Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:This bit of what-if is ridiculous. And it is not as if the Japanese were sitting still. They were working on a successor to the Zero fighter, the A7M, but the Americans bombed the factory that was working on the prototype.
What what-ifs? The history of British fighter planes is pretty well documented, if anything, UK would accelerate the 1945-48 programs had war continued. They were able to deal with German planes just fine, equal to or better than Japanese.
A7M? By all accounts I saw, it was worse plane than Fw 190, two years too late. Moreover, British started heavy strategic bombing before Americans did, if they fought the war against Japan the overall course would be probably similar. Japanese air home defence was very bad.
And if you want to take this ridiculous what-if even further, let's throw in the fact that the Japanese at their peak had a well trained attack bomber force which could pull of Pearl Harbor. The best the British could do at that time was bomb Taranto which was a substantially smaller operation in comparison.
The "best" if you ignore several carrier strikes against battleships in Norway and France, such as Operation Tungsten. Also, Taranto was
night bombing that did far greater damage with much smaller force than Pearl Harbor did. If anything, British demonstrated much bigger skill executing their attacks. Yes, their attacks were smaller in scale, but only because most of carrier force was busy elsewhere then and they had to do with less.
Again so? What use is that radar if they cannot get close enough to attack the Japanese battleships? You do recall that many of the major battles fought in the Pacific war did not have any Battleship-Battleship engagements and they were fought by fighters alone?
Why not get close? Japanese pushed to get close, see Battle of Leyte Gulf, for example, which also proved just how effective radar battleship is against conventional one. Why it wouldn't end the same, British radar armed battleship force slaughtering its Japanese equivalent?
If we assume purely carrier to carrier battle, UK had massive advantage in best radars in the world by then and could win the war purely by adopting more defensive battle stance in first half. Merely targeting and destroying air wings means by 1943 Japanese carriers are mostly irrelevant.
Let's try this. Do you think the British could have pulled off the Battle of Midway with what they had in 1942? What with the only torpedo bombers they had being a bunch of bi-planes?
They would obviously try to adopt a bit different strategy, but the battle would probably end up about the same. Remember, plan was to trap allied carriers (wouldn't happen, British had cracked Japanese codes), and the response was to try and destroy Japanese ones. The same strategic result could have been achieved with destruction of their irreplaceable air wings, something Royal Navy was definitely capable of.
Carrier sinking was secondary, but could have been achieved seeing Japanese had no radar and very small reconnaissance force, fighting virtually blind. Remember, their numerical advantage was nullified by need of keeping substantial part of air wing in reserve, while Allied commander would be able to commit all of it, as demonstrated in Battle of Britain.
Yes, British torpedo planes were worse, at least before Barracuda, but did it matter any? Zero was capable of shooting down any WW 2 naval bomber anyway, if RN fighters can outfight them, the bomber qualities don't matter, if not, well, it doesn't matter either. There was a reason why they were kept so long while carrier fighters were constantly upgraded.