The Fast Carrier Task Force has appeared so often in news dispatches, has become so much a commonplace in this war of unnumbered innovations, that its uniqueness tends to escape notice. It represents in fact a revolution in naval war, and more completely than did the invention of the submarine or torpedo. To an extent almost beyond belief, today's naval war is different from that of World War I. And in spectacular measure, the new pattern of sea warfare has been the product of American ingenuity and initiative—in response to the compulsion of cold, geographic facts quite unlike any which belligerents of earlier wars ever faced.
To be sure, the British and American fleets have maintained distant blockades of their enemies. They have convoyed their own shipping over immensely long sea communication lines. They have made relentless war on enemy submarines and surface raiders, in the endless task of maintaining command of the sea. Our own submarines have made a magnificent record as raiders of Japanese shipping, in addition to their other missions. These fleets, in short, have carried on all the traditional functions of naval power. But if blockade, convoy, and raiding were the whole story, Allied naval forces today would have the same inconspicuous though valuable role they had in World War I. And the United States Navy would have yet to fight its first real combat action since before the turn of the century.
The facts, as everyone knows, are very different. The United States Fleet has been in active combat steadily from the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The new role and the new pattern of sea power are to be seen most clearly in (1) amphibious war and (2) the operations of the Carrier Task Force. It is with the latter of these factors that this article is concerned.
The amphibious force is a wondrous complex of old and new ship types, of still-proliferating forms of landing craft, of diverse new weapons, and of specially trained troops with technics entirely their own. In part the product of British and American enterprise, it has had its greatest development in the Pacific and under the guiding genius of American tacticians. The amphibious force is an arm devised to make landings on hostile shores. The Carrier Task Force, even more completely American in conception and use, derives from the unique conditions of the Pacific theater. It is an arm created to gain and hold command of the broad seas. In brief it is the weapon which sets the stage for amphibious warfare, creating the "area of immunity" in which the amphibious force performs its mission. The Carrier Task Force and the amphibious force are warp and woof of the fabric of our war effort in the island-studded oceanic spaces of the Pacific.
To wage war in those immense spaces, the United States has built a fleet unlike any previous fleet in history. It has devised its own stratagems—consistent, to be sure, with the unchanging principles of strategy—and has shaped its own tactics. And all are cut to fit the contours of an unprecedented geographic situation—and to utilize the weapons born of a new technology. The new pattern of naval war—of oceanic war as we might call it for the sake of clarity—was foreshadowed quite some years ago, when the U. S. Navy began to build aircraft carriers and to develop a powerful, efficient air arm, primarily of carrier-based planes. In the late 1920's, when the Lexington and Saratoga were completed as giant carriers, the basic pattern of our present naval war in the Pacific was already adumbrated. The Navy never abandoned its farsighted concept of the pattern which naval war would take—would have to take—when the inevitable clash should come in the Pacific. The American fleet as a whole was designed and trained for the world's largest ocean, even to such factors as the steaming radius of its battleships, cruisers, and submarines. Fueling at sea, a necessary logistical feature of war in great oceanic spaces, was developed as a unique aspect of American naval practice. This was to foreshadow the provisioning and rearming of our warships while under way on the open ocean, in good weather and foul. But the development of aircraft carriers was the dominant fact—no less significant because we had built only seven of them when war came. (We had built few heavy ships of any sort in the period between wars.)
If anyone had doubts about the central role of the aircraft carrier in the new pattern of war at sea, he found a shocking and tragic confirmation on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese used carrier-borne aircraft for their enormously successful attack on our battleship force at Pearl Harbor. That assault not only demonstrated the possibilities of carrier warfare, but also forced the United States to turn unequivocally to the use of aircraft carriers in the months to follow. In terms of effective naval striking power, we had nothing left for use in the Pacific but cruisers and carriers. Forced to the defensive, and to yield control of most of the Pacific, the Navy nevertheless maintained the offensive spirit—a basic ingredient of ultimate victory—by the ingenious, pragmatic use of its few carriers and supporting craft.
