Aircraft Carriers at War Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Preface

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1 - The End of an Era

  THE BATTLE OFF SAMAR

  THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER EMERGES

  THE FAST CARRIER TASK FORCE

  ESCORT CARRIERS

  TRANSITION TO NAVAL AVIATION

  Chapter 2 - The Cold War

  THE THREAT OF THE USSR

  THE STRATEGIC NUCLEAR BALANCE

  THE TRIAD

  NUCLEAR SAFEGUARDS

  THE NAVAL BALANCE

  SEALIFT

  AIRLIFT

  THE ROLE OF AIR POWER IN THE COLD WAR

  WORLDWIDE CHALLENGES TO A FORWARD STRATEGY

  THE STRATEGIC IMPLICATIONS OF LIMITED WARS

  THE ANNUAL POSTURE STATEMENT

  THE COLD WAR STRATEGY

  Chapter 3 - Korea

  BECOMING A JET PILOT

  UNPREPARED

  WAR BEGINS

  UNDERESTIMATING THE ENEMY

  KOREA’S FIVE CAMPAIGNS

  GENERAL MACARTHUR SACKED

  THE END AND THE OUTCOME

  TWO EPIC BATTLES

  Chapter 4 - Korea

  EARLY AIR OPERATIONS

  THE WEEKEND WARRIORS

  THE JOINT AIR CAMPAIGN IN KOREA

  THE MIG-15

  NAVAL CARRIER DEPLOYMENTS

  LOGISTICS AND CARRIER LANDINGS

  CATAPULTS

  PATTERN OF OPERATIONS

  Chapter 5 - Korea

  WEATHER AS A FACTOR

  AIR GROUP STRIKES

  INTERDICTION

  CLOSE AIR SUPPORT

  INTERDICTING SUPPLY LINES AND CUTTING RAILS

  ARMED RECONNAISSANCE

  Chapter 6 - Korea

  MISSION PREFLIGHT

  THE IRON TRIANGLE

  NEW SKIPPER

  TRUCE

  THE BRIDGES AT TOKO-RI

  Chapter 7 - Tactical Nukes

  FIGHTER SQUADRON 83

  SIXTH FLEET DEPLOYMENT

  LEBANON

  PACIFIC BOUND

  Chapter 8 - The Pentagon, a Seaplane Tender, and Typhoons

  DEPUTY CHIEF OF NAVAL OPERATIONS FOR AIR WARFARE

  NAVAL AIR TRAINING AND OPERATING PROCEDURES

  CARRIER COMMAND

  AIDE TO PRESIDENT KENNEDY

  NATIONAL WAR COLLEGE

  SEAPLANE TENDER

  Chapter 9 - Nuclear Propulsion

  TWO-REACTOR CARRIER

  THE ENTERPRISE

  Chapter 10 - The Enterprise

  OFF TO WAR

  Chapter 11 - The Enterprise

  THE WAR IN VIETNAM

  THE TWO WARS

  SPECIAL LIBERTY

  Chapter 12 - The Enterprise

  BACK TO SEA

  READY FOR WAR AGAIN

  Chapter 13 - The Enterprise

  TARGETING

  BATTLE EFFICIENCY PENNANT

  THE WAR COUNCIL MEETS

  SHOW OF SHOWS

  CARRIER- AND LAND-BASED TACTICAL AIR

  RECAPITULATION

  Chapter 14 - The Pentagon

  OP-03V IN BUSINESS

  THE CARRIER PAMPHLET

  THE CV CONCEPT

  JUSTIFICATION FOR LARGE-DECK NUCLEAR CARRIERS

  THE ANTICARRIER BIAS

  WAR GAMING THE CARRIER

  Chapter 15 - The Syrian Invasion of Jordan

  CARRIER DIVISION 6

  CRISIS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

  CAMEL STATION

  OPERATION FLAT PASS

  OPERATION FIG HILL

  NAPLES

  AFTERMATH

  Chapter 16 - Vietnam

  SEVENTH FLEET CHANGE OF COMMAND

  COMMAND RELATIONSHIPS

  CARRIER WARFARE

  MUSCLE FOR THE SEVENTH FLEET

  MARINE HUNTER-KILLERS

  VISIT TO THE ARVN FRONT

  LIEUTENANT (JUNIOR GRADE) LEHMAN

  Chapter 17 - Vietnam

  LION’S DEN

  Chapter 18 - Vietnam

  LINEBACKER II

  OPERATION END SWEEP

  PEACETIME CRUISING

  LOSS OF SOUTH VIETNAM

  A LONGER-TERM VIEW

  RETURNING TO WASHINGTON

  Chapter 19 - Chief of Naval Operations

  VICE CHIEF OF NAVAL OPERATION

  CHANGE OF COMMAND

  FLEET READINESS

  SECRETARY MIDDENDORF

