Mister Hoover's Navy

[Tobius]

Thanks RM, but if in 6 months, the word "cartoonish" still appears, it is not the fault of the observer, who sees it and writes it, but the guy who simply does not get it. Some can, and some can't. I may be one who can't. I know; I have tried.

On a second note, if you would like to join the shipbucket discord, myself and others present would be more than willing to help you improve your work.

Thank you for the offer.

[eswube]

While I wasn't following this AU particularly closely, I noticed that You've put a substantial amount of effort in it, judging at the very least from amount of text and drawings (even if the final results aren't quite as awe-inspiring as You probably hoped for) and I think it would be a shame if You were just to "stop drawing, never to return again".

If I may suggest something, maybe it would be useful (in terms of enhancing Your talent and ability to draw ships that aren't considered to "look cartoonish") if for some time You try to concentrate on drawing some real-life ships (perhaps, for starters, with emphasis on less ambitious categories than aircraft carriers or battleships). That could make You more used to the way they are built, look and how to draw them.

[reytuerto]

Hi Tobius:
I recognize your effort in the history of your AU narrative, and I find that your are trying to draw your ships in line to the text, and that is also a valuable effort. The problem is that your ships are not aesthetically appealing designs. They look «cartoonish» mainly because they lack of detail and proportion, they look too schematic to be a realistc design (they look as a preliminary concept design, comment said without any intention of being acrid).

My first ships with Paint (but in Jpg) were in line with the drawings in the topic «RN WWII, SB was born here», awful by today standarts! They also looks cartoon like, but as they were based in real desigs, at least were known cartoons. They lacked of proportion, shading, correct scaling, details. They failed in every possible category (even in something so obvious as the number of screws!).

Compare my drawing with Portsmouth Bill´s drawing of the same Crown Colony cruise:

The difference is enormous, and marks the path that I must follow if I want to improve my drawings.

That is the advantage of having a real life model to compare with, as Eswube had pointed before. Try to graft to your basic designs some parts of already done designs, try if you want, to shade to SB criteria. Took this (draw up to SB standarts) as a challenge! Cheers.

[heuhen]

My reason to write that text, was to get other shipbucket member attention, get them to react, explain, help. People that have the experience of going from amateur to damn good artist.... Reaction. I succeeded with that.... My work is done.


One of the first ship I draw for shipbucket, I had redrawn 7-10 times before I had the shipbucket standard in me

[WWII44]

One of the main things that really get me with your designs are that your turrets don't seem to fit your time period, the look like something you would find on a modern warship rather than a ship from the 1920s.

[Tobius]

One of the main things that really get me with your designs are that your turrets don't seem to fit your time period, the look like something you would find on a modern warship rather than a ship from the 1920s.

That is a historical comment that merits a considered response. If one is to benchmark a template for alternate US designs for the period 1923-1933, one has to see what the normative examples for the period are. Here is what I did.

Destroyers: since the RTL USN has not constructed this type since the Bainbridge class, the only type examples for an AU construction model are British, French or Japanese. For the British this would be the Ambuscade or the Amazon class. These designs had half shield open back gun shelters and used a 4.7 inch shell and bag charge gun. Their AAA defense was terrible, their cruising arrangements were inadequate, though seakeeping capability and torpedo armament was good. This model was RTL and AU entirely unsuitable for American Pacific Ocean purposes.

That leaves France, Italy and Japan. France has the Chacal class destroyer leader, but these ships have more severe problems than the British A-series, having a worthless 13 cm main armament in open faced shields, a gun director system that is primitive by Italian(!) standards and stability problems that make Japanese designs look conservative.

So the model for an AU American destroyer is ... naturally the Fubuki class from Japan;

Fitzsimons, Illustrated Encyclopedia of 20th Century Weapons and Warfare (London: Phoebus, 1977), Volume 10, p.1040.

Fitzsimmons notes that the Fubuki (1927) has weather-tight, gas attack proof, electrically insulated gun houses. The chief defects of the class, other than stability problems addressed by counter-ballast and their utterly inadequate AAA, are their rather poor turning radius and inadequate high speed range. They are fuel hogs.

