WI: on January 1st 1942 Skippy the friendly ASB turns USS Langley USS Ranger and USS Wasp into Lexin

Interesting, two more fleet carriers give Nimitz some more room until the first Essex come online.

part of what makes this so interesting for me, at least is the shock factor for the Japanese. Americas had hidden away three very large fleet carriers out of nowhere. What else are they hiding? It’s the uncertainty fact and I find personally fascinating, on both sides. Because the Navy is going to wonder where on earth did Wasp Ranger and Langley go? I wonder do they get worked up in time for coral sea? I think I could definitely make midway. if it even happens.

Your variation is also quite fascinating. Another POD I had personally toyed with is Moffett surviving, somehow managing to get strategic air from the army(possibly buy arguing that power projection is inherently part of the navy’s mission) and becoming CNO where he had then has king succeed him 38. He may have been a bastard and a hard ass, but incompetent he is not. I personally blame drumbeat, and everything wrong with the United States Navy from the mid thirties to six months after he was no longer chief of naval operations on Stark.

She also doesn’t have a full crew remember. The British of all people will probably understand the need to work up the ships. They are also gonna need some time to work up. Yes, she has a cadre so the time will be reduced. they’re probably reentering the fleet late February early March. This happens on January 1. So Langley has either not yet or just arrived at Australia. The interesting parts start with coral sea with an additional Lexington’s worth of aircraft we’re probably not losing lax herself. She’s still probably damaged so back to the United States for her for repairs. Meanwhile, the Japanese are very confused. The Americans suddenly have five Lexington class carriers instead of two.




I think that the more political officers might be forced out(Mitchell, hap Arnold). There’s also a quite likely possibility that the Navy views strategic air differently than the army. I don’t think that the Navy would go with Douhet’s theories on terror bombing. Not for any moral reasons. I just don’t think the Navy would his arguments persuasive. They focus more on key points, industrial centers and waterways. they also look at you proposing to send a bomber out unescorted the same way they look at someone proposing to send a capital ship out unescorted. There’s also the thing that Moffett instilled in all navy’s aviators i.e. their navy first in the navy and an aviator second. Re: Moffett and dirigibles. him surviving might actually make him realize that dirigibles aren’t as useful as he thought they’re useful just not as much as he thought. This is starting to get off topic.

1. It costs more to scrap on the weigh than to complete on the weigh.
2. The IJN and RN were gun club addled admiralties. Moffett was a hard charger and if Hughes had not been a nitwit, there was a chance Moffett's ideas would have sold to the three chief navies. The British and Japanese were battleship centric and would have bitten on the swapout. You are looking with OUR airpower hindsight, not with the p-revailing lessons of Jutland, Julian Corbett and the Beatty fixation whose lies and alibis blinded the British or the Tsushima decisive battle nonsense which plagued the Japanese.


3. This you did correctly assess. An aircraft carrier of the era was simpler to build but 4X the costs (aircraft, fuel and labor) to operate as an equivalent battleship. You are wrong about fleet tankers. The USN of 1940 required 60 fleet tankers minimum for peacetime operations and 2X that for war. One of the reasons Stark was fired was because he did not propose the 200 tankers needed for the 2 Ocean navy and he sent half of the 60 the USN did have to the RN to make up their shortfall.

4. The escorts the US expected to use off its coasts were sent to escort convoys around Africa to Iran and Egypt and to escort convoys to the UK and to northern RUSSIA. When King was brought in to unsnarl Stark's stupidity, there was a full blown war on with Japan, the RN, itself, had been badly beaten in the Mediterranean and the Indian Oceans and something had to give somewhere as the USN struggled to fill in the gaps where the RN had thus been badly defeated. Namely King had to rush destroyers and escorts to those areas where they were needed most, the western Pacific and to the Arctic and Indian Oceans to keep the British and Russian armies supplied and fighting.

