What if Pearl Harbor failed?

[BAYLOR]

The US had troops cached in the Aleutian Islands in preparation for a fight with the USSR. They were not ignoring it.

Although the Japanese were considering alternatives, there was no reason for the US to wait, see and accept anything but an unconditional surrender and the end of the empire of Japan.

The few days between the two bombs seems a bit short to me. US planes dropped messages which basically said "Surrender now, look at what just happened in Hiroshima" but that had little apparent effect. Maybe there was a channel of communication open in which the Japanese could have made a decision to surrender and communicate that to the US.

Shock and Awe , It was all of that. If Japan had not surrendered even then . The US probably one to two additional devices at the most?

 

[lynnfredricks]

Shock and Awe , It was all of that. If Japan had not surrendered even then . The US probably one to two additional devices at the most?

My understanding is that they didn't have additional bombs ready, though in another few weeks more could have been available. They weren't being built off of an assembly line.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

The US had troops cached in the Aleutian Islands in preparation for a fight with the USSR. They were not ignoring it.

I mean accounts since, justifying use of the Atomic bombs.

 

[Lew Rockwell Fan]

My understanding is that there were enough planes at Hickham Field to give the Japanese attackers at least a good fight if they had heeded the Radar warning they got and had them in the air waiting.

Absolutely. And even more so if Kimmel had gotten the aircraft he requested. The book to read on this, and on the entire run up to Pearl is "Day of Deceit" by Stinnett. It is an extremely worthwhile book.

What if the attack had failed, and spectacularly because the American planes followed the attackers back and then more planes and ships from Pearl attacked the Task Force.

Which is totally plausible. As far as the U.S. aircraft go that is. The ships not so much. I don't think we had anything there fast enough unless the Japs waited for us to hit back like a bunch of suckers. But had the horseshoe nails dropped differently, it could easily have happened that way.

The declining importance of the battleship AT THAT TIME has been greatly exaggerated. They didn't form Napoleonic lines of battle and duke it out in massive fleet actions as at Jutland, but that change was already understood. It is true that their vulnerability to aircraft had been underestimated, but the vulnerability of carriers to surface ships had also been underestimated and both mistakes were soon corrected and tactical doctrine adapted. Battleships were far from obsolete. They were a huge factor in amphib ops. And the Pacific war was all about island hopping. Even in the 1990s when the last battleships were retired, the protests came mainly not from the regular Navy per se, but from the Marines. There was a significant body of opinion that even then they weren't obsolete and that in terms of support of amphibious operations the navy did not have anything quite as effective.

So, yes, OF COURSE, the immediate loss of all U.S. battleships in the Pacific, and half of all U.S. battleships anywhere made a big difference. It took a month to get 2 of the 8 back in service and a year or so for another 4. In war, that's a long time. And 2 were total losses. Furthermore, for the attack to have been a tactical failure implies the U.S. wouldn't have lost half the aircraft based there and that the Nips would have lost a lot of the attacking aircraft. That might indeed have put their carriers at risk if a counterattack was swift. And of course, with a little more accurate anticipation, a counterattack would have already been planned. Stuff like that snowballs. Very possibly the Japanese would have never taken the Philippines and if they did they certainly wouldn't have held them as long. Probably they'd have been pushed back to the home islands long before the bomb was developed.

That is where it gets interesting. With a quicker victory in the Pacific, Wild Bill Donovan (may he RIH and that's no typo) might have never backed Mao. More resources would have become available to the European theater faster. The Warsaw Pact would have wound up much smaller. The world might be very different indeed in that case. More likely better than worse, but you never know, chaos always rules.
=====================================================

Now about the stuff later posters wandered away from OP's question into:

Whether Truman was right to drop the bomb is a darned complex topic. I used to think obviously yes, for many of the reasons advanced here. Later I learned more and switched my view to no. Then I learned still more and realized it is darned hard to say.

