Carrier Night Actions in WW2 - What you can't see can still hurt you

[Music] I so this month one of the topics I've been asked to cover by the fine folks over on patreon is night carer actions in the second world war now it is possible to talk about every single night carrier action but for one thing that would be a fairly extensive book so we're going to take some edited highlights and look at a number of night carer actions throughout the war as it we progress through World War to and hopefully that will give some idea of just how these things were actually developing of course we will be focusing on the Royal and United States navies because well the Italians and the Germans never deployed any aircraft carriers so by default they can't do carrier Knight actions and whilst the Japanese did have a lot of carriers at the start of their involvement in World War II they didn't have any night carrier Doctrine particularly and by the time they could theoretically have developed one well they had other things to be worrying about including ironically enough United States Navy carryer night actions but we also need to Define what exactly constitutes a night carrier action and for the purposes of this video I'm going to use a relatively broad definition and that is to look at aircraft carrier operations as comprising five main elements you've got takeoff you've got heading from your ship to the target attacking your target then going from the target back to your ship and then finally landing on your ship and I'm going to define a carryer knite action as when at least two of these elements are occurring in the hours of Darkness so it could be that your takeoff and travel occur in darkness but maybe you're attacking at dawn it could be that you take off in daylight maybe you're even attacking in daylight but at least a good chunk of your travel back and Landing is happening at night or you know you could take off at night travel at night attack at night come back at night and land at night all of these would qualify as night actions for the purposes of this video now carrier KN actions were a relatively New Concept going into the second world war attacking your enemy at night from the air had been toyed with and it implemented almost from the dawn of aerial Warfare there were night raids in both Germany and the UK in World War I for example but in those cases the issue with night flying was the same as the issue that you had with night flying if you were operating from a carrier but with one major complicating Factor the core problem was navigation but if you are taking off from a fixed airfield on land heading for a fixed Target somewhere else and then retracing your steps there are certain measures that you can take in order to assist with your navigation unless it's completely overcast and a moonless night there will be some level of Light present and that can help you with determining some fairly simple things like am I over land am I over the sea is that a river and of course if there's no blackout you can try and work out from the lights that you'll looking at is this a city a town a village if so which one and you can try and use a map to navigate now of course that's not the only way you'd navigate at night you would also use where at all possible the stars and the moon but sometimes those things were not visible now obviously if this is a landbased campaign you can just not travel on the nights that the skies are somewhat against you and of course as things progress During the interwall period in terms of radio communications and radio Direction finding landbased aircraft up would be making this kind of attack would be bombers which tend to be twin engine or larger which will also tend to have the space to hold a reasonable amount of equipment and or dedicated Navigators for aircraft carriers however the same core navigation problem is actually massively more complex for a start even the biggest carrier-based aircraft in World War II was nowhere near the size of a strategic bomber at least in terms of regularly deployed carrier aircraft the b-25s not withstanding and if you were striking another Target at sea or even if you were going for a Target on land the vast majority of what you would be navigating over would be relatively featureless ocean which would massively complicate your attempts at navigation especially if either the moon and the stars weren't out or if they were obscured partway through by unexpected weather and unlike a land-based aerial Campaign which might be going on for weeks or months if you were doing a knight attack from a carrier chances were this was your only opportunity so you couldn't be quite as strict with what weather you would fly in as compared to operations from land air bases your smaller carrier aircraft were also less capable of carrying the bulky and heavy early home equipment and that assumed that the aircraft carrier in question that you just launched from was willing to mount any kind of hobing Beacon because of course most homing beacons in the interwall period would tell any nearby enemy with a decent radio set where the carrier was just as well as it would tell friendly aircraft and well carriers were not usually ually set up for night actions in terms of a surface gunfight and to top it all off the aircraft carrier moves so just because you might be able to make your way back to exactly the point that you took off from which was a fairly long shot anyway didn't mean you in the clear because that is the one place the aircraft carrier is not going to be when you get back and then of course you have the additional problem of actually landing