For some reason this just reminded me of what my step dad's father told me Everytime we were in a parking lot "a parking lot and the deck of a aircraft carrier are the 2 most dangerous places in the world"
Honestly the whole thing reminds me of the Matsushima class cruisers, and makes me wonder if there was a common origin point. IMHO if building pairs of carriers like this had become a fashion in other navies, whatever benefits it may have provided, I doubt the practice would have lasted through WWII. The RN and USN both ended up strapped for platforms and operated carriers solo, as well as fielding any units that were available with whichever squadrons were worked up. No matter what they built pre-war, they would have ended up with fleets composed of odd numbers of mismatched designs, aircrews that may or may not have been trained not to fly into the island, and wouldn't really have been able to do properly paired operations anyway, even while paying the penalty for it. The RN would likely have learned their lesson in 1940, but who knows if the USN would have listened. If the practice survived in USN doctrine until Pearl Harbor, I could see the first 2-4 Essexes being ordered as (but likely not completed as) mirrored pairs. But by the time 1942 was over, with any available squadrons being assigned to any available ships, and the massive scaling up of both construction and training programs, I suspect the advantages of standardization would have been embraced fully. Which leaves the question of what those navies would have done with their remaining "off-handed" carriers, if any had survived.
Not to argue with you, you have a lot more information available, especially about Japanese naval practice, but I always understood that the British put the islands on the starboard side because the amount of torque developed by the early rotary engines tended to turn the planes to the left. A problem that WW2 aircraft also suffered from.
It's a mixture of the two to an extent, the torque makes it easier to turn that way, but that only really became a factor in the 1930s when engines were more powerful. It's mostly instinctive human reactions, there was a whole testing program conducted by Wing Commander Cave Brown Cave(from memory his surname) which examined it all in detail when they were designing Eagle & Hermes
@@DrAlexClarke Is that due to holding the stick with the right hand (with the left hand controlling the throttle)? If you imagine holding a stick between your legs with your right hand, and then in a panic you pull it back, you'll also pull it a bit to the left. So if you have mirror image carriers with the island on the left, you should also have mirror image aircraft for it, with the pilots holding the stick with the left hand and controlling the throttle with the right hand? 😃
I think for the US Navy, if they did mirrored pairs, it would have been for the Yorktown-class and perhaps two pairs with Wasp being a Yorktown proper instead of a budget. However it would have died with the Essex-class because there's a problem with mirrored pairs. If you lose one, you almost effectively lose both at least until they either get another pair, or they retrain to fight solo.
I’m thinking the Japanese felt they couldn’t continue building Shokaku-class or Taiho-class. The Hiryu was developed into the Unryu-class and it was felt could be more “mass” produced. In hindsight, I think the Hiryu and Soryu were somewhat fragile ships built for high-speed and to conduct strikes alongside the battle line.
I have to say a similar accident rate would make sense. The island position itself shouldn't directly cause accidents. It will however affect the severity of an accident - slid along the empty port side of the flight deck & stopped vs slid along flight deck, met island, stopped suddenly. It's not something I'd thought about before but it makes sense. It's also a good example of why FMECA is always a good idea rather than FMEA.
Firstly, from the cut at 27:00 to the cut at 38:24 there is a significant background hum in the audio. It seems to me to be RFI. Secondly, if USS Yorktown was the "right hand side" carrier in formation, and thusly had her island to port, perhaps she survives Midway since this may counter some of her severe starboard list. Maybe this provides enough of a margin to get her clear before she is found by I-168.
If the mirrored carriers ever were a thing it would have died out by now. Most countries don't have carriers (or pseudo-carriers), of those that do even fewer have more than one. This directly eliminates how many people would use the idea. Second eliminating factor how often do the countries that have multiple carriers or pseudo-carriers deploy multiple carriers to the same area. Third factor communication capabilities increase. We can communicate much more effectively over range currently then when twin carriers was an idea. In short it removes any benefits of coordination because we can do that from significantly farther away. Even if we didn't want radio coms we could use laser transmission. Fourth factor nukes. Nukes remove any desire to have ships close enough to get the benefits of proximity because it makes the pair immediately more viable for a nuclear attack.
