Fighters Over the Fleet

Naval Air Defence from Biplanes to the Cold War

Norman Friedman

• Publisher: Seaforth Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781848324060
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

A tactical and technical historyof the development of British, American, and Japanese naval air defense from the 1920s to the 1980s. This is an account of the evolution of naval fighters for fleet air defense and the parallel evolution of the ships operating and controlling them, concentrating on the three main exponents of carrier warfare: the British Royal Navy, the U.S. Navy, and the Imperial Japanese Navy. It describes the earliest efforts from the 1920s, but it was not until radar allowed the direction of fighters that organized air defense became possible. Thus, major naval-air battles of the Second World War like Midway, the Pedestal convoy, the Philippine Sea, and Okinawa are portrayed as tests of the new technology. This was ultimately found wanting by the Kamikaze campaigns, leading to postwar moves towards computer control and new kinds of fighters. After 1945 the threats of nuclear weapons and standoff missiles compounded the difficulties of naval air defense. The second half of the book covers R.N. and U.S.N. attempts to solve these problems, looking at the American experience in Vietnam and British operations in the Falklands War. It concludes with the ultimate U.S. development of techniques and technology to fight the Outer Air Battle in the 1980s, which in turn point to the current state of carrier fighters and the supporting technology. Based largely on documentary sources, some previously unused, this book will appeal to both the naval and aviation communities. " Fighters Over the Fleet provides more information about fleet air defense than any other work currently available. It is recommended for specialist as well aviation-minded readers." —Naval Historical Foundation

CHAPTER 1

THE CARRIER NAVIES

THE ROYAL NAVY AND CARRIERS

During most of the period covered by this book, the Royal Navy was administered by a five-man Board of Admiralty headed by the First Sea Lord. After 1917 he was both operational commander of the Royal Navy and Chief of the Naval Staff. The latter had been reorganised in 1917 specifically to emphasise the need to translate naval experience into specific Staff Requirements for, among other things, types of aircraft and air weapons. In theory, the materiel departments of the navy, the Department of Naval Construction (DNC), the Department of Naval Ordnance (DNO) and Engineer-in-Chief (propulsion) met the Staff Requirements and supervised the acquisition of ships and weapons. DNC (the same letters are used for the Director of Naval Construction) was, for example, responsible for aircraft carrier design, which in turn set the limits within which British naval aircraft were built. DNC and DNO were served by a number of laboratories, including the Admiralty Research Laboratory (ARL) and the Admiralty Signal Establishment (ASE). Initially ASE was responsible for British naval radios (a role taken away from Vernon, the mine/electrical school and lab, in 1917), but later it developed radar. Other naval schools developed tactics. For this book the most important pre-war and wartime school was probably Dryad, which was responsible for navigation and therefore for plotting. Plotting developed into fighter direction, Dryad becoming the school of navigation and direction.

Before the First World War, a new Department of Naval Aircraft was created, headed by the Director of Naval Air Division (DNAD); it might be considered analogous to the DNO. A new Fifth Sea Lord was responsible for the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS). During the war the RNAS was responsible not only for shipboard and associated land-based naval aviation, but also for some shore-based operations which might be considered only loosely naval. For example, because the Royal Navy was responsible for the defence of the British coast (beyond fixed army defences), the RNAS was largely responsible for defence against German air raids (the navy also deployed ships specifically to fire at Zeppelins approaching the British coast). The RNAS also bought the first British long-range bombers, because the navy was the closest thing the British had to a means of strategic attack.

