 Look at fighter aircraft before World War II. It doesn't work real well. And it doesn't work really well. Where is the clicker? Oh, I guess this is a clicker. Right. And you see a fighter that worked out rather well. An amazing fighter, actually, because it's an accident. You realize that until 1940, there was no expectation of even buying the Hellcat. And then suddenly someone from the Navy procurement officer said, I understand that the plane you're buying may not work out right. And there's this alternative. And Navy's always been very good at that. By the way, am I audible in the back? Am I OK? It turned out rather well. You could argue it was a very successful airplane in the Pacific. I always found it more attractive than the Hellcat, but that's just me, than the Corsair rather. That's just me. Very forgiving airplane. But I was interested in how you use them and where they go. The other thing is, while I was doing this book, I was doing a project at the War College on wargaming between the wars. And as you read the war games, and I did, and I don't think anyone else has, because I would not recommend that as a light entertainment, as you read the war games, you realize that they were extremely important for the Navy. The war college at that time was the Navy's lab for understanding what a future war would be like. You've got to realize no one had ever imagined actually fighting a Pacific war. It's a horrible problem. It's an enormous ocean. And the first question is, well, how do you cause the Japanese to surrender? How do you do it with not a lot of troops? Because when the warplanes are drawn, no one can imagine forming a 12 million man army that's not in the cards. And what happens way out there in the Western Pacific? Oh, and by the way, the Japanese own the islands past which you've got to go, the mandates. This is just some difficulty. So one of the things the war college does is every year it plays a big game. The big game lasts about a month. It's the only game in which the junior and senior classes both play. And the big game simulates the war plan. In fact, in 1927, the president of the college says, this is the most important thing you're going to do. This is the rest of your careers. You pay attention to this game. Well, they played a game in 33. And it turned out the war plan didn't work. That's really what being a lab is about when you find out things better change. What happened was that the plan until then was called the through ticket to Manila. The through ticket to Manila was that the fleet goes straight to the Philippines. Once it's in the Philippines, it has a base. It fights the Japanese fleet. Once the Japanese have been wiped out, we can blockade Japan and strangle them. And the theory in all these war plans is if you want to beat the Japanese, you strangle them, which makes a lot of sense to what we did in the end. What happens in this game is the Japanese get Manila, but they don't get the southern Philippines instantly. But all there is in the southern Philippines is anchorages without facilities. So the fleet fights a battle on the way out. In this battle, the Japanese lose, but they don't get wiped out. The trouble is that in the course of beating them, we take a lot of underwater damage. And at that time, the college had a commentator, a captain, Van Orken. And Van Orken was a man of very strong views, and he was willing to say things. And he says, oh, you think this was a real victory, right? Well, there's a little problem. Once you get to these anchorages in the southern Philippines, there were about three places that had them on. The Taui Taui, Malampaya Sound, and there was another one. I've forgotten. It doesn't matter now. Well, you get there, right? And you turn off your engines, and you go to the bottom immediately. And there's nothing to fix you. You're stuck. You think this is a real good result? Well, no, it isn't a real good result. Then they played another game the following January, I guess, in which it was assumed that magically they'd repaired the fleet. But the Japanese is still coming. And the fleet is the only reason the Japanese don't overrun these anchorages. But the fleet needs support. So there's a convoy coming. And the question is, well, what happens when you go out to meet the convoy to bring it in, and the Japanese army turns up in your rear? And the answer is very bad things, surprise, surprise. So Van Okken writes this up. And I think the only time in history, this thing is sent to CNO. Oh dear, this was not a good thing to discover. The war plan changes to what we actually do, which is we go step by step. Now you don't think that has anything to do with fighters. It has a lot to do with them. Because what happens when you go step by step is real different. If you're going to go straight through to Manila, as you pass through the mandates, the Japanese bomb the living daylight side of you unless you can wipe them en route. So a lot depends on whether you can bomb their airfields. A lot depends on whether you can take their airfields out permanently. In a lot of these war games, the way you take airfields out permanently is you drop gas on them. If you're going step by step, then you seize an island. That becomes a base. Now you can use that as a base to attack other Japanese bases further in as you move forward. Also, it's not necessary to do with a carrier. You can do it with big flying boats with bombs. And at that time, briefly, it looked like flying boats could be as high performance as landplanes. Good luck. It doesn't work, but things change. That's why we buy a lot of seaplane tenders, because we're going to move