If you really think about it. They are the IJN equivalents of Yorktown and Enterprise. Both are the respective 5th and 6th carriers of their navies. Both were 2nd generation purpose-built fleet carriers. Both were lightly designed due to the treaty limits. Both were built in the mid-late 1930s. Both were part of their navies Carrier Division 2 and led by aggressive Admirals. Tamon Yamaguchi and William F Halsey. Both had their main strike strength in the form of dive bombers, both for carrying well-trained pilots and effective aircraft like the Val and Dauntless. And in the case of Soryu, Hiryu and Yorktown, they were lost at Midway. The only thing missing is Hiryu surviving the battle and going on to be as big a menace for the US Navy (along with Shokaku and Zuikaku) as Enterprise was for the IJN
Instead of a full mirrored paid could see a mirrored second haul that would be linked at sea. Double everything up in mirror design but depend on a common island (like a sidecar designed carrier that is a stripped down to hanger and flight decks to double the force but is in effect more like adding on to the parent carrier) Would share much of the combat control in the side ship.
Okay, 'mirrored pairs?' Assuming this refers to always pairing sister ships together, such as Shokaku and Zuikaku or Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, the answer is yes...if you limit the timeframe to Drachinifel's unwillingness to go beyond the Korean War, where all American and British capital ships operating off the Korean Coast were mirrors, in the sense that the RN CVs were exclusively 1942 Design Light Fleet carriers and the USN BBs and CVs were exclusively Iowa-class and Essex-class (Midway-class carriers were the heart of the USN's nuclear deterrent until the first supercarrier was commissioned in 1955 and the first SSBN was commissioned in 1959, and thus the CVBs were kept far from Korea during 1950-53). This was even more prevalent during the second half of WWII in the Pacific, where the Fast Carrier Task Force's TF37/57 and TF38/58, with the exception of oddballs of USS Saratoga and USS Enterprise, the RN typically pairing 2-4 Illustrious-class carriers with an Implacable-class carrier escorted by two or more King George V-class battleships while the USN typically paired two Essex-class CVs and two Independence-class CVLs per each of the Fast Carrier Task Force's four task groups escorted by as many U.S. fast battleships that were available. But the experience since 1953 tells a very different tale. Vietnam featured TF77 in combat with supercarriers operating alongside WWII-era carriers for the first time, and the three carriers operating at Yankee Station regularly included an Essex-class carrier all the way up until 1973, with USS Ticonderoga and USS Oriskany remaining attack carriers until being decommissioned in 1973 and 1976 due to the conversions being made on both to operate A-7s in place of the venerable A-1s. The fact that both Essex-class USS Oriskany caught fire in 1966 and the supercarrier USS Forrestal caught fire in 1967 at Yankee Station shows how important it became that U.S. carriers could be interoperable across classes, doesn't it? The necessity of Yankee Station-type interoperability between carrier classes became even more apparent in the 1980s, where the British Task Force's ability to operate HMS Hermes and HMS Invincible together almost seemlessly was a testament to the Royal Navy foresight, though the lack of an available third carrier such as HMS Bulwark or (better yet) the Audacious-class HMS Ark Royal would have turned a Yankee Station-style fire into a total failure for the British effort to retake the Falklands instead of a temporary setback as Oriskany and Forrestal's fires did not measurably affect Operation Rolling Thunder. Then there is the U.S. Navy's Battle Force Zulu, which almost purposefully seems to prove the USN's carriers were fully interoperable across classes. Its three major operations were twice in the Gulf of Sidra in 1986, where Midway-clas USS Coral Sea, Forrestal-class USS Saratoga and Kitty Hawk-class USS America formed Task Force 60 to launch Operation Prairie Fire on 24 March 1986 and three weeks later USS Enterprise CVN-65 relieved Saratoga in time for Task Force 60 to hit Libya again with Operation El Dorado Canyon. Most famously, Battle Force Zulu participated in Operation Desert Storm with four of its six carriers operating in close formation in the famous photo: flagship USS Midway, Forrestal-class USS Ranger, Kitty Hawk-class USS America and Nimitz-class USS Theodore Roosevelt. To be fair, Battle Force Zulu had a 'mirror,' as Ranger's sister USS Saratoga was also on station along with JFK-class USS John F. Kennedy. Nevertheless, five classes of fleet carrier operated in combat together in 1991, demonstrating that interoperablity is definitely not class-specific.
