen were either confined to port or subject to capture. Diversion of naval power to subsidiary tasks like commerce raiding (a favorite U.S. naval strategy in the early years of the republic) was a waste of resources.

Broken down to its most basic ingredient, Mahanist theory was based on the application of raw power in the most concentrated form possible. in reality it was a theory lacking in any elegance or imagination. It had many weaknesses, not least its lack of mobility, and its myopathy at sea

Alternatives theories did exist. And it was from those pre-WWI theories that the application of seaborne airpower was derived. The primary theories supporting the newer application of sea power were the theories of Jeune Ecole, which tended to favour light forces built around the new technologies of submerged mines, submarines, torpedoes, high speed . Small light, expendable forces. Such strategies were dependant upon knowing the whereabouts of your enemy and hitting him where he least expected. Small, fast, light and expendable were the tennents of the Jeune Ecole.

Seaborne airpower was part of that theory, but was also evolved into an extension of the basic Jeune Ecole. Light forces and alternative naval wepons like mines and submarines were, for various reasons, unable to control oceans in the traditional sense. Airpower had the potential to do so. The experiments carried out in 1917-22, incorporating in its latter stages those carried out by the USAAC and the USN were significant in that they proved the possibility of airpower being able to combine the two schools of naval theory. Whether aircraft alone could render a battleship impotent, and therefore obsolete, would have to wait, however, until 1940-41 in battles like Taranto, Denmark Strait, and ultimately Pearl harbour. after Pearl Harbour there should have been no doubt, but some navies, notably the japanese, Italian and german, stubbornly clung to the notion that the keystone to their naval power remain their battleships. This was even evident in the two big allied navies. What finaly killed the idea that the battle line was really dead was the advent of nuclear weapons. The tests at bikini demonstrated that in spades.





That was the theory according to Mahan However that notion r

The 2 power standard is where the Royal Navy had to have as many battleships as the next two biggest navies combined.

The battleship was as much as a symbol of power as a weapon of war. So sinking battleships was akin to sinking the British Empire whose prestige and power was navy based

The IJN loved Mahan which fitted into their psychology of big set piece battle rather than attrition warfare such as a U-boat campaign.

parsifal said:

That was the theory according to Mahan

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My professor in Historical Geography was convinced that Alfred Thayer Mahan single handedly put the US on the map as a world power by the power of his ideas.
Cheers,
Wes

The Basket said:

the British Empire whose prestige and power was Navy based.

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And to which the Japanese aspired. Their undoing arose from letting the Army into the driver's seat.
Cheers,
Wes

Oh it's "Tommy this", and "Tommy that" and "Tommy get out of there!"
But "Won't you walk in front Mr Atkins!",
When there's danger in the air.

Ironically the USN, in an attempt to combat the submarine menace, developed the Bat air launched missile, a radar guided fire and forget weapon. Its best use would be to launch from high altitude heavy bombers, both to extend the range and to reduce vulnerability of the bomber to interception. Imagine B-29's loaded with Bats; all day and night a surface fleet would have been pounded by such weapons, no matter how they maneuvered to evade them.

The Bat's main drawback was that the crew launching it from the aircraft could neither tell which target they were locked onto nor if they were close enough to hit it. The simple way to handle that problem was to just launch more of them. This was exacerbated by the missile's plywood construction and the fact they had to haul tjhem all the way from the USA as an external load. A PB4Y-2 Privateer could only carry two and was not designed as a high altitude bomber; no doubt a B-29 could have carried a lot more in the bomb bays.

Combine the Bat technology with that of the air-launched V-1 or Loon cruise missile, and a long range stand off weapon could have been in service before 1950. We did not need nukes to render surface combatants obsolete, or at least gravely endangered.

The Basket said:

the British Empire whose prestige and power was Navy based.

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Funny how different this looks depending on which side of the pond you're on. I was taught that prestige and power of the empire, in fact the empire itself was sea commerce based, and the RN was just the prop it leaned on. In other words, the power and prestige radiated from the economic, rather than the military forces at work.
Cheers,
Wes

For an idea of what was going on at the time of these tests on the navy side you have the USS Colorado

Laid down:29 May 1919
Launched:22 March 1921
Commissioned:30 August 1923

and when commissioned had four 3in/23 AA guns


same gun, smaller ship. The .50 cal machine gun had yet to enter mass production so any AA machine guns would have been Lewis guns or .30 cal Brownings.

She got a new battery of AA guns similar to this. eight 5in/25s

while being refitted in 1928-29. four to eight .50 cal machine guns may have been added at this time?

"Bombers Versus Battleships" is a very good book, written by a former RN officer, that reveals the sad state of the RN relative to air defense, even well into the war.

