- Zichek, Jared A.
The Incredible Attack Aircraft of the USS United States, 1948–1949.
Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 2009.
ISBN 978-0-7643-3229-6.
-
In the peacetime years between the end of World War II in 1945 and the
outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 the United States Navy found
itself in an existential conflict. The adversary was not a foreign
fleet, but rather the newly-unified Department of Defense, to
which it had been subordinated, and its new peer service, the United States
Air Force, which argued that the advent of nuclear weapons and
intercontinental strategic bombing had made the Navy's mission
obsolete. The
Operation Crossroads
nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946 which had shown that a well-placed
fission bomb could destroy an entire carrier battle group in close
formation supported the Air Force's case that aircraft carriers
were simply costly targets which would be destroyed in the first
days of a general conflict. Further, in a world where the principal
adversary, the Soviet Union, had neither a blue water navy nor a
warm weather port from which to operate one, the probability that
the U.S. Navy would be called upon to support amphibious landings
comparable to those of World War II appeared unlikely.
Faced with serious policy makers in positions of influence questioning
the rationale for its very existence on anything like its current
scale, advocates of the Navy saw seizing back part of the strategic
bombardment mission from the Air Force as their salvation. This
would require aircraft carriers much larger than any built before,
carrier-based strategic bombers in the 100,000 pound class able to
deliver the massive nuclear weapons of the epoch (10,000 pound
bombs) with a combat radius of at least 1,700—ideally 2,000—miles.
This led to the proposal for CVA-58,
USS
United States, a monster (by the standards of the
time—contemporary supercarriers are larger still) flush deck
carrier which would support these heavy strategic bombers and
their escort craft.
This ship would require aircraft like nothing in the naval inventory,
and two “Outline Specifications” were issued to
industry to solicit proposals for a “Carrier-Based Landplane”:
the basic subsonic strategic bomber, and a “Long Range Special
Attack airplane”, which required a supersonic dash to the
target. (Note that when the latter specification was issued on August
24th, 1948, less than a year had elapsed since the first supersonic
flight of the Bell
X-1.)
The Navy's requirements in these two specifications were not just
ambitious, they were impossible given the propulsion
technology of the time: the thrust and
specific
fuel consumption of available powerplants simply did not
permit achieving all of the Navy's requirements. The designs
proposed by contractors, presented in this book in exquisite detail,
varied from the highly conventional, which straightforwardly conceded
their shortcomings compared to what the Navy desired, to the downright
bizarre (especially in the “Special Attack” category), with
aircraft that look like a cross between something produced by the
Lucasfilm model shop and the fleet of the Martian Air Force. Imagine
a biplane that jettisons its top wing/fuel tank on the way to the
target, after having been launched with a Fireball XL-5 like
expendable trolley; a “parasitic” airplane which served
as the horizontal stabiliser of a much larger craft outbound to the
target, then separated and returned after dispatching the host
to bomb them commies; or a convertible supersonic seaplane which
could refuel from submarines on the way to the target. All of
these and more are detailed in this superbly produced book which
is virtually flawless in its editing and production values.
Nothing at all came of all of this burst of enthusiasm and
creativity. On April 23rd, 1949, the USS United States
was cancelled, provoking the resignation of the Secretary of the Navy
and the
Revolt of
the Admirals. The strategic nuclear mission was definitively
won by the Air Force, which would retain their monopoly status
until the Navy got back into the game with the
Polaris
missile submarines in the 1960s.
April 2012 