Countering Plan Z - What would the Royal Navy have done?

Indeed, this exact same topic was raised on the other board:

www.tapatalk.com/groups/alltheworldsbattlecruisers/british-reply-to-plan-z-t9066.html

Certainly. This will be a LONG response.

That matches this data source.

One cannot plan construction in isolation. For example, based on WW! experience operational and tactical, the military experts in Great Britain should have understood the importance of air reconnaissance at sea.  It was a force multiplier that allowed area fan search by 4 aircradt in a 90 degree arc out to a distance of 150 kilometers  quadrant in one hour that is one order of magnitude (10x) greater than the area a trade protection cruiser could steam and search in that same time. The great problem of WWI naval operations was search and location. The great solution was the airplane. The derivative problem (Mahan) was the airplane lacked persistence and presence. This explains the early and rather quixotic fixation on Zeppelins by the Germans, British and Americans in the 1930s until it proved that weather effects and dirigibles did not mix well.

Now notice the British program? They were building the aircraft carriers, but what did they miss?

link=> Armstrong Whitworth AW 16.
link => Blackburn Baffin
link => Blackburn Roc
link => Blackburn Skua; actually a decent aircraft.
link => Fairey Seafox; gunnery spotter seaplane catapult launched  
link => Fairey Swordfish; an aircraft that served well when there were no Japanese around to shoot it down.
link => Gloster Gladiator; fleet defense fighter
link => Saunders Roe London flying boat; a flying deathtrap
link => Saunders Roe Lerwick flying boat; also a flying deathtrap  
link => Short Sunderland flying boat; a decent aircraft lacking the range or bomb capacity or endurance of the PBY Catalina, hence why the British bought the American bird when they were caught short in numbers.

The thing of note is there was no shore based LRMPs included in the schema and definitely an inadequate flying boat recon element for the Royal Navy. What shipborne aircraft there were, seems at first glance to be competitive with foreign designs until one looks at the "scouting" function and one realizes that in the year 1939 the only scouts the FAA had, were the Swordfish and the Skua. Both were outclassed by their likely enemy aircraft of equivalent type in the recon role and neither was survivable in a fighter rich environment where they would most likely have to scout.   
    
If one wants to thwart plan Z, then one wants a tracking ability to ensure the enemy German fleets or ships do not break into the North Atlantic. The RN planning staffs failed to cover the air element of recon adequately. Historically in WWII the sheer incompetence of British over ocean reconnaissance persists as a constant theme to plague their naval operations. Even when the British did it properly (MATAPAN), the coverage was spotty, inaccurate, incomplete and the information passed late to the admiral who needed that information. When they did it wrong, (Operation Rhine at the Denmark Strait and Force Z in the Gulf of Siam and the Indian Ocean Raid.), they were slaughtered.        

Not to point out that other navies (Italians and the Americans) did not have their own incidents (Matapan and Savo Island) but they learned. Some navies (The Dutch) did it correctly and though they suffered defeats, (Java Sea), their shore-based air tracked enemy movements and at least gave their admirals (de Ruyter) positional and compositional intelligence on what was out there.  
    
Plan Z was known around 1934 because the idiot, Raeder, published it as a refutation to the Wegener Thesis. Sort of like Admiral Gorshkov of the Soviet navy letting the USN in on how he was going to fight them around 1974. One can track USN changes in build programs around 1975. British construction shifts around 1935 to reflect Plan Z delusions that Backhouse and Raeder shared. 


I suggest this... He covers a lot of what I wrote in this thread. His comments on ABC-1 and ABC -2 are significant in how the British Royal Navy thought it would handle Italy and Japan. Let me write that the British naval staff were Corbettists and their planning assumptions were severely colored by that bias. How did it work out for them? Not too well.


