Carrier deck operations (WWII)

[Alatriste]

I'm looking for data on the arcane art of aircraft carrier operation during the world war. Things like deckload organization, elevator speeds, catpults and the lack of them, landing signal officers, CAP launch and recovery methods, refuel and rearming procedures, etc, etc... Does the Languish Collective(TM) know of some reasonably detailed work on the matter?

Thanks in advance.

Note: perhaps this should be in OT, but it was the old 'Carriers at War' lately revisited what made me search for this information. Without success, for the moment.

[PDH]

Grumbler helped design and build the first carriers in World War I.

[Warspite]

Grumbler helped design and build the first carriers in World War I.

Yes, the reputation he earnt at Actium set him up for that post.

[DontSayBanana]

Would this help?

[Alatriste]

Would this help?

Partially. But the focus of that book is in carrier design. What I'm looking for is details on how the carriers worked: for example, to recover planes all aircraft on the deck had to be moved to the bow or to the hangar decks. To launch them, however, they had to be moved to the stern. For an all-out attack not only had they to be moved to the stern, but usually (or always) the deck had space only for roughly half the airplanes, the rest had to wait in the hangar decks until enough planes had took off to leave space available and at least one elevator free.

With these problems come difficult decissions: was it better to launch escort fighters first, leaving more space for bombers to get speed? Or last, to avoid them spending fuel circling while bombers took off and climbed? Should rearming and refuelling be done on the hangars for the second deckload? In which cases paid to use the catpults? Etc, etc... And the answers, I suppose, were different in fleet carriers, light carriers and escort carriers...       

[grumbler]

I've been looking around for something on that topic, and have come up empty.  I have a pretty good understanding of the issue for modern USN carriers, from my time on the COMCARGRU Four staff, but not so much from the WW2 perspective.

The USN tended to launch strike aircraft first, because they were slower to altitude and slower on course, and because the Wildcat had a shorter range than the Dauntless or Avenger.  The Japanese tended to launch their Zeroes first, because their range was greatest.

Obviously, the larger the strike, the longer it took to form up and the shorter its resulting range.  I would note that the entire Enterprise strike group of 37 SBDs, 14 TBDs, and 16 F4Fs were forced to spot sequentially (6 F4Fs for CAP and 37 SBDs in the first spot, and then 10 F4Fs and 14 TBDs when the deck was clear) for their strike at Midway.  They were unable to form up in the air, and each squadron flew independently to target.  Yorktown (which had more experience in air ops) launched 12 TBDs first, then 6 F4Fs, then 17 SBDs (from Bombing Three - all the SBDs in Scouting Three had just returned from a scouting mission).  These were all spotted simultaneously.

So, the flight deck of carriers this size had room for a bit more than half the air group.  At least 43 could be spotted at once, but probably not a lot more than that.  Aircraft could be moved to the flight deck quickly - the twenty minute delay in the launch of the second batch of Enterprise aircraft was considered a FUBAR, so the expectation was clearly that it would happen long before that.  Further, the Yorktown had recovered the last of Scouting Six's SBDs at 0830, but was able to launch the first of Torpedo Six's TBDs at 0838.  It is possible that these aircraft may spotted forward during the landing of Scouting Six, but since Fighting Six had launched a CAP ten minutes before Scouting Six returned, maybe the strike was still below deck.  If so, a 35 plane strike could be summoned to the deck and spotted in 8 minutes.  That is faster than I would have thought possible.  It is also possible that planes were being brought to the flight deck as flight operations occurred - though with just one deck edge elevator, this would be an impressive feat.

So, I cannot answer your questions, but can say that some of them can be answered by consulting detailed accounts of the battles.

[grumbler]

Bumping this to make sure Alatriste doesn't miss it.

[katmai]

Man wish i had all my research info from when i did the USN database for WWII pacific wargame that died in devlopement with me and not sitting in storage 3k miles away.

[grumbler]

Man wish i had all my research info from when i did the USN database for WWII pacific wargame that died in devlopement with me and not sitting in storage 3k miles away.

Punctuate much?

[katmai]

Man wish i had all my research info from when i did the USN database for WWII pacific wargame that died in devlopement with me and not sitting in storage 3k miles away.

Punctuate much?

Punctuation is for pussies

[Habbaku]

I don't know, Katmai's grammar seems pretty typical of some of the more prolific wargame developers.