on the thing because if you again again are doing a landbased air campaign the Airfield you're operating from is going to be presumably deep within friendly territory and is not going to have too much of a problem lighting itself up for you to return but much like an omnidirectional homing Beacon Lighting up a carrier to show the pilots hey we're over here is a very good way of telling any nearby enemy submarines destroyers etc etc hey there's a thing over here that probably isn't going to see you coming and you can try and bomb and or torpedo and Factor on top of all of that the fact that well landing on an aircraft carrier is not exactly an easy task at the best of times and now with low visibility thanks to the darkness and likely reduced depth perception due to the same you've now got to make what is arguably one of the hardest aircraft Landing jobs in the world in situations where it's just become a whole lot harder plus of course again referencing back to landbased airfields if you are trying to land a bomber after a night Mission and you happen to unders shoot overshoot or S lightly missed the runway to either side at least when we're talking about World War II bombers chances are at best you will just have a slightly rougher Landing of it at worst you might pancake your aircraft but you are probably still going to walk away from it thanks to the fact that most World War II airfields were in the middle of rather large flattish grassy areas and bombers could kind of work on those things whereas if you are trying to do this on a carrier and you overshoot you end up in the water and then run over by your carrier if you undershoot you probably run into the back of your carrier and then after a few moments past it across the stern you very humiliatingly slide down into the water where you get churned up by the ship's wake and if you miss to either side that's probably the least embarrassing because at that point you're probably just going to plunge straight into the sea there's a small chance you might survive long enough for a destroyer to pick you up and so from that hopefully you can appreciate that the navigation issue was the single biggest problem facing any kind of coordinated and coherent Knight carrier operations and that's without going into all the potential nightmare scenarios of aircraft flying into each other at night in the congested airspace around an aircraft carrier but be that as it may compared to the navigation issue the issue of actually taking off from a carrier at night was relatively speaking Child's Play the only other major problem was that assuming you could take off and assuming you could navigate to your target how exactly did you find your target once you got to the approximate area where it was supposed to be as assuming you said solve the navigation problem to get into that vicinity in the first place well we'll see how this was done as we go through our series of night carrier actions so with all that in place hopefully you've got some idea of just how utterly terrfying it would have been to do night carrier Ops in World War II we'll start off with a relatively famous one which will no doubt at some point get its own video The Battle of Toronto World War III wasn't even quite a year old when the British faced the problem of trying to deal with Italian battle Fleet pre-war plans had called for the Mediteranean to be held by a combination of French and British ships and had mostly focused on the idea of fighting one or the other of Germany or Italy with some worst case scenarios accounting for both now however not only had those worst case scenarios come true but an even larger worst case scenario France had been knocked out of the war which meant that instead of being a 2V1 situation or at worst a 2v2 the naval situation was one V2 and unlike the cigs Marina by the mid to late part of 1940 the Ria Marina actually had a significant number of operational Capital ships Germany remember had yet to make bismar operational turits was yeah at some point in the future maybe and sha host and Ganer now were both recovering from a little bit of a battering taken in the Norwegian campaign the Italians on the other hand had a number of the refitted dread norts of the cavor and dilio types in various stages of refit but a number of them were fully operational and they also had two modern fast battleships Lorio and vitorio Veno the idea of the British dealing with an annoying enemy Fleet by flying torpedo bombers over their Harbor and torpedoing them out of existence was a fairly old one they'd been planning to do this to the high seas Fleet in 1918 except that production of the torpedo bomber that they were planning to use had been a bit slow so they plan to do it instead in Spring 1919 and then World War I came to an end and unlike Edward I with the trebuchet warwolf the fleet aarm couldn't really ask the British government could you pretty please keep the war going for another three or four months just so we can exercise our massive Doom Laden air strike but the idea had percolated back and forth in the minds of the royal Navy ever since for most of the interwall period this had obviously looked at attacking an enemy Harbor during the day but when it came to dealing with the Italian Fleet there were a number of factors which ruled against this firstly thanks to the AFF mentioned fact that the Royal Navy was having to deal with both Germany and Italy at the same time on its own Britain was a little bit short on car assets grown to the loss of courageous and glorious hadn't really helped matters that much but even if they had still been around there would still have