Participative thread - about carriers & carrier ops IRL

[Fishbed]

Dear Board,

It's been a long, long time since my last passage in this place. Real life has been exhausting, and has left me with little resting time. I've done things, Ive seen things, and now I am at a time of my life when I can actually start to do what I like most. Among these things, playing WitP does qualify, naturally [;)] but I also started studying every aspect of some little pet project of mine revolving about carrier warfare and carrier command.

I will be working gathering some references about carriers and carriers ops mainly, in many respects (air ops, communications, doctrine...). Ive been reading a lot of literature on the topic lately, I do not lack sources, whether primary or secondary (in French, by primary we mean original material, and by secondary studies, analysis & al). Still, a lot of my work required me to go online to find the sort of graphic resources most books can't provide me. I am still left with a number of interrogations about under-documented aspects of US early war carrier warfare, and I wondered if some brave souls out there would be willing/able to give me a hand from time to time regarding this topic.

For starters, I am particularly interested in what you may have in store regarding carrier command facilities.

- The Flag Plot

Although most of the action actually happened there (it must be the single most important place in books such as Black Shoe Carrier Admiral...) I was unable to find a lot of sources regarding the arrangement of a CV Flag Plot, especially for the pre-war carriers.

The Hornet CV-12 museum does offer an insight – Ive been there personally, but they did post some photos online in here for those who wouldn't be familiar with it. http://www.usshornet-cv12.com/Ship/Island/index.html

The Hornet association tried to keep it “low-tech” and I suppose that it is a good start, but I expect Essex ships to have way better accommodations than the Yorktown class did, not to mention the Lexington class. J.Lundstrom mentioned that time when a helmet from a lookout standing in the the early 1942 post-repairs British-style open bridge fell all the way down directly into the flag plot area aboard USS Saratoga; I suppose it speaks much about the actual intricate design of the whole thing, and the questionable comfort of these command quarters despite the massive size of the ship. And from the floor plans I could gather, beyond size difference, the island on a Lexington class CV doesn’t look much bigger than the the one you’d find on your average heavy cruiser, after all…

Some other views exist, aboard other ships, but then again nothing regarding pre-war CVs.

Here we have Admiral Halsey hard at work aboard USS Missouri
https://www.history.navy.mil/content/hi ... 24418.html


Here we have a view of the Flag Plot aboard CV16
https://www.history.navy.mil/content/hi ... 31081.html


Here we have (back then) Commander Jimmy Thatch with Admiral McCain aboard CV19
https://www.history.navy.mil/content/hi ... 08561.html

There are several pictures of Admirals Mitscher & Burke posing for pictures aboard CV15
https://www.history.navy.mil/content/hi ... 08561.html

Here and there, pictures of admirals looking at maps in late war carriers or battlewagons – there are quite a few of them, but they hardly offer a clear idea of how the whole place was set up – and moreover, pre-war ship views are definitely lacking. The closest thing Ive come to is a view of USS Louisville (CA28) which, as a treaty cruiser, has a distinctive 30s feeling. I imagine it’s a good start for the atmosphere.

https://www.history.navy.mil/content/hi ... 92377.html


Besides, another (older) taste of the past can be found here in this USS Texas refit plan for the Flag Plot area, which is very handy as it comes with the basic floor plan once again.

http://www.navsource.org/archives/01/pdf/013542.pdf

Still, I wondered if any of you gentlemen around here had knowledge of a private, or public photo, or detailed layout of the flag plot area aboard a pre-war US carrier? So far, the closest specific info I have about this are the original plans for CV2 & CV5, which give an idea of the general disposition inside the island, but wouldn’t say what sort of accommodations and tools you would find inside the flag plot proper. I didn’t come across much about it in the literature either beyond references here and there (regarding the distance to the intel booth, the size of the place...) – but I understood that photos were scarce to begin with, and the loss of Lex, Yorktown and Wasp didn't help with the available content. At any rate, a description of what one might find in such quarters (which instruments/repeaters? which communication tools? any anecdote you would think of?) would be highly appreciated and helpful.



- Early-war Ouija (aircraft management) boards

Regarding flight operations management, I had a question about how the early-war Ouija boards would look like, if they existed at all. Problem is that the only wartime photo of a Ouija board I know of is this (thankfully!) beautiful photo from USS Randolph at the end of the war.

https://www.history.navy.mil/content/hi ... -5395.html

If anyone knows how an early-war Ouija board would differ from this, that would be a treat indeed.



