The rise of the United States to its present position as the greatest naval power the world has ever seen, the seizing of the trident let fall from Britannia’s hand, has been one of the outstanding events of the history of the modern world. What brought it about has been accepted as an inevitable outcome of the inexorable march of history—and so, no doubt, it is. The vast expansion of American wealth and prosperity and the contraction of that of Great Britain would have led up to it anyway in the long run. But a study of the naval history of World War II makes it tempting to attribute the suddenness of the eclipse of British naval supremacy to one basic, disastrous mistake in British policy— that which decreed the formation of an independent Royal Air Force into which were absorbed the personnel, the equipment, and the administration of the erstwhile Royal Naval Air Service. A similar emasculation so nearly occurred to the U. S. Navy that it is perhaps of interest to examine its consequences, which are rarely considered by the official histories anxious to avoid controversy.
When the Royal Air Force came into being on 1 April 1918, it took over from the Navy no less than 3,000 airplanes and seaplanes operating from a hundred stations on the coast, 50 blimps, a number of flying boats, and more than 100 aircraft carried in the ships of the Grand Fleet. This considerable air force, up to this date an integral part of the Navy, together with the existence of the first flush-deck aircraft carrier in the world, the Argus, bears witness to the high degree of air-mindedness which existed in the Admiralty of that period. At that time the U. S. Navy had one battleship, the Texas, carrying British Sopwith Camel aircraft on a turret platform as against 22 such battleships in the Royal Navy. America’s first carrier-to-be, the Langley, was still the collier Jupiter whose conversion had not yet even been considered.
Thus it was from no lack of appreciation of the importance of aircraft in naval warfare that the Admiralty, bowing to political pressures, signed away its right to possess or control its own air arm. When the matter came to be reconsidered at the end of the war in the calmer atmosphere of peace, the Navy sought to reverse the decision. It was too late. Just as in America the fanatics led by General “Billy” Mitchell were making wild but spectacular claims for air power in pursuit of the formation of an independent air force controlling all aeronautical matters, so in Britain General Hugh M. Trenchard fought stubbornly and tirelessly to retain the new service of which he had become the first head. Mitchell’s ambitions were defeated. Had they succeeded, U. S. naval aviation would surely have suffered the same fate as that of the British Navy’s air arm, and the Battle of Midway would have had a different outcome. It is worth noting, therefore, what was the fate of the British Navy’s air arm.
The setting up of the independent Royal Air Force and its absorption of the naval air service was unwillingly accepted by the British Admiralty on the understanding that the new service would supply the necessary air support for the fleet. It soon became apparent, however, that the airmen, besotted with the apparently limitless possibilities of the airplane, and suffering from the narrow outlook of the fanatic, were unable to appreciate that conquest of the new element made no difference to Britain’s basic need for supremacy at sea if she wished to preserve her widespread empire or even the integrity of the British Isles themselves.
Not only did airmen look upon armies and navies as outmoded forces whose functions would soon be taken over by aircraft, but in their anxiety to build up those sections of their service which could most readily be shown to have an existence independent of the other services—the heavy bomber and land-based fighter squadrons—they begrudged every penny allocated to maritime aircraft, which inevitably, would play an ancillary role.
The consequences were to leave Britain, when war broke out again, with a fleet out-of- date owing to its lack of an adequate maritime air component, to bring her perilously close to defeat and unnecessarily to prolong the war. Let us examine some figures.
The number of ship-borne aircraft of the Fleet—provided and manned by the R.A.F.— had shrunk by 1919 to one spotter/reconnaissance squadron, one flight (1/3 of a squadron) of fighters and half a squadron of torpedo aircraft. By 1924, the total was only 105 aircraft. Four years later, when the U. S. Navy had 283 aircraft of its own, the British number had risen only to 135. While the U. S. Navy, enjoying complete control of its own air arm, was pressing ahead with the construction of aircraft carriers, catching up on the clear lead previously held by the British Navy, British air policy was laid down by the Air Ministry, which in 1932, was stating that it favored the drastic reduction and limitation of the aircraft-carrying capacity of fleets. Thus, in the following year, when the U. S. Navy had no less than 689 ship-borne aircraft besides a large shore-based naval air force, the British Fleet Air Arm could boast of only 159.
