When the late Robert Fulton successfully harnessed steam to the job of propelling ships through the water, it was generally assumed that mariners were freed from the tyranny of fickle wind. Of course, storms still held peril. But in the ordinary course of events, the navigator was free to go anywhere his fuel supply would carry him, regardless of the direction from which the wind blew. The weather gauge, so important to fighting tactics, had been relegated to unimportance, with perhaps the secondary considerations of its bearing upon the use of smoke screens or its effect upon the smoke from the firing of one’s own guns.
But this freedom was short-lived, as historical cycles go. A little more than a century after the Clermont severed the fetters of wind, fighting men afloat again find themselves inexorably ruled in their strategy by the direction of motion of a restless atmosphere. The devil in the picture, or at least the devil’s agent, is the airplane. So long as ships, just ships, were carrying the ball of war, the wind’s direction was a negligible factor. But, forced by circumstances to carry aircraft, they are again the creatures of wind—to an extent that armchair strategists, solving the problems of maritime war without having served on or with an aircraft carrier, seem not to appreciate.
Ironically, it is the lee gauge, rather than the weather gauge, which nowadays is an advantageous position. Given a wind blowing from the direction of the enemy, a carrier or carrier task force may advance at will, and thus exercise a choice of when the issue may be closed. Bedeviled by a wind blowing toward the enemy, however, a carrier may push forward only by inches, relatively speaking, paying dearly in time and fuel for each bit of net advance. It is for this reason that certain enemy bases, superficially appearing to be within easy reach of our carrier striking forces, have received little if any destructive attention from our effective ship-based dive bombers and torpedo carriers. It has not infrequently happened that carriers, steaming at 18 knots toward an inviting target, find themselves unable to make good a net speed of advance of better than 6 knots, because they happened to have the weather gauge with a light wind.
The difficulty lies in the fact that a carrier is not only a ship which can launch and recover aircraft. It is a ship which must launch and recover aircraft. Unless it keeps planes in the air continuously during daylight hours, while within reach of any probable enemy aircraft, it is inviting disaster for itself and the ships which accompany it. And, because launching aircraft requires that the carrier turn into the wind, that type of ship is helplessly enslaved by the direction from which the wind happens to blow.
Consider the case of a carrier somewhere in the Coral Sea trying to work its way up past Guadalcanal toward those sore spots to the northwest, Shortlands, Buka, and Rabaul. It is no military secret that the wind in that region blows from the southeast with a steadiness of purpose that is the despair of those who worry about how long the fuel is going to last. Because the wind blows from the southeast, it is of course necessary that the carrier turn to that course when launching or landing aircraft—in other words, it must go dead away from the place toward which it is trying to travel.
The lighter the wind, the worse the predicament of the carrier, from the standpoint of net distance gained, for a light wind means greater speed through the water in order to provide adequate “wind across the deck” for plane operations. Thus, a carrier steaming to the northwest at 18 knots, would, with a southeast wind of 3 knots, have to reverse course and steam at 27 knots in order to give its bomb-and torpedo-laden planes that 30 knots wind across the deck which most pilots prefer to have when starting for the bow.
Planes in the air are of no offensive or defensive use unless they have on board sufficient fuel to engage the enemy should he show up. Hence, in an area where the other fellow may be encountered at any time, it is necessary to relieve patrolling fighters when their gas is a little more than half gone. That means, as a rule of thumb, that the carrier may steam on its desired course for about 1½ hours before being forced to come about to launch and land aircraft. If a reasonably large number of planes is involved in these operations, it will probably be 45 minutes before the carrier is again heading the way it wants to go. Hence, having steamed ahead for 1½ hours at 18 knots, and then gone back for three-quarters of an hour at 27 knots, the carrier will have made good a net advance of 6¾ miles in 2¼ hours, or a rate of advance of only 3 knots! And the engine-room bell book will show that the average throttle speed was a fuel-eating 21 knots!
Given, then, an inviting target only 500 miles away, and a tantalizing 3-knot wind over the stern, a carrier burning up oil at this average throttle speed of 21 knots for 12 daylight hours will have advanced only 36 miles toward its goal by nightfall. By comparison, that frog which, trying to get out of the well, jumped up 2 feet and fell back 1, was really an efficient traveler.
It is easy to understand, then, why apparently near-by enemy bases are not frequently shellacked by our carrier task forces. Even waiving the fact that such snail-like progress would so well advertise the advancing force that the enemy would be amply prepared to defend himself effectively, there is still another insuperable barrier in the situation: The fact that long before the target area were reached, the destroyers so necessarily a component of any carrier task force would have run out of fuel. And even the cruisers and the carrier itself would be ill-supplied for the high-speed operation incident to battle and subsequent retirement after the attack. The impracticability of attempting to refuel from tankers in the enemy’s own backyard is self-evident.
Communiques covering operations in the Solomons area demonstrate the effects of the wind on our own and the enemy’s carrier strategy. Time and again, when the big flat-tops have clashed, it is later revealed that contact was made in the area just to the northward of the Santa Cruz Islands, that rocky group of spots on the map north of the New Hebrides and southeast of Guadalcanal. If one keeps in mind that the wind prevails from the southeast, it is understandable that they should slug it out in that region.
The Jap has well-defended bases at Rabaul and Kavieng, and (at the time of this writing) still controls the Solomons south as far as Santa Ysabel Island. Lining these enemy-held islands are numerous coves and bays suitable for operation of float-plane scouts and fighters. In addition, powerful land-based aircraft operate from Buka Passage on the north end of Bougainville Island, from Kahili on the opposite end of the same island, and from the more recently installed fields in the New Georgia islands. Our one base in the Solomons, on the other hand, is the efficient but small and frequently-mauled Henderson Field on Guadalcanal.
With this set-up, and a southeast wind, the Jap carrier task force commander has important advantages. He may advance at any speed he desires, launching and landing his aircraft without seriously deviating from his course. Should the issue go against him (as, happily, it has on occasion), he may make a comparatively fast retirement by using the co-operating cover of planes from near-by shore bases, thus reducing the number of turn-abouts he must make for launching defensive air screens. Against this situation, our carriers are hampered in their attempts to advance by the constant need for turning to accomplish plane operations. Constantly spied upon by the Jap shore-based scouts, they must maintain heavy patrols in the air. And, not far north of the Santa Cruz Islands, they get beyond effective reach of whatever help the single air base on Guadalcanal can give them.
Should the Jap come south of Santa Cruz, out of reach of his Solomons shore bases, and within reach of an increasing number of our own bases, the situation would be more favorable to us. Though still hampered by unfavorable wind, our carriers might be able to gamble on reduced flight operations prior to contact, relying to some extent on shore-based air cover. And the Jap, without effective land-plane help in the event of retirement, would be hopelessly stalled by the wind, within reach of our land aircraft.
It is for those reasons that the Japanese does not nowadays try to come south of Santa Cruz. With our surface-borne air strength blocked by the wind and lack of shore-based support from going far north of the Santa Cruz group, it is inevitable that the meeting ground of the opposing forces should be in that “no man’s sea” area.
In the Coral Sea, to the westward of the Solomons, the situation is much the same. However, the increasing progress of Allied military operations in New Guinea, and the inability of the Japanese to sneak past the effectively maintained land-based scouting operations with any sizable force, have virtually denied them the use of those waters for carriers.
A light wind over the stern, then, is an embarrassing situation for a carrier. But that is not the only source of annoyance. Too strong a wind presents its hazards, too. Just as there is a minimum “wind across the deck” necessary to land and launch aircraft, so, too, is there a maximum—and the two are not far apart. At all times while on the deck during flight operations, aircraft must be moved about. They have to be brought to the take-off spot before going aloft, and to their parking spots after landing. Too much wind makes much manhandling impossible. And even in the actual business of taking off or landing, the wind relative to the deck must be kept within rather narrow limits. Hence, in a strong wind, a carrier cannot steam at high speed during flight operations. With 25-knot wind, for example, a carrier launching or landing its planes could scarcely crank on more than 10 or 12 knots without risk of deck troubles. At such speeds, a nice, big, vulnerable flat-top makes a dream picture in the lens of an enemy submarine’s periscope.
In extreme cases of high wind, with pitching and rolling resulting from the seas thus generated, planes are unable successfully to negotiate landings and take-offs. When such a high wind is accompanied by reasonably clear skies, and the carrier force is within striking distance of enemy shore-based aircraft, it presents a rather dreary picture.
The vulnerability of surface craft to air attack has made the presence of a carrier virtually a necessity for any long-range operations into enemy areas. Because of their dependence upon the wind, the carriers have similarly enslaved all the ships that operate with them.