From December 7 onwards, the primary agency of our naval war was the instrument that has come to be called the carrier task force. At first it was characteristically made up of one or two carriers, a couple of heavy cruisers, and a small screen of destroyers. When Admiral W. F. Halsey raided Wake Island late in February of 1942, for example, he took the Enterprise, two cruisers, and seven destroyers. A week later, the same force raided Marcus Island. His early raids on the Gilberts and Marshalls were made with two carriers, Enterprise and Yorktown, supported by five cruisers and ten destroyers. In March of 1942, the raid on Salamaua and Lae was carried out with the Lexington and Yorktown, and supporting craft. Such were the slender task forces of the months immediately following Pearl Harbor, before we had either carriers in numbers or battleships at all. At the very best, such a task force had 175 aircraft of all types; and in practice only about half this number could be sent out against an objective.
Such task forces could take no reckless chances of encountering the vastly superior Japanese fleet. They made hit-and-run raids on the outposts of Japanese power, and a single defiant gesture against Tokyo with 16 B-25's off the Hornet. Harassing raids and long-distance jousting with enemy carrier forces were the only resource of the fleet in that unhappy period when we had no heavy, armored, gun-firing ships to risk against the enemy's battle line. Yet those harassing operations on the periphery of the area under Japanese control were enough to slow the enemy's advance and blunt the spearheads he was aiming at New Caledonia, Australia, and Hawaii.
The clearest example of this is the Battle of the Coral Sea, May 4-8, 1942, in which the Allied force counted only 2 carriers, 8 cruisers, and 11 destroyers. Yet by sinking two enemy carriers, at the cost of only one of ours, and four enemy cruisers without losing any of our own, this small American task force disrupted Japan's plans to drive southward to Port Moresby and Australia.
The most spectacular use of the carrier task force in this early form came of course in the Battle of Midway, June 3-6, 1942. The Jap drive towards Hawaii with a great invasion force created the most notable historic opportunity for our carrier forces. Although again outnumbered in every ship type save submarines, the United States this time had three carriers (Yorktown, Enterprise, Hornet), 7 heavy cruisers, one light cruiser, 14 destroyers, and 20-25 submarines. Wisely handled, and with superior personnel and equipment, the American force met and turned back the enemy force which was to lay Hawaii open to seizure. Because it resulted in the sinking of 4 Japanese carriers—in the destruction of the backbone of Japan's naval air—this engagement changed the whole strategic picture. It enabled the United States to turn from defensive to a limited form of offensive war, and also enabled our fleet to turn gradually from the enemy's naval air to his land-based air as the primary target of the carrier task force. But because it lacked battleships, the American force at Midway was not in position to pursue the defeated enemy force, which counted four battleships. There is no doubt as to the decisive nature of the engagement; and yet Midway did not accomplish what it might have accomplished, had the United States Pacific Fleet had in June of 1942 the fast battleships later placed in the Fast Carrier Task Force.
Already, in this early phase of carrier warfare, the special characteristics of the carrier task force as an instrument of naval power were becoming evident. It had a range commensurate with the fabulous distances of the Pacific, made possible by the frequent topping-off of destroyers and the fueling of all units at sea. It had a tactical speed approaching 30 knots. With such range and speed, the task force was highly mobile—able to strike in the Solomons one week and in the Marshalls the next. With mobility goes surprise—a factor of particular importance for a Power obliged to admit inferiority in gun-firing ships, even though the inferiority was only temporary. There was a long road to travel before the United States Fleet would roam the Pacific without fear of meeting the Jap battle line. In good time, of course, it was to steam unhindered in every corner of the ocean, in arduous search for the strongest force the enemy could send out. The carrier force likewise had a large flexibility. As the name task force implies, it was assembled for a specific mission, and was given the components thought necessary to do its particular job—within the limits of what ships were available.
In forming any appraisal of the carrier task force, one must bear in mind that the aircraft carrier was for all practical purposes a completely new weapon in 1941. Except for occasional forays under disadvantageous conditions, some ferrying work, and one brilliant operation at Taranto, the British made no major use of their carriers. Nor did the geography of European waters encourage them to venture much. The United States Fleet had its own experience in peacetime maneuvers over 12 or 14 years, and its own theoretical doctrine, to guide it in the use of carriers and their aircraft. That was about all.
