Special Ops: Four Accounts of the Military's Elite Forces

by Orr Kelly

  When the U.S. entered the war in Europe in April 1917, the navy had fifty-four training planes and thirty-nine aviators. By the time the war ended in November 1918, they had 1,656 aviators, as well as 2,127 aircraft—purchased at a cost averaging about a million dollars apiece.

  Becoming a naval aviator in those days was a brief and dangerous process. Cadets received preliminary flight training and then went to Pensacola, Florida, still a center for advanced naval aviation training today.

  To earn his wings, a pilot had to fly at least fifteen hours solo; operate a service airplane satisfactorily; navigate a sixty-mile, cross-country hop; spend at least fifteen minutes at 6,000 feet, and make a “dead stick” landing. He was also required to make at least two night landings with flares. That all took twenty-five to fifty hours in the air, after which he either was sent overseas or became an instructor.

  During the war, twenty-five students died in accidents at Pensacola, and another 208 pilots and crew members were killed in accidents in the U.S. and overseas. The wonder is that more men did not die, considering the brevity of the training and the trickiness of the planes they flew.

  One of the greatest hazards was a stall followed by a spin. Student pilots were told that they should always keep up enough air speed to cause the wires to whistle sharply. “If the wires don’t sing to you, the angels will,” they were warned.

  Despite the dangers, naval aviation drew a steady stream of volunteers, stimulated by the thrill of flying and the propaganda coming from the European battlefronts.

  The French, Germans, and Americans, and to a much lesser extent, the British, deliberately glamorized aerial combat as part of their effort to attract recruits. The propaganda campaign was launched after soldiers, watching the carnage in the air, decided that life in the trenches, bad as it was, was preferable to death in the air.

  The French lionized Garros after his spectacular string of victories and made him the first “ace.” His five victories became the standard, still observed in the U.S., for a journeyman air fighter. The British refused to adopt the ace system and the Germans set their own standard: A flier who shot down ten planes became a kanone and could look forward to the award of the Pour le Merite medal, or Blue Max, as it was known.

  The propagandists created and glamorized the “knights of the air” and a new stream of recruits came, not from among the soldiers who had seen the air battles from below, but from among youths who had not. Despite the persisting glamor that has been associated with aerial combat, the fact is that most of those made famous during World War I—the “Red Baron” Manfred von Richtofen, Max Immelmann, Oswald Boelcke, Norman Prince, Frank Luke, Georges Guynemer, Albert Ball—died young in combat.

  The glamor of aerial combat was particularly appealing to a group of men at Yale University. They learned to fly on their own, studied aviation, and enlisted in the navy together as the U.S. entered the war. Two more Yale units followed them into the service, together forming a significant number of the navy’s first 100 aviators.

  By the fall of 1917, Americans were patrolling the English Channel and the approaches to European ports. When the war ended a year later, they had flown 22,000 patrols and carried out more than thirty attacks on submarines. Although none of the subs was known to have been sunk by air attack, the air crews were credited in a number of instances with helping destroyers to find and sink German submarines.

  The Yale students and others who volunteered to fly with the navy may have been enticed by the prospect of dogfights over the trenches and the chance to join the select company of aces, but the majority of navy and marine pilots spent most of the war airborne in lumbering flying boats and bombers. A few, however, volunteered to help out British and French units and found themselves flying Nieuport, Spad, and Sopwith Camel fighters on combat patrols.

  Throughout the war, America’s naval aviation was land based even though the U.S. Navy had been the first, by many years, to demonstrate that a plane could take off from and land on a ship. Ely’s first landing on the U.S.S. Pennsylvania, did, in a rudimentary way, utilize the same technology used today to stop planes after they have touched down on a modern carrier. But, having carried out these dramatic demonstrations, the navy turned to other things.

  It was not until the midst of the war that Britain’s Royal Navy resumed the attempt to send planes to sea as part of a desperate effort to find some way to prevent German lighter-than-air ships from bombing London and other parts of England.