5. If the British complained that shipping in US waters suffered from DRUMBEAT then ask them at the time why our destroyers were in the Red Sea and off the Kola Peninsula instead of off Key Biscayne? Why were we the ones doing the fighting in the Coral Sea? 

6. If there is a reluctant RN answer, it is because the British admiralty was the actual admiralty that had wasted three years losing the U-boat war, had lost the first aircraft carrier battle in history in the Indian Ocean, had mismanaged the Singapore defense, had lost two sea air battles to the Japanese during the ABDA debacle that the British alone screwed up, etc. . In mid 1942, the Americans had ceased to listen to Sir Dudley Pound and his admirals and taken matters into their own hands. Part of that seizure of responsibility was to decide which sea frontier had to be shorted so that the American escort forces went where the need for them was most critical.

King made the calculation that the North Atlantic sea frontier had to be shorted a full year of destroyers and corvettes until enough escort forces were built to replace the redeployed assets sent forward. The lighted cities issue conjoint was a purely political one that had to be POTUS handled and that one involved Unreconstructed Confederates, so it took FDR himself a while to squash them. 

So when the British complain about DRUMBEAT in American waters in 1942, ask them why the U-boats got past them in the first place? Then ask them about March 1943 when the Americans finally bore down hard in the North Atlantic.

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Here is how we actually see things from WWII onward ... with the British and other certain nations. 

For point of clarification, I would need to know, "ship's complement",

To be specific:

---USS Langley, as a seaplane tender, had a complement of 500 with an air division of 100 plus the PBY air and maintenance crews she would support as a tender. Figure that as 300 men additional men for an 8 plane squadron. She is the problem child here. She would need about 1,000 additional personnel, especially ship's crew and a few months to bring the air division up to scratch.
---USS Wasp, as a light aircraft carrier, had a complement of 1900 peacetime with an air division of 700 to support the 80 aircraft she operated. She might be short of ship crew but her air division would ber able to handle a Lexington air wing with no trouble at all. It was the same size.
---USS Ranger, as a small aircraft carrier, had a complement of 2,500 with an air division of 600 men in 1941. Like USS Wasp she would have no trouble handling a Lexingtom drop-in. A Lexington had a complement of 2,700 with an air division of 700 personnel.


Plenty of those off the swimmers who made it off the USS Shaw, USS Arizona, USS Oklahoma, and the USS West Virginia, since it happened for real to bring USS Hornet and about 6 CVEs into service at that time.

Emergency measures could have inserted fill-outs into every "new Lexington" from the Pearl Harbor disaster by the beginning of February in the ship's divisions. It is the AIR DIVISIONS where we have hiccups.

Pilot shortage. About 200 pilots and aircrew.. Sorry Army Air Force, but 200 of your better pilots and aircrewmen just became MARINES. Carrier quals takes 90 days, assuming the pilots know their basic land based aircraft skills. In the meantime the deadheaders on the other flattops are parceled and shared out to bring Langley up to strength and instead of 70 birds a chicken farm, it is 60.

Types of aircraft in service.

With USS WASP and USS RANGER, the problem is fighters, dive bombers and torpedo bombers.



and



and



There are not enough Devastators to go around for that line was foolishly shut down before the Avengers were developed.

The point is to keep the "New Lexingtons" away from the Japanese until the Wildcats and Dauntlesses can flesh out the air groups. The American flying garbage in service can handle the Luftwaffe incompetents and the Italians, but not the IJNAS of 1942. Nobody could, not even with Spitfires and Warhawks.

Your facts are incomplete. The USG, aside from Hughes, was trying to neutralize everyone else as a threat to us. We were reading your mail and cheating as hard as you imperialist folks were as a matter of self defense.

The three governments were each for their own reasons desirous to stop an arms race, but because of our own distrust of imperialists who had started WWI and dragged us into that fight under a pack of recently exposed lies, we decided that parity was our endgoal no matter what you folks wanted.

