8 Bells Lecture | Norman Friedman: Naval Air Defence from Biplanes to the Cold War

look at a fighter aircraft before World War two it doesn't work real well and it doesn't work really well where is the clicker I guess this is a clicker right and you see a fighter that worked out rather well an amazing fighter actually because it's an accident you realize that until 1940 there was no expectation of even buying the Hellcat and then suddenly someone had Behrman the Navy procurement officer said I understand that the the plane you're buying may not work out right and there's this alternative Navy's always been very good at that by the way and I might audible in the back am i okay um turned out rather well you could argue is a very successful airplane in Pacific I always found it more attractive than the Hellcat but that's just me done they yeah course irregular that's just me are very forgiving airplane but I was interested in how you use them and where they go the other thing is Walla was hmm okay ah while I was doing this book I was doing a project at the War College on wargaming between the wars and as you read the war games and I did and I don't think anyone else has because I would not recommend that as a light entertainment as you read the war games you realized that they were extremely important for the Navy the War College at that time was the Navy's lab for understanding what a future war would be like got to realize no one had ever imagined actually fighting a Pacific war it's a horrible problem it's an enormous ocean and the first question is well how do you cause the Japanese to surrender how do you do it with not a lot of troops because when the war plans are drawn no one can imagine forming a twelve million man army that that's not in the cards and what happens way out there in the western Pacific oh and by the way the Japanese owned the islands past which you've got to go the mandates this is just some difficulty so the one of the things that War College does is every year it plays a big game the big game lasts about a month it's the only game in which the junior and senior class is both play and the big game simulates the war plane in fact in 1927 the president of the college says this is the most important thing you're going to do this is the rest of your careers you pay attention to this game well they played a game of thirty three and it turned out the war plan didn't work okay that's really what being a lab is about when you find out things better change what happened was that that the plan until then was called the through ticket to Manila the through ticket to Manila was that the fleet goes straight to the Philippines once it's in the Philippines it has a base a fight the Japanese fleet once the Japanese have been wiped out we can block a Japan and strangle them and the theory and all these war plans is if you want to beat the Japanese you strangle which makes a lot of sense what we did in the end what happens in this game is the Japanese get Manila but they don't get the southern Philippines instantly but all there is in the southern Philippines is Anchorage's without facilities so the fleet fights a battle on the way out in this battle the Japanese lose but they don't get wiped out the trouble is that in the course of beating them we take a lot of underwater damage and the at that time the college had a compensator a captain van Wilkin and the Innokin was a man of very strong views and he was willing to say things and he says so you think this was a real victory right well there's a little problem once you get to these Anchorage's in the southern Philippines there were about three places that had a manga its Howie's Howie mullein pious sound and there was another one I'd forgotten it doesn't matter now well you get there right and you turn off your engines and you go to the bottom immediately and there's nothing to fix you you're stuck you think this is a real good result well no it isn't the real good result then they played another game the following January I guess in which it was assumed that magically they repaired the fleet but the Japanese is still coming on the fleet is the only reason the Japanese don't overrun these languages well but the fleet needs support so there's a convoy coming and the question is well what happens when you go out to meet the convoy to bring it in and the Japanese army turns up in your rear and the answer is very bad things surprise surprise so then token writes this up and I think the only time in history this thing is sent to sea and no oh dear this was not a good thing to discover the war plan changes to what we actually do which is we go step by step now you don't think that has anything with fighters it has a lot to do with them because what happens when you go step by step is real different if you're going to go straight through them to Manila as you pass through the mandates the Japanese bomb the living daylights out of you unless you can wipe them on route so a lot depends on whether you can bomb their airfields a lot depends on whether you can take their airfields out permanently in a lot of these war games the way you take airfields out permanently is you drop gas on them if you're going step by step then you're seized an island that becomes a base now you can use that as a base to attack other Japanese bases further in as you move forward also it's not necessary to do with a carrier you can do with big flying goes with bombs and at that time briefly it looked like flying boats could be as high performance as land planes good luck it doesn't work but you know things change that's why we buy a lot of seaplane tenders