Due to the time difference, Washington is the city that gets the latest at night, and the quarrels in the Joint Chiefs of Staff are no less intense than those in London. Pen × fun × Pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 ｉｎｆｏ

"We should find a way to help Iceland, even if we can't go directly into the fighting, it is necessary to contain the German army at the right time." The impatient Nimitz stood up, not knowing how many times he was speaking, and from the very beginning of receiving the news, he planned to follow the Spruance method and use the only remaining fleet carrier to take 4-6 escort carriers to Iceland to fight.

After several months of construction, the U.S. military has produced a bunch of Casablanca-class escort aircraft carriers, plus the Anglo-Canadian route has been cut off, the South African route cannot be taken, and Australia and New Zealand cannot be moved by Japan, except for the delivery of supplies to the Caribbean Sea and the loss of 4 ships in the Indian Ocean (although 1 of them is British, but in the final analysis, it is the United States man-made), the loss rate of escort aircraft carriers has finally been reduced to a relatively low and bearable level.

The current outstanding problem in the United States is the lack of skilled carrier-based aircraft pilots. Last time, thanks to Cunningham's final cover, Nimitz successfully left the battlefield with the Franklin, and also gathered nearly 150 British and American pilots, and the Joint Staff Association arranged all of them to the newly commissioned Hancock and Bennington.

But this number is only the number of first-line echelons, the overall number of people (groups) is less than 357 people, and even the minimum coefficient of 1.2 (referring to the ratio of the number of pilots to the capacity of aircraft carriers) has not been reached, let alone the expected coefficient of 1.5. At present, among the three major aircraft carrier countries, Germany's coefficient is as high as 1.6, Japan's has 1.3, and the United States is less than 1.2.

Operations do not only look at the quantitative coefficient, but also take into account the experience and ability of the pilots, and the United States is the worst in this regard. Among the pilots of German carrier-based aircraft, the proportion of pilots who have participated in more than 5 battles (referring to carrier-based aircraft) is as high as 45%, 75% have participated in more than 3 battles, and 90% have at least 1 combat experience; More than 50% of Japanese have participated in more than 5 battles, but less than 65% have participated in more than 3 battles, and about 0% have at least 1 experience.

If the US military is measured by the same standard of experience, the proportion is less than half that of Japan, especially the American pilots who can survive five battles are all treasures, and all of them have withdrawn from the front line to serve as training instructors, so where are they willing to go to the battlefield again? If we consider the land-based combat that German pilots participated in before joining the HNA team, the level of technology is completely crushing in the sky and on the ground. Among other things, the more than 400 trained pilots on Socotra (mainly German, some Japanese and Italian) were enough to overwhelm the power in Nimitz's hands.

And this is only the third echelon of the German fleet - the first echelon includes existing carrier-based aircraft members and pilots capable of performing cross-platform tactics at several major bases; The second echelon includes pilots from various naval bases who are capable of boarding ships but are currently conducting land-based operations; The third echelon is the special training base of Socotra; As for the larger fourth echelon (belonging to the HNA but not conducting targeted carrier-based aircraft training) and the fifth echelon (belonging to the Air Force but not yet transferred), there are even more.

Now the number of front-line aircraft and pilots of the Luftwaffe and Luftwaffe is almost equal to that of the other major powers (Japan, Britain, the Soviet Union, Italy) except for the United States combined.

This number of first-line pilots is not inferior even compared with that of the United States, and after the two sides jointly eliminated the pilots of the four heavy bombers (transport planes), the number of German and American pilots was basically equal, and the United States would not have had a numerical advantage over Germany if it had not relied on the more than 4,000 groups of four-engine heavy aircraft. In the field of jet aircraft, which represents the future, the number of pilots in Germany has exceeded 3,000, including not only jet fighters, but also jet bomber pilots, while the British and American figures combined are less than 15% of Germany.

In fact, there are not many pilots of carrier-based aircraft of the US Navy, but the number of top-notch pilots with high technical level is too small, and the aircraft is not very powerful, so that they have repeatedly been hit with a high exchange ratio in combat. If the United States is willing to calm down and bring all the pilots on the escort aircraft carriers together and bring them into the ranks of front-line operations, there will be considerable room for improvement in the embarrassing situation of the US Navy pilots. Although the total number of escort aircraft carriers in active service in the hands of the U.S. Navy (almost all of them Casablanca-class) has not yet met the lower limit of Turner's original C+ plan (50), it is completely overwhelming compared to Germany's 12 ships and Japan's 9 ships, which is also a huge scale of nearly 1,500 people (groups).

