My dad was an Aviation Machinist Mate in a CASU unit during the war. He was stationed at Pearl Harbor and San Diego. It's good to see them getting some recognition here.
It is nice to see some of the lesser known units get some credit. My grandfather was an aircraft mechanic on the USS Santee an escort carrier. Started the war doing anti-submarine duties in the North Atlantic, was involved in the attack on Vichy France and invasion of North Africa. Also escorted Roosevelt on the way to North Africa. They went over to the Pacific and were involved in many of the major battles there. He was nearly killed by the first kamikaze of the war. Though if it was first is somewhat debatable.
The mind boggles to think of the sheer number of trained men able to work on these machines. It would be interesting to learn what these men did after the war. how many, for instance who went into the domestic aviation business.
My dad flew an F6F-5 with VF-19 aboard the USS Lexington in the summer and fall of 1944. In October, '44, his plane was shot up by Japanese AAA fire twice. Once it was a 20mm hit on the prop hub which drained most of the oil. The engine brought him back to CV-16, was replaced, and the plane went back into service. The second time, his plane was hit at least twice (engine & port wing root) by Japanese 40mm AAA. Mangled plane still brought dad back to the Lexington. It was deemed "not repairable," and pushed over the side into the Pacific, to be replaced by a new F6F-5 in a day or two. The "throwaway" culture existed by the autumn of 1944…
@@robertoroberto9798 All the major combatant nations in WW 2 used a 40mm AAA gun (I don't know if they were all modeled after the Swedish Bofors that we (U.S.) and the British used, but they were 40 mm). The squadron history labels it a 40mm as well. Gun caliber aside, my point was that my dad's "unrepairable" plane was easily replaced.
@@rayschoch5882 The only Japanese gun to use 40mm shells was the Ho-301 that was optionally mounted on the Ki-44 and Ki-45. There’s a slight chance that he was unlucky enough to be hit by one though the chances are slim as they’re subsonic and more like 40mm grenades. I have a better feeling he was hit by a 20mm or 30mm shell that blew a big enough hole that the ground crew mistook it for 40mm.
I remember reading somewhere of an account of a New Zealand airgroup that was moved to an American base. The pilots were walking through a row of Corsairs admiring the low hours and sharp still dark factory paint jobs when an American ground crew chief asked them what the hell they were doing. After explaining how much nicer the planes were to their worn Corsairs he just laughed and held up a clipboard. They were airframe considered having too many hours being shipped out to be refurbished and replaced. After the shock left the faces of the Kiwis whose own planes had more than triple the hours, they began bartering out how paperwork could get mixed up and their planes accidentally get shipped off instead. 😂
Outstanding Chris. Few people ever talk about logistics. My grandfather was in logistics for the army during WWII. He always stressed the need for such. I think as a result, the man was always prepared nearly anything that came up, even late in life. Cheers
@@michaellangevin3943 The Duke of Wellington also planned his campaigns around logistics. If his soldiers stole from the Spanish people, as the French had done, it would have caused a large strain on their Spanish allies. Instead he carried gold to purchase supplies when his stocks were running low.
One takeaway from this video is that not only did the US have material and productive superiority, but also employed superior organizational skills and advanced planning to better leverage that material advantage.
The only major aspect of an industrial war the US was clearly inferior, I suppose, was the willingness to spend resources on the war - until Japan kindly outraged the whole country with a surprise attack.
One big factor for instance at Midway was top-flight damage control. But the real answer is simply: infinite amounts of fuel, spares, and crew. Japan was massively constrained in all categories. People only count the big carriers but the US ended the war with something like 90 escort carriers, absolutely insane.
Yes, and those escort carriers would often serve as auxiliary air fields in ferrying new aircraft to the front lines, which goes back to the importance of logistics.
People who obsess about who had the best planes, tanks, ships, guns, etc. tend to overlook the reality that the war was actually won by the side that had all of the bulldozers.
Didn't Yamamoto mention something about having about 6 months to accomplish Japan's goals in the Pacific before American industrial capacity became an insurmountable problem?
Having spent time in America well before the war, Yamamoto was very well aware of America's industrial might. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he said "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve ". He said this upon learning that the attack happened 55 minutes before the Japanese ultimatum had been presented to the American government and knew how it would infuriate the government and the people of America.
He did. One of few senior Japanese officials (military or non-military) who spent time on the ground in US and knew it relatively well. Weird. The Japanese officials surely knew they must know their enemy (Sun Tzu, Art of War) in order to fight against and win. But they didn't know their enemy, US, that well.
Indeed; you're right. He'd toured the U.S. prior and had seen it's potential. U.S. industrial capacity was underutilized in the '30s as a result of the depression, and Yamamoto had seen that. But not only was it larger and better resourced than Japan's, but it was more advanced as well. On this latter point I feel the USA deserves a bit of recognition beyond what I think is sometimes an unfair assessment of dumb factories burying adversaries under a mountain of material. A U.S. factory was more advanced than many Axis ones (both German and Japanese), both in terms of advanced tooling, but also in how they were used. Continuous improvement and quality control from concepts like the Shewhart cycle gave U.S. manufacturing not just a lead on numbers of factories, but on a per-factory basis too. A large material advantage turned into a gargantuan one. When I think of those from the U.S. who made brilliant moves to contribute to the Allied victory, names like Demming, Kaiser, and Bush come to mind.
@@seanhynds8482 _After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he said "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve "._ That quote is an invention of the movie _Tora! Tora! Tora!_ as there is no evidence Yamamoto ever said such a thing. It is true he said that he expected to run wild in the Pacific for the first six months or year of the war, but after that he had no expectation of a Japanese victory in the war.
I think it’s worth mentioning that the Japanese believed that a single decisive blow could dealt against the US navy and would result in the USA suing for peace. This is partly because in 1905 Japan had successfully employed this tactic against Russia which was a world power and won the Russo-Japanese War. What they failed to take into account was the full potential of modern war machines and the differences between 1900s Russia and 1940s US.
Mahan style doctrine! 😃 It didn't work... The U.S. pacific fleet actually did run out of operational CV's and BB's. So much so they had to borrow one from the UK just to keep an operational CV in the Pacific. Then the Essex Zerg swarm began!! 🙆♂️
Admiral Yamamoto, a Harvard graduate who knew US very much, warned Japan that a victory at Pearl Harbor would give 12-18 months to Japan to build a good defensive position - after that, US industry would simply steamroll Japan. What the Japanese did not understand was that a surprise attack on the US would simply convince it of the necessity to destroy Imperial Japan.
According to Japanese history textbooks, they defeated Russia in 1905, then 40 years passed where nothing happened, after which the US nuked them for some reason.
Being militarist fascists, the government of Japan by the late 30s was obsessed with war. Faced with a challenge that could not be accommodated in rational logic, they just adopted a 'strategy' based on wishful thinking. Can't happen today? It happened in Iraq/Afghanistan 20 years ago.
Great video on an important topic. My grandfather worked as a machinist mate in the Pacific during the Second World War, and I can see how important was his role in repairing engines. BTW - the interior organization of your videos with sub-titles is truly awesome and informative.
If Gramps was a Machinist Mate, he was part of the ship's company and worked on the ships main engines, turbogenerators, distilling plants, etc. Unless you meant Aviation Machinist Mate?
@seafodder6129 He was never stationed aboard a ship but worked at a repair facility near New Guinea. He must have been a mechanic for aircraft. Thanks for the correction.
As a Navy AMH2 in the 90s, its good to see that maintenance and technicians are highlighted. For every 1 pilot, there are more than a dozen of us making it possible.
Simply put, Japan lacked the essential resources it needed to sustain a war with America. Even Admiral Yamamoto knew this. He knew once the American industry got going, Japan couldn't win, and the battle of Midway was a clear sign that it was the beginning of the end for the Japanese navy having lost all but one carrier and not having the resources or the industry to replace them like America could.
There's that, plus I honestly think the IJN's Doctrine doomed them as well. For them, one must stick to their role and were punished for going outside of it. Then their Damage Control.... Granted, some ships had decent ones but from what I read, it was a very small group. For the USN, everyone was trained in damage control (and/or Gunnery).
Strictly speaking Japan still had two fleet carriers and three light carriers after Midway. Admittedly Shokaku was in dry dock and Zuikaku missed Midway due to her aircraft losses at the Coral Sea but things weren't quite as desperate as you suggest. At that point.
I read an article on Wikipedia that one reason why Hitler declared war on America was that he thought it would take us 10 years to get out war production up to speed. Instead, within 6 months were fully converted over to wartime production, and it was then just a matter of time. . Apparently the Japanese thought so too.
@@katrinapaton5283The problem is that, while Zuikaku's planes and pilots were fine, and while Shoukaku as a ship was fine, the IJN refused to transfer Zuikaku's plane to Shoukaku, out of insistence on tying squadrons to their "home" carriers. So instead of having an operational fleet carrier complete with aircraft, Japan had none
Japan could, and did, replace carrriers throughout the war. But quality of the vessels themselves progressively declined, and they could not replace the trained aircrews that were lost, in either quantity or quality. They hit limitations (via the aerial mining campaign) on fuel supply, at which point the ships could not sail, the pilots themselves not train. And then the experienced cadre were lost, factories that built the planes got bombed, the ships were sunk while at anchor, and training became impossible as USAAF and USN fighters dominated the skies over Japan itself. Japan started on an artificial high, and took early gains while the Allies struggled to regroup, but then after simply could not keep up with the ability of the USA to simply out-produce in every area, while the IJN was steadily and irreversibly degraded beyond the point of any chance of recovery....much the same happened with the Luftwaffe, though it was also a much longer war in Europe.
