BACKGROUND ON THE MONOGRAPH
NAVAL AVIATION COMBAT STATISTICS—WORLD WAR II

The publication Naval Aviation Combat Statistics—World War II was compiled during the winter of 1945—1946 and the following spring by a group of some 30 officers, enlisted men, and civilians headed by Lieutenant Commander Stuart B. Barber, USNR.

[Information concerning the compilation of this document comes from an interview conducted by the author with Mr. Barber on 25 February 1989; from a copy of a portion of a draft memoir by Stuart Barber on his Navy service that was loaned to the author by Mr. Barber in May 1996; and from additional information supplied by Mr. Barber in a review of a draft of the introduction.]

The group, a section within the Air Branch of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), had the function of IBM tabulation of naval air action. It began declining rapidly in size as wartime coding backlogs were eliminated and current tabulations were kept up to date, and the production of this volume soon became its principal task.

Barber personally designed the final series of some 160 tabulations for this report and wrote the accompanying text. He was uniquely experienced for this task. Originally assigned to the Bureau of Aeronautics to develop a standardized action reporting system, in 1943 Barber designed the Aircraft Action (ACA-1 and -2) forms and drafted the instructions to be used in completing them. Following a training tour at the Navy's Air Combat Intelligence School, he served at Pearl Harbor on the staff of Commander Air Force, Pacific Fleet (COMAIRPAC) from November 1943 until July 1945. For most of that period, he was responsible for producing the COMAIRPAC Analysis of Pacific Air Operations, from the incoming squadron ACA and higher-echelon reports which covered aircraft carrier operations in detail, as well as providing a monthly statistical summary and an analysis and overview of all other Pacific air operations. During the final months of the war, Barber also initiated and wrote a series of COMAIRPAC Ordnance and Target Selection Bulletins, as a way of highlighting the important points raised in the Pacific Air Operations analyses.

The report included herein was completed in May 1946, and by the time Stuart Barber left active duty in June of that year, hundreds of copies were in the process of being printed for distribution throughout the Navy and Marine Corps.

[For the proposed distribution, see Naval Aviation Combat Statistics—World War II OPNAV-P23V NO. A129 (Washington, D.C.: Air Branch, Office of Naval Intelligence, Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, 17 June 1946), ii. ]

It was at this point that the document fell afoul of postwar service politics.

In the wake of the Navy Department's ongoing fight with the War Department over service unification, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal had set up an organization in the fall of 1945 designated SCOROR (Secretary's Committee on Research on Reorganization) to review unification and other issues. In July 1946, SCOROR was given a copy of Barber's report for review. A highly critical memorandum resulted from this examination. In this paper, an anonymous SCOROR staff member, apparently acting as a devil's advocate, asserted that the study had been “compiled for Navy propaganda purposes” and took the accompanying text to task for containing a number of apparent errors of interpretation. Because of the Army Air Forces' express concern over the Navy's continuing use of land-based aircraft, the reviewer seemed particularly upset that some of the tables illustrated the Navy's extensive (and successful) operation of land-based air in the Pacific War.

[ Copy of [SCOROR] memo entitled “’Naval Aviation Combat Statistics,’ Comments on,” no serial, 29 July 1946; "A21/1-1 Navy (1917 thru July 1948) /S&C/" Folder, Series II, Op-23 Records, Operational Archives, Naval Historical Center (hereafter OA). ]

As a result of this review, Rear Admiral Thomas H. Robbins, Jr., the Assistant Head of SCOROR, sent a memorandum to the Chief of Naval Intelligence on 2 August 1946 providing his comments on Naval Aviation Combat Statistics—World War II. In this paper, Robbins stressed:

(a) As a compilation of statistics it is an excellent work containing much information of value to those concerned with Operations Planning. In addition it serves as an excellent source of information for historical and other purposes.

(b) Page iv contains statements which, while probably not intended to give the implications which they do, nevertheless in my opinion would reflect discredit upon the Navy Department and the Naval Service. . . .