It was shocking to read that the carrier HMS Glorious was sunk while on the way back to GB from Norway, without air patrols up, and all so the captain could court martial an officer promptly. I guess the captain would have been court martialed himself if he had survived the sinking.

MIflyer said:

and all so the captain could court martial an officer promptly.

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Jack Aubrey would be turning over in his grave.

Remember, you have to remember that Billy Mitchell wasn't entirely operating on facts -- but on persuasive arguments, omitted facts, and appeals to emotions: In the field of politics and law, the argument matters more than the facts.

Zipper730 said:

Remember, you have to remember that Billy Mitchell wasn't entirely operating on facts -- but on persuasive arguments, omitted facts, and appeals to emotion

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Whoa! Don't forget, Billy Mitchell had recently had the experience of orchestrating an aerial campaign on a scale seldom seen before, which contributed to the collapse of the final German offensive in WWI, and to the success of the Allied offensive that led to the armistice. He had seen (and shown) what airpower could do. But he couldn't show it to those who would not see. People like Mitchell are looking at what's ahead while the rest of us are still trying to figure what just happened.
Cheers.
Wes

XBe02Drvr said:

Whoa! Don't forget, Billy Mitchell had recently had the experience of orchestrating an aerial campaign on a scale seldom seen before, which contributed to the collapse of the final German offensive in WWI, and to the success of the Allied offensive that led to the armistice.

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That's true...

He had seen (and shown) what airpower could do.

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True

But he couldn't show it to those who would not see. People like Mitchell are looking at what's ahead while the rest of us are still trying to figure what just happened.

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Not exactly... he had an agenda of his own. There's no inherent need for an independent air-force provided the service branch you belong to understands the concepts involved.

Since cavalry units understood the concepts of raiding deep into enemy territory and wrecking everything and setting massive fires, this doesn't seem to be a big issue.

Zipper730 said:

There's no inherent need for an independent air-force provided the service branch you belong to understands the concepts involved.

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And there's the rub. The ground Army (except for theater commanders) thinks tactical. Mitchell's mind was going strategic. Sort of an "ancestor" of Curtis LeMay. He could foresee the potential of airpower being straitjacketed by ground pounder thinking.
Cheers,
Wes

Zipper730 said:

Not exactly... he had an agenda of his own. There's no inherent need for an independent air-force provided the service branch you belong to understands the concepts involved.

Since cavalry units understood the concepts of raiding deep into enemy territory and wrecking everything and setting massive fires, this doesn't seem to be a big issue.

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Cavalry units rarely raided deep enough to destroy an enemies sources of production.
Setting massive fires in farm towns or burning crops close (2-3 days ride by horse) from the front lines wasn't going to cut it once nations began to rely on railroad trains for transportation.

The trouble most fledgling air forces had was that the senior officers of the parent service saw "air power" as either reconnaissance or an extension of artillery, with all the heavy work being done by the existing branches of the service involved and all the senior officer positions to be held by men from the traditional, existing branches.
The colonels and generals (admirals) who had never flown didn't need upstart younger officers telling them how to use airplanes and they sure didn't need them getting promoted to command/staff positions.

Britain did not save a single battleship.
Not one. It's a crying shame.
The only British battleship left is...Mikasa which was built for the IJN.

Mitchell is no match for the British government for scrapping battleships.

XBe02Drvr said:

And there's the rub. The ground Army (except for theater commanders) thinks tactical.

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Is that due to doctrine, or due to the fact that only those that can think strategic get to command at that level?

Shortround6 said:

Cavalry units rarely raided deep enough to destroy an enemies sources of production.
Setting massive fires in farm towns or burning crops close (2-3 days ride by horse) from the front lines wasn't going to cut it once nations began to rely on railroad trains for transportation.

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Sure, but the fact is that the concept could easily be extended to the (then) current day to wherever it mattered.

The trouble most fledgling air forces had was that the senior officers of the parent service saw "air power" as either reconnaissance or an extension of artillery, with all the heavy work being done by the existing branches of the service involved and all the senior officer positions to be held by men from the traditional, existing branches.

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Mitchell didn't think that way, and I have a feeling others had similar attitudes to varying degrees of extremity.

The colonels and generals (admirals) who had never flown didn't need upstart younger officers telling them how to use airplanes and they sure didn't need them getting promoted to command/staff positions.

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I figure if you have a goal that your superiors will like, you just tell them directly; if you have a goal that you have that they won't like but will work, you just tell them "some variation of the truth", or just risk some "inexactitude of terminology", while you implement your plan and carry it out. You of course tell the like-minded what you're doing if they can keep their mouths shut.

Can you believe people accuse me of having "ends justify the means" style thinking? The nerve!

BTW: Actually I'm just basing the thought process on the way people in authority positions or some form of power often act.