I dont argue about them being a class. Between being almost literal mirrors of each other because of the islands, and reinforcements made to the ship. If anything she might be considered a sub class or given her design overhaul more like a US navys destroyer blocks or flights. As for anyone else building miror image cariers, i dont realy see it, the RN could not be sure of having matching pairs never mind its existing mix of carriers, anf my impression was was as likely to operate single cariers as oposed to close in pairs and groups early on as they tried to figure out how to best deploy them.
Between Japans wargames that we know about and the fact that the US Navy kept blindsiding them, (never mind their entire consept of distant suport which has me wondering if all thoes scattered units were activly trying to avoid eachother instead of providing even "distant suport") I have to wonder if the reality was that the IJN was not realy that competent.
I don't see how it would have made sense for the RN - they needed to be able to send their ships all over the world as and when required. In the worst case you end up with 2 port side carriers having to work together. The only thing I could think of would be something like an RFA set up so she could maximise the transfer to a CV when alongside the island for maximum vision for both bridge crews. Failing that a guard ship where you can concentrate all your weapons and armour on the seaward side which is (hopefully) the side the enemy has to engage
Japanese training is watch and learn, so what you may see as lack of training is not since Japanese Pilots would watch some Hanshi land, the teacher would now believe they have train the student.
Most underated channel on youtube
For some reason this just reminded me of what my step dad's father told me Everytime we were in a parking lot "a parking lot and the deck of a aircraft carrier are the 2 most dangerous places in the world"
That was great, thanks. Surely they must rank high in the Miss Warship pageant.
Honestly the whole thing reminds me of the Matsushima class cruisers, and makes me wonder if there was a common origin point.
IMHO if building pairs of carriers like this had become a fashion in other navies, whatever benefits it may have provided, I doubt the practice would have lasted through WWII. The RN and USN both ended up strapped for platforms and operated carriers solo, as well as fielding any units that were available with whichever squadrons were worked up. No matter what they built pre-war, they would have ended up with fleets composed of odd numbers of mismatched designs, aircrews that may or may not have been trained not to fly into the island, and wouldn't really have been able to do properly paired operations anyway, even while paying the penalty for it.
The RN would likely have learned their lesson in 1940, but who knows if the USN would have listened. If the practice survived in USN doctrine until Pearl Harbor, I could see the first 2-4 Essexes being ordered as (but likely not completed as) mirrored pairs. But by the time 1942 was over, with any available squadrons being assigned to any available ships, and the massive scaling up of both construction and training programs, I suspect the advantages of standardization would have been embraced fully.
Which leaves the question of what those navies would have done with their remaining "off-handed" carriers, if any had survived.
Not to argue with you, you have a lot more information available, especially about Japanese naval practice, but I always understood that the British put the islands on the starboard side because the amount of torque developed by the early rotary engines tended to turn the planes to the left.
A problem that WW2 aircraft also suffered from.
It's a mixture of the two to an extent, the torque makes it easier to turn that way, but that only really became a factor in the 1930s when engines were more powerful. It's mostly instinctive human reactions, there was a whole testing program conducted by Wing Commander Cave Brown Cave(from memory his surname) which examined it all in detail when they were designing Eagle & Hermes
@@DrAlexClarke Is that due to holding the stick with the right hand (with the left hand controlling the throttle)? If you imagine holding a stick between your legs with your right hand, and then in a panic you pull it back, you'll also pull it a bit to the left. So if you have mirror image carriers with the island on the left, you should also have mirror image aircraft for it, with the pilots holding the stick with the left hand and controlling the throttle with the right hand? 😃
I think for the US Navy, if they did mirrored pairs, it would have been for the Yorktown-class and perhaps two pairs with Wasp being a Yorktown proper instead of a budget. However it would have died with the Essex-class because there's a problem with mirrored pairs. If you lose one, you almost effectively lose both at least until they either get another pair, or they retrain to fight solo.
