How to Save the Aircraft Carrier from Becoming Obsolete Like a Battleship

One of the great conceits of admirals in the-interwar- years was their dogmatic embrace of the nostrum that battleships Fwon naval-wars-. Officers such as those of the Imperial Japanese navy proved particularly susceptible to this dogma, a thought process that found itself manifested in so called super battleships such as the IJN Yamato, which one Japanese commentator ranked alongside the pyramids and the great wall of China as one of history’s great white elephants. Indeed, even after British carrier borne aircraft had demonstrated their value against the Italian navy at Taranto and Japan’s own carrier wing had achieved a spectacular tactical success at Pearl Harbor, Japanese admirals held firm to the view that the sheer firepower of a battleship would be the decisive arm of any navy.
This is not to say that Japan’s admirals of the-interwar-years were entirely dismissive of carriers. Rather, they saw the carriers roper role as a supporting unitacting as scouts and spotters for naval gunfire and laying smokescreens for big gun battleships as well as protecting them from land- and carrier-based aircraft. While attacking surface vessels was considered as a role, it was auxiliary insofar as Japan’s naval planners felt that aircraft could augment but not supplement large calibre fire.
Where Japan’s admirals erred was failing to recognize that the carrier in fact illustrated one of their own navy’s cherished principles namely that range mattered more than firepower. While a battleship did deliver more firepower than an aircraft carrier, it could not get within range of a carrier in order to deliver this firepower before being targeted by carrier-based aircraft. Moreover, the anti-aircraft guns placed aboard ships were woefully inadequate for the task of intercepting waves of incoming aircraft.