The Final Countdown (movie)

[Aesop]

Sing it, brother. It's what I've been trying to say.

One 1980s CVN would overmatch any nation short of Britain or the US at the time, and even that'd be iffy, for Britain and the US.
The Nimitz, alone and at sea, would've gone through the entire Hawaiian Fleet like crap through a goose in less than 24 hours, and the ships wouldn't be refloatable in six months afterwards.
And hell yes they had "special weapons", that was rather the entire point of dispatching them hither and yon from 1946-1990.
The Japanese Army would become irrelevant in two ways in a matter of days: no way to get anywhere, and nothing to eat.
Watching a lone A-6 fly in overhead every morning to erase another metropolis would get them to "unconditional surrender", probably before the first week was out, and if not, they're back to weaving baskets and fighting with spears and arrows by the end of the month.


This was the successor to ships that ran ops against North Vietnam from Yankee Station for weeks.
And on Dec. 8th, 1941, the first guy who tried to downcheck any aircraft for anything less than inability to fly would be swimming for shore from somewhere aft of the nearest open elevator bay in a matter of seconds.


As a result, China rallies, and what's left of the IJA there is fleeing Manchuria by canoe and junk a la Dunkirk, and getting strafed by the AVF the whole way.
Manila never gets attacked, Wake Island neither, and there are no strikes against Indochina or Singapore. What's left of RAN and the ANZACs are more than enough to contain the leftovers, and the troops in the Phillipines are turned loose to start attacking the Japanese possessions, island-hopping in reverse outwards, and leaving most of them to wither on the vine and starve as well. The unscathed Pearl Harbor Fleet is shelling the mainland within two weeks, in all probability with USS Arizona et soeurs doing so from inside Tokyo Bay, and our submarines blockade the Home Islands until the biggest killer in Japan was starvation.

Given historical revelations, Hoover's FBI rounds up entire Soviet US networks, including about half the State Department of 1941 and a third of Roosevelt's advisors, and Stalin is left paranoid and blind. Hitler is pushed back to beyond the Seigfried Line or bombed there by spring, and he and the Soviets are left to destroy each other toe-to-toe in the 1941 version of the Iran-Iraq War, while Britain reorganizes, a rescued France regroups and extends the Maginot Line to the Channel, and Italy collapses and capitulates 2 years early.

American troops, rather than invading mainland Europe, get deployed to clean out Scandinavia, bolster Turkey and Iran, and contain Russia while choking off Germany and bleeding both to exhaustion and irrelevancy. The Germans string Hitler & Co. up on their own, and the Holocaust never happens. Poland gains and regains territory, including all of Danzig, and the Ukraine becomes independent from the USSR. Ethnic Germans are permanently repatriated from Danzig and the Sudetenland; Schleswig and Holstein are returned to Danish rule, Alsace and Lorraine irretrievably French, and the former German state is re-balkanized, by force or choice, back into its respective duchies for another century, as if Bismarck had never lived.

French colonialism is ended as a cost of doing business and penalty for Vichy; British possessions emerge largely unscathed, with India alone fast-tracked towards eventual independence.
Vietnam becomes another American colony like the Phillipines, with both slated as well for independence - the P.I. on schedule in 1946, Vietnam by 1960.
Ho Chi Minh and Giap are rounded up and shot, and the country, along with Nepal, Tibet, and Burma, become the springboard to undermine Mao's further moves in China. His KMT army is pinned down thousands of miles in the interior, and receives nothing in support or encouragement from a Soviet Union gasping for its life.
There is no Tankograd, no Kursk, no Lend Lease to Russia, no Murmansk convoys. All that materiel goes straight to Britain, who uses it to push the Germans out of the Low Countries, and retake all of North Africa by the end of 1942.
Palestine becomes independent in 1943, bolstered by the arrival of millions of unslaughtered Jews emigrating freely from Europe with all their possesions and resources. The carve outs from former French colonies in Syria and Lebanon, and British colonies of Transjordan and Egypt leave them well able to emerge and thrive without interference from within or without. Nationalism in Libya, Arabia, and the Gulf States is squashed by any number of royal families. OPEC never forms. Fidel Castro gets a contract to play AA baseball; the entire Mafia Mob stateside is rounded up under wartime security rules and never heard from again. Havana becomes the Monte Carlo of the Cuban Riviera in a prosperous and free Cuba, the breadbasket of the Carribean.

