Carrier

The aircraft carrier redefined naval warfare on December 7, 1941, when Japanese carrier aircraft sank or crippled eight American battleships at Pearl Harbor without a single surface ship firing a shot. The lesson was immediate and irreversible: the carrier, not the battleship, was now the capital ship of naval warfare. A fleet carrier displacing sixty to ninety thousand tons embarks sixty to ninety aircraft, projecting combat power over a radius of a thousand kilometers. Carrier task forces — surrounding the vulnerable hull with cruisers, destroyers, and submarines — became the instrument of American Pacific strategy from Midway to Tokyo Bay. In the game the carrier is the mobile air base of the naval game: launching fighters and bombers against distant targets, devastating against all opposition when properly screened, but enormously expensive and fatally vulnerable to torpedo attack and air strikes if her escort is stripped away.