Unfortunately in that Era challenging the thinking of the Rear Admirals was an absolute career killer.
I’m drawing a blank on his name right now but there was a young Cdr or Lt. Cdr that put his entire career on the line in proving the battleships were sitting ducks for carrier based aircraft.
They basically ran him out of the navy a couple of times but once the war was on they had to bring him back to help build the carrier fleets.
Just think of the public´s reaction if one bomb had killed one American.We would be still discussing it today!
If you mean during the development side there were actually quite a few deaths because of how the program was rushed.
Also, if not for one man speaking up out of turn risking everything having noticed they’d miscalculated how far the collection tubes at the reactor in Tennessee on the day they were to fire it up we’d have had our own version of Chernobyl.
He was a black man, a physicist and nuclear engineer that was basically being treated like an errand boy and bus boy by the “big boys”.
He highhandedly saved our entire nuclear program.
Of the deaths that did occur they were simply covered up due to the secrecy of The Manhattan Project.
I believe you are thinking about Billy Mitchell, considered the father of the US air force.
It’s instructive that even after the devastating Japanese air attacks on Pearl harbor and the Philippines the British admiralty dispatched 2 warships to support the defense of Singapore with no air cover. Japanese air power promptly sank both.
Yes, Mitchell and I think Richtoven both.
Richtoven convinced them to build carriers and Mitchell Proved the Battleships were vulnerable.
Thanks.
Many presidents have fired generals…
But that’s not why FDR fired Richardson. Moving the PF to PH was not tenable based upon the US navy’s own studies of the harbor, and in a mock attack by the Japanese in 1932 all the planes were destroyed before they could get in the air. Also, the port was too shallow, and it’s entrance too narrow which they realized could be blocked by the enemy sinking a single ship at its entrance.
Richardson wasn’t going to be a part of FDR’s folly. He was the smart one.
No. The ships were vintage, from WWI.
But he made sure a carrier would be out of harm’s way.
He was also the one who sold petroleum in California to Japan.
In the mock attack the shallow depth of the harbor protected the ships because torpedoes bottomed out.
What the navy wasn’t aware of was that the Japanese modified their torpedoes with a specail wooden “swim fin” that prevented them from diving so deep.
Any airfield can be hit without getting a single plane off so that’s just nonsense.
The Attacking planes were identified on radar in time to give us reasonable reaction time but the duty officer dismissed the reports as being a flight of B-17’s being shuttled in from the states.
As usual either you’re just completely dishonest or laughably ill informed.
Complete BS. Our capital ships were almost all under 20 years old and all of our carriers, not just one were at sea.
Even the huge battleships were for the most part built during WWI but never went to sea or saw any combat during the war.
They were the product of what we learned during the war that needed to be improved in the next classes of BB’s, FB’s, Cruisers and especially the various classes of Destroyers.
Most of our older DD’s and DE’s went to England and Russia as part of the Lend Lease acts and were replaced with the most modern class of destroyers to see the war under any flag.
Oh yeah?
How come they were sunk so easily, like steel sitting ducks?
Because of the heavy armor piercing aerial bombs that penetrated the decks all the way down to the magazines and fuel tanks.
They were built before the age of modern carrier forces and heavy bombs.
Maybe sometime take a look at the changes that occurred in Aviation and ordnance between the two wars.
The battle wagons were built with an emphasis on protective armor on the sides to protect from naval guns and torpedos, not for aerial bombs.
It wasn’t realized how vulnerable capital ships could be to aircraft until the British raid on Taranto in 1940. Even then the US Navy was very slow to accept it as anything but an anomaly.
The ships were dispensable according to SOW Stimson’s journal, FDR ordered the aircraft carriers that couldn’t afford to be lost, kept safely out to sea.
Here’s the main point. Admiral Richardson who was well aware of the 1932 mock attack, knew the results, and the logic behind keeping the fleet stationed at San Diego. He was so pissed off he traveled to Washington to confront FDR and FDR fired him, offered the command to Kimmel and instructed him to move the fleet to PH. We can be sure that Kimmel lived to regret accepting FDR’s folly, as he and Short became known as the “necessary scapegoats”.
In contrast Richardson, though his career was basically over by confronting FDR, lived the rest of his life knowing he had done the right thing and could sleep at night.
From the US naval institute, after FDR ordered the Pacific fleet deployed to PH.
U.S. Fleet Commander-in-Chief Admiral James O. Richardson challenged the President’s action, arguing that the fleet would be better served by returning to the West Coast, where support facilities for war preparation were far superior. As a result of such bluntness, the President fired Richardson
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2016/december/plenty-blame-go-around
There is no denying FDR fired Richardson for telling him something he didn’t want to hear but it wasn’t a warning about vulnerability in PH.
As for the planes, they were parked wing tip to wing tip to protect against sabotage. The fear was of Japanese spies among the ethnic population. That turned out to be true but the closely packed parked aircraft made for an easy target for Japanese bombers.
We know for a fact the Japanese developed modifications to their torpedoes so they could be air dropped into the shallow waters of PH. At least as far as the Japanese were concerned the shallow Waters served as a defensive obstacle to torpedo attack which they overcame.
Instead of the fleet deploying torpedo nets or the air corps dispersing the parked planes commanders relied on the political assessment the Japanese would not be so foolish as to attack. Paraphrasing an old saying “do not assign to a conspiracy that which can be assigned to incompetence.”
I cannot find evidence of FDR ordering the carriers to sea prior to the attack. Such evidence would be fascinating to review, please provide it with links.
Monte has proven over and over again she’s immune to facts and truth.
Had we moved the fleet out of PH we would have effectively surrendered PH to the Japanese giving them a perfect staging base for a two pronged invasion of the US mainland.
All they’d have needed to do then is launch a dual pronged attack via land routed in Alaska and Mexico or use AK as a further staging point assaulting through the Puget Sound.
That would have rendered out biggest deterrent in the Pacific Theater useless.