- The Nips DID offer surrender well before the bomb was dropped. I'd have to look it up but I believe it was a few MONTHS before. Certainly more than a couple of weeks. The terms they asked for were NOT materially different from those Mac unilaterally granted as the occupying American shogun. If you want to look at it in terms of the effect on Japan, then the difference was NOT in terms of actual conditions but the different psychology of:

-- your face has been unambiguously, undeniably ground in the dirt, indeed you have no more "face" at all, your total impotence has been demonstrated, and you have rolled on your back like a whipped dog begging for mercy, knowing Halsey can and will make good his threat ("the Japanese language will be spoken only in Hell") if allowed, and the conqueror has graciously unilaterally ALLOWED you the concessions you wanted to get by negotiation, after demonstrating he can easily cause the total extinction of your culture, the near extinction of your race, and literally sterilize the home islands . . .
vs.
-- being allowed to save face by negotiating a peace, possibly allowing future Japanese politicians to capitalize on claims like Hitler's "stab in the back" claims vis a vis Versailles.

The trad leftist anti-war view (not counting those who just ignore the facts as inconvenient), moderated only by their loyalty to Truman's party, is that that was just pure evil on Truman's part since their was no MATERIAL difference and the war ran on months LONGER than it needed to, costing MORE lives, not less.

But realistically, you can't ignore the psychological effect. Japanese culture and politics is profoundly different than it would have been. On that score, he may have been right.

And yes, of course the bombing was a cautionary message to the Soviets. He might have been right on that score too. Damfino.

But there is another joker in history's deck almost never acknowledged, partially, I suspect, for reasons that draw on unconscious racism or cultural chauvinism, and the comforting, unstated, and false belief that westerners innovate and asians imitate. While the Germans largely kept their wartime records, the Nips engaged in massive destruction of records beginning months before the end. And, bizarrely, a huge portion of those documents that WERE captured, after being held in the U.S. for a few years, during which the majority were never scrutinized (or so it is claimed - Finagle knows what the truth is), were then returned to Japan. This may or may not have bearing on the credibility of some of what follows. Furthermore, as recently as the Clinton administration (see the excellent Pearl Harbor book "Day of Deceit" mentioned above) the U.S. still had classified documents from BEFORE Pearl Harbor that they refused to declassify. I presume they still do. Furthermore I'd presume that the refusal to do so is NOT driven by any military consideration, but a desire to spin history. Hard to say. There is a bio of Hirohito, which is worth reading. I THINK the title was simply "Hirohito", but I may misremember. I believe the dust jacket was largely white with a photo of Hirohito mounted on a horse, although it is possible I am confusing 2 different bios of the man. I remember nothing about the author, but it struck me as credible when I read it. Most of the following comes from that. There was a German submarine ordered to carry a cargo to Japan late in the war. It was in the mid Atlantic when the order came to proceed to the nearest Allied port and surrender. The Captain figured his proximity to England and New York city essentially the same and actually polled the crew to see if anyone had a preference. Not surprisingly, there was a strong preference for New York and that's where they went. Two Nips aboard promptly committed sepuku or whatever they call it, and were polite enough to use poison, rather than make a mess. The cargo being delivered was uranium. I believe it was already isotopically enriched, but I may be mistaken on that point. Meanwhile, back in the far East, there was at least one witness (I want to say a German, but I'm hazy on that point) who claimed to have seen a test fission bomb detonated by the Nipponese army on the mainland in what would now, I believe, be North Korea. It was suggested that the plan was to use the bomb on the expected invasion fleet.

Even if you assume this is true (and provisionally, I'd bet even money it is), it still seems likely that Truman didn't know it at the time the decision was made to drop the bomb on Hiroshima. However, it also seems likely that unless Truman was a lot stupider I think he was, he was probably aware that there was at least a CHANCE that something like this might be the case. This is true even if the factoid, as Mailer would say, of Japan's fission bomb program is false. And even if he evaluated that chance as very low, it is still something he would have to take into account. He also couldn't exclude the possibility that they didn't have it, but were 6 months FROM having it, for example. Imagine yourself in his position. Does that idea push you toward taking the peace offer and shortening the war, or toward the idea of waiting a little bit longer in order to damage Japanese industry in a really big way, and, bluntly, totally cow the leadership, before occupying it? The more you think about it, the more layers of complexity you see.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Whether Truman was right to drop the bomb is a darned complex topic. I used to think obviously yes, for many of the reasons advanced here. Later I learned more and switched my view to no. Then I learned still more and realized it is darned hard to say.

A fair point.

The cargo being delivered was uranium. I believe it was already isotopically enriched, but I may be mistaken on that point. Meanwhile, back in the far East, there was at least one witness (I want to say a German, but I'm hazy on that point) who claimed to have seen a test fission bomb detonated by the Nipponese army on the mainland in what would now, I believe, be North Korea. It was suggested that the plan was to use the bomb on the expected invasion fleet.

