History Friday: Curtis SC-1 Seahawk – A Case Study of U.S. ‘Materialschlacht’ vs. Samurai ‘Spirit’

15 thoughts on “History Friday: Curtis SC-1 Seahawk – A Case Study of U.S. ‘Materialschlacht’ vs. Samurai ‘Spirit’”

1. Thank you for this installment. I had never thought of the scout seaplanes being used as a serious CAP, and I did not know about the climb and turn rate performance of the SC-1. To be honest, I thought of them as being restricted to either the search or spotting role. This is triggering some thought.

   Subotai Bahadur

2. Boooook!!

3. Subotai Bahadur,

   During the SC-1’s short time in service, the crews of the US Navy cruisers and battleships with Seahawks referred to them as “Quarterdeck Messerschmitts.” See the USS Little Rock link.

   VXXC,

   It is getting written one column at a time.

4. That is very interesting. I think a big risk on those scout planes would be that they’d get shot up by US anti aircraft weapons as they returned to their ships. But given the dangers that these picket ships faced it seems like this would be a good trade off.

5. Note also that “materialschlacht” is not simply a blunt instrument. It is a matter of increasingly devastating and effective machines, not mere mass of shells and bombs, as it is sometimes misconstrued to mean. The human frame and its spiritual component are constants, but the better and better armament they have to wield, or confront, change rapidly under wartime conditions. This qualitative aspect of the American materialschlacht in World War II was actually on a sharp upward slope in the closing months, as these posts show. The A-Bomb was just the most spectacular example.

6. Carl said:

   >>…I think a big risk on those scout planes would be that they’d
   >>get shot up by US anti aircraft weapons as they returned to their ships.
   >>But given the dangers that these picket ships faced it seems like this
   >>would be a good trade off.

   All US Navy and USAAF aircraft at the end of the Pacific War were fitted with the Mark III Identification Friend of Foe (IFF) beacons.

   There were several issues with them at the time.

   1. Getting the proper code in the beacons. They were changed daily and long range patrol planes flying in/near Okinawa were chronically behind in the codes due to bases decoding the latest transmissions with the daily code late and not getting them to PBY, PBM, PV-1 and PB4Y patrol planes prior to their take off time. This was not an issue with ships in the fleet like the SC-1.

   2. Keeping the IFF equipment properly operational. This was a problem for pretty much every air unit in the war.

   3. Possible Japanese spoofing of the beacons since several Japanese radars could modulate to produce a US Mk III beacon response. This resulted in pilots turning off their IFF beacons close to their targets and forgetting to turn them on again flying back to the fleet. (This is a problem that is still present in today’s air operations.)

   There were a number of technical fixes in terms of new beacons doing the IFF function that were connected with Project Cadillac airborne early warning radars, but the Pacific War ended before their widespread deployment.

   The bureaucratic food fights between the services during the standing up of the Department of Defense resulted in a new IFF standard being delayed until after the Korean War.

7. ” This qualitative aspect of the American materialschlacht in World War II was actually on a sharp upward slope in the closing months, as these posts show. The A-Bomb was just the most spectacular example.”

   The most spectacular example of early failure was the Sherman tank. I have a book by a guy in a tank recovery unit in Normandy. The losses in armored units was 600%. By the end of the campaign, the crews were being dredged from infantry The title of the book is Death Traps and it is excellent although there are some newer reviews with good criticism of some of his technical points.

8. 150 SC-1 vs 5000 Kamikazes? Would they have been overwhelmed? Plus, if the SC-1 are dogfighting, would the deck guns on the ships be quiet lest they hit their own planes?
   Overload in CO

9. My dad was on the USS San Francisco (CA-38) during WWII (but he was a young one, missing Guadalcanal as he only got into the service in late ’43.)

   For years I helped him edit the newsletter of the (now defunct) USS San Francisco (CA-38) Association; they had a few articles and a photo now and then of their scout aircraft. They used the biplane SOC throughout most of the war, but perhaps shifted to the OS2U (my google-fu is weak at the moment and I can’t find any specifics on the ‘Frisco’.)

   The performance gains of the SC-1 over the SOC were huge: about twice the top speed, 2.5 times rate of climb and service ceiling (not sure how important the latter was in an observation aircraft!), yet still providing about the same range (and the SC also provided the ability to carry an auxiliary fuel tank.) Better armament, too. Quite an upgrade.