Notes about this construction program overall.
1. The British never did develop a decent general purpose (dual purpose) gun comparable to the USN 5/38 or IJN 100/50 for surface combatants to fulfill antiship and anti-aircraft roles. The WWII artillery they did use; the 5.25, the 4.7 and the 4.0 were either not developed with a proper ram feed assist, used the wrong ammunition (separate as opposed to semi-fixed) or rounds too heavy for human loading. Either HA or LA mounts were the norm. train and elevate servos were too slow and the fire control systems for AAA or Ash were trash systems. 
2. FAA aircraft developed during the war (Seafires, Sea Hurricanes, Albacores, Fulmars, Barracudas, etc.) were either ad-hoc adaptations, conformed to an outdated tactical requirement or were flying deathtraps at sea. None was fit for service against an enemy versed in aircraft carrier warfare.
3. Submarines in the RN were a scattered uneven achievement. Of particular note were the T class. This workhorse seems to have been a class ill suited for general operations as their poor underwater characteristics made them easy to detect and the boats were particularly vulnerable in shallow water operations in areas like the west Pacific and inshore Mediterranean Sea.     
4. The British kept modifying their destroyer designs and never seemed to be happy until they finally developed a postwar design based around the Squid and their version of QC sonar and the 4.5 inch / 45 gun. By then of course it was the missile age at sea.
5. On the battleship front, the KGVs were a compromised design that served. i have ruffled feathers with my criticisms of these ships, but nevertheless, the design choices (5.25 secondaries, 14 / 45 mains, poor TDS, bungled power distribution systems, worst compartmentation of any WWII era battleship, poor shock mounting, etc.) were less than optimal and there was no excuse for how poorly made and designed these ships were. NONE. The KGVs would have been dead meat in a gunfight with their era peers. Fortunately they did not meet their peers on equal terms more than once. How did that one meeting turn out? Not too well.  The Duke of York put down a Scharnhorst with difficulty. She should have done better.   
6. British WW II aircraft carriers have been a source of pride. The "man your brooms" myth of armored flight deck aircraft carriers being able to resist kamikazes off Okinawa has been the chief example British naval historians use to show off British superiority in the type.

Here is another view.

a. The Americans had 16 flattops off Okinawa. The British had five.
b. The Japanese launched about 4400 kamikazes at the combined allied CTFs.
c. 2000 of those were shot down by the USNAS. The FAA got 50.
d. ~2000 broke through the air defense and USN flak shot down roughly 50%. The RN got about 100 with AAA. That is 5% by math. 
e. Of the 1000 or so survivors, about 400 ran out of gas and fell into the sea. Of the 600 impactors, about 40 hit US flattops damaging 4 enough to put them out of action. An equal number of British flattops were hit by the 12 kamikazes that targeted them. 4 of 5 British flattops had flight operations interrupted. One was pranged so badly she was a post war write off. 
f. It is true that US flattops had their flight decks wrecked in the 4 major incidents, two had to be sent home and the four hit British flattops resumed operations quicker, BUT, the British did not fight off 85% of the kamikazes, did not take as many impactors and those they did take were not designed specifically to KILL British aircraft carriers through side impacts. The armored boxes served well in that one circumstance only. When dive bombed or torpedoed or gunned down, British aircraft carriers were wrecked more severely or sank quicker and easier than their American opposites.  Their plane handling qualities were not as well thought out and in battle they were not well handled. That is WWII history.      
       
And that is ironic, because one would think from Pedestal and the "Club Runs" that the RN would have done better off Okinawa? But then we have evidence from USS Wasp's own Malta runs that maybe the British, like the Americans, had to learn how to use naval aviation from the basement up?   
There is some merit in that argument. The 4.5 / 45 would have been backfitted. British ASW sensor refits would have matched German GsF acoustics or US QVC series by 1943. I am not sure the FAA would have good aircraft. I think they would still have to go hat in hand to the Americans for decent ship-borne aviation and LRMPs. Nothing is going to fix the KGVs. The Lions would have solved that issue. Flattop evolution would see the Maltas, too short length to beam and poor launch platforms compared to Midways, but a darn sight better than the odd job lot of box aircraft carriers being rushed through from 1937-1943.

On the escort front, the coverage would have caught up with the 1939 need, but then we have the electro-boats. That will be a big Battle of the Atlantic problem in 1943. Better pray that prescient King has the tools ready in the ATL as he did in OTL. 

Pound and crew would be gone and the replacements (Walker, Vian, Cunningham and Ramsay) were and have to be better than his batch of battleship gun clubbers.  
    
And then we must keep aware that it is not a history where one side or party stands still and one can sprint ahead alone. Always remember... the enemy has a say in what happens and so do the allies.

1. The blackouts will happen. It is standard in the era WWII air campaign. Decoys might be employed by 1943 to divert radio-nav bombing?
2. It will still take two years for a convoy route and control to manifest itself.
3. The Battle of the Atlantic still happens.
4. The multifront conflict might not happen, but that depends on FRANCE, not the Royal Navy. A 1943 France will be in much better shape to fight the Germans, basically because the French will close the air-land battle gap faster than the RN can make up for its faulty doctrine and poor technological choices. If the Wehrmacht packs it in, then the war at sea is not as critical as the Germans will have a Franco-Russian nutcracker to worry them.
5. Threats to the home islands will be a tad different. I think a 1943 cruise missile campaign upon the ports would be in the offing.



