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The pilots who flew torpedo planes, such as these British Swordfish, had to have the cold courage of a matador, the eye of a sharpshooter, and the reflexes of a boxer. They had to make their approaches slow, straight, and level. Few mastered the art and fewer still lived to tell about it.
-L or 110 years, no weapon has had more influence on naval warfare than the torpedo. Since it was invented in 1867, navies have tailored their ships, their tactics, and often their campaigns to the torpedo. In two wars it came perilously close to bringing victory to Germany. The reason for its excellence as a ship-sinking weapon is plain. A gun or a bomb lets in air; a torpedo lets in water. Used against ships, it is a small ship in itself. This makes it exclusively a naval weapon, used only at sea.
Nevertheless, during World War II, Britain, a country which depended on its Navy above all else for its survival, entrusted much of its torpedo warfare to another service, the Royal Air Force. The land-based torpedo bombers belonged to Coastal Command, which was under operational control of the Navy, but which dressed in light blue, was fed, maintained, and administered by the Air Force, and identified primarily with the Royal Air Force rather than the Royal Navy.
This military schizophrenia stemmed from several causes, dating back to April Fool’s Day, 1918, when the Royal Air Force was formed by the forced amalgamation of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service. For the next 19 years, the Navy and the Air Force fought for control of naval aviation. For the Air Force it was a matter of survival as a separate service. Without the naval component it would have been so small that the Army would probably have swallowed it up, to recreate the old Royal Flying Corps. The Navy had no fear for its own survival, knowing full well that there would always be a Navy. But with its airmen torn away to staff Air Force squadrons, it no longer had a cadre of men who knew and were dedicated to aviation. The blue-water sailors who were left wanted control of naval aviation, but they did not really believe in it. For that matter, they did not greatly believe in torpedoes either. What they believed in was guns.
For centuries, Britain’s great naval victories had always been won by ships carrying guns. Torpedoes were a danger to them and correspondingly unpopular. Ironically, it had been the Royal Navy which had pioneered the aerial torpedo. In March 1914, two Royal Navy officers, Captain Murray Sueter and Lieutenant Douglas Hyde-Thomson, applied for a patent on a torpedo-carrying aircraft. (They were not the first; Rear Admiral Bradley Fiske of the U.S. Navy had done the same in 1912.) On 28 July 1914, Squadron Commander Arthur Longmore launched the Royal Navy’s first aerial torpedo (although an Italian Captain Guidoni had got airborne in a Far- man biplane carrying a 350-pound torpedo in 1911)-
In 1915, three Sopwith seaplanes launched torpedoes at three Turkish ships and sank them all. This 100% record of success had its predictable result. Sueter was relieved of his post as Director of Air Department, and his successor shelved the project. Torpedo planes saw no more action during World War I.
During the annual kicking-and-gouging match in high places for available money, any naval officer who advocated spending anything on aircraft was considered to be consorting with the enemy. Thus, when war broke out in 1939, HMSAr£ Royal was the Navy's only completed carrier which had not been laid down during World War I. Likewise, the British carrier aircraft were outmoded and inefficient. The Swordfish torpedo aircraft, which would remain in use until 1944, cruised, under load, at the ridiculous speed of 87 knots—slower than combat aircraft during World War I. Strutted and wired, they had fixed undercarriages, open cockpits, and two .303 machine guns as their defensive armament. At the beginning of the war, the Royal Navy possessed only 12 fighters, biplane Sea Gladiators. There were also some dual-purpose Skua aircraft, designed as both fighters and dive-bombers, which proved to be failures. This state was largely due to the fact that the Royal Air Force was responsible for design and development of aircraft, and the airmen were not about to waste time and money on naval aircraft in which they did not believe.