- Early-war Fighter direction station

I am curious about how CAP was managed above the fleet early in the war. Although there are numerous pictures of circular grid-like interfaces in circulation inside late war CICs, we also know that the first prototype CIC was actually only featured on USS Hornet (and as such wouldn't have seen action before Santa Cruz). Any idea of what fighter direction may have looked like before that? How would someone like Oscar Pederson or an early FDO manage his CAP assets at Coral Sea, Midway or the Eastern Solomons?

What I've found so far (apart from shots taken directly from the Fighting Lady) is this sort of nice views of the CIC aboard CV16. I surmise this setting was probably the closest thing to a FDO station shot one could expect, and may have drawn part of its inspiration from the pre-war configuration...?

https://www.history.navy.mil/content/hi ... 31073.html

https://www.history.navy.mil/content/hi ... 31079.html


There’s also that kind of vertical board, here from USS New Jersey

https://www.history.navy.mil/content/hi ... 69942.html

Would a FDO in 1942 have this sort of boards and human assets at his disposal, or was he just a guy with a table, a mike, a pen, charts and a very vague idea of what was going around, trying to make some sense of all the infos provided by the comms and the radar? I am particularly interested in his working procedure with the lookouts and the radar team (the behind the scenes stuff), considering the FDOs comms with the planes feature already prominently in the after action reports.

If anyone here has any sort of input or idea on either of these topics, that will be great news, and you'll have my thanks... After all, today is Christmas day, I could do with a few surprise gifts [;)]

Thanks in advance and everybody take care

AJ

[adarbrauner]

What could be said or digged about same facilities onboardcJapanese carriers/flag ships?

[wegman58]

In the 1970s and 1980s you could have Combat Information Centers on US ships with enlisted men with grease pencils writing backwards behind boards to show where threats were.

The SPRUANCE class destroyers were a step up with lots of electronics, but before that - not so much.

And in the mid-1980s on a KNOX class frigate you had an enlisted guy, a grease pencil, a sound powered phone and a map of the ship showing the Captain where the damage was.

The screens with all the stuff are a modern (late Cold War) invention.

One of the advantages to the old fashioned way is you have battery powered lights and the phone line didn't get cut a power outage didn't kill command and control.

[MakeeLearn]

Radar and the Fighter Directors

https://ethw.org/Radar_and_the_Fighter_Directors

[MakeeLearn]

First-Hand:No Damned Computer is Going to Tell Me What to DO - The Story of the Naval Tactical Data System, NTDS

https://ethw.org/First-Hand:No_Damned_C ... stem,_NTDS


"The combat information center of the aircraft carrier USS Lexington off Formosa in January 1945. A radar plotting team works at a backlit plotting table"

[MakeeLearn]

Layout of an Essex Class carrier combat information center.

[Anachro]

ORIGINAL: Alain-James
in French, by primary we mean original material, and by secondary studies, analysis & al

That's how we use primary and secondary "sources" in English as well. As for the topic of discussion, I think the Armored Carriers website might or might not have some useful material/discussion on this.
Armored Carriers Website

[MakeeLearn]

Combat Information Center, is a monthly magazine created during WW II to spread the best practices in the rapidly developing art of integrating information (particularly radar) for command and control in U.S. Navy ships.

https://maritime.org/doc/cic/index.htm

[Fishbed]

What could be said or digged about same facilities onboardcJapanese carriers/flag ships?

From what I could understand reading Shattered Sword & al, most of Japanese carriers didn't even have a flag plot, owing to their very small island. In the end the command facilities were rather bare. I am interested to know the floor plan of other facilities inside the island, and especially how they looked like. Any input regarding this matter will be very instructive indeed.

ORIGINAL: wegman58

In the 1970s and 1980s you could have Combat Information Centers on US ships with enlisted men with grease pencils writing backwards behind boards to show where threats were.

The SPRUANCE class destroyers were a step up with lots of electronics, but before that - not so much.

And in the mid-1980s on a KNOX class frigate you had an enlisted guy, a grease pencil, a sound powered phone and a map of the ship showing the Captain where the damage was.

The screens with all the stuff are a modern (late Cold War) invention.

One of the advantages to the old fashioned way is you have battery powered lights and the phone line didn't get cut a power outage didn't kill command and control.

Well then I suppose that 1943 technology was rather close to 1942 technology in that regard indeed. Even if I have to rely on CIC models for pre-war carriers, I suppose I will not stroll too far away from the truth ^^
Obviously one of the big achievements of the CIC concept is to put everybody together in the same ecosystem and optimize information sharing. But afterall, the fact that Hornet was provided with a prototype CIC as early as 1941 probably shows that the organizational leap was quite something, but still wasn't supernatural per se.

[MakeeLearn]

US Navy CIC concept was based on the Royal Navy's.