  The concept of using gas-filled balloons in warfare was not new. As early as 1793, the French used captive balloons for reconnaissance, and Napoleon took along a balloon company on his invasion of Egypt. Nearly a century later, when Paris was besieged during the Franco-Prussian War, the French used balloons to carry passengers and mail out of the city—and the Germans responded by developing the first antiaircraft gun to shoot at them. Before Paris finally capitulated on 28 January 1871, the balloon airline had made sixty-six out-bound flights carrying nine tons of mail and 155 passengers.

  Across the Atlantic, during the Civil War, the North successfully used captive balloons to observe troop movements. Count Frederick von Zeppelin, a young German army officer serving as a military attaché in Washington, was permitted to go aloft in one of the balloons. He saw how a man raised 200 feet above the earth could, with a telescope, study enemy troop formations five miles behind the front lines.

  But he also saw something more: a balloon would be able to do far more if it were made rigid and provided with power to move from one place to another. When he returned home, he set to work to develop such a craft. The result was a large dirigible with a rigid frame and engines to propel it. The first Zeppelin—a 420-foot-long monster—flew successfully from a floating hangar on Lake Constance on 2 July 1900.

  In the years immediately before the war, Germany poured money into the construction of dirigibles. On 31 May 1915, a Zeppelin, flying at more than 20,000 feet, bombed London, killing seven persons and injuring thirty-five more. In the next year, they carried out fifty-one raids, dropping 196 tons of bombs, and killing 557 persons. The British responded with a massive anti-Zeppelin defense that pulled 110 planes from duty on the Western front.

  Much of the effort fell to the Royal Navy. In one early attempt to deal with the dirigible menace, a fighter plane was placed on a barge. The barge was then towed into the wind by a destroyer, and the plane took off. During one of these tests, word came that a Zeppelin was in the vicinity. The pilot took off, fired a stream of incendiary shells into the craft, and dodged out of the way as it exploded in flame and fell into the sea. Despite this success, the barge concept was abandoned as too dangerous, especially in the rough seas often encountered in the North Sea and English Channel.

  The Royal Navy then turned to a system similar to the early American experiments. Wooden platforms were built on cruisers and battleships so land planes could be taken to sea. The pilots were able to take off from the thirty-foot platforms, but were not able to land again. If they could not make it to shore, they were ordered to come down in the water alongside a ship and hope to be rescued before the plane sank.

  After one Zeppelin was shot down by a fighter launched from a ship, the Germans were careful to avoid flying over British ships. The scheme thus served as a deterrent. But it was clearly not a very satisfactory way to take planes to sea, and the British turned their efforts to the construction of a true aircraft carrier. A 200-foot platform was added forward of the bridge of H.M.S. Furious, a cruiser then under construction. Planes were launched successfully, but landing proved difficult and dangerous, even after a 300-foot landing platform was added aft of the superstructure.

  Despite these problems, seven Sopwith Camels were launched from the Furious while she was cruising sixty miles off the German coast on 19 July 1918, and they succeeded in destroying two Zeppelins in their hangars. This was the first successful bombing raid launched from an aircraft carrier.

  With air currents eddying arou
nd her superstructure, Furious was far from being a fully satisfactory carrier. By the time the war ended, H.M.S. Argus was ready to go to sea with forty planes. She had a flush deck and horizontal funnels. Later, a temporary “island” was added at the side of the deck as a navigating bridge and the Argus assumed the now-familiar shape of an aircraft carrier.

  It was not until 1922 that the U.S. Navy, which had pioneered taking planes to sea more than a decade before, commissioned its first aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Langley. The ship, converted from the hull of a coal-carrier while it was still under construction, had a displacement of 11,050 tons and could carry twelve one-man fighter-spotter planes, twelve two-man spotter planes, and ten torpedo planes. It was equipped with one elevator to move planes between the hangar deck and the flat, unobstructed flight deck.