been a lot more places that carriers were needed than the British had carriers this in turn meant that a relatively small number of aircraft would be available for the strike and that meant that if you were going after the enemy Homeland the regia aeronautica might have something to say about this not to mention of course the anti aircraft defenses of Toronto Harbor itself and the ships that you would be trying to torpedo who would understandably be less than enthusiastic about going through with this experience and once they dealt with the strike package presumably both the regia aeronautica and the regim marina would be in something of a joint competition to track down whoever had had the tarity to launch said strike and sarily blow them out of the water the British understandably not wanting to lose a good portion of their available carrier strike Assets in a daylight attack decided right well we're going to go with a nighttime attack and fortunately the harbor of Toronto is not known for getting up and going walkes of its own valtion and therefore they were going after a fixed Target which this early in the war made things a little bit easier the plan had been to launch aircraft from two carriers but one of them developed fault so most of its strike aircraft in this case obviously swordfish were moved across to the remaining carrier HMS illustrious in this case the entire operation was done at night more so for the security of the carrier than anything else with the first aircraft leaving illustrious just before 9:00 in the evening on the 11th of November 1940 and the last aircraft returning to illustrious at around about 20 to 3 in the morning thanks to the fixed nature of the target it was possible to navigate to Toronto with relatively little difficulty as long as you had some basic navigational fixes as the carrier knew where it was roughly speaking and so you could just head generically for the Italian Coast on a rough Compass bearing if you really really wanted to be crude and then Meander up and down the Italian Coast until you found something that looked Harbor and full of battleships in the event most of the swordfish had somewhat more accurate navigation than that which was just as well and this was all assisted by the fact the attack was launched a few days before full moon so the moon was 80 to 90% full which made navigating by it and also navigating by its reflected Moonlight a somewhat easier Prospect than perhaps it would have been if the operation had been launched a week or two earlier once over Toranto flares were dropped by some aircraft to allow everybody else to see what they were doing doing the attack was undertaken and then they had to make their way back to the illustrious for this the Royal Navy had developed a rather neat little piece of technology starting with experiments in 1933 and 1934 by 1936 the first operational system had actually been deployed on a British carrier and this was what pilots affectionately called the Dustbin look at World War II pictures of British aircraft carriers and you'll notice a big cylindrical object sitting on top of the bridge on top of a m usually and that's the transmitter they're talking about now what this transmitter did was it just sent out a regular pulsed tone signal but it sent it out on a fairly narrow bearing and it was set to rotate a full 360° once per minute with its reference at the top of the minute being true north so regardless of what direction the carrier was pointing in at 0 seconds of each minute it would always be pointing True North this meant if you synchronized your watch before you left the carrier and you knew roughly where the carrier was then once you carried out your attack you headed in what you reckoned was your bearing and as long as you got to within about 100 nautical miles of the carrier you could start picking up this signal and you'd look at your watch you be listening on your headphones and when you hear the pulse of the signal transmitted reach its peak you know what time in seconds it is on your watch so for example if the signal reaches its peak when your second hand is pointing to nine that means that the transmission you're receiving has been transmitted at 270° from True North which means that you are directly west of the aircraft carrier or rather the transmitter and therefore if you fly a reciprocal course due east at 90° to True North you should in theory be following the beacon down towards home and of course as you fly that way if you start to get signals that are say at 8:00 or 10:00 you know that you are drifting or potentially the carrier is moving and you can make the appropriate adjustment of course as long as you head down a reciprocal line or for better fuel efficiency a deflected line if you know what course the carrier should be on then you will get to within visual range of the carrier and you can make your Landing attempt this all went pretty well the only aircraft that didn't make it back aboard the carrier were the ones that were shot down over Toronto the next mission we're going to consider is actually the Battle of Cape matad not the famous night action but the circumstances that immediately preceded it because whil it's relatively well known that swordfish crippled the Italian crew AP POA which then led up to the night action at the Battle of cap Matan what's not often appreciated is that hm formidable had already launched two sets of strikes one of which had succeeded in damaging the Victorio Veno earlier in the day but her last strike which was the one that would eventually Paula was a night action the swordfish took off just before Sunset but the