everything forward. And if you look at the designations of the big seaplanes, they get a bomber designator. They're PBs instead of just P's. And PBs mean they get a fancy bomb site, a northern bomb site. It means they get serious bombs. Now the role of the fighters is going to change also. Because when you look at the fleet going all the way through, the fighters have to beat off land-based aircraft. So the fighters have to have the highest possible performance. You can't tolerate garbage fighters. Now you may think that's obvious. But if you look at another big Navy, the Royal Navy, they believe that somehow airplanes that operated off ships were inherently worse than airplanes from land. But since all they were going to face was shipboard aviation, they didn't have to have high performance. There's a logic to it, but the words wishful thinking come up a lot when you read about British comments. I think we were more realistic. I think we're much more cold-blooded and it shows in our successes. Well, here's what fighters do in this case and later on. The season air superiority is very difficult. The only way you can really do it is wipe out the other guy's air. And I don't think we ever thought you could do that. If he doesn't have a lot of air, you can wipe it out. And that's really what the maritime strategy was later on. I was involved in that stuff. The fleet air defense is very hard to do unless you have radar because you don't get enough warning. There was a lot of talk about how you would get warning, not so much about how you would use the warning. Just before the war, we in the British both get very interested in standing air patrols. I'm not talking about a combat air patrol. I'm talking about what spots the other guy coming in. And there was a lot of talk of using cruiser spotting planes for that purpose. I don't think that we ever tested it. I don't think it was for real, but I don't know. You don't get much discussion of how to do it. You find it in handbooks of how you operate your aircraft off the carrier. But you don't find it very much in, say, operational discussion. And the one thing that war college couldn't simulate when it wanted to pretty badly was air to air combat. There's a lot of discussion in their records of the problem of trying to make sense out of it. And then there's the strike support. If you're going to get it mostly by attacking the other guy, well, he's going to try to beat you off. You need escorts. So you need a combination of very high performance and very long range. And that's hard to do. So if you look back just before the war, the Bureau of Aeronautics thinks it's almost there, but they can't really get there until they have a new generation of engines. And that's the World War II fighters. Oh, I'm sorry. This is the gaming thing I've talked about. And I don't think that people have realized how important gaming was. I think that one of the parts of gaming that mattered was that if you came to Newport and you weren't an aviation guy, you learned about what aviation would do. And you learned by doing. That was a big thing about gaming. When you look at the records of the War College, most people focus on the lectures that are easy to find. And what I'm thinking is, remembering school, the lectures don't do it. You've got to do it. OK? The effect of the treaties, the War College advised about the treaties, but his advice is generally disregarded. On the other hand, when it came to we've signed the treaty, now what do we do? They had real influence. And you see that in cruiser designs into war. This is what I told you about how we were supposed to fight Japan. And in each case, you need a lot of air. Oh, and the other thing about these war games is pilots get used up like water. And so although we didn't have the money for a big pilot training scheme, I think that everybody who went through Newport realized you had to have a lot of reserve pilots. And once we have some money, we start doing it for real. We do it much more for real than anybody else. The British don't. And you know that the Japanese didn't. And I think that we could not imagine that there would be that stupid. And that had real effects. All right. How do you get air superiority? You hit their bases. Until you have radar, it's got to be preemptive. If you're lucky, and it's a carrier on a carrier thing, you hit the carriers first. So if you look at an American carrier in, say, 1940, you'll find that there's a squadron of scouts and there's a squadron of dive bombers, the same airplanes, but different jobs. And there's a lot of talk about if you can find them first, you win. The most astounding thing about 1944 and the Turkish shoot is they found us first and they lost. That is the rules changed. Radar changed everything. Fighters needed maximum performance, but you couldn't get it before the new engines. If you look at World War II, there's a jump in engine power that makes a tremendous difference. The fact that we could build engines in very large quantities that hadn't really existed two or three years earlier made a tremendous difference to us. And that's the R2600 and 2800, the 2,000 horsepower engines. Basically, you build an airplane, you make compromises. And the compromises are very difficult because it has to be light and you're trying to get some range out of it and it has to weight. And if you want high speed and you have 1,000 horsepower engines, you basically wrap an airplane around the smallest airplane you could build. That's like a Spitfire or some message meters like that. Once you have very powerful engines, you can wrap a much bigger airplane around them. You're limited