Aircraft Carrier | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Aircraft Carrier

World War I was instrumental in spurring the development of the airplane. The tentative unstable Wright Flyer, which Orville and Wilbur Wright had barely gotten off the ground in 1903, had developed into a variety of sleek fighting machines. Amidst the general euphoria following the end of World War I, one man saw both the danger of repeated escalation of hostilities, and the role that the newfangled airplanes might play.

His name was Billy Mitchell, a decorated hero of the 1915-1917 air war in France. A passionate aviator, he had seen firsthand the advantage that air superiority had conferred in the skies over France, and upon his return to the United States after the war, he brought these opinions forcibly to military planning tables. Here the United States was expending vast sums on battleships and other ships of the line, he argued, when it should be spending money on airplanes. These opinions encountered stubborn resistance from the Navy, and the 1920s saw years of inter-service squabbling.

Mitchell threw himself recklessly into the fray. Finally permitted to carry out test bombing runs against obsolete warships, he proved that airplanes could sink ships with bombs. He attacked opponents of his views right and left, perhaps more sharply than was wise, but never without notice. In 1926, after a particularly vicious attack on his superiors, he was court-martialed and found guilty of insubordination. He resigned from the service, but continued his campaign as a private citizen, warning the public about the short-sightedness of the military and, ominously, about the air power being amassed by the Japanese empire.

Despite Mitchell's ousting from the service, the United States did begin a limited program of aircraft carrier construction. The earliest bona fide aircraft carrier was the U.S.S. Langley, commissioned in 1922. It was an ungainly ship, capable of only limited air operations. Over the next decade, the United States put only a few other carriers in service. The Lexington and Saratoga were converted battlecruisers, and the small Ranger,, a true aircraft carrier, was slow and hard to manage. The more modern Yorktown, and Enterprise joined the fleet in the late 1930s.

By the time these ships entered service, the world situation had deteriorated drastically. Adolf Hitler was rapidly annexing parts of Europe, while Japan had invaded Manchuria in 1936 and was amassing naval striking power that greatly outmatched that of the United States. In 1939, Japan proved Mitchell right once and for all, sinking the British battlecruisers Prince of Wales and Repulse with airplanes.

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked the United States navy in Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii. By chance all three of the United States's major carriers were not in the harbor that day, a fact grimly noted by Japan's brilliant naval strategist, Isoroku Yamamoto. The war in the Pacific was joined, and the scattered islands around which the United States strategy revolved were the perfect demonstration of the necessity of air superiority. For six months the Japanese, with their enormous aircraft carrier superiority, stormed across the Pacific. Then, in early June, 1942 the battle of Midway turned the tide. In return for losing only the Yorktown, United States aircraft destroyed the core of the Japanese carrier fleet: the mighty quartet consisting of the Akagi, Kaga,, Hiryu,, and Soryu. In one stroke nearly half of Japan's carrier capacity slipped beneath the waves, and though the war dragged on for another three years, the outcome was no longer in doubt. The great carrier battles of the Pacific were the tactical conflicts on which the greater strategic victory won by the United States hinged.

With America's war machine in full gear, the 1940s saw an explosion in the number and types of aircraft carriers. The slanted deck was introduced, which effectively gave carriers two runways from which to conduct operations. Catapults at the bow of the ships enabled efficient launch operations. Some fifty fleet carriers and a host of light and escort carriers joined the service during the war.

Following World War II, the United States continued a vigorous program of aircraft carrier construction. Fast attack carriers constructed during the late 1940s and early 1950s saw service through the 1990s, including during the Korean and Vietnam wars.

The aircraft carrier entered a truly new era in 1961, with the commissioning of the Enterprise as the first nuclear-powered carrier. Literally a floating city, this giant ship carried a crew of more than 5,000 sailors and could accommodate nearly 100 jet aircraft. Its descendents, the Nimitz-class carriers, have been continuously under construction since the early 1970s. The latest of these, the U. S. S. Ronald Reagan, is an appropriately-named testament to the ex-President, whose commitment to aircraft carrier superiority in the 1980s led to substantial upgrading of the fleet.

The presence of long-range nuclear missiles might at first glance seem to make aircraft carriers obsolete in the way that carriers themselves made the old battleships obsolete. Aircraft carriers have maintained a vital presence in modern conflicts, however, serving crucial roles in the 1980s British campaign in the Falkand Islands, and in the Gulf war of 1991 against Iraq. The great ships stemming from Billy Mitchell's vision still play an essential role in military policy and operations, and the vital role of air superiority in regional conflicts has been dramatically demonstrated even in the most recent conflicts.