New Fast-Attack Nuclear Submarines to be Named Arizona and Oklahoma

[Bob DBF]

It is interesting how many battleships (BBs) were cancelled. It's hard to believe that the navy thought they would need about 20 more battleships even by the middle of WWII.

In the middle of WWII, there was not a clear indication how long the war would last. Since the use of naval gunfire was the cornerstone of amphibious landings, the lead time to build one is a lot longer than a Kaiser Liberty ship, and there is no such thing as too much firepower.

I still don't think the navy understood the importance of transporting Marines even at the end of the war.

Which is funny, since that was their job throughout the war for both Marines and the Army.

I guess it comes down to hindsight versus being stuck in the past. I think navies are at particular risk of being stuck in the past...

The problem is that between major conflicts, the path to advancement is playing it safe and being political, these are not traits that are needed during a conflict where innovation and audacity will win the day. The Caine Mutiny covers the topic pretty well.

The one area that managed to advance al lot after the wars was submarine development, not only the design of the boat itself, but it's usefulness as a platform for missions other than sinking enemy shipping.

 

[Ukmc]

The first Yorktown (CV-5) was named after the battle of Yorktown. My dad flew off of that until it was sunk in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Since it was sank while he was in the air, he landed on the Enterprise. The Yorktown (CV-10) was named after the CV-5. It was the fourth naval ship to be named the Yorktown.

Yes, it was a point of confusion for me until I toured CV-10 at the Patriot’s Point in Charleston, SC. Naively I was wondering how was the ship that had been sunk at the battle of Midway was recovered and brought in for a display in such a good shape of course, once I toured the carrier I learned about Navy honoring tradition and CV-5 vs CV-10 difference

 

[Jared0425]

And to be fair, naval gun fire was relatively poor and rarely accomplished objectives. The Japanese bombardment of Henderson Field was a failure. Tarawa Atoll was a failure (though the commander was killed quickly), Iwo Jima, Okinawa, D-Day, TF-38 all failed to adequately suppress the enemy.

 

[Bob DBF]

And to be fair, naval gun fire was relatively poor and rarely accomplished objectives. The Japanese bombardment of Henderson Field was a failure. Tarawa Atoll was a failure (though the commander was killed quickly), Iwo Jima, Okinawa, D-Day, TF-38 all failed to adequately suppress the enemy.

Depends on the objectives, it is one peice of a battle plan. In the case of Henderson Feild, the bombardment made the field unusable, and covered the landing of troops to take the field. The troops did not take the airstrip and it was repaired. During the bombardment no one made a effective effort to stop the Japanese.

Pharmacist's Mate 1st Class Louis Ortega, who was at Henderson Field that night, recalled:

“It started about 11 pm on 13 October 1942. We were laying down in our pillbox. A whistling noise and then boom! "What the hell was that?" And then another one. For the next 4 hours we were bombarded by four battleships and two cruisers. Let me tell you something. You can get a dozen air raids a day but they come and they're gone. A battleship can sit there for hour after hour and throw 14-inch shells. I will never forget those four hours. The next morning when they stopped shelling, there was a haze over the whole area. Five miles of coconut groves were gone! Where the day before you had miles and miles of coconut trees, now 5 square miles were wiped clean. Every tree was gone. The airfield was destroyed. And over on Point Cruz you could see six Japanese transport ships merrily unloading troops.”


As for Tarawa, it was the lesson on how big a fustercluck an island landing could be, naval gunfire was low on the list of what went wrong.


Naval gunfire may not be as accurate as a guided bomb, but if you want to have folks keep their heads down for a protracted period of time... Unfortunately, some say, the time has passed for that system.

 

[HalcyonDaze]

Plenty of state names not in use, and they are not limited to Ohio class SSBN / SSGN (18 total). State names are also used on SSNs and a lonely LPD.

List of United States Navy ships named after US states - Wikipedia

Looking through that list, there are only three that are currently not taken - South Carolina, Kansas, and Wisconsin. All others are taken by ships either in commission or authorized for construction.

It is interesting how many battleships (BBs) were cancelled. It's hard to believe that the navy thought they would need about 20 more battleships even by the middle of WWII.

Naval planning must have been a total mess after Pearl Harbor. Carriers were the next big thing but are really vulnerable. Battleship big guns were of no use against aircraft and can't compete for range. Nuclear subs and the cold war weren't foreseeable. I still don't think the navy understood the importance of transporting Marines even at the end of the war. The UDT came close to getting the ax many times before Kennedy's special forces mandate.

I guess it comes down to hindsight versus being stuck in the past. I think navies are at particular risk of being stuck in the past because their career paths were tied to commanding big capital ships and more ships equals more opportunity. Not much glory being a taxi for Marines.

The cancelled battleships bit has two parts. The first was the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, which attempted to head off a repeat of the Anglo-German naval arms race that preceded WWI except with Britain, USA, and Japan as the main parties. This resulted in the cancelation, scrapping, or conversion into aircraft carriers of a number of capital ships then under construction (this is how Akagi, Kaga, Lexington, and Saratoga wound up being converted into aircraft carriers instead of schlepping 16-inch gun turrets). One Colorado-class battleship and all five of the proposed 1920 South Dakota-class battleships were canceled and a ten-year "building holiday" was put into place, with exception made for the Royal Navy to build HMS Nelson and HMS Rodney to match the three remaining USN Colorado-class and two IJN Nagato-class battleships with their 16-inch guns.