  The Langley reflected general agreement among naval officers in the period immediately after World War I that control of the air at sea was an essential part of their effort to build a fleet second to none. But there was much less agreement on the extent to which airplanes might be used successfully to attack ships and not just to fight other planes and serve as spotters for the fleet. Many admirals were certain that large warships were far too heavily armored to be sunk by aircraft. In 1921, tests were set up in which U.S. Navy pilots carried out carefully controlled attacks on captured German vessels to determine how much damage could be inflicted on a warship by bombers.

  In the midst of these tests, Brig. Gen. William (“Billy”) Mitchell, the army’s most outspoken and controversial proponent of air power, challenged the navy to let his pilots have a crack at an anchored battleship. His goal was to prove that bombers could effectively guard the U.S. and its possessions from attack from the sea. Beyond that, he wanted to show that the U.S. should spend its money on airplanes, not warships.

  Ignoring the rules laid down by the navy, Mitchell’s pilots roared in over the former German battleship Ostfriesland, anchored in the Atlantic off the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, and bombarded it with eleven 1,000-and 2,000-pound bombs. The ship sank. Mitchell’s demonstration, details of which he promptly leaked to the press, was a sensation. And it foreshadowed what would become of powerful warships two decades later, if they found themselves under attack without friendly aircraft to protect them. Practically, however, his demonstration probably did more to strengthen the case of the naval aviators than it did to bolster his own case for a fleet of bombers.

  In the winter of 1921–22, the United States, Great Britain, Japan, Italy, and France met in Washington in the first of a series of arms control meetings. They agreed to reduce their navies according to a complex formula that limited shipbuilding by the powers until the eve of World War II. For the U.S., the treaty involved scrapping a number of older battleships and stopping construction on new ones. But it also permitted conversion of two cruisers, then under construction, into aircraft carriers.

  When these sister ships, the Lexington and the Saratoga, went into service in 1927, they were the supercarriers of their day. They displaced 33,000 tons, were 888 feet long and carried ninety planes apiece—about the same number as today’s 95,000-ton supercarriers. They were also fast: a top speed of more than thirty-four knots or forty statute miles an hour, also matching today’s big carriers.

  Over the next fourteen years, the U.S. built five more carriers, none of them as big or powerful as the Lexington and Saratoga. The Washington Treaty provided some restraint on size, but budget pressure played an even more important role. The first two big carriers cost $46 and $44 million respectively. When the U.S.S. Ranger was approved in the last days of the presidency of Calvin Coolidge in February 1929, Congress held the cost at $19 million. This meant a ship of only 14,500 tons, capable of less than thirty knots and carrying only eighty-six aircraft, none of them the bigger torpedo planes.

  But, despite budget constraints, the navy was not as hard up for money as the army, which was reduced to drilling with wooden guns even as the war clouds billowed in Europe and Asia. In 1922, when the Lexington and Saratoga were approved, Congress also okayed a five-year program to increase the naval air arm to 1,000 modern planes. In 1933, in the heart of the depression, the navy won approval to increase its force to 1,625 planes. Funding was also voted for more carriers. Three were virtual sister ships, at 20,000 tons, carrying ninety planes and capable of thirty-four knots. They were the Yorktown, Enterprise, and Hornet, which entered service in 1937, 1938, and 1941. The smaller 14,700-ton Wasp was commissioned in 1940.

  During the two decades before World War II, there was an obvious fascination with aviation throughout much of the navy. As early as the mid-1920s, a new policy went into effect requiring all Naval Academy graduates to undergo flight training.

  For the aviation enthusiasts, the concept of mobile air bases didn’t stop with ships. The navy built two huge dirigibles—the Akron and the Macon—and used them as flying aircraft carriers. Experiments with the Los Angeles had already demonstrated that tiny fighter planes could be launched from an airship and recovered with a hook hanging down below the hangar bay. Both the Akron and Macon were lost in accidents, however, and the idea of flying aircraft carriers faded away.

  Even as the powerful new carriers came into service, there was still considerable uncertainty among the senior battleship admirals as to how this new force would be used. Their tendency was to keep the carriers safely back behind the battleship battle line with the supply ships and other support vessels.

  Younger officers, fascinated by the advantages offered by their high-speed carriers, put on a series of demonstrations of how sea-based air power might be used in combat.