As a curious side note, the other template model I considered was the Italian Leone scout cruiser/destroyer leader class. These ships have powered barbette mounted guns that used enclosed but not sealed weather shelters. For such ships with lamentable lack of endurance, inadequate, AAA, and torpedo armament, they possesse good seakeeping qualities. Their direct USN answer was the RTL Porter class destroyer(1936, but designed in 1920), which is properly more an RTL response to the Fubukis than to the Italian scout cruiser/destroyer leaders.

For the cruiser template; there is certainly the famous Hawkins class: However as the main armament was little better laid out in single mounts on open pivot posts than the execrable USS Chicago of 1888, this dubious WNT model only could serve as a RTL guide for the tonnage and armament limits. Better British templates could be the Counties of the late 1920s which are good cruiser designs, even if they resemble 1920s ocean liners with guns. The Japanese template model I selected, instead, was the Aoba (1927).



(Aoba photo from Wikimedia commons, probably USN in origin)

The layout is certainly impressive, even by late 1940 standards?

For American carriers (and battleships not seen until now but I drew them), the armament choices were based on RTL US examples. Calibers (properly bores) are different from the RTL based on a different artillery and torpedo line of devlopment, but the director arrangements and gunhouses are not historically out of place with foreign contemporary RTL examples.

AAA guns.

Here I took a look at what was RTL done and found that it was terrible.



(USN photo Wikimedia commons)

2.8 cm/L70 was close enough to 3 cm/L50 ballistically and operationally that I could use that as an AU start point. But I sure as heck was not happy with the awkward gun mount I saw.



(History of War: Royal Navy photo)

There is your British example. Aside from the feed paths, this over-glorified Maxim machine gun has nothing to recommend it over the US 1.1 inch.

Then we have this horror:

Japanese 25 mm gun.

(Lone Sentry: USN photo)



(Lone Sentry: Japanese media source unknown)

Of the three RTL type models available, it should come as a considerable surprise, that it is the most effective AAA gun available?

This much better RTL UK/USN/Swedish solution is way too early.



(USN photo)

italy's model

(NAVWEAPS: source origin unknown)

The best features of the Hotchkiss (AU available to the USN), and the British 2 pounder are present in the Italian 37 mm (~1932). That is one obtains either a horizontal or vertical feed from this type and one has the bonus of gas operation with a water cooled barrel jacket possible. This inspired the open tub emplacement for the Remington Mark1q I drew into my renders.

As for the Winchester Gatling gun? I frankly cheated.



(US Army)

In the mid 1950s, the US army had properly concluded that its existing inventory of gun based AAA systems had not handled the WW Ii/Korean War era propeller driven air threat and certainly could not handle the new jets. Being a generation behind and backwards looking, they tried to reinvent the Gatling gun and failed miserably, a mistake they would duplicate with the Bofors 4 cm. in the 1970s with the Sergeant York gun DIVADS gun system.

I retroed it back to the 1920s and suggested an AU USN that had never abandoned the Hotchkiss rotating cannon as an option.

It is not properly a Gatling Gun, but a revolver cannon of Hotchkiss' own design. As "French" as American apple pie it is, in other words. As for the weatherhouse enclosure, whether the gun is electrically driven or hydraulically, the fast power slue and elevate systems for such a modernized 1920s multi-barrel rotating cannon system, have to be protected from salt water corrosion. There is no real technical choice in this matter. Those guns have to stay dry to cycle the ammunition feed as the barrels rotate and the mount articulates and shakes from vibration. Salt crusts on everything aboard a hot gun. So one gets the lightweight weatherhood hemispheres I drew to protect the mounts' workings, and I put the box shaped ammunition trays outside the "domes" where the loaders actually feed the rounds horizontally into the shell chutes akin to what sees in the British pom poms or the large French Hotchkiss machine guns of the period.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity for explaining what I did. As always, the poor art renders are my responsibility and I do not excuse the cartoonishness. I do, however, defend the "modernity" of the AU look as being no more modern than any RTL Japanese or British examples of the period.

