Carriers were the main recon elements of the fleet. Most prewar plans had them either as trade protection, ie using their aircraft to look for raiders and guide in the battleships and cruisers, or as the new scout for the battlefleet. It was also planned to use their torpedoes to damage the approaching battleships and slow down raiders.
Dread Nought but the Fury of the Seas
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Captain Oblivious
Banned
I've modified my post in the meantime.
So I have two questions
- what @CV(N)-6 said : is 30 kt mandatory for that role ?
- can 23 or 24 kt be enough ?
- could a Normandie hull be tweaked to 23 kt or 24 kt ?
Checked Wikipedia (hmmm) and they say this
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Coulsdon Eagle
Monthly Donor
I believe the Royal Navy did tentatively explore the possibility of purchasing the Normandies hulls and completing them with triple 15" guns but found the time it would take & costs it would be cheaper to build new ships.
Captain Oblivious
Banned
Calling them the Wellington-class or Nelson-class just to p*ss the french off ?
Coulsdon Eagle
Monthly Donor
Calling them the Wellington-class or Nelson-class just to p*ss the french off ?
So Agincourt, Iron Duke, Marlborough, Ramillies or existing Lord Nelson didn't do that already! They've probably forgot who Collingwood was too.
Not every navy needed carriers. Arguably the Germans and Italians really didn't, because most (Italy) or all (Germany) of their naval ambitions were inside the range of land based air. Granted, ensuring the air force paid attention to naval needs could be difficult. The French were borderline, because while they did expect to operate worldwide, I doubt they were seriously contemplating naval combat in the Pacific, outside the range of land-based aircraft.
The navies that did need carriers, the RN, USN, and IJN, wanted them because they expected to need to operate outside the range of land based air. As CV(N)-6 pointed out, they were key scouting/recon elements. After all, it was hard to have a main fleet engagement if the two sides could not find each other. Also, in the US case, I expect they were seen as a means of damaging a few of the enemy battleships to slow them so the USN battlefleet, with its lower fleet speed, could catch them.
Captain Oblivious
Banned
Very interesting. And indeed the French aeronavale inherited from a crapload of obsolete bombers from the Armée de l'air. LeO-257 were flying relics, but they had range aplenty. Plus the aéronavale never had any issue to get large quantities of flying boats, some of them pretty good and long ranged.
According to your first paragraph, surely enough, France did not intended to do, well, what happened in WWII Pacific theater. Beyond the horizon strikes with massive carrier borne aviation.
France only had Indochina plus of course the Pacific islands and territories, New Caledonia. Priority number 1 was the Mediterranean sea (no need for carriers there, not with Corsica & Northern Africa on one end and Syria / Lebanon on the otherend)
The Atlantic by contrast... with all those colonies in Africa... but the Atlantic is not the Pacific, and it can be covered from Dakar, Casablanca, and other coastal bases. By land-based bombers and ultralong range flying boats.
Hint: the aéronavale had a military variant of the flying boat that killed Jean Mermoz in 1936, the Latécoère 300 / 301 series. They could also seize Air France innumerable flying boats of every kind, and this was done in 1939-40.
In this context, can't 3* Bearns / converted Normandies ( 24 kt, under cover of land-based aviation), be a realistic goal / target for interwar France ?
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Minor quibble, the Japanese carrier Kaga was a converted Tosa class battleship, not a battlecruiser. IIRC they had intended to use Akagi's sister ship Amagi, but Amagi's hull was too badly damaged by the Great Kanto earthquake on 1 Sep 23. The conversion still yielded a carrier with about 28 knots because the base ship had been planned for 26 knots.
Escort carriers (CVEs) did OK in WW2 with 18-22 kt. The problem is the fleet carriers were expected to do 28-30+ knots for several reasons. They had to be able to outrun battleships if they got close (due to bad weather or scouting errors) because they certainly couldn't carry battleship armor. They were expected to operate in scouting/raiding forces with 30 kt cruisers and destroyers.
Another point is that aircraft operations were facilitated by having the carrier steam into the wind to increase the windspeed the aircraft took off in and landed in. This allowed heavier loads, either with or without the use of the catapults. In addition, the catapults were not yet as powerful as the post-WW2 steam catapults so the wind speed over the deck the carrier could generate by its own speed was even more important.
Given that the Italians managed to increase the Conte di Cavour class dreadnoughts from 21 knots to 27 knots via massive reconstruction, I expect it is possible. Whether it is cost-effective is a harder question.
What I was trying to get at is that I don't think the French every really contemplated trying to fight a Pacific war. They would definitely have zero chance against the British or the US, and while the IJN was smaller, it was still much bigger than the Marine Nationale. I expect they put it into the same file as the British and the Americans, the one given to the Foreign Ministry that says "Do not get us into a war with them, we will lose".
AFIAK, the French Navy saw its potential opponents as the Italians and/or the Germans, and if it was the Germans, they would have British help. I doubt they every seriously contemplated fighting the Japanese, because the logistics would be extremely difficult before they considered the IJN seriously outnumbered them.
As for French carriers, I think a Bearn would work as a training/experimental carrier. I doubt they would want two or three because they would be better off learning how to use carriers and getting a better understanding of what a good carrier would be like. Then they can design and build new ones from the keel up.
