دانلود کتاب زیردریایی USN در مقابل ناو هواپیمابر IJN – اقیانوس آرام 1942-1944

Zelmer, Lieutenant Commander Herman J. Kossler (Cavalla’s skipper), and the rest of the men aboard Cavalla were unaware of the identity of their target at the time they sank it. It was not until they refueled at Saipan they learned it was the carrier Shōkaku. That made victory all the sweeter, because Shōkaku was one of six Japanese carriers that participated in the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Shōkaku would be the only one of the six sunk by a US Navy (USN) submarine during the ensuing war. Battles between submarines and aircraft carriers were very much David and Goliath contests. Submarines were among the smallest oceangoing naval combatants; so small that men of the Submarine Service called their vessels “boats,” a tradition followed to this day. In contrast, carriers were among the largest oceangoing naval combatants; and they were faster than even a surfaced submarine. To attack a carrier successfully the submarine relied upon stealth, placing itself in a favorable position from which to launch its torpedoes. Then the interception solution for the torpedoes had to be accurate. US torpedoes moved at around the top speed of a carrier, which meant that if they were detected early enough the carrier could outrun them. Finally, the torpedoes had to explode when they struck the carrier. Early in the war US torpedoes ran deeper than set, underrunning their target. Often when they did strike home the torpedo exploder failed when it hit, resulting in a dud. US torpedo warheads were smaller than those of other navies. The USN Bureau of Ordnance believed at least four hits were required to take down a ship the size of a carrier. Although skill was necessary to successfully sink a carrier, so was luck. Only ten aircraft carriers of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) were sunk by USN fleet submarines during World War II, each by a different submarine. All the sinkings took place between December 1943 and December 1944. Before that period the performance of US torpedoes was too unreliable. After December 1944, Japanese carriers largely remained in port or in waters USN submarines could not reach. These battles captured the public imagination. The climax of every war movie that featured a USN submarine in World War II seemed to involve the sinking of a carrier, the submarine having been sent to a rendezvous point by radio message from Commander, Submarine Force, US Pacific Fleet (COMSUBPAC: Rear Admiral Robert H. English from May 14, 1942 through January 21, 1943; Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood thereafter). What happened when a submarine engaged a carrier in real warfare? Usually anticlimax. Sometimes, though, the event lived up to the legend, not least ten times in the Pacific Ocean.