6. Churchill was a nutter when it came to the operational art and one should hide the Balkans maps, but let us not blame Churchill for the errors of Chatfield, Backhouse and Pound. What errors?
7. Singapore.
8. Failure to understand the naval geography of the Greenland, Iceland, United Kingdom distribution. Unlike their WWI predecessors, these three admirals took no measures to air garrison the islands and land masses with LRMPs or anti-ship aviation to prevent surface raiders from popping through the sieve of AMCs they sought to establish as reporting lines.
9. Protection of trade? Why did it take them longer than the Canadians or the Americans to establish routing and traffic control once war was declared?
10. Why is it, that the British Royal Navy should not be criticized for their lack of development of ASW systems or AAA? If the Americans are honest enough to berate themselves for their torpedo crisis (No worse than the ones the British and the Germans and JAPANESE suffered.); then a fair objective assessment to the British approach to naval warfare, shows that they underestimated the dive bomber and had no clue as to how to thwart torpedo bombers clear into 1943. On the ASW front, the British figured out ASDIC about a decade before the Germans and Americans developed multichannel acoustics. However... what about the fire control systems to go with the search and warning sets? Then we have the effectors. When did SQUID and LIMBO make their appearance? 1943. When did MOUSETRAP appear? When did acoustic ASW torpedoes appear? When did sonobuoys become a thing? (American developments 1942-1943...)
11. Leigh Lights and ASV radar search sets for U-boat hunting were post 1942 developments. Here is an interesting observation, the HMS Audacity was introduced into service around June 1941. When was the USS Long Island in service as a CVE? Same exact time.
12. I have explained the Second Happy Time. There was a Japanese situation completely out of control that required urgent attention from ships that would have been on the Atlantic sea frontiers "if" the ABC-1 plans had worked. But of course those plans did not and at least one (American) admiral was fired because he (fell for) implemented them. FDR did not forgive mistakes.
13. Let us see what the British developed for FAA use from 1940 to 1944?
link This is the Blackburn B20. Lost out to the Saunders Roe Lerwick, so that indicates what kind of a turkey it was.
link This is the Blackburn B44. Floatplane fighter to imitate the floatplane Zero. How did it do? Not too well. Like the B20 and B40 Flying boats, this piece of aviation history was supposed to use a pontoon that lowered from the hull. It did not work as hoped.
link This is the Bristol Beaufort. It along with the Bristol Beaufighter was an unqualified success. More of them built would have helped. Only complaint was the range and endurance.
link Fairey Albacore intended to replace the old "Stringbean". it was slow and it was short ranged, but it could deliver a torpedo. It was retired before the Swordfish. Wonder why?
link Fairey Barracuda was supposed to be an attack plane and dive bomber. It was a deathtrap. Underpowered with various engine problems all through I-V marks it was not ever as good as an Avenger.
link The Fairey Firefly is considered to be a "success". Its performance was inferior to the F4F Wildcat in the fighter role. Its main claim to fame was that it could bomb and strafe and it carried a ASV radar. Good ASW bird.
link The Fairey Fulmar was built as a fleet defense fighter. It failed. It was replaced by the Wildcat.
link The Sea Hurricane was a near peer to the Wildcat. It performed adequately in the Atlantic. It was unacceptable in the Pacific for "obvious" A6M reasons.
link Supermarine Sea Otter was comparable to the Grumman Duck, though not as successful.
link The Seafire was an ad-hoc design of some utility as a fleet defense fighter. It was available in about 2600 examples. Introduced around 1942. Churchill is falsely blamed for the delay. The practical reason it was delayed was because of the BoB and the fact the plane was a poor land on type for aircraft carrier use.

That was what the British would have had in the pipeline. Aside from the Sea Hurricane and maybe the Seafire, all of these birds were not suitable for naval warfare circa 1942 in fleet versus fleet engagements.

I think it is more likely that 1943 would be the latest that Germany could delay, whatever NAZI was in charge, for economic reasons. Their deferred internal IOU system for funding their rearmament was at the end of the credit line in 1939. Into 1940, there would be no capital to underpin a further extension.



Except the First Happy Time shows this "plan" was not implemented at all and even if it had been, the actual implementation of the system that eventually occurred in OTL actually took two years.

The US coastal blackouts happened when? When King became CNO. We have gone round and round with "Betty" Stark on this topic. Also, a global naval war was in progress. Where was the fire in early 1942? In the Pacific and the Indian Ocean. The point British historians keep missing is that King made a judgement call that he could put the Atlantic on hold for six months until US build programs gave him the ships to cover the sea frontier. The IJN had just clobbered the RN Eastern Fleet and ABDAFLOAT. Next stops for Yamamoto's crowd were the Australian SLOCs and Hawaii. (Again.). King could not wait on the British, who retreated to the coast of Africa to pull themselves together. Churchill prodded Roosevelt to do something to keep the Japanese out of the Indian Ocean.