Fantasy. The Germans didn't get close to enriching enough uranium for a bomb and the Japanese never detonated any fission device.

 

[Lew Rockwell Fan]

Possibly. I don't claim it IS true. I do claim it is plausible. Certainty is almost always a mistake. Nor is it implied that the Germans were the sole source. And the main point is that Truman couldn't KNOW that something of the sort wasn't happening, regardless of whether it did or not.

 

[BAYLOR]

Possibly. I don't claim it IS true. I do claim it is plausible. Certainty is almost always a mistake. Nor is it implied that the Germans were the sole source. And the main point is that Truman couldn't KNOW that something of the sort wasn't happening, regardless of whether it did or not.

The Japanese had their own bomb program going right up until the end of the war. Both their army and the navy each had a their separate programs.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

The USA had broken Japanese codes (with I think UK help). The Japanese didn't know this.

 

[Lew Rockwell Fan]

Fantasy.

Sir, you shall retract that and substitute "SF" or "alternate history" or my friend shall call on you to make arrangements. It's only fair to warn you that I've been trained in dueling by the ghost of Richard Boone.

Seriously, while I stand by my earlier reply that the point isn't whether the incident really occurred but that HST couldn't be 100% certain that something of the sort wasn't in the offing, and also by my implied guesstimate of the odds as being near 50%, I thought I should add a couple of links, lest anyone think the idea has only appeared in privately printed crackpot brochures or in the cannabis scented mumblings of people who talk about reptiloids on the trilateral commission hiding their space ship in area 51. I don't intend to delve into this subject deeply enough to form a strong opinion of what actually happened. But anyone who thinks "most mainstream historian say" is a much better argument that "everybody knows" has a much higher opinion of the general level of diligence of historians than I do. I've mentioned elsewhere on this forum my high regard for the book PAST IMPERFECT by Prof. Peter Hoffer of the University of Georgia. He is a history prof himself, but he doesn't spare his colleagues or himself embarrassment. I think it is notable that the most egregious of the frauds he describes was perpetrated by a scholar widely respected professionally and that he was NOT exposed by another historian but by an amateur, an IT geek actually.

I've read enough to assure myself that the incident with the submarine is clearly real, that the Nips were clearly trying to build a bomb, clearly intended to use it, were clearly much further along than anything that happened in Germany, that both countries had some isotopic enrichment capability (although it may not have been quantitatively adequate), that the U.S. had clearly overestimated the German capability and underestimated the Japanese one, that both "did" and "did not" voices lack some crucial evidence, and that the truth is clearly unclear.

This is a photo of the article that first brought the claim into public discourse:

Although today I think the Miami Herald might rival it, in 1946, the Atlanta Constitution was THE newspaper of the south east. I can't find a full text copy of the article from any source I trust, probably because of IP issues, but this is alleged to be and probably is:
1946 Atlanta Constitution Atom Bomb Articles

This AP article appeared in the LA Times in 1997:
New Details Emerge About Japan's Wartime A-Bomb Program

This is from the Korea Times in 2014 and mentions Japanese blueprints for bomb that came to light in 2002.
Japan Tested Atomic Bomb in NK Before End of WWII?

I don't know who these people are, and this is more about North Korea today, but unless it is total BS, it does clarify some things:
Hungnam, North Korea: Delving into Pyongyang’s Long Nuclear Past « DC Bureau

There is a huge discussion of the controversy here:
A Successful Japanese Atomic Bomb Test? - Page 3

Although I hate pdfs, this, which also appears to have been published in 2014, and apparently was a side effect of the writer's interest in Allied POWs in Japanese custody, has a lot of links to supporting documents, and is extremely detailed. The main purpose is to determine who Snell's pseudonymous source for the Atlanta Constitution article was and reached the firm conclusion that it was Suzuki Tatsuaburo, a Nipponese physicist, later president of Iwaki Meisei University. Unfortunately, the man seems to have told conflicting stories of what actually happened. There is quite a tangle here. Some relevant documents no longer exist, or at least haven't turned up. Others are known to exist but are still classified. Unlike the Germans, who carry their breast beating to an extreme, most Japanese willfully distort the history of that era. Today most Japanese teenagers aren't even aware that Japan ever fought a war with the U.S. Official understatement and denial of the atrocities in Nanking are notorious. Most people of that generation didn't brag about their wartime activities. I don't think that is entirely because they lost or that the memories were unpleasant. I think it is also because mainstream culture of the younger Japanese became pretty ardently anti-war and the oldsters didn't get the kind of positive reactions our vets did. So they tended to shut the hell up instead. Another problem is that actions took place (or didn't) in North Korea and and a part of mainland China and that by the time U.S. personnel would have been attempting to verify or refute this the Cold War had begun and indeed got hot enough for an American aircraft to be forced down there by Russians at the Chinese site. Maybe the CIA knows the truth of this. Maybe mainland China's government does. Maybe someone in Japan does. I certainly don't. But unless you are privy to information not publicly available, dismissing it out of hand is imprudent.

