McBride W.M. Technological change and the United States Navy, 1865-1945

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the Paciﬁc Fleet commander on 31 December 1941.

Nimitz’s support for

nonaviator commanders, such as Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, became

the focus of aviator complaints. These criticisms came to a head when the

escort carrier Liscome Bay was sunk, with 644 dead, while assigned to a de-

fensive position off Makin Atoll in November 1943.

Many senior naval aviators, such as Vice Admiral John H. Towers, were

ardent supporters of carrier-based aviation as the new technological foun-

dation for the navy’s guerre d’escadre strategy. They criticized Spruance’s

use of carrier aviation and advocated more offensive operations. According

to his biographer, Thomas Buell, Spruance “believed the Japanese would

be defeated primarily through amphibious warfare.” Aviators, however, saw

themselves as the new offensive warriors of guerre d’escadre and resented

the “cost and drudgery” of protecting amphibious forces. Prior to opera-

tions in the Gilbert Islands in 1943, aviator Vice Admiral John S. McCain

advocated carrier operations into Japanese waters to force a ﬂeet engage-

ment. Spruance advised Nimitz that the logistics requirements were too

great, Japanese air power too strong, and the chance of a ﬂeet engagement

unlikely unless the Japanese saw a clear chance to win.

The Japanese

would not be complaisant enough to “come and be killed,” to paraphrase

the French minister of marine Admiral Jackie Fisher had been fond of

quoting. The post–Liscome Bay furor eventually led to a dual command

structure in the Paciﬁc in which aviators and nonaviators were teamed in

the top two positions in every major Paciﬁc naval command.

The destruction of a signiﬁcant portion of the battleship navy at Pearl

Harbor offers a seductive, but false, demarcation between the battleship

and aircraft carrier-technological paradigms.

Clark Reynolds, in his his-

tory of the rise of carrier aviation, wrote that, after Pearl Harbor, the

battleships “played a very minor part in the Navy’s construction plans.” In

terms of numbers of hulls this was certainly true. However, Reynolds’s at-

tribution of the retention of the battleship to “conservative forces” ignores

the battleship’s continued relevance through the end of the war.

Many of the weaknesses attributed to naval aviation by the conservative

Naval War College staff in the late 1930s did not disappear with the Japa-

nese or American aviation successes at Pearl Harbor, Coral Sea, or Mid-

way. Naval aviation remained hampered by poor weather and darkness.

There is ample precedence for weather adversely affecting battleship per-

formance—Jutland in 1916 being the best example. Aircraft carriers, de-

signed only to survive gunﬁre from cruisers, were extremely vulnerable to

Technological Change and the United States Navy

184

surface ship attack, especially at night or in bad weather. During 1942, the

Japanese sent their surface ships carrier hunting during three of the four

major battles that year.

U.S. carrier vulnerability to battleships continued

in the Paciﬁc until the last of the two Yamato-class superbattleships was

sunk during the Okinawa campaign in April 1945.

On 7 December 1941, the two “1937” battleships (North Carolina and

Washington) were in service and ﬁfteen fast battleships had been autho-

rized. By 1944, the four “1939” battleships (South Dakota class) and two of

six Iowa-class fast battleships were with the ﬂeet. Five superbattleships of

the Montana class authorized in July 1940 were canceled in July 1943. This

was done to free engineering design assets for the Midway-class large car-

riers (CVB) and to shift material and manufacturing resources needed for

the broad spectrum of ship construction to support the United States’s two-

ocean war.

The nineteen months between Pearl Harbor and cancellation of the

Montana class can be attributed to more than the residual momentum of

the battleship technological paradigm. When the Paciﬁc War began, the

navy had seven aircraft carriers in service. In demonstrating their effec-

tiveness to concentrate what Bradley Fiske termed “mechanical power” to

bear at great distances during the major engagements of 1942—Coral Sea

(May), Midway (June), Eastern Solomons (August), and the Santa Cruz

Islands (October)—only three were left aﬂoat by that autumn.

Aviator

complaints about the lack of offensive use of carriers during 1943–44 by

“black shoe” (nonaviator) admirals under Nimitz tended to minimize these

losses and ignored the desperate night battles fought in the Solomons,

where the effect of carriers was limited.

By the end of the war, the chief of naval operations, Fleet Admiral Ernest

J. King, was attributing the “successful application of our sea power” to the

“ﬂexibility and balanced character of our naval forces.”

Surface forces,

which before the war were deﬁned myopically in terms of the battle ﬂeet

arranged around the battleship, were characterized in 1945 as “fast task

forces comprised of aircraft carriers, fast battleships, cruisers, and destroy-

ers.”