True, we used the Wasp in the North Atlantic, but always beyond the range of German land-based air. Battle experience, the forge on which tactical doctrines are fashioned, was yet to come. And it was in this early phase of small, vulnerable task forces that tactics were perfected—or rather greatly developed, for perfection is never attained. Tactics came the more readily because a fleet inferior in surface fire power must always seek to make up in ingenuity of tactics what it lacks in weight of salvo. Thus the early forces under Admiral Halsey learned to use the weather fronts of the South Pacific for protection, learned to steam along under a protective overcast and launch aircraft where they could break into clear skies for lightning strikes at the enemy's formations. In these uphill months, when every encounter was likely to be with a superior force, the American fleet also learned what anti-aircraft fire could accomplish; and the spectacular improvement of A A. defenses aboard our ships dates from this period of naval inferiority in mid- Pacific.
As the United States Fleet as a whole grew, the Carrier Task Force gradually became a very different weapon. It became the Fast Carrier Task Force, after a transitional period in which many changes were made. The new battleships were added as they became available. The two North Carolinas, commissioned already when war came, had some seasoning before going to the Pacific. The first three South Dakotas were in commission by the spring of 1942, and were sent out at intervals thereafter. All these and the Iowas were fast enough to steam with the carriers. From this combination there emerged a swift, compact striking force, retaining all the military advantages of speed, mobility, and surprise, and yet possessing the fire power and protective armor to stand and slug it out with any enemy force save the main Japanese fleet en masse—which the Japs shortsightedly declined to commit to battle until October of 1944, when its superiority had been lost. Without some of the ten fast battleships now in commission, and all of which have been used with the carrier force, it may safely be said that the Fast Carrier Task Force would have remained a hit-and-run raiding force, and nothing more.
Just a few months after Midway, in the Solomons campaign, the gradual change was apparent. There the Washington and South Dakota made their heavy guns count, and at Savo Island made an end of Japanese attempts to reinforce their Guadalcanal garrison. The main pattern of carrier warfare was still not greatly changed. There were pre-invasion strikes with fighters and bombers. There were diversionary strikes to disperse the enemy's strength when amphibious landings were to commence. Air cover was provided at landings, but not the close, continuous, tactical air support given later on.
Meantime new weapons and hitherto unused older weapons were finding their way out to the Pacific theater, to be fitted into the complex pattern of amphibious war. The escort carrier, designed originally to give aerial protection to convoys against submarines and enemy planes, was adapted to the urgent need of the amphibious forces for close air support at the landing beaches. Old battleships, too slow for service with the Fast Carrier Task Force, were added to the invasion fleets. They were excellent for shore bombardment, fire support of land operations, and close defense of the amphibious forces against enemy surface units. As refitted, they had valuable anti-aircraft fire power. With the escort carriers, heavy cruisers and screening destroyers, they made up a support force new in warfare and amazingly successful in lightening the cost of our landings. This canny use of slower combat vessels served to free the Fast Carrier Task Force from constant attendance on close support missions. It was to venture upon a new and more daring schedule of far-flung strikes, in a strategic rather than tactical relationship to the amphibious forces. In its new role, the Fast Carrier Task Force was to roam the Pacific, covering the ponderous, massive amphibious fleet, neutralizing Jap airfields, and keeping the Jap surface fleet out of the way of our landings. Larger and more powerful month by month, it became the spearhead of American forces in the Pacific, blazing a trail for the far more numerous and more vulnerable forces to follow.
Thus by the beginning of 1944 the Fast Carrier Task Force had become something wholly different from the small, impromptu carrier task forces of 1942. It was in fact a powerful fleet, although officially it remained a task force within a fleet—that fleet embracing the invasion forces themselves and their train. In reality, it was a superb surface fleet, but organized about and taking its pattern from the carriers rather than ships of the line. The carriers remained the primary offensive weapon, while the other ships had distinctly defensive roles. In a sense, the term "task force" became a misnomer, for its composition was not changed for each operation but remained intact, save as ships went back for yard overhaul and new or newly overhauled ships came out. All units were usually kept in one fairly compact force, in keeping with the most fundamental principle of naval warfare—that of concentration. As operations neared Japan's home bases, this was more imperative; and this strategic concentration became almost a continuous tactical concentration.
