history never repeats, well hardly ever ...

[rb1957]

read this, in wiki for USS Saratoga ...
"During Grand Joint Exercise No. 4, Saratoga and Lexington were able to launch an airstrike against Pearl Harbor on Sunday, 7 February 1932, without being detected."

note the date and the target !

those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it !

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[ivymike]

eh? what's the significance of 7-Feb-32?

 

[IRstuff]

well before Dec 7, 1941

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[msquared48]

Billy Mitchell fought hard to convince a bunch of egotistical, antiquated idiots the value of air power.

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[rb1957]

i have to admit i read it as sunday 7th "december" ...

still they war-gamed an attack on a sunday ... wonder if the Japanese had this info in their planning ?

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[KENAT]

Or you know, a vague familiarity with US culture & customs.

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[IRstuff]

A good war gamer makes use of whatever is available, be it having everyone in church, or everyone glued to the Super Bowl, or the World Cup...

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[KENAT]

Religious holidays are a good one, Yom Kippur 1973; Christmas 1944 (Battle of the Bulge)...

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[KENAT]

Oh, and Pearl Harbour was arguably if not a copy then inspired by Taranto.

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[JohnRBaker]

Billy Mitchell fought hard to convince a bunch of egotistical, antiquated idiots the value of air power.

And he was court-martialed when he spoke out against plans that continued the building of battleships while ignoring aircraft carriers.

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[IRstuff]

"Pearl Harbour was arguably if not a copy then inspired by Taranto"

Aside from the British still using biplanes!!! in 1940...

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[KENAT]

They continued to use the Swordfish to the end of WW II in anti submarine and later anti E boat roles - out lasting it's more 'advanced' US monoplane contemporary the Douglas Devastator.

In fact several other participants were using Biplanes well into and even after the war.

I think the Swordfish may have done better at Taranto than the much more modern Avenger did at Midway if memory serves.

(However, fair point that the general state of British designed carrier aircraft during WW II was not great.)

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[ScottyUK]

The old Swordfish biplanes were so slow that the Bismarck's fire control couldn't track its guns onto them, and flew so low that the AAA couldn't depress their fire far enough to hit them, allowing these relics to cripple one the most powerful warships of the period. Not a bad result. ;-)

 

[rb1957]

i agree that the Japanese studied the UK attack on Taranto.

i don't think the battle of the bugle was timed for a religious holiday. they did attack through a sector that was "impassable to tanks" ... except twice (in 1940 and again in 1944) ! they did rely on weather to ground allied aircraft (and to hide from PR planes).



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[jte]

The "battle of the bugle"?

That evokes thoughts of cavalry charges or perhaps a drum and bugle corps show!

 

[IRstuff]

Well, the tanks used were considered to be armored "cavalry" Likewise, helo units were referred to as air cavalry. The horse allusion remains.

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[KENAT]

While weather etc. may have been more significant I suspect coinciding with Christmas was at least a secondary consideration.

Bit of a difference from playing football in no man's land.

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[dpc]

I've read that the US Navy does not include the loss of an aircraft carrier as a possible scenario in war games. It's apparently unthinkable. This same article mentioned that at least one USN sub commander has a collection of photos showing various US carriers in the sights of his periscope and his sub went undetected.

Before Pearl Harbor, the battleships were the sacred cows, now it is the carriers. The military gets trapped in group-think a lot - it's just a by-product of the culture.

 

[IRstuff]

I don't know whether that is correct, per se, but I do know that asymmetrical threats are considered, in general, by the Navy. Naval War College doctrinal papers are aware of the inherent vulnerability of carriers.


And certainly, it's known that old-school, anti-ship missiles are still a big threat, since every defensive system has a threshold above which the system is unable to deal with the number of incoming threats. I seriously doubt that any carrier commander would consider his ship to be invulnerable, and neither does the Naval War College

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[dpc]

You're probably right IRStuff. The article I read was in Newsweek quite a few years ago, but was generally believable. I know some folks involved in War College simulations. Their feelings were that the problem was getting the leadership to buy into the War College work. After the USS Cole, I'm sure a lot of re-thinking was done regarding asymmetrical threats. At least, I sure hope so.