Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [52]
The Navy had at least as much institutional investment in carriers as the AAF did in heavy bombers. But there were profound differences. For example, navies nearly always opposed other navies whereas strategic air forces sought to destroy enemy cities. For another, navies tend toward an evolutionary progress—sometimes spanning centuries, as with the ship of the line—whereas air forces are by definition revolutionary. In the forty-two years between Kitty Hawk and Hiroshima, the most significant change in navies was due to aviation.
Shipboard takeoffs and landings had been demonstrated in America in 1910–11 but only the Royal Navy had developed a workable if rudimentary system in 1917, launching from platforms erected on battle cruisers. The first true aircraft carriers with flight decks unimpeded by superstructure appeared with His Majesty’s Ship Argus (1917), United States Ship Langley (1922), and His Imperial Japanese Majesty’s Ship Hosho (1923).
The timing in Japan and America was not wholly coincidental. In 1921–22 the Five-Power Naval Treaty among the United States, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan limited the tonnage (and therefore, numbers) of capital ships. Since carriers were still an unknown quantity, and not deemed major combatants, the conferees allowed conversion of battleships and battle cruisers to flattops. The United States and Japan especially made use of that exception.
Dating at least from 1906, American strategists anticipated conflict with Japan, and produced a succession of contingencies. They became War Plan Orange, which envisioned a battle of the dreadnoughts in mid-Pacific. Orange evolved into Rainbow Five, the plan current in December 1941. Aircraft carriers had been gradually folded into the plans, evolving from merely scouting into active combat roles.
The task facing the naval airmen was twofold: to develop a viable means of operating shipboard aircraft for attack missions, and to gain a place at the nautical table amid the resistance of “the gun club,” the battleship traditionalists who envisioned any future sea war as a replay of Jutland in 1916. The rivalry was compounded by vastly reduced peacetime budgets, especially in the Depression years of the 1930s.
Institutionally, naval aviation’s biggest problem was a lack of seniority. Though the first naval officers had earned their wings in 1911, thirty years later very few had risen high enough to set policy. In fact, the two leading advocates of carrier development were products of the pre-aviation Navy.
Rear Admiral William A. Moffett established the Bureau of Aeronautics in 1921. He had graduated from Annapolis in 1890, eight years before the Spanish-American War. He fought at Manila Bay and received the Medal of Honor for action in Mexico in 1914.
Blessed with uncommon vision, Moffett grasped the potential of naval aviation as a battleship captain in World War I. He took note when Billy Mitchell’s fliers rocked naval orthodoxy to the keel by sinking the captured German Ostfriesland in 1921. Though a soft-spoken Carolinian, Moffett’s tough-minded attitude gained him recognition as the father of naval aviation. He secured control over not only technical matters and acquisition, but also personnel. Moffett proved indispensable, remaining as chief of BuAer until 1933, when he died in an airship disaster.
The other major influence in naval aviation was slender, bearded Joseph M. Reeves, an Annapolis athlete credited with inventing the football helmet. Four years junior to Moffett, Reeves also went the battleship route, seeing action against the Spanish at Santiago Bay.
Between 1914 and 1923, Reeves commanded a cruiser and two battleships, establishing himself as a card-carrying member of the gun club. But after attending the Naval War College he was drawn to flying. In 1925, at the advanced age of fifty-one, he completed the aerial observer’s course,