The Royal Navy invented the carrier in several guises: strike (torpedo attack), reconnaissance and fleet air defence (initially, to drive off German snoopers). Flycatcher fighters of 401 Flight are shown over Furious in the 1920s. Her large main flight deck was intended for her torpedo bombers, which needed a long take-off run. The short lower flight deck, which Furious shared with her near-sisters Courageous and Glorious, was intended for the Flycatchers, which had a shorter take-off run. (David Hobbs)

Glorious is shown newly-completed in 1930. The windbreak on her bow protects the doors to the lower hangar housing fighters. She, her sister Courageous and her near-sister Furious operated together as the Mediterranean Fleet carrier force during the 1930s, the source of British carrier tactics. Glorious was sunk by the German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in the North Sea in May 1940, in effect proving that carriers were both extremely powerful and extremely vulnerable. No other carriers in the Second World War were threatened by capital-ship gunfire until the battle off Samar in October 1944.

The Royal Navy employed naval aviation far more extensively than any other First World War navy. Among other things, it invented the aircraft carrier and built or converted many ships to serve aircraft. Its great aerial failure, which was inevitable, was its inability to prevent German air raids against London. To a considerable extent the 1917–18 reorganisation of British military aviation, which consolidated all air services into the Royal Air Force (RAF), was a political attempt to demonstrate the will to overcome this failure, even though there was no reason to imagine that any improved defence was possible.

On 1 April 1918 all British naval and army flying activities were merged into the Royal Air Force. In theory the new organisation would simplify aircraft production and procurement. Separate elements would support the army and the navy. In practice, after about 1920 the new air force sought an independent role based on strategic bombing. The Royal Navy continued to frame staff requirements for its aircraft and it continued to pay for them. The Admiralty also paid the pilots, but attempts to convince naval officers to become pilots foundered because such officers had few career prospects open to them. A major point of contention during the interwar period was that the new RAF was centred on pilots, whereas the Royal Navy maintained that often the executive role in an aircraft should fall on the observer or other senior officer present in a multi-seat aircraft. Naval officers were recruited into the navy’s Observer Branch. An extension of this idea, particularly antithetical to the RAF, was that naval ratings were perfectly acceptable pilots (as the Admiralty proposed in 1935 as a way of solving its pilot shortage). At the time the RAF rejected the idea of non-officer pilots on what amounted to class grounds – ironically, shortly before it began recruiting non-commissioned pilots of its own in order to meet essential expansion requirements.

Without air expertise integrated into the Royal Navy, it was difficult for the Admiralty to be sure of formulating naval air policy. Staff Requirements for new aircraft, which might or might not be realistic, were submitted to the single Air Ministry, which carried out its own feasibility studies (examples of its conclusions survive). Unfortunately there was no one with naval experience to suggest that changes in the Staff Requirements, however feasible, could offer greater capability.¹ The most important consequence of this gap was probably naval acceptance, during the interwar period, of the idea that carrier fighters were inevitably inferior to land-based aircraft. That justified naval acceptance of relatively low-performance aircraft when the main objective of war plans was the Japanese fleet, whose own aircraft would also be carrier-borne. It caused serious problems when the Royal Navy had to face land-based attackers in European waters.

Hermes was the first purpose-built carrier in the world, designed in 1916–17. Note her single-purpose 5.5in guns in shields, indicative of the threat presented to such a ship by enemy cruisers. There was no separate fighter hangar, because the ship was conceived entirely as a strike carrier. Hermes spent most of her career in the British China Fleet, the only non-Japanese carrier in the Far East. Note her T-shaped lift, which other interwar British carriers shared. It was designed to handle aircraft without folding wings. Later carriers, designed after naval aircraft had folding wings, had much narrower lifts. When the Royal Navy adopted non-folding high performance fighters in 1940–1 (Wildcats, Sea Hurricanes and early Seafires), only the earliest carriers could strike them below.

The Admiralty was well aware of its need for an air component. Its struggle to regain control of the Fleet Air Arm (FAA) has been well-publicised. It regained control of shipboard aviation, but not of land-based naval co-operation units (including flying boats), in April 1939. Separate air force control is often blamed for inadequacies of British naval air power after war broke out in 1939. It seems arguable that the lack of naval air experience in senior ranks associated with air force control was more significant. Pre-war Royal Navy expectations of the nature of war at sea, which are addressed in Chapter 3, may have been nearly as important. After the First World War the British Army also argued strenuously against the loss of its aircraft, but it seems not to have been in any position to maintain an equivalent of the interwar FAA. It seems arguable that the army suffered far worse than the Royal Navy from inadequate air support when the crisis came in 1940.