10. Overload in CO Says:

    >>150 SC-1 vs 5000 Kamikazes? Would they have been overwhelmed?

    Just because the Japanese Military said their “Ketsu-Go Six plan” to defeat the American invasion of Kyushu would use 5,000 wood and canvas Kamikazes to sink the American fleet, doesn’t mean they could really do it.

    The American military got a vote — see the SC-1 deployment — on the Japanese carrying out their plans and American Ultra intelligence meant American commanders were reading Japanese Military mail faster than they could decode it.

    There were three big and interrelated reasons that the Japanese Ketsu-Go Six Kamikaze coordination plans were going to fall apart like their aerial plans for the Marianas “Decisive Battle,” more commonly known as the “Marianas Turkey Shoot.” The consisted of the following:
    1) Communications,
    2) Maintenance, and
    3) Flawed operational planning amounting to wishful thinking.

    I’ll stick to the last point for now.

    The Imperial Japanese Military liked big, complicated operational plans with lots of moving parts, where everybody got a piece of the action. This worked with the consensus style of Japanese leadership in that it let the various military factions participate with the least amount of political friction. When there was a lot of time to plan and collect intelligence. There were highly trained forces that had long lead times to execute rehearsals of the plan, and most importantly an unprepared foe. This style worked. It was the “Short Victorious War” planning style.

    When the Imperial Japanese faced a prepared foe with anything approaching equal capabilities, they got locked in a war of attrition. Then when they went for the “Big Plan” decisive battles, they got their heads handed to them as the command consensus could not adapt to the changing realities fast enough and started to believe in fantasy
    in order to cope.

    Retreat into fantasy is the best way to describe Ketsu-Go Six’s operational assumptions.

    At Kyushu, the Imperial Japanese would be facing a prepared American foe with superior capabilities that was reading their communications in real time and had a template of the Imperial Japanese fighting style to apply it’s overwhelming force upon.

    True, the Japanese had successfully hidden a huge number of Kamikaze planes in Kyushu, Shokaku, Western Honshu, Korea and Formosa.

    True they had hidden the fuel for them.

    What was not true, and assumed to be so, was that the Japanese would have the ability to coordinate large numbers of them, with disparate flying characteristics (Think A6M2 Zero as compared to a Sopwith Camel), over a wide area to achieve large, hourly, time-on-target pulses of 300 Kamikaze at a time off individual landing beaches.

    Which -is- what the plan assumed.

    One of the old Far Eastern Air Force (FEAF) “Air Technical Intelligence” (ATI) reports I read spoke of a cave hanger with 13 ‘modern fighters’ investigated in Oct-Nov 1945. It went into detail about how well hidden the hanger was to include a description of the light rails with hand mine cars filled with vegetation constructed in front of the hanger entrance to hide it from the air. This part of this ATI report later showed up in a US Strategic Bombing Survey report on Japanese underground aircraft production facilities.

    Then the FEAF ATI report spoke to the practical reality of this cave as a working hanger, which the USSBS report did not.
    o There was one string of electrical lights run by generator, for which there was
    limited fuel. Most work was done by torch or candle light.
    o The cave floor was mud save for a wooden walk way.
    o There were no vehicles to move the airplanes, only draft animals and people.
    o There was no room to stage operational aircraft at the back of the cave past inoperative aircraft closer to the
    cave mouth.

    So come the day, if the facility was to get out seven aircraft, and the seventh operational plane was number 13 at the back of the cave. The entire cave had to be cleared of planes to get that plane airborne…by hand. And all the planes had to be placed back in the cave — or pulled away some distance from it and camouflaged — before day light or roving American fighter-bombers would pounce and napalm and fragmentation bomb the whole area, then seed it with M-83 butterfly-bomb scatter-able mines.

    This facility would have been expected to handle further aircraft staged from elsewhere after the original planes were gone while American intelligence would be busy correlating pilot reports, radar plots and signals intelligence to steer day and night air patrols and photo intelligence flights looking for it.

    A single plane crashing on take off or landing would be a smoking beacon drawing American fighter-bombers and medium bombers for miles around to come look.