sun did in fact set whilst they were on route to the Italian formation which meant that when the Italians opened fire there was quite a spectacular display of Tracer fire but also quite extensive use of search lights now in the case of this particular attack due to the fact that formidable was traveling with the main Fleet which was obviously under very tight Emissions Control except for obviously later on the use of radar and a variety of other minor factors it was not possible during this night action for the aircraft to return to formidable essentially she wasn't in a position to be able to carry out independent air operations while she was having to stick so close to Cunningham's battleships and whilst the Homing Beacon was a little bit difficult to figure out as compared to just an omnidirectional unit it was enough of a vulnerability that while she was operating this close to Cunningham's main Force she wasn't allowed to operate that electronic device either and so in this case although the swordfish had and Alors involved had successfully flown off of the carrier flown through the darkness attacked in gathering darkness and were now navigating away in Pitch Darkness they ended up having to head for the rather more praic Land Based at suda Bay where they landed except for one or two the ran out Fuel and had to ditch nearby and formidable had to then recover those aircraft a little bit later on in this particular case flares were not needed to identify the ships that they were supposed to be attacking because the Italians between the search lights and the AA gunfire did a pretty good job of pointing out where they were anyway and then we move forward a couple of months to May 1941 when we look at the pursuit of bismar but we're not looking at HS Arc Royals attack on bismar which is perhaps sometimes the better known one we instead looking at the slightly earlier one launched by HMS Victorious now whilst this was not a night of operation in terms of the aircraft attacking bismar because it was still daylight when bmar was attacked the light faded very shortly thereafter the attack and this attack is notable for two specific uses of technology or in one case the lack of use of a technology firstly Victorious showed the way forward in future attacks because one of the swordfish was carrying an ASV radar what we would today term a surface search radar or an air to surface search radar and this was important because although it wasn't dark when the attack was launched the weather was absolutely foul with a very low cloud ceiling so in terms of finding Bismark a lot of the issues that would present themselves with a true Knight attack did actually present themselves in this case as well but with the help of the ASV radar they were able to determine where bismar was and make their attack even if it didn't accomplish a huge amount but it became a night action because on their way back the sun set and so not only would they have to make a night navigation back to Victorious but they would also have to do a night landing now the second element of this particular action and why it relates to the progress of Knight actions is because whilst the swordfish had been the aircraft actually made the attack on bismar there were also five fulls which had been launched partly to keep an eye on bismar as Recon aircraft and partly as I guess potentially escorts if the arado 196 is on Bismark had been sent up to oppose the swordfish but in any case whilst the swordfish made a beine straight back for victorious the full Mars had to wait a little bit longer and by the time the last of the full Mars were heading back home the Homing beacon on Victoria had in fact failed and this meant that two of the forars the last two coming in weren't able to actually find where Victorious was because the problem of navigating to a moving Target which had no real means of telling you where exactly it was at any given time was pretty much insoluble without that technological solution one of the full Mars disappeared Without a Trace but the other fulmar luckily had its Twan crew cre rescued by a passing merchant ship so this action had demonstrated both the utility of some pretty new and impressive technology but also what could happen when some of the established technology failed and then we move into April 1942 and we also move oceans we're over now in the Indian Ocean with operation C now this was an operation which didn't actually end up involving any carrier Knight action but all almost did and from the records left behind by Admiral Somerville in the Eastern fleet's War Diaries we can see exactly what he was planning somerville's idea was that when nagumo entered the Indian Ocean he was almost certainly at some point going to attack salon now Sri Lanka and he was right somerville's plan therefore was to take his forces which were comprised of two carriers plus the battleship war Spite and escorts all grouped into force a and the four remaining Revenge class battleships in force B and position them to the west of the expected line of the Japanese Advance he then planned to stay out of Japanese Recon range during the day close in at night and deliver a decisive blow with his aircraft carrier strike forces followed up by Battleship attack now this didn't actually come off thank to some extremely lucky or unlucky depending on which side of the equation you're on interactions between some reconnaissance albors and some zeros off of hu however when we look at the Eastern fleets War diary we see that somerville's plan was to hit the Japanese carriers if he'd known where they were which essentially amounted to if a 20 mm