[Tobius]

I have not given up.

[Tobius]

FLUFF: THE DIFFICULTIES OF OPERATING PRE-WWII SUBMARINES.

Now many of us have seen WW II submarine movies, such as "Destination Tokyo" and "Das Boot"? These movies, like sailing ship movies, give us nothing of a true idea that even approaches the complexity, uncertainty, and hazard of life aboard those sealed machines and communities.

The crew operated a pre-WW II submarine with all the usual problems of a diesel motorized surface warship, plus they had to add the complexity of a self contained miniature electric power plant and an electric battery powered vehicle on top of that complexity. In addition to these burdens, the equivalent of a hydraulics operated cofferdam system is piled on that workload. Glib references in movies to a man earning his dolphins, obscures the RTL minimum training requirement that a teen aged boy fresh out of navy boot camp has to learn a system of systems that makes an Atlas rocket look simple by comparison. And none of this 1920s complexity is assisted by any computer aided monitoring or operating interfaces. Imagine operating a Buck Rogers machine of that era with just analog interfaces and controls. Throw switches, pull in pull out plugs, and manually turned valves are the norm. In some navies, there is not even McCoy automatic lubricators for the exposed moving machinery!

Take another RTL example of the lunacy in the design and operation of such a submarine. Someone, not something, someone: has to crawl into the battery banks to maintain those batteries that the submarine uses. These batteries (hundreds of them), are like and unlike car batteries of the era. That means a lead acid battery of 6 to 18 cells of 60 -100 amps discharge with exposed anode and diode terminal post leads. Right away, the posts and connector cables are a maintenance fail-point which requires a daily check, a weekly cleaning, and replacement (the posts are supposed to be plug-ins or screw ins!) when it wears out. Add to it, that the battery casings are fragile, glass, ceramic, or some kind of plastic that is acid proof; but not too sturdy when the old depth charge goes off nearby. And there is the hydrogen gas that will seep out of any battery of the era and which gas is seeping off in a semi-closed compartment where sparking is commonplace when the poor rate is trying to check connectors and cable runs. BOOM.

It is amazing that so few of these 1920s submarines are lost to electrical accidents. Check many navy records, those who operate the 1920s submarines, and the submarine accidents reported generally add up to incompetent officers running the submarine into something, or somebody misses a valve evolution or a hidden design fault that is built into the hydraulics somewhere now suddenly announces its presence, contributes to the usual loss of the boat. This is the normal peacetime operational hazards for these navies, these boats, and these crews. They know it with statistical certainty. The USS Chopper (~1969!) as an example of this condition makes interesting reading.

The navies do report they have electrocuted crewmen, leaking battery accidents, battery compartment fires and explosions, hydrogen cyanide gas poisoning incidents and main shorts that fry the sub's electrical systems en-toto. The reports of these incidents are numerous. In those same reports, medals and commendations get handed out to the crews who save their boats and these awards in peacetime are routinely plentiful, especially for the Russian Navy.

No wonder the professional people who run the various navies of the 1920s are very reluctant to embrace oxygen enriched or NAVOL augmented wet-heater torpedoes or even take on the "safer" electric battery powered ones. Why triple the maintenance workload in the forward torpedo room and introduce dangerous corrosives and/or all the problems one finds in the battery compartment? Not to mention the dangers of a ram-assist torpedo-loader? Just transitioning over to a water- hammer assisted torpedo ejector as opposed to the barely understood but safer compressed air ejectors that most navies used in their torpedo tubes, could and in several navies, DID result in the loss of several submarines and hundreds of crewmen's lives.

