>But we don’t have to trust it, all that really matters is the aircraft carrier numbers, nothing else. As it turned out, the carrier was a hard counter to everything, even other carriers—the other ships in a carrier battle group are there to hunt submarines, supplement the carriers antiaircraft fire, and resupply the carriers.
This is not true. Carriers were powerful, yes, but also vulnerable. I point to the loss of Glorious and Samar as cases where they ended up under the guns of battleships and it didn’t go great, and frankly Samar should have been so much worse than it was. And sinking ships with airplanes is quite difficult. The total number of battleships sunk at sea by carrier planes? Two, and in both cases, it took a lot of planes.
More broadly, the growth of the American carrier fleet was because there was a war on, and any time there was a US-Japan war, the US was going to be building a lot of ships. There were a lot of carriers because carriers had reached the point of being genuinely useful (and could be built reasonably quickly, the main reason the battleship program was curtailed) but it wasn’t like the USN would have had 30+ fleet carriers in 1945 in a world with neither the treaties nor the war.
>But we don’t have to trust it, all that really matters is the aircraft carrier numbers, nothing else. As it turned out, the carrier was a hard counter to everything, even other carriers—the other ships in a carrier battle group are there to hunt submarines, supplement the carriers antiaircraft fire, and resupply the carriers.
This is not true. Carriers were powerful, yes, but also vulnerable. I point to the loss of Glorious and Samar as cases where they ended up under the guns of battleships and it didn’t go great, and frankly Samar should have been so much worse than it was. And sinking ships with airplanes is quite difficult. The total number of battleships sunk at sea by carrier planes? Two, and in both cases, it took a lot of planes.
More broadly, the growth of the American carrier fleet was because there was a war on, and any time there was a US-Japan war, the US was going to be building a lot of ships. There were a lot of carriers because carriers had reached the point of being genuinely useful (and could be built reasonably quickly, the main reason the battleship program was curtailed) but it wasn’t like the USN would have had 30+ fleet carriers in 1945 in a world with neither the treaties nor the war.