With the election of President Taft in 1944, he thanks President Roosevelt for his service to the country, and begins the rapid dismantling of the Depression-era Welfare State, down to the last brick and stone, transitions the U.S. to a firmly federal peacetime Army, and builds the largest and strongest Navy in the world for over the next several centuries.

With the resultant savings of expenditures not squandered on either the Cold War or redistributionist welfare schemes, the dollar's value is tied once again to gold, the US economy becomes stronger than the next five countries' combined, and the US standard of living rises to heights unimaginable in the dark days after the 1929 Crash. Our colonies in space and on the moon provide boundless unimaginable resources beyond the foreseeable future, as we begin the steps to colonize Mars.

[Steamforger]

Ya'll have any idea how much ordnance is in a modern carrier's magazine?

Yes. I sent it all.

[mekender]

So here are a few things I have thought about over the years... This is one of my favorite movies from my childhood so I have been thinking about this for decades.

First of all, bombs... The stores on the carrier would be sufficient even without explosives in them. The carriers and ships of the time were not armored to take precise hits from kinetic weapons... A single 500lb training bomb would have ripped right through the bridge of almost every ship on the seas at the time, from ANY navy. Toss in the modern explosive fillings and not a ship on the sea would stay afloat.

Missiles, the tech was not unknown at the time of WWII, the problem was the machining capabilities to build precise rocket nozzles and such... But with the fab shop on the carrier and its tech specs, that problem would be over in a few months.

Data... That is the BIG key... The files and info on a 1980's carrier would have likely been sufficient to develop tech to at LEAST a 1965 level of tech within a few months. Not only that but the info on the ship would have detailed plans for probably every bit of military tech that was used in WWII... Soft points in Tiger tanks, check... Weaknesses in German bunkers, check... Locations of every Japanese garrison, check... Remember, the same engineers the learned how to build great tanks, planes and ships in WWII used those skills only a few years later to start the space program, imagine if you walked in and gave them the complete technical specs of a Polaris ICBM?

But not only that... But the carrier itself would be studied from keel to masts in detail. It would be a massive treasure trove of data in terms of manufacturing. Welding techniques, metalworking tech, Sonar, Radar, Communications, everything would change overnight.

The real problem I could forsee would be the ability to get metals to make parts... We did not have solid supplies of Titanium until the mid 70's... But by 1980, we knew where to get it.

[Aesop]

The carriers and ships of the time were not armored to take precise hits from kinetic weapons...

Well, no, except for the foot-thick steel around the auxiliary bridge right behind the main one, and the double and triple belts of steel armorplate on most battlewagons, designed for taking 12"-18" NGF; pretty kinetic, if not so precise.

A Harpoon or Maverick would be a different kettle of fish than an iron bomb, and that goes only for the battleships, not carriers, cruisers and destroyers, but they weren't as defenseless as you might think. Review how hard it proved to accidentally sink the Forrestal or Enterprise.

The actual damage control SOP for the New Jersey off Beirut in case some raghead terrorists drove a speedboat full of half a ton of HE into the side was to turn 180 degrees, lower two sailors with paintbrushes to repaint the scorch marks back to haze grey, retrieve them, and then do another 180 to demonstrate the lack of damage to shoreward observation.

[skb12172]

The downside for the crew and officers, however, would be what someone had previously mentioned on this thread. Their debriefing would NEVER end. They would more or less end their lives under internment/house arrest.

[Aesop]

Assuming they would willingly submit to same, and took no countermeasures to prevent same.

"After reading up on the sensibilities of the era, we thought you might see things that way. So we took the liberty of sending a helicopter with some of our Seals with some "special" munitions - you don't have either of those yet now, do you? - off into the wild blue yonder. If we don't send them regular reports at random but precisely determined intervals, including no duress codes, their instructions are to make San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Washington go away. We played this exact same game with the Russians our entire lives after most of you were dead and buried. So like the patient said to the dentist with his hand around the guys' nuts, 'Let's all be reasonable here, and not make any rash mistakes', okay? We're patriots to a man, but we're nobody's fools. We signed up to the possibility of dying for our country, but we didn't save it for you only to end up in gilded cages, or any other kind. We know we've left our families and friends behind in a future we can never get to, as far as we know. We have nothing to lose, and you have everything to lose. We've demonstrated the will to do this. Take another look at the pictures from what we did to Japan, then rethink this, and call me back; or we can all go settle our affairs right now, and you can kiss your most important cities goodbye forever." - CO, USS Nimitz, 3 Apr 1944 postwar Pentagon debrief for JCS, number 001.