Wartime aggravates these conditions. Not all of those ~1000 German boats lost in WW II were ASW kills. About 100 of those boats were lost through routine operational accidents. That's 6000+ crewmen who died because someone aboard the Type VII or Type IX goofed. As a comparison, of the 52 US boats that were lost in WW II, how does the RTL USN fare? It seems that 5-10 (USN guess), losses were apparently accidents, either somebody friendly bombed the sub, somebody goofed in setting a torpedo guidance setup; so that the torpedo circles back and hits the sub, or the US Navy does not even know the exact cause. But they do know the Japanese and the Germans had nothing to do with it. That fact, the JANAC reports show.

Good grief.

That is something anyone who creates an AU has to factor in when he tweaks an RTL naval history. Electric torpedoes, and a snort, water-hammer torpedo rams, and an all electric sub means that the USN which suffered 100 submarine incidents and 8 losses between 1900-1931 may have to have double those numbers.

Something serious to consider...

[Tobius]

FLUFF: PLAN DOG

If the USN General Board ever had a fond wish, it was to do unto Japan’s IJN, before Japan did unto the USN. That instituted a complicated problem for a “liberal democracy” with a strong isolationist streak, an anti-military bias, a strong anti-colonialist political tradition, and an aversion to anything that would taint the nation with the imperialist brush. Just to pull off a Spanish American war, the “imperialist/progressives” in the American polity had to suborn the Ohio pacifist McKinley, put one of their own sleepers on a political party’s national ticket and administration, being Gardner Hobart and Teddy Roosevelt respectively and ; and enlist the popular press in the persons of Pulitzer and Hearst to pull off their planned war of conquest and naked aggression against the Spanish empire. Even so, the schemers and planners had to await a “they shot-first” USS Maine accident or incident to pull off their plans against Spain.

Imagine how much harder it is now for the General Board to pull off a contemporary surprise attack plan, after the bumbling Woodrow Wilson has fallen for a combination of British chicanery, German ineptitude and able lobbying by the Roosevelt “imperialist/progressives” who are Anglophiles for suddenly suspicious reasons, which produced a US entry into the tragedy that was WW I? The US that came out of that war, had her eyes wide open. Journalists, despite the modern so called historians' revisionist attempts to obscure and distort the actual records, accurately report that the European victors, namely France and Britain, ramrod through a peace that not only punishes the aggressors: Germany, Austria, (and do not forget Russia! She was carved apart, too.) and Turkey, but also actually thwarts the aspirations of dozens of peoples, who want self-rule (Yugoslavia is an abomination, but the Arab and Indochinese peoples are also mistreated and denied. Let us not begin to speak of the African crimes perpetrated down to the RTL present.). They shaft their own allies, Japan and Italy being prime examples along with Russia and to a lesser extent the United States, but Belgium and Holland are mistreated, too. All of this forgotten Versailles Treaty history is reported as it happened. Is it any wonder that Wilson’s opponents, such as Henry Cabot Lodge are opposed to the treaty or any policies that lead to it or could flow from it? There is a lot that happens from the Versailles Treaty that angeras the American people who are revulsed and repulsed by the Treaty's results.

They turn away from the direction that Wilson’s ill-considered and hypocritical brand of international “progressivism” tends and return to their isolationist internalist nativist first traditions. That is not good news for the American navy that is settling into its newfound role as one of the two premier navies in existence. For you see, while Teddy Roosevelt tried, he could not get Congress to allow and Taft would not allow Congress to pass the navy bills that would give the USN parity with Britain; Woodrow Wilson has to have a navy as well as an army that will allow him to sit as an equal with Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau at the conference. He wants his League of Nations and national self determination (for Europeans only, it should be noted and not even for all Europeans, but only for favored groups.) And the wartime addled Congress passes the bills that gave Wilson his “clubs”. So the navy is a-building furiously and then Harding is elected. Harding is elected on an anti-Wilson platform. The wily Charles Evans Hughes knows the anti-militarist trends, and he is a closet Roosevelt man, (Teddy, not Franklin). He wants to keep the hard-won US parity with the British and also mollify the isolationists. That is the real work behind the Washington Naval Treaty. And of course Harding is associated with Teapot Dome and the Veterans Administration scandals. These incidents impact the General Board’s plans RTL in severe ways, as it seems to the electorate, that those in charge of American military affairs are essentially corrupt and untrustworthy. It has to be admitted, that in the 1920s and most of the 1930s, despite valiant efforts by various civilian and military reformers, Charles Adams, William Sims, William Mitchell, John Pershing, Adna Chaffee, that impression the voters have is RTL accurate for the US military establishment is corrupt, at least as regards to its political direction, by uniformed and pinstripe suited politician leaders who are at best misguided and at worst criminally in the legal and ethical senses, utterly incompetent.