After much vicious struggling, the Navy regained control of its Fleet Air Arm in 1937. It won back only the carrier planes, however. All the land-based aircraft charged with cooperating with naval vessels remained firmly in the hands of the Royal Air Force, under the control of the newly-established Coastal Command. One of the illogical results was that the seagoing planes, which were to operate mostly against well-armed warships, were the ancient Swordfish, while the RAF’s torpedo planes, which were detailed primarily to attack merchant ships, were more modern, better armed, and faster.
The aerial torpedo work between the wars was done by the RAF at Gosport, where it had formed the Torpedo Development Unit. The accepted wisdom at the school was that the bomb, not the torpedo, was the ultimate Air Force weapon. It had several reasons for keeping torpedo training low-key. The RAF believed that the carrier was hopelessly vulnerable and that the torpedo was expensive and uncertain compared to the bomb. Above all, money spent on improving torpedo tactics or buying better torpedo planes for the Navy could much better be spent on bombers and fighters for the Air Force.
Once the divorce had become final in 1937, the
RAF’s land-based torpedo aircraft were given considerably more attention. They needed it. The RAF had only two torpedo-bomber squadrons in Britain, No. 22 and No. 62, and they were armed with Vickers Wildebeest aircraft, which were of the same vintage as the Swordfish and looked much the same. They were strutted-and-wired, open-cockpit, singleengine, fabric-coated biplanes, of a type which had done service on the Northwest Frontier of India m the Twenties. The RAF at once set about replacing them with the Bristol Beaufort, but the Navy stayed with the antediluvian Swordfish.
The Beaufort was modern for its time. It was one of the Bristol line of aircraft whose names began with “B”—Blenheim, Bisley, and Bolingbroke. They served without notable distinction as light bombers, reconnaissance craft, long-range fighters, and night fighters. The Beaufort, highly touted at the beginning of the war, had been designed to conform with RAF tactical doctrine, which called for torpedo planes to approach the target low, thus requiring machine- gun protection behind and above but not below- Swordfish tactics, in contrast, called for an approach at about 5,000 feet and then a dive to an altitude of 18 feet to drop the torpedo. This was impractical with the Beaufort, because with its clean design n picked up speed too fast in a dive to make the drop at the standard 140 knots. It carried a pilot, a navigator-bomb-aimer, and two wireless airgunners.
The aircraft had several flaws, the worst being that with its two Taurus sleeve-valve engines it was seriously underpowered. Its cruising speed was only l45 knots, which made it unable to run away from enemy fighters, and it was clumsy and not noticeably maneuverable. Its greatest fault was that it could not maintain height on one engine. With one engine out, the crews would jettison everything they could tear loose, but the plane would run out of height and have to ditch. The ditchings were dangerous, since the aircraft could float for only about 38 seconds before it went to the bottom. Worst of all, the engines were unreliable. The result was a high rate of training accidents. During some stages of the war, more torpedo crews were lost in training than in operations.
Dropping the torpedo was a delicate business. The aircraft had to fly at 140 knots at a height of 70 feet- If the speed was too fast or the height was too low, the torpedo would porpoise and take off in some unpredictable direction. If the aircraft was too high, the torpedo would dive in nose-first and head straight for the bottom. The aircraft had to be less than 2,000 yards from its target but more than 500, since the torpedo traveled forward 200 yards as it was falling from the bomb bay, then needed another 300 yards 15 its “recovery range” to settle down, find its preset depth in the water, and arm itself. The torpedo Could not be set to explode until after it hit the wafer; otherwise, the impact with the water would set it off.
Aiming the torpedo was difficult. The pilot had to estimate the speed of the ship, correct this for the ar>gle at which he was attacking her, and combine this with his own speed and the speed of the torpedo to lay off a deflection. He was briefed to make his drop at a precise range (1,000 yards) which he also had to estimate. The ship was also always maneuver- lr>g at her highest possible speed. Thus, although the kAF badgered its pilots to use torpedo sights, most °f them relied on “seaman’s eye” to estimate the lead angle. Work on a torpedo sight continued through- °ut the war, but a really effective one did not emerge L1ntil the war was nearly over, and by then the torpedo plane was going out of fashion.
