The Smallest Aircraft Carrier.

Modified Submarine Chaser-449 to play an aircraft carrier role.

Noticing the giant sailors and tiny planes on the deck, you may instantly conclude, this is some kind of a mock-up for filming. And this would be wrong.

This is quite a warship that served in the American Navy at the end of World War II. It never received the own name other than the unique number SC-449 (Submarine Chaser-449).

SC-449 - ON THE LEFT, Aircraft carrier Bogue - ON THE RIGHT.

Initially, this small ship was called Patrol Coastal-449 and was built at the Luhrs Marine Construction Co. shipyard in 1939 as a prototype of the submarine hunter for the American Navy.

The vessel appeared to be very stable and seaworthy. These qualities contributed to the new role. Submarine Chaser-449 (SC-449) spent the whole war being the testbed for new weapons.

Submarine Chaser-449.

Then came the summer of 1945, and the American Navy began to prepare for the final act of World War II: The Invasion Of Japan.

The main headache for the Americans at that moment were Japanese kamikazes. The Japanese used 1465 kamikaze planes in attacks and sank several American warships, damaging significantly more.

Submarine Chaser-449 in the role of aircraft carrier.

Japanese jet engine powered Okha Model 22 aircraft could be launched from a carrier bomber in a safe distance, and its high speed made it extremely difficult to intercept by the fighters.

Trying to solve the kamikaze problem, American engineers considered a variety of solutions: improved auto-cannons with radar guidance, anti-aircraft missiles, radar-equipped interceptor fighters.

Okha Model 22.

Considerable efforts were made to disguise the ships and mislead the Japanese. And someone came up with the idea — what if we divert the kamikaze's attention to a fake fleet or to a fake vessel?

The idea was to make small and inexpensive units — like submarine hunters — and play them the roles of the bigger warships. These deceptive formations would take on the first (the most powerful) blow from the Japanese kamikaze planes.

This project was called "The Swiss Navy" with a good sense of humor: we know that Switzerland does not have any navy.

To test the idea, Americans took the Submarine Chaser-449 and disassemble the weapons from the hunter, removed its superstructures and pipes. In their place, the flight deck was assembled along with the flybridge and scaled aircraft models. Even the mock-ups of the planes on the "flight deck", carefully maintained in scale, were not forgotten.

The real US aircraft carrier.

And it should be noted, the result was quite satisfactory! The tiny Submarine Chaser-449 was more than four times smaller than the aircraft carrier (33 meters long vs. 144 meters), but... who, after all, would look closely? Could badly trained, inexperienced kamikaze-boy pick up a difference?

The Americans reasonably believed that a kamikaze pilot, pushing through an anti-aircraft fire and maneuvering to escape fighters, would not think for a long, and would attack the first thing that looks like a target.

The small size and an excellent maneuverability of the Submarine Chaser-449 left the vessel a good chance to survive the multiple kamikaze attacks.

There were plans to organize a massive conversion of Submarine Chaser-ships into the models of aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers and desant ships. Such an armada — accompanied, of course, by the real destroyers and carrier based aviation - could well mislead the Japanese. And they would throw all the remaining reserves against it.

However, in the end, the "Swiss Fleet" was never created. The atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the Soviet Union entering the Pacific War, forced Japan to capitulate.