If there was hatred in that actual historical political objective and outcome, that is your interpretation of what we actually did.

Drachinifel, who toes the usual British-biased misinterpretation of actual naval history, makes that point quite clear in spite of his own factual errors.



a. The UKG could not pay what they owed us and build a navy at the same time, because we used that debt as a lever to get them to agree to our terms.
b. We were not building 16 BBs of the South Dakota class (1920). We were building 6.
c. Congress was still on board with a navy second to none.
d. The UKG never wanted to call a disarmament conference. We called it, ourselves and forced them to it. See a. .

Note that the US initial terms, with some minor tweaks were the FINAL terms.

We got what we really wanted which were:
a. We decoupled Britain from Japan.
b. We got parity by tonnage.
c. We squashed British efforts to make "Dominion navies" separate. The Dominions did want their own navies separate. 
d. The cruiser question was a bit of a sticker, but since we wanted Britain short of trade protection in case they double-crossed us, we made sure that they never had enough heavies to thwart us. (We were allowed more; since we could outbuild the UK in this category.). .
e. Submarines. Important to us because we knew that it was how we would throttle the British or the Japanese once we figured the boats out. Pick one. It turned out that we guessed right. France is wrongly blamed for this one.   
f. We read what you guys passed around to each other. Funny thing is that you tried to read our mail and we think you might have been successful, both governments still classify this bit of espionage, but we got what we wanted more than you did anyway.

The Nelsons were given the "standard displacement" tweak. It turned out that British designers used this to cheat on torpedo defense and that might have been useful if the British had not screwed the technology choices totally up. In point of fact HMS Nelson (Operation Halberd) demonstrated that her "shock absorbers" magnified the effect of the single Italian torpedo hit that kayoed her massively far more severely than the torpedoes that failed to significantly damage the USS Saratoga (twice) or any of the American Standards who had to eat many multiples of Japanese fish to kiss mud. Bow down and barely making it to port (Gibraltar) for a patchup, she limped back to Rosyth for a 9 month mission kill repair job. She never was "right" after that one hit, being reduced to a floating battery or "monitor" for the remainder of the war. 

Facts which Drachinifel failed to mention along with other British "cheating".    

g. Aircraft carriers were where the gun clubbers were at work. They derailed Moffett. Drachinifel gets this all wrong. The British did want 5 flattops of their own. They got 6 if you count Argus, but nothing "modern" resulted from it. .And they did not have the funds interwar to replace their "experimentals" as the Slump did them in.
h. The Lexingtons were built under the "3,000 ton defense clause", which the Americans wrote, into the treaty for that reason so it was not cheating. It was "our lawyers are better than your diplomats". Note that this clause was also used on the Standards? 
i. The claim that the British knew that 25,000 tonne aircraft carriers would be better than the Lexington battlecruiser conversions is a flat out lie. Drachinifel does mention the 22,500 ton Yorktowns were arguably the best pre-war flattops ever built although I would argue the Shokakus at 33,000 were their near match on a higher tonnage, as was the Lexingtons as modified. That modification in 1941, (counterbulging) was where the cheating happened. 
j. The cleanup articles were designed to prevent the British from gifting or seizing warships built for other parties. 
k. Article 19 was the big American mistake. We should have insisted on fortification rights in our "Guano islands" and the Philippine Islands. 
l. Bookkeeeping.

Effects... 

m. USG, France and Italy did not utilize the options to the maximum.

