Naval CAP (Combat Air Patrol) Doctrine in WW2

[renrich]

You gentlemen have forced me to go back into my references to back up my (perhaps) poorly chosen words. From Dean's chronology of the Wildcat in "America's 100 thousand" In March of 1940, a contract change by the Navy provides for installation of wing folding on an F4F3. That is the first mention of wing folding on the Wildcat. As you know a Martlet shot down a vaunted(by some) JU 88 on Christmas Day, 1940. 4 guns seems to have been plenty then. Interestingly all the Wildcats at Coral Sea were F4F3s. No folding wings and 4 guns. all the Navy Wildcats at Midway were F4F4s with manual folding wings and 6 guns. From Lundstrom "The First Team" page 435. " Because of production difficulties, modern aircraft were slow in getting to the fleet and newly formed squadrons often languished with just a few planes." Page 436-"New AC deliveries and new flight school graduates have done little more than balance operational and battle losses of active carrier planes and pilots." These statements are in June after Midway. Back to Dean-about 75% of all Wildcats were built by Eastern(GM) Back to Lundstrom-On 18 April, BuAer signed a contract with Eastern to produce the FM1 an exact copy of the F4F4. Deliveries expected in late summer 1942. Meanwhile the Bureau seemed to hedge it's bet with an order for an additional 100 fixed wing F4F3s with 4 guns. The Bureau seemed to feel guilty about the 6 gun planes with the extra weight and reduced ammo load. The decision to go with six guns was a desire for standardization in production "because of the British insistence on 6 guns." "Upon seeing the installation which Grumman cooked up for 6 guns, this Section as well as Armament has realised we made a mistake, but there again it is too late to tamper with production at this time." A little later they did decide to tamper with production. "Armament labored to redesign the F4F4s folding wings to accomodate four guns instead of six and with 430 rounds each instead of 240. The resulting AC , which included a few minor changes tipped the scales about 500 lbs lighter than a standard f4f4." The Bureau did not tamper with Grumman's production but shocked Eastern on 14 June, 1942 by issuing a change order directing that the eleventh production FM1 and those following had to feature a redesigned 4 gun battery. Therefore I cannot find an exact quote about the 6 gun wing demanded by the Brits causing a production dlay but I will keep looking. The fact remains than in the summer of 1942 there was a shortage of Wildcats in the USN. Who would have thought it?

[freebird]

Originally Posted by renrich

"Upon seeing the installation which Grumman cooked up for 6 guns, this Section as well as Armament has realised we made a mistake, but there again it is too late to tamper with production at this time." A little later they did decide to tamper with production. "Armament labored to redesign the F4F4s folding wings to accomodate four guns instead of six and with 430 rounds each instead of 240. The resulting AC , which included a few minor changes tipped the scales about 500 lbs lighter than a standard f4f4." The Bureau did not tamper with Grumman's production but shocked Eastern on 14 June, 1942 by issuing a change order directing that the eleventh production FM1 and those following had to feature a redesigned 4 gun battery. Therefore I cannot find an exact quote about the 6 gun wing demanded by the Brits causing a production delay but I will keep looking. The fact remains than in the summer of 1942 there was a shortage of Wildcats in the USN. Who would have thought it?

Ren it seems like this refers to the time BEFORE Dec 1941, because the British order (folding wings, 6 guns) was presumably larger, the USN went along, then later (after Pearl) changed their mind, and ordered the 4 gun. But its not a surprise that their was a shortage of A/C in summer '42, because of the rapid expansion needed to convert from peacetime to wartime.

i will agree with you that the 4 gun model seems better, I think the British were looking at combat with Me 109's {in the Med} vs lighter Zeros with less protection.

It seems that it was a mistake by the Bureau to change production on an existing line so late in the game. The grumman line was working on the 6 gun model. The Bureau should have gone to Eastern right after Pearl {ie Jan 1942} and said THIS is the model that we want. Instead it seems that they were undecided as well {understandable with very little war experience} and it was only after the early battles in the S. Pacific that they decided that 4 guns would have been better. Again, it sounds as if this might be something that could only be learned through combat. IF they had decided right away after pearl what they wanted, there would have probably been no delays. However, the shortage of aircraft might not have been avoidable in any event.

[renrich]

I think that part of the problem was that the Wildcat, because of power available, was just not suitable to gain all the weight that the various mods caused. A big part of that weight gain was the 6 gun configuration. With all that extra weight the Wildcat just could not perform. I also know that the Brits had different training standards for their pilots(of necessity) than the USN and on average they did not have as much gunnery practise and were not trained for deflection shooting like the USN pilots. The Brits, FAA and RAF, were trained to get on the enemy's six, spray a bunch of bullets, their doctrine was they would have 2 seconds to fire and needed to put 261 303 bullets(as I recall) into a bomber to bring it down. That was the reason they wanted 8-303s in their fighters and I suspect they thought the 6-50s was needed in order to get the number of hits necessary. Our Navy pilots were not trained that way.

[renrich]

One interesting thing about the IJN fighter pilot tactics in 1942 is that I believe we all have images of Zeros engaged in turning fights with Wildcats. According to Lundstrom that was not true. Their tactics were to get an altitude advantage, make a firing pass and then climb out to do it again. In other words,pretty much energy tactics or what the flight sim people call boom and zoom. One reason for this was they did not want to engage in a WW1 type dogfight and risk being hit with no armor or SS tanks. Another reason was that they only carried 90 rounds per gun for the 20mms and the 7.7s had lots of ammo but weren't up to heavily damaging the robust US AC. The 20s also had a low muzzle velocity and they had to get close to get any hits. That is the reason the Thach Weave worked well as the A6M did not want to go head to head with a Wildcat. The Wildcat could reach out and touch the Zero with those 50s before the Wildcat was in good range of the 20 mms plus the Wildcat could take a lot more hits than a Zeke. However all the Wildcat tactics were defensive in nature. Just think you are in a F4F4 and you see a Zero. He can outclimb you, out turn you and out run you. You somehow get on his six and he loops and he is on your six. The only advantage you have is you can take more damage and live, you can maybe outdive him but if you can get him going real fast his ailerons get too heavy. Course he knows all that. What to do?