Army & Navy And Civilian Defense: Are the Carriers Going?

At the news that the U.S. is to have a great fleet of carriers, Major Alexander P. de Seversky, whose book Victory Through Air Power has stirred a general one-way controversy (no one disbelieves in air power) did not jump up and cheer. He stood up instead to denounce the carrier fleet as a waste of precious effort, to cry that carriers are doomed. He believes that diversion of unfinished cruisers to carriers right now is a practical move, but that there is no use starting to build any new carriers. By the time they are ready to go to sea, says Seversky, land-based planes, operating from “stationary carriers,” the unsinkable islands of the world, will dominate the oceans.

The basis for this thesis was laid when U.S. Army & Navy land-based planes flew out from Midway and Hawaii to take a terrible toll of Jap carriers (TIME, June 22). Most bombers deliberately ignored the accompanying Jap battleships, went directly for the vulnerable carriers. When the carriers were sunk, the whole huge task force had to turn tail. The thesis was strengthened last week when land-based U.S. Consolidated bombers from Northern Africa hammered the Italian Fleet (see p. 22). And the Army in Alaska is even using land-based torpedo planes to blast the Japs out of Attu and Kiska harbor.

Are the days of the carrier, too, numbered? When long-range, land-based bombers and fighters really get into action, will the flat-top be as obsolete as the battlewagon?

It is too early to give a positive answer to that question. But one thing is already certain: the carrier as now known is a transitional weapon. It is vulnerable to air attack from the land and from other carriers. Perhaps in fleets of the future all ships will be, in part, carriers, armed with aircraft just as all ships are now armed with guns.

By that time the carriers now authorized may embody part of that transition. The question raised by Seversky is whether the evolution of carriers can be successful enough so that ships of the sea can hold their own against ships of the air in the struggle, already begun, for the survival of the fittest.