Winners and losers:
a. Italy and France? How did that turn out? France actually lost, and Italy turned in a performance that showed they did win as a result of the treaty provisions.  
b. USG won the most from the treaty breaking the RN, and decoupling the Dominions and Japanese from the British imperialists as potential assets. 
c. Drachinifel claims the Rodneys, Hood and possible Ark Royals and the 10,000 ton cruisers were British "wins". Theory not practice are these claims as he makes them. What was the practical outcome? 
--- practicals are that Rodney and Nelson were bodged up hulks with defective guns, incompetent torpedo defense and functionally IN BATTLE they proved worse than the Standards, which after the Pearl Harbor refits proved to be much more useful than "the angry oil tankers".
--- Hood, well we know that she was sunk through misuse, misunderstanding and overall British naval incompetence at the higher command levels. She was lost through Pound's strategic and Tovey's operational bungling and not through Holland's tactical fault because he, Holland, knew and tried to fight with her as is within her defects and limitations and in the position the fools at the Brirtish admiralty put him in.   
--- British aircraft carriers?  Hermes, Eagle, Courageous, Ark Royal, Glorious lost through the same exact sheer stupidity. There is no other word for it. Indomitable and Formidable were defeated in the Easter Week debacle off Sri Lanka by utter similar blind incompetence (D. W. Boyd was the Royal Navy's Marc Mitscher and Somerville was not too good either.  M.).
--- Arguably with her geographic position and the technical opposing means available, the UK RAF and RN could have shut the U-boats down in their ports or severely restricted U-boat presence in the North Atlantic.  The British, though, did not put the air coverage effort in and the U-boats ran wild for 3 years. It was left to CANADA and the United States to put in the air cover effort, close the mid Atlantic gap and shut down the U-boats and that happened when? March 1943. A full 16 months after the US entered the war; for it took that long to clean up the naval mess the British RN made of things globally.         
        
Do I hate the RN? 

No. I do not hate the RN or the British. 

I report the actual history and results and what it costed. The British really should have urged the Americans to build those six flattops.         
 

I would hate to go into battle with Brewster Buffaloes and Vought Vindicators. With only 130 Devastators built, and 5 historical aircraft carriers to equip, that was 80 aircraft operationally afloat, 32 for the teaching establishment ashore and 18 for the fleet reserve. No worse than a Swordfish, these birds were still pilot suicide to fly against the Japanese. Their accident rate was fairly low, but by 1941 the 30 or so actually lost in peacetime accidents meant that the fleet reserve was gone and the shore establishment teaching units were well short of their authorized machines as they were scavenged to keep the forces afloat at full complements.

John Tower at BuAir was the reason the Avenger program was delayed by over a year. He also scorched the Douglas VTB and managed to bolo the Consolidated TBY Sea Wolf as well: which is why the British were actually in a better torpedo bomber position at the beginning of 1942 with the Albacores than the USN was with its assorted delayed birds.

There were none to be had unless you strip the Atlantic fleet.

Hence my previous comments about USS Ranger.

It has been hotly argued that the USS Lexington should have survived that torpedo hit, and that a simple ventilation mistake such as what killed the HIJMS Taiho should have been avoided. The fact remains that USS Lexington was a burnout and not a flooding. She was a scuttle. I argue that another Lexington would have been useful to chop the Japanese up in the previous air actions before the air action that got her. Takagi, Takeo had rather stupidly launched a search and strike and bungled that evolution which found the USS Neosho. On the return leg from that fiasco to mother, the Japanese flew over Fletcher weaponless, and proceeded further on; then trapped aboard late in the day on his, Takagi's flattops. He tried to stage a night or dusk attack after a hasty turnaround due to another bungled contact report Takagi received from Inoue's air recon and the late reports of his own returned fliers. The Japanese, this time out on this specific sortie, ran afoul of Aubrey Fitch's CAP which shot them up. The 11 Wildcats committed were not enough to do the job properly. 20 CAP fighters would have been better, even if half of them were Buffalos. That would have doubled the IJNAS losses in Kates and that would have saved USS Lexington the next day. C'est la guerre.

