Very true. Given how fast and thinly armoured she was, any damage to Soryu's propulsion is going to be nasty for her survival prospects.
IJN Soryu's and USS Wasp's Durability and Usefulness
- Thread starter Kantai Kessen
- Start date
Huh. I knew that Wasp was not originally designed for a TB squadron, but I didn't know she was reliant just on bombs for her Avengers. That cuts down her offensive power significantly (although makes her better for land support).
Wasp does have a larger aigroup (about 70 compared to 63) so can last longer in a theatre, potentially - assuming no damage and an escort force.
Maybe no speed at all - some bulgings, the ones on the R-class and the American coal-burners, cost no speed at all due to hydrodynamic refinements compensating for the bluffer hull.
This is completely incorrect. Ranger was the carrier not designed for torpedo bombers. Wasp had them in December 1941, and she had them in March 1942 before she went on that Club Run to Malta. And no, the TBFs were not shipped in prior to her last mission, unless you count the entire Guadalcanal campaign her "last mission".
That her torpedo bombers were not used to actually launch torpedoes comes down to a lack of opportunity, not capability.
There is a difference in being equipped for torpedoplanes, and carrying TBD's, or TBF's. Just having the planes is not the same as capable of launching them with torpedoes as ordonance. To have these, your ship must have a dedicated magazine to store torpedoes in the first place, which was absent on USS Wasp CV-7. At first in december 1941, a wing of TBD-1's was carried, soon to be put ashore due to lack of space as the ship was to perform in other duties in Europe and North Atlantic. In june 1942 the TBD-1 was replaced by the new TBF, when the ship was reassigned for the Guadalcanal campaign, where she did not return from, so it is correct to mention the TBF's were assigned to USS Wasp on her final mission (meaning being send to the SW Pacific.)
They were carrying those same torpedo planes in March before the Club Run.
As for her not having torpedo stowage: prove it.
I've got to agree with @CV12Hornet here. I think you're confusing Wasp (CV-7) with Ranger (CV-4). Either that or your confusing the lack of torpedo defenses with the lack of a torpedo magazine. While Wasp didn't have a TDS, she very much had a torpedoe magazine and was operating torpedo bombers from at least June, 1942 when she loaded the rest of her Air Group after transferring from the Atlantic Fleet to the Pacific.
Removing the torpedo stowage was considered as a weight-saving measure during the design process, as I recently discovered. But Admiral King intervened and got it put back in. That's the closest thing to any sort of confirmation I've found one way or another on her torpedo stowage.
nbcman
Donor
CV-7 had torpedo storage on the poop deck and main deck (2 levels) by the elevator well according to plates 10 and 11 of the Booklet of General Plans for CV-7:
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Yup, that's torpedo stowage. I must have missed that in my first look at the plans.
Welp, that settles that.
Regarding Midway in general, Shattered Sword by Parshall and Tully is really a must read.
Soryu was built extremely lightly and was hit extremely hard. The three bombs were placed nearly perfectly, destroying both hanger deck, destroying elevator operations, wrecking the propulsion systems and killing a LOT of crew. Worse, it would appear that they ruptured aviation fuel tanks, meaning that even if there wasnt ordinance scattered around, she is burning horribly.
From the circumstances around Midway, she is unlikely to survive any of those hits.
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If, however, the hits take place near Japan, away from enemy forces and with towing assets near (this is of course a thought excersise) and with her planes mostly off the ship or on deck, it could be that she is towed to port.
In this case, expect extreme crew casualties along with the need to essentially rebuild the ship. She'll need nee boilers, a redone powerplant and a new crew. Given the hanger "box" that the IJN used (really the worst of both the Smerican and British designs) the intense and prolonged heat may have warped her hull form, necessitating a removal and replacement of entire hull sections.
Finally, all the slag metal inside will need to be removed, along with the hanger decks themselves.
In short, if we bend space and time to get her into port, the entire inside will need to be replaced, much of the hull will need replaced, her crew probably needs 80%+ replacement after increased casualties from fighting fires, and it's possible that her superstructure collapses, needing removal and replacement.
Usually when people say "not worth repairs" it's done a little early. However, in this sake you are looking st replacing over half the displacement in order to get a still somewhat warped ship back in service.
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Nice drawings, I agree with you this is what I had been overlooking due to lack of this drawing. I stand corrected and thx for the details.
That was exactly Nagumo's reason why he ordered the scuttling of his stricken CV's. The option of towing back stricken hulks across the Pacific was not a very tempting option, so to get rid of the stricken hulks was the best option, primarily as the towing would be at a creepingly slow pace, taking months at least before getting back in Japan, besides acting as a magnet for enemy attacks, as Nagumo by now must have realized the USN was still capable of striking him with aircraft, while he could do nothing in return.
