In 1940 I was crystal clear on what I should be asked to do as a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm. Provided I was selected as a fighter pilot and not for the far more dangerous job of flying a ‘Stringbag’ or, worse still, as an Observer in the back seat, I would do exactly the same as any fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain. The only difference would be that I would operate from an aircraft carrier instead of an airfield and have to learn the additional job of decklanding. If an incoming raid was spotted on the carrier’s radar, I would take-off with the others and be vectored out to intercept the enemy bombers and shoot them down in the normal way. The destroyers and cruisers and battleships would then be free once more to ‘command the sea’ as in days gone by before the aeroplane, without fear of being constantly blown out of the water by German Stukas. Carrier-borne aircraft would also allow our own torpedo-bombers to attack enemy ships, harbours, submarines and airfields. We fighters would also escort the slower Swordfish to their targets and fight off the enemy opposition en route. This seemed to me to be the likely position, exactly the same as the Germans had been doing over England for the past six months in the Battle of Britain. As neither the Germans nor the Italians seemed to have a Fleet Air Arm of their own, our job would be that much easier over the sea. I thought that the Navy would be in an excellent position to win any sea battle that cropped up from time to time.
Unfortunately, my new bosses, Their Lordships of the Admiralty, had no such clear picture at that time. Their minds had gradually clouded over on the subject of naval air warfare, ever since they had handed over the Royal Naval Air Service to the Royal Air Force in 1918. The RAF had then taken over a Service with a complete command structure, ten times the size of the 1940 Fleet Air Arm, with 55,000 sailors, 100 shore stations and 2375 aircraft, balloons and airships. In the past 20 years the Naval Air garden had become a mass of weeds, with but a few patches of Naval brilliance here and there, growing wherever they could. The RAF had taken almost everything and, when they finally left again in 1938 with the Inskip Report as their bible, they left a hole of immense size.
I and the general public had no knowledge whatever of this state of affairs. The Navy was “the Silent Service”, with scarcely an office boy running its Public Relations Department. However, it was the general opinion amongst all those who I knew at this time that our Navy would naturally see to it that it now got the best of everything, as it always had in the past. That was good enough for me. However, it was to be three murderous years before the task given to the Fleet Air Arm resembled my imaginary plan, and another year still before it could carry it out with any degree of success.
Most of the Senior Naval aviators had left en bloc in 1918. They did this because, if they had stayed in the Navy as professional airmen, they would have been little more than a ‘branch’, an auxiliary force; whereas if they formed a new Service — the Royal Air Force — they would become the root of a new Service — not a ‘Branch’ or an ‘Arm’. Their promotion would be secure, their fight for money from the Exchequer would be straightforward and they would not have to compete with an entrenched line of Admirals wanting to build more battleships with bigger and bigger guns. The RAF became single-minded and skilful in this task — particularly in building up Fighter Command with radar interception — and deserved the admiration they later received for their victory in the Battle of Britain. The man responsible for this feat of dedication and endurance was AVM Sir Hugh Dowding. No such person existed in the Royal Navy at this time.
The ‘established’ Navy had not taken much interest in Naval aviation since 1918. None of its schools or weapons’ training establishments had airmen on their staffs and none were near airfields where the interchange between ‘specialisations’ — gunnery, communications, submarines and airmen — could easily take place. Between four and seven years of the formative training for permanent peacetime officers was carried out 100 miles from the nearest Naval airfield. Embryo officers then continued their ‘specialisation’ training, their minds closed to other matters — including air matters — from that time forward. Whether they wanted it or not, non-airmen could not hope to learn anything about air warfare, command of the air, or air weapons, unless they volunteered to become pilots or observers themselves. Until 1935, they would not even be able to do that in significant numbers.
Meanwhile, at the top, few if any at the Board of Admiralty knew one end of an aircraft from another and none had commanded an aircraft carrier of any sort. Their minds were set in casements of steel. Their plans were limited to the range of a 16 inch gun and proceeded at the speed of the Grand Fleet at Jutland. Of course, I and my fellow volunteers in 1940 had no idea we were about to be employed by such a management. We naturally assumed that the Royal Navy, with its fine history and its traditional good sense, would now turn the new weapon which it had just re-acquired into its main striking force, and that they would obtain the very best aircraft, including fighter aircraft, against all other competition to defend it for this purpose.