It is not a question of money as is often claimed. Even in RTL Depression America, the money, the resources, the ability, is quite evidently there. Tanks, guns, planes, ships, trucks, munitions, even down to mess kits and boots one asks? These are in the pipe-line. It takes a decade or more to design these odds and ends and the prototypes are ready to go by 1930. So it has to be the leadership that is at fault for a decade or more.

And that leads directly to the war-plans.

RTL: RED-ORANGE

We can thank Woodrow Wilson for this actual RTL example that inspires this AU PLAN DOG. How? One may ask, but like many things American, it is a question of venality rather than of designed malice. In other words, the incompetence of American leadership renders the absolute necessity of the warplan, no matter how crazy it looks on paper. And believe this. RAINBOW did not magically come into being in 1940. Substitute Germany for Britain and France/Italy for Canada and Red-Orange is the American plan for WW II.

It traces its origin to Mexico of all places. In 1913, the inept Wilson has a crisis. Counter-revolutionary forces in Mexico assassinate Wilson’s favorite Mexican “progressive”, actually just another tin-plated dictator with delusions of godhood. The man killed is Francisco Madero. He seems no better and no worse than any of the other pretenders and bandits who follow the popular model of Mexican politicians first prototyped by El Presidente Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. That is, Madero promises reform, but has his eye on absolute power and looting the Mexican treasury. Wilson believes the lies Madero proclaims. The assassinatos apparently know better. Victoriano Huerta, the one who seizes power, at least, is not a hypocrite. Wilson, determined to bring Mexico “good government”, decides Huerta has to go. And you think nation-building started in the 1990s? Like so many modern things rotten in Washington that can be directly traced to Uncle Woody and his peculiar notions of international morality.

More “good things”, from Wilson’s point of view, are happening though, to offset the Huerta bad news. The state legislature of California, in a fit of intellectual insanity and dishonesty that even in 1913 defies belief, passes a law that forbids the Japanese (naturalized US citizens, native Japanese Americans or Japanese alien first generation immigrants), from the purchase or possession of property in the state. Wilson sees nothing wrong with that law. Japan does. They do not understand how a liberal democracy such as the United States proclaims itself, can do such a thing, or why Washington (read the Supreme Court), does not declare that law unconstitutional under the equal protections clause. The Japanese lawyers who argue the law, are shrewd; but even they miss the fact that Wilson needs California votes, plus the “liberal progressive” in the White House is the biggest racist individual east of the Mississippi. Wilson holds views that men, such as Nathan Bedford Forrest would find utterly offensive and ridiculous to hold.

The US military RTL, with this kind of national leadership, has to concoct Warplan Green and urgently update Warplan Orange. You see, JAPAN is arming and advising Huerta’s army. One understands why that is, right?

And then Great Britain recognizes Huerta’s government, and signs huge oil contracts. World War I has not happened yet. Is not even expected or suspected. Great Britain, though, still needs a source of petroleum for her new oil fueled navy. As things stand, Britain does not control any oil supplies, yet. Oddly enough, in 1913, it is the Ottoman Empire, Holland, and the United States which hold the developed oil fields. Except for Mexico that is true. American companies develop the Mexican fields, but HUERTA controls the sales of that Mexican national resource. This is a developing rotten situation to Washington. America wants that oil for herself, and here Britain muscles in on HER turf. Add this RTL factoid. Japan and Britain are formal allies. Japan aids America’s traditional defacto enemy, Mexico, in what is obviously a retaliation act to the American encroachment into Japan’s “Pacific sphere of influence” and to the racist policies of the United States government against Asian peoples specifically, and people of color generally. America's military would normally blow this all off as nonsense, but when Great Britain’s action is added to the situation, the warplanners have real nightmares.