Cannon shell that smashed one of the alu's radios hadn't done so these 24 strike aircraft a mixture of swordfish and mostly albors would have been sent in at between 8 and 10:00 that night with the objective of hitting the enemy somewhere between 11: and 12:00 and then returning back to the carrier for about 2 to 3 in the morning which would then in theory allow some of's forces to get well out of range of any potential Japanese retribution from surviving enemy carriers long before day break and to do that he would use the Ron reports which would hopefully tell him where the enemy fleet was and the reason why swordfish were accompanying mostly albore force was because the swordfish was the aircraft that was carrying the ASV radar so there would be a couple of ASV radar equipped swordfish going along they would fly ahead of the aloor they would find the the Japanese forces tell the albors where they were supposed to be going and the albors which be following fairly close behind would then actually do the running and drop the Torpedoes because the swordfish if it was carrying the airp radar had to sacrifice the torpedo carrying capability but as we mentioned in the event that didn't come off because the albore Recon aircraft that had been sent out to spot the Japanese although it managed to do so had its radio smashed the other one that also did so got shot down and they wer able to report in time before Somerville change course and the whole plan became irrelevant but to his credit in the evening Somerville did fly off another wave of ASV equipped aircraft and sent them on a Recon pattern in the area that he thought the Japanese might now be in with all his other aircraft still warmed up on Deck they weren't actually told okay shut your engines down and stuck the aircraft down until almost midnight but as it turned out despite having several radar equipped aircraft sweeping the oceans ahead for potential Japanese carriers the estimations of where the Japanese had gone based on a report that was 3 or 4 hours out of date at the time it had been received several hours before this ended up being a little bit in error and so they didn't actually find anything nonetheless the second wave of Recon aircraft did launch during the hours of Darkness fly during the hours of Darkness search during the hours of darkness and turn safely to the carriers all during the hours of Darkness that's technically making a night carrier action even if they didn't actually find anything now as the clock ticks over to 1943 we enter a slightly different phase of things because we're now going to look for the most part at the US Navy partly because to be honest by this point there wasn't all that much for the Royal Navy to go after um but what there was tended to be hit in Port A lot of the time anyway anyway nonetheless the US Navy was also developing its own night carrier operations but this followed a slightly different path you see for the Royal Navy night carrier actions were more about avoiding enemy fighter opposition degrading enemy anti-aircraft opposition and striking targets for the US Navy on the other hand going into the war they had essentially no real night carrier operation experience or doctrine the Japanese also didn't have night carrier experience or doctrine for large strikes but they did have a fairly Advanced Night operation Paradigm for land-based bombers which showed up quite a bit in the Western Pacific and also for small Recon float planes and thus initially the US navies Focus was actually not on Knight strike capability from their carriers but on Knight fighter capability from their carriers the original impetus for all of this was actually the guadal canal campaign as so many other things were specifically in this case the Japanese using a form of psychological warfare by flying a twin engined aircraft around over us heads at night with the aircraft having a set of desynchronized engines which made an awful Racket and kept everybody horribly awake initially usn efforts were landbased which obviated some of the navigational difficulties which was just as well because they were using single seat Fighters and the first operational unit so deployed vfn 75 was let loose in August 1943 using Corsair and their tactics very closely resembled early night fighter tactics that the RAF had used during the Battle of Britain and subsequently the blitz where the aircraft themselves didn't carry radar but would be veted into their targets by ground station radar which would direct them but whilst that program pro project affirm was the official US Navy version of night fighting carrier operations Al not yet quite on carriers simultaneously on the front lines USS Enterprise cv6 was serving off of the Makin islands and was rather irritated by the number of Japanese night bomber attacks and so they improvised their own night fighter Doctrine which used a TBF Avenger which was equipped with extensively an air to surface radar much in Imitation of the swordfish and laterally albaca of the Fleet air arm and they were using it as a kind of prototype awax this effort being led by Commander Tom Hamilton the air officer of cv6 at the time along with the Air Group commanding officer but chare although he was shot down during the course of the campaign and so unfortunately that sport was cut a little bit short the usn was also rapidly developing homing Beacon systems for its aircraft because you know the whole navigation thing we discussed at the beginning the making Island mini awax impromptu effort did have a degree of success because although the radar was primarily air to surface it turned out you could use it as