because we're going to move everything forward and if you look at the designations of the big sea planes they get a bomber designator they're PBS instead of just peace and pb's meaning they get a fancy bum site or Norden bombsight it means they get serious bombs now the role of the fighters is going to change also because when you look at the the fleet going all the way through the fighters have to beat off land-based aircraft so the fighters have to have the highest possible performance you can't tolerate garbage fighters now you may think that's obvious but if you look at another big Navy the Royal Navy they believe that somehow airplanes that operated love ships were inherently worse than airplanes from land but since all they were going to face was shipboard aviation they didn't have to have high performance there's a logic to it but the words wishful thinking come up a lot when you read about British comments I think we were more realistic I think we're much more cold-blooded and it shows in our successes well here's what fighters do in this case and later on the seizing air superiority is very difficult the only way you can really do is wipe out the other guys air and I don't think we ever thought you could do that if he doesn't have a lot of air you can't wipe it out and that's really what the maritime strategy was later on I was involved in that stuff the Fleet Air Defense is very hard to do unless you have radar because you don't get enough warning there was a lot of talk about how you would get warning not so much about how you use the warning just before the war we in the British both get very interested in standing air patrols I'm not saying about a combat air patrol I'm talking about what spots the other guy coming in and there was a lot of talk of using Cruiser spotting planes for that purpose I don't think that we ever tested it I don't think it was for real but I don't know you don't get much discussion of how to do it you find it in handbooks of how you operate your aircraft off the carrier but you don't find it very much in say operational discussion and the one thing that War College couldn't simulate and it wanted to pretty badly was air-to-air combat there's a lot of discussion in their records of the problem of trying to make sense out of it and then there's the strike support if you're going to get it mostly by attacking the other guy well he's going to try to beat you off you need escorts so you need a combination of very high performance and very long range and that's hard to do so if you look back just before the war the Bureau of Aeronautics thinks it's almost there but they can't really get there until they have a new generation of engines and that's the world war two fighters all right I'm sorry this is the gaming thing I've talked about and I don't think that people have realized how important gaming was I think that that one of the parts of gaming that mattered was that if you came to Newport and you weren't an aviation guy you learned about what aviation would do and you learned by doing that was a big thing about gaming when you look at the records of the War College most people focus on the lectures that are easy to find and what I'm thinking is remembering school the lecturers don't do it you got to do it okay the effect of the treaties are the War College advises about the treaties but his advice was generally disregarded on the other hand when it came to we've signed the treaty now what do we do that had real influence and you see that inclusive designs into war this is what I told you about how we were supposed to fight Japan and in each case you need a lot of air oh and the other thing about these war games is pilots get used up like water and so although we didn't have the money for a big pilot training scheme I think that everybody went through Newport realized you had to have a lot of reserve pilots and once we have some money we start doing it for real we do it much more for real than anybody else the British don't and you know that the Japanese didn't and I think that we could not imagine that there would be that stupid and then I really real sense all right how do you get air superiority you hit their bases until you have radar it's got to be pre-emptive if you're lucky and it's a carrier our carrier thing hit the carrier's first so if you look at an American carrier in say 1940 you'll find that there's a squadron of Scouts and there's a squadron of thye bombers the same airplanes but different jobs and there's a lot of talk about if you can find them first you win the most astounding thing of about 1944 in the turkey shoot is they found us for us and they lost that is the rules changed radar changed everything fighters needed maximum performance but you couldn't get it before the new engines if you look at World War two there's a jump in engine power that makes a tremendous difference the fact that we could build engines and very large quantities that hadn't really existed the two or three years earlier made a tremendous difference to us and that's the the are twenty six hundred and twenty eight hundred mm whisper our engines basically you build an airplane you make compromises and the compromises are very difficult because it has to be like I hacked you're trying to get some range out of it and that's way and if you want high speed and you have thousand horsepower engines you basically wrap an airplane around the smallest day applying you could build that's like a Spitfire or some of Messerschmitts like that once you have very powerful engines you can wrap a much bigger airplane around them you're limited in maximum speed by air