American Airship Fleet in WWII

OOC: I just KNOW this will get the airship guys all wound up and happy, like usual.

IC:

I've wondered, with the 3000+ mile patrol range of them, how the airships like USS Akron and Macon would have fared in WWII. Both were lost in accidents in the mid-1930s, but one other airship, the (German-built) USS Los Angeles, never died and was decommissioned in 1939.

Now, assume that Macon doesn't crash, and continues to serve. It's successful search for President Roosevelt on cruiser USS Houston convinces the Navy that the big airships could be designed for a long-range patrol route. By 1939, Macon and seven other airships, complete with modified P-36 Hawk planes for scouting, are out patrolling both oceans. These ships have a range of 2500 miles, a reduction in the range in exchange for the heavier P-36 fighters and a structure made of 2219 duraluminum, which is stronger than the frame of the older models.

What does this do? With patrols out for over a thousand miles, the Japanese fleet that was going to strike Pearl Harbor would be easily noticed, giving a couple of days notice to defenders at Pearl. This would obviously change WWII......

Ponderous, slow moving, vulnerable, massive, exploding airships that don't have much more range than a B-17 are absolutely useless. Period. At all. Ever. The End.

EDIT: Not to mention that if the usual airship routes are known, which would not be too much work, the 30 mph airships could easily be bypassed by 300 mph planes taking a slightly more circuitous route. Pearl Harbor might be lulled into even more of a false sense of security.

Some airships clocked 70 Mph. But then again, the figures on those Wikipedia articles seem a bit dubious.

The US Navy did have plans for a follow-on airship to the Akron and Macon, which was to be larger and carry more aircraft. A lot of people tend to forget that the US used blimps successfully in ASW during WWII.

The airships would never be used in any frontline combat, but would prove indispensible patrolling the convoy routes off the east coast of the United States and off the western approaches to the British Isles. It is possible that they could be used to patrol the west coast of the US, particularly the shipping lanes to the Hawaiian Islands.

wormyguy said:

Ponderous, slow moving, vulnerable, massive, exploding airships that don't have much more range than a B-17 are absolutely useless. Period. At all. Ever. The End.

EDIT: Not to mention that if the usual airship routes are known, which would not be too much work, the 30 mph airships could easily be bypassed by 300 mph planes taking a slightly more circuitous route. Pearl Harbor might be lulled into even more of a false sense of security.

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But those cannot hang on station for any length of time, and aren't carrying 4-5 planes.

TheMann said:

But those cannot hang on station for any length of time, and aren't carrying 4-5 planes.

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So much more useful than a regular aircraft carrier, that can stay in one place for any length of time, and carry 80 regular fighter planes, while simultaneously being nearly as fast as a zeppelin, and not all that much more expensive.

Well as mentioned America technically did have an Airship fleet, it was just non-rigid blimps as opposed to zeppelins. They proved extremly good at ASW in the Atlantic but were few in number if I remember.

Also wormguy, obviously airships can't outdo sea-based Aircraft Carriers in terms of general strike capability but they some advantages for ASW and convoys in particular.

1) They're ALOT cheaper than a Carrier, particularly blimps
2) Being aircraft they are themselves pretty safe from sub attack (I think one blimp got taken out by a ballsy- and very lucky- U-Boat gun)
3) A much more efficient use of resources, you have the airship crew, plus pilots for the handful of planes, which is all you need to take on a sub. Whats the point in putting an 80-plane Carrier on convoy duty when a much cheaper ASW Airship fufils the same role and do to its location in the sky is itself safe.

Carriers are offensive weapons, ASW Airships are defensive weapons, so its silly to try and compare when they'd never fill the same roles

If airship carriers would have served in the war, people would be talking about airship drone carriers about now.

Slowpoke said:

If airship carriers would have served in the war, people would be talking about airship drone carriers about now.

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That would be amazing!

David S Poepoe said:

The US Navy did have plans for a follow-on airship to the Akron and Macon, which was to be larger and carry more aircraft. A lot of people tend to forget that the US used blimps successfully in ASW during WWII.

