Six Ships That Shook The World

JOSHUA HUMPHREYS’S IDEA OF A SUPER -frigate (“Six Ships That Shook the World,” by Roger Archibald, Fall 1997) was indeed a technological breakthrough that shook the naval establishments of Europe. It can also be viewed in terms of another European naval concept. After touring the USS Constitution at Charlestown Naval Shipyard some years ago, I came to realize that “Old Ironsides” and the other vessels of her class were the embodiment of the pocket-battleship idea adopted by the German navy just prior to World War II—a ship whose armament and armor would enable her to destroy any warship fast enough to catch her, but fast enough herself to outrun any enemy she couldn’t deal with. Unlike the Constitution class, though, the German pocket battleships did not prove a successful weaponsystem design, if the fate of the Graf Spee in 1939 is any measure.

The art of technological design is the art of arriving at the optimal compromise involving a number of objectives and constraints whose satisfaction mostly leads to conflicts. (Joshua Humphreys succeeded in satisfying his ambitious design objectives only by devising a novel means for overcoming his most critical constraint.) American aircraft designers have tended to favor the balanced approach to fighter design, whereby all weakness factors are minimized even though this usually means reducing strength factors as well. The Japanese “Zero” represented the other extreme in philosophy—a fighter design in which all other considerations were sacrificed to one: maximizing performance and maneuverability.

The specific design flaws discovered in flying Zero 4593 after its retrieval from Akutan Island (“Koga’s Zero,” by Jim Rearden, Fall 1997) enabled American fighter pilots to level the playing field during the earlier part of the Pacific War, but its more fundamental weaknesses were what doomed the once-invulnerable Zero when it came up against later-design American fighters. These weaknesses included inferior armament and lack of armor protection for the pilot and for critical components, particularly fuel tanks. Japanese industry simply lacked the material resources to carry on comparable programs for developing new models.

Marvin A. Moss
North Hills, Calif.