in maximum speed by air resistance and what propellers will do. You're not going to get a whole lot faster at the maximum end, but you'll go a lot longer. You'll be armored. It makes an unbelievable difference. I think a Hellcat would weigh about twice as much as a Spitfire. And it's probably not nearly as maneuverable, but boy, it's a lot faster. And it can take a lot worse beating. The Japanese had been fighting in China. They had discovered that bombers would not always get through. The Chinese had real air defense. They found they had to escort their bombers. So they also realized that you had to have long-range high-performance fighters. They had a little problem, though, which was allows the industrial base. And allows the industrial base meant that although they could design more powerful engines, they couldn't produce them in quantity. And that's basically why Zeroes made out of paper. OK, these are Wildcats. They don't look like much, but they're rather impressive. Before the war, the Bureau of Aeronautics split this as one of the highest-performance airplanes around. It wasn't really, but it was very effective and, by the way, it stayed in service throughout the whole war, which is not bad. This is what Buer wanted. It's a Corsair landing on a carrier in Korea. That big engine at the front is what mattered. And you'll know that Corsairs had some problems, but they worked. If I look abroad, I think that the only way you can see who does it right and who does it wrong is to look at other people. Once you look at other people, you can say, geez, we avoided that problem. Boy, did they get stuck. Well, the Royal Navy had the problem of a separate air force that basically ate their air. And the effect of eating their air was subtle. The Royal Navy paid for its airplanes. Nobody tried to stop them from buying the airplanes, although in the 30s, the RAF wanted to kill their air because they thought there was going to be some kind of air disarmament. The disarmament story in the 20s and 30s is very bizarre. They thought they were going to gain air superiority by hitting Japanese carriers first. They also were interested in fighting Japan. And they were good on scouting. They were very good on training. They were very good at navigation. I think probably better than we. I think they were probably better than we were before the war at training observers. Unfortunately, there weren't a lot of them, and the airplanes were lousy. So if there weren't a lot of you at the start of the war, they're going to be a lot fewer. In their internal history, which hasn't been published, they talk about how mistakes they were making in 41 were due to the loss of all their hardly. Now, whether that's an excuse or reality, I can't answer. They wanted to try to get long range. But one of the effects of the RAF owning their air was that if you were a pilot in the Royal Navy, you ended up with an RAF job. So that they didn't have a lot of senior people who had a good feeling for air. I'm not talking about a good feeling for how you use airplanes. They have some very smart people. I'm talking about a good feeling for what the technology meant. So for example, they swallowed the line about how the planes will be lousy because they operate from carriers. They were apparently not very good at seeing anybody else. So when they built their dive bomber fighter to gain air superiority, it could lift a 500 pound bomb. And therefore, when they went for armored hangers, which are their famous armored carriers, that's what they were supposed to keep out. Now you say, oh, that seems sensible. No, we were flying with 1,000 pound bombs at that time. And I think it was fairly public. On the other hand, they regarded us as a lot better. There's a wonderful line where the director of naval construction is being asked what they should reveal to us in exchange for information about aircraft. And he says, reveal everything. We're lousy. These guys are terrific. The crumbs from their table are worth the effort. The inter-service problems are difficult to lay out, but they're obviously very serious. They invent radar fighter control that helps them a lot. It comes in kind of late, but they're pretty good at it. And when you look at actual battles, like there's a big convoy battle called pedestal, they do rather well out of that. They end up being badly hurt anyway, but the Mediterranean is a very nasty place. This is their preemptive strike aircraft. Lousy engine. You want long range, you're gonna get low speed and light bomb load. Now, the Japanese, they recognized that they would get wiped out by air attack. They don't seem to have made any serious attempt at understanding how to defend themselves. I know there were zeros trying to defend it midway. Without any fighter control, they all go to whatever looks interesting and then you get in the back. So no fighter control, you might as well kill yourself, and they do. They believed that they would find us first and hit us first and it would be over. They did a pretty good job, but we did a better one. The China experience really affected them and I think it determined the way they thought and they wanted long range. If you want long range and you have lousy engines, you're gonna pay for it. You're gonna get killed. Surprise. I don't think we realized what they were doing in China. I don't think anyone had a very good idea of what they were doing. If you look at intelligence before the war, they were pretty good at closing things down. This is a zero, kind of beat up. Very good fighter in 1941, but only as long as it's shooting you down, not as long as it gets damaged. And you know