At this point it is interesting to speculate what happens next. I think Shokaku still makes it back with her bow stoved in, or she might not. Either way Cardiv 6 is still dropped from Operation MI because in a 3 on 3 revised Coral Sea, I estimate the IJNAS lose 100+ aircraft instead of the 70 they actually did. All 3 American bird farms race back to Pearl for Round 2 to join the useless Bull after his Doolittle Raid dithering foolishness, and his failed first Bull's Run to reach Coral Sea late. Nagumo, thus, sails into an even bigger buzzsaw off Midway than what happened. Yamamoto, the worst admiral of WWII, was determined to lay Midway on despite what his own people told him after Coral Sea that the USN was no joke. He even cheated on the wargame used to validate his lunatic plan. People think Midway was a miracle? It was an unending series of American bad luckisms that allowed Nagumo to last as long as he did to kill USS Yorktown. Add the "USS Langley" into the mix and Yamashita does not survive to get her.



USS Wasp as a Lexington has a 5 cell torpedo defense. If you remember, USS Saratoga took an atom bomb surface burst 800 feet away in a test shot? She took days to sink. I think three torpedoes were survivable. A Yorktown typically survived 5 or more such Japanese heavyweight torpedoes.

The USS Ranger was wasted on Operation Tungsten. Properly sinking the Tirpitz was always a 4 engine heavy bomber mission. That was the only aircraft that could make the repeated attacks with large enough gravity bombs to do the job. The other option, using a BAT was not possible until about the same time as the Tall Boys came into their own.



A Lexington could operate an Avenger and an Avenger could launch a BAT.




First of all, Kincaid should have run for it and lured Nagumo and Kondo into reach of the Cactus Air Force. "Stand and fight" might seem courageous and "Bull" Halsey and all that, but there are times when playing keepaway and jabbing until the other fellow shows you his chin, a favorite Frank Jack Fletcher move, is the smart play. Spruance did that at Philippine Sea and Marc Mitscher blew it when Spruance finally gave him permission to run Ozawa down in that op.

USS Enterprise had the expletive deleted Miles Browning running her air ops during Santa Cruz despite his failures at Midway. It was not Osbourne Hardison's fault that his CoAS was a drunken incompetent moralless pile of walking manure masquerading as a man, or that Kincaid, who was aboard USS Enterprise which was his flagship, had given him, Hardison, the CAP duty knowing full well that he had a new radar crew complement that was as useless to him as Miles the not teetotaler chief of air staff. Browning was found to be drunk before, during, and after the op and it proved out that Browning had neglected the radar / signals division basic ATC training before the op. The "green" USS Enterprise crew, despite this shortcomings list, was still doing better than the supposedly Mitscher-trained and actually equally incompetent USS Hornet air control crew during this same op.
1. The faults were known, but C and R kept putting off modernization due to "reasons" until the war came. Once war came it was every hull forward no matter what and the full year of yard work needed to rebuild the aft elevator and modernize the forward one, to rerig the fire mains and counterbulge to correct the permanent starboard list was not possible early war. The turbo-electrics were sloppy WWI leftover shipbuilding from the weighs forward. Get them wet and the generators (dynamos actually) packed it in. This was corrected after USS Lexington lost power at Coral Sea and was scuttled. The USS Saratoga was better waterproofed in her various refits and repairs between her war-ops.

2. More "New Lexingtons" would have an interesting effect on aircraft procurement. USS Ranger was originally not supposed to have torpedo bombers. The idea at the time, was that dedecking (around 1930) was more useful than flood out, so pack in dive bombers. Well, that was wrong at the time, and USS Ranger was expensively refitted in 1941 to carry torpedo bombers; but wrong decisions initially tend to have a stupid steps forward effect in that when the USN finally got around to fielding a modern air dropped torpedo from a modern torpedo plane, the torpedo was badly built, the drop method was incompetent, the torpedo plane was grossly underpowered and the numbers ordered of both were not enough to ensure any plausible mission success. Twice as many Devastators would barely have sufficed for the 5 actual flattops, much less the 8 hypotheticals we would have had (6 Lexes and 2 Yorkies) in 1941.

M.