I’m thinking the Japanese felt they couldn’t continue building Shokaku-class or Taiho-class. The Hiryu was developed into the Unryu-class and it was felt could be more “mass” produced. In hindsight, I think the Hiryu and Soryu were somewhat fragile ships built for high-speed and to conduct strikes alongside the battle line.
I have to say a similar accident rate would make sense. The island position itself shouldn't directly cause accidents. It will however affect the severity of an accident - slid along the empty port side of the flight deck & stopped vs slid along flight deck, met island, stopped suddenly.
It's not something I'd thought about before but it makes sense. It's also a good example of why FMECA is always a good idea rather than FMEA.
Firstly, from the cut at 27:00 to the cut at 38:24 there is a significant background hum in the audio. It seems to me to be RFI.
Secondly, if USS Yorktown was the "right hand side" carrier in formation, and thusly had her island to port, perhaps she survives Midway since this may counter some of her severe starboard list. Maybe this provides enough of a margin to get her clear before she is found by I-168.
If the mirrored carriers ever were a thing it would have died out by now. Most countries don't have carriers (or pseudo-carriers), of those that do even fewer have more than one. This directly eliminates how many people would use the idea. Second eliminating factor how often do the countries that have multiple carriers or pseudo-carriers deploy multiple carriers to the same area. Third factor communication capabilities increase. We can communicate much more effectively over range currently then when twin carriers was an idea. In short it removes any benefits of coordination because we can do that from significantly farther away. Even if we didn't want radio coms we could use laser transmission. Fourth factor nukes. Nukes remove any desire to have ships close enough to get the benefits of proximity because it makes the pair immediately more viable for a nuclear attack.
If you really think about it. They are the IJN equivalents of Yorktown and Enterprise.
Both are the respective 5th and 6th carriers of their navies.
Both were 2nd generation purpose-built fleet carriers.
Both were lightly designed due to the treaty limits.
Both were built in the mid-late 1930s.
Both were part of their navies Carrier Division 2 and led by aggressive Admirals. Tamon Yamaguchi and William F Halsey.
Both had their main strike strength in the form of dive bombers, both for carrying well-trained pilots and effective aircraft like the Val and Dauntless.
And in the case of Soryu, Hiryu and Yorktown, they were lost at Midway.
The only thing missing is Hiryu surviving the battle and going on to be as big a menace for the US Navy (along with Shokaku and Zuikaku) as Enterprise was for the IJN
Instead of a full mirrored paid could see a mirrored second haul that would be linked at sea. Double everything up in mirror design but depend on a common island (like a sidecar designed carrier that is a stripped down to hanger and flight decks to double the force but is in effect more like adding on to the parent carrier) Would share much of the combat control in the side ship.
BZ, thanks!
Okay, 'mirrored pairs?' Assuming this refers to always pairing sister ships together, such as Shokaku and Zuikaku or Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, the answer is yes...if you limit the timeframe to Drachinifel's unwillingness to go beyond the Korean War, where all American and British capital ships operating off the Korean Coast were mirrors, in the sense that the RN CVs were exclusively 1942 Design Light Fleet carriers and the USN BBs and CVs were exclusively Iowa-class and Essex-class (Midway-class carriers were the heart of the USN's nuclear deterrent until the first supercarrier was commissioned in 1955 and the first SSBN was commissioned in 1959, and thus the CVBs were kept far from Korea during 1950-53).
This was even more prevalent during the second half of WWII in the Pacific, where the Fast Carrier Task Force's TF37/57 and TF38/58, with the exception of oddballs of USS Saratoga and USS Enterprise, the RN typically pairing 2-4 Illustrious-class carriers with an Implacable-class carrier escorted by two or more King George V-class battleships while the USN typically paired two Essex-class CVs and two Independence-class CVLs per each of the Fast Carrier Task Force's four task groups escorted by as many U.S. fast battleships that were available. But the experience since 1953 tells a very different tale.