  SECRETARY OF DEFENSE RUMSFELD

  Chapter 20 - Chief of Naval Operations

  EDWARD TELLER AND THE SUBMARINE CARRIER

  PRESIDENT FORD AND THE CVAN-71

  JOHN McCAIN

  THE POLICY FOR NUCLEAR PROPULSION IN SURFACE SHIPS

  REAR ADMIRAL STOCKDALE’S INTERVIEW

  SECRETARY OF DEFENSE BROWN AND NUCLEAR CARRIERS

  THE BATTLE GROUP ORGANIZATION

  NAVAL WARFARE INFORMATIONAL PUBLICATION NO. 1

  Chapter 21 - The Joint Chiefs of Staff

  SEIZURE OF THE SS MAYAGUEZ

  OPERATION PAUL BUNYAN

  KISSINGER AND THE CRUISE MISSILE

  PRESIDENT CARTER AND NUKES

  Chapter 22 - Elder Statesman

  THE NAVAL HISTORICAL FOUNDATION

  ASSOCIATION OF NAVAL AVIATION

  THE DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD ON V/STOL AIRCRAFT

  THE IRANIAN HOSTAGE RESCUE OPERATION

  THE PRESIDENT’S TASK FORCE ON COMBATING TERRORISM

  “DISCRIMINATE DETERRENCE”

  Chapter 23 - The Future

  WORLD WAR II, KOREA, AND VIETNAM

  LIBYA

  OPERATION DESERT STORM

  KOSOVO

  OPERATION ENDURING FREEDOM

  OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM

  THE NATIONAL MILITARY STRATEGY FOR THE FUTURE

  CARRIER FORCE LEVELS

  THE FUTURE THREAT FROM CHINA

  Envoi

  Abbreviations and Acronyms

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  This book is dedicated

  to the carrier aviators of the

  United States Navy

  FOREWORD

  George H. W. Bush

  There are few people as well qualified as Admiral Holloway to write this special book about the Cold War, one of the most fascinating chapters in our country’s relatively young history. Drawing upon examples from his personal experience, Admiral Holloway gives his readers a front-row seat to many of the dramatic and strategic decisions made by our political and military leaders that held the Communists in check and led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

  From ensign to admiral, through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the nasty little skirmishes of the Cold War, Admiral Holloway served in the front lines in both operational and policy positions. It has been said of Jim Holloway that his destroyer was shot up by the Japanese in World War II, his plane shot down by the Chinese in Korea, and his flagship shot at by the North Vietnamese.

  I was long an admirer of Jim’s from afar but had a chance to work with him personally when, in 1985, he served as executive director of the president’s Task Force on Combating Terrorism. In 1986, I appointed him special envoy to the Middle East to resolve a territorial dispute between Bahrain and Qatar. Long before anyone had ever heard of Al Qaeda, Jim knew and understood the terrorist threat and was working behind the scenes to keep our country safe.

  His lucid views of the grand scheme of things are enlivened by firsthand accounts of combat and tactics. The breadth of Jim’s experience, and the depth of his wisdom, gives the reader a remarkably broad perspective of naval warfare from cockpits to capitals. It’s an incredible journey through
a period of history that scholars and academics have barely begun to examine. Admiral Holloway’s book gives all of us a head start on understanding how and why the Cold War was won.