I suspect, just as in the movie, it would be simpler and vastly preferable all around, to see that they lived subsequent lives of well-compensated freedom as invaluable consultants and trainers if they so chose, with no more oversight than anybody coming out of the OSS or Manhattan Projects was subject to in actuality. Those guys, down to the lowest spec-rated enlisted man, would be the chief ops, engineering, and maintenance officers at half a dozen airlines and aerospace companies, the nucleus of NASA, and FedEx would start 50 years early. Not to mention the kids that would pioneer TV, music videos, rock and roll, freeways, fast food, and any number of ideas not even thought of in 1941. Imagine the guy who walked into Disney Studios with a tape deck and three of the animated movies Walt hadn't made yet, or never lived to see - in 1945, and Disneyland opens ten years earlier. Or someone with a box of vinyl records, a shoebox amp, and an electric guitar wanders over to the Fender guitar shop or Capitol records. One movie fan, turned loose at Paramount or Warner Brothers, to do nothing but pick scripts and cast movies, let alone "discover" talent, would live like Midas. Ditto the guy who showed up at NBC or CBS. And yes, there's even the chance that some sports fan would become another Biff Tannen, and pick all the sports winners for 40 years. The lowliest corpsman could teach lessons to the AMA, and the ship's surgeon would be Surgeon General of the US for 30 years, while his colleagues would be raking in pharmaceutical and medical Nobel Prizes annually for life. Medicine in the US would be at 1980s standards in 1944 - which is a braindump of biblically epic proportions. Ditto for machinists, reactor operators, damn near everybody. As far as the embarked divers and Seal team, and the Marine detachments, the Navy, Marines, and even Army SF would break them out of prison themselves rather than squander the knowledge and skillsets they carried in their heads and seabags.

I think it's far more likely they'd be the kings and captains of industry to their dying days, and not a few would end up in Washington, running that show from the inside. The responses in those veins just from this board show you what would happen if you had a crew of 5000 hard-working Americans turned loose with a 40 year technological and societal leap between their ears.

[Johnnyreb]

Destroyermen is a series about two Fletcher class destroyers and one very nasty Japanese heavy cruiser going back to a pre-gunpowder, sailing era. Protagonists are evolved lemurs (Lemurians) and antagonists are evolved, though not too bright, lizards (Grick.) It is notable that not only did they experience a shift in time, but also worlds. The new world is geographically very similar to the one they came from. Their maps mostly match up with the new stuff they're seeing and the names are close enough together that they can kind of communicate about locations. This allows them to take advantage of known deposits of oil, copper, etc.

Basically, super advanced war machines performing as force multipliers for a indigenous people while being zerged by lizards from the sea. It's entertaining enough and an easy read.

I read this whole thread expecting somebody to pipe up and say "Those were not Fletcher class destroyers." But none of you did.

The Fletcher class was only just entering service and I don't think there were even any on the west coast much less the pacific until after Pearl Harbor. They were the latest thing in destroyers, and better than what the Japanese had. The destroyers in the Asiatic fleet were old 4 stackers, dating back to the early 1920s if not WWI, just like the mothballed ones given to Britain. They were old, near the end of their service life, worn, and decidedly out of date, no radar either. I want to say they were Paulding class, but I don't recall.

They were awesome to the Lemurians, but not to the Japanese Navy, few of the Asiatic fleet survived for long.

As I recall, in the ship's weapons locker, they carried 1898 krag rifles. That's how out of date they were.

[MiddleAgedKen]

The Asiatic fleet destroyers were Clemson and Wickes classes, dating to about 1917-18.

[dfwmtx]

Axis of Time trilogy, John Birmingham. If you liked "THe Final Countdown", you may want to read this one.

Not sure what to tell you on his "Weapons of Choice" series. Involves too much of the alien space bats for me.