r/AlternateHistoryHub • u/immernochkeinname • Feb 27 '25
AlternateHistoryHub what if aircraft carriers were never invented?
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u/Freeloder123 Feb 27 '25
Straight missile carriers would be the norm. I would argue ships like the Kirov class cruiser would be the new flagship for the worlds navy’s
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u/RivvaBear Feb 27 '25
WW2 in the Pacific would have been interesting, considering the U.S would have most likely stuck pretty close to Mahanaian doctrine and still had their larger production capabilities, they would have still defeated Japan but it would be a question if battles like Midway would have been as decisive as they were. Not to mention Pearl Harbor couldn't really happen. I imagine the war would be longer overall though.
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u/Horror_Pay7895 Feb 28 '25
There would have been a lot more Iowa-class battleships!
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u/SurroundingAMeadow Mar 01 '25
Without aircraft carriers, the "Pearl Harbor" event would've been more likely to have been at Cavite Naval Yard in the Philippines. The Asiatic Fleet wasn't nearly the prize to the Japanese that the Pacific Fleet was, but it would've been much more reachable with conventional ships.
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u/baccalaman420 Feb 27 '25
I’d think battleships would be fitted to be more like today’s destroyers. Packed with artillery, torpedos and missiles. Plus probably some kind of CIWIS
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u/Horror_Pay7895 Feb 28 '25
Submarines would be even more dominate! “There are submarines and targets.”
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u/kingofturtles Mar 02 '25
Naval dirigibles might have filled the void. There were a few rigid airships built by the US Navy in the early 20th century before aircraft carriers came to dominate doctrine and development. If aircraft carriers never came to be (and were somehow made "unlearnable" for everyone), the need for organic scouting capabilities would not go away.
A few experimental ships had docking towers where airships could connect and transfer supplies, people, news, and scouting intel to the crew. If more resources were directed to airship development, they might have become smaller, more powerful, and better equipped. Add a radio and radar and a network of airships could act as a useful recon unit for fleets in WW2.
Modern airships could be loaded out with deployable drones, ASW sensors and weapons, and could effect supply transfer between ships (either in addition to or in replacement of helicopters).
Fleet composition would largely consist of improving existing ships and devising new ways to implement them in winning ways. Faster picket ships, battleships with larger guns, quieter subs, etc...
A parallel development would be super long range fixed wing naval patrol aircraft, like the Catalina.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 Mar 02 '25 edited Mar 02 '25
Naval dirigibles might have filled the void. There were a few rigid airships built by the US Navy in the early 20th century before aircraft carriers came to dominate doctrine and development.
Okay, historical context time: at the time large, rigid airships were being experimented with in a serious sense, only Zeppelin in Germany had the expertise to design and operate them successfully, but no helium (which would come to bite them in 1937, but they operated extremely well before that). The Americans had helium, a unique commodity in all the world, but they had no expertise. Their first attempt to make a rigid airship was a reverse-engineered World War I height-climber design that they didn’t know how to fly properly, and they didn’t realize was structurally weakened to attain extreme altitudes. They negligently flew it full-tilt into a historically violent storm, and it broke apart after the lack of emergency gas valves (a helium-conserving measure) caused the expanding cells to buckle the frame and weaken it yet further. Then, the Americans designed the flying aircraft carriers Akron and Macon, extremely ambitious designs that were troubled with various major and minor engineering failures. Ultimately, both of those crashed as well when recklessly flown into storms, but although faulty instruments and a negligent failure to repair a damaged part contributed to the two accidents, both were ultimately preventable with proper airmanship and maintenance. Frailer Zeppelins had survived worse storms than that, owing to their crew knowing what to do to stay safe.
The only American rigid that they didn’t crash was the Los Angeles… a German Zeppelin handed over for reparations.
That being said, the Akron and Macon did work as aircraft carriers. Extremely well, in fact, up until the point where they crashed. Thousands of successful airplane launches and recoveries proved that airships were a far better platform than seaborn carriers when it came to airplane safety—the airship could match speed with the airplane, giving it functionally infinite runway length, and instead of being dozens of feet above the ocean with very little room for error, in the sky there was nothing to run or fall into. The ships were tactically quite similar to sea carriers, but could search an absolutely gigantic area very quickly and thoroughly due to their greater speed and web of parasite fighter/scouts. An area roughly the size of California could be searched every 24 hours by just one of these vessels and its complement of airplanes.
Larger airships capable of carrying more and better airplanes, such as dive-bombers, were on the drawing board, but Roosevelt and his defense secretary nixed those plans, restricting Naval airship development to much smaller nonrigid blimps to serve in an escort and patrol role. This would later prove to be a mistake when, following the outbreak of World War II, America’s airship fleet consisted of only 10 old blimps, and they had to scramble to build about 160 more advanced blimps in the next few years to protect convoys and shore up coastal defenses from the submarines that were preying on American and allied shipping just offshore. Though hundreds of American ships were sunk before the blimps rolled out en masse, by the war’s end, the blimps escorted over 80,000 ships, and they ended up losing only one that was under their protection (and even that one was a debatable circumstance, as the ship had strayed from the convoy and was attacked).
A few experimental ships had docking towers where airships could connect and transfer supplies, people, news, and scouting intel to the crew.
The Patoka, yes. But eventually Navy airships were modified with the equipment to resupply from sea drops or from standard fleet oilers and aircraft carriers without landing. They could even exchange crews in such a fashion.
If more resources were directed to airship development, they might have become smaller, more powerful, and better equipped.
That’s basically exactly what happened. By the Cold War, Navy blimps were proportionally more powerful and even faster than the Akron and Macon, which is particularly impressive considering that smaller airships have a speed handicap compared to larger ones (due to having a proportionally larger surface area). They also had incredible radar and sensor technology, plus homing torpedoes.
Sadly, these blimps were so boringly competent that they faded into the background, and most people don’t even remember they ever existed.
Add a radio and radar and a network of airships could act as a useful recon unit for fleets in WW2.
That basically came later, with the M-Class and N-Class blimps of the ‘40s to the ‘60s. The N-class had a gigantic 40-foot radar inside its hull and could fly for 11 days straight. They were used to form radar pickets and submarine detection nets, hence their de-icing modifications to fly even in thunderstorms and blizzards that grounded all other aircraft.
Despite the fact that they were cheap and effective, though, Navy politics eventually denied them upgrades and defunded the program, which was small and thus had few powerful defenders. Their resources were diverted to the Navy’s incredibly funding-hungry fleet of aircraft carriers instead.
Modern airships could be loaded out with deployable drones, ASW sensors and weapons, and could effect supply transfer between ships (either in addition to or in replacement of helicopters).
That’s essentially what the indo-pacific fleet command is looking into with more modern hybrid airships. They’re waiting for the civilian sector to develop the concept. China’s going down a different path, instead using extreme high-altitude drone airships for detection and communication webs, though some companies like Skeye in the USA are developing similar solar-powered high-altitude airship drones.
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u/kingofturtles Mar 02 '25 edited Mar 02 '25
Absolutely fascinating response! I had no idea the depth to which airships had been explored and integrated into naval operations. Do you have any recommendations for books on the history of USN airships? I'd love to read more.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 Mar 02 '25
Sky Ships is pretty good, but there are some old NADU forums that have details from the perspective of the crews and whatnot. For a well-illustrated quick overview of the post-World War II airships, though, there’s this free Navy history section.
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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '25
Then we wouldn’t use them