I think OTL Bearn would be fine to learn to operate a carrier, then build one fast 18000ish ton one for the Atlantic the 30's-basically a functional Joffre
Captain Oblivious
Banned
Fair enough. Note that OTL PA15 studies that led to Joffre & Painlevé started in 1928-36
(scroll down or search "PA15" in the page)
> https://translate.google.com/transl...-les-porte-avions&&hl=fr&ie=UTF-8&sl=fr&tl=en
(scroll down or search "PA15" in the page)
> https://translate.google.com/transl...-les-porte-avions&&hl=fr&ie=UTF-8&sl=fr&tl=en
Soaking up post war unemployment with drydock building is practical at Rosyth, not so practical at Malta or Sembawang (aka Singapore Naval base aka a swamp in the middle of nowhere).
It would be very brave of the RN to start building a ship that required enlarged docks until after the construction had started.
Not at all
The UK Entered WW2 with 7 Aircraft carriers
3 of them were not 30 knot ships
HMS Argus - 20 knots
HMS Hermes - 25 knots
HMS Eagle - 24 knots
Béarn - 21.5 knots
Obviously a bit at the slow end but its not going to prove to big an issue until you start trying to operate higher performance aircraft from them!
And that is not really going to happen until the late 30s at the earliest
As you point out, carriers slower than 30 knots do have their uses. The US built over a hundred CVEs during WW2 and none of them got anywhere near 30 knots (even if the ones in Taffy 3 devoutly wished they could go that fast on 25 Oct 44).
Their main drawback and the reason that the US didn't build any slow fleet carriers was the expectation that carriers would be part of scouting-raiding forces with cruisers. Carriers under 25 knots would have serious problems with this. They would be tied to the battleline or relegated to second-line duties, the way the HMS Argus, Hermes, and Eagle were in WW2.
I think the answer to those far flung locations are Admiralty floating docks large enough to do the job
Have one at Singapore and one at Malta - build them on the Clyde etc
The advantage of them is that they can be moved if needed.
I would like to add the Dutch at this time could have used a carrier for the DEI, this does not have to be a big deck like a Lexington sized but something along the lines of a Hermes/Eagle sized CVL or even a CVS like a Chitose class. Because of the lack of airfields in the DEI this would allow them to do the normal colonial duties, but also force projection for anti smuggling or anti piracy. Ideally you would have two, one to keep home for training and refit and one on station.
Scouting forces don't tool around at 30 knots. Cruising speed until you find your baddie then the cruisers go tally ho. As noted the aircraft won't need the airspeed over the flight deck until the late 30s. Even then. Remember the Light Fleet carriers were only good for about 24kt.
With the US it is interesting to remember that the the ships they learnt to carrier on were the Langley and Lexingtons. One slow and small to the point of uselessness and the other excessively fast and over sized. With hindsight the lessons learnt are pretty obvious.
Agree that scouting forces don't run around at 30 knots all the time, but if they can't do 30 knots they risk getting run down by opponents that can.
The US light carriers could do 30 knots and were expected to operate with the fleet carriers. The British light fleet carriers were intended for second line roles like aircraft transport. They were not intended AFIAK for scouting and raiding. The British fleet carriers from Ark Royal onwards could all do at least 30 knots.
Captain Oblivious
Banned
Might be fun to do a vignette where in 1924 France build two more Bearns out of these Normandie hulls - with the rest of the world and history not changing elsewhere. Fast forward to May 1940...
... no, aircraft carriers can't stop the Sedan collapse.
...
or maybe they can ?
Because, you see, OTL the Aéronavale with its lone Bearn was handled France very own Stuka, the LN-401 / 411 (two squadrons of them). More interestingly, they also bought two squadrons worth (40 to 90) of Vought 156F "cheesecake / wind indicator " ROTFL.
With the the Stuka shock these 4 squadrons (AB1 AB2 AB3 AB4) were thrown into the fire to dive bomb the germans, too - alas they were slaughtered for little results.
Now whatif much more of them were bought for two more Bearns - and that was barely enough to make a difference ? dive bombing the Sedan bridgehead ?
... no, aircraft carriers can't stop the Sedan collapse.
...
or maybe they can ?
Because, you see, OTL the Aéronavale with its lone Bearn was handled France very own Stuka, the LN-401 / 411 (two squadrons of them). More interestingly, they also bought two squadrons worth (40 to 90) of Vought 156F "cheesecake / wind indicator " ROTFL.
With the the Stuka shock these 4 squadrons (AB1 AB2 AB3 AB4) were thrown into the fire to dive bomb the germans, too - alas they were slaughtered for little results.
Now whatif much more of them were bought for two more Bearns - and that was barely enough to make a difference ? dive bombing the Sedan bridgehead ?
Floating dry docks are much less capable than a proper graving dock. A dry dock is a lot more than just a dock, it's the whole supporting infrastructure of cranes, railways etc. that let you rapidly take a battle damaged ship, turn her around and get her back into the fight. In an ideal world every RN Fleet would have one or two graving docks for the heavy work plus a floating dry dock or two for smaller jobs (e.g. hull cleaning) that could be forward deployed. But in a would of limited budgets I'd choose the graving dock over the floating.