Reply to post: Re: Bloody Shambles

Re: Bloody Shambles

Archtech,

As of 1941 no number of battleships constituted a fleet.

Depends what you mean by a fleet. And depends what you wanted them to do. Although airpower was very important, it was also very short range.

So where you had land based airpower available, you didn't need carriers. Equally there were plenty of situations where airpower was limited and then a battleship could still be a perfectly acceptable and survivable choice of ship for a particular role.

AA fire was reasonably effective - as the heavy losses of carrier planes in many engagements would attest. One of the early war Japanese advantages was there preponderence of fast battleships - which meant that the US carriers always had to worry about where the Japanese might get to at night - when their planes didn't fly. And also at the end of a battle, when the air groups were tiny due to combat losses and planes damaged beyond repair.

One of the unappreciated things that enabled to the RAF to win the Battle of Britain was that our fighter production was way higher than the Germans even by 1940. And that RAF doctrine was to try to have about 15 pilots and 20-odd planes per squadron - but only ever fly 12 at a time. Thus the fewer squadrons of Fighter Group 11 were replenished at night - and also moved to rear areas to rest and replaced by those from quieter sectors in the Midlands and North.

Whereas the German staffel often had more pilots than planes and flew in nines. But maybe with 20 pilots and 12 planes.

Military Intelligence ("a contradiction in terms" as the old joke goes) on both sides fucked this up. The RAF looked at the Germans and saw all these squadrons and assumed there were 20 planes in each - and were all depressed. The Germans looked at the smaller number of RAF squadrons and assumed we probably had loads of pilots but many fewer planes. So were overconfident. Hence that awful raid on Newcastle they launched with unescorted bombers in daylight in August 1940 - assuming that all the fighters must have been drawn down South by now - only to find fully operational squadrons up there that shot most of the bombers down.