  PREFACE

  “Where are the carriers?” That question, the essence of this retrospective, was made memorable during the Cold War by Henry Kissinger, national security advisor to President Richard Nixon and, later, secretary of state under both Nixon and President Gerald Ford. “Where are the carriers?” were Henry Kissinger’s customary opening words to his staff and colleagues upon joining an emergency session of the National Security Council during the Cold War. The purpose of Kissinger’s query was to pinpoint the location of the nearest source of U.S. military power, ready and available to serve as an effective first response to the crisis at hand.

  It was the aircraft carrier and its battle group that offered a full set of options, from mere military presence to warfare on arrival, either showing the American flag or operating clandestinely. The carrier was able to use conventional weapons or employ nuclear arms and always had access to the crisis area without needing permission from another sovereign nation to enter it. Designed to be powerful enough to establish U.S. military dominance immediately upon arrival, it had the staying power to remain in the theater until reinforced or relieved.

  These assets were the diplomatic and military options the National Command Authority would have as its alternatives with the closure of the Navy’s carrier battle group. This was the portfolio of capabilities within the role of the U.S. Navy’s carriers throughout the Cold War and as employed in all of its phases—Korea, Vietnam, and the Soviet confrontation. In the early days, the Cold War was the test bed for the genesis of the post–World War II carrier force, from which evolved the tactical structure of the U.S. Navy as it transitioned into the twenty-first century.

  The confrontation with the USSR was the first global crisis, and the Korean War was the first military conflict to be faced by our country after the creation of the U.S. Air Force by the 1947 National Security Act. There was, as would be expected, substantial involvement on the part of the Department of Defense and interest among the American public as to how the changes would affect the operations of the air combat components of the war, especially regarding cooperation among the services and support of the ground forces.

  With the advent of the U.S. Air Force, air power advocates had pushed to have the new service absorb virtually all airborne missions, including those in the maritime environment that the U.S. Navy had expected to retain and exploit. These issues transfixed Congress in the 1949 B-36 hearings, during which the relative capabilities and merits of carrier aircraft versus land-based heavy bombers and whether naval aviation should have a future role in carrying nuclear weapons were debated. An outcome of these hearings was the cancellation of the Navy’s first postwar carrier, the United States, and the so-called revolt of the admirals, which culminated in 1949 with the firing of the chief of naval operations, Adm. Louis Denfeld.

  By 1950 the Navy was facing a reduction in its 1951 force levels to five fleet carriers—that is, carriers that could operate first-line jet aircraft. Then, with the remobilization that took place after the start of the Korean War and the overwhelming need for tactical aviation, a total of nineteen Essex-class carriers were taken out of mothballs, put back into commission, equipped with air groups, and deployed to the operating fleets. A total of twenty-one carriers of all types ultimately served in the conflict, and carrier aircraft flew more than 30 percent of all combat sorties during the Korean War.

  In retrospect, historians generally now agree that the Korean War could not have been won by air power alone. There is also consensus that without tactical aviation as a component of the combined-arms support for the ground forces, the enemy could not have been stopped. Without complete air superiority, the UN would have lost the war to the Chinese.

  The Korean experience demonstrated the continued viability of carrier-based air power. Carrier force levels remained at about twenty-five large carriers until the post–Vietnam War drawdown. However, this resurgence of the fleet aircraft carrier would not have occurred unless it had been possible to modernize these ships to handle the new jet aircraft that were transforming military aviation. When the first jet squadrons were deployed aboard the fleet carriers in the early post–World War II years, the results were not impressive. Naval aviation worked hard at the task, and in spite of seemingly insurmountable technical obstacles and daunting operational problems, the introduction of jet operations into the postwar carrier fleet was successful.

  By July 1950, when the Valley Forge launched the first carrier strikes into Korea, each fleet carrier had been equipped with two squadrons of jet fighters. The first jets were the Grumman F9F-2 Panthers, soon followed by the McDonnell F2H-2 Banshee. These early Navy fighters were not as capable as the Air Force F-86E, which was able to match the Communist MiGs to ensure that air superiority would reside with the United States and its allies. Yet by the time the Navy’s fleet carriers were deploying regularly in the Cold War, in the late summer of 1950, all of the embarked aircraft—Panthers, Banshees, and Corsairs—had proved capable for their mission, and the Douglas AD-2 Skyraider had no equal in any air force for close support of ground forces.