For the second part, what a lot of people don't appreciate is that the navy that crushed Japan was actually already on order before Pearl Harbor. A series of Congressional acts (Representative Carl Vinson of Georgia being the driving force, which is why CVN-70 is named after him) in 1934, 1936, 1938, and 1940 expanded the USN; the last bit (the "Two Ocean Navy Act" of 1940) authorized 10 Essex-class aircraft carriers (three were authorized in the previous 1938 act), two Iowa-class (three previously authorized in 1938) and five Montana-class battleships, six Alaska-class "large cruisers" (often referred to as battlecruisers), 27 heavy and light cruisers, 115 destroyers, 43 submarines, and 15,000 naval aircraft. A number of these ships (in particular the last two Iowas, all five Montanas, and four of the six Alaskas) were never completed as they were either judged to be surplus to requirements during the war or incomplete at war's end. The Montana-class was really what the USN "gun club" wanted as they felt the Iowas traded too much armor for speed; problem was that even US industrial capacity was not infinite and Essex-class carriers had priority in the slipways. What was authorized after Pearl Harbor was basically parking a cement truck on the IJN's already-dug grave; while another 19 Essex-class carriers were ordered after the declaration of war only two of those were completed before VJ Day.

 

[Akimbo]

The cancelled battleships bit has two parts...

Impressive explanation, thank you for taking the time.

 

[formernuke]

The problem is that between major conflicts, the path to advancement is playing it safe and being political, these are not traits that are needed during a conflict where innovation and audacity will win the day. The Caine Mutiny covers the topic pretty well.

Yup having served during a period where really was not a major threat I can tell you that senior leadership and leadership in general was seriously lacking. Kiss asses got promoted while actual good leaders where pushed out.

 

[HalcyonDaze]

Impressive explanation, thank you for taking the time.

History is kind of a hobby for me, and as a biologist/ecologist there are a lot of parallels I can draw with ecology and evolution. The 1922 Washington Naval Treaty had a lot of interesting wrinkles. The three remaining top naval powers after WWI - the UK, US, and Japan - all had very ambitious postwar naval expansion plans but reasons to want out of an arms race (the UK was recovering from the war, the US wanted to crawl back into isolationism, and Japan didn't have the GDP to match the other two). At one point the Wilson Administration was proposing a US fleet of 50 battleships and battlecruisers, which fell flat in Congress. The US and UK had become allies during WWI, the UK and Japan had a naval alliance dating back to 1902, and the US and Japan were naval rivals who saw each other as their biggest prospective enemy. The British Empire was somewhat divided on which ally to favor at the 1921 Imperial Conference; in the end they decided to end the Anglo-Japanese Alliance to earn goodwill with the US. The US organized the 1922 Washington Naval Conference to head off British-arranged talks on the Pacific region; by that time the US had cracked Japanese diplomatic codes and therefore knew how far they could push on concessions.

The result was a ten-year "building holiday," the scrapping or disarming of a number of older warships, and a restriction for all future capital ships to a limit of 35,000 tons standard displacement and a 16-inch main gun caliber. That put paid to the US South Dakota and Lexington classes, the British G3 and N3 designs, and the Japanese Amagi, Tosa, Kii, and unnamed "Number 13" designs. There were also capital ship tonnage limits/ratios by nation; the US and UK got 525,000 tons each of battleships or battlecruisers as they had global deployments, Japan was allowed to retain up to 60% of their level, and the two smaller signatory powers France and Italy got 35% each of what the US and UK were allotted (a 5:5:3:1.75:1.75 ratio respectively). Cruisers were not limited in quantity, but limited to 10,000 tons standard displacement and 8-inch gun caliber. Aircraft carriers were limited to 27,000 tons and similar tonnage ratios as battleships (e.g. 135,000 tons for the US and 81,000 tons for Japan), with the option to convert up to two existing capital ships to aircraft carriers of 33,000 tons or less (it took some creative interpretation of fine print for Lexington and Saratoga to technically meet that limit). "Experimental" carriers or ones under 10,000 tons didn't count towards the limits.

Those restrictions and those of the subsequent London Naval Treaties in the 1930s defined just about every warship designed between 1922 and the late 1930s; this is why USS Wasp (CV-7) was a cut-down version of the preceding Yorktown and Enterprise as the US only had 15,000 tons of carrier displacement left under the tonnage cap at the time. Even the Iowas and Montanas were originally intended to adhere to the 45,000-ton "escalator clause" that upped the tonnage limits once other parties (Japan and Italy) withdrew from the treaties in the mid-late 1930s. Between being abandoned by the British and getting a shorter tonnage stick than the British and Americans the Japanese left with a significant chip on their shoulder; that would play into a few quiet little violations (a British naval attaché famously said that if the Mogami-class cruisers were under 10,000 tons, the Japanese were either building their ships out of cardboard or lying) and their eventual rage-quit of the treaties in 1936. That last bit didn't work out as well as planned; even if everyone's WWII building programs had gone ahead Japan would have built five Yamato-class battleships versus 11 new British and 17 new American BBs.

There was also a ban on new Pacific fortifications; twenty tears later this made the initial Japanese campaign easier but meant bases like Truk weren't fully developed to support the fleet or repel an attack.

 

[Pressurehead]

A little off topic but worth a read: The Royal Australian Navy named a submarine after a sailor Ordinary Seaman Edward Sheean, yes a sailor, his story: Link
Ordinary Seaman Edward ‘Teddy’ Sheean VC | Royal Australian Navy

 

[Jared0425]

A great read I had was Massey's "Dreadnought". It covers the period of 1850 to August 3rd 1914, and covers the entire evolution of the British and German navies along with other developments by other navies.

It gives great insight on the naval arms race and the foundation for the interwar navies also. Britain was in financial trouble in the early 1900s before the war began, and the treaty took a large burden off the empire and the US. The Japanese just took advantage of it and caught up with the other 2 powers quickly.

As @HalcyonDaze mentioned, when the treaty collapsed in the mid 30s, Japan was ahead in many developments and ships.