Origin of Fighter Direction in the U.S. Navy
https://ethw.org/The_Beginnings_of_Nava ... _Directors


CXAM radar
"On 20 February 1942 the carrier Lexington was operating 400 miles east of New Britain Island preparing to attack the Japanese base at Rabaul the next day. Lexington’s CXAM radar’s flying bedspring antenna was mounted high up on the leading edge of the smokestack, and the radar set itself was in a small shack below the antenna. The radar set was six feet high, five feet wide, and two feet deep, and the radar compartment was just big enough to hold the set and an operator’s chair. The only communication from the radar shack to the outside world was a phone line leading down to Air Plot on the aft side of the bridge. Only eleven people in ship’s company knew what the flying bedspring was for, and that number included the skipper, CAPT Frederick C. Sherman and his executive officer. The remainder were fighter director officer Lieutenant Frank F. “Red” Gill, his two ensign assistant FDOs, two chief petty officer operators, and four maintenance technicians. "
https://ethw.org/The_CXAM_Goes_to_War_- ... _Directors


First "BLIP"
"It was about 1045 on the morning of 20 February 1942. One of the assistant fighter directors was in Lexington’s radar shack slowly turning the CXAM’s antenna train crank and gazing at the A-scope. A blip shot up out of the grass and he stopped the antenna. Then he cranked the antenna back to where the blip was at its highest. He reached up and punched the ‘trip’ button on the console to verify whether the blip was in the fifty mile range scale, or was a second-time-around range that should have fifty miles added to displayed range. He read off range and then read antenna bearing from the train indicator. Then pressing the button on his sound powered phone headset, he said “plot—radar”, and came the response, “plot aye”. “Air target bearing two five one degrees, range fifty-two miles.” The plotters noted there were no friendly aircraft at that location, classified the target “probable bandit,” and called the sighting to the bridge who told the fighter director in air plot to send some of the airborne CAP to investigate. "

"LCDR John S. “Jimmy” Thatch was on combat air patrol, in charge of six Wildcat fighters orbiting Lexington’s task group. They were in strict radio silence and the air-waves had been totally quiet. Thatch later wrote,” I almost jumped out of my seat when the loud voice of the Lexington’s fighter director [LT Red Gill] came on giving me a vector to course 240 degrees and saying there was apparently a snooper about thirty-five miles away.” Thatch and his wingman, Ensign Edward Sellstrom, started out on the vector, advancing their throttles from maximum endurance power to about two-thirds power."
https://ethw.org/The_CXAM_Goes_to_War_- ... _Directors

[spence]

What could be said or digged about same facilities onboardcJapanese carriers/flag ships?

The book "Shattered Sword (Parshall/Tully)" speaks to the operations of Japanese carriers, specifically at the Battle of Midway.

Several features of those operations which are not simulated in WitP:AE (I may not use the correct terminology, particularly since the official titles are Japanese):

1) Japanese carriers did not control their own CAP. The flight deck control officer had no means of directly communicating with his fighter planes. When the planes ran low on ammunition or fuel they hand-signaled their intent flying by the ship and then landed. The effect on Japanese air operations was severe since no other aircraft could be spotted for an subsequent attack while the ship was re-cycling CAP (like on the American CV located by the much maligned TONE Scout No 4). Although the Japanese did employ radar on their ships the did not have, at any point in the war, an equivalent of the Fighter Direction Center (CIC).

2) The so-called Flag Plot on AKAGI was co-located with the ship's bridge. The physical area inside the bridge was itself very small and relatively noisy compounding Admiral Nagumo's ability to control both the defense of the task force and the attack on the American fleet.

3) The physical containment of the hangar deck meant that engines could not be warmed up within the hangar deck and required that the a/c be warmed up on the flight deck. Re-cycling CAP created a "competition" between the CAP and launching attack planes (bombers and their escorts).

4) For the same reason Japanese carriers launched only 1 squadron of their bombers (1/2 of their bombers) for any particular attack wave (unless the attack was with reduced squadrons or the range to target was short). The second squadron needed to be brought on deck and spend 30-40 minutes to warm up its plane's engines. The launch and forming up of a particular wave was very efficient (compared to the Americans) but in the game the Japanese usually attack the US with one very large strike (with all of their bombers) as opposed to 2 smaller ones.

5) During the early war (1941-43) the Japanese did not employ a ring formation for the carrier TF but rather spread the ships out into a very dispersed TF such that individual CVs could maneuver freely. As a result the individual CV could not receive much if any AAA support from additional ships in the TF.

[Lecivius]

As I recall, the Japanese also did not have radio communication with it's aircraft in the first few years of the war.