that from, I'm not telling you anything new. The point that people miss is that the fighter is a visible part of an iceberg and if you don't recognize the other bits, you miss the point. So there has to be some way of seeing things coming. That isn't the same as knowing what's happening. That's situational awareness. That's what happens in a plot or right now a computer system. Without that awareness of what's happening, you can't give orders to go there, he's coming in. Then there has to be some way of controlling the aircraft and that's a radio issue. And radios become effective for this job as the war starts. And then there's the final part is you gotta shoot him down. We were apparently extremely good at air to air gunnery. And there's some evidence that the British never quite got it. By the way, the Army Air Force didn't get it either. It's a matter of deflection shots. If you don't have all of it, you get killed. Now the other thing is before the war, when the war colleges to run games, carriers got hit a lot. And the question is, well, can you survive hits? Now I had always imagined that if you got hit, carrier was sort of an explosion waiting to happen and that was it. No, nothing like that. The story was that if you got hit in your flight deck, if it was a metal flight deck, it was a shipyard job. And by about 1930, people of the war college are saying, is there anything you can do to do rapid repairs? And the reason we had those flimsy wooden flight decks that everyone laughed at in England, that's to be able to fix it fast. If you look at our experience until the Kamikazes, if you look at, say, Enterprise. Enterprise is famous because she's in almost all the battles in the Pacific. Well, surprise, that's because she didn't spend all that time being fixed. If you took a bad beating on your flight deck and it was a nice steel flight deck that looks terrific, well, as long as it didn't break, you're in great shape. If your flight deck could beat all 500 pound bombs and a Stuka was dropping a 1500 pound bomb on you, unfortunately you wouldn't do very well. So, for example, Illustrious, which is the first of their armored flight deck carriers, it gets hit, I think in January 41 in the Med by a Stuka and it takes something like 11 months to fix it in Norfolk. We're terribly impressed by it. We will admit it, but that if you're gonna face real bombs, you want a lot more structure deeper in a ship. If you look at an Essex, Essex has two armored decks, the hangar deck and one below that. It'll take a lot worse beating. And if most of this literature hadn't originated in the UK, my line would be much more familiar to you. This is jealousy and you gotta remember this book originated in the UK and was imported here, but it was an American writing it so, tough luck. Another fighter role is if you can wipe out the other guy's air, you win. And that's a Turkish shoot in 44 in Philippine Sea. Now the most interesting thing about the Turkish shoot to me is if you read Morrison's account, Morrison is not real good on technology, but he's very good on what people are thinking at that time. And he said the pilots were very depressed because although they shot down all the Japanese aircraft, they hadn't been able to get into Japanese carriers. And therefore they felt they'd not achieve much. I mean, shooting down a whole bunch of Japanese planes was a day's work. Well, what they'd actually done was wipe out the Japanese naval air arm, which is rather nice. The reason they didn't realize, for my money, what they had done was that no one believed that the Japanese could be so incredibly stupid as not to be churning out pilots at a high rate. Now I think there was intelligence to that effect, but what's known, say, in Washington doesn't always percolate. None of you's ever experienced that, right? So they didn't realize what they'd done. When we looked again at the Turkish shoot in the 80s, when it was the outer air battle and maritime strategy, it was boy, is that a good idea. Now at the time, what comes out of it is if you're gonna wipe out Japanese naval air, you gotta wipe out the carriers. When Nimitz gives Halsey his marching orders, Halsey is told to concentrate on the Japanese carriers. Guess what? That's what happens when they go. And people conveniently forget his orders, as far as I can tell. The other thing you learn in war games before the war is that if your carrier is caught by a big surfer ship, you're dead meat. And so when Halsey goes north, he takes his battleships with him because he doesn't want his valuable carriers to get caught by accident. Nobody gets it. If you look at an actual attack on ships in World War II, it's very hard to sink a large ship. If you look at the sinkings that we achieve, the number of aircraft are very, very large. I mean, I think it's four carriers get Yamato. That's a lot of airplanes. So your view of surfer ships and carriers may be just a little different when you're looking at it that way. If you want to see what happens when you don't understand air, there's a ship named HMS Glorious in 1940. She's caught by a couple of German battleships. She's caught largely because the captain of the ship is having a fight with his air commander. Nobody's up scouting, surprise. It's like he doesn't get it. What did the war college do for us? They got it. That's why guys like Spurwin's knew how to wield carriers really well. That's here. Did a very good job. Okay, the turkey shoot, I've said all of this. I think that the reason that we were surprised by kamikaze was we didn't understand what we had done. Once all of your good pilots are gone, you're stuck. You're