In reading about this, I find that whatever actually happened, my suspicion that racist misconceptions caused a major underestimate of the level of Japanese progress is strongly supported. My thinking had not progressed to the point of wondering about the flip side, but, not surprisingly, many of the Nips were misleading themselves with the same sort of errors and grossly underestimated how far along the U.S. was. I failed to bookmark quotations to support this, but it is out there if you care.

 

[lynnfredricks]

The Nips DID offer surrender well before the bomb was dropped. I'd have to look it up but I believe it was a few MONTHS before. Certainly more than a couple of weeks. The terms they asked for were NOT materially different from those Mac unilaterally granted as the occupying American shogun.

There are some claims that it was under discussion as early as February, and then some activity did occur in mid July but no actual terms were proposed yet.

Not that I have taken a comprehensive survey but some living Japanese people find "Jap" and "Nip" offensive.

 

[Lew Rockwell Fan]

There are some claims that it was under discussion as early as February, and then some activity did occur in mid July but no actual terms were proposed yet.

I could dismiss the existence of Antarctica as "some claims" since I haven't actually seen it, but:

The earliest distinct peace overture I'm aware of was made shortly after Midway in 1942 to the British diplomat Sir Robert Craigie. This was verbal and vague, and AFAIK, was never responded to. But Tojo wasn't stupid - at that point they knew they were beaten.
-"Journey to the Missouri" by Toshikazu Kase, Yale University Press, 1950

An explicit and very concrete offer to surrender all conquered territories and cease hostilities was made through the Swedish diplomat Widar Bagge early in 1944. Another offer was made through the Vatican in Nov 1944.

In Jan 1945, shortly before Yalta, they explicitly offered Mac essentially a total capitulation, including surrendering anyone the allies designated as a war criminal, and retaining only the emp and a token face saving degree of internal sovereignty. This was immediately relayed thru Leahy to FDR who ignored it. Some of this became public knowledge 10 days after Nagasaki when Walter Trohan covered the story for the Chicago Tribune 19 Aug 1945. Here is a photo reproduction from their archives:
JAPS FLYING TO MACARTHUR (August 19, 1945)
More details became available in the mid 60s and the same reporter with the same paper covered them again:
Ignored Japanese Peace Bids Plague U. S., West, with What Might Have Been (August 14, 1965)
but by then most people were focused on Viet Nam and the Cold War and had lost interest in WW II. Also it didn't fit neatly into the simplistic "just so" stories USnians like to tell themselves about their national history. So despite clear documentation this never became incorporated into the already crystallised popular wisdom of what "everybody knows".

----------------------

And BTW, anybody who gets upset by abbreviations and shortened forms of words would be well advised to avoid all text based fora.

 

[lynnfredricks]

I could dismiss the existence of Antarctica as "some claims" since I haven't actually seen it..

The newspaper articles don't make clear who the statesman was. Was that ever revealed?

And BTW, anybody who gets upset by abbreviations and shortened forms of words would be well advised to avoid all text based fora.

Since those usages were used extensively during the war to describe a much caricaturized enemy and afterwards as a racist epithet, it is more than an abbreviation or shortened form. I don't get upset about words I am familiar with, but it does definitely clarify the character of the person who uses them, no matter how well read they are.

 

[ralphkern]

Hard to say but from what I've read it didn't make a huge difference to the war in the pacific - crucially the US didn't lose any aircraft carriers (they lost a significant number of battleships but these were quickly becoming obsolete). If they'd actually been there and had been sunk or damaged, it would have made a much greater difference.