resistance and what propellers will do you're not gonna get a whole lot faster at the maximum end but you'll go a lot longer you'll be armored it makes an unbelievable difference I think a health art would weigh about twice as much as a Spitfire and it's probably not nearly as maneuverable but boys a lot faster and if it could take a lot worse beating the Japanese had been fighting in China they had discovered that bombers would not always get through the Chinese had real air defense they found they had to escort their bombers so they also realized that you had to have long-range high-performance fighters there had a little problem though which was allows the industrial base and the lousy industrial base meant that although they could design more powerful engines they couldn't produce them in quantity and that's basically why is zeroes made out of paper okay these are Wildcats they don't look like much with it rather impressive before the war you're very Nordic split this was one of the highest performance airplanes around it wasn't really but it was very effective and by the way stated service throughout the whole war which is not bad this is what you air wanted it's a Corsair landing on a carrier in Korea that big engine at the front is what mattered and you'll know that course Sears had some problems but they worked if I look abroad I think that the only way you can see who does it right it who does it wrong is to look at other people once you look at other people you can say jeez we avoided that problem boy did they get stuck oh well the room Navy had the problem of a separate Air Force that basically ate their air and the effect of eating their air was subtle the room may be paid for us airplanes nobody try to stop them from buying the airplanes although in the 30s the RAF wanted to kill their air their air because they thought there's going to be some kind of air disarmament the disarmament story in the 20s and 30s is very bizarre they thought they were going to gain air superiority by hitting Japanese carriers first they also were interested in fighting Japan and they were good on scouting they're very good on on training they're very good at navigation I think probably better than we I think they were probably better than we were before the war had training observers unfortunately there weren't a lot of them and the airplanes were lousy so if there aren't a lot of you at the start of the war there going to be a lot fewer and their internal history which hasn't been published they talk about how mistakes they were making in 41 will do to the loss of all their pre-war people you know whether that's an excuse or reality I can't answer they wanted to try to get long range but one of the effects of the RAF owning their air was that if you were a pilot in the Royal Navy you ended up with an RAF job so that they didn't have a lot of senior people at a good feeling for air okay I'm not talking about a good feeling for how you use the airplanes if some very smart people I'm talking about a good feeling for what the technology meant so for example they swallowed the line about how the planes will be lousy because they operate from carriers they were apparently not very good at seeing anybody else so when they built their dive bomber fighter to to gain air superiority it could lift a 500-pound bomb and therefore when they went for armored hangars which are there they're famous armored carriers that's what they were supposed to keep out now you say oh that seems sensible no we were flying with thousand-pound bombs at that time and I think it was fairly public on the other hand they regard us as a lot better there's a wonderful line where the director of naval construction is being asked what they should reveal to us in exchange for information about aircraft and he says reveal everything we're lousy these guys are terrific the crumbs from their table are worth the effort the inter-service problems are difficult to lay out but they're obviously very serious they invent radar fighter control that helps them a lot it comes in kind of late but they're pretty good at it and when you look at an actual battles like there's a big convoy battle called pedestal they do rather well out of that they end up being badly hurt anyway but the Mediterranean is a very nasty place um and this is their preemptive strike aircraft lousy engine you want long-range you're gonna get low speed and light bomb load now the Japanese they recognize that they would get wiped out by air attack they don't seem to make any serious attempt at understanding how to defend themselves I know there were zeroes trying to defend it Midway without any fighter control they will go to whatever looks interesting and then you get in the back so no fighter control you might as well kill yourself and they do they believe that they would find us first and hit us first and it would be over they did a pretty good job but we did a better one the China experience really affected them and I think it determined the way they thought and they wanted long range if you want long range and you have lousy engines you're going to pay for it you're gonna get killed surprised I don't think we realized what they were doing in China I don't think anyone had a very good idea what they were doing alright if you look at intelligence before the war they were pretty good at closing things down this is a zero kind of beat up very good fighter in 1941 but only as long as it's shooting you down not as long as it gets damaged and you know that from I'm not telling anything new the point that people miss is that the fighter is a visible part of an iceberg and