It is a minimum two front war they foresee. Possibly a three front war. Great Britain will have to be first, as she is the strongest. Hold the line in the Pacific, tear off Canada, and then go after the Japanese in round two. Knock Japan out and then if necessary, rebound and finish off Britain.

The navy flatly tells the army, they cannot do it. Not enough seapower. Nevertheless, Red-Orange is what the Joint Army Navy board actually gives Wilson in 1915. And THAT is the basis for the navy bills starting in 1914. The warplanners think the US Navy will be ready in 1925. The Orange part of the warplan is to hold a sea line of communications to the Philippines, engage in commerce raiding and bide time until Japan comes to her senses, or the Canadian part of Plan Red brings London to the peace table. Either condition will then lead to a commerce war with the remaining sea power; where the remaining seapower sees her merchant marine wiped out and colonial targets of opportunity invaded. You get a sense of what it means on the Orange side of Red-Orange in Hector Bywater’s “The Great Pacific War”. It ain’t pretty at all. Bywater knows his stuff.

Anyway, even if Bywater’s rosy assumptions are true, it still turns out that the WNT USN cannot get it done. Not enough seapower in 1931.

Unless you Pearl Harbor them. You need an incident like the Maine accident provided for Spain or the radio station excuse on the Polish frontier if you are a devious liar or politically desperate, to justify such a surprise attack. With Hoover, it will have to be an accident of a huge magnitude. Not even a Rape of Nanking will be enough. It is not enough for Roosevelt, and he is more than willing to go to war and do the things political to ensure that it happens.

Nuttier things have been proposed (The CIA proposal: shoot down an airliner full of American citizens flying to Venezuela, blame Castro’s Cuba for it, invade the island and kill him. Voila. No more communist Cuba. Kennedy shut that one down real quickly. Cost Dulles his job) Packing an ocean liner full of evacuated missionairies from China and pulling off a Lusitania just as it leaves Shanghai, preferably through a “Japanese” air attack might work on Hoover. It almost did for Roosevelt with the USS Panay in 1937. Of course Prince Fumimaro Konoe is not a hothead like future Tojo will be and Japan still has lawyers/diplomats in Washington who know what they are doing, so the peace holds and Roosevelt (Franklin) has no excuse.

Suppose it does not and it is 1931? The USN never officially has or had a plan (unless you count the Gulf of Tonkin Incident as one) since Dewey attacked Montojo to surprise attack an enemy in his harbors.^1

PLAN DOG is the AU answer to that question of what happens if the peace fails and it is the AU WNT USN against the IJN of 1931-1933.

Airpower is not as potent as it will be in 1941, there are three targets, instead of one as at Pearl Harbor: three Japanese targets, difficult ones; Sasebo, Kure and Kogoshima. One had better hope that those American submarines and the mine warfare doctrine works as postulated. And one better hope that the other tweaks work, too. Shall we wargame and find out?

^1 One wonders about that one. John Lehman, Reagan’s navy secretary pursued a policy of “forward deployment” of US fleets in case war broke out with Russia. The quickest way to win that war at sea, was to destroy the Red Banner Fleet. The quickest way to do THAT was to catch them at their moorings.

[Tobius]

FLUFF: WHAT MAKES THIS AU WORK DIFFERENTLY?

In case one wonders what is afoot in this AU; recently I read some books by Hector Charles Bywater, the British counterpart to the American alarmist of the 1910s, Homer Lea. Both fantasists wrote about the possibility of a Great Pacific War between Japan and the United States.