The torpedoes themselves were inferior. They were standard 18-inch torpedoes fitted with plywood tails t0 keep them horizontal as they fell toward the 'vater. Range at their full speed of 40 knots was a dttle more than 2,000 yards, after which, their fuel exhausted, the torpedoes would sink. This compared "dth the 5,670 yards of the Japanese aerial torpedoes 'vhich could be dropped from 1,000 feet at coaximum aircraft speed. The Japanese torpedoes, 24 ‘riches in diameter, carried a much bigger punch, ^he Germans developed homing and pattern-running torpedoes, but neither the Fleet Air Arm nor the RAF ever had any truck with such developments. Finally, fhe torpedoes had a disturbing habit early in the war °f failing to explode.
Attacking a convoy was bad enough, with the escorting sperrbrechers” putting up a solid curtain of fire, while convoys creeping along the coast of occupied Europe were almost always provided with fighter cover, Me 109s or FW 190s which far outperformed the lumbering torpedo bombers. If the targets were major naval units, they would fire their main armament into the water ahead of the bombers, creating towering columns of water which would wreck an aircraft flying into them.
After dropping the torpedo, the pilot had to break away. Early in the war, the favored method was to pull up and fly over the target ship. This soon proved to be deadly, since the aircraft was likely to hit a mast and was exposed to concentrated short-range
fire from the ship’s armament, first from one side and then from the other. Experience proved that it was best to break sharply toward the stern of the ship and to fly down her wake as low and fast as possible. Guns mounted on the quarterdeck often could not be depressed enough to get the aircraft in their sights, while the fact that the ship normally would be turning sharply in her efforts to avoid the torpedo disturbed the gunners’ aim even more. Furthermore, there were just not so many flak guns firing aft as firing to the side. Of course, the aircraft had to take its chances with other ships astern of the first one.
One effect of this storm of flak the pilot had to face was that he had a tendency to drop too soon. There is only one recorded case during World War II of an RAF pilot dropping too late. An aircraft was expected to carry out the same job as a submarine, but it had none of a submarine’s advantages. A submarine fired a spread of three or more torpedoes, calculated to allow a hit no matter how the target maneuvered, and the target seldom had any warning of the attack. The pilot launched only a single torpedo, he had no complicated “fruit machine” to help him aim, and he gave warning of his approach when he was miles away. He also had to present a slow and steady target during the dropping process.
Because of this, torpedo-bombing was horribly dangerous. Standard RAF personnel planning called for 95% replacement of the aircrew of a torpedo squadron on operations every three months. In late 1942, a small celebration was held on 217 Squadron to celebrate the survival of aircrews that had lasted a whole year on operations. There was one crew involved, and that single crew had been shot down and survived a ditching.
Torpedo squadrons were always short of crews, often to the point of pressing into service men who had just reported from the operational training unit. They would arrive by train, find themselves allotted to an aircraft and briefed before their baggage was delivered to the guartJ room, and make their first sorties. In many cases they did not survive it. Their kits would be handed straight over to the Committee of Adjustment before they were even unpacked.
It was routine for a formation to lose half its numbers. On a fairly typical strike against the Italian Navy off Malta, seven of 12 Beauforts were shot down. One of the five survivors had to be belly- landed, and another which had been damaged in battle crashed into another aircraft on landing and was destroyed. On a nine-plane strike against a four-ship convoy in April 1942, one aircraft crash-landed, one landed badly damaged, and one got away without a bullet-hole. The other six were shot down. The six
Swordfish which attacked the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau during their dash up the Channel in February 1941 were all shot down without scoring a hit. German experience was little different. Twenty-two Heinkel Ills and Junkers 88s attacked Convoy PQ-18 in August 1942 on its way to Russia. Eleven were shot down into the sea while others were damaged. On the other side of the world, RAF experience was grimly parallelled. At the Battle of Midway in June 1942, all 15 Devastator torpedo planes from the USS Hornet (CV-8), ten of 14 from the USS Enterprise (CV-6), and ten of 12 from the USS Yorktown (CV-5) were shot down within a few minutes.