very desperate. The Japanese like suicide stuff anyway. Everyone knew that. By 1945, you see analyses in Navy publications saying, actually, if you're gonna lose all your airplanes, you might as well lose them this way. And after the war, Japanese said that to us. I remember reading a book in which a Japanese officer is asked, well, how could you do something horrible like that? He says, wait a minute. All pilots got killed anyway. And might as well get something for it. Now, what happens later? This is later. And the problem with the Russians was standoff missiles. By the end of the Cold War, this could probably attack from 150, 200 miles away. And we realized sometime during the Cold War that although this was quite a nasty threat, there weren't all that many of them. And they had very highly trained crews. So if it's a finite threat and you could somehow wipe it out, that gets kind of interesting. And that's the essence of what we try to do later. So we invented an idea called the Outer Air Battle. The Inner Air Battle was missiles shooting at whatever was coming in, which would mostly be missiles. And the Outer Air Battle was kill the bombers. And the line was, you must have heard it, kill the archer and not the arrow. If you could wipe out these expensive bombers, that was like wiping out the Russian fleet. Once you realize the bombers were the core of the Russian, if you like, anti-ship fleet, that gets kind of interesting. And that would gain the Navy freedom of action. It would allow the Navy to intervene in the war on land. Once you wiped out the bombers, and if you could neutralize the subs, which we also thought we could do, then you could take chances. And the chances where you could go in inshore, you could seize a Jutland after the Russians tried to, you could go after the flanks of an advancing Russian army. Armies don't like their flanks threatened, they tend to pull back. And I don't think anybody outside the Navy understood quite how impressive this could get. And you know that the maritime strategy was very controversial in the Army and Air Force, they hated our guts. We wanted a battle. We wanted a decisive battle. The Norwegian Sea was our favorite place. We thought that the new technology would do it. And the new technology was the computers that finally work without breaking down every five minutes. We had enormous advantage that way that we didn't even realize was the advantage we had. We assumed the Russians also had computers, they didn't. I think it looked kind of good. Now, if the Russians had brought in another generation of missiles, it would have gotten nastier. We had to try to beat off their satellite reconnaissance and things like that. But this is really fighters doing what fighters are supposed to do. And if you look at the Chinese now, in a lot of ways the Chinese play the same game as the Russians. What they get out of the carrier is not clear. There's a sense that when you watch them that we want to have all the stuff that makes you look good like you have without the logic that fits it together. It couldn't happen to nicer people. And to me, this is the symbol of the Outer Air Battle. It's an F-14, which was the long endurance fighter with long range missiles. And the E-2, which would direct it. And the payoff on the E-2 was it could go way out. Would it have worked perfectly? Nothing works perfectly. The F-14s needed new engines. We were putting them in during the 80s. We would have been happier with a lighter weight missile. Phoenix was a good missile, but not as good as you might like. I can talk about that if you want. But if you look at the logic of the situation, I think we rather well understood. It's a rather good story. And in between, if you look at fighters and jet fighters, I talk a lot about the problems we had developing them. I think we were more realistic than others. For example, we wanted every fighter to have a radar. And the reason was, if you're coming at somebody else, and each of you is almost Mach 1, you're approaching at incredibly high speed. If you don't see the guy pretty far out, you're not gonna react. So I read about the British and they have these attractive looking airplanes. And they also had a well known British aircraft rider who said, well, if it looks nice, it's good. Yeah, good luck. They didn't work. We had problems. We had a lot of trouble with engines. Probably if you know airplanes, you know about that. But I think that we did what you're supposed to do. It took a while to make it work. Through the 50s, I don't think it would have worked real well because we didn't have computer combat direction. Once we had it, I think it worked pretty well. If you look at Vietnam, the Navy's combat direction systems were tested in effect. They provided support to aircraft attacking North Vietnam. I think they did rather well. The missiles worked after a while too. And you know we had some spectacular successes. Once the electronics worked, it really worked. Look, I'm ancient enough that the first computer I ever saw, it was an IBM computer, and it was constantly breaking. And the guy who had come to it had a sort of doctor's bed full of elegant little instruments. Does anybody remember that? And you just knew that if you bought a computer somehow, your life would be repair people. And then it changed. You would buy something in a box, you could drop it and it would still work. It would work when it came out of the box. It was very rare for these things not to work, right? That's a different world. And once you're in that world, this kind of thing works really well. Now there are other problems that come with that world.