With the European war mostly closed, we move from the Philippines north into some of the best-known battles of the Pacific War. I don't have a lot to say about Iwo Jima, but was amused by his comment that Okinawa was somewhere "where American forces seem destined to remain until the cold war waxes hot or the communist menace fades." And here we are, six decades later, with the communist menace that he spoke of gone, and yet American forces remain on Okinawa.
I was also intrigued by his comments about the New York Fire Department providing the impetus for the development of fog nozzles, which I don't think came up when I wrote about the subject. I did a bit more digging, and discovered that while nothing Morison says is technically wrong, the framing is extremely weird. The fog nozzle was pushed on Adm. Cochrane at BuShips by Harold J. Burke, who was a member of the New York City Fire department, but was a Lieutenant in the Naval Reserve at the time, and he did go on to run the damage control school with Lt. Thomas Kilduff, who was formerly of the Boston Fire Department. As far as I can tell, there was no particular institutional involvement by either city's fire department in the DC school or program, which would explain why I'd never heard about this.
I certainly appreciate Morison's skillful portrait of the Okinawa landing, and of the destruction of Yamato, although I have to nitpick his comment that "not another battleship was ever built". Both Vanguard and Jean Bart were completed after the war, and I maintain that the battleship remained important for a decade or so after this. I also feel compelled to point out that the effectiveness of the armored flight decks on British carriers is overstated, and that the smaller air wings imposed by said decks meant they were hit about as often as the Americans, despite having far fewer ships.
And then we come to the horror of the kamikaze attacks on the Americans off Okinawa, one of the most brutal battles of the war. I don't have much to add to Morison's account, except to call him out for ignoring the loss of the William D. Porter, a favorite here at Naval Gazing. But with that campaign closed, next week will be our final chapter in the book.
Comments
The American forces on Okinawa are still facing two menaces that explicitly include "communist" in their name.
Not to mention that I would agree that we're still in a state of Cold War with both the PRC and the DPRK. Legalistically, in the case of the DPRK, even, because we're officially in a "cease fire"
Yes, but basically nobody in the US talks about the Chinese problem in terms of communism, and whatever effects communist ideology may be having inside China, it's definitely not doing very much outside China. The Soviets set up communist client states and were, admittedly somewhat inconsistently, trying to spread communism. The Chinese seem to care very little about spreading their version of communism, and can be adequately modeled as a more conventional geopolitical adversary.
China has basically abandoned communism anyway, so has North Korea (which is only officially socialist these days).
I think the real design issue with British carriers wasn’t the armored flight deck it was the fact they went with a full armored box around the hangars. The armored flight decks in my view proved themselves out during the war as being valuable protection. The rest of the box? Not so much. The weight of the box also helped drive the low hangar heights that became such an issue post war.
Looking back with the benefit of hindsight the ideal WW2 fleet carrier configuration would be one that has an armored flight deck, a single tall hangar and no other armor anywhere else. Certainly no side armor. I would also argue that a 4 shaft configuration is the way to go with a unit machinery layout.
I don't think you can dismiss it as merely being a problem of the armored sides. The flight deck is going to be at least 50% wider than the combined height of the hangar sides, and from a stability perspective, it's also a lot worse than the sides because it's really high up.
Communism is alive and well, it's just morphed so that many countries are economically Communist but politically democratic; and other countries are politically Communist but economically captalist. Both hybrids are "Communism but with more steps" in order to disguise their overall control structures. China IS nakedly Communist, there is no real free market on a macro scale, no major industry that operates without Central Committee holding the leash. Just ask Jack Ma.
@Ski206 there is a question about cost. How much more expensive is it to build an armoured deck carrier vs unarmoured, given equivalent budget.
Matt C:
Yet those countries are generally speaking less socialist than they were during the cold war (and never even tried to be communist).
Matt C:
Communism is about economics, a country that is economically capitalist is not communist, even if it is run by a communist party.
Matt C:
An inefficient state dictated form of capitalism is still not communism.
@Anonymous, "Yet those countries are generally speaking less socialist than they were during the cold war" I disagree. You cannot run a country on socialist economic principles and still claim not to be socialist. Well you can certainly CLAIM not to be, it's just a lie.
"a country that is economically capitalist is not communist, even if it is run by a communist party" "An inefficient state dictated form of capitalism is still not communism." Au contraire, Marxist theory holds that it is acceptably socialist if individuals hold private capital, so long as the State Committee has the final say in its employment. This is one of the answers to a longstanding debate called the socialist calculation debate, of how to set prices more equitably in a socialist economy. And Deng Xiaoping's reforms are cited by socialist economists as an example of market socialism.