It was not only in numbers of aircraft that the Royal Navy, dependent upon the Air Ministry for its air equipment, suffered. Funds made available to the Air Ministry for development and design inevitably went to improvement and replacement of aircraft which played an independent R.A.F. role. Aircraft which joined the fleet in 1924 were still staggering about the sky at a cruising speed of 80 to 90 knots in 1934. The replacement of the Fleet fighter took 11 years from the time that the Naval Staff gave the Air Ministry their requirements. When the new aircraft finally made its debut, it proved to be an adaptation of the already obsolescent fighter in use by the R.A.F., a shift which was to be resorted to again later.
The development of other types of aircraft for the Fleet Air Arm suffered the same fate. In comparison with contemporary aircraft elsewhere, they were of low performance and unreliable. It was not surprising therefore that many senior officers of the Royal Navy, none of whom had much aeronautical knowledge, looked on the air arm as of dubious value.
Furthermore, although after an enquiry in 1923 it had been agreed that all observers and 70 per cent of the pilots of the Fleet Air Arm should in future be naval officers, it took some years for this to be implemented. Naval officers were not attracted by the conditions in which they would find themselves if they specialized in aviation. They disembarked with the aircraft to R.A.F. stations when their ships were in harbor. There they assumed the R.A.F. rank, which they held concurrently with their naval rank, and became subject to R.A.F. discipline. Indeed, the captain of the ship to which a naval pilot had been appointed by the Admiralty could not order him to return on board except with the concurrence of his R.A.F. station commander or by re-embarking him with his aircraft.
Thus, even the small Fleet Air Arm allowed to the Navy was for much of the time divorced from it. The gap between 1918 and 1925 during which no naval officers were trained as pilots meant that it would be many years before there would be naval officers of sufficient air knowledge, experience and seniority to join the staffs of commanders-in-chief to advise them on the capabilities or the tactical employment of aircraft. For such advice the Admiralty had to rely upon the “experts” of the R.A.F. who, like all non-nautical airmen, held an exaggerated faith in the efficacy of high-level precision bombing in attack on ships. No dive-bomber was developed therefore, and though the ship-borne “strike” aircraft was a torpedo-carrier, it suffered numerically from the general starvation of the Fleet Air Arm and in quality from a lack of Air Ministry interest. Furthermore, the faith in high bombing led the Navy to concentrate upon provision of large-caliber anti-aircraft guns and an almost total neglect of close- range weapons.
While the Navy grew up bereft of its own air component, the independent air force, brought into being on the condition that it would assume the responsibilities previously undertaken by the R.N.A.S., failed to provide in its place an adequate shore-based striking force of torpedo aircraft or dive-bombers which naval opinion held to be the most effective weapons against warships. It failed to provide an adequate or properly trained air reconnaissance force to take the place of the shipborne aircraft which Air Ministry self- interest denied the Royal Navy. It even failed to train the bomber force (on whose account the other air components were starved) to navigate itself to overseas targets, and when war came this force had to call upon naval observers for this task and for reliable ship recognition. Above all, and in defiance of the lessons of history, the Royal Air Force almost totally neglected the provision of aircraft or trained crews for naval co-operation or for antisubmarine work.
It was not until 1937 that growing dismay at the neglect which naval aviation was suffering led to a belated political decision that the whole responsibility for the manning, organization and control of ship-borne aviation should be transferred from the Royal Air Force to the Royal Navy within two years. Four air stations were to pass under Admiralty ownership. This went some way towards a long overdue rectification of the basic mistake made on 1 April 1918. Nevertheless, it left the Navy with a tremendous task on its hands at a time when rearmament was in full swing after the years during which the rule that no war was to be expected for ten years had kept all expenditure at a minimum. In the time remaining before the war broke out, little could be done to rectify the aircraft situation, either in quantity or quality. In September 1939, the Royal Navy still possessed only 340 aircraft, 232 of them operational types. Their performance was far below that of contemporary aircraft elsewhere. The Swordfish, the famous “String-Bag,” was expected to function in the spotter, reconnaissance, antisubmarine and torpedo roles and even as a dive- bomber on occasion. Its fame derived more from the gallantry with which its creaking bones were taken into action than from its suitability for any of these roles except antisubmarine work with convoys, a role which, until the advent of the escort carrier, it was rarely called upon to play.
For fighter defense, the biplane Gladiator, long superseded in the R.A.F., was just being replaced by the Navy’s first monoplane aircraft, the Skua. This had been produced as a result of the Navy’s demand for a dive- bomber, in which role it was not unsuccessful. It was expected to function as a fighter also, however, a dual role which no aircraft could perform competently.