(c) Many of the tables of statistics could be misused, from the point of view of merger [of the services], were the publication to be given wide distribution among the armed services.

In light of these concerns, Robbins recommended that the publication not be distributed at that time, although he noted that pertinent excerpts could be made available on a "need to know" basis by the head of the Air Branch of the Office of Naval Intelligence.

[Copy of memo from RADM Robbins to the Chief of Naval Intelligence, no serial, 2 August 1946; "A21/1-1 Navy (1917 thru July 1948) /S&C/" Folder, Op-23 Records, OA. Robbins had suggested in his memo that all copies of page iv of the report be burned. This apparently was carried out, since no page iv is present in the copy reproduced here. ]

Agreeing with Robbins's recommendation, ONI ordered the destruction of all but a handful of copies of the printed report, which it kept for its files.

Barber first discovered this fact when he returned to the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (OPNAV) in mid-September 1946, as one of a dozen or so Reserve Air Combat Intelligence Officers (ACIOs) specially selected to support a project set up by Vice Admiral Forrest Sherman, the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Operations. The idea behind the project was that such a group of officers, possessing wide-ranging wartime experience, could assemble from the mass of facts about Naval Aviation during the war material of great potential value for supporting Navy positions during the ongoing fight over unification. Each man was ordered to two weeks of temporary duty, reporting to Captain Wallace Beakley and his assistant, Captain George W. Anderson, Jr.

At the end of the two weeks, Barber was given an additional week of active duty to enable him to pull the material together. While its final destination after delivery to Captain Anderson is not known, this material appears to have provided the main factual input to a thin, unclassified, hard-cover volume published in 1947 entitled U.S. Naval Aviation in the Pacific, for which Admiral Sherman wrote a preface.

[See U.S. Naval Aviation in the Pacific (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, United States Navy, 1947). ]

It contains many verbatim extracts from the material assembled by the group, including Stuart Barber's comparison of carrier and Army Air Forces air-to-air combat results.

Although all members of the Reserve ACIO group had had access to the suppressed report during their time in OPNAV, when a copy turned up missing, Miss Eleanor Linkous, the Air Branch's secretary, rightly suspected that Barber was the culprit. Fortunately, however, no one in the office took any action to retrieve it, because this is the copy that he turned over to the Naval Historical Center more than forty years later—the one from which this CD-ROM version is being reproduced.

The fate of the other file copies of Naval Aviation Combat Statistics remains unknown. For many years, the Air Branch employed Miss Blanche Berlin, the only member remaining from the wartime coding and tabulation crew, whose knowledge was invaluable for filling special requests for action report data from the files. But so far as is known, no broad release of statistical data from the suppressed report has ever been made—with the conspicuous exception of the air-to-air combat data released in the spring of 1948 and described in the author's book, Revolt of the Admirals.

[Jeffrey G. Barlow, Revolt of the Admirals: The Fight for Naval Aviation, 1945—1950 (Washington, D.C.: Naval Historical Center, Department of the Navy, 1994), 62—63. ]

While historians may still find the data in this report to be of great value, the fifty years of its suppression undoubtedly have reduced its usefulness for other purposes. For example, one of its important original objectives—documenting the reasons for the naval aviators' evident pride in their wartime accomplishments—is no longer of concern for the majority of the participants.

What remains inexplicable to this day is why the Navy made no effort to prepare and issue a carefully edited version of the study, at least once the heat of the unification controversy had died down. It is particularly baffling since Stuart Barber served as a senior civilian employee in OPNAV from 1947 to 1970 and since as the report's author he was in a favorable position to have at least proposed this course, but he never attempted to do so.

Whatever the report's current value, however, it is unthinkable that this mass of descriptive and interpretative data covering the efforts of so many thousands of men—constituting one of history's greatest and most decisive striking forces—should not be released in full as originally written. One of the best lessons to be learned from this story may well be that rather than suppress information to prevent its possible misuse, the best course of action may be to aggressively use the information to confound opponents, once it has been reviewed for accuracy.