'Only' three ships were damaged beyond repair, and two of those it was more a case they were not worth repairing. The Arizona, which was the flag ship and a major loss. The Oklahoma could have been repaired, but was not economical to do so and the Utah was a WW1 era dreadnought which had been turned into a training ship. All other ships were returned to service.

 

[Lew Rockwell Fan]

The distinction between "not repairable" and "not economical to repair" is spurious in this context. If it is cheaper and faster to build a new ship than to repair a damaged one, then from a strategic point of view, indeed from ANY practical POV, it IS not repairable. The cost of something isn't some sort of fiction dreamed up by mysterious people wearing green eye shades to manipulate others - it represents real limitations to possible ways of deploying finite resources. Indeed, it was the US economic capability that won the war. We outproduced more than outfought them.
As I mentioned earlier, the loss of half of the US battleships in the Pacific (and I'm not counting the loss of the Utah - that's a red herring, she was neither classed as a BB, nor was she one de facto) FOR A YEAR, the diversion of resources to repairing them, and the loss of another fourth permanently was not a trivial blow. Some 70 years later, people tend to telescope history and confuse the 40s with the 50s. The role of battleships had changed and the carrier had become of major importance, but the battleships were certainly not "obsolete" during WW-II. The Navy continued to build battleships throughout the war. The decision to do so was made by professionals with expertise acquired through specialized education and experience and wasn't casual or sentimental. The Brits made the same decision independently. None of these people were being stupid. Neither were the people who decided to attack Pearl. It could have worked. It's amazingly easy for people long after the fact to convince themselves that the particular course events took was inevitable and that highly expert men with much more knowledge of the relevant details sure were stupid not to have seen what seems obvious to them. But it ain't so.

 

[BAYLOR]

The distinction between "not repairable" and "not economical to repair" is spurious in this context. If it is cheaper and faster to build a new ship than to repair a damaged one, then from a strategic point of view, indeed from ANY practical POV, it IS not repairable. The cost of something isn't some sort of fiction dreamed up by mysterious people wearing green eye shades to manipulate others - it represents real limitations to possible ways of deploying finite resources. Indeed, it was the US economic capability that won the war. We outproduced more than outfought them.
As I mentioned earlier, the loss of half of the US battleships in the Pacific (and I'm not counting the loss of the Utah - that's a red herring, she was neither classed as a BB, nor was she one de facto) FOR A YEAR, the diversion of resources to repairing them, and the loss of another fourth permanently was not a trivial blow. Some 70 years later, people tend to telescope history and confuse the 40s with the 50s. The role of battleships had changed and the carrier had become of major importance, but the battleships were certainly not "obsolete" during WW-II. The Navy continued to build battleships throughout the war. The decision to do so was made by professionals with expertise acquired through specialized education and experience and wasn't casual or sentimental. The Brits made the same decision independently. None of these people were being stupid. Neither were the people who decided to attack Pearl. It could have worked. It's amazingly easy for people long after the fact to convince themselves that the particular course events took was inevitable and that highly expert men with much more knowledge of the relevant details sure were stupid not to have seen what seems obvious to them. But it ain't so.

General Billy Mitchell's 1921 demonstration on the battleship Ostfriesland proved that that the era of the battleship was passé. He got punished for being right.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

The Navy continued to build battleships throughout the war.

That of itself proves little.
Look what submarines, aircraft carriers, MTBs and E boats did.
Lots of battleships got sunk without doing very much.

 

[Lew Rockwell Fan]

General Billy Mitchell's 1921 demonstration on the battleship Ostfriesland proved that that the era of the battleship was passé.

Mitchell proved only that unopposed land-based aircraft, given enough time, could eventually drop enough bombs to sink an unmanned target ship that was neither moving nor fighting back. Even at that it took 6 sorties spread over 23 hours and the newly produced 2000 pound bombs. The largest carrier based planes of the time might, in principle, have carried 1, count 'em, one, of these bombs, though I rather doubt any of them ever did.

Mitchell was a genius of self-promotion to the general public, rather like Teddy Roosevelt, and spun the tale into aircraft sinking an "unsinkable" ship, which made a good story for newspapermen, but was to say the least misleading. Ostfriesland was built in 1908, had a displacement of 22,808 metric tons, 12 inch guns, & 11.8 in armor, which no responsible person would have described as "unsinkable" in 1921. All the battleships damaged at Pearl were appreciably more modern, larger, and had bigger guns and thicker armor.