if you don't recognize the other bits you miss the point so there has to be some way of seeing things coming that isn't the same as knowing what's happening that situational awareness that's what happens in a plot or right now a computer system without that awareness of what's happening you can't give orders to go there he's coming in then there has to be some way of controlling the aircraft and that's a radio issue and radios become effective for this job as the war starts and then there's the final part it is you got to shoot him down we were apparently extremely good at air-to-air gunnery and there's some evidence that the British never quite got it by the way the Army Air Force didn't get it either it's a matter of deflection shots if you don't have all of it you get killed now the other thing is before the war when the War College used to run games carriers got hit a lot and the question is well can you survive hits now I had always imagined that if you got hit carrier was sort of an explosion waiting to happen and that was it no nothing like that the story was that if you got hit in your flight deck if it was a metal flight deck it was a shipyard job and by about 1930 people the War College is saying is there anything you can do to do rapid repairs and the reason we had those flimsy wooden flight decks that everyone laughed at in England that's to be able to fix it fast if you look at our experience until late the kamikazes if you look at say enterprise enterprise is famous because she's in almost a little battles in Pacific well surprise that's because she didn't spend all that time being fixed if you took a bad beating on your flight deck and it was a nice steel flight deck that looks terrific well as long as it didn't break your gray shape if you're a flight that could be to a 500-pound bombs and Snuka was dropping a 1500 pound bomb on you unfortunately you wouldn't do very well so for example in Austria switch is the first of their armored flight that carriers gets here I think in January 41 in the Med by a Stuka and it takes something like 11 months to fix it in Norfolk we're terribly impressed by it we will admit it for that if you're going to face real bombs you want a lot more structure deeper in your ship if you look at in Essex Essex has two or more decks the hangar deck and one below that it'll take a lot worse beating and if most of this literature hadn't originated in the UK my line would be much more familiar to you this is jealousy and you got to remember this book originally in the UK and was imported here but it was an American writing itself that's luck another fighter role is if you can wipe out the other guys air you win and that's the Tucker shooting 44 and a Philippine City now the most interesting thing about the turkey shoot to me is if you read Morrison's account Morrison is not real good on technology but he's very good on what people are thinking at that time and he said the pilots are very depressed because although they've shot down all the Japanese aircraft but they hadn't been able to get at the Japanese carriers and therefore they felt they had not achieved much I mean shooting down a whole bunch of Japanese planes was a day's work well what they'd actually done was wipe out the Japanese naval air arm which is rather nice the reason they didn't realize for my money what they had done was that no one believed that the Japanese could be so incredibly stupid as not to be turning out pilots at a high rate now I think there was intelligence to that effect but what's known saying Washington doesn't always percolate none of you has ever experienced that right so they didn't realize what they'd done when we looked again at the turkey shoot in the 80s when it was the outer air battle and marathon strategy it was boy is that a good idea now at the time what comes out of it is if you're going to wipe out Japanese naval air you've got to wipe out the carriers when Nimitz gives Halsey his marching orders Halsey is told to concentrate on the Japanese carriers guess what that's what happens that way they go and people conveniently forget these orders as far as I can tell the other thing you learn in war games before the war is that if your carrier is caught by a big surface ship you're dead meat and so when Halsey goes north he takes his battleships with him because he doesn't want his valuable carriers to get caught by accident nobody gets it if you look at an actual attack zone on ships in World War two it's very hard to sink a large ship if you look at the sinkings that we achieve the number of aircraft are very very large I mean I think it's four carriers get Yamato that's a lot of airplanes so your view of service ships and carriers may be just a little different when you look at it that way if you want to see what happens when you don't understand air there's a ship named HMS glorious in 1940 she's caught by a couple German crew battleships right she's caught largely because the captain of the ship is having a fight with his air commander nobody is up scouting surprise it's like he doesn't get it what did the War College do for us they got it that's why guys like Spruance knew had a wheel carriers really well that's here did a very good job okay the turkey shoot I've said all of this I think that the reason that we were surprised by kamikazes was we didn't understand what we had done once you once all of your good pilots are gone you're stuck you're very desperate the Japanese like suicide stuff anyway everyone knew that by 1945 you see analyses in Navy publications saying actually if you're going to lose all your airplanes you might as well lose him