Carriers in Combat: The Air War at Sea

Air & Space Power Journal, Winter, 2007 by David R. Mets

Finally, Carriers in Combat is full of mistakes of both a technical and historical nature. To cite only a few, Hearn at least implies that the Saratoga and Lexington of 1927 were powered by diesel engines; in fact, both were driven by steam turbines. He later says that the Saratoga suffered the flooding of three firerooms as a result of torpedo attack--without wondering why a diesel-powered ship would need a fireroom! He mistakenly seems to identify the Navy's conversion from coal to oil with conversion to a diesel engine. Sometimes he calls the 20 mm gun a machine gun and elsewhere a cannon. (It is a cannon, with the dividing line at .60 caliber.) He suggests that the two great ships came on the line with 16 five-inch guns each. Actually, they did so with eight-inch cruiser weapons that were removed at the beginning of World War II in favor of more antiaircraft guns, those of the five-inch caliber among them. Later he confuses the USS Enterprise with the Saratoga and elsewhere equips them with 22 mm (instead of 20 mm) antiaircraft artillery guns. He calls sonar waves "supersonic" even though we know that the speed of sound is much faster underwater than in the air. He calls the Skyraider an evolution of the Dauntless. Far from it; the latter was a scout bomber, and the former came along much later, designed not only for bombing but also for the delivery of torpedoes. He claims that Nimitz went to Germany to study diesel engines to facilitate the conversion of the Navy from coal to oil. Quite wrong; the conversion had begun long before and had nothing to do with those engines. Rather, they were being studied as the surface power plants for submarines in a Navy that had already largely converted to oil. The author claims that the TBD Devastators were old and sluggish at the onset of war; they were sluggish all right--but not old. They had come on the line in 1937 and were only four years old at the time of Pearl Harbor, when the Royal Navy was still flying open-cockpit biplanes as torpedo bombers. In one place, Hearn asserts that tactics determined the outcome of the Battle of Midway (from time to time, he made me worry about whether he knows the difference between tactics and strategy); elsewhere he credits the victory to luck or the breaking of the Japanese codes. He credits the escort carrier with winning the campaign against German submarines but ignores the importance of breaking their code. Hearn describes the Valley Forge as having a displacement of 36,000 tons and the Leyte 21,000. Both were of the Essex class, the standard displacement of which was 27,000 tons. When he gets around to the Korean War, he misspells Gen Matthew Ridgway's name every time he uses it.

Again, I could go on and on. It is not good form to nitpick an author's work, but the errors in Carriers in Combat occur so frequently that one must suspect that Hearn simply did not do his homework, a problem which disqualifies this book from inclusion on Airmen's professional reading lists. Instead, they should try Raymond Buell's biography of Ernest R. King or that of Reynolds on Towers, cited above.