Chapter 380
15th March 1944
The fact that the Canadian Navy managed to bring her into service at all is an incredible achievement all on it's own, but that she served as long as she did is the bigger miracle. The decision to not only retain USS
Arizona but to actually comission her into the Royal Canadian Navy has often been questioned, and with good reason. For one, the steel she was made of could have been used to make a large number of smaller ships or an even larger number of tanks, and secondly at the time Canada had exactly one drydock large enough to take a Battleship, though more would eventually be added with British assistance to accommodate Canada's aircraft Carriers.
However in the early days, in 1939 when the war had just started, scrapping her or at the very least selling her to someone who might need a Battleship and could actually maintain her was given serious consideration. Even candidates such as Brazil, Argentina and Sweden were considered. In the end the former declined because they couldn't afford the exorbitant price the cash-hungry Canadians were asking, and Sweden declined because they didn't really need her. At that point Prime Minister King put a stop to any efforts to sell
Arizona, correctly pointing out that while Canada indeed lacked much of the vital infrastructure to run a Battleship (such as cranes needed to switch out guns during maintenance, or in fact the capability to manufacture those guns in the first place) it would alienate a vital part of the Canadian populace to do so, as most expatriates saw Arizona as a vital part of what heritage they had left.
Thus kept from doing what they wanted to do, the Canadian Naval Staff did what they were forced to do, even though they knew that an enormous amount of effort and scarce resources would be needed to accomplish things.
'The biggest issue up front was the armament of the ship. While using the new dual-purpose secondary guns and light anti-aircraft artillery pieces the British were using presented only a relatively minor challenge, the main battery almost ended up a dealbreaker. Initially the Canadian Navy looked at using British 14'' ammunition as used on the King George V-Class ships, as small but rising quantities of it were produced in Canadian factories, but the shell weight was different and that still left the problem of not having any replacement guns.
In the end it was a young Franco-Canadian Lieutenant who was at the time a bag carrier for one of the Officers in the working group tasked with coordinating the rebuild, asked why they wouldn't just look at fitting the existing British 14'' gun to the turret. The dimensions were roughly the same for the version used in the erstwhile American Dreadnought. It was pointed out to the Lieutenant, and somewhat acidly, that the British guns may have the same length, but they weighed a lot more, in fact a difference of nearly forty tons per, and that was without the balancing weight.
But in the end no one could come up with a better idea except not firing her guns at all to save on wear, and teams of engineers went out to study what sort of modifications would need to be made to the turrets. Much to their surprise, it turned out that the turrets themselves would need only need relatively minor modifications to accept a British-style mounting, especially if the balancing weight was left which reduced elevation but would not require a complete rebuild of the gunhouse.
As it turned out though, things were not quite that easy, as the heavy weight of the guns themselves required so many modifications and additions to the load-bearing structure that the weight ended up being added as it increased the weight by only another twelve tons.
Even so the ship could never fire more than half-salvos for fear of ripping her own hull apart, and even for that she was only cleared after extensive tests and under the responsibility of the yard during her trials. She still ended up taking stress damage which contributed to her early retirement in 1950.
When the British were approached about this they were receptive to the idea, as it meant an additional Dreadnought for very little, but there was still the issue of supplying the guns. It would take until after the last KGV had been delivered it's initial set of guns, but in winter 1942/43 a freighter carrying the first set of guns arrived in Halifax, with a set of spares arriving in Canada in spring 1944.
With massive British assistance and utilizing professional expertise of American expatriates, of which several had worked on her during her 1929 modernization, the Canadians had managed to construct a crane large enough to handle gun replacement, it was even able to lift the entire turret off in it's new, far heavier configuration.
Commissioned into the Royal Canadian Navy as HMCS Arizona (DN-01) in September 1943, she then went on extensive sea trials, first once across the Atlantic and then in the quiet Mediterranean where she twice was called on to provide fire support for the French Army's grinding efforts in the South of France.
By December she was declared fully operational and slated to join the gathering Allied Pacific Fleet, but on 19th January 1944,
Arizona suffered an engineering casualty that took months to repair, even if it was a fairly simple issue from an engineering point of view. By the time she re-joined the Fleet in early April that year, the planning for Operation Jaywick and onwards were mostly complete, so she was instantly sent to join Force Z.
It's subsequent employment was par the course for Dreadnoughts in this phase of the war but has often been used by those arguing against the rebuild. Amateurs as well as serious historians often argue that the resources, money and scarce manpower used to rebuild and later operate the ship could have been used for anything from more tanks for the Army to the ever elusive 'additional Carrier'.
This ignores the strategic thinking of the Allied naval planners between 1943 and the end of 1944.
Not even the most optimistic of planners in the beginning of 1944 could have dared to imagine that the Imperial Japanese Navy would be finished as a fighting force by the end of the year. Planning for Jaywick always assumed that the Combined Fleet could be lured into a major engagement at some point, but no one had the least hint at how devastating to the Japanese and decisive for the Allies it would end up being.