The American experience during the Paciﬁc Ocean War came clos-

est to Admiral William Fullam’s 1924 call for a “three-plane navy” capable

of dominating above, on, and under the sea.

Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King’s ﬂexible and balanced navy of 1945 in-

volved the reﬁnement of aviation during the 1930s and then during almost

four years of war. An important step in the evolution of naval aviation, as

War and a Shifting Technological Paradigm

185

the navy moved toward the balanced ﬂeet of 1945, was the termination of

the promising lighter-than-air ship program.

Streamlining Aviation: The End

of Lighter-Than-Air Ships

Interwar naval aviation was divided between traditional aircraft (classi-

ﬁed by the navy as “heavier-than-air-craft”) and lighter-than-air ships. The

1,000-plane navy act that followed the Morrow Board in 1926 included two

rigid airships and an airship base on the Paciﬁc coast. Airships and regular

aircraft would both serve as scouts in support of the battleship. Airships

were to act as land-based, independent, long-range scouts. Traditional

aircraft scouted at shorter range and operated from aircraft carriers that

required cruisers and destroyers for protection. Rear Admiral William

Moffett, chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, characterized the airship as an

efﬁcient scout cruiser for the battle line: “The rigid airship is primarily a

scouting ship, the purpose of which is to travel long distances at high speed;

carry observers who can see what is going on and report back by radio.”

Unlike carrier-based scout-bombers, which could carry torpedoes and

bombs, airships posed no direct threat to the battleship.

In many ways, the airship was a technology that was familiar, if not com-

forting, to battleship ofﬁcers. As Douglas Robinson and Charles Keller

pointed out, the airship was even perceived, not as an airplane, but as a ﬂy-

ing ship:

the big rigid airship, when compared with the ﬂimsy and dangerous airplanes

of the day, appealed to senior ofﬁcers of Moffett’s generation . . . [who] could

identify with an aerial craft longer than a dreadnought, ponderous and stately

like the ships they had grown up with at sea. As in surface ships, the airship crews

stood watches . . . and it was the ofﬁcer of the deck [not pilot] who gave orders

to the helmsmen in the control car, also called “the bridge.”

The navy’s airships were commissioned ships, for example, USS (United

States Ship) Los Angeles, and the later versions even served as ﬂoating air-

craft carriers, carrying their own complement of ﬁghter planes to defend

themselves during scouting missions. Unfortunately for its advocates, the

navy’s lighter-than-air program ran afoul of funding disputes in the wake of

Technological Change and the United States Navy

186

post-1936 naval rearmament. Ironically, these dreadnoughts of the air were

done in by the leading member of the battleship Gun Club, Admiral

William D. Leahy, and Rear Admiral A. B. Cook, chief of the Bureau of

Aeronautics.

The navy airship program did not have a smooth start. Construction on

the two airships authorized in 1926 was delayed almost two years. Moffett’s

reputation as a politician and a showman—he drove a golden rivet into the

Akron in front of thirty thousand spectators—hindered the airship’s ac-

ceptance into the ﬂeet. Moffett emphasized public relations ﬂights, which

led many ofﬁcers to dismiss the airships as “show” boats of little value.

Akron was as large as a battleship, almost 800 feet long with a maximum

design speed of 72 knots, and carried ﬁve Curtiss ﬁghter/scout planes in a

vertical hangar within her giant hull. Moffett’s early emphasis on publicity

ﬂights delayed installation of Akron’s aircraft recovery equipment and ra-

dio direction ﬁnding gear by the time the ship was called upon to take part

in a scouting exercise in January 1932.

Akron’s introduction to the Scouting Force was less than impressive.

She eventually located part of the ﬂeet, but Akron’s observers missed two

destroyers, which had not failed to identify the huge target.

Akron’s luck

was no better in subsequent exercises. The chief of naval operations, Ad-

miral William V. Pratt, wanted Akron to take part in joint ﬂeet exercises in

the Paciﬁc beginning in March 1932, but Akron’s tail was damaged while

she was being removed from her hanger in Lakehurst, New Jersey. After

two months of repairs, Akron proceeded to the West Coast.

In June 1932 Akron participated in a small portion of the ﬂeet exercises.

Operating near Guadalupe Island, Akron located “enemy” cruisers, which

launched their own observation/scout planes to attack the giant airship.

Without her own aircraft, the airship could only present a passive defense.

Ignoring the fact that Akron was ﬁlled with nonﬂammable helium, the

scout-plane pilots reported that the airship was a sitting duck and could

have easily been destroyed by their machine guns.