I love learning about US WW2 logistic capabilities. We got floating airports out the wazoo, floating mechanic shops, and even floating ice cream factories! EDIT: Can't forget about the floating fuel stations either. 😂
As someone who works at an aircraft component overhaul center and having worked on landing gear overhauls and now on engine components, just seeing all the work needed to overhaul these components really drives home how intricate and important such advanced planned is. Gotta plan out the facilities, the tooling, the labor and so on. Just to overhaul things on time when they come in every ten years. Now imagine that for the armed forces on such a large scale at war.... truly mind boggling. Learned a lot from this video, truly the stuff never talked about. But the impact is obvious. Fantastic video Chris.
The US Navy has sadly forgotten a few of these lessons in recent times; fleet readiness has hit low ebb in recent years due to extensive downsizing and shuttering of naval shipyards around the US, a process which has been quietly happening since the end of Cold War tensions… The Navy of 2023 is in a similarly dire state of readiness to fight a naval war on the Pacific as it was in 1933.
This isn't the first or only time the US Navy has been at a poor state in the last century - the Navy was in a bad state at the end of the '70s and the beginning of the '80s with rampant drug use and a downsizing, aging fleet. The Reagan administration's concerted focus on military spending helped the Navy surge back to readiness for the end of the Cold War and the decade afterward, but the Navy's been back-burner on the budget since military planners turned their attentions to counterinsurgency operations instead of peer competition post-9/11. The question is: will we see SecNav and Congress work to pull the Navy's readiness back or will we continue the backslide into naval weakness...? Time (and politics) will tell.
We screwed up when the first genuine socialist, Mikhail Gorbachev, became head of the USSR and our socialism-hating 1% managed to NOT offer him enough support. Now Putin is as bad as the worst of the Tsars.
I mean Japan lost Midway, but for a month and a half the only operational fleet carrier in the U.S. fleet was Ranger in the Atlantic. Everything else was sunk, except Enterprise and Saratoga getting repaired. They actually borrowed a CV from the UK complete with crew just to keep a capital ship in the Pacific active.
They made the same mistake by their buddies, they talked to much we were listening. No code is uncrackable. It also helps to have a little luck. But the major mistake made by the Japanese was keeping their experienced men fighting until dead. It's very important to bring seasoned battle hardened men home to train the replacements.
They presumed our culture was cowardly and that democracy was our weakness: by intimidating the people they hoped there would be enough pressure on politicians to force a favorable peace treaty early. Needless to say, that backfired massively.
Great video, full of not often thought of issues that are war winning or losers. You hear about the fact that Japan could build Great fighters in 1945 but the good pilots are dead and haven't been replaced. I never thought of the depot level maintenance part of a campaign. Keep up the great work.
I don't believe American troops or commanders are, on average, any better than anyone else's trained troops, but they have the *best* logistics in the world. My grandfather fought at Kokoda, and he was immensely grateful for US involvement. To quote him, "Thank God for the Americans."
Thank you very, very much, Chris. This is hugely informative and insightful. It almost seems as if military professionals would really want to focus on logistics.
I am a huge fan of Naval air, especially Pacific World War II operations. I’ve watched endless videos about Navy operations in the South Pacific, but yours was probably the most informative of explaining why the US won the war! Thank you for an excellent video! Go NAVY!
Royal Navy had HMS Unicorn, HMS Pioneer and HMS Perseus, light carriers with extra hanger space equipped to undertake complete overhauls at sea or transport aircraft back to land, they each carried two smaller lighters (barges) to ferry aircraft which couldn't fly to the maintenance carrier and to transport bulky items like engines.
That's an aspect I was a bit curious about: the transfer of non-flyable aircraft. The only option I could think up was two ships coming alongside each other & craning it over. But that felt way too difficult. A small barge makes much more sense.
Towards the end of the war, it often became more practical to simply shove damaged planes over the side rather than repair them. The photo at 5:00 gave me a jolt; a first glance, the sailor in front looks a lot like my dad.
My grandfather was a land based armorer in the USN, unfortunately he died when I was really little but I believe he was attached to VF-17 in the Solomons at one point
My Dad was on a PT Boat that participated in Leyte Gulf & Midway - largest Naval Battles in History, possibly as forward Scouts, etc.... He also played Cards with JFK. I have Original 1940's Newspaper clippings of his little Boat sinking a Destroyer and I even believe a Cruiser, although would have to recheck that. He also mentioned that his one Boat destroyed several hundred barges. He mentions circling and taunting large Japanese ships very close-by and because a PT was tiny, the larger Boats guns could not hit them. He also mentioned being attacked after going through very narrow straits between Islands. -@@kenedmisten7995
Brilliant video: a crucial and frequently-overlooked element of the Pacific war. It would be fascinating, but challenging, to compare the Japanese approach to these problems. I suspect it was drastically different.
Nice vid again! Cool footage too of Clark Gable during his service as an aerial gunner (even though he was in the USAAF and not the USN) that I had never seen before.
I love the still photo at 11:10 where it can be seen clearly some bloke repairing a piano in the background. Obviously music in the bar was considered essential at that juncture.
Great Video Chris! Next, you should do one on the Naval base at Ulithi, which was a tiny spec of land (not even an island?), that became the largest Naval base in the Pacific during WWII almost overnight. Little known by the public, but a massive feat of logistics.
There was a lecture on exactly this topic recently on the excellent WW2TV RUclips channel. I am sure Chris will not mind me plugging this excellent resource here.
Excellent video as always. I am curious as to how the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm built up their sustainment capacity. HMS Unicorn was a proof of them realising the need to sustain the air groups. And RAF also had been focusing on a system where repairs and training of aircrew and ground crew were set up "for the long haul". But how did the Fleet Air Arm achieve this? Especially considering they only became part of the navy again in 1936 and had to play hard catch up after years of neglect and being down prioritized by the RAF?
HMS Unicorn as you mention was begun before the war but her completion was delayed by it entering service in Mar 43, she was joined by two other dedicated light carriers HMS Pioneer completed Feb 45 and HMS Perseus Oct 45, Perseus missed the war by a few months and after a period of mothball then served as the test ship for the development of the first steam catapult while Pioneer was transferred to the Pacific fleet in the build up to the invasion of Japan and got a couple of months service repairing aircraft for the invasion fleet before then being set to Hong Kong to rebuild the Territories telecoms, electricity and public transport infrastructure. In addition to dedicated ship tenders the Royal Navy started the war with one fleet repair ship (mobile workshops) and 12 more were converted during the war from mostly cruise liners, but also a WW1 carrier, a refrigerated cargo ship and a destroyer, they also usually doubled up as troop transports for their accommodation capacity.
Not going to lie. The way you made the flow of this video really made me anticipate for the US Navy to throw away "worn out" aircraft. Just brilliant! 👏
I think you may be missing an interesting nuance. But the only evidence I can furnish comes from a US Army source. The source is an unpublished book titled "Final Report of the U.S. Army Service Forces." The book was dated 1949, I believe I recall. It could be found in the Army-Navy Library in the Pentagon. Reading it in 1983 left a deep and lasting impression on a young logistician (me). We have to imagine a logistics operation of staggering scope and detail, managed entirely by hard copy (paper). It was impossible to quickly supply essential parts to Army units scattered across vast oceans and land masses who were in constant and unpredictable motion. And so 'push logistics' were used. I'll explain that term in a moment. The Army Service Forces (ASF) provided acquisition, distribution, manuals and more to support the Army at home and overseas. At the start of the war, it was a small outfit headed by a lieutenant Colonel. Nowadays the same responsibility warrants a four star general. 'Push Logistics' involves trying to guess where the troops will be months in advance, and guessing what they'll need, and organizing shipments of all classes of supply to those locations. Well, it worked, sort of. But not very well. Mountains of crates were unloaded onto beaches and in ports, often enough where the troops *were,* as opposed to where they *are.* Those mountains of crates were often left out in the open, in mud. Labels vanished. With a war to fight, those mountains of supply were often abandoned. We saw the same thing happen in Viet Nam. Vast, vast stores of irretrievable supplies stacked to the heavens, nobody knowing what, exactly, was there. It might as well have been shipped to the moon, for all the good those supplies did for the troops. So if an urgent requirement needed to be solved fast, we did the same thing thing in Nam that the Army did in WWII. We flew parts from the States marked 'urgent,' or we pillaged hanger queens. I suspect the Navy did the same thing during WWII: they pushed supplies forward based on forecasts that were rapidly overcome by events; and when production of airframes attained an oversupply, hanger queens were the fastest, easiest way to keep airframes in the air. They probably flew urgent parts, too, but you can't keep a war machine that big generously supplied by air. Doesn't work. Computers and communications today have changed the math for logistics, and the monumental cost of high-tech weapons systems have made 'push logistics' fall out of favor. Now it's almost all 'pull logistics.' The warfighter, not rear echelon weenies like me, decides what to demand. Mostly. But it's probably inevitable that if we get into a serious war with a near-peer, the weenies will hit the panic button and try to push. And hanger queens aren't going to go away.
Interesting information on how they overlooked logistics, in spite of transitioning weapons platforms in the midst of war. We see a similar obliviousness to the need for trained people in energy transitions deemed the equivalent of wartime mobilization: we lack people to mine and refine critical minerals, build out power grids, and etc. Plus ca change…
Excellent video Christoph. Fascinating history. Thank you. I have ordered Mr Fisher’s book plus Cold War Test Pilot, Brown Water Navy and a book about Schnellbootes, using your discount code.