Vietnam featured TF77 in combat with supercarriers operating alongside WWII-era carriers for the first time, and the three carriers operating at Yankee Station regularly included an Essex-class carrier all the way up until 1973, with USS Ticonderoga and USS Oriskany remaining attack carriers until being decommissioned in 1973 and 1976 due to the conversions being made on both to operate A-7s in place of the venerable A-1s. The fact that both Essex-class USS Oriskany caught fire in 1966 and the supercarrier USS Forrestal caught fire in 1967 at Yankee Station shows how important it became that U.S. carriers could be interoperable across classes, doesn't it?
The necessity of Yankee Station-type interoperability between carrier classes became even more apparent in the 1980s, where the British Task Force's ability to operate HMS Hermes and HMS Invincible together almost seemlessly was a testament to the Royal Navy foresight, though the lack of an available third carrier such as HMS Bulwark or (better yet) the Audacious-class HMS Ark Royal would have turned a Yankee Station-style fire into a total failure for the British effort to retake the Falklands instead of a temporary setback as Oriskany and Forrestal's fires did not measurably affect Operation Rolling Thunder.
Then there is the U.S. Navy's Battle Force Zulu, which almost purposefully seems to prove the USN's carriers were fully interoperable across classes. Its three major operations were twice in the Gulf of Sidra in 1986, where Midway-clas USS Coral Sea, Forrestal-class USS Saratoga and Kitty Hawk-class USS America formed Task Force 60 to launch Operation Prairie Fire on 24 March 1986 and three weeks later USS Enterprise CVN-65 relieved Saratoga in time for Task Force 60 to hit Libya again with Operation El Dorado Canyon.
Most famously, Battle Force Zulu participated in Operation Desert Storm with four of its six carriers operating in close formation in the famous photo: flagship USS Midway, Forrestal-class USS Ranger, Kitty Hawk-class USS America and Nimitz-class USS Theodore Roosevelt. To be fair, Battle Force Zulu had a 'mirror,' as Ranger's sister USS Saratoga was also on station along with JFK-class USS John F. Kennedy. Nevertheless, five classes of fleet carrier operated in combat together in 1991, demonstrating that interoperablity is definitely not class-specific.
I dont argue about them being a class. Between being almost literal mirrors of each other because of the islands, and reinforcements made to the ship. If anything she might be considered a sub class or given her design overhaul more like a US navys destroyer blocks or flights.
As for anyone else building miror image cariers, i dont realy see it, the RN could not be sure of having matching pairs never mind its existing mix of carriers, anf my impression was was as likely to operate single cariers as oposed to close in pairs and groups early on as they tried to figure out how to best deploy them.
Between Japans wargames that we know about and the fact that the US Navy kept blindsiding them, (never mind their entire consept of distant suport which has me wondering if all thoes scattered units were activly trying to avoid eachother instead of providing even "distant suport") I have to wonder if the reality was that the IJN was not realy that competent.
I don't see how it would have made sense for the RN - they needed to be able to send their ships all over the world as and when required. In the worst case you end up with 2 port side carriers having to work together.
The only thing I could think of would be something like an RFA set up so she could maximise the transfer to a CV when alongside the island for maximum vision for both bridge crews.
Failing that a guard ship where you can concentrate all your weapons and armour on the seaward side which is (hopefully) the side the enemy has to engage
Hiryu gains nearly 9% displacement over her sister.
I agree with you.
Japanese training is watch and learn, so what you may see as lack of training is not since Japanese Pilots would watch some Hanshi land, the teacher would now believe they have train the student.
You can leave one at home, don't need a crew for it.
Chiralty.
Are you on Rumble I am getting sick or RUclips pushing the replacement of life with A.I. on every vid.
Your book is getting low on stock now btw.
I think it's on Kindle now. One sec
Yes it's on my phone and pad
@@drakenred6908 Nice.
It’s on iBooks as well.
Does this mean a 3rd edition with additional material from visiting preserved examples is pending????!
Bravo Zulu.