One reads Homer Lea and one is appalled by the base principles of his survival-of- the-fittest- nations-that-are-built- on-their-military-virtues-arguments. Notwithstanding the evidence of archeology that competition does raise up and throw down social systems in a cultural anthropology sense and the central truth that for human beings, a superior idea defeats an inferior one, the thesis that it is force of arms and martial virtue that decides which civilization rises or falls is untrue. Solid evidence in the written record and pottery records shows that civilizations tend to collapse when an external martial agent is not even present to overthrow the civilization. Numerous examples in Mexican central America, and in the South American Andes exist where the basic collapse of a culture comes to pass because the local population was technologically unable to handle drought or face a new disease or adapt to a climate change is there for the archeologist to dig up. It is this type of civilization ending crisis which many social scientists suggest will do us all as a global civilization in about a century. That thesis remains to be negated. Let one hope that it is not proven true. The past suggests otherwise.

Why bring it up? Because Homer Lea’s thesis, that the United States is ripe for plucking in 1910, or even in 1931 was put to the test. Fat, dumb, unhappy America is placed in the laboratory of war and the social scientists had and have a field day. Levees en mass of commerce happy prols were RTL pitted against the best martial [one could argue medieval as in feudal] virtues that fit the Lea thesis for a rising empire and it turns out that “the greatest generation” had not forgotten that they were cowboys after all. It seems at first glance that citizen soldiers led by a thin patina of professionals can beat the pure professionals after all. Emory Upton is right and so is Oliver Hazard Perry. Militia works?

Uhm, not so fast one must tell the Pangloss military sociologist types. The year of defeat that America suffers is followed by two years of bloody stalemate or painful slow progress as the nation trains up and equips. What levees en mass with a thin skein of professional leaders can actually do is RTL shown on the small scale at Kasserine, and on the large scale in Operation Barbarossa. After Kassserine, the US Army has to spend months to rethink what it thinks it knows about infantry tactics. They will get it right in the end, but in the meantime it is stick to the basics, nothing fancy and stack the deck with every bit of material advantage against the other guy before any attack or defense. As for the Russians, they have good soldiers, decent equipment and still only win because they out-die their enemy. Nine million battlefield dead they rack up and twenty million civilians die on top of it. One reads their campaign histories (even their cold war ones) and one shakes one’s head in dismay and disbelief. Amateurs; they are utter amateurs. Why does anyone model their military on the Russian example?^1

Anyway, there is a little truth to Homer Lea’s thesis after all. Not the tommy-rot that it is about the nation existing because of immutable Darwinian social laws it ignorantly historically exploits that allow it to expand unchecked against Neolithic tribal opposition , but the central truth that good leadership, proper preparation, the right training, and good planning matters more than “the myth of the minute man” for America. If the Republic wants peace, it must plan deterrence, or if deterrence fails, it must plan efficiently for war in the changing world of faster travel times between geographic points, greater industrialization and a globe inhabited by deluded nations that still seek wars of conquest as viable national policy. He actually writes these details into his social Darwinist pseudo-scientific drivel and misses the central truth into which he stumbles. Anyway, in this AU naval setting, the central thesis that professional preparation aforehand matters, is applied in this manner:

a. America’s chief military means to hand is its navy. The American navy must correctly identify its existential threats.
b. The American navy must plan to efficiently deter in peace, and remove in war, those threats.
c. The American political leadership, though still as venal and corrupt in the AU, as it is in the RTL, must listen to its navy insofar as deterrence is its national policy and the navy is the means of war if their policy of deterrence fails.
d. The Spanish American War template is the guide for a, b, and c.condition. If it is c. then hit the other fellow first, hit him often and never give the other fellow a chance to get up from the floor to fight at all. (Mahan.)
e. Never attempt more than is prudent under the circumstances. One might call this a limited war doctrine.