Even though Akron worked only two of the thirty-eight days she was de-

ployed to the West Coast, the navy’s assessment remained optimistic. Air-

ships remained attractive as high-speed scouts, especially against the

Japanese navy in the western Paciﬁc. Senior ofﬁcers recognized the vul-

nerability of airships when confronted with the numerous aircraft carried

by an enemy battle line. But in this, the airship was no different than a scout

cruiser; neither was designed to engage strong enemy forces.

War and a Shifting Technological Paradigm

187

Subsequent trials demonstrated Akron’s ability, using two of her em-

barked aircraft, to scout a 250-mile-wide path at a speed of advance of 50

knots. With each aircraft carrying fuel for ﬁve hours, a remarkably large

search area 62,500 nautical miles square could be covered—theoreti-

cally.

Further reﬁnement of scouting techniques in support of the battle

line was cut short when Akron crashed at sea during a storm off New Jer-

sey on 3 April 1933, killing seventy-three out of seventy-six crew members,

including Moffett.

With the energetic and politically savvy Moffett dead, the airship fared

worse at the hands of its detractors. Akron’s sister ship, Macon, was com-

missioned three weeks after the crash of the Akron, but Franklin Roosevelt’s

new chief of naval operations (CNO), Admiral William Standley, was a

staunch member of the “Gun Club” and cool to aviation and airships.

Standley ordered Macon to Sunnyvale to operate with the ﬂeet (now con-

centrated in the Paciﬁc) in order to determine the military value of the air-

ship.

Admiral David F. Sellers, commander of the U.S. Fleet, continu-

ally assigned Macon to narrowly deﬁned tactical scouting missions rather

than to the long-range missions to which she was suited. Through the

remainder of 1933, the airship supposedly was shot down several times by

aircraft, cruisers, and even by the old battleships New York and Texas.

In July 1934 Admiral Sellers condemned Macon for failing “to demon-

strate its usefulness as a unit of the Fleet.” Sellers recommended against

further expenditure of funds for airships and called for seaplanes with a

range of 3,000 miles.

Moffett’s successor, another battleship-sailor-

turned-aviator, Ernest J. King, considered Sellers’s recommendation fool-

ish. No existing aircraft, save the airship, had the capability to carry out a

search over 500 miles from its base.

When the sole surviving ofﬁcer of Akron, Lieutenant Commander Her-

bert Wiley, assumed command of Macon in July 1934, the airship’s perfor-

mance improved markedly. Wiley delighted Franklin Roosevelt when air-

craft from Macon delivered letters and newspapers to the president as he

traveled aboard the cruiser Houston in the Paciﬁc, 1,500 miles from the

nearest land. In ﬂeet exercises, Macon proved its ability to locate opposing

ships and, in a bit of intra-aviation competition, even dodged an attack by

dive bombers from the aircraft carrier Saratoga.

The excellent performance of Macon converted some opponents of the

airship. The General Board was so impressed that it recommended the im-

mediate construction of a new training airship to replace the aging war-

Technological Change and the United States Navy

188

reparation zeppelin, Los Angeles. By the fall of 1934, Rear Admiral King

had convinced Admiral Standley to allow the Macon to perform scouting

services in support of Fleet Problem XVI to be held west of Hawaii.

The prospect of a bright future for the airship ended with the crash of

Macon on 12 February 1935 off California. An exceedingly strong wind gust,

acting on a known structural weak point, ripped off the upper vertical ﬁn.

Some of the metal framing punctured three gas cells in the stern, causing

the tail to drop suddenly. To stay in ﬂight, watchstanders dumped too much

fuel and ballast, causing the airship to motor above her pressure ceiling.

Automatic valves released helium to prevent the gas cells from rupturing

in the low pressure. So much gas was released that the ship could no longer

stay up. Macon struck the sea twenty-four minutes after the ﬁn was lost. The

navy had learned the value of carrying lifesaving equipment from the Akron

disaster: only two men of the eighty-three on board died.

The loss of Macon left the airship’s strategic and tactical capabilities

promising but unproven. The excellent demonstrations of the airship un-

der Commander Wiley had convinced some senior ofﬁcers that the airship

program should be continued. The matter was referred to the General

Board.

Airship veterans such as Commander C. E. Rosendahl defended

the airship, but Rear Admiral A. B. Cook, chief of the Bureau of Aeronau-

tics, was leery of expending limited aviation funds in pursuit of a periph-

eral technological trajectory. Cook told the General Board that “the build-

ing and operation of airships for solely military purposes is not justiﬁed. It

is too costly.” Cook advocated government aid to build commercial airships

with “certain design features” which would allow the ships’ crews to be aug-

mented by “several naval ofﬁcers” in time of war.