What Churchill did not know and what British "Atlantic centric" historians fail to recognize, is that to the USNGS, the key ocean for the Allies at the time, was the INDIAN OCEAN. It was necessary to divert the Japanese away from attacks on the convoy routes to the British desert army in Egypt, the lend lease convoy routes to Russia through Persian Gulf ports, prevent the Japanese securing Sri Lanka as an operations base, keep access to the Middle Eastg OIL which was important for British operations in region and for Australia and keep the Japanese from a linkup with the Italians, who would shortly stage their Alexandria Raid and neutralize the eastern RN Mediterranean fleet in a defeat as horrible as the British suffered off Sri Lanka.

This is the context for all those American ships, planes, and troops headed into the Pacific, for the Doolittle Raid, for the Coral Sera, for Midway and for Watchtower. It should have been obvious that the Doolittle Raid was a "poke the IJN and make them turn away from the Indian Ocean at the most critical time in the naval war"? Yet, one reads the same tired myths about how the Americans let 7,000,000 tonnes of AMERICAN shipping go to the bottom because they were "stupid" and "unprepared"; as if the British were being shortchanged in support. There is a different way to look at what happened.

And to be clear on the Atlantic segment, It was the USN which patrolled the Denmark Strait and began to close the Iceland to UK gap so the Home Fleet could release units to reconstitute the Eastern Fleet and support TORCH. Not to mention US battleships rotating in and out of the North Sea on a "Tirpitz Watch" when they should have been off Guadalcanal shooting up the Tokyo Express.



And what was Eastern Solomons but a battle to sustain a landing force pinned against the sea? That a British carrier sank under damage a Yorktown would have shrugged and did shrug off. Namely HMS Eagle went down. Four submarine torpedoes killed her. USS Enterprise (3 bombs) was turned around for Santa Cruz where she fought about six weeks later, How long was HMS Indomitable out after she was dedecked by 3 bombs? A half year. She returned to eat an Italian aerial torpedo in March 1943 and went back to the United States again for another 9 months work. IOW, this British carrier spent more time in US repair yards than fighting.
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I suggest this... because if one thinks Guadalcanal could be held without CTF support, then one does not know the naval side of WATCHTOWER.


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USS South Dakota had a damage control ninny who threw a wrong gate switch. This knocked out fire control, radars and rudder steer. The armor held up. USS Washington did what the SoDak should have done. Nine salvoes at 7,000 meters with 70% hits. Kirishima sank as a result of this gunnery and later air attack.

Lancelot Holland had a 30 second piece of misfortune. His tactics were sound. He had a championship gunnery ship in Hood. His side belts would have held up if he had turned sooner. But a plunging shell hit a crease in the deck and belt armor and pierced that 4 inch ammunition magazine, the British folly of using hot charges for their propellant manifested itself and one saw a Queen Anne type event, WWII fashion. PoW never should have been in that line. She was not only crew unready, she weas not able mechanically to function. And what happemned in the Gulf of Siam? Crew unready and mechanically unable to function. 2 for 2.




Here is another way to think about it. H. told Braubitsch; "I am 56. I have to start now if I want to live to finish this war and we will never be better prepared." That was when Hitler committed to the Polish aggression for which he was criminally responsible. As a further naval comment, Hitler tended to listen to Doenitz. Doenitz convinced Hitler not to scrap the KM surface fleet arguing "fleet in being", so Hitler did listen to his admirals; just not to Raeder.


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That should be "VANGUARD". I keep getting those two ships mixed up.

It would not be worth it, if we did not present different points of views so that others could make their own observations from the differences. 

I refer to the whole year when Italy was not in the war, and France was still operational and the British did not properly implement air coverage, port traffic control and convoy deceptive routing.   


The Florida governor was "difficult" as was the gentleman misgoverning New Jersey.  


