The Lesson of Murderers' Row, Two Layers Deeper

...the hard math of heavy industrial capacity...

Murderers’ Row. Ulithi anchorage, December 8th, 1944. Just three years after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

One of the most iconic pictures of WWII.

The carriers are (from front to back): USS Wasp (CV-18), USS Yorktown (CV-10), USS Hornet (CV-12), USS Hancock (CV-19) and USS Ticonderoga (CV-14).

The oldest of those ships, Yorktown, was only 19 months old. The youngest, Hancock, was commissioned only a little under eight months earlier. All were laid down and took from a bit under three to a bit under four years to build.

Just a year prior, the US Navy was so short of aircraft carriers, it had to borrow a carrier from the Royal Navy.

At first glance, it appears to be a flex of American naval power at flood tide—the aircraft carrier’s unassailable invincibility manifest—and it is. However, when you dig deeper, it has a more important story. It gives a warning. It informs us today, if we are willing to listen.

It isn’t about the power of being the world’s greatest shipbuider, that we were. It isn’t about an unequalled ability to project national will across the Pacific like no nation ever has in human history, which it is.

No. That isn’t what it tells us that is most important.

As we have done more than once over the last two decades, we’re taking a holder of a front row seat on the Front Porch and CDR Salamander Plank Owner Sid’s comments, in this case from yesterday, and bringing it to a standalone post.

Most of this post is his. The insight certainly is.

The actual story this picture tells is much more sobering, right there in plain sight, but you can’t see it.

The reality is that on the day this picture was taken, the Fast Carrier Task Force (TF 38/58) was down an entire Task Group from where it started two months earlier.

USS Franklin (CV-13) was severely damaged on 27 OCT by kamikaze and had to return CONUS for repairs.

USS Belleau Wood (CVL-24) was severely damaged in the same attack.

USS Princeton (CVL-23) was sunk on 24 OCT by a Judy dive bomber.

USS Essex (CV-9) had a devastating hit by a kamikaze on 24 NOV followed by a disabling machinery casualty requiring a trip back to CONUS for repairs.

USS Enterprise (CV-6) departed a few days earlier for repairs in Pearl Harbor.

All the carriers in this picture had been damaged to varying degrees. Damage that today would require a trip to the yard to fix, like the absent Enterprise and Essex.

For example Ticonderoga (fourth Essex in the line from the bottom) would take damage to her radar waveguides in January. That could not be repaired forward and she would have to return to Bremerton as well.

As a note and aside, another member of the Front Porch, Scoob’s father is aboard the Lexington (uncamouflaged carrier on the left) being repaired having taken a kamikaze blow to her island in November. It was Admiral Mitscher’s flagship during the attack, with future CNO Arleigh Burke as his Chief of Staff. 50 killed and 132 wounded in this attack.

Also not obvious in the picture is the tremendous replacement effort of aircraft and pilots to replenish from the losses, that today would be called catastrophic, ferried forward by nearly a score of CVE’s shuttling from the west coast and Pearl.

When the next Great Pacific War comes, it won’t just be clean numbers on a sheet and your preferred weapon winning—but like it was when the picture at the top was taken, it will be about the entire system built around them.

Logistics. Repair. Replacements. Sustained operations, forward, for years on end.

An industrial base that can, on a dime, rise from economic doldrums to building a fleet that would rule the world’s oceans.

Are we training, manning, and equipping for that? How many CNOs this century chased this or that socio-political trend instead of beating this drum?

Why?

The norm since the 80’s of deployment of one or even two carriers will not be enough for the fight to come. We are not ready.

As I remind everyone I have a chance to, like I did exactly a year ago:

Should we find ourselves in a Great Pacific War with the PRC, as our fleet heads west across the International Date Line, we should expect in the first 90-180 days to lose somewhere in the neighborhood of 8-10,000 Sailors and Marines...at sea alone.

That is the most-likely outcome; not the most-positive or most-dramatic. Two CVN, a few large deck amphibs, a handful+ of DDG/CG/LCS and SSN—all sunk in the first 90-180 days. That doesn’t even start to outline what will happen to ground-based support from Guam west.

This truth is right there in our own history. We have a Naval Academy, a Naval War College, JPME, all of it—and yet the recognition of this clear fact seems shocking, new, unheard this century of to way too many in positions of power and influence.

Why? What other things captured their minds?