United States Navy in World War II
The U.S. Navy grew slowly in the years prior to World War II, due in part to international limitations on naval construction in the 1920s.
[1] The Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) sought naval superiority in the Pacific by sinking the main American battle fleet at Pearl Harbor, which was tactically centered around its battleships.
The United States Navy (like the IJN) had followed Alfred Thayer Mahan's emphasis on concentrated groups of battleships as the main offensive naval weapons.
TF 19 included 25 warships and the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade of 194 officers and 3,714 men from San Diego, California under the command of Brigadier General John Marston.
On 7 July, Britain persuaded the Althing to approve an American occupation force under a U.S.–Icelandic defense agreement, and TF 19 anchored off Reykjavík that evening.
On 6 August, the U.S. Navy established an air base at Reykjavík with the arrival of Patrol Squadron VP-73 PBY Catalinas and VP-74 PBM Mariners.
The first Japanese wave of 183 aircraft arrived at Pearl Harbor at 7:48 am, targeting ships in Battleship Row in addition to attacking airfields in other places within Honolulu.
The USS Oklahoma was hit by four torpedoes and rolled completely over within five minutes, with its bottom and propeller rising above the waters of the harbor.
The Japanese focused on ships and planes yet spared fuel tank farms, naval yard repair facilities, and the submarine base, all of which proved vital for the tactical operations that originated at Pearl Harbor in the ensuing months.
Most importantly, the shock and anger that Americans felt in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor united the nation and was translated into a collective commitment to destroy the Japanese Empire and Nazi Germany.
Therefore, the IJN kept its main strike force together under Admiral Yamamoto and won a series of stunning victories over the Americans and British in the 90 days after Pearl Harbor.
[10][11][12] Between June 4–7, 1942, the United States Navy decisively defeated a Japanese naval force that had sought to lure the U.S. carrier fleet into a trap at Midway Atoll.
After Midway, and the exhausting attrition of the Solomon Islands campaign, Japan's shipbuilding and pilot training programs were unable to keep pace in replacing their losses while the U.S. steadily increased its output in both areas.
Military historian John Keegan called the Battle of Midway "the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare.
Not every Japanese stronghold had to be captured; some, like the big bases at Truk, Rabaul and Formosa, were neutralized by air attack and then simply isolated and leapfrogged.
The U.S. Navy did not seek out the Japanese fleet for a decisive battle, as Mahanian doctrine would suggest; the enemy had to attack to stop the inexorable advance.
Tokyo sent Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa with nine-tenths of Japan's fighting fleet—it was about half the size of the American force, and included nine carriers with 473 planes, 18 battleships and cruisers, and 28 destroyers.
Ozawa gambled on surprise, luck and a trick strategy, but his battle plan was so complex and so dependent on good communications that it quickly broke down.
Marines and soldiers landed on 1 April 1945, to begin an 82-day campaign which became the largest land-sea-air battle in history and was noted for the ferocity of the fighting and the high civilian casualties with over 150,000 Okinawans losing their lives.
One impediment to progress was that admirals who had grown up with great battleships and fast cruisers had a hard time adjusting their war-fighting doctrines to incorporate the capability and flexibility of the rapidly evolving new weapons systems.
The Kriegsmarine, distrusting its Japanese ally, ignored Hitler's orders to cooperate and failed to share its expertise in radar and radio.
Prior to the outbreak of the war, the London Naval Treaty had fallen apart as major powers began restarting capital ship production.
When the second escalation clause was activated, this allowed displacement to rise to 45,000 tons and the Iowa-class battleship began development.
The "big-gun" admirals on both sides dreamed of a great shootout at twenty-mile (32 km) range, in which carrier planes would be used only for spotting the mighty guns.
Absent Pearl Harbor, big-gun admirals like Raymond Spruance might have followed prewar doctrine and sought a surface battle in which the Japanese would have been very hard to defeat.
[28] However, USN warships did enjoy a significant advantage over the IJN in terms of fire control, with even ships as small as destroyers being fitted with radar and ballistics computers.
Even Roosevelt, however, considered Billy Mitchell's warnings of bombers capable of sinking battleships under wartime conditions to be "pernicious".
[30] Having failed in its attempt to rig a demonstration attack against the decommissioned USS Indiana,[31] the Navy was forced by Congressional resolutions to conduct more honest assessments.
"[34] Navy nurse Ann Agnes Bernatitus, one of the “Angels of Bataan”, nearly became another POW; she was one of the last to escape Corregidor Island in the Philippines, via the USS Spearfish.
In 1943, Thelma Bendler Stern, an engineering draftsman, became the first woman assigned to perform duties aboard a United States Navy ship as part of her official responsibilities.