Typically, the Fast Carrier Task Force of this period—of 1944 and early 1945—was a gigantic force of varying size and strength. It had perhaps 15 aircraft carriers (CV's and CVL's), from 6 to 8 fast battleships, 8 or 10 or a dozen cruisers, and possibly 75 destroyers. In this period, two battle cruisers of the Alaska class were added. Plodding busily between the Carrier Task Force and its base was a train of oilers, ammunition ships, supply ships, and their protecting screen of escort carriers and destroyer escorts. It was this latter force, growing as the Task Force grew, universally ignored in the news for its lack of glamor, which enabled the carrier force to keep the sea for six weeks or two months on end—which gave the carrier force its endurance, and therefore its amazing mobility. In the winter of 1944-45, gun crews and lookouts shifted weekly from heavy wool underwear and fur-lined parka coats to sun-bathing trunks, as the rampaging Carrier Task Force shuttled between blustery, snow-swept Tokyo and its base in a sun-drenched harbor of the Western Pacific. From the anchorage there, the task force could sortie on any course and keep the sea as long as necessary, drawing fuel, ammunition, spare parts and planes, relief personnel, and provisions from its own industrious train. This gave it the range to strike any point in the Western Pacific, from Tokyo to Saigon. There we see mobility, on a scale not even dreamed of a few short years ago—or rather forgotten since the days of sail, when fleets did not have speed but did have the ability to keep the sea for extraordinary periods of time. But that is a story in itself—a saga of logistics that will some day amaze the world (and has long since amazed and confounded Japan's pedestrian strategists).
Normally, the Carrier Task Force is deployed in three to five task groups, for so vast a fleet could not well be maneuvered as a single tactical unit. Each task group, uncle: the command of a Rear Admiral, is made up of several carriers, a couple of battleships, a few cruisers, and its own circular screen of destroyers. Each such task group is an integrated fighting team, capable of independent missions when these are appropriate, and with its ships so disposed as to give the maximum protection to the vulnerable carriers, each ship's A.A. fire covering the others in company. The task groups, however, although maneuvered independently by their tactical commanders, are normally kept within 10 or 20 miles of each other. This preserves the advantages of concentration, permits sweeps or strikes of overwhelming strength against enemy targets, and confers the benefits of a tighter defense against enemy air attack.
The cruisers, heavy and light, have an important part to play. They are at hand to knock out enemy light surface forces. They are equipped to deal with torpedo attacks by the enemy's destroyers. They give substantial anti-aircraft protection to the carriers in company. There are occasional bombardment missions for which cruisers are superior to battleships. And periodically the cruisers are detached for independent missions as a light striking force. Along with the battleships, of course, the cruisers provide an extremely valuable seaplane rescue service. Their float planes alone of the aircraft in the Carrier Task Force can pick up downed pilots.
As for the destroyers, steaming along on the perimeter of the formation, or dodging through it at high speed on mysterious errands, they are valuable in countless ways. First of all, they give anti-submarine protection to the force, and incidentally detect and detonate floating mines. They throw up a circular wall of A.A. fire that helps enormously against enemy planes coming in low—the hardest ones to knock down. They rescue downed pilots, in or near the formation, pick up survivors from damaged ships, transfer mail, personnel, and news copy in an endless water-taxi service. Bobbing like corks in heavy seas, they steam sturdily on their strangely varied missions. Without them, the Carrier Task Force would live a precarious, frustrated existence.
It is immensely impressive, this Fast Carrier Task Force, as it steams through the blue waters of the Western Pacific at 25 knots, spread out over 75 miles of sea—although it is hard to see all at once, except from the air. As it exists in 1945, the Carrier Task Force represents naval power on a scale hitherto not even approached by any Power in any war—except by comparison with the British Grand Fleet of 1915 and in terms purely of volume of surface fire. (And that could easily be matched if to the Carrier Task Force were added the fire power of the amphibious support force of slower battleships and heavy cruisers.) The task force has rarely been used in direct conjunction with the bombardment force, so different are their functions. Their relationship, as has been noted, is strategic. But in October of 1944, in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, and again briefly at Iwo Jima, slow and fast elements of the fleet were jointly engaged. And for a day or two, or sometimes longer, at each amphibious landing, the whole fleet may be concentrated. Careful study of the war as a whole, however, makes it plain that each force supplements the others in an overall strategic plan made by men who see the complex picture in its wholeness.