These losses led to the concept of the operational tour. Before 1941, RAF aircrewmen simply flew until they were lost or were posted to some other duty. Medical officers investigating an epidemic of glandular fever among torpedo crews, however, diagnosed the trouble as nervous exhaustion. Human endurance had its limits. A standard length of tour was established, which gave the crews something to look forward to. They would be “screened” and sent to an operational training unit to serve as instructors.
Part of the reason for this was that simply too much was expected from the aircrews. Their job called for the cold courage of a matador, the eye of a sharpshooter, and the reflexes of a boxer. Pilots who had spent years in practicing their craft in peacetime could gain the necessary experience, but the young men fresh from the training schools were too often unequal to the task. It was noticeable that the great torpedo successes came predominantly early in the war. The great Japanese exploits at Pearl Harbor and against the Prince of Wales and the Repulse came in the first week.
Tactics used by the RAF at the beginning of the war were faulty also. The lethality of the torpedo bomber was greatly overestimated. In 1938, for example, the Royal Canadian Air Force, which took its cues from the RAF, proposed to protect the entire Canadian West Coast with six Blackburn Sharks, aircraft which had been retired by the Royal Navy in favor of the Swordfish. In 1941, single Beauforts were sent to patrol specific areas, usually in the North Sea, with the method of attack left to the captain’s discretion.
These “rovers” prowled about in clouds, always in bad weather, until they had the chance to drop down on an unwary merchantman. At that time of the war, even torpedoes were scarce, and pilots were briefed not to waste one on a ship of less than 5,000 tons- The essence of success was surprise, and although German shipping along the Dutch coast was harassed for a few months, the enemy soon took to providing
flak-ship escorts for their merchantmen, and the rover technique became too expensive. The RAF went back to bombs as its chief antishipping weapon against North Sea convoys.
Nevertheless, the torpedo bombers did achieve s°me significant successes. The Japanese in particular astonished the world in December 1941. At Pearl harbor, “Kate” aircraft torpedoed five battleships as ^ell as two cruisers and the old target-battleship ^tah (AG-16). On 10 December, “Nells" and “Bettys” Sank the two big British ships in the Gulf of Siam.
11 November 1940, Swordfish operating from *^Ms Illustrious had attacked the Italian fleet in ^aranto harbor and torpedoed three capital ships and
Airborne Torpedoes 5 1
two cruisers. On the night of 24 May 1941, Swordfish from the Ark Royal had torpedoed the Bismarck off Greenland, crippling her badly enough to allow British battleships to catch and sink her. On 12 June 1941, a Beaufort torpedoed the Lutzow.
These successes, impressive though they were, were not indicative of what the torpedo bomber could do as a matter of routine. The attack on Pearl Harbor came as a complete surprise without a declaration of war, and the ships attacked were all moored. The two British capital ships were sunk by a force of no fewer than 95 Japanese aircraft, including 52 torpedo planes. The British ships had no air cover at all. Despite this, HMS Repulse evaded 19 torpedoes before one hit her, and the three destroyers with them managed to stay afloat. The attack on the Italian Navy came as a surprise, being the first night torpedo attack of the war, and again the ships were at anchor. The Bismarck was alone, without air cover, and the attack was delivered from low-hanging clouds which concealed the attacking aircraft until the last moment. The Lutzow was surprised by a single Beaufort which was mistaken by the Germans for one of their own Ju 88s, and not a shot was fired at it.
The Beauforts which were held as striking forces against German capital ships during 1941 had no such luck. They attacked the Prinz Eugen, the Scharnhorst, the Gneisenau, and the Lutzow again, but except for the one torpedo which hit the Lutzow, they had no success at all against maneuvering ships. In April, six Beauforts were launched against the Gneisenau as she lay in Brest Harbor and one of the six managed to torpedo her. The other five planes missed the port or arrived too late to attack. The successful attack immobilized the ship for eight crucial months.