Before the Battle of the South China Sea, the IJN still traded on it's pre-war reputation to a large degree. While it had lost it's aura of invincibility through actions such as the sinking of the
Yamato or the Singapore Convoy, those actions were seen as 'nibbling on the edges' by most Allied and American naval planners.
But that was a misconception.
Even though lack of access to some American archives and the paucity of surviving Japanese Naval records makes an exact estimate difficult, it is generally assumed by the academic community that up to nearly half of all pre-war Japanese carrier pilots, aircrew and support personnel had been killed or otherwise incapacitated by the time of Jaywick 1. The Combined Fleet's carrier wings had been rebuilt to be sure, but the extremely low throughput of the Japanese aircrew training system due to fuel shortages and instructors serving at the front when compared to the British and Allied practice meant that on the whole aircrew was of much lower quality as what there was had to accommodate a far greater number of recruits which obviously ended up diluting quality.
In addition to that, Allied and American technology had was in the process of leaving the Japanese far behind. They still relied on variants of the famous Mitsubishi A6M, while the Allies had rushed the Hawker Sea Fury into service and the Americans were introducing the F-6/44 (Allied reporting name Hellcat). Combined with tactics such as the Taylor Dance this left the Japanese increasingly outclassed and goes a long way to explaining the outcome of the Battle.
None of this was known to the Allied Naval Staffs. While most knew or at least believed that they had technological superiority and that especially their damage control techniques were superior thanks to several IJN DCP manuals captured in Cham Rahn Bay, the scale of their superiority was unknown.
For all they knew they would have to fight several such engagements before the Japanese fleet was fully defeated, and in fact Admiral Cunningham's planners proceeded on that assumption. In fact such was the surprise about the Allied success that Admirals all over the free world scrambled for something to do for the massive and very expensive fleets they'd crafted, which led to the Tiger Force raids on the Japanese Home Islands beginning in spring 1945.
If one considers all this, the decision to rebuild
Arizona is understandable though still massively optimistic, as it took far longer than expected, and not only because of the delays in gun delivery, but also because costs spiralled out of control which, in the light of recent Government (mis-)management is probably not all that surprising.
For the most part
Arizona was a symbol for what Canada could accomplish, and because of that she featured in Canadian Newsreels far more often than was her due.
Arizona at anchor in Halifax in late 1937, still flying the US Flag and with her original float planes on board.
When she arrived at the forward fleet Anchorage at Singapore,
Arizona was greeted with wild enthusiasm, even though the American Naval Liaison was reportedly not amused when he saw that she flew the Stars and Strips from her forward mast as well as the Canadian White Ensign aft. The ship joined Force Z just in time for one of the preliminary operations for Jaywick where Force Z, covered by the Commonwealth Battlegroup, would shell several targets on the southern coast of Hainan, even though events in Europe would soon overshadow everything going on in Asia.
With the addition of
Arizona and a few other arrivals, Force Z would go into Jaywick and all that followed with more strength than any Allied Battleline since World War One. Nine Dreadnoughts (
King George V, Prince of Wales, Anson, Howe, Warspite, Queen Elizabeth, Nelson, Arizona, Richelieu), four Battlecruisers, (
Hood, Repulse, Renown, Dunkerque), twenty-four heavy and light cruisers as well as forty-five Destroyers, in short, almost everything afloat that would not be escorting the Carriers. Only token forces would remain behind to screen the rest of the Dutch East Indies, namely the oldest and least useful ships of the Dutch and ANZAC fleets, as well as some late-coming reinforcements from Europe that had not yet adjusted to the climate.
Stripping the territory like this was a calculated risk. Cunningham, who would later say that the war had turned him into a gambler, banked everything on providing the Japanese with a ripe, perfect target to exercise the doctrine against that had been the cornerstone of their naval planning for decades, a target too large to be ignored by a Navy that could no longer afford to do everything it wanted. The wisdom of this has been discussed often enough, but only after the declassification of MAGIC alongside it's European counterpart ULTRA in 1974 it is clear that it was not a gamble but the sensible thing to do.
Cunningham was well aware that the Japanese had gathered all their remaining heavy units in Formosa and southern Japan with the latter having orders to move south by the end of the month, and that the Japanese strategic oil reserve was all but exhausted, now that the wells in Manchuria were no longer available. With hindsight it is easy to attribute the decision to Cunningham's famous nerves of steel, but at the time it must have taken a lot of soul searching on the Admiral's part to push ahead with the plan at the time it was decided.
'San Diego to Tokyo' – The full history of the Canadian Dreadnought'
tbc
The Arizona in active Canadian service is an artefact from the early days, one of those I'd do differently now as I know somewhat better.
Taylor Dance is pretty much OTL's Thatch weave.