In 1937 the General Board recommended the construction of another

airship, equipped with aircraft, to continue the development of these ﬂy-

ing aircraft carriers. President Roosevelt, perhaps recalling Macon’s news-

paper delivery at sea in 1934, approved of the appropriation of $500,000 to

start construction of a Los Angeles replacement in the spring of 1938. But

the House Appropriations Committee deleted the training airship funds on

3 June 1938 since the testimony of senior naval ofﬁcers had not shown “any

desire or need for it.”

Acting Secretary of the Navy Edison warned Roosevelt that “exclusion

of this item sounds the death knell of all lighter-than-air activity and de-

velopment in this country.”

Roosevelt referred the question of new air-

ship construction to Standley’s replacement as CNO, Admiral William D.

War and a Shifting Technological Paradigm

189

Leahy, writing, “we come back to the original question as to whether the

expenditure of three million dollars is justiﬁed at this time, or should we

not spend the three million dollars for some more useful purpose. A year

ago the consensus of opinion in the [Navy] Department was adverse to

building a lighter-than-air ship.” Ignoring the General Board’s recommen-

dation, Roosevelt identiﬁed the “principal pressure” for a new airship as

coming “from a very powerful lobby conducted by the rubber company

[Goodyear] which is seeking to salvage fairly heavy speculative invest-

ment.”

Implicit in Roosevelt’s memo was his opinion that money spent on air-

ships precluded the acquisition of more “useful” technologies. Leahy dis-

agreed with the secretary and assistant secretary of the navy as well as his

own chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, who had advocated a training air-

ship. Leahy advised the president against future naval involvement with air-

ships of any kind, writing that he did “not believe that [the] possible value

of lighter-than-air ships for naval purposes justify at the present time the ex-

penditure of $3,000,000 from the naval appropriation.” Leahy thought that

“all available funds can be used to better advantage for other purposes.”

This was largely in line with Leahy’s 1937 testimony before the House

Naval Affairs Committee in which he reported that the “consensus of opin-

ion of the high command of the Navy has been that up to the present time

rigid airships have not been particularly useful.”

The testimony of aeronautical expert William F. Durand, professor

emeritus from Stanford, contributed to that assessment and helped to turn

the navy away from rigid airships. Durand had led the team investigating

the crash of Macon, and informed the General Board that if the navy were

to build another airship it should be a “ﬂying laboratory” rather than an

“adjunct to the ﬂeet.” The construction of this expensive ﬂying laboratory

would improve American airship design to preclude a repetition of the

Akron and Macon tragedies. Durand told the Board that the Macon crash

“led to the conclusion that the attack of gusts on airships or airship struc-

ture, and particularly the control structures, [indicated that] the seriousness

of the consequences of such an attack have not been altogether fully ap-

preciated.”

Durand’s back-to-the-drawing-board advice dismayed those

who believed the Macon crash could be overcome with a quick-ﬁx.

In addition to the general unwillingness to fund an expensive airship ex-

perimental program, Admiral Leahy saw no pressing need for airships. He

expressed a classic argument for intraspeciﬁc weaponry development and

Technological Change and the United States Navy

190

rejection of any technology not being pursued by other navies: “the Navy

Department up to the present time has not felt it correct to expend our lim-

ited appropriation for construction on rigids, particularly in view of the fact

that no other nation is developing rigid airships for naval use.” However,

Leahy worried—should a future airship gap develop—that “trained per-

sonnel will be dissipated” without rigid airships to operate. He offered no

objection to an amendment to use some of the $15 million reserved for ex-

perimental vessels for rigid airships. Leahy held the line that the need for

battleships to counter the Japanese buildup had ﬁrst claim on nonexperi-

mental funds.

Roosevelt, swayed by Leahy’s opinion, ended the navy’s airship program.

Like the North Carolina battleship contracts, the decision generated polit-

ical complaints from the area most affected—Akron, Ohio. Ohio con-

The battle cruiser origins of the large carriers Lexington and Saratoga are evident in

this October 1941 photograph of Lexington. The long ﬂight deck allowed larger air

wings and development of the concept of “full-deck strikes.” The four 8-inch gun tur-

rets, mounted to keep enemy cruisers at bay, can be seen to the left of the superstruc-

ture and to the right of the funnel. (Naval Historical Center, 80-G-416632)

Image not available.

gressman William Thom appealed to Roosevelt to go ahead with the air-

ship program, as it would mean “much in the way of relief for [the] un-

employment situation in Akron.”