I have long known how important all this from reading the history of Panzer units on the Eastern Front during W W II. This is still a good review of this subject in terms of the USN.
One of the reasons the navy could sustain a carrier war was massive aircraft production numbers. At sea if a repair took too long, they’d make the decision to roll the aircraft over the side! Because they knew they’d get more and better aircraft soon
My brother-in-law, Tom Collins, was a "T-5" enlisted Marine. He started his war at Midway, immediately after the battle. VMF-223 was a reinforcement unit for that place. As an "enlisted aviator", Tom flew hundreds of hours "breaking in" overhauled engines. Ultimately, he was used to fly resupply missions to Iwo Jima, flying wounded out at dawn. He loved the SBD but the F4U was his favorite.
Having been a Marine aviation repair tech in the 1980's this is a great presentation of aviation history. Maintenance never gets enough credit. The folks I worked with were incredibly smart and dedicated. While deployed on the USS Ranger we took a lot of pride in helping to maintain aircraft uptime. I have always admired the Navy and Marine ingenuity, perseverance and creativity in performing maintenance on incredibly complex aircraft while at sea. Now I can appreciate the origins of the sea borne maintenance organizations.
Drachinifel dives into this in his Damage Control video, it's worth it for going deep into this one specific area and how the two sides approached it differently.
This video illustrates the reason my grandfather who was a tool & die maker for an aircraft manufacturer was told that he would never be allowed anywhere near combat and to stay in the job he had.
Have to remeber that usa also surplied uk (and well canada and austrailia that still was part of uk) as well as ussr with engines as well as some airframes. By 1942 ussr aircraft engine production was over run and the only engine they could get for quite a while was via convoys. Uk also had a lack of engines, so usa had to peoduce for both of them. The had to ramp up production by a insane anount. Granted, this ramping up started alreddy in 1939
Canada and Australia were not part of the UK, they were member nations of the greater British Empire. Canada was confederated as a self governing nation in 1867 (Newfoundland joined in 1949), Australia in 1901. We are both still members of the British Commonwealth and the current Monarch of the UK is nominally our head of state.
My dad worked at Lockheed a year or so before the US entered the war. When he joined the Navy at the onset of hostilities between the US and Japan. He was placed in a "Rated" company. He left boot camp as a Aircraft Structural Mechanic third class petty officer. This was because he had the experience for which the Navy was desperate. I am sure this was repeated in the Army and Marines as well. Dad spent the entire war at NAS San Diego, repairing aircraft.
I recommend Ian W. Toll's three book series on War in the Pacific. He goes into depth on how the US, although caught out by the Pearl harbor attack, was already in the process of ramping up the Pacific fleet and putting in place the logistics required to eventually win a conflict with Japan. US war planners had, for almost 2 decades, planned on who they were going to war with in the Pacific. As Admiral Nimitz put it (and I paraphrase a bit here) "We developed Plan Orange in the 20's and that is exactly how we fought the war in the Pacific". Also, I believe it was one of the great generals (Von Clausewitz??, and again I paraphrase) who said "Good generals focus on tactics, great generals focus on logistics". Thank you for providing some focus and insight on this critical aspect of the Pacific war.
Interesting to see how the abundance of newly built aircraft impacted the need for repairs. The USSR had a similar paradigm with tanks during the Cold War. With the rate of attrition and the operational tempo it was more efficient to simply bring up fresh tanks.
They even downgraded the quality of some components in their tanks because of that line of thinking. If some widget typically will last 4 or 5 times longer than the tank is expected to survive in battle ... why not cut use less material & cut some cost.
@@dgthe3 Apart from the very top end equipment most WW2 weapons were pretty disposable. A WW2 fighter costs roughly as a % of GDP in 40's as a modern car does today. The pilots and fuel were the real resource. Different for the heavy bombers
They have a different institutional philosophy. Their reasoning is that most vehicles are damaged (in need of major overhaul) or destroyed after a few months, so why make them durable?
As someone that worked in US Marine Corps aviation maintenance from the 1990s to the 2010s, it's nice to see this video. Any sort of talk about the maintenance and upkeep of any air service, whether land or carrier based, tends to be totally ignored. It's simply not a sexy topic. The air services of the Japanese army and navy faced nothing but problems with little help in terms of logistics, maintenance. It's not just enough planes and pilots. The whole system to build, maintain aircraft, especially further away from home in the South Pacific, was a nightmare for them. The animosity between the Japanese navy and army made it even worse. These issues were brought up by the maintenance personnel, but in typical Japanese military fashion, they were told to shut up. They weren't doing their jobs with enough "spirit."
this really does plug the massive gap in my knowledge that I didn't know I had people ask questions like "what if the Germans won WW2" or "what if the Japanese won WW2" but the truth is that they never stood a chance. It's such a strange thing to think of when you read the history though, the axis always felt like an overwhelming force, something that the allies were only just barely able to defeat. And the reason is that a battle between two technologically equal nations will feel even and intense in the conflict itself, but the bigger issues of logistics, production, maintenance, and replacement are silently winning the war in the background. Most servicemen probably feared their opponents, or saw them as a real threat. It's hard to have such a positive top-down view even when you're in high command. The capability of any nation to hold out is so far beyond what it takes to take away their strategic capability to win. Real victories are grinding, slow, and painful. And so it feels evenly matched, even when it's not
Another first class video. You really shine when it comes to this "four dark dusty corners" kind of subject matter. After a person has read as many books as I have about the Pacific war, they really begin to value these things. When I read about a carrier, I wonder about the location and construction of the fuel and av-gas tanks and delivery systems. Damage control; pilot recovery doctrine; pilot training. I think that you probably think about those things too.
Great video. Now in comparison to this might, consider that Ian Toll's trilogy on the pacific war contains a passage that (paraphrasing) every single Mitsubishi Zero built had to be towed by oxen to the nearest airfield, because the factory had no suitable roads or railways connecting for any alternative transport. When you think of the logistic constraints the Axis fought under, like this, or like the Wehrmacht being largely horse-drawn, it is simply astounding that they ever thought they could win.
The US Navy had very little in the Pacific in 1942. Japan had a chance until Midway, at least in the short-term. Truth is, they should have never gone after Midway, and concentrated all six flattops in the Coral Sea. Even if they took Midway, they had no way to resupply it. Of course, once the Essex Class Carriers started rolling off the slipways, along with their hundreds of escorts, and the fleet's logistical tail was developed, along with better aircraft models, it was over. By 1943, Japan had lost. 1944's carrier battles did little more than confirm it.
To be fair, they weren't trying to have a battle at Coral Sea, the carriers were there to provide air cover for the invasion of Port Moresby. Similarly, they weren't really planning on resupplying Midway for long, they just wanted to force the USN into a major carrier battle. Both times their plans were ruined by the fact the the US had already decrypted their cypher and knew what they were planning.
They should have hit Pearl harder, bombed fuel depos for example then put boots on the ground and taken the islands. But thankfully, they didn't. You don't poke a bear you kill it or stay away.....
I believe the idea of taking Midway was always a feint; to fake a threat against Hawaii (that they could never have delivered on) to force the US fleet into the "decisive battle" they wanted.
@@graham2631 If they bombed the oil tanks first, it would have obscured the gound targets. They were afraid to send in a third wave because the carriers weren't there and they didn't know where they were. Putting boots on the ground in Hawaii would have been more foolish than putting boots on the ground at Midway. How could they hope to defend it even if they won it in the first place?
One grandpa was in the 75th Rangers, Sicily and D-Day. My other grandpa was a water cooled aircraft engine instructor for most of the war. He was an auto and boat mech when the war started, already 28. He was deployed to Iwo Jima at the end of the war with a P-51 squadron. He always told me the Navy and Marine crews were better than most of its in the Army because the training plan was years ahead. Did they call it phase maintenance back then or was that a newer term? My grandpa never used it when talking about his work but I never had a chance to ask after I got into the Navy in 1990. He passed in 1991.
"Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics” is attributed to several people, plausibly Liddell Hart. It's nicely demonstrated in the career of the excellent Dwight Eisenhower, whose first job after graduating from West Point was lecturing on supply -- at West Point. He had a number of staff jobs, notably getting to know Flash MacArthur, the loudmouth who lost the Philippines, rather better than anybody should have to, but then he went back to being a logistics intellectual -- before being leapt up several layers to overall campaign chief by the superb General Marshall. One of my favourite Eisenhower stories may come from journalist Murray Kempton: on D-Day he had landing craft carrying rock-crushing and road building equipment actoss the Channel: he saw well in advance that the French and then the German road networks were going to evaporate under his tanks' treads. So: good to see you doing the same thing here for Naval Aviation. Logistics.
You can have your reservations about the goals of the American military industrial complex and at the same time admire the fact that Americans are really, really good at war. They remind me of the Romans really.
I always say this! As a repair and maintenance officer it's always the grey area when you're actually in the field with all the forces, but out of the light when people talks about wars. 😕
It because what we do is not sexy or exciting. I’m a 14 year army logistics officer and it’s just an unsung area. You have to be a quiet professional and know that the door kickers couldn’t do it with out you.
@@horatiusromanus I work with artillery units, it's even more complicate than with infantry. A foot soldier always can take his things and walk on. but M109 must stand in it's position, with everything ticking and running right as it suppose to, or it will hit civilians or even worse - our guys. I recall our battalion once came back from a two days training, all the crews ran to bed and all the maintenance teams parked our APCs, tired as all the others, and went to fix their vehicles...