Let me put it the way I actually wrote in a more clear manner:
1. King estimated that the war would be lost if the British army in Egypt and the Russian army in the Ukraine was defeated.
2. King looked at his resources distribution and decided middle eastern oil was vital to the Allied war effort. Refer to 3..
4. King looked at his naval geography and decided that the common sea line of communication to the Persian Gulf and Red Sea was in danger. that the Japanese navy with its carrier task forces and cruiser forces was the chief operational short term naval threat to that route. The SLOC supported the Russian army in the Ukraine, the British army in Egypt, was the supply route for much of Australia's and the British army's and NAVY's oil requirements.
5. One month after King took over the Allied naval war (You do not think King listened to the British after their defeat off Sri Lanka?) why would he listen to anything the British offered? Now factor the previous Alexandria raid the Italians mounted and Phillips being annihilated without cause and the disasters the British piled up in their ABDA operations? 
6. In addition to 5. King discovered that the British exaggerated their tonnage losses in the North Atlantic to keep the US commitment to western Atlantic convoy coverage as agreed in ABC 1. 
7. Given 1-7; just what would the USNGS do? They knew they had a time pad and that the UK itself was not in immediate danger. They knew the war effort against the Germans was, if the SLOC to the Middle East was interrupted. They knew the British admiralty had botched the war at sea, by not covering that issue adequately as Pound promised they would.   
8. What could the American admirals do? Poke Yamamoto and the Japanese with the Doolittle Raid. Draw Japanese attention east NOT south or west.
9. Secure the fallback positions in Australia and New Zealand. (CoraL Sea, the effectively most important naval battle of WWII.).
10. Neutralize Kido Butai, at least for the moment. (Midway, the second most important battle of WWII.)
11. Begin an offensive operation immediately to tie down the Japanese and divert them from India. (Guadalcanal was not entirely successful in this goal; but it did divert the IJN into an attrition campaign and take pressure off the British Eastern Fleet which continued to waste time and burn heavy fuel oil to no purpose. Note that when the Americans requested aircraft carrier and aviation support, the Royal Navy refused and it was one of the few right things Churchill did when he overruled Pound.)    

12. Andrew Boyd's thesis about what was happening. He claims Churchill and Pound went to the Americans in March of 1942 asking them to mount operations to draw the Japanese off the Eastern Fleet. The Pacific Fleet was doing its best at the time, mounting raids in the Gilberts and Marshalls and hammering at Japanese landings in New Guinea. The Doolittle Raid was a secret that FDR was told not to share with Churchill, because the Americans thought there were British traitors in Eastern Command. It turns out that the Americans were correct.     

13. Refer to 4, 6 and 7. King committed ships where he knew they were vital. Russia was more important than the Caribbean? By the way the USN did send Standards to the Southwest Pacific; specifically USS Colorado during November 1942 to Fiji and the New Hebrides.  She was not committed forward because she was too slow to pace the aircraft carrier task forces.  Nice to see that one is aware of the tanker shortage the Pacific Fleet suffered. King committed those tankers to sustain the Royal Navy cover groups in the Battle of the Atlantic; or rather he did not reverse Stark's misallocation.

14. At Midway. She WAS the USS Yorktown. She had to be scuttled after the I-168 blew her bottom out, but she refused to sink. Impossible to tow.  

15. HMS Hood was unlucky. HMS Prince of Wales caused an oil leak. It was a Swordfish torpedo hit in the rudders that pinned KMS Bismarck, causing her to turn in circles. That and Lutjens yakking on the radio to let Tovey know where the German battleship was. Otherwise; she, Bismarck, would have escaped with minor damage. The Prince of Wales was a distinct liability.     




We can quibble about the math. Suggest age 50 instead? 

Here is what was actually important when he told Braubitsch he had to start the war early:

Syphilis.
Eczema. 
Parkinsons disease.
Irregular heartbeat.
Stomach ulcers.
Possible enlarged heart.
Exposure to mustard gas and lung damage thereby.
Drug addict.

Hitler knew that he was not going to make it to sixty. 

I will have to take them, in order:



The Royal Navy placed too much faith in ASDIC and did not use wargames for convoy defense. One can quibble about American failures in ASW preparation, but for the RN, it became the major lesson of WWI and they did not do due diligence. The Atlantic Ocean was their lifeline. They could have done some relatively cheap things.

Better seaplanes at least in prototype form. Their plane park was unsuited for coastal protection or reconnaissance. How is it, that the British wound up using American aircraft?

Hit to kill contact antisubmarine weapons. The British deployed Hedgehog in 1941 and found it was a shock and explosion hazard for their ships that used it. The USN Solar famously blew up in 1946 using the device, when a sailor dropped a round and it fell into ready use ammunition. This was not too good.

Mousetrap, the USN ASW rocket boosted underwater mine, was much safer and was co-developed at the same time as Hedcgehog. Postwar? The Russians took a look at He4dgehog and Mousetrap. They went with Mousetrap.



Yes, the blackout order, they did not obey until August 1942 the mayors of Atlantic City and Miami and the governors of New Jewsey and Florida. Did not Churchill have local politics as an excuse for the Indian famine? FDR was the final authority and he did not give King the legal tools until his attorney general said "Okay".