The airships would never be used in any frontline combat, but would prove indispensible patrolling the convoy routes off the east coast of the United States and off the western approaches to the British Isles. It is possible that they could be used to patrol the west coast of the US, particularly the shipping lanes to the Hawaiian Islands.

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Which is exactly what I had in mind.

Wormyguy, a B-17 patrol will pass by quickly, and cannot loiter on a station and watch for stuff. An airship CAN do that. It sits still, lets out its patrol fighters, who go out and find stuff. Patrol planes find something, radio to the airship, who calls its remaining fighters back and gets the hell out of dodge before somebody or something shoots it. You're comparing an airship to a sea-borne carrier, which is comparing apples to oranges at best.

With ASW, this is even better because U-boats don't tend to have effective anti-aircraft guns, and particularly in the Atlantic the German surface fleet wasn't much of a worry but the U-boats were, these would be almost ideal. You could have them cruise back and forth between the British Isles and America, doing sub hunting. Let's see the U-boats dodge that.

TheMann said:

Let's see the U-boats dodge that.

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Lets see a zeppelin dodge a Bf-109 or Zero.

wormyguy said:

Lets see a zeppelin dodge a Bf-109 or Zero.

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That's why they carry P-36s, so the Airship doesn't go right into harm's way. Later in the war, one might be able to load it up with Spitfires instead - the weight difference between them and the P-36 is only 600 lbs.

The trouble with airships is you need a crew with a high degree of knowledge in meteorology. On board the Hindenburg for example they had a trained meteorologist on board and all the officers had extensive training on the subject. This was supported by a network of shipborne radio operators along route to provide real time weather data.

The Germans thought the Americans were amateurs with a horrific accident record because they didn't pay anywhere near the attention to weather that the Germans did.

In the days before doppler radar, operating large airship fleets safely would have been extremely uneconomical.

No, you just needed good meteriologists. And having them spead across said large airship fleet would go a long way towards making weather analysis and prediction easier. Weather could be predicted before doppler, that just made long-range predictions and up-to-the-minute warnings possible. In that middle range...a wide network of stations could allow decent guesses.

I actually think airship carriers could have made valuable convoy escorts, as suggested. They could probably either make it the way on their own tanks or refuel off a tender or something, but an airship or two puts a CAP in the range of possibility for any convoy you want. For a bigger convoy, deploy three or four. Helium production will be the major limiting factor.

While I hesitate to use the term "indispensable", since the US won the war nicely without them, A fleet of 20-odd ZRCV type airships would extremely useful in ASW work in the Atlantic. I think to a large extent they could effectively replace both blimps and escort carriers. They could easily stay on station or follow slow moving convoys for up to a week, and their 9-10 aircraft would give them a tremendous search radius and a worthwhile ASW punch. Unlike blimps, which were effective at spotting u-boats but had to call in DDs, DEs or attack planes for help, the ZRCVs could attack/harrass u-boats with their own attack planes. A downside is the lousy visibility and weather in the North Atlantic, but this would affect normal blimps and carrier planes as well.

The ZRCVs would probably be less effective in the Pacific due to Japan's effective carrier force, but even there they would be useful in patrolling the western approaches to Hawaii, the Panama Canal, and other distant areas. That said, I think people need to get away from the presumption a 10,000,000 million cubic foot zeppelin would be easy pickings for a couple of Bf109s or Zeros. It takes a lot of MG holes in the un-pressurized gas cells of a helium-filled zeppelin to bring it down, and heavier cannon shells would usually pass straight thru the soft parts without striking anything rigid and exploding. Same with bombs. Eventually, determined attacks would destroy the control stations, engines, and control systems, but unless the ZRCV accidentally blundered within easy range of a Japanese fleet carrier or a Luftwaffe fighter base in France, most airplane attacks it would typically face would involve only lightly armed planes engaged in scouting themselves...which the ZRCV's own planes might be able to handle.