@@horatiusromanus If the stuff ever gets complicated enough maybe it will need universal engineering degrees to be in the military and the door kickers can get kicked to the curb! >
The Army had a fleet of ships called Aircraft Maintenance Unit that supplied Sub-Depot level maintenance and repair to USAAF airfields on islands during the Island Hopping Campaign. The Air Force Historical Research Agency has the unit histories on microfilm that are availible. I used these reports to write Lineage and Honors Statements for active units that were once AMUs when I worked there 96-99.
I read somewhere that by the end of the war, there were so many pilots in the training pipeline that training was taking two years, and pilots reaching the fleet were better trained than any others in the world. Guess that goes along with having so many extra airplanes.
I was in the Navy from 70 to 90 and spent 10 years in squadrons and 10 years in AIMD. AIMD, or Aviation Intermediate Maintenance Department. Every Air Station and every Carrier had this department. This was the last decendant of this WW2 system. Even those capabilities are greatly diminished or gone entirely. The well established Depot system has been more, or less greatly diminished, or vanished entirely.
Today AIMD's in the Corps are known as MALS (Marine Aviation Logistics Squadron) where as before they were known as H&MS (Headquarters and Maintenance Squadron or HAMS)
They had real trouble knocking out 🇬🇧 carriers in the far east also. Not because of quantity though but they were so tough with steel decks and thick hulls.
Many historians decried the 1920s treaties with Japan that limited the number of our forward bases. Others have claimed that it was a blessing in disguise, by forcing the Navy to develop stronger logistics & support divisions. This film seems to support that. Today most folks don't grasp the then-current reaction to FDR's call for 50,000 airplanes. Many thought him insane, in the same was the press ridiculed Reagan's SDI (dubbed "star wars" by the media). Churchill was one of the few who had a strong grasp of what America was capable of. In Martin Caidin's The Zero Fighter an IJN Lieutenant recounts the time he proposed an American style pilot training program, as he properly foresaw shortages after 1942. The high brass thought the plan outrageously overblown. Good thing they ignored him.
A lieutenant pointed out what the USA could do at Midway and the senior officers dismissed his foolish idea. It turned out to be exactly what the USA did.
Quite interesting to see our history youtubers talking more about the logistics of things than just the battles and fighting aspects. Not too long ago a video came out titled "six oilers" with the named ships. They talk about how on top of fleet oilers and the sangamon sisters. There were fresh water ships for example. On the topic of this video, another ship that helped with aviation logistics was HMS Unicorn, yes she's British but she's an aircraft ferry, maintenance and light aircraft carrier. She did also help in the Pacific as well. I love this, its fine quoting famous generals who talk about logistics but its useless if dont actually talk about logistics in military history. So to our history youtubers (spread this message) keep this talk about the logistics side of things going.
I read an article on Wikipedia which said that as of war's end, the U.S. Navy had 54 aircraft carriers on station in the Pacific Ocean. I think the split was 24 big fleet carriers and 30 light "jeep" carriers, but by whatever count, they had so many carriers they were coming out of the Navy's ears. And more were about to be commissioned, including the 3 very large Midway class ships.
Fantastic video, thank you. I'll have to add Sustaining Carriers to my read list. I'm really curious, does that book go into details about when exactly that transition over from 'build planes and their spare parts' to ' just build more planes and replace them vs. fix them' makes sense to occur? I would imagine that has to happen in any long drawn out war where industrial capacity becomes a major factor. I haven't read anything about it, but thinking about modern examples I wonder if the same thing happened with MRAPs in Iraq and Afghanistan. And now in Ukraine, obviously many or all pieces of equipment are still so rare that it makes sense to repair damaged equipment, but I wonder what conditions might lead towards that transition, and how it might be accelerated. Anyway, thanks again, great video!
A few years back, I listened to the audio version of The Fleet at Floodtide and one of the parts that just blew me away was the insane cadence of major US invasions is just unbelievable. Like the US landed on Iwo Jima in late February and then landed on Okinawa in early April. Those two invasions went off seperated by only 41 days. That is literally beyond my comprehension. How in the actual hell was that managed?
I'm not discounting the repair and maintenance operations of aircraft in the Pacific theater, but American production was quickly outpacing aircraft losses as early as 1942 and by a long shot in 1943. Oftentimes, damaged craft were just pushed overboard while replacements arrived very soon after. The key to winning the Pacific War and the War in Europe was American Industrial Might and Logistics.
Thanks. Always nice to learn new things. From 1976 to 1979 I was a Marine Corps avionics technician. When assigned to USS Tripoli/LPH-10 I spent eight months working my specialty (UHF radios) in the AIMD (Aircraft Intermediate Maintenance Division) and I was familiar with the spare parts down in ship's stores aboard that helicopter carrier. All parts had to be accounted for. During my time as an avionics technician the Corps was into fixing and repairing equipment rather than replacement. One day I received a scorched AN/ARC-51 UHF radio that had survived the crash of a CH-46 helicopter in Hawaii. The radio was fine, but the air crew was toast. I found out a month later that the First Mech was a friend of mine.
I think I can understand the throwaway culture around airplanes. I mean, new and fresh airplanes can be flown to the carriers on the front lines. But the inoperable ones on the front lines cannot fly back. So something would need to pick them up. And then you wouldn't want just one ship for one plane. You'd need to have lots of ships being able to carry lots of planes. Which means the carrier would spend precious time doing rendez-vous with the transports and take time and big cranes to switch the aircraft over. Time is the single thing no one can get back. Besides that, those transports would also need escorts.
@@FrancisFjordCupola The CVE sometimes would fly land planes off the flight deck directly to forward airfields--and more often replacement carrier planes would take off from the CVE and land on either a CVL or CV.
Awesome episode, yes indeed logistics is and has been the foothold of victory whenever it was and is acknowledged. Absolutely agree on the fact that most documentaries just forego on this subject, where without this information the narrative lacks the necessary historical, strategical and logistical depth. Always wondered on the missions near Midway and the Marianas in which the common story tells a large number of planes were ditched, or, because of nighttime landings, damaged and thrown overboard. The majority of those stories don’t tell about the units which were working round the clock to replace the planes within a fortnight. It is evident that by doing so, these units haven’t received the awe and respect they deserved. Wonder why that is, is indeed the ‘ace’ more sexy than the mechanics? After all, without the mechanics, for whatever unit they were assigned to, no ace would have been able to achieve the results history seems so eager to focus on. Henceforth a more than interesting episode, plus a true and sincere reminder of the sweat and blood spilled by faithful and apt hands and minds.
Did you get to Wichita on your trip? In addition to an abundance of replacement aircraft, the US turned out an abundance of replacement air crew, partially due to the mass of trainers produced in Wichita. Logistics, logistics and even more logistics. Great vid as always MAH.
Glad you mentioned the escort carriers, which were pretty much the USN's secret weapon in the War in the Pacific: they could ferry entire fleets of planes, support the main CVs in offensive operations, and assist in convoy protection. 77 of the 115 carriers we put to sea in WW2 were escort carriers...sadly, I don't think a single one of them survived the scrapyard though.
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My dad was an Aviation Machinist Mate in a CASU unit during the war. He was stationed at Pearl Harbor and San Diego. It's good to see them getting some recognition here.
It is nice to see some of the lesser known units get some credit. My grandfather was an aircraft mechanic on the USS Santee an escort carrier. Started the war doing anti-submarine duties in the North Atlantic, was involved in the attack on Vichy France and invasion of North Africa. Also escorted Roosevelt on the way to North Africa. They went over to the Pacific and were involved in many of the major battles there. He was nearly killed by the first kamikaze of the war. Though if it was first is somewhat debatable.
The CASUs were amazing units -no way the US could have sustained its fight without them.
The mind boggles to think of the sheer number of trained men able to work on these machines. It would be interesting to learn what these men did after the war. how many, for instance who went into the domestic aviation business.
In the book I do follow a few technicians and tell what they do after the war.
My dad was AMM1c in Dutch Harbor. He loved his PBY-5A.
My dad flew an F6F-5 with VF-19 aboard the USS Lexington in the summer and fall of 1944. In October, '44, his plane was shot up by Japanese AAA fire twice. Once it was a 20mm hit on the prop hub which drained most of the oil. The engine brought him back to CV-16, was replaced, and the plane went back into service. The second time, his plane was hit at least twice (engine & port wing root) by Japanese 40mm AAA. Mangled plane still brought dad back to the Lexington. It was deemed "not repairable," and pushed over the side into the Pacific, to be replaced by a new F6F-5 in a day or two. The "throwaway" culture existed by the autumn of 1944…
If you’re dad was with VF-19. He would’ve returned to Pearl Harbor on Enterprise in December 1944.
@@ph89787 I think that's correct.
I’m sorry, but he was hit with Japanese 40mm AA? I don’t think the Japanese ever fielded 40mm weaponry.
@@robertoroberto9798 All the major combatant nations in WW 2 used a 40mm AAA gun (I don't know if they were all modeled after the Swedish Bofors that we (U.S.) and the British used, but they were 40 mm). The squadron history labels it a 40mm as well. Gun caliber aside, my point was that my dad's "unrepairable" plane was easily replaced.
@@rayschoch5882 The only Japanese gun to use 40mm shells was the Ho-301 that was optionally mounted on the Ki-44 and Ki-45. There’s a slight chance that he was unlucky enough to be hit by one though the chances are slim as they’re subsonic and more like 40mm grenades.
I have a better feeling he was hit by a 20mm or 30mm shell that blew a big enough hole that the ground crew mistook it for 40mm.
