There is no doubt about it, the best warship in WW2 was the aircraft carrier. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, proved it, showing its capacity to project lethal fire power much farther away than the range of ordinary warships guns. By destroying more than 50% of the American Pacific fleet from a distance where they could not be spotted by both the binocular-aided eye and the land radars, the Japanese carriers showed the world they were the most effective and deadliest warship of WW2, even surpassing and dwarfing the mighty battleship.
Therefore, the main reason it was the best war vessel of all time was the fact that it could project fire support, with to a distance, which was the flight range of the dive bombers and fighters it carried on its deck. It was able to attack and destroy unseen enemy targets. However, this overwhelming importance of the aircraft carrier as power projection in warfare at sea was only dimly foreseen in the years before World War II.
Historically, it had been the battleship and the naval gunnery which had dominated the oceans ever since the days of the Spanish Armada in the 16th century right up to the Battle of Jutland at the beginning of the 20th century. When World War II broke out, battleships considerably outnumbered carriers in navies throughout the world. Nevertheless, the 1930s saw the evolution of the methods and tactics that were to dominate the Pacific Theater of Operations and which were also to contribute greatly to the successful conclusion of the war in the Atlantic. It was the US Navy that was eventually to become the master of carrier warfare; however, it was the Imperial Japanese Navy that first used the aircraft carrier in war, to destroy the Chinese ports and provide support fire power to Japanese ground troops during the Sino-Japanese War and to attack the US Navy base of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
Carrier-borne air power reached such a peak in World War II that several battles which took place over the Pacific were fought solely with carrier-borne aircraft. Elsewhere the carriers were protecting convoys, fighting submarines and covering beach assaults. The demands made by this new form of warfare were considerable, especially upon the aircraft used and upon the young pilots who flew them. The ‘controlled crash’ of a carrier landing demanded strong nerves and a strong aircraft. If the sea itself was anything other than calm (which unfortunately it so often was), the motion of the waves would cause the deck to pitch and roll alarmingly, making landings rather tricky.
Generally, carrier-based aircraft had inferior performance when compared to their land-based contemporaries. However, this did not prevent the Fairey Swordfish from amassing a war record which was second to none – while conversions of land-based planes, such as the Supermarine Spitfire produced performance – at the expense of durability. Instead, it was left to the Japanese to show that the carrier aircraft, in the shape of the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, could outfly and outfight its land-based opponents. It was, however, the swarm of big, beefy US Navy aircraft, which were based upon the navy’s massive American carrier force, that was to prove decisive in the Pacific. Led by the Grumman F6F Hellcat and the Vought F4U Corsair, US and Allied naval aircraft acquired air supremacy in the skies over the Pacific Ocean during the last two years of the war, in a display of naval air power undreamed of only five years before.
The mighty power of the aircraft carrier (WW2 historical footage). In the Battle of Midway it played a key role in sinking enemy ships.
