The Army Air Forces was woefully unprepared to conduct maritime interdiction missions in the first nine months of the war and initially proved almost totally inept against Japanese shipping. The Luftwaffe did not emphasize maritime interdiction, but, after a slow start, the Allies did.
“Discerning observers asked not so much how well the warship would fare under air attack as whether Britain’s vast shipping could be carried on in the shadow of the Luftwaffe.” “The old dispute about whether the airplane could or could not sink a battleship has long since been answered, but the issue was always somewhat beside the point,” observed Bernard Brodie, author of A Layman’s Guide to Naval Strategy, in 1942. Halfway across the world, Britain also was dependent on shipping to support its wartime operations.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, it was land-based airpower-not carrier-based aircraft-that proved most effective in the maritime interdiction mission. In 1937, Japan imported 82 percent of its oil via sea-lanes criss-crossing the Southwest Pacific.Īlthough the atomic bomb delivered the coup de grace, it was the war against transportation that sealed Japan’s fate in World War II. Land-based airpower helped destroy Japan’s maritime capabilities, paralyze the Japanese war machine, and strangle its industries and economy.Īs an island nation lacking strategic resources, Japan needed to import raw materials and energy to fuel its economy and sustain its military power. Ironically, Phillips had once counseled a junior officer that aviation was “poppycock” and steered the officer away from the aviation profession because it would “ruin” his career.īy the end of the war, Japan was defeated, in large part, by the same maritime interdiction strategy it had helped validate. He was among those killed in the sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse.
Phillips, British force commander, believed so strongly in battleship superiority that he made no effort to arrange for air cover, even while under attack. Naval convention was sometimes difficult to overcome. The efficacy of airpower against naval forces had already been demonstrated at Pearl Harbor and, more than a year before that, in the British attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto, but both of those engagements were against fleets that were sitting in port.