I remember reading somewhere of an account of a New Zealand airgroup that was moved to an American base. The pilots were walking through a row of Corsairs admiring the low hours and sharp still dark factory paint jobs when an American ground crew chief asked them what the hell they were doing. After explaining how much nicer the planes were to their worn Corsairs he just laughed and held up a clipboard. They were airframe considered having too many hours being shipped out to be refurbished and replaced.
After the shock left the faces of the Kiwis whose own planes had more than triple the hours, they began bartering out how paperwork could get mixed up and their planes accidentally get shipped off instead. 😂
I wonder if that’s a true story lol
@sc1338 no idea... I truly wish I remembered where I read it!
if it's not true, it should be @@sc1338
Your english writing is incomprehensible; get some lessons from a tutor.
Awesome!
Outstanding Chris. Few people ever talk about logistics. My grandfather was in logistics for the army during WWII. He always stressed the need for such. I think as a result, the man was always prepared nearly anything that came up, even late in life. Cheers
Logistics is what won the war.
Lay a wreath on his grave on veterans day. An unsung hero.
Napoleon did he coined an army fights on it's stomach.
@@michaellangevin3943 The Duke of Wellington also planned his campaigns around logistics. If his soldiers stole from the Spanish people, as the French had done, it would have caused a large strain on their Spanish allies. Instead he carried gold to purchase supplies when his stocks were running low.
One takeaway from this video is that not only did the US have material and productive superiority, but also employed superior organizational skills and advanced planning to better leverage that material advantage.
The only major aspect of an industrial war the US was clearly inferior, I suppose, was the willingness to spend resources on the war - until Japan kindly outraged the whole country with a surprise attack.
Lost a lot of ships, subs, Aircraft , Bombers getting there
One big factor for instance at Midway was top-flight damage control. But the real answer is simply: infinite amounts of fuel, spares, and crew. Japan was massively constrained in all categories. People only count the big carriers but the US ended the war with something like 90 escort carriers, absolutely insane.
Yes, and those escort carriers would often serve as auxiliary air fields in ferrying new aircraft to the front lines, which goes back to the importance of logistics.
People who obsess about who had the best planes, tanks, ships, guns, etc. tend to overlook the reality that the war was actually won by the side that had all of the bulldozers.
Didn't Yamamoto mention something about having about 6 months to accomplish Japan's goals in the Pacific before American industrial capacity became an insurmountable problem?
Having spent time in America well before the war, Yamamoto was very well aware of America's industrial might. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he said "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve ". He said this upon learning that the attack happened 55 minutes before the Japanese ultimatum had been presented to the American government and knew how it would infuriate the government and the people of America.
He did. One of few senior Japanese officials (military or non-military) who spent time on the ground in US and knew it relatively well.
Weird. The Japanese officials surely knew they must know their enemy (Sun Tzu, Art of War) in order to fight against and win. But they didn't know their enemy, US, that well.
Hitler said the same about the USSR
Indeed; you're right. He'd toured the U.S. prior and had seen it's potential. U.S. industrial capacity was underutilized in the '30s as a result of the depression, and Yamamoto had seen that. But not only was it larger and better resourced than Japan's, but it was more advanced as well. On this latter point I feel the USA deserves a bit of recognition beyond what I think is sometimes an unfair assessment of dumb factories burying adversaries under a mountain of material. A U.S. factory was more advanced than many Axis ones (both German and Japanese), both in terms of advanced tooling, but also in how they were used. Continuous improvement and quality control from concepts like the Shewhart cycle gave U.S. manufacturing not just a lead on numbers of factories, but on a per-factory basis too. A large material advantage turned into a gargantuan one.
When I think of those from the U.S. who made brilliant moves to contribute to the Allied victory, names like Demming, Kaiser, and Bush come to mind.
@@seanhynds8482 _After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he said "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve "._
That quote is an invention of the movie _Tora! Tora! Tora!_ as there is no evidence Yamamoto ever said such a thing. It is true he said that he expected to run wild in the Pacific for the first six months or year of the war, but after that he had no expectation of a Japanese victory in the war.
I think it’s worth mentioning that the Japanese believed that a single decisive blow could dealt against the US navy and would result in the USA suing for peace. This is partly because in 1905 Japan had successfully employed this tactic against Russia which was a world power and won the Russo-Japanese War. What they failed to take into account was the full potential of modern war machines and the differences between 1900s Russia and 1940s US.
Mahan style doctrine! 😃 It didn't work... The U.S. pacific fleet actually did run out of operational CV's and BB's. So much so they had to borrow one from the UK just to keep an operational CV in the Pacific.
Then the Essex Zerg swarm began!! 🙆♂️
Probably wouldn't have mattered if they lost 3 CVs since they can make more than Japan can
Admiral Yamamoto, a Harvard graduate who knew US very much, warned Japan that a victory at Pearl Harbor would give 12-18 months to Japan to build a good defensive position - after that, US industry would simply steamroll Japan.
What the Japanese did not understand was that a surprise attack on the US would simply convince it of the necessity to destroy Imperial Japan.
According to Japanese history textbooks, they defeated Russia in 1905, then 40 years passed where nothing happened, after which the US nuked them for some reason.
Being militarist fascists, the government of Japan by the late 30s was obsessed with war.
Faced with a challenge that could not be accommodated in rational logic, they just adopted a 'strategy' based on wishful thinking.
Can't happen today? It happened in Iraq/Afghanistan 20 years ago.
Great video on an important topic. My grandfather worked as a machinist mate in the Pacific during the Second World War, and I can see how important was his role in repairing engines. BTW - the interior organization of your videos with sub-titles is truly awesome and informative.
If Gramps was a Machinist Mate, he was part of the ship's company and worked on the ships main engines, turbogenerators, distilling plants, etc. Unless you meant Aviation Machinist Mate?
@seafodder6129 He was never stationed aboard a ship but worked at a repair facility near New Guinea. He must have been a mechanic for aircraft. Thanks for the correction.
As a Navy AMH2 in the 90s, its good to see that maintenance and technicians are highlighted. For every 1 pilot, there are more than a dozen of us making it possible.
Simply put, Japan lacked the essential resources it needed to sustain a war with America. Even Admiral Yamamoto knew this. He knew once the American industry got going, Japan couldn't win, and the battle of Midway was a clear sign that it was the beginning of the end for the Japanese navy having lost all but one carrier and not having the resources or the industry to replace them like America could.
There's that, plus I honestly think the IJN's Doctrine doomed them as well. For them, one must stick to their role and were punished for going outside of it. Then their Damage Control.... Granted, some ships had decent ones but from what I read, it was a very small group.
For the USN, everyone was trained in damage control (and/or Gunnery).
Strictly speaking Japan still had two fleet carriers and three light carriers after Midway. Admittedly Shokaku was in dry dock and Zuikaku missed Midway due to her aircraft losses at the Coral Sea but things weren't quite as desperate as you suggest. At that point.
I read an article on Wikipedia that one reason why Hitler declared war on America was that he thought it would take us 10 years to get out war production up to speed. Instead, within 6 months were fully converted over to wartime production, and it was then just a matter of time. . Apparently the Japanese thought so too.
@@katrinapaton5283The problem is that, while Zuikaku's planes and pilots were fine, and while Shoukaku as a ship was fine, the IJN refused to transfer Zuikaku's plane to Shoukaku, out of insistence on tying squadrons to their "home" carriers.
So instead of having an operational fleet carrier complete with aircraft, Japan had none
Japan could, and did, replace carrriers throughout the war. But quality of the vessels themselves progressively declined, and they could not replace the trained aircrews that were lost, in either quantity or quality. They hit limitations (via the aerial mining campaign) on fuel supply, at which point the ships could not sail, the pilots themselves not train. And then the experienced cadre were lost, factories that built the planes got bombed, the ships were sunk while at anchor, and training became impossible as USAAF and USN fighters dominated the skies over Japan itself.
Japan started on an artificial high, and took early gains while the Allies struggled to regroup, but then after simply could not keep up with the ability of the USA to simply out-produce in every area, while the IJN was steadily and irreversibly degraded beyond the point of any chance of recovery....much the same happened with the Luftwaffe, though it was also a much longer war in Europe.
another very good book on the logistics of the US Navy in the pacific is "Beans Bullets and Black Oil" by Rear Adm Worrall Reed Carter.
I love learning about US WW2 logistic capabilities. We got floating airports out the wazoo, floating mechanic shops, and even floating ice cream factories! EDIT: Can't forget about the floating fuel stations either. 😂
don't forget Floating drydocks.
mobile military industrial complex, i'm half surprised there wasn't an actual floating factory
As someone who works at an aircraft component overhaul center and having worked on landing gear overhauls and now on engine components, just seeing all the work needed to overhaul these components really drives home how intricate and important such advanced planned is. Gotta plan out the facilities, the tooling, the labor and so on. Just to overhaul things on time when they come in every ten years.
Now imagine that for the armed forces on such a large scale at war.... truly mind boggling.
Learned a lot from this video, truly the stuff never talked about. But the impact is obvious. Fantastic video Chris.
Thank you´, glad you enjoyed it!
This is a fascinating and very underserved topic, thank you for sharing this information!
The US Navy has sadly forgotten a few of these lessons in recent times; fleet readiness has hit low ebb in recent years due to extensive downsizing and shuttering of naval shipyards around the US, a process which has been quietly happening since the end of Cold War tensions…
The Navy of 2023 is in a similarly dire state of readiness to fight a naval war on the Pacific as it was in 1933.
Our current leadership isn’t helping
@@rotorheadv8 It happened well before Biden. Did Trump change anything? Did Obama? Bush?