Thus, when war broke out, the air forces at the disposal of the Navy were far behind in quantity and quality that was required. Indeed it can be said that in spite of the eleventh-hour decision to modify some of the evil consequences of an independent air force by giving back to the Navy the control of its own ship-borne aircraft, the situation with regard to naval aviation on the outbreak of war verged on the calamitous.
For shore-based air support, on which depended reconnaissance of home waters, the initial attack of enemy naval units detected, and antisubmarine escort, the Navy had still to rely upon the 300 aircraft, of which only 170 were operationally available. And those aircraft were under the Coastal Command of the Royal Air Force over whom the Admiralty had no operational control.
The results of this situation were clearly to be seen in the events of the war at sea so far as the Royal Navy was concerned. When Hitler risked his whole fleet in the invasion of Norway in the spring of 1940, had there been a competent air striking force available to Britain, either sea or land-based, he might have lost the majority of his ships. The R.A.F. sent out the high bombers in which they had so much faith. Like similar attacks against ships throughout the war by air forces of every nation engaged, these attacks failed to achieve anything. Of the Royal Navy’s aircraft carriers, still only four in number of which only one was less than 20 years old, the veteran Furious alone was in home waters and was not operationally fit. Two others were occupied in essential training in the Mediterranean. There could be no question therefore of forming a carrier striking force at this stage of the war. What might have been done by such a force can be gauged from the exploit of the two squadrons of Skuas which, taking off from the Orkneys, flew to Bergen and sank the cruiser Konigsberg.
Conversely, as the campaign in Norwegian waters progressed, had the German Navy enjoyed the support of an air arm of its own, British naval losses from air attack must have been more severe. Fortunately, the Germans —like their Italian allies—had adopted the system of an independent air force. Consequently, the dive bombers and high bombers of the Luftwaffe, untrained in attack on ships at this time, achieved little in repeated, unopposed attacks against warships very poorly armed to defend themselves.
The next theater in which the consequences of British naval weakness in the air were to be suffered was the Mediterranean. Here the Navy fortunately found itself again facing an opponent who likewise depended for air support upon an independent air force. As a result, in spite of having to operate continuously within range of shore-based enemy aircraft in great force, in spite of repeated high-level bombing attacks delivered with remarkable skill and accuracy, and in spite of the totally inadequate fighter air cover available from its few carriers, the Royal Navy was able to retain control of the central Mediterranean basin against a superior enemy surface fleet. For a time, indeed, that surface opposition was eliminated by the air attack on the Italian Fleet at Taranto, in which the paucity of air strike power available—24 lumbering Swordfish—and the lack of fighter escort was compensated for by attacking at night.
When the German dive bombers of Flieger-korps X, specially trained now in attack on ships, were brought to the support of the Italian Air Force, however, the situation became very different. The Royal Navy was forced to abandon the central basin, the German supply route to North Africa was restored, and the British armies were driven back to the borders of Egypt. Not until the air defenses of Malta were built up by fighters flown in from British and American carriers, and an air striking force of naval and R.A.F. aircraft was able to operate from the island against the enemy supply route, was the situation in Africa stabilized. The advance from Alamein followed.
The hunting down of the Bismarck brought another demonstration of the weakness of British maritime air capability. Only two aircraft carriers, one from the Home Fleet and one from Force “H” at Gibraltar were available and had, perforce, to be employed singly. Each succeeded in putting a torpedo into the Bismarck. The Victorious, sending out her laughable force of nine Swordfish against the most powerfully armed battleship in the world, was unlucky in that her torpedo failed to find a vulnerable spot. The Ark Royal could muster 15 Swordfish, which was still a very small force for the task. They, too, got one hit, this time a crippling one, and it sealed the Bismarck's fate. Without it, the Bismarck would have foiled all the efforts of 14 battleships and cruisers scouring the ocean in search of her. But had there been available a carrier striking force such as both the United States and Japanese navies possessed at that time, the Bismarck's destruction could have been achieved with a great deal more speed and certainty.
Lack of maritime air resources, brought about by the system of an independent air force, had a crucial effect in the vital Atlantic theater. The most important lessons arising from the operations of the Royal Naval Air Service during World War I had been in the field of convoy escort. Statistics reveal that during that war only five ships were lost from convoys which had a joint sea and air escort. Examination of the records show that month after month went by during the latter half of 1917 and during 1918 when no attacks whatever were attempted by U-boats against convoys with air escort. Log books of the U-boats themselves monotonously recorded, “Aircraft overhead. Unable to attack.” This was in spite of the fact that the aircraft carried no lethal weapon with which to attack submarines, And, indeed, not one U-boat was destroyed by aircraft attack.
