force when the Pacific War began, and this bomber also made up the majority of the force which sank Prince of Wales and Repulse. The object under the belly of this ‘Nell’ is the rack for a torpedo or bombs. (Phil Jarrett)
The most important factor in air operations against ships is that the sea is so broad. Air attacks cannot be mounted until the enemy is found. That is why signals intelligence was so important in the Second World War: when it worked, it showed the attacker where to search. Operations in narrow waters were of course simpler, but they always required search before attack. The Japanese used shipboard floatplanes to find enemy fleets. In 1942 the Japanese naval staff tried an alternative, the high-performance carrier aircraft shown here. This C6N1 Saiun (‘Myrt’) was designed to a Spring 1942 specification requiring a maximum speed of 350kts and a range of 1500nm at 210kts (maximum 2500nm). The Saiun flew in May 1943 and was accepted even though it did not achieve the desired speed. During the battle of the Philippine Sea, Saiuns effectively shadowed the US fleet, their high speed protecting them from interception. They were responsible for the great success the Japanese enjoyed: they were able to attack from well beyond the attack range of the US fleet. That did them little good, because US fighter control and US anti-aircraft guns were so effective. This ‘Myrt’ was captured on Saipan in June 1944.
The wartime successor to ‘Nell’ was the G4M (‘Betty’), which, like its predecessor, could deliver both bombs and torpedoes. G4Ms were part of the attack against Repulse and Prince of Wales, and later in the war they executed effective night torpedo attacks against US carriers and cruisers. At the end of the war they launched Okha manned stand-off missiles. (Philip Jarrett)
Like their US counterparts, Japanese cruisers carried floatplanes assigned to scouting as well as spotting duties. In the US Navy, the floatplane scouts were intended for use when the cruiser or cruisers operated independently, far from the fleet. Unlike the US Navy, the Japanese used these same floatplanes to scout for carriers screened by the cruisers, as at Midway. Wartime US and British observers considered that the problems of tracking enemy fleet units and of coaching a strike force into position had received particular attention in the Imperial Japanese Navy.3 Scouting was considered so important that, unlike the US Navy, the Japanese separated it from strike, to the extent that scouts were ordered to avoid combat if possible so that they could complete their scouting missions. The fleet scouting mission was symbolised by the design of the Tone class cruisers, with their open aircraft areas aft. Only during the war did the Japanese develop a specialised high-performance carrier scout, the C6N1 Saiun.4 It had no Western equivalent. Wartime Japanese air tactics envisaged a scout or snooper working with a strike force, using elaborate tracking and liaison techniques. By 1943–4 Japanese scouting aircraft had radar. They were advised to minimise both radar and radio transmissions until the moment came to home the strike force on the target, at which time there had to be a considerable volume of traffic to and from the tracking aircraft. On this basis communications volume became a reasonable indication that a striking force or a relief shadower was being homed on the target.
Japan was unique in having both a carrier air arm and a substantial naval land-based air arm. The US Navy also had a large shore-based air arm, but it consisted of flying boats, not high-performance bombers like the G3M ‘Nell’ and its successor G4M (‘Betty’). ‘Nell’ was built to a requirement conceived in 1933 by Admiral Yamamoto, who was then chief of the technical division of the Japanese Naval Bureau of Aeronautics (the equivalent of the US Navy’s BuAer). Admiral Yamamoto was aware of developments which gave twin-engine aircraft very high performance (which in Britain was taken to mean that ‘the bomber will always get through’) and he asked for an aircraft capable of maintaining surveillance over Pearl Harbor, the US fleet base, from Japanese airfields. Such surveillance was necessary if, as the Japanese hoped, they could intercept and defeat the US fleet before it reached their home waters. The aircraft also had to be capable of carrying out attacks at long range. Yamamoto and others were interested in using a force of land-based bombers which could shuttle among the Micronesian islands Japan then ruled as League of Nations mandates. It was clear that the flying boats Japan was using at the time lacked the requisite performance.5 The requirement was in accord with the Japanese naval strategy of wearing down an approaching US fleet before it encountered the main Japanese fleet, and the high performance envisaged would give the new bomber a reasonable degree of immunity against the fleet’s fighters. Yamamoto chose Mitsubishi as sole-source developer because that company had imported engineers from the German company Junkers (which was building high-performance twin-engine bombers) specifically to obtain the technology involved. In effect ‘Nell’ was the air power equivalent of the Yamato class battleship: a technological solution to the numerical inferiority of the Japanese battle fleet. The ‘Nell’ entered production in June 1936. As the longest-range Japanese bomber, it participated in the war against China that began in 1937, first carrying out attacks from Formosa in August. These operations made the British aware of it, though not of its extraordinary range. It also appears that the British tended to mirror-image, and thus to associate all land-based bombers (such as G3M) with the Japanese army, not the navy. That may have blinded them to the threat of such aircraft (in 1942 US air intelligence was counting Japanese biplane torpedo bombers as the aircraft which sank the two British capital ships).
The Heinkel He 111H-6 was the main German wartime land-based torpedo bomber, typically carrying two torpedoes (in this case practice F-5bs) as shown. Numbers were always limited, and it lacked radar. This aircraft was used mainly against Russian convoys, from 1942 onwards. (Philip Jarrett)
The longest-ranged German anti-ship aircraft was the Fw 200 Condor, used both for direct attack and for reconnaissance in support of U-boats. (Philip Jarrett)
Japanese land-based units (including seaplanes) were organised into Air Groups named after the cities at which they were based. In 1940 the Japanese created an 11th Air Fleet of medium bombers. It consisted of three Air Flotillas, each of which consisted of two or three Air Groups. In effect it was the land-based equivalent of the First Air Fleet, the carriers and their aircraft separate from the First Fleet (which included two carriers supporting the battleships directly). There were also fleets intended specifically to operate in the Mandated Islands: the Fourth and Fifth. Among their roles were attrition of any US force trying to pass through the Mandates en route to the expected decisive battle in home waters. Fourth Fleet included 24th Air Flotilla, equivalent to the three medium bomber flotillas (21st, 22nd, 23rd) of 11th Air Fleet. In addition to the attacks on the two British capital ships, aircraft of the 21st and 23rd Air Flotillas were responsible for the early attacks on the US air bases in the Philippines.
The French Navy had both a few carrier aircraft and considerable numbers of land-based torpedo bombers as well as seaplanes. Its aircraft do not figure in this book because it had few opportunities for action before France fell in 1940.
Before the war Germany had a separate naval air arm equipped with ship-based floatplanes and with larger He 115 coastal floatplanes and flying boats.6 Despite an agreement leaving attacks against ships to the naval air arm, the Luftwaffe created its own anti-ship unit, X Fliegerkorps, which soon absorbed the few land-based units the navy had formed. At the outbreak of war the Luftwaffe considered the torpedo inadequate compared to bombing, particularly dive or glide bombing. Torpedo attack was frowned upon as tactically difficult. In November 1940 Göring extracted from Hitler an order temporarily forbidding the provision of aerial torpedoes to anti-shipping units, in theory to allow their use in a special operation in the Mediterranean (this was soon after the Luftwaffe conducted successful torpedo trials