This isn't the first or only time the US Navy has been at a poor state in the last century - the Navy was in a bad state at the end of the '70s and the beginning of the '80s with rampant drug use and a downsizing, aging fleet. The Reagan administration's concerted focus on military spending helped the Navy surge back to readiness for the end of the Cold War and the decade afterward, but the Navy's been back-burner on the budget since military planners turned their attentions to counterinsurgency operations instead of peer competition post-9/11.
The question is: will we see SecNav and Congress work to pull the Navy's readiness back or will we continue the backslide into naval weakness...? Time (and politics) will tell.
We screwed up when the first genuine socialist, Mikhail Gorbachev, became head of the USSR and our socialism-hating 1% managed to NOT offer him enough support. Now Putin is as bad as the worst of the Tsars.
Champagne defense policy on a beer budget.
Japan could have won Midway, killed every USN carrier afloat in 1942, and still would have lost the war of industries and pilot training.
💯
I mean Japan lost Midway, but for a month and a half the only operational fleet carrier in the U.S. fleet was Ranger in the Atlantic. Everything else was sunk, except Enterprise and Saratoga getting repaired. They actually borrowed a CV from the UK complete with crew just to keep a capital ship in the Pacific active.
So even if they blew up all the carriers in Pearl Harbor, the US could win?
They made the same mistake by their buddies, they talked to much we were listening. No code is uncrackable. It also helps to have a little luck. But the major mistake made by the Japanese was keeping their experienced men fighting until dead. It's very important to bring seasoned battle hardened men home to train the replacements.
They presumed our culture was cowardly and that democracy was our weakness: by intimidating the people they hoped there would be enough pressure on politicians to force a favorable peace treaty early. Needless to say, that backfired massively.
1 hell of a video thank you the books you gave info on 2 mega 👍👍
Great video, full of not often thought of issues that are war winning or losers. You hear about the fact that Japan could build Great fighters in 1945 but the good pilots are dead and haven't been replaced. I never thought of the depot level maintenance part of a campaign. Keep up the great work.
Even the A6M Zero could prove deadly in the hands of an expert in 1945.
I don't believe American troops or commanders are, on average, any better than anyone else's trained troops, but they have the *best* logistics in the world.
My grandfather fought at Kokoda, and he was immensely grateful for US involvement. To quote him,
"Thank God for the Americans."
US forces in general allowed more initiative and decision making by the lower level troops. No other military did this.
Thank you very, very much, Chris. This is hugely informative and insightful. It almost seems as if military professionals would really want to focus on logistics.
I am a huge fan of Naval air, especially Pacific World War II operations. I’ve watched endless videos about Navy operations in the South Pacific, but yours was probably the most informative of explaining why the US won the war! Thank you for an excellent video! Go NAVY!
Royal Navy had HMS Unicorn, HMS Pioneer and HMS Perseus, light carriers with extra hanger space equipped to undertake complete overhauls at sea or transport aircraft back to land, they each carried two smaller lighters (barges) to ferry aircraft which couldn't fly to the maintenance carrier and to transport bulky items like engines.
That's an aspect I was a bit curious about: the transfer of non-flyable aircraft. The only option I could think up was two ships coming alongside each other & craning it over. But that felt way too difficult. A small barge makes much more sense.
Towards the end of the war, it often became more practical to simply shove damaged planes over the side rather than repair them.
The photo at 5:00 gave me a jolt; a first glance, the sailor in front looks a lot like my dad.
My grandfather was a land based armorer in the USN, unfortunately he died when I was really little but I believe he was attached to VF-17 in the Solomons at one point
My Dad was a mechanic with VF-17 from the time they were formed.
My Dad was on a PT Boat that participated in Leyte Gulf & Midway - largest Naval Battles in History, possibly as forward Scouts, etc.... He also played Cards with JFK. I have Original 1940's Newspaper clippings of his little Boat sinking a Destroyer and I even believe a Cruiser, although would have to recheck that. He also mentioned that his one Boat destroyed several hundred barges. He mentions circling and taunting large Japanese ships very close-by and because a PT was tiny, the larger Boats guns could not hit them. He also mentioned being attacked after going through very narrow straits between Islands. -@@kenedmisten7995
1944: "Who needs overhauls? I just grab a new plane from the pile!"
Brilliant video: a crucial and frequently-overlooked element of the Pacific war. It would be fascinating, but challenging, to compare the Japanese approach to these problems. I suspect it was drastically different.
Nice vid again! Cool footage too of Clark Gable during his service as an aerial gunner (even though he was in the USAAF and not the USN) that I had never seen before.
Another thorough video. Thank you!
I love the still photo at 11:10 where it can be seen clearly some bloke repairing a piano in the background. Obviously music in the bar was considered essential at that juncture.
Another book I didn’t know I needed
Great Video Chris! Next, you should do one on the Naval base at Ulithi, which was a tiny spec of land (not even an island?), that became the largest Naval base in the Pacific during WWII almost overnight. Little known by the public, but a massive feat of logistics.
There was a lecture on exactly this topic recently on the excellent WW2TV RUclips channel.
I am sure Chris will not mind me plugging this excellent resource here.
Yep, same book, same author-glad you noticed! 😊Keen awareness of this aspect of military history!
Always learn something new here. Thanks Chris!
Happy to hear that it was informative
Another good book: 'Beans, Bullets, and Black Oil', by Carter.
Amateurs think about tactics. Professionals think about logistics.
Who think of Intel and tech?
Masters think about both.
Excellent video as always. I am curious as to how the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm built up their sustainment capacity. HMS Unicorn was a proof of them realising the need to sustain the air groups. And RAF also had been focusing on a system where repairs and training of aircrew and ground crew were set up "for the long haul". But how did the Fleet Air Arm achieve this? Especially considering they only became part of the navy again in 1936 and had to play hard catch up after years of neglect and being down prioritized by the RAF?
HMS Unicorn as you mention was begun before the war but her completion was delayed by it entering service in Mar 43, she was joined by two other dedicated light carriers HMS Pioneer completed Feb 45 and HMS Perseus Oct 45, Perseus missed the war by a few months and after a period of mothball then served as the test ship for the development of the first steam catapult while Pioneer was transferred to the Pacific fleet in the build up to the invasion of Japan and got a couple of months service repairing aircraft for the invasion fleet before then being set to Hong Kong to rebuild the Territories telecoms, electricity and public transport infrastructure.
In addition to dedicated ship tenders the Royal Navy started the war with one fleet repair ship (mobile workshops) and 12 more were converted during the war from mostly cruise liners, but also a WW1 carrier, a refrigerated cargo ship and a destroyer, they also usually doubled up as troop transports for their accommodation capacity.
This was mind-blowing, I had no idea that the navy had these mobile capabilities. Incredible video and going shopping for books!!!🎉
Best time to get books with those rainy autumn days coming up!
@7:24 It's quite amazing that there is not a single one of those Devastators left. They did find some sunk on carriers though in great shape.
Not going to lie. The way you made the flow of this video really made me anticipate for the US Navy to throw away "worn out" aircraft. Just brilliant! 👏
I think you may be missing an interesting nuance. But the only evidence I can furnish comes from a US Army source.
The source is an unpublished book titled "Final Report of the U.S. Army Service Forces." The book was dated 1949, I believe I recall. It could be found in the Army-Navy Library in the Pentagon. Reading it in 1983 left a deep and lasting impression on a young logistician (me).
We have to imagine a logistics operation of staggering scope and detail, managed entirely by hard copy (paper). It was impossible to quickly supply essential parts to Army units scattered across vast oceans and land masses who were in constant and unpredictable motion. And so 'push logistics' were used. I'll explain that term in a moment.
The Army Service Forces (ASF) provided acquisition, distribution, manuals and more to support the Army at home and overseas. At the start of the war, it was a small outfit headed by a lieutenant Colonel. Nowadays the same responsibility warrants a four star general.
'Push Logistics' involves trying to guess where the troops will be months in advance, and guessing what they'll need, and organizing shipments of all classes of supply to those locations.
Well, it worked, sort of. But not very well. Mountains of crates were unloaded onto beaches and in ports, often enough where the troops *were,* as opposed to where they *are.* Those mountains of crates were often left out in the open, in mud. Labels vanished. With a war to fight, those mountains of supply were often abandoned.
We saw the same thing happen in Viet Nam. Vast, vast stores of irretrievable supplies stacked to the heavens, nobody knowing what, exactly, was there. It might as well have been shipped to the moon, for all the good those supplies did for the troops.
So if an urgent requirement needed to be solved fast, we did the same thing thing in Nam that the Army did in WWII. We flew parts from the States marked 'urgent,' or we pillaged hanger queens.
I suspect the Navy did the same thing during WWII: they pushed supplies forward based on forecasts that were rapidly overcome by events; and when production of airframes attained an oversupply, hanger queens were the fastest, easiest way to keep airframes in the air.
They probably flew urgent parts, too, but you can't keep a war machine that big generously supplied by air. Doesn't work.
Computers and communications today have changed the math for logistics, and the monumental cost of high-tech weapons systems have made 'push logistics' fall out of favor. Now it's almost all 'pull logistics.' The warfighter, not rear echelon weenies like me, decides what to demand.
Mostly.
But it's probably inevitable that if we get into a serious war with a near-peer, the weenies will hit the panic button and try to push. And hanger queens aren't going to go away.
Awesome video!
I had never thought of the support structure for keeping the planes in the aie.