From an organisational point of view, the Admiralty saw the fleet’s aircraft as a single entity, spread among multiple ships. They were commanded initially by a Senior Officer (Aircraft) and then, from 1931 by a Rear Admiral (Aircraft) and then by a Vice Admiral (Aircraft).² The sense that aircraft were integral with the surface fleet seems to have led the British not to adopt the dispersed-carrier tactics used by the US and Imperial Japanese Navies. Also, the British seem to have been more acutely aware of navigational issues than were their foreign counterparts, having experienced their consequences during the First World War. To the extent that they saw carrier aircraft as crucial fleet scouts, it was essential that the scouts’ reports be keyed to the position of the surface fleet. That meant keeping carriers within visual signal range of the fleet flagship, which was part of a concentrated battle fleet. This thinking was probably also affected by the fact that the alternative fleet scouts, flying boats, were under RAF rather than naval control. Although it was assumed that they would co-operate with the fleet, the Royal Navy never developed the sort of mobile seaplane tender organisation that the US Navy and, to a slightly lesser extent, the Imperial Japanese Navy created. It did not help that flying boats (and shore-based naval co-operation in general) had a low priority in the interwar RAF. Unlike fleet aircraft, they were not funded by the Admiralty and therefore were very much subject to RAF policy. The US and Japanese situations were radically different, all naval-related aircraft, including flying boats and (in the Japanese case) land-based reconnaissance bombers coming under naval control.

The new Air Ministry created in 1918 was the RAF’s equivalent to the Admiralty. It bought all RAF aircraft, including naval ones. The Admiralty continued to frame requirements on the basis of DNAD advice (i.e. staff requirements) and they were submitted to the Air Ministry for action. The Air Ministry included the centralised aircraft research establishment at Farnborough (the Royal Aircraft Establishment, RAE), which had a naval section. The naval section was responsible for, among other things, catapults and arresting gear. In 1945 its chief proposed the flexible landing deck which, although not adopted, led to the vital concept of the angled deck.

When the Royal Navy regained control of its shipboard aircraft in April 1939, it continued to rely on Farnborough and other establishments. The Air Ministry continued to buy aircraft for the navy. A new Ministry of Supply was created in July 1939 to centralise weapons procurement, but the Air Ministry retained control of aircraft design and construction, just as the Admiralty retained authority over warship design and production. The aircraft function was transferred to a new Ministry of Aircraft Production created in 1940 to emphasise the desperate need for production. In August 1945 the new Labour Government placed a single minister in charge of both the Ministry of Supply and the Ministry of Aircraft Production and they were formally merged the following year. Thus the Ministry of Supply oversaw both aircraft procurement and research post-war. That placed many key decisions, such as that to continue or abandon supersonic flight research, outside service hands. The Ministry of Supply aircraft function was moved to a new Ministry of Aviation in 1959; in 1967 it gave way to a Ministry of Technology. Anyone researching naval aircraft design will sense its range of responsibility in the ‘AVIA’ (Ministry of Aviation) designation of aircraft design files. Perhaps the most important point was that the Ministry of Supply (and its successor Ministry of Aviation) considered itself responsible not only to the service consumers of the aircraft but also to the larger central government, which might have other interests. For example, they were much concerned with the health of the British aircraft industry, which led to encouragement of joint RAF/Royal Navy tactical aircraft projects.

