Aircraft carrier operations during World War II
This article discusses aircraft carrier operations during World War II. Historical overview Naval historians such as Evan Mawdsley, Richard Overy, and Craig Symonds concluded that World War II's decisive victories on land could not have been won without decisive victories at sea. Naval battles to keep shipping lanes open for combatant's movement of troops, guns, ammunition, tanks, warships, aircraft, raw materials, and food largely determined the outcome of land battles. Without the Allied victory in keeping shipping lanes open during the Battle of the Atlantic, Britain could not have fed her people or withstood Axis offensives in Europe and North Africa. Without Britain's survival and without Allied shipments of food and industrial equipment to the Soviet Union, her military and economic power would likely not have rebounded in time for Russian soldiers to prevail at Stalingrad and Kursk. Without victories at sea in the Pacific theater, the Allies could not have mounted amphibious assaults on or maintained land forces on Guadalcanal, New Guinea, Saipan, The Philippines, Iwo Jima, or Okinawa. Allied operations in the Atlantic and Pacific theaters were interconnected because they frequently competed for scarce naval resources for everything from aircraft carriers to transports and landing craft. Effective transport of troops and military supplies between the two war theaters required naval protection for shipping routes around the Cape of Good Hope, through the Suez canal, and through the Panama Canal. In both theaters, maritime dominance enabled combatants to use the sea for their own purposes and deprive its use by adversaries. As naval historian Admiral Herbert Richmond stated, "Sea power did not win the war itself: it enabled the war to be won." Aircraft carriers played a major role in winning decisive naval battles, supporting key amphibious landings, and keeping critical merchant shipping lanes open for transporting military personnel and their equipment to land battle zones. Ascendancy of aircraft carriers over battleships It became apparent early in the war that control of the air was prerequisite for successful surface action both on land and at sea. For much of the war, Britain and America fought mainly on the seas, where successful Allied naval operations permitted effective support and reinforcement of troops in North Africa, the Soviet Union, western Europe and the Pacific. These operations also crippled similar efforts by Italy and Japan to sustain the empires they built by conquest. By 1942, aircraft carriers with the striking power provided by hundreds of warplanes delivering bombs and torpedoes to targets hundreds of miles away supplanted battleships with big guns as the principal warships around which navies assembled task forces for major campaigns. Only the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan made significant use of aircraft carriers during the war. The following table shows the number of each type of carrier the principal combatants operated that had at least one flight deck, was capable of both launching and recovering aircraft at sea, and that was operational sometime between July 1937 and August 1945. The counts include carriers in service before the