this way and after the war dropping he said that to us I remember reading a book in which a Japanese officer is asked well how could you do something horrible like that he's just wait a minute all the pilots got killed anyway might as well get something for it now what happens later this is later and the problem with the the Russians was standoff missiles by the end of the Cold War this could probably attack from 150 to 200 miles away and we realized sometime during the Cold War then although this was quite a nasty threat there weren't all that many of them and they had very highly trained crews so if it's a finite threat and you could somehow wipe it out that gets kind of interesting and that's the essence of what we try to do later so we invented an idea called the outer air battle the inner air battle was missiles shooting it whatever was coming in which would mostly be missiles and the outer air battle was pillow bombers and the line was if you must have heard it kill the archer not the arrow if you could wipe out these expensive bombers that was like wiping out the Russian fleet once you realize the Bombers were the the core of the Russian if you're like ant I should flee that gets kind of interesting and that would gain the Navy freedom of action it would allow the Navy to intervene in the war on land once you wiped out the Bombers and if you could neutralize the subs for you also though we could do then you could take chances and the chances were you could go in in sure you could you could seize a Jutland after the Russians tried to you could go after the flanks of an advancing Russian army armies don't like their flanks threatened they tend to pull back and I don't think anybody outside the Navy understood quite how impressive this could get and you know that that the marathon strategy was very controversial in the Army and Air Force they hated our guts we wanted a battle we wanted a decisive battle the Norwegian Sea was our favourite place we thought that the new technology would do it and the new technology was the computers that finally worked without breaking down every five minutes we had an enormous advantage that way that we didn't even realize was the advantage we had we assumed the Russians also had computers that didn't I think it kind of good now if the Russians had brought in another generation and missiles it would have gotten nastier we had to try to beat off their satellite reconnaissance and things like that but this is really fieger's doing what fighters are supposed to do and if you look at the Chinese now in a lot of ways that Chinese play the same game as the Russians what they get out of the carrier is not clear there's a sense that when you watch them that we want to have all the stuff that makes you look good like you have without the logic that fits it together it couldn't happen to nicer people and to me this is this is the the symbol of the adder a about it's an f-14 which was the long endurance fighter with long-range missiles and the Itza which were directed and the payoff on the e2 was it could go way out wouldn't have worked perfectly nothing works perfectly the f-14 is needed no engines we were putting them in during the 80s we would have been happier with a lighter weight missile Phoenix was a good missile but not as good as you might like I can talk about that if you want but if you look at the logic of the situation I think we rather well understood it's a rather good story and in between if you look at fighters and jet fighters I talk a lot about the problems we had developing them I think we were more realistic than others for example we wanted every fighter to have a radar and the reason was if you're coming at somebody else and each of you is almost Mach 1 you're approaching an incredibly high speed if you don't see the guy pretty far out you're not going to react so I read about the British and they have these attractive looking airplanes and they also had a a well known British aircraft writer they say well if it looks nice it's good yeah good luck they didn't work on we had problems we had a lot of trouble with engines probably if you know airplanes you know about that but I think that we did what you're supposed to do it took a while to make it work through the 50s I don't think it would have worked real well because we didn't have computer combat direction once we had it I think it worked pretty well if you look at Vietnam the Navy's combat direction systems were tested in effect they provided support to aircraft attacking Los Vietnam I think they did rather well the missiles worked after a while too and you know we had some spectacular successes once the the electronics worked it really worked look I'm ancient enough that the first computer I have a saw it was an IBM computer and it was constantly breaking and the guy who would come to it had a sort of doctor's bag full of elegant little instruments it's any friend remember that and you just knew that that if you bought a computer somehow your life would be repair people and they've changed you would buy something in a box you could drop it and would still work it would work when it came out of the box it was very rare for these things not to work right that's a different world and once you're in that world this kind of thing works really well now there are other problems that come with that world I can

Channel: U.S. Naval War College

Views: 4,078

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Keywords: naval war college, united states navy, wwi, wwii, world war i, world war ii, aviation

Id: pyQZvg5ddYs

Length: 33min 53sec (2033 seconds)

Published: Wed May 30 2018