Secondly the inflicted damage was such a heavy one, even if returning the stricken hulks back to japan, rebuilding the CV's on the damaged ships was a seriously challanging project to say the least. (Building a new ship from scratch would have been easier.) Basically the ships were burnt up above the waterline and internally completely destroyed. This left just the bare hulls as a base, with not much else in terms of engines, boilers and other internal systems. (Except Kaga which was holed by a large internal explosion, possibly her bombstoremagazine, and going down even without scuttling. Akagi, Soryu and Hiryu were scuttled by putting a few torpedoes in them, which holed their hulls to flood them. Note in this time USN torpedoes were still horribly unreliable as the failed scuttling of USS Hornet would show a few months later.)
Something technical: The box system of hangars on their own are not the main cause of making a design more vulnerable to damage, as the system did work fine in other nation's carriers of similar layout. It was the nature of AVGAS pipelines and other fuel related systems that were the primary reason of the IJN CV's being such fire hazards. British CV's build as such all had armored box style internal layout for hangar and ship sides, which worked pretty well, especially with the armored flight deck in Illustrious class and succeeding ships. Unlike Japanese CV's the British used CO2 gas to fill their pipelines when the ship was under attack, preventing such horrors as the Japanese would suffer time and time again. USN CV's too did this in most cases, unless hit by surprise in some cases. (Like USS Wasp, USS Princeton, USS Bunker Hill and USS Franklin to name a few.) The biggest advantage of the internal armored box style hangar to the open superstructure style, mostly used on USN CV's and a few Japanese, is the strength offered by such a system when taking direct damage from weapons, where lightly build superstructure style hangar's and flightdeck are more prone to crippling damage to force the ship out of the combat, being incapable of further operations, as the hangar, or flightdeck is incapacitated an unable to be repaired at sea. (Even nature can cause this sort of damage btw.) The best examples were proven when the Kamikaze attacks were done on both USN and Royal Navy carriers, with USN Carriers being forced back home to repair their gutted flightdecks, while the tough British CV's were barely scratched.
Good to know about the bulges. Wasp still has nearly no deck armour though - just 1.25 inches over the steering gear. A 550lb bomb should punch through her. Being small, she won't be able to absorb the damage as much and will suffer.
So basically, @HMS Warspite and @Pete55 , if Soryu is hit by anything big in a combat environment, she is doomed.
However...
As shown at Midway, she can do impressive donuts (this is her dodging a B-17 attack). I think that is her biggest strength and the way to survive: don't get hit.
Makes me wonder: if Soryu operates with bigger and more visible carriers, or even battleships, perhaps as a fighter carrier given their smaller size and lighter weight, bombers will probably go for those targets and leave her alone. Does that seem like a viable role for her?
I suspect that this would depend on the enemy planes' axis of attack. If Soryu happens to be the closest aircraft carrier some of the USN dive bombers and surely most of the torpedo bombers will attack it. Of course there can be other factors as confusion in the coordination (as it happened at Midway) or meteorology (rain) that could change this.
I would expect USN attacking Dauntless to try to hit the aircraft carriers first as per doctrine and leave the battleships for later.
Put her in between two bigger targets, then - say Shokaku and Zuikaku. Harder to get past those and they are more tempting targets too.
Possible formation for an alternative after-Midway situation in which Soryu did not participate in the battle and thus was not sunk: three carriers in line, Shokaku then Soryu then Zuikaku. A Kongo on each side to provide AA support. Soryu provides CAP over the whole force and some extra strike escorts while the Cranes focus on processing strike bombers and a few fighters.
Thoughts? Less likely to attack the Blue Dragon, and she can keep company with the Cranes as they have a similar speed.
Theoretocally it would not differ much as USN strkeplanes often choose not just the biggest target, but whatever they could hit with a high percentage of dealing damage. Note that the Zuiho was knocked out early in the battle, while there were larger carriers in her taskgroup (Shokaku & Zuikaku) at Santa Cruz. Basically any ship looking like a CV was being attacked normally, as size was often very difficult to make up at a distance and especilaly from aircraft, that also had to fly through cloads, void enemy fighters and so on. The Japanese did something simmilar normally and for example, at Coral Sea an oiler was misidentified as a CV and attacked as well as a result.
You do know that the Allied Submarine Ace of Aces was British right?
David Wanklyn sank a greater tonnage than Richard O'Kane.
Of course neither of them was even close to Otto Kretschmer.
Also your own source points out that "...the U-Boat arm faced the most efficient anti-submarine force operating in WW2, namely the Royal Navy." The most successful Anti-Submarine commander of WW2 was Captain Johnnie Walker RN.
You also seem to be missing that the British Sank 2.4 Million tons of Axis Shipping in the Mediterranean, Submarines are not the whole story, and did cut the Italian SLOC. By 2nd El Alamein the tonnage of supplies delivered had dropped to a thirteenth of its peak. (I suggest Alamein by Stephen Bungay for a succinct analysis) And that was heavily dependant on Air-Supply. Italy lost 72% of its entire merchant tonnage in the campaign.
So basically, Soryu is a death trap unless they make her look like a battleship. Hmm...
Zuiho's camo at Leyte comes to mind. Mind you, that didn't save her.
That is what camo was supposed to do indeed. Just make it visually something it was not is the basic principle of camouflage as such.