Having handed over the Royal Naval Air Service to the RAF in 1918, by 1921 the Navy realised that they would soon lose operational control as well as administrative and material control of the RAF’s “Fleet Air Arm”. To keep a foot in the door they recruited Observers — a new RN ‘specialisation’. The Naval Observers would fly in the back seats — and they would purposely be made senior to the RAF pilot in front so that the Navy would then command the aircraft. By 1936, Observers were being attracted into the Navy with the recruiting slogan “Become a Naval Observer and command your own aircraft”. As these Naval aircrew rose in rank they would command the new aircraft carriers, would advise on air matters in the Admiralty and take their place as senior officers on Admirals’ Staffs.
However, time was too short for this idea to begin to operate before war came in 1939. The ‘short service’ 1936 intake had scarcely reached the rank of Lieutenant when they were needed to fight in such aircraft as the Skua and for their numbers to be decimated for little result.
Besides the Navy’s lack of senior officers to advise on air operational matters and how aircraft and aircraft carriers could best be used, it also lacked those with the vital experience and technical knowledge necessary to write specifications for new aircraft and weapons. Two such specifications resulted in the production of the Blackburn Skua/Roc and, three or four years later, the Fairey Barracuda. The Skua was designed as a torpedo/bomber/recce/fighter. It was, and still is, impossible to design such a dream of an all-purpose aircraft, any more than it is possible to produce a lorry which, once it has dropped its load, turns miraculously into a racing car. Two or three fundamentally different roles — such as strike/fighter, cannot be combined into the same basic structure and remain effective in either. The Skua was consequently a ghastly failure, both in its basic flying characteristics and in its performance. When a version of the Skua — the Roc — was fitted with floats for the Norwegian campaign, it could only just remain airborne at full take-off power!
The Barracuda was designed and built as a replacement to the Swordfish/Albacore just as the Grumman Avenger of the US Navy was designed and built as a replacement to the Douglas Devastator at about the same period. The Grumman Company was given only the barest outline to work on. They had already started to produce the Hellcat single-seat US Naval fighter to replace their Wildcat and they had the US Navy’s full confidence. Although the RN’s counterpart to the Avenger was, in time, cost, and task, almost to the same specification, the ‘Barra’ was a travesty of an aircraft. Their Lordships had altered its original logical design concept to a high wing design. This was decided upon without regard to the damaging effect it would have on the aerodynamic problems. Apparently, the high wing design was required so that the Observer, sitting on his throne at the back, could take bearings from two enormous compasses sited in bay windows on the mezzanine floor behind the pilot and have an unobstructed view of the earth and sea below. Besides the obvious structural problems of supporting a large tailplane at the uppermost extremity of the tail fin, the designers had to make sure that the tailplane itself was high enough to clear the expected turbulent down wash from the mainplane itself when airbrakes were in use.
In fact, they never succeeded, as the hangar height of the Illustrious Class carriers was too low to allow this. The Barra therefore suffered from a fatal design flaw, an unpredictable change of trim in the pitching plane when dive brakes were used. The wingfolding arrangements were also thrown off course and the undercarriage was so long and heavy that when a leg broke after a heavy decklanding it required eight men to lift it and throw it into the sea. The equivalent Seafire undercarriage needed only two. It was so overweight and underpowered that its rate of climb was too slow for any hope of surprise in its approach to the target, and barely perceptible at all in tropical temperatures — if a useful load was carried. It was little wonder that the Barracuda was soon declared unfit for use in the Far East, almost the moment it arrived there in any quantity. Of course it is easy to blame Their Lordships for the various iniquitous flying abortions which they caused to be produced, but the firms of Fairey and Blackburn — the main contributors to this sorry line of lethal failures for the FAA before and during the war — should have used their wisdon to warn their customers of the consequences of their impossible demands, as, no doubt, designers such as Sydney Camm, Folland and R. J. Mitchell would have done before money and time were spent on them.
When, in 1938, the Navy eventually re-acquired a measure of control of the air over its Fleet, it only possessed about 150 obsolescent aircraft in first-line duty. This compared with 1300 in the US Navy, 550 in the Japanese Navy and 350 of Goering’s Luftwaffe permanently assigned to the Kriegsmarine. Under the terms of the Inskip Report, its most impracticable and illogical measure of all was to allow the RAF to retain not only ownership, but operational control of Coastal Command. The Navy was therefore mainly dependent upon its rival service for A/S and surface surveillance and, as we shall see, for the major defence of the air over its Fleet.