  The U.S. Navy was able to build on these foundations to achieve the very pinnacle of success for the future. The McDonnell-Douglas F-4 Phantom II, a Navy carrier fighter, became the standard tactical fighter for all of the free-world air forces. Today there are nine 85,000-ton large-deck nuclear-powered carriers operating in the fleet, and a tenth, the George H.W. Bush, launched in 2006.

  This book is a largely contemporary perspective of the events, decisions, and outcomes in the history of the Cold War—Korea, Vietnam, and the Soviet confrontation—that shaped today’s Navy and its principal ships-of-the-line, the large-deck nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, the unique trademark of this country’s sea power, now and into the future.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to acknowledge the following individuals whose support and assistance were invaluable to me in the preparation of this book: John Tucker, who convinced me I should undertake the project; Beau Puryear, who got me started on my oral history; Frank Arre, who transcribed the hours of dictation and disciplined my handwritten edits; Capt. Todd Creekman, who brought order to the process; Dr. Dave Winkler, whose understanding of the history of the Cold War years kept me on track; John Reilly, whose research and proofreading made the first drafts respectable; Vice Adm. Bob Dunn and Capt. Tim Wooldridge, whose knowledge of aircraft carriers and their operations lent credibility to the details; and my faithful wife Dabney, who, having endured the experience of a Navy wife throughout the Cold War, stood by me as I tried to derive some meaning and order from those decades.

  1

  The End of an Era

  Shortly after 0300 on 25 October 1944, the USS Bennion (DD-662) made its first visual contact with the Japanese heavies. I was standing up through the hatch in the Mark 37 gun director, scanning the horizon with binoculars. The rumble of heavy gunfire was now continuous, and the lower quadrant of the southern sky was aglow from the muzzle flashes. The patrol torpedo (PT) boats in the strait had sprung their ambush on the Japanese column and triggered a fierce firefight.

  There was a tug on my trouser leg. The sailor at the pointer’s station next to me motioned to my eyepiece, and I lowered myself into the director control seat. I looked through the magnification of the director’s optics and the scene to the south became clearer: The crosshairs were fixed at the base of the jumbo “pagoda” superstructure of a Japanese battleship. The flashes from her main turret salvos and the rapid fire of the secondary battery were lighting up the entire ship. Judging by her clearly visible bow wake, she was making at least twenty-five knots.

  The radar operator sitting behind me tersely reported that he had picked up the target out of the land mass return and was getting good ranges. I pushed down the bridge switch on the intercom
, called that we were tracking a Japanese battleship, and locked on with the fire-control radar. The captain, Cdr. Joshua Cooper, replied that the “Martinis”—the radio call for the PT boats—were reporting that two enemy battleships, a cruiser, and at least three destroyers had passed through Surigao Strait, the narrows between Leyte and Mindanao in the southern Philippines. Our target was to be the second battleship. “Let me know when you have a fire-control solution on the Big Boy,” the captain said. “Have the gun battery ready, but don’t shoot unless I specifically tell you to. We have been directed to make a torpedo attack with five fish.” His voice was clear and businesslike. In the background noise of the intercom I could hear on the TBS (talk-between-ships) radio the excited chatter of the Martinis as they maneuvered to launch their torpedoes. Going back to the optics, I could now see the two battleships in column. I moved the crosshairs to the second Big Boy, got a confirmation from the radar operator that he was locked on, and called the plotting room, telling them to let me know when they had a firing solution on the new target.

  Now that the battleship had emerged from the strait, the image on the radarscope was clear of ground clutter and the fire-control radar was ranging consistently. In minutes, the plotting room talker reported, “Tracking in automatic.” I passed this to the bridge, and the captain acknowledged, “Very well. Train out the tubes but don’t launch or shoot until I give the order.” I switched the 5-inch guns and both quintuple torpedo mounts to director control and again, standing up in the hatch, looked aft to see the torpedo mounts trained out on the beam.