To minimize any political fallout, Roo-

sevelt directed the Navy Department to develop plans and speciﬁcations

for a rigid airship and informed the Ohio congressman that bids would be

invited in the “near future.”

Although legislation was introduced for civil-

ian airships for transoceanic travel in 1940, no airships were ever con-

structed. The navy continued to dabble in blimps, smaller nonrigid airships

primarily used for antisubmarine and coastal patrols. However, the navy

program in rigid airships, despite Roosevelt’s inferences to the Ohio con-

gressional delegation, had ended with the crash of Macon.

In retrospect, the airship should have succeeded within the navy. Its

scouting capability supported the navy’s battleship strategy, and its poten-

tial to scan 62,500 square nautical miles in ﬁve hours versus approximately

6,000 square miles for a scout cruiser gave the airship a marked advantage.

Unlike the aircraft carrier, with its dive bombers and torpedo planes, the

airship also posed no threat to the battleship.

Secretary Edison was correct that the death knell for the airship had

sounded in 1938. But Roosevelt, who took such an interest in the day-to-

day operation of the navy and its technology, was a battleship sailor at heart.

His deference to the CNO, Admiral Leahy, and cancellation of any future

airships led to a reallocation of airship funds to more traditional expendi-

tures on the battle ﬂeet—expenditures considered critical to regain an ad-

vantageous warship ratio vis-à-vis Japan. Leahy’s action lends some cre-

dence to Herbert Hoover’s belief that if the navy’s admirals had their way

they “would spend their entire income on battleships” or at least on tradi-

tional supporting technologies.

However, the end of the airship program

had some help from the chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics. Streamlined

naval aviation increasingly developed into a presumptive anomaly capable

of successfully challenging the battleship technological paradigm.

Improvements in Naval Aviation

During the 1920s, many naval aviators saw themselves ﬁghting the battle-

ship establishment for operational independence as a means to develop a

viable aviation presumptive anomaly.

Their revolutionary spirit contin-

ued through the 1930s, and their efforts became more sophisticated and

Technological Change and the United States Navy

192

fruitful as aviation technology improved. During the interwar years, scout-

ing aircraft evolved into scout bombers and torpedo planes. Dive

bombers—judged more accurate and lethal—came to dominate aviation

tactics.

Air power zealots predicted a future in which aviation would

eclipse other weapons.

However, compared with many army ofﬁcers,

naval aviators tended to be less radical.

Aircraft carriers, like battleships, were limited by naval treaties. Of the

135,000 tons the United States was allowed under the Five-Power Treaty,

the large, battlecruisers-turned-carriers, Lexington and Saratoga, took up

66,000 tons. The navy debate during the 1920s centered on how best to use

the 69,000 tons remaining: build three carriers displacing around 23,000

tons or six smaller carriers displacing half that size. The issue was confused

further by a lack of consensus on how carriers would be employed—for ex-

ample, in close support of the battle line or as advance scouts.

Employ-

ment affected speed requirements, and higher speed drove displacement

up signiﬁcantly. If operated close to the battle line, high speed became very

important since a carrier had to steam into the wind for approximately

thirty minutes to launch her air wing and sixty minutes to land it later. Be-

tween these evolutions, the ship would then have to rejoin the battle ﬂeet

at high speed since she was vulnerable to attack by enemy capital ships and

cruisers. High speed also became necessary for carrier operations inde-

pendent of the battle line.

During the late 1930s, independent carrier op-

erations came to dominate U.S. naval thinking since carriers, tied to the

battle line, were believed to be easy victims of enemy air attack.

The size versus numbers trade-off was reminiscent of the Sims–Mahan

debate over more small mixed-battery ships versus fewer large all-big-gun

battleships. Unfortunately for the bureaus and the General Board during

the 1920s, no experience similar to the Russo-Japanese War offered guid-

ance. In mid-decade, the chief of the Bureau of Construction & Repair,

Rear Admiral J. D. Beuret, observed that smaller carriers would provide

“greater deck area in the aggregate” and “greater hangar space.” Small car-

riers also had the advantage of distributing airplanes “more widely, if that

is a tactical advantage.” He also pointed out that, as with battleships or any

other type of ship, “larger vessels are more seaworthy” (recall the British

squadron lost under Craddock off the Coronelles in 1914).

The lack of operational experience with carriers during the 1920s com-

plicated the decisions about carrier size and the number of aircraft needed.

According to Beuret, “We do not know . . . how many airplanes can be de-

War and a Shifting Technological Paradigm

193