Among the three major navies, the ratio of aircraft carriers to escort aircraft carriers in the German fleet is nearly 1:2, and that of Japan is nearly 1:1.5, and only the United States is 1:10. In short, there are too few regular aircraft carriers and too many escort aircraft carriers. Truman, who did not understand the navy, was very sensitive to numbers, keenly pointed out the problem, and proposed to stop the routes to aid Britain and the Soviet Union, which would not only save a lot of material and financial funds, but also use valuable shipbuilders for the construction of capital aircraft carriers and cruisers, and also relieve the urgent needs of pilots. It is a pity that the reality of the two-ocean navy forces the United States to maintain a huge escort aircraft carrier formation, otherwise the Caribbean, Australia and New Zealand will die immediately.

Admiral Kim also believes that it is time to adjust, and there are still two Essex-class aircraft carriers (the Good Man Richard and the Randolph) in July and August, and three aircraft carriers in service in September-October, the Shangri-La, Lake Champlain, and Antietam, which is a shortage of at least 600 groups of pilots. In contrast, at present, the shortage of cruisers is extremely large, and it has even been reduced to a dangerous level, and the number of cruisers to maintain 3 aircraft carriers is not enough, and if 5 more aircraft carriers are added, I am afraid that it will not be enough for all the cruisers available in the country to be used for the aircraft carrier formation, and it will not be used in the escort force at all.

In late May, the Naval Council decided to reduce the production of 80 escort aircraft carriers originally planned for fiscal year 1944 to 45, and to invest the funds, raw materials, and workers freed up for the construction of the Oakland-class air defense cruisers, adding 16 ships in one go.

In view of the long construction period of the Oakland class (about 20 months), the naval committee proposed a number of simplifications, including the removal of torpedo tubes and the construction of a modular system, and at the same time required the use of a three-shift production process like the Essex class, which would reduce the construction period to less than 14 months. As for the Brooklyn-class (10,000-ton light cruisers), which are larger in size, larger in displacement and longer, they are no longer newly built, except for the warships that have already started construction on the slipway, and as for the more complex and troublesome heavy cruisers, no one mentions them at all.

The number of excellent pilots has become a problem for the United States, which is completely at a disadvantage in this regard, but they never expected that their confident aircraft production advantage is gradually dissipating.

The United States still has a significant advantage in the total number of aircraft produced by individual countries: more than 8,000 aircraft per month, nearly 50% more than the second-place Germany (5,500 aircraft per month), but compared with 1942 data, the gap is significantly narrowed: at that time, the United States produced more than twice as much as Germany. The production of aircraft by the Axis allies - Italy, Japan, France and even Belgium is still rising steadily, the output of Japanese aircraft in the army and navy has been unified and the allocation of resources is nearly 3,000 planes per month, Italy's output has exceeded 1,000 planes per month for the first time, and the aviation industry in France and Belgium has recovered the fastest, and the two together are more than 1,000 planes per month

However, the United States' allies, Britain and the Soviet Union, were experiencing a steady decline in aircraft production due to resource constraints. Taking the United Kingdom as an example, the production of aircraft was the same as that of Germany, about 2,000 planes / month, and when the peak of Germany's general mobilization gradually approached 5,500 planes, Britain was blockaded because of resources, and the production volume fell to the level of 1,500 planes / month instead of rising. The Soviet Union was even more miserable, as production suddenly fell from the level of 3,000 planes per month to less than 2,000 planes per month due to the continuous loss of the main industrial base and the base of raw materials.

Overall, the production of aircraft per month by the three Allied countries is less than 12,000 aircraft/month, and the Axis four countries are just over 10,000 aircraft/month.

Although it is impossible for Germany and the United States to accurately obtain each other's figures, they can know from the process of fighting each other and each other the level of expansion of each other's strength -- Germany can continue to suppress the air force of southern Britain while fighting a large-scale battle on the Eastern Front, and even the number of planes in the air fleet in the direction of Norway has swelled to the level of more than 1,500 aircraft.

Based on various factors, General Li Haihai strongly opposed the dispatch of the fleet, and also obtained Marshall's understanding and Admiral King's agreement: Iceland has 3 divisions, but South America has 8 divisions, if Iceland puts all the remaining naval forces into it, what will South America do? As for the Icelandic question, the British should have sent their air force to cover - if Iceland was lost, the United States would have lost three divisions, but Britain would have been finished, shouldn't it have used all its strength to fight?

Those who hold this view have selectively forgotten that Britain has low reserves of high-grade jet fuel, and even more so the possibility that Britain is unwilling to continue fighting.

Truman concluded: "This also has to be saved, and that also wants to be saved, but in the end it is impossible to manage it all." Gentlemen, we must now face up to the lack of our own strength, not to mention the fact that even Iceland may not be able to defend itself without the strength to conquer the Falkland Islands and the Azores, and it is not wise to throw our forces into a place that is doomed to failure. ”

That's right, Nimitz could understand it perfectly, and even applauded it before, thinking that it was a cautious use of power, but when he thought of Cunningham's demeanor when he was separated from him, he felt that he couldn't say such things.

In this delicate mood, the members of the Syndicate rejected Nimitz's request, and Truman sent a telegram refusing to help.

Unfortunately, it didn't take long for information about an air raid on Iceland to arrive......