NATIONAL ARCHIVES
century,” included for the first time the fast carriers Lexington and Saratoga. It was designed to validate through the use of actual carriers and their squadrons earlier lessons inferred by the use of surrogates. Fleet Problem X inspired the creation of carrier battle groups, in which cruisers and destroyers are assigned to protect a carrier and the group trains as a team. Fleet Problem XII (1931), marked the beginning of the fast carrier era by attempting to solve the “carrier versus battleship” debate then in vogue. It was also notable for the recommendation that a carrier fleet commander be stationed on the aircraft carrier, which had not been done before. The most important result of the exercise was the recommendation of a series of design changes for future fast carriers. In 1932, two military exercises were conducted against military installations on Oahu – the Army/Navy Grand Joint Exercise 4 and Fleet Problem XIII. The latter focused on the use of aircraft in anti-submarine warfare and underscored the vulnerability of submarines to air attack, as had been revealed by the British in World War I. It also examined the pros and cons of specialized carriers (having only one type of aircraft) or “mixed-use” carriers (ones possessing fighter, dive bomber, and torpedo bomber squadrons). Fleet Problem XIV (1933) was another battleship-versuscarrier exercise, and it demonstrated that bugs remained in developing carrier doctrine. Fleet Problem XVI (1935) saw the participation of the Navy’s fourth carrier, the USS Ranger (CV 4). This exercise was notable for its use of new technologies, such as the automatic pilot, then becoming available. Fleet Problem XVIII (1937) attempted to answer the question of whether or not a carrier battle group should operate independently or as part of the larger, battleship-based fleet. Results were inconclusive.
The flight deck aboard USS Yorktown (CV 5) during a lull in air operations while participating in Fleet Problem XX, February 1939. The planes are Grumman F2F-1 fighters, of Fighting Squadron Five (VF-5). The large black Y painted on Yorktown’s stack for identification purposes echoed the vertical black stripe on Saratoga’s stack and the horizontal black stripe on Lexington. The Fleet Problems were pivotal in the development of U.S. Navy carrier doctrine as well as in determining the best size and configuration for future aircraft carriers.
Fleet Problem XIX (1938), was another attack on Oahu. Much later, studies would reveal numerous similarities between the Navy-only Fleet Problems and combined Army-Navy Grand Joint Exercise 4 operation that targeted Oahu with the Japanese attack in 1941. Fleet Problem XX (1939) conducted shortly before war broke out in Europe, was designed to determine how large a fleet the Navy would need in the Atlantic to protect the nation’s strategic interests there. Fleet Problem XXI (1940) was devoted to refining carrier warfare tactics, including the coordination and planning of scouting and screening. Taken as a whole, what is most remarkable about the Fleet Problems is the forward thinking of the planners and ship captains and how they overcame an incredible array of logistical, technological, and theoretical problems. Lacking sufficient aircraft carriers, they creatively substituted battleships and cruisers as surrogates and innovatively devised practical paradigms to expand the handful of catapult-launched scout planes into attack squadrons. In addition, they refused to be intimidated by the limitations of the immature aviation technology and imaginatively looked past the fragile, underpowered, and under-armed aircraft and weapons systems they had to work with. When World War II began for the United States in 1941, the country faced a maritime strategic reality of enormous complexity and danger. The possibility of having to fight a two-ocean war was no longer an exercise of war game imagination, but a dread USS GERALD R. FORD
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