The Inskip ‘agreement’ was a management document of a semi-political nature, first written in 1936, mostly by Winston Churchill. Its ideas on air defence of the Fleet were entirely out of date by 1939 yet it was religiously used by the two Services as a day-to-day job specification in all its unworkable aspects through the first, vital, three years of the war before the Americans joined in.
At the outbreak of the war, Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty and Chairman of the Military Co-ordinating Committee soon after. On becoming Prime Minister on 10 May 1940 he was in charge of Defence. He, together with the First Sea Lord, Admiral Pound, and his Deputy, Admiral Tom Phillips, perpetuated these unworkable arrangements. For instance, when dealing with air defence of the surface Fleet, the Inskip Report announced:
“The Navy could never be required to maintain air strength sufficient to cope with a concentrated attack upon it . . . by a large air force of great power. When the hostile air force, or any considerable detachment from it, is encountered, it must be by the RAF.”
This beautiful, archaic language described the writer’s dream of an air defence requirement for a large Fleet setting off for another Jutland. The Navy would supply the AA gunfire — with its dual purpose guns in which it had the utmost confidence — and the RAF would supply the fighter defence overhead. Let us suppose that just such an attack on the Fleet took place — as indeed it did in miniature in the first few days of the war — and that warning was somehow received by the Admiral that it was a “considerable detachment” of enemy aircraft that was approaching. The Admiral would then contact, somehow, his RAF Group Commander ashore and ask for fighter support overhead. With no communications, with no Air Defence Radar (ADR) in HM Ships and with no agreed priority in the usage of the RAF fighters, the arrangements could not possibly work. Neither did they. Pre-planning, where the Navy and RAF could sit down beforehand, was the only workable method of making use of the available RAF fighter support. Even this was quite plainly uneconomical in the use of aircraft. Additionally, the RAF fighter pilots would be entirely untrained in flying over the sea, and the Navy itself had no means of communicating with the fighter pilots, nor of directing them by radar. The RAF quite rightly rebelled in such misuse of its slender resources and was unwilling to provide alternative uneconomical ‘standing patrols’ over the Fleet except on a low priority basis and where the Navy was within easy reach of its few well defended airfields. The Biggin Hill experiment in 1936 had already proved that ADR-directed interceptors were five times as efficient as ‘standing patrols’ of fighters patrolling on the likely approach path of the enemy and using visual interception techniques only.
Such was the position in home waters and in the Mediterranean in the opening stages of the war, until the end of 1942. From 1939-1942 Their Lordships’ minds were still ‘encountering’ the enemy at speeds of 40 knots, instead of 400 knots, the approach speed of fighters sent to intercept the oncoming Stukas. For it was the Stukas which had brought the enemy’s hitting power half way across the North Sea and half way across the Mediterranean, in the same time that it took the Fleet to raise its anchors from Scapa, Gibraltar or Alexandria.
The average Dartmouth-trained Naval officer not only had little knowledge of the air threat or how to deal with it but was also saddled with an impossibly slow and archaic flags and morse communications and warning system for air-age warfare which could not react in time. Naval Gunnery officers shut their minds to the threat from the air believing that their AA gunnery was the best in the world and that no aircraft could live for long in its grasp. They could think of no case in any preceding war where an aircraft had sunk a capital ship. They considered that their air defence over their surface Fleet was ‘well balanced’ and able to do without the RAF in all cases except where there was a ‘large’ and hostile air force of great power about to descend on it. They also preferred Churchill’s maxim: “Airforce versus Airforce, Navy versus Navy”, when it came to a decision on a demarkation dispute.
The Navy therefore considered that they had no need for large numbers of Naval interceptor fighters, such as the Gladiator or Hurricane. Radar direction was not in any case available aboard ships, only to the RAF for the Battle of Britain, and Naval ADR crews had not been trained for the task of fighter direction in significant numbers before late 1941. The space in the carrier’s hangars would be filled with ‘strike’ aircraft to cripple the enemy battle-fleet. One or two Gladiator and Hurricane fighters might, however, be carried for the sole purpose of shooting down enemy ‘snooper’ reconnaissance planes outside AA range in conditions of w/t silence. Silence and secrecy were of paramount importance in surface warfare when two fleets were looking for each other. Chattering fighter pilots were an anathema, as their aircraft transmitters, high over the top of the Fleet, could be received by the enemy 100 miles away. The Navy had a hatred of noise, in all its forms. Radar had double the ‘noise’