  In January 1929, the brand-new Saratoga moved in south of the Panama Canal and launched an early morning raid in which eighty-three planes “destroyed” the locks and air bases in the Canal Zone. As the war game played out, however, the carrier was, in turn, knocked out by battleships and army planes.

  An even more impressive demonstration took place on a Sunday morning three years later. Two of the fast carriers took up a position northeast of the Hawaiian Islands and launched 152 planes for a devastating surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. The date was 7 February 1932, nearly a decade before the Japanese launched their own assault with real bombs.

  In July 1940, after war had broken out in Europe, but a year and a half before the U.S. entered the conflict, Congress passed the Two-Ocean Navy Act, which not only provided for more ships, but called for an increase in navy aircraft strength from 1,741 to 15,000.

  Until it got enough ships and planes for a true two-ocean force, however, there was no doubt about the navy’s orientation. The navy, as it was then shaping up, was specifically designed for battle against another major sea power. The only potentially hostile major sea power was Japan. As soon as the new carriers entered service, the biggest and fastest of them—Lexington, Saratoga, Enterprise, and Yorktown—were sent to the Pacific. The two smaller carriers, Wasp and Ranger, were based at Norfolk as part of the Atlantic Fleet. The old Langley became a floating base for seaplanes. In exercises, the navy showed its flexibility by sending ships through the Panama Canal to beef up strength in the Atlantic. But as soon as the exercises ended, the ships returned to their proper places in the Pacific. In the months before Pearl Harbor, the Yorktown was sent to the Atlantic, but she was soon back in the Pacific to play a vital role in the early battles of the Pacific war.

  Just as there was no doubt about the navy’s Pacific orientation, there was little doubt either, at least among the more senior admirals, about the most important ships in the fleet. While the fast carriers were sent to the Pacific, they were thought of as an adjunct to the twelve battleships, not a replacement for them.

  By this time, of course, the carriers did have a potent offensive capability. The four big carriers in the Pacific each carried four squadrons of fighters, four squadrons of torpedo planes, and eight squadrons of scout bombers. This practice of assigning a separate type of plane to each role and making the crews
experts in that one task became a deeply embedded navy tradition. Although some of the bombers were fitted with the new Norden bomb sights to see if they could drop bombs while flying horizontally high above their targets, the planes were designed and used primarily as dive-bombers. Large air brakes permitted them to dive almost straight down toward the target, in a tactic developed by the marines in Nicaragua in 1924. They were extremely accurate bombers.

  Despite the attacks on the Panama Canal and Hawaii during peacetime battle games, and despite Billy Mitchell’s early demonstration of what planes could do to a surface ship, the true offensive power of sea-based air had not been demonstrated in actual warfare at the time World War II broke out in the fall of 1939. The war had been underway for more than a year when the British put on such a demonstration: On the night of 11–12 November 1940, twenty-one aged biplanes from the carrier Illustrious attacked the Italian fleet at anchor in the harbor of Taranto, on the western side of the Italian boot. With the loss of only two planes, the British knocked out three battleships, burned the harbor’s oil depot, and succeeded in putting half the Italian fleet out of business.

  The British onslaught proved one important point for the Japanese, who were even then thinking of the possibility of an attack on Pearl Harbor. A major concern was that torpedoes could not be used effectively in the relatively shallow waters of Pearl Harbor. But torpedoes had worked at Taranto, where the maximum depth of the water was forty-two feet, three feet shallower than that of Pearl Harbor. While the Japanese learned from the British success, however, the Americans didn’t. The U.S. officers decided against rigging anti-torpedo nets at Pearl Harbor because of the congestion it would cause and because they considered the water too shallow for torpedo attack.

  The task of planning the Japanese attack fell, ironically, to Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, who had studied at Harvard, served as a military attaché in Washington, and knew the United States better than any other Japanese military man. He was adamantly opposed to any policy that would bring his country into war with the United States. But if there was to be war, he reasoned, the only chance for a Japanese victory was to go for a quick kill, avoiding a drawn-out war in which Japan would surely lose.