Cub Driver ) wrote:

: How much of a difference did battle ships and destroyers make in the
: Pacific battle?? Since the carriers were out to sea when Pearl was
: attacked, and looking at the day by day reports of the battles, it seems
: that most damage was done by the planes from the carriers. Torpedo
: bombers and such. It doesn't seem like the damaged battleships were
: missed. Also, how effective were the bigger bombers in the ocean
: battles. Looking at a particular photo on the Navy's history web site,
: B17's were a complete miss when going after a Japanese ship.

: Both your points are valid. Curiously, the Japanese could be said to
: have invented the concept of the carrier battle group, which the
: Americans used to such good effect from 1942 onward. Perhaps they did
: the U.S. Navy a favor in so rudely divesting the Pacific Fleet of its
: battleships?

The concept--referred to by the US as a Carrier Task Force--had
occurred to someforward-looking US officers but had not been
accepted by the high command, which still saw battleships slugging it
out as the way sea wars would be decided. (War Plan Orange, still in
effect on 12/7/41, called for the US to send battleships towards the
Philippines to engage the Japanese fleet. Cruisers and destroyers,
supplemented by carrier-based aircraft, were primarily scouts, though
they could deliver some weapons.) Pearl Harbor forced the US to
abandon this strategy and build the striking force around the aircraft
carrier.

: Battleships saw heavy use as seaborne artillery throughout the war,
: right up to its last days.

And as anti-aircraft platforms. More and more AA guns were
added to battleships, cruisers, and destroyers through the war. With
the proximity fuse, they were quite effective, leaving the Japanese
to adopt Kamikaze tactics as the only way to get through.

: And high-level bombing did prove ineffective against ships,
: vindicating the navy's decision not to use the Norden bombsight (a
: navy project) but to develop dive-bombers instead.

Through the 15 or so years before the war, both the US and
Japanese navies, and to a lesser extent the British (whose operating
environment was completely different), worked on effective means of
attacking ships with aircraft. Coordinated dive bombing and torpedo
atacks were the preferred method.
But the US Army Air Force was able to attack surface ships by
skip-bombing using conventional bombs.