    Now multiply that example 100 times and you see after the first couple of days the Kyushu suicide campaign would have been a continual and irregular stream over several weeks and not a 10-day orgy of coordinated pulses Ketsu-Go 6 assumed would overwhelm American air defenses.

    The American Military’s “vote” on Ketsu-Go Six also included a series of operational and tactical scale deception plans to get the Japanese to “show their hand” regards launching mass Kamikaze raids by using US Navy “Beach Jumper” deception units to replicate radar and radio traffic of an invasion fleet off Kyushu days before the real thing.

    The Japanese intended to send many Kamikaze flights out without enough fuel to get back. Decoy invasion fleets engaged by such planes are a pure loss.

    The specific issues with wood and canvas Kamikaze was that in daylight they had to be used in huge numbers to overwhelm American air defenses (Think P-51 Mustang versus several loaded down Sopwith Camels) and at night they had to have pilots good enough, with enough night time flight hours, with good enough night vision, to do twilight/night flying attacks. There would have been no more than 5% of the 10,000 or so Kamikaze pilots (500 pilots plus or minus a hundred) the Japanese had that fit that category.

    The Beach Jumper decoy operations and American airpower would disrupt the daytime Kamikaze coordination all to hell and at night the American Fleet would coil into anchorages covered with machine generated smoke screens.

    This would place those wood and canvas bi-plane instructor pilots out orbiting the smoked out transport areas where the American Destroyer and small combatant “Fly-catcher” surface screen was. A screen augmented by patrolling radar equipped F6F-5N Hellcats, P-61 Black Widows and SC-1 Seahawks.

    The SC-1’s were going to be with the “Fly-catcher” screen in any case as Japanese small subs and suicide boats were going to be present and the Seahawk was designed to deal with them.

    The Seahawk’s ability to go low and slow with an air intercept capable radar would make those instructor pilot bi-planes their meat.

11. ‘The most spectacular example of early failure was the Sherman tank.’

    You must be kidding. The Sherman was a reliable medium tank armed with a medium velocity gun based on experience from North Africa, where British tanks lacked the high explosive shells needed to destroy towed anti-tank guns. It was comparable to the common panzer mark 3 and 4 of the Germans, though outgunned by the less common Panther and Tiger heavy tanks.

    The Sherman vs Tiger argument is a bit like arguing that cruisers are defective if they can’t beat a battleship.

12. “The Sherman vs Tiger argument is a bit like arguing that cruisers are defective if they can’t beat a battleship.”

    No, I am not kidding and your comparison is silly. Early in WWII there were still a number of “treaty cruisers” around and they showed their weaknesses at Tassafaronga and elsewhere. Later cruisers were built like cruisers and not to a 1930 treaty by politicians.

    The Russians had a better tank, the T 34. It was still a medium tank but far more survivable. The Sherman was not even that successful against the Pkw4. The Tigers were clumsy and had mechanical problems but the Panther and the T 34 showed what could have been done by 1944.

13. ” This worked with the consensus style of Japanese leadership in that it let the various military factions participate with the least amount of political friction. When there was a lot of time to plan and collect intelligence. There were highly trained forces that had long lead times to execute rehearsals of the plan, and most importantly an unprepared foe. This style worked. It was the “Short Victorious War” planning style.”

    I think this is very important. Churchill wrote about the Japanese difficulty with improvisation. He attributed it to the language but I think you are correct about the cultural connection.

14. Mike K,

    Pretty much everything you think you know about the M4 Sherman in WW2 is wrong.

    It isn’t my area of expertese, but I know where to look to find those that have it and their story is much different that the “Official Narrative.” Since the official narrative is much nicer to the professional reputations of Ike, McNair, Bradley, Patton and pretty much the entire generation of 1st String US Army senior flag leadership in the ETO, AKA “General Marshall’s men.”