Interesting information on how they overlooked logistics, in spite of transitioning weapons platforms in the midst of war. We see a similar obliviousness to the need for trained people in energy transitions deemed the equivalent of wartime mobilization: we lack people to mine and refine critical minerals, build out power grids, and etc. Plus ca change…
Excellent video Christoph. Fascinating history. Thank you. I have ordered Mr Fisher’s book plus Cold War Test Pilot, Brown Water Navy and a book about Schnellbootes, using your discount code.
Awesome, Michael, glad you enjoyed it and have fun with the books!
I have long known how important all this from reading the history of Panzer units on the Eastern Front during W W II. This is still a good review of this subject in terms of the USN.
Excellent compact, detailed and thorough explanations. Superb visuals as well. Great presentation.
One of the reasons the navy could sustain a carrier war was massive aircraft production numbers. At sea if a repair took too long, they’d make the decision to roll the aircraft over the side! Because they knew they’d get more and better aircraft soon
My brother-in-law, Tom Collins, was a "T-5" enlisted Marine. He started his war at Midway, immediately after the battle. VMF-223 was a reinforcement unit for that place. As an "enlisted aviator", Tom flew hundreds of hours "breaking in" overhauled engines. Ultimately, he was used to fly resupply missions to Iwo Jima, flying wounded out at dawn. He loved the SBD but the F4U was his favorite.
Brother in law? That means you must be pretty old yourself?
His marriage to my sister was his second, a 'May/December' thing. He was thirty years senior to her. I am a 'puppy' of 68 years. @@Zarastro54
Having been a Marine aviation repair tech in the 1980's this is a great presentation of aviation history. Maintenance never gets enough credit. The folks I worked with were incredibly smart and dedicated. While deployed on the USS Ranger we took a lot of pride in helping to maintain aircraft uptime. I have always admired the Navy and Marine ingenuity, perseverance and creativity in performing maintenance on incredibly complex aircraft while at sea. Now I can appreciate the origins of the sea borne maintenance organizations.
Drachinifel dives into this in his Damage Control video, it's worth it for going deep into this one specific area and how the two sides approached it differently.
Thanks Chris. Great video. Learned a lot as I am a carrier fan!
This video illustrates the reason my grandfather who was a tool & die maker for an aircraft manufacturer was told that he would never be allowed anywhere near combat and to stay in the job he had.
Grumman and the other manufacturers were delivering planes at a rate that we cannot even comprehend today!
THAT was an incredibly informative video!!!
You ROCK!!!
KEEP UP THE HARD WORK!!!
👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
Have to remeber that usa also surplied uk (and well canada and austrailia that still was part of uk) as well as ussr with engines as well as some airframes.
By 1942 ussr aircraft engine production was over run and the only engine they could get for quite a while was via convoys.
Uk also had a lack of engines, so usa had to peoduce for both of them.
The had to ramp up production by a insane anount.
Granted, this ramping up started alreddy in 1939
Canada and Australia were not part of the UK, they were member nations of the greater British Empire. Canada was confederated as a self governing nation in 1867 (Newfoundland joined in 1949), Australia in 1901. We are both still members of the British Commonwealth and the current Monarch of the UK is nominally our head of state.
My dad worked at Lockheed a year or so before the US entered the war. When he joined the Navy at the onset of hostilities between the US and Japan. He was placed in a "Rated" company. He left boot camp as a Aircraft Structural Mechanic third class petty officer. This was because he had the experience for which the Navy was desperate. I am sure this was repeated in the Army and Marines as well. Dad spent the entire war at NAS San Diego, repairing aircraft.
I recommend Ian W. Toll's three book series on War in the Pacific. He goes into depth on how the US, although caught out by the Pearl harbor attack, was already in the process of ramping up the Pacific fleet and putting in place the logistics required to eventually win a conflict with Japan. US war planners had, for almost 2 decades, planned on who they were going to war with in the Pacific. As Admiral Nimitz put it (and I paraphrase a bit here) "We developed Plan Orange in the 20's and that is exactly how we fought the war in the Pacific". Also, I believe it was one of the great generals (Von Clausewitz??, and again I paraphrase) who said "Good generals focus on tactics, great generals focus on logistics". Thank you for providing some focus and insight on this critical aspect of the Pacific war.
great video! I look forward to reading some the books that you highlighted.
Cool video Bis!
Interesting to see how the abundance of newly built aircraft impacted the need for repairs. The USSR had a similar paradigm with tanks during the Cold War. With the rate of attrition and the operational tempo it was more efficient to simply bring up fresh tanks.
They even downgraded the quality of some components in their tanks because of that line of thinking. If some widget typically will last 4 or 5 times longer than the tank is expected to survive in battle ... why not cut use less material & cut some cost.
@@dgthe3 Apart from the very top end equipment most WW2 weapons were pretty disposable. A WW2 fighter costs roughly as a % of GDP in 40's as a modern car does today. The pilots and fuel were the real resource. Different for the heavy bombers
They have a different institutional philosophy. Their reasoning is that most vehicles are damaged (in need of major overhaul) or destroyed after a few months, so why make them durable?
As someone that worked in US Marine Corps aviation maintenance from the 1990s to the 2010s, it's nice to see this video. Any sort of talk about the maintenance and upkeep of any air service, whether land or carrier based, tends to be totally ignored. It's simply not a sexy topic.
The air services of the Japanese army and navy faced nothing but problems with little help in terms of logistics, maintenance. It's not just enough planes and pilots. The whole system to build, maintain aircraft, especially further away from home in the South Pacific, was a nightmare for them. The animosity between the Japanese navy and army made it even worse. These issues were brought up by the maintenance personnel, but in typical Japanese military fashion, they were told to shut up. They weren't doing their jobs with enough "spirit."
You will enjoy the book!
this really does plug the massive gap in my knowledge that I didn't know I had
people ask questions like "what if the Germans won WW2" or "what if the Japanese won WW2" but the truth is that they never stood a chance.
It's such a strange thing to think of when you read the history though, the axis always felt like an overwhelming force, something that the allies were only just barely able to defeat. And the reason is that a battle between two technologically equal nations will feel even and intense in the conflict itself, but the bigger issues of logistics, production, maintenance, and replacement are silently winning the war in the background.
Most servicemen probably feared their opponents, or saw them as a real threat. It's hard to have such a positive top-down view even when you're in high command. The capability of any nation to hold out is so far beyond what it takes to take away their strategic capability to win. Real victories are grinding, slow, and painful. And so it feels evenly matched, even when it's not
Another first class video. You really shine when it comes to this "four dark dusty corners" kind of subject matter. After a person has read as many books as I have about the Pacific war, they really begin to value these things. When I read about a carrier, I wonder about the location and construction of the fuel and av-gas tanks and delivery systems. Damage control; pilot recovery doctrine; pilot training. I think that you probably think about those things too.
I enjoyed your video and I gave it a Thumbs Up
Great video. Now in comparison to this might, consider that Ian Toll's trilogy on the pacific war contains a passage that (paraphrasing) every single Mitsubishi Zero built had to be towed by oxen to the nearest airfield, because the factory had no suitable roads or railways connecting for any alternative transport.
When you think of the logistic constraints the Axis fought under, like this, or like the Wehrmacht being largely horse-drawn, it is simply astounding that they ever thought they could win.
“Numbers do not win a battle.”
“No, but I bet they help.”
Especially when backed by good logistics.
The US Navy had very little in the Pacific in 1942. Japan had a chance until Midway, at least in the short-term. Truth is, they should have never gone after Midway, and concentrated all six flattops in the Coral Sea. Even if they took Midway, they had no way to resupply it.
Of course, once the Essex Class Carriers started rolling off the slipways, along with their hundreds of escorts, and the fleet's logistical tail was developed, along with better aircraft models, it was over. By 1943, Japan had lost. 1944's carrier battles did little more than confirm it.
To be fair, they weren't trying to have a battle at Coral Sea, the carriers were there to provide air cover for the invasion of Port Moresby. Similarly, they weren't really planning on resupplying Midway for long, they just wanted to force the USN into a major carrier battle. Both times their plans were ruined by the fact the the US had already decrypted their cypher and knew what they were planning.
They should have hit Pearl harder, bombed fuel depos for example then put boots on the ground and taken the islands. But thankfully, they didn't. You don't poke a bear you kill it or stay away.....
I believe the idea of taking Midway was always a feint; to fake a threat against Hawaii (that they could never have delivered on) to force the US fleet into the "decisive battle" they wanted.
@@graham2631 If they bombed the oil tanks first, it would have obscured the gound targets. They were afraid to send in a third wave because the carriers weren't there and they didn't know where they were. Putting boots on the ground in Hawaii would have been more foolish than putting boots on the ground at Midway. How could they hope to defend it even if they won it in the first place?
There are 2 words every maintainer hates hearing: "Hangar...Queens" those are some long hours getting Hangar Queens FMC
One grandpa was in the 75th Rangers, Sicily and D-Day. My other grandpa was a water cooled aircraft engine instructor for most of the war. He was an auto and boat mech when the war started, already 28. He was deployed to Iwo Jima at the end of the war with a P-51 squadron. He always told me the Navy and Marine crews were better than most of its in the Army because the training plan was years ahead.
Did they call it phase maintenance back then or was that a newer term? My grandpa never used it when talking about his work but I never had a chance to ask after I got into the Navy in 1990. He passed in 1991.
You showed a clip of Clark Gable being inducted as an officer into the Army Air Corps.
Another brilliant, meticulously researched video, Chris! Bravo!! 😎
"Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics” is attributed to several people, plausibly Liddell Hart.