Means:
a. The means change over time. Radically 1931-1941, not so much between 1921-1931. The Curtiss CT is not much different from the Martin T-4M operationally in the 20s. The difference between a T4M and an Avenger, however, is like the difference between a Model T Ford of 1932 and a 1940 Packard touring sedan. The technological leap between is incredible.
b. Based on a. in 1931; forget about 1940s style aircraft carrier warfare. The battle-line naval Jutland big battle alternative is actually not viable either. Too many targets, not enough battleships in any nations fleet to go around because of the Washington Naval Treaty.
c. The Washington Naval Treaty is deliberately designed to hold fleet sizes to such severe limits to make cross ocean offensive warfare impossible. And it works, sort of. Japan finds that even by cheating and with a huge jump in the naval operational art in 1940, she cannot do what she needs to do to force a quick Pacific peace. She cannot take Pearl Harbor. Hawaii is barely in raid range. It is out of Japan's invasion range. Logistics limits. That probably saves Australia and New Zealand, too.
d. So, if PLAN DOG is supposed to work in 1931 due to a->c. , there cannot be a buildup, there cannot be a wait for Japan to descend upon the Philippines, then sail across the Pacific to fight a single massive fleet engagement in Red-Orange as the misreading of Mahan suggests. Mahan does write in his other books about American naval policy in the War of 1812, the Spanish American War, and the American civil war. Herein these books, he speaks mainly of blockade and sea denial. In other words, he discusses siege operations at sea. The enemy fleet is not necessarily brought to decisive battle. The enemy is whittled away economically. The enemy may still have a fairly formidable (for 1898) navy at the end of the war (Spain did), but it is so much junk because it fails to protect commerce, maintain the normal sea lines of communication, and/or allow a commerce that a nation dependent on imports for its economy to operate, needs.

Hector Charles Bywater sure gets that much correct in his fantasy. He misjudges air-power in 1940, but his setting is 1931 and his writing is likewise. He thinks that in 1931; it should take the American fleet two years to set up the Yap misdirection trap and stage a Pacific Jutland. One notices in his fantasy, that as in the RTL, the Japanese will have the Philippines as a bargaining chip; but one supposes that in 1933 as Bywater does not foresee it, that they will make the 1944 mistake and not sue for peace immediately after the Marianas Islands fall. It will take America three years in the RTL, though it should have taken only two years if the US submarine campaign had worked in 1942 as it finally did in 1944. Bywater misjudges Japanese desperation, though he writes repeatedly of it in practice in the Sino Japanese war. He underestimates the inventiveness and resilience of both sides. He fundamentally underestimates American rage. Though he correctly deduces the national bigotries that makes the Great Pacific War almost inevitable, he does not foresee the barbarism and savagery in the war that Homer Lea predicts will happen and emerge.

One reads Hector Bywater for the essentially correct geographic and logistical factors that his Great Pacific War fiction contains. The United States Navy cannot save Guam or the Philippines. It will have a hell of a time taking them back. In addition, the technical means do not exist in 1931. They have to be invented or built. Nor does the US economy have the capacity. When Bywater says that the US will have to exert more effort than it expended in WW I to retake the Philippines, that is RTL accurate. It did.

So... Any realistic American strategy for a Pacific War in 1931 to stop Japanese aggression, or to enforce an American demarche with regards to China, has to be governed by the deterrence principle. Failing this operant condition; the only viable naval choices left, RTL or AU, because of geography and technological limitations, has to be a preventive war with the means at hand. In 1931, with those technological limits (not enough destroyers, not enough oil tankers, stores, or repair ships), that does not mean battleships will slug it out. It means American submarines lay mines off Japanese harbors and chase Japanese merchant vessels and warships anywhere the subs can find them to sink them. This kind of naval war, in 1931, based on proven technology and naval tactics existent is doable. It plays to America's strengths; because subs can be quickly built in improvised shipyards. American crews are mechanically minded so training them will be quicker, and it plays right into the harem-scarem inclination to attack that is at the heart of the USN ship tactics. It is especially devastating against Japan, because they design their own navy for the wrong war. They think of Jutland, when ironically they should remember their WW I war in the Mediterranean when Japanese destroyers did good work against Austrian and German submarines.

Naturally, with this thought in mind, PLAN DOG, includes a Manila Bay component. What preventive American naval war does not start out with the traditional patented Roosevelt sneak attack? The Japanese like to exercise their fleet problems up around the Kameda Peninsula in that bay between Oshima Shicho and Iburi Schicho. OOPs.