    See these links —

    The Chieftain’s Hatch: End of the M4(75)
    10.08.2013
    http://worldoftanks.com/en/news/21/the_chieftains-hatch-end_of_75_M4/

    The Chieftain’s Hatch: US Tank Guns
    05.01.2013
    http://worldoftanks.com/en/news/21/chieftains-hatch-us-tank-guns/

    Chieftain’s Hatch: Ordnance Dept Tank Development
    28.11.2012
    http://worldoftanks.com/en/news/21/chieftains-hatch-ordnance-dept-tank-development/

    The Chieftain’s Hatch: US Guns, German Armour, Pt 1
    04.01.2012
    http://worldoftanks.com/en/news/21/chieftains-hatch-us-guns-vs-german-armour-part-1/

    The Chieftain’s Hatch: US Guns, German Armor: Pt 2
    09.02.2012
    http://worldoftanks.com/en/news/21/us-guns-german-armor-part-2/

    This text excerpt is from the final link:

    “…This transition of views does not derive from any decline in the qualities of US guns, nor any improvement in German armor. Rather it is a reflection of the changing nature of the combat that 6th Armored was involved in. It is, in effect, a microcosm of the growing maturity of user feedback, as the US Army learned first-hand what tanks had to be able to do, while also gathering real-world data on what their own guns and their opponents’ armor were actually capable of.

    The US Army was not alone in going through this learning curve. The Germans struggled in 1941, when they discovered that their tank guns were inadequate against the Soviet T-34. The Germans also discovered at that time that their standard AP rounds had poor metallurgical qualities. It took about a year, until mid- to late-1942, before the Germans had effected their solutions to these issues.

    The British found out in 1941 that their 2pdr gun was not good enough against their German adversaries. They managed to respond on the firepower issue within a year, as the 6pdr began to replace the 2pdr, but it was not until almost two years later with the advent of the 17pdr that the British truly got the anti-tank firepower they wanted.

    For the US Army’s perspective, the M4 was very well regarded by both British and US tankers in Tunisia in 1942 and 1943. When paired with the M10 tank destroyer (and later the M18), it appeared that the US had everything that was needed. And so they would have, if the panzers they faced in France in 1944 were the same panzers they had faced in Tunisia in 1943. But they weren’t.

    US Army Ordnance had developed the basic tools. The Sherman had a 75mm gun in 1942. The 76mm gun was developed specifically to fit as an upgrade in the Sherman in 1942, and was available in 1943. The 90mm gun was developed in 1943, and was available for tanks in 1944.

    But there was no consensus that this was the right path to follow. Ordnance’s own flawed testing lulled Army Ground Forces and the commanders in the European Theater of Operations into a false sense of security. It was not until the cold hard realities of combat in Normandy that a clear picture emerged on the needs for better guns to defeat the panzers. And even here AGF and ETO waffled on their feedback, demanding immediate solutions in the Summer, then asking only for more of the existing designs in the Fall, and finally screaming for immediate solutions again in the Winter/Spring. But as with any major industrial/technological undertaking, there are no immediate solutions. Fortunately, Ordnance continued their development efforts regardless of the changing user feedback, and so had effective solutions available within less than a year of the first hint of crisis.

    The US Army responded better and faster than either the German or British armies. But alas, even with under-performing US tanks and guns, the Germans had been defeated before the US response to the Panther could make its way to the forefront.

    So what of the whole debacle anyway? Would the outcome have been significantly different had the M4(76) been the standard American tank instead of the 75mm variant? Probably not. Neither would have been of great effectiveness against the German frontal armour, and as we’ve seen, when not facing the front of the cats, the 75mm seemed quite good enough. Would the outcome have been any different had HVAP ammunition been available for the 76mm guns from June 6th 1944? Again, I doubt it would have been enough to make a huge difference, as the ‘engagement range’ was such that it would only have helped a small amount of incidents. Of course, if you were the tank crew involved in that particular incident, you would have had a much different view of not having 76mm HVAP. 90mm guns were of practical utility but were being churned out pretty much as quickly as hulls could be found for them.

    Really the US was a victim of nothing more than poor intelligence. They underestimated the enemy threat, and failed to prepare for it accordingly. It wasn’t that they couldn’t build tanks capable of winning the war with fewer losses, they chose chose not to since they honestly believed what they had was perfectly servicable and didn’t warrant the issues with introducing the upgraded equipment. When informed otherwise by the Germans, they reacted with commendable speed whilst balancing out current operational requirements with future upgrades.

15. Kirk Parker,

    See the following:

    NavSource Online: Cruiser Photo Archive
    USS SAN FRANCISCO (CA 38)

    http://www.navsource.org/archives/04/038/04038.htm

    Dicctionary of American Fighting Ships — CA-38

    http://www.history.navy.mil/danfs/s4/san_francisco-ii.htm

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