It is important, therefore, that the Fast Carrier Task Force should not be conceived as doing an unrelated job. It is the far-ranging, hard-hitting element, depending in final analysis on the courage and skill of some thousands of clear-eyed young pilots, whose aircraft are the true offensive weapons of the force. It might be likened in some of its functions to the cavalry of land war in an epoch now past, or more accurately to a mobile tank force in modern land warfare.
The functions of the Fast Carrier Task Force have changed somewhat with the years, as it has itself changed from a small harassing force into a powerful balanced fleet. But in the main, a clear pattern persists—the pattern of oceanic war. The task force serves, most importantly, as a strategic screen for the more vulnerable craft—transports, supply ships, landing craft, escort carriers, command ships, and the like—of the amphibious forces. That is, it interposes itself between the landing forces and the areas of greatest mobile enemy strength. Or in other words, it provides general cover for the ships that carry armies and their gear to the theaters of landing operations—the old, time-tried, basic function of any great navy. It may make pre-invasion strikes against the islands marked out for conquest. That was notably true of the Luzon and Okinawa campaigns. The purpose of such strikes (or sweeps as they are called when sent against enemy fighter craft) is primarily to destroy the enemy's combat air strength in the area of impending invasion. This may be by bombing his airfields and installations and parked aircraft, or by fighter sweeps to engage and destroy his airborne planes. The task force may conduct diversionary strikes at points quite remote from the scene of an amphibious operation. That would not be a vicious lunge at random, but a calculated effort to disperse the enemy's strength, or to disorganize his plans for air support of the islands to be assaulted. Or the task force may carry out fighter sweeps against all the enemy airfields within operational range of the pending invasion point—to neutralize Jap land-based air throughout the area while our amphibious force has its innings. On an incidental basis, fast battleships and heavy cruisers can sometimes be detached briefly for the shelling of a convenient target—an island lacking air strength, but with installations that shellfire can best destroy.
As seen by the public, the Carrier Task Force usually plays a secondary role, especially since the purely naval war gave place to major amphibious landings. Popular interest inevitably is focused on the landings. Most news correspondents like to ride the transports or command ships and follow the Marines ashore, to report the grim, colorful story of an amphibious job—by all odds the most dramatic aspect of this war. This tends to overshadow the role of the unseen fleet which sails the broad seas, maintaining radio silence for months at a time, and providing little grist for the newsmen's mills. In fact, however, the Fast Carrier Task Force has been of absolutely basic importance for the Pacific war. This is most clearly evident when we compare our earlier landings in the Solomons with more recent landings, made after our naval superiority was established.
When our Marines went into Guadalcanal in August of 1942, making an invasion on a shoe-string because the need was desperate, they had not only to overpower the newly arrived Jap garrison, which would have been simple, but had to fight off successive waves of Jap reinforcements. Because the Japs had superior sea power, they were able to reinforce and supply their garrison, and to make telling attacks with surface craft on our beachhead. Even two years later, despite the immensity of our increment of naval power, the divisions that landed on Leyte in October of 1944 had to defeat first a strong Jap garrison and then a larger force staged in from the West. We still were unable to command all the sea approaches to the island we had marked out for conquest.
Since then the story has been different; for the naval victory of Leyte Gulf totally changed the relationship of naval forces, Jap and American. When General MacArthur's divisions landed on the beaches of Lingayan Gulf last December to grasp Luzon, they had to fight only the garrison of that island. There were no reinforcements this time, and no stealthy shuttling in of supplies for the Jap forces, because we fully controlled the adjacent seas. The proof of our command of those seas was plain, for the Fast Carrier Task Force, after vicious stabs at the Jap airfields of Formosa and Luzon, steamed into the South China Sea—forbidden territory to American surface ships for three years—and placed itself between the Lingayan beaches and the continental and home bases of the enemy fleet. Carrier strikes at Hongkong, Cam-Ranh Bay, and Saigon gave double assurance that there would be no interference with MacArthur's forces from outside Luzon.
At Iwo Jima, it was much the same. The striking arm of the fleet—the Fast Carrier Task Force—isolated the tiny island, and neutralized enemy air bases as far away as Tokyo. This made it possible for the Marines to land with their task limited. Difficult as it was, that task was simply to kill the Japs on Iwo—the Japs who were on Iwo on D-day. There was no Tokyo Express to come down the slot by night, to feed reinforcements and munitions into the island—even though this was the first American operation against Japan's "inner defense ring," and even though the Tokyo Express would have had only 600 miles to come from Tokyo itself.