Most of the Beaufort action during 1942 took place in the Mediterranean. German convoys were streaming across from Italy to supply General Erwin Rommel s Afrika Korps, and Beauforts were sent to Alexandria to attack them. Wellington aircraft, twin-engined bombers which had formed the backbone of the night offensive against Germany earlier in the war, were armed with two torpedoes each for use at night and put to work in the Mediterranean also. The torpedo planes were in desperate action all through the year.
Learning from their experience of the previous years, they devised new and much more effective tactics. Single attacks were out. Coordinated operations were laid on with Blenheims dropping bombs and Beaufighters (the most successful variant of the Blenheim breed, they would later become torpedo
planes) shooting up the ships with their cannon. The objective was to use nine Beauforts in three flights, intercepting the convoys from ahead and flying down their tracks. One flight would attack from port, one from starboard, and one from dead ahead, dropping simultaneously at a single target. The bombing and strafing attacks were timed to begin just before the Beauforts went in, to distract the defending gunners while the torpedo planes made their dropping run. The tactics began to pay off. At the end of June 1942, a vitally needed convoy for Rommel was so harassed by torpedo Beauforts and Wellingtons that it lost half its numbers en route. Admittedly, such coordinated attacks had been planned before, but they never had seemed to come off. Radio messages had been garbled, aircraft had lost their way, and flights had become separated. Things worked better in the Mediterranean.
On 26 August 1942, Rommel had to postpone his final offensive which was to take him to the Nile for four days while he waited for two promised Italian tankers. Nine torpedo Beauforts escorted by nine Beaufighters sank one tanker and her attendant destroyer, while a torpedo Wellington got the other in a night attack. The fact that 18 aircraft had been sent after one merchantman showed how thinking had changed since the previous year. On 30 August, with victory in his grasp, Rommel called for another tanker, and the Italians sent the San Andrea. Eighteen more aircraft, half Beauforts and half Beaufighters, sank the ship off the heel of Italy. On the morning of 1 September, Rommel called off the attack and ordered the Afrika Korps to retire. On 26 October, as he prepared for the crucial British attack on El Alamein, Rommel depended on the tanker Proserpina and the 6,000-ton freighter Tergestea to bring him vital supplies. Beauforts sank the tanker, together with a smaller 900-tonner, and Wellingtons got the freighter. Rommel was left without sufficient fuel to allow his artillery to deploy from one end of his battle-line to the other, and the resulting immobility was fatal. The Eighth Army won the battle and went on to drive the Afrika Korps back to Tunisia, where it was forced to surrender in 1943. It was not done cheaply. Of 19 crews of 217 Squadron, 11 were lost in two months. Only two men in the whole torpedo force dropped as many as 18 torpedoes in anger and lived to tell the tale.
When the Beauforts were sent to the Mediterranean, with some of them continuing to the Far East, other aircraft were required to take their place in Britain. Hampdens, which had started the war as bombers but soon had proved to be too small for the job, were chosen.
British Beaufighter
The Hampden was never more than a stopgap, however. By 1942, tests had shown that torpedoes could be dropped successfully from the Beaufighter, the only really successful member of the Blenheim breed. It had been designed as a long-range fighter, and it was the only one of its family not underpowered. It was a two-man-crew plane, with a pilot and a radio-navigator, who thus added a new category to aircrew. Meanwhile, from Canadian operational training units the old four-man crews were being graduated and sent overseas. They were all sent to Bomber Command, where their chances of survival were marginally better; only 52% of Bomber Command aircrews lost their lives.
The Beaufighters were built as fighters—fast, maneuverable, and had the magnificent asset of being able to hold height on one engine. They also carried forward-firing cannons, inherited from their fighter days, which came in very useful for strafing flak- ships. The fact that they carried no rear-firing guns made little difference, since it was an unfortunate fact that a Beaufort, with its two .303 Brownings, could do little to beat off a determined Me 109- The Beaufighters’ high speed made it possible to approach the target quickly and then make a quick getaway.