[Fishbed]

ORIGINAL: MakeeLearn

Radar and the Fighter Directors

https://ethw.org/Radar_and_the_Fighter_Directors

MakeeLearn

First-Hand:No Damned Computer is Going to Tell Me What to DO - The Story of the Naval Tactical Data System, NTDS

https://ethw.org/First-Hand:No_Damned_C ... stem,_NTDS


"The combat information center of the aircraft carrier USS Lexington off Formosa in January 1945. A radar plotting team works at a backlit plotting table"

Thank you very much for this reference and all the others. The only thing I was aware of was the Lex II CIC pics - other stuff was new, and certainly groundbreaking for me when it comes to the ethw website. Great thanks!

For the CIC issues, some links were broken on the maritime website. Head over there if you have trouble downloading some of them: https://archive.hnsa.org/doc/cic/index.htm

@Anachro thx for the tip. Armoured Carriers is a great source I could not miss about the FAA. For now the FAA is out of the scope of my research, but it's always good to remember about the people who actually invented naval aviation [:)] Especially considering the invaluable role of what the RN did earlier in the war regarding the actual job of a FDO

[spence]

As I recall, the Japanese also did not have radio communication with it's aircraft in the first few years of the war.

The A6M2 was equipped with a radio by the factory but it was heavy AND unreliable so many pilots had the radio removed or removed the radio so as to decrease the plane's weight and thereby increase its performance (IIRC Japanese a/c engines were generally not as powerful as other nations a/c engines).

[Buckrock]

Pretty sure that only applied to some land based units flying the A6M2. The carrier based A6M2s appeared to have retained their Type 96 radios, even though they were unreliable. In both volumes of Lundstrom's First Team series, you can find examples of carrier/CAP communications being mentioned for the Japanese side.

[Korvar]

Here are a collection of snippets from various sources.


Photos of the USS Lexington island:









Photos of the Essex class:





Note that a 40mm Bofors mount was removed to make the flag plot larger in the later Essex carriers; this was during a period when everything afloat in the USN was being "stuffed to the gills" with every 40mm Bofors and 20mm Oerlikon mount that would fit.





Combat Information Center photos:

"The data collected by the various optical and electronic sensors mounted on the wartime Essex-class carriers was fed into the Combat Information Center (CIC), an example of which is seen here on the USS Wasp (CV-18) during the Second World War. It was here that all the information was manually processed and presented to the ship’s command staff to determine a course of action, such as when to engage incoming enemy aircraft."

The best I can tell, this picture was taken from a position roughly between persons #7 and #18, facing "left" or "west" to catch the vertical summary plot in the right portion of the photo, with the status board on the wall behind and part of one of the intercept plots in the left foreground. The officer centered in the photo is most likely the DHIP Information Officer.



If you reference the color Essex CIC map MakeeLearn posted earlier, this is a view of the five radio operators in the bottom-left corner. The end of the padded bench is visible as the black object in the lower left of the picture. The Radiophone and speaker amplifiers can be seen mounted on the wall behind the sailor writing on the grease pencil board.


Of note, the separate gun plot room:

"The twelve large-calibre 5″/38 guns on the Essex-class carriers were not fired from the ship’s Combat Information Center. Rather, once the decision was made by the ship’s command staff to engage the enemy, that information was passed to the carrier’s central fire-control room, also known as the ‘gun plot’. An example of a gun plot is seen here in this October 1943 picture taken on board the USS Yorktown (CV-10)."

This looks very similar to the gun plot room on the Iowa class battleships, with the mechanical computers mounted in rows on the wall.

[wegman58]

Post #16 - the picture with the circular display - you can see the enlisted man with the sound powered phones behind the plot. He is equipped with a grease pencil and a rag and plots things by hand.

NOTE - Fixed the Post number.

[MakeeLearn]

Alain-James

For the CIC issues, some links were broken on the maritime website. Head over there if you have trouble downloading some of them: https://archive.hnsa.org/doc/cic/index.htm

Their website was quirky Sunday night. Try it again and give the PDF time to load.

[BBfanboy]

ORIGINAL: wegman58

Post #15 - the picture with the circular display - you can see the enlisted man with the sound powered phones behind the plot. He is equipped with a grease pencil and a rag and plots things by hand.

Just FYI to help with correctly referencing posts, the post number is at the bottom of the post. You can see that is true by looking at the last post in a thread - the number is there on the bottom band. The picture is therefore in Post #16.

[Korvar]

ORIGINAL: wegman58

Post #15 - the picture with the circular display - you can see the enlisted man with the sound powered phones behind the plot. He is equipped with a grease pencil and a rag and plots things by hand.

That would jive with the floor plan / map that MakeeLearn posted. It has him as #23: status board keeper.

His phones threw me off at first when I was trying to place the photo in the room - 1st thought was a radioman until I took closer note of his surroundings.