a kind of air-to-air search radar as well as a result of both this unofficial program and the more official one back in Charleston in the US at the start of 1944 the US Navy officially deployed its first set of KN fighter squadrons board carriers and they very quickly began to pick off Japanese aircraft which had here to for been relatively secure operating in small groups or as individuals during the night however starting with Operation Hailstone in February 1944 the US Navy advanced both its night fighter capability and its night strike capability at the same time Enterprise which at this point in the war was becoming something of a test bed for all things night action not only launched the first official night bombing actions with a fully trained KN fighting Strike Force which used avenge is equipped with air to surface radar to pick out the Targets in truck Lagoon since the Avenger has a bigger and more powerful aircraft than the swordfish could carry the second generation air to surface radar and a reasonable weapons payload but Enterprises Air Group Air Group 10 also had a rather Niche variety of the F4U Corsair which was itself equipped with its own Airborne interception radar which can be seen on the right hand extremity of of the wing as a big bulge this made them relatively unique for the second world war as single engine one man night Fighters with their own onboard radar were something of a rarity through the rest of 1944 there followed something of a paradox within the US Navy's aerial component as the officially Advanced Night fighting elements of the US Navy rapidly went from strength to strength aboard Enterprise The Avengers were equipped with even newer and better radar a night fighter version of the f6f Hellcat was devised which also like the pred ceding F4U Corsair variant had its own onboard radar and indeed at one point Enterprise was even redesignated to CV n6 as in a night the night capable carrier and since the Avengers could carry ridiculous amounts of equipment some of them were even equipped with anti- radar technology as well as general electronic counter measures to help them track down and counter Japanese radar installations which were beginning to crop up but at the same time by concentrating most of their efforts into what was at least for the US Navy a relatively small Elite Force equipped with the latest and greatest in technology there were still openings for tragedies to occur whereas in the Royal Navy the ability to fly strike and return safely night was pretty much par for the course in the US Navy a good chunk of their pilots were still realistically only dayc capable and this came back to bite them to a certain extent at the Battle of the Philippines C in the famous final strike that was launched wherein large numbers of aircraft were then faced with the problem of having to return to their carriers after Knight had fallen now to be fair this was the middle of 19 1944 so there were homing beacons and all sorts of fancy technology which had previously at the start of the war been very specialist gear so getting the aircraft to come vaguely back into the vicinity of the carriers was not so much of the problem but getting the pilots to land on the carriers in the hours of Darkness was another matter entirely the carriers and the other ships in the fleet had to light themselves up as much as humanly possible to make them very visible to the incoming pilots and even in that case whilst a large number of aircraft were running very short of fuel and had to put down as a result of that more still aircraft ended up ditching simply because their pilots took one look at the situation and when I am not trained and not confident for that I would rather ditch near a destroyer and take my chances there and still other aircraft which did take the chance with a night Carrier Landing ended up basically pancaking into the decks of the aircraft carrier in question ionically enough in the battle of the Philippine Sea 80% of US aircraft losses on that particular day and about 70 to 75% of us losses overall could be put down to this mixture of fuel starvation and having to try to land at night but the night capable elements of the US Navy were still expanding and the Royal Navy was of course maintaining its night strike capability and looking to expand in the other direction compared to the Americans who as we just said had started out looking at Knight fighter capability before evolving into Knight strike capability RI having already got the Knight strike capability had spent the last part of the war moving more towards getting night capable Fighters as well so hopefully that provides you a nice quick summary of some of the key highlights in the evolution of Knight carrier action in World War II and some of the pitfalls that were attended unto it for a much more in-depth discover discussion of some of the operations that we've mentioned we will of course cover those in future videos and if you'd like me to look into detail as to what exactly you might be doing s of blowby blow for a single night carrier flight during the second world war then I can potentially look into doing that as well but for now thanks very much for listening and see you again in another video that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pin post for dry do questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 153,578

Keywords: wows, world of warships, WW2, RN, USN, IJN, Battle of Taranto, Operation Hailstone, Fairey Swordfish, F4U Corsair, Bismarck, USS Enterprise, CV-6

Id: kvHUJzwbpGc

Length: 38min 30sec (2310 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 11 2023