In late 1942, profiting by the Mediterranean experience, Coastal Command formed “strike wings” consisting of two or three squadrons of Beaufighters, torpedo planes, and cannon-armed flak-suppressors integrated into a single formation. It was assumed by now a single torpedo plane was useless and that six torpedoes would have to be launched to ensure one hit on a single ship, while three antiflak aircraft were needed to neutralize one escort vessel. The first such wing carried out its initial operation in November 1942 and found it a costly failure. The reason was that handling so large a formation, in an attack requiring split-second coordination, required months, not weeks, of training.
The Commander in Chief of Coastal Command bit the sour apple. He pulled the new wing out of action
for five months of intensive training. In April 1943, •t was ready. Twenty-one Beaufighters attacked a convoy near the Texel, sank the big merchantman 'vhich was the prime target, and damaged three escorts. They returned to their base without loss 15 oiinutes later.
Such immunity did not continue, of course, since fhe Germans beefed up their escorts. Aircraft flying low and straight and level into the teeth of heavy fire suffered heavy losses, even if they were Beaufighters. but they gained the upper hand, virtually closing the Port of Rotterdam and forcing the Swedish iron ore ships to be unloaded at Emden. This was the first foajor strategic victory for the strike forces.
Toughened German defenses brought their usual response; if big forces were successful, ever bigger forces would be more successful. The answer was to ernploy two wings together. On 15 June 1944, nine days after D-Day, such an attack was launched on two new ships, a merchantman and a naval auxiliary, lust launched at Rotterdam, escorted by 18 warships. Forty-six Beaufighters took off, maneuvered like Guardsmen under the command of an experienced of: ficer using a new very high frequency radio set, and
Stacked in a single deadly pass. Thirty-two anti-flak . beaufighters dived from 2,000 feet at the naval ves-
. Sels, silencing the flak so completely that the ten
torpedo craft flew through the convoy without being . shot at. Something new had also been added—four
i tocket-armed Beaufighters. Sixteen of their 32 rock-
c ets hit the two big ships, as did four of the tor; Pedoes. Four minesweepers were set on fire, and
; Another blew up. All the other ships were damaged,
i One of the weapons used in the attack presaged
r the beginning of the end for the air-launched tors Pedo. The rocket projectile was introduced into the
. autishipping war in June 1943. A Beaufighter car, tled eight rockets, and each 5-inch warhead carried
as much punch as a 5-inch shell from a cruiser, t It took some time to develop rocket attacks. The
British Beaufort
and watch the fall of shot. Fired deliberately low, the first shells would explode in the water short of the target. The pilot would then raise the nose until the shell-strikes marched up the side of the ship, and fire the rockets. There was no long, deadly, low-speed, low-altitude run with the aircraft flying straight and level as there was for torpedoes. The rocket aircraft could jink as much as it wished during the attack, while the storm of fire from its guns silenced the flak. Rockets were not bothered by shallow water, rough seas, reefs, or sandbars, and did not require the pilot to lay off deflection. Because of their great speed, ship motion during the time of flight of the missile was negligible. A ship could not dodge rockets the way it could comb a torpedo, and the dispersion of an eight-rocket salvo gave a shotgun effect. Rockets were also much cheaper than torpedoes, could be loaded more easily, did not require special sights, had a longer range, and could be used against land targets as well.
The rocket did not displace the torpedo at once. It
^ Preferred method was to dive on the target, level out afc>out 1,000 yards from it, open fire with cannon,
operated side-by-side with the torpedo for the rest of the war. Through 1944, the assault on German shipping continued. In August, the Swedish Government announced that it would no longer insure its ships for trading with German or German-controlled ports. This was a double blow, because the German road and rail systems were being pounded to pieces by Allied bombers.
