Fleet exercises before WW2

[vonfriedman]

Having found it very interesting to read the USN publication To Train the Fleet for War 1923 1940 as suggested by oldpop2000 in another thread, I would like to know more about the fleet exercises with opposing parties carried out by other navies in the years before WW2.

To make a contribution, I enclose here an excerpt from one of the books by Admiral Bernotti, a staunch supporter of aircraft carriers, about an exercise held in the Tyrrhenian Sea in April 1930.


A Fleet Problem for the Regia Marina.pdf (70.36 KB)

[oldpop2000]

Jun 26, 2021 11:31:20 GMT -6 vonfriedman said:

Having found it very interesting to read the USN publication To Train the Fleet for War 1923 1940 as suggested by oldpop2000 in another thread, I would like to know more about the fleet exercises with opposing parties carried out by other navies in the years before WW2.

To make a contribution, I enclose here an excerpt from one of the books by Admiral Bernotti, a staunch supporter of aircraft carriers, about an exercise held in the Tyrrhenian Sea in April 1930.


View Attachment

Thanks for the attachment. I will research over the coming days for such information. I know that the German Navy conducted fleet exercises in the Baltic Sea and Japanese Navy off of the Bonin Islands. I will have to check this out. France and Great Britain would be interesting to find and Russia. 

[oldpop2000]

This short piece is from Scheer's book on the High Seas Fleet:

On July 14 Squadron II,( 1914) of which I had assumed command at the beginning of February in the previous year, in succession to Vice-Admiral von Ingenohl, who had been appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Fleet, left Kiel Bay to rendezvous off Skagen with the ships coming from Wilhelmshaven and then carry out extensive fleet exercises which were principally concerned with the solution of tactical problems. Through the addition of a third squadron to the High Sea Fleet these exercises were of particular importance for this cruise, as this newly-formed third squadron had as yet had no chance of taking part in combined exercises. The practical appl1cation of theoretical tactics to the circumstances arising out of battle is inexhaustible and provides fresh material from year to year.

Scheer, Reinhard. Germany's High Seas Fleet in the World War (p. 14). Kindle Edition.

[vonfriedman]

An excerpt from Admiral Cunningham's A Sailor's Odissey.

(In 1939) Cyprus was to be our next stop, where the fleet in turn were to carry out bombardment and anti-aircraft practices. On the way, however, we had arranged to carry out an important exercise in which the whole fleet was to be engaged in the mock attack on, and defence of, Italian convoys from the home country going to Libya and Tripolitania. Curiously enough the Italians had been trying out exactly the same problem a short while before, with the ships representing the British working from Rhodes. We were unable to discover what conclusions they reached; but as their battleships from Taranto had been constantly off the coast of Cyrenaica we hoped that this disposition had proved satisfactory from their point of view.

Our own exercise was most instructive and interesting and gave us much food for thought. It was also useful for discovering how the ships’ companies would stand up to the torrid conditions in the engine-and boiler-rooms and between decks in very hot weather for forty-eight hours with all watertight doors and side scuttles closed and ventilation at a minimum. Our old ships were not originally designed for work in such conditions, and in one of them there were eight cases of heat-stroke. It was little to be wondered at. There were temperatures of 130 (Farenheit) degrees in the boiler-rooms. Even on deck it was almost unbearable, and in those days few British men-of-war had modem air-conditioning.

[vonfriedman]

Another excerpt from the various hints about fleet exercises that Admiral Cunningham makes in his book A Sailor's Odissey. This one regards the deployment of aircraft carriers.

(1937) After exercising hard on passage, the fleet spent a few days at Argostoli reviewing and discussing the exercises we had carried out. I need say nothing about them, except that they clearly demonstrated the danger of letting an aircraft-carrier loose by herself. For the purpose of flying aircraft off and on she must steer a course into the wind as well known to the enemy as to her own fleet, with the consequences that, alone and isolated, she was in great danger of being snapped up. The antidote, of course, was for the carrier to operate in line with the fleet and under its protection, though at that time this was anathema to all captains of aircraft-carriers. Hard experience and losses under war conditions quickly altered their point of view. Under the heavy umbrella of the fleet’s anti-aircraft fire they were also much less liable to damage through bombing or torpedo attack.

[oldpop2000]

This is meagre but its the best I can do.

The 1939– 40 fleet exercises centered on the effectiveness of coordinated air attacks by massed formations of dive bombers, torpedo bombers, and protecting fighters. In doing so, they highlighted even more clearly the problems of coordinating such attacks from dispersed carriers. Radioed instructions to dispersed carriers, for example, would sacrifice surprise, and preliminary concentration of air groups from widely dispersed carriers would needlessly consume precious aviation fuel.

Peattie, Mark. Sunburst: The Rise of Japanese Naval Air Power, 1909-1941 (Kindle Locations 3668-3672). Naval Institute Press. Kindle Edition.

Repeated practice in these techniques in the years before the war gradually improved the percentage of hits in bombing runs. In the Combined Fleet exercises of 1939, navy dive bombers of several types achieved a 53.7 percentage of hits; and two years later, in the First Fleet training exercises, using Aichi D3A aircraft exclusively, dive-bombing units attained a high of 55 percent. By 1940, therefore, the navy had adopted the Takahashi tactic as its standard dive-bombing practice. In the first year of the Pacific War it achieved dramatic results: the sinking in the Indian Ocean of the British cruisers Cornwall and Dorsetshire— on which 90 percent of the bombs struck home— and the small carrier Hermes in April 1942.37

Peattie, Mark. Sunburst: The Rise of Japanese Naval Air Power, 1909-1941 (Kindle Locations 3530-3535). Naval Institute Press. Kindle Edition.

[oldpop2000]

Here is a link to an available documents on War Preparations for World War 2

www.jstor.org/stable/44638027?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents


www.jstor.org/stable/44636824?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

[oldpop2000]

Another interesting document - digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=newport-papers