This, of course, made for dull reading. Neither the Air Ministry, intent upon building up the fighting tradition of the new service, nor the Admiralty from which responsibility for air matters had been withdrawn, were greatly interested, if, indeed, the facts were known.
Thus, of the crews of the 170 operational aircraft which comprised Coastal Command of the Royal Air Force, none were trained for antisubmarine work and no air-borne depth- charge was available for their use. Furthermore, although U-boat tactics of attacking by night from on the surface had been defeated in 1918 by installation of searchlights on aircraft, no such device was fitted in the aircraft of the Coastal Command in World War II until 1942.
The result of these shortcomings was the long-drawn Battle of the Atlantic in which the U-boats were finally defeated in May 1943 when, at last, convoys were given end-to- end air escort on the Atlantic routes. Statistics similar to those quoted for World War I suggest that this result could have been achieved a year earlier if Coastal Command had been given a couple of dozen of the long-range Liberator aircraft coming to Britain from America—aircraft which, instead, were employed in strategic bombing of doubtful value. Out of 2,353 merchant ships sunk by the enemy in all theaters of World War II, only 19 were lost from convoys which had a combined sea and air escort.
It is of interest and was fortunate for the Allied cause that the German adoption of the system of a centralized air force handicapped their U-boat effort also. Admiral Doenitz in his memoirs complains more than once of the lack of co-operation on the part of the Luftwaffe and of the starvation of naval air strength in what was probably the one theater in which Germany could have won the war.
By 1943, efforts by the Royal Navy to build up a modern naval air arm were beginning to bear fruit. Compared to the advances made by the U. S. and Japanese navies starting from the firm foothold of a long-established naval air service, they were puny indeed. The Royal Navy, too, was still dogged by the legacy of Air Ministry control of the design and production of aircraft, whereby carrier aircraft were adaptions of R.A.F. types designed for use from airfields and were neither sufficiently robust nor of sufficient range for carrier work. The advantage held by navies with their own air arm had been painfully demonstrated by the brilliant career of Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s carrier striking force, starting at Pearl Harbor, continuing through the East Indies to Darwin, and finally to the shameful episode in the Indian Ocean when a British Fleet had to avoid being brought to action by it. That the Royal Navy could no longer claim to possess a modern fleet was finally brought home by the shape taken by the Battle of Midway.
By the end of the war, the British Navy could claim that, with the help of American- designed naval aircraft, she had regained an equality of efficiency with the U. S. Navy, but on such a small scale that never again could she aspire to naval leadership. That this was inevitable by reason of America’s vast wealth and industrial capacity is, of course, true. But it is interesting to ponder what might have happened if Britain had begun the war with an adequate naval air arm. The destruction of the German Navy in Norwegian waters might have been followed by the elimination of the major units of the Italian fleet. With adequate air cover for convoys to Malta and the maintenance of an air striking force on that island, the enemy could never have waged his North African war. It could well be that, without the encouragement of Britain’s naval difficulties resulting from her weakness in maritime air power, Japan would not have attacked the United States.
But such ruminations are the stuff of daydreams. What is more of interest perhaps is what would have happened if Billy Mitchell had had his way in America as Trenchard did in Britain. The Japanese Fleet at Midway might then have been opposed only by shore- based aircraft of an independent air force, which, to judge by the performance of the U. S. Army air units in the battle or that of the bombers of the independent air forces of Britain and Italy elsewhere, would have reversed the result of the battle. Subsequently, while the U. S. Navy would have been, like the Royal Navy, belatedly striving to build up its air arm, Australia and India might have fallen to the Japanese. The American west coast might have shaken under Japanese bombs, and certainly the war would have been greatly prolonged.
The recent publication in England of an eulogistic biography entitled “Trenchard— Man of Vision” has been greeted by further panegyrics lauding Trenchard’s successful fight, against the opposition of “stupid” admirals and generals, to preserve his independent air force. Any critical examination of the validity of the claim that Trenchard was a man of vision in this respect is unable to gain a hearing. The public always prefers a glamorous myth to the unpalatable facts of history. Billy Mitchell’s place in many American hearts as a martyr is an example of the same preference.
Those Americans who, back in the 1920s, successfully fought off the political pressure and the misinformed public opinion demanding the centralizing of their air power, may have saved the Free World by their efforts.