By September, Nazi shipping had been driven from the Dutch coast by day, and action moved north to the Scandinavian coasts. The campaign culminated bloodily in the last weeks of the war, when the battered Reich was pulling its forces back within its borders. The strike wings were thrown against the ships leaving Norway and Denmark, crowded with troops, and wreaked havoc among them.
After the end of the European war, the land-based torpedo bombers saw no more action. The Japanese islands were too far from Allied land bases, and in any case, Japanese ships could scarcely put to sea because they lacked fuel. Furthermore, the atomic bombs fell, and the war ended before redeployment plans could be completed.
After the war, guided missiles, “smart bombs, and other such modern weaponry were assessed as being far more lethal than aircraft-launched torpedoes. Since there has not been a naval war since 1945, nobody really knows for sure. The air forces and navies have accepted the decisions of the pundits, and there are no torpedo-bomber squadrons left. Like piston-engined bombers and Woolworth carriers, they have had their day and gone their way.
After an indifferent beginning, the RAF’s torpedo bombers ended their careers in a blaze of glory. Given large enough numbers, efficient support from cannon-armed or rocket-armed flak-suppressors, provided with fighter cover, and launched after meticulous briefing on the basis of accurate intelligence, the torpedo bombers scored impressive successes.
Nevertheless, it was four years before they were really effective, and five years before they showed themselves capable of smashing a convoy. Why did it take so long?
The first consideration is the split responsibility between the services, which prevented crossfertilization between carrier torpedo crews and their land-based opposite numbers. Royal Air Force torpedo squadrons were sent into battle under wing commanders with no combat experience at all, while veterans of attacks on the Bismarck stagnated on board their ships. Land-based torpedo bomber commanders who had successful records were often promoted to top Royal Air Force jobs far from naval concerns. The Navy itself wasted the experience of its carrier aircrews. No British carrier during the war was ever commanded by a pilot.
A second aspect is that the Air Force believed in bombs, while the Navy believed in ships and thought that torpedoes were good enough as they were. In any case, fighting a largely antisubmarine war, the Navy was countering torpedoes and gave no thought to making them better. The same dichotomy saddled the Navy with its ridiculously outmoded carrier aircraft.
There was little cooperation between the Air Force and the Navy. No combined operations were launched. Because Coastal Command was under naval control, communication with other RAF commands was so bad that torpedo bombers attacking the Scharnhorst and Gnetsenau could not communicate with their Spitfire escorts.
This lack of coordination led to a lack of research and development. The Air Force expanded bombs from 500 to 22,000 pounds, but it left torpedo development to the Navy, and the torpedoes ended the war as they had started it. Likewise, torpedo sights were never successfully developed. The big advance in attacking ships turned out to be doing away with the torpedo in favor of the rocket. The Navy s successor to the Swordfish, the Barracuda, turned out to be a failure, and when the British fleet went to the Pacific in 1944, it did so largely with American aircraft.
And then, of course, the fact that torpedo bombing was so dangerous meant that the best crews seldom lived long enough to pass on their experience.
With the cards thus stacked, it is little wonder that losses were catastrophically high for doubtful returns for so long. Indeed, it was not until 1944 that the torpedo bomber became a paying proposition in the grim reckoning of war. Most of the lessons that could be learned from the campaign are outdated now. There is, however, one that endures. It is that naval power, whether it be wielded above the sea, on it, or beneath it, is indivisible.
Mr. Emmott enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force \ 1937 as a storekeeper. He spent five years in the
ranks before assignment to aircrew and service as a navigator in Halifax heavy bombers, RCAF Squadron i 433, Group No. 6, out of Yorkshire. Graduating from Specialist Navigation Course in 1950 and from RCA?
\ Staff College in 1954, he served largely in positions dealing with the development of navigational electronic gear during his last ten years of service. He retired in 1963, with the rank of squadron leader, and has been employed with the aerospace industry in California- He is now marketing manager for Litton Systems, Ltd., at Rexdalc, Ontario.