It's nicely demonstrated in the career of the excellent Dwight Eisenhower, whose first job after graduating from West Point was lecturing on supply -- at West Point. He had a number of staff jobs, notably getting to know Flash MacArthur, the loudmouth who lost the Philippines, rather better than anybody should have to, but then he went back to being a logistics intellectual -- before being leapt up several layers to overall campaign chief by the superb General Marshall.
One of my favourite Eisenhower stories may come from journalist Murray Kempton: on D-Day he had landing craft carrying rock-crushing and road building equipment actoss the Channel: he saw well in advance that the French and then the German road networks were going to evaporate under his tanks' treads.
So: good to see you doing the same thing here for Naval Aviation. Logistics.
You can have your reservations about the goals of the American military industrial complex and at the same time admire the fact that Americans are really, really good at war. They remind me of the Romans really.
From a former technician, thank you for this. (not WW II.)
I always say this! As a repair and maintenance officer it's always the grey area when you're actually in the field with all the forces, but out of the light when people talks about wars. 😕
It because what we do is not sexy or exciting. I’m a 14 year army logistics officer and it’s just an unsung area. You have to be a quiet professional and know that the door kickers couldn’t do it with out you.
@@horatiusromanus I work with artillery units, it's even more complicate than with infantry. A foot soldier always can take his things and walk on. but M109 must stand in it's position, with everything ticking and running right as it suppose to, or it will hit civilians or even worse - our guys.
I recall our battalion once came back from a two days training, all the crews ran to bed and all the maintenance teams parked our APCs, tired as all the others, and went to fix their vehicles...
@@horatiusromanus If the stuff ever gets complicated enough maybe it will need universal engineering degrees to be in the military and the door kickers can get kicked to the curb! >
Ah, nice pictures from the Museum of Flight. I’ve been there last year.
The Army had a fleet of ships called Aircraft Maintenance Unit that supplied Sub-Depot level maintenance and repair to USAAF airfields on islands during the Island Hopping Campaign. The Air Force Historical Research Agency has the unit histories on microfilm that are availible. I used these reports to write Lineage and Honors Statements for active units that were once AMUs when I worked there 96-99.
Thank you for the video, love your work.
I read somewhere that by the end of the war, there were so many pilots in the training pipeline that training was taking two years, and pilots reaching the fleet were better trained than any others in the world. Guess that goes along with having so many extra airplanes.
Yeah, the training programs compared with the Axis developed along opposite trajectories
I was in the Navy from 70 to 90 and spent 10 years in squadrons and 10 years in AIMD. AIMD, or Aviation Intermediate Maintenance Department. Every Air Station and every Carrier had this department. This was the last decendant of this WW2 system. Even those capabilities are greatly diminished or gone entirely. The well established Depot system has been more, or less greatly diminished, or vanished entirely.
CASU and AROU were the forerunners of AIMD. You will appreciate the history of it in the book. Thanks for your service!
Today AIMD's in the Corps are known as MALS (Marine Aviation Logistics Squadron) where as before they were known as H&MS (Headquarters and Maintenance Squadron or HAMS)
Also worth pointing out British Maintenance aircraft carriers like HMS Unicorn (I72)
Indeed!
Japan never sent pilots back to train new recruits.
Thank you for this.. very good information…
I believe your acquaintance Alex has a few videos about US logistics and repair across the Pacific.
They had real trouble knocking out 🇬🇧 carriers in the far east also. Not because of quantity though but they were so tough with steel decks and thick hulls.
That discount is pretty sweet. Just ordered this book and a few others.
Thank you!
Many historians decried the 1920s treaties with Japan that limited the number of our forward bases. Others have claimed that it was a blessing in disguise, by forcing the Navy to develop stronger logistics & support divisions. This film seems to support that.
Today most folks don't grasp the then-current reaction to FDR's call for 50,000 airplanes. Many thought him insane, in the same was the press ridiculed Reagan's SDI (dubbed "star wars" by the media). Churchill was one of the few who had a strong grasp of what America was capable of.
In Martin Caidin's The Zero Fighter an IJN Lieutenant recounts the time he proposed an
American style pilot training program, as he properly foresaw shortages after 1942. The high brass thought the plan outrageously overblown. Good thing they ignored him.
A lieutenant pointed out what the USA could do at Midway and the senior officers dismissed his foolish idea. It turned out to be exactly what the USA did.
Quite interesting to see our history youtubers talking more about the logistics of things than just the battles and fighting aspects.
Not too long ago a video came out titled "six oilers" with the named ships. They talk about how on top of fleet oilers and the sangamon sisters. There were fresh water ships for example. On the topic of this video, another ship that helped with aviation logistics was HMS Unicorn, yes she's British but she's an aircraft ferry, maintenance and light aircraft carrier. She did also help in the Pacific as well.
I love this, its fine quoting famous generals who talk about logistics but its useless if dont actually talk about logistics in military history.
So to our history youtubers (spread this message) keep this talk about the logistics side of things going.
Always interesting, thank you.
I read an article on Wikipedia which said that as of war's end, the U.S. Navy had 54 aircraft carriers on station in the Pacific Ocean. I think the split was 24 big fleet carriers and 30 light "jeep" carriers, but by whatever count, they had so many carriers they were coming out of the Navy's ears. And more were about to be commissioned, including the 3 very large Midway class ships.
Alexander the Great’s said, “My logisticians are a humorless lot ... they know if my campaign fails, they are the first ones I will slay."
Fantastic video. Thanks!
Fantastic video, thank you. I'll have to add Sustaining Carriers to my read list. I'm really curious, does that book go into details about when exactly that transition over from 'build planes and their spare parts' to ' just build more planes and replace them vs. fix them' makes sense to occur? I would imagine that has to happen in any long drawn out war where industrial capacity becomes a major factor. I haven't read anything about it, but thinking about modern examples I wonder if the same thing happened with MRAPs in Iraq and Afghanistan. And now in Ukraine, obviously many or all pieces of equipment are still so rare that it makes sense to repair damaged equipment, but I wonder what conditions might lead towards that transition, and how it might be accelerated. Anyway, thanks again, great video!
Great question … the book answers it better than I can here in the comments section.
A few years back, I listened to the audio version of The Fleet at Floodtide and one of the parts that just blew me away was the insane cadence of major US invasions is just unbelievable. Like the US landed on Iwo Jima in late February and then landed on Okinawa in early April. Those two invasions went off seperated by only 41 days. That is literally beyond my comprehension. How in the actual hell was that managed?
I'm not discounting the repair and maintenance operations of aircraft in the Pacific theater, but American production was quickly outpacing aircraft losses as early as 1942 and by a long shot in 1943. Oftentimes, damaged craft were just pushed overboard while replacements arrived very soon after. The key to winning the Pacific War and the War in Europe was American Industrial Might and Logistics.
Thanks. Always nice to learn new things.
From 1976 to 1979 I was a Marine Corps avionics technician. When assigned to USS Tripoli/LPH-10 I spent eight months working my specialty (UHF radios) in the AIMD (Aircraft Intermediate Maintenance Division) and I was familiar with the spare parts down in ship's stores aboard that helicopter carrier. All parts had to be accounted for. During my time as an avionics technician the Corps was into fixing and repairing equipment rather than replacement.
One day I received a scorched AN/ARC-51 UHF radio that had survived the crash of a CH-46 helicopter in Hawaii. The radio was fine, but the air crew was toast. I found out a month later that the First Mech was a friend of mine.
I think I can understand the throwaway culture around airplanes. I mean, new and fresh airplanes can be flown to the carriers on the front lines. But the inoperable ones on the front lines cannot fly back. So something would need to pick them up. And then you wouldn't want just one ship for one plane. You'd need to have lots of ships being able to carry lots of planes. Which means the carrier would spend precious time doing rendez-vous with the transports and take time and big cranes to switch the aircraft over. Time is the single thing no one can get back. Besides that, those transports would also need escorts.
@@FrancisFjordCupola The CVE sometimes would fly land planes off the flight deck directly to forward airfields--and more often replacement carrier planes would take off from the CVE and land on either a CVL or CV.
Awesome episode, yes indeed logistics is and has been the foothold of victory whenever it was and is acknowledged. Absolutely agree on the fact that most documentaries just forego on this subject, where without this information the narrative lacks the necessary historical, strategical and logistical depth. Always wondered on the missions near Midway and the Marianas in which the common story tells a large number of planes were ditched, or, because of nighttime landings, damaged and thrown overboard. The majority of those stories don’t tell about the units which were working round the clock to replace the planes within a fortnight. It is evident that by doing so, these units haven’t received the awe and respect they deserved. Wonder why that is, is indeed the ‘ace’ more sexy than the mechanics? After all, without the mechanics, for whatever unit they were assigned to, no ace would have been able to achieve the results history seems so eager to focus on. Henceforth a more than interesting episode, plus a true and sincere reminder of the sweat and blood spilled by faithful and apt hands and minds.
U.S. materiel-related manufacturing capacity, organization, logistics and abundance was awe-inspiring, as deftly illustrated in this video.
Did you get to Wichita on your trip? In addition to an abundance of replacement aircraft, the US turned out an abundance of replacement air crew, partially due to the mass of trainers produced in Wichita. Logistics, logistics and even more logistics. Great vid as always MAH.
Thank you.
Glad you mentioned the escort carriers, which were pretty much the USN's secret weapon in the War in the Pacific: they could ferry entire fleets of planes, support the main CVs in offensive operations, and assist in convoy protection. 77 of the 115 carriers we put to sea in WW2 were escort carriers...sadly, I don't think a single one of them survived the scrapyard though.