People love a dramatic story of a prophetic hero genius persecuted by the old fuddy duddies of the establishment, but if you look at the facts, Mitchell isn't a good fit. Certainly he was right in advocating the coming importance of air power, but he was hardly alone in that view. And as to the specifics of the coming war, he had it totally wrong - his advocacy was for land-based aircraft and he dismissed aircraft carriers as useless. And while my main point in this thread has been to moderate the very anachronistic, over-simplified, and exaggerated view of the battleships as being irrelevant in the 1940s, there is no question that this was "the carrier war" and to dismiss carriers is even more off target than dismissing battleships.

He got punished for being right.

He was court martialed for insubordination. AFAIK, the only officer on the court who voted for acquittal was Mac, who was later famously dismissed from his command for the same offense. The only thing Mitchel was right about was his view of the increasing importance of air power. That was hardly a unique or non-obvious belief and quite a few officers held and expressed similar views without getting court martialed for it. Furthermore he couldn't have been more wrong about the most important weapon of WW-II - the carrier.

That of itself proves little..

You dropped a little context there. Not merely "the" navy. The navies of ALL 4 major combatants on BOTH sides. Actually, not merely the navies, but the supreme command authorities of 4 nations. It certainly proves that a lot of professional men with a great deal of highly relevant specialized education and experience, and a detailed grasp of the details of the situation AT THE TIME, not only perceived the battleship as a worthwhile investment at the BEGINNING of the war, but also all the way through it. The Brits even built one after the war. Doesn't it strike you as a little odd that all those pros on the spot with far more relevant knowledge than any of us have, all made the same stupid mistake INDEPENDENTLY? I think it much more plausible that your awareness of how things would develop in the 50s and later is coloring your perception and leading you to an anachronistic view of the early 1940s.

Look what submarines, aircraft carriers, MTBs and E boats did.
Lots of battleships got sunk . . .

About a dozen. Do you know how many "submarines, aircraft carriers, MTBs and E boats" were sunk?

. . . without doing very much.

That's much more to the point - but incorrect. The battleships played a vital role in island hopping campaigns of the Pacific. They also convoyed carriers. Even today, carriers are almost never deployed on their own but as part of "carrier groups" which contain numerous surface ships as escorts. All you have to do is look up their service records. You might also look up the controversy surrounding the retirement of the last battleships from the USN in the 90s. Even then, a lot of Marine officers were of the opinion that no adequate replacement for support of amphib ops was yet operational.

Gents, I'm not arguing that the importance of battleships wasn't in decline, or that the carrier wasn't the most crucial capital ship of that war. I am simply arguing against an oversimplified and anachronistic claim that battleships were no longer of strategic importance in the early 40s and the corresponding claim that the attack on Pearl was just plain stupid. This sort of idea comes under the category John Denson in "The Costs of War" calls a "patriotic national myth" - that we won because the enemy were a bunch of dummies. Neither is true.

 

[Lew Rockwell Fan]

Lots of battleships got sunk . . l

About a dozen.

I just realized that my response was not clear. In WW II, about a dozen TOTAL. Most of those were Axis. A few Brits. After Pearl, the USN lost exactly 0 battleships.

 

[Brian G Turner]

I am simply arguing against an oversimplified and anachronistic claim that battleships were no longer of strategic importance in the early 40s

Certainly the popular history here has it that the German battleship, Bismark, was a serious threat that required a dedicated force to take out. However, the North Sea is ringed with major cities, whereas the Pacific is famously empty pace.

I suspect the role of specific ship classes varied in strategic importance according to the corresponding arena. Certainly aircraft carriers would have been far more important in the Pacific than the North Sea!

 

[Lew Rockwell Fan]

I suspect the role of specific ship classes varied in strategic importance according to the corresponding arena. Certainly aircraft carriers would have been far more important in the Pacific than the North Sea!

Certainly. Carriers were used little if at all in European waters, maybe once in the Med. We associate carriers with the Pacific, but actually there were more, albeit substantially smaller ones, in the Atlantic, on convoy duty. I'm not sure why the destroyers seem to get all the credit and carrier escorts seem totally forgotten.

I should also mention that the role of BBs in amphib ops wasn't limited to the Pacific. Battleships provided the most effective fire support of the landings at Normandy. Smaller gun ships didn't have enough range.