Eagle was laid down as the Chilean battleship Almirante Cochrane but completed as a carrier. That the Royal Navy was willing to sacrifice a battleship for this role suggests how important fleet aviation was to the wartime Grand Fleet. This photograph shows the pronounced round-down at the ship’s stern, a typical feature of British carriers intended to improve airflow for landing aircraft. Eagle’s design was tested in a wind tunnel while she was being built. After the First World War the Admiralty hoped to build entirely new carriers and there was some discussion of completing Eagle as a battleship and returning her to Chile. The cost of such reconstruction (and the realisation that there would not be money for a new carrier) helped kill the project. Although she was a large ship, Eagle had a very limited aircraft capacity because her hangar was quite small. About 1931 the Royal Navy became aware that the US Navy kept as many as two-thirds of its aircraft continuously on deck, using a barrier and arresting gear to allow aircraft to land despite the aircraft parked forward. An attempt to increase the rated aircraft complements of carriers such as Eagle was resisted by the RAF in an arms-control context. The League of Nations was considering a plan to limit total numbers of military aircraft and the RAF did not want to sacrifice bombers for naval aircraft. The attempt to increase numbers had been forgotten by the time the League of Nations project collapsed. Note that at this time the ship had no arresting gear whatever.

Perhaps most importantly, revived naval control of naval aviation created naval officer fliers with a clear career path, meaning with the potential to become senior officers with air experience and insight. The absence of such officers during the Second World War is evident in some unfortunate mis-steps, such as the exposure of Glorious to loss by surface fire during the Norwegian campaign in 1940. However, despite serious attempts to create air-mindedness and a very aggressive carrier-building programme, the Royal Navy did not adopt the sort of view of naval aviation typical of the US Navy or indeed of the pre-1945 Imperial Japanese Navy. At the time of crisis in 1965–6 it was unable to articulate an effective case for carrier aviation.

* * *

After the First World War the Royal Navy came to see Japan as the most likely future enemy. Admiral Jellicoe, who made an Empire cruise in 1919–20 to advise the Dominions as to future naval policy, pointed out that during the war the Japanese had sheltered anti-British subversives and had promoted their long-term policy of ‘Asia for the Asians’ (under Japanese tutelage). By 1924 British naval building programmes were predicated on the needs of a Far Eastern War.

At the time the major factor in overall British defence policy was the urgent need to recover from the deep wounds, particularly the financial wounds, inflicted by the war. One solution, instituted by Winston Churchill when he was at the Treasury, was the ‘Ten Year Rule’, the doctrine that defence budgets could be written on the assumption that there would be no war for ten years. On that basis spending on expendables such as ammunition and even quartz transducers for sonars (Asdics) could be eliminated (major capital items such as ships could still be bought). Personnel could also be cut. To some extent the Ten Year Rule was a horizon for modernisation to reflect the technological leaps – such as air warfare and tank warfare – represented by the First World War. During the 1920s the Ten Year Rule became self-perpetuating, so the horizon for modernisation receded into the indefinite future.

Ark Royal was the first of the Second World War generation of British carriers. She had a double hangar to accommodate a large air group; British practice was to house all aircraft in the hangar. The double hangar accounts for her considerable freeboard. The pot-shaped object atop her single mast is the lantern of her Type 72 aircraft-homing beacon. The Royal Navy was very conscious of the danger of intercepted radio communication, particularly at the frequencies generally used for long-range communication. The higher frequency used by Type 72 was a lesser, but still real, concern. The tracks and end pulleys of two catapults (accelerators) are visible at her bow. The Royal Navy wanted them mainly to launch floatplanes; a carrier in the fleet would service and fuel the floatplanes launched by battleships and cruisers, so that they would not have to stop to retrieve them. The accelerator used a cumbersome four-point trolley which made for very slow launching. During the war, the Royal Navy adopted the much simpler US catapult arrangement, which did not allow for the floatplane role. Ark Royal was sunk by a U-boat torpedo on 14 November 1941 (she took a day to founder). The Royal Navy emphasised the submarine threat to carriers far more...