To deal with enemy surface forces in strength, the Fast Carrier Task Force contains within itself a task force of gun-firing ships, built around a battle line of fast battleships. This task force is rarely formed up, save for maneuvers; and it is not much advertised. But it is a potential weapon of staggering power. At a moment's notice, this surface battle fleet can be withdrawn from the Fast Carrier Task Force, to become a balanced, hard-hitting fleet of battleships, battle cruisers, heavy and light cruisers, and destroyers.
This "orthodox" fleet of gun-firing ships is always there, with its own battle and cruising dispositions, its own signals and communications and tactical doctrines—and of course its own tactical commanders, who ride the battleships and cruisers so as to be on hand "just in case." This "force within a force" was America's unequivocal answer to any effort the Jap might make to use his battleships against our vulnerable carriers or against our amphibious forces.
To be sure, this task force with its "old-fashioned" battle line has never fought a major surface action as such, even in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. But its usefulness is not to be measured by that fact. Simply by being there, as the British Grand Fleet stood watch at Scapa Flow for four years in World War I, the American battle force influences the behavior of the enemy. The battleship traditionally is a weapon that accomplishes much by merely existing, rarely firing its main battery in a fleet engagement. The "force within a force" that steams with the carriers, a part of the Carrier Task Force yet having its own independent existence, is an unnoticed but significant example of sea power at work—serving its purpose not by firing its big guns but by its readiness to do so.
Thus analyzed, the mission of the Fast Carrier Task Force is not particularly new. It does what a fleet traditionally is supposed to do—establish and maintain command of the sea, so that our invasion forces may carry out their assigned missions, free from enemy interference. Yet in carrying out this highly orthodox mission, the carrier force uses a technic completely new with this war. Its primary offensive weapon is not the 16-inch shell—or the 8-inch or 6-inch—but the .50-caliber machine-gun slug, aerial bombs from 100 to 1,000 lb., 5-inch rockets, and aerial torpedoes. It is not a gun-firing fleet, although it could be on occasion. Rather, the carrier-based aircraft is its supreme striking weapon. For defense, which usually means defense against enemy aircraft, it relies on its Combat Air Patrol of fighter planes and on three guns of proved efficiency—the 5-inch 38-caliber dual purpose, and the 40-mm. and 20-mm. machine guns.
In addition to the orthodox role of providing strategic cover for landings, however, the carrier force also does a new job—really a new function of naval power, and not seriously attempted until the middle of the present war. This is the destruction of enemy land-based air power, or at least the neutralizing of enemy airfields, in as large a radius as necessary from the point of our landing operations. This we might regard as a modern, air-age type of general cover, an extension of the general cover provided by fleets in the past against enemy surface forces. The Carrier Task Force, in other words, has added a new dimension to the strategic use of a fleet. The importance of this new function is clear from the numbers of Japanese planes destroyed. During 1944, in the Pacific Ocean Areas (not including the Southwest Pacific), 6,650 enemy aircraft were destroyed. Of these, about 5,450 were destroyed by our carrier-borne aircraft. In one busy month of 1945, planes from our fast carriers destroyed more than 1,600 enemy aircraft in the home islands of Japan and the Ryukyu chain alone. (March 18 to April 17.) In just two lively days off Tokyo, the carrier force destroyed more than 500 Jap aircraft. Obviously, this represents more than asserting command of the seas. It represents an air-sea offensive to establish command of the air over the enemy's own territory. That this is a new function for a fleet, nobody would deny.
As it has grown in size and battle experience, the Carrier Task Force has developed to meet each challenge. When it struck against the outer screen of Jap positions in the Gilberts and Marshalls, the dive bomber played a major role, for there were Japanese surface forces to engage and land installations to bomb. In later operations against the Jap fleet elements, the dive bomber and torpedo bomber shared the honors. But when the scene of conflict moved westward to the Philippines, Formosa, and the Empire, the main problem was to combat the enemy's land-based air. And so the Hellcat, the Navy's principal fighter plane, became the premier offensive weapon. (Sharing honors of course with the Corsair, more recently placed aboard carriers.) After that, the more urgent mission became strategic bombing, and the other carrier-based aircraft types reemerged to make good with their heavier bomb-loads. (This of course does not alter the fact that in the main strategic bombing, is the responsibility of the Army Air Forces.)
Similarly, a gap appeared in our armor when the Japs began to make effective night attacks with their aircraft. The answer was found, within the framework of the Fast Carrier Task Force, in the night fighter—the Hellcat with special gear for night interceptions. Primarily defensive in function, the night fighters of the carrier force have made it possible to wage war around the clock in our fleet.
Changes continue, for sea war is not a static affair. The carrier-based plane is being improved. The rocket has been added to their armory. The carrier itself is being improved in some respects, although really basic changes are difficult in wartime. The enemy, although rocking on his heels, was resourceful; and each new trick of his invention evoked an answer from the U. S. Pacific Fleet. The best proof of our success in this respect lies in the statistics of relative plane losses. In respect to carrier operations, Jap aircraft losses totaled 2,472 aircraft from June 11 to October 30 of 1944. In the same period, our own combat losses were 123 aircraft. The ratio was about 20 to one. It is not always so favorable. But the example cited is not extreme.
There are some obvious difficulties, centering on the vulnerability of the carriers to enemy attack while they have deck-loads of planes gassed up and armed for a strike. There are inherent shortcomings in the carrier-based aircraft, as compared with land-based; but fortunately they have had no practical importance against our Japanese enemy. Whatever the future of the aircraft carrier in naval warfare generally, it has been the weapon of primary decision in our oceanic warfare in the Pacific, and seems likely to remain the cornerstone of our defenses in the Pacific.
Just why has it been the weapon of decision? The answer to that seems to stem from the familiar principle of concentration. The Fast Carrier Task Force is in net effect a mobile fighter air base, with sometimes as many as 1,500 aircraft available. It can be placed anywhere in the Pacific Ocean, can be moved at high speed, can dodge or zigzag or hide under cloud cover. By means of this force, the United States can concentrate enormous fighter or bomber power at any desired point at any chosen time, always being able thereby to focus more air power at the critical place than can the enemy, whose airfields are spread over a vast area of islands and mainland. Concentration remains the basic principle of sea war, in the air as well as on the surface. The carrier force permits an astounding concentration of air power.
Because it does, and because it is so mobile, the United States has been able to advance in enormous strides across the Pacific. If we had had to make our landings within the range of our land-based air, we could have moved westward only about 250 miles at a jump. By-passing never would have been heard of. But with a mobile umbrella of carrier-based air power, we were able to advance a thousand miles from Hawaii to the Gilberts and Marshalls, and then a thousand miles to the Marianas, and then still another thousand miles to the Ryukyus. Thus was the war shortened by years. And it is for this reason that we may say the aircraft carrier has been the weapon of primary decision in the Pacific war.
The chief mission of the Fast Carrier Task Force was completed, however, with the securing of Okinawa and the establishment of bases there for our land-based fighter and bomber aircraft. Once our shore-based fighters were able to reach the innermost citadels of Japanese power and to bid for mastery of the Japanese air, the historic mission of the carrier force was completed. This, even though central and northern Honshu remained for some time the bailiwick of carrier aircraft, and even though many valuable missions of opportunity were found for the carrier force in succeeding months.
For it has been the essential mission of the Carrier Task Force in World War II to extend the range of American air power through the immense spaces of the Pacific, and by new weapons and new tactics to establish American sea power over the whole, awe-inspiring breadth of that ocean. By the middle of 1945, our forces had achieved undisputed command of the entire Pacific, even to the coastal waters of Japan's home islands. Work remained for the fast carriers—strikes on strategic targets beyond the convenient range of our land-based heavy bombers, fighter sweeps through central and northern Japan to ferret out and destroy Japan's remaining fighter aircraft, and of course air support for amphibious landings when they were made. Gun-firing ships of the task force found a new and valuable role when in mid- July they began the bombardment of strategic targets in Japan's main islands.
All this, however, represents an "extra dividend," for the principal job had been done. This bridging of the Pacific—6,000 nautical miles by the usual routes—by a combination of gun-firing ships and carrier-based aircraft must be accounted not only a veritable revolution in the long history of sea warfare, but a superb chapter in the inspiring chronicle of American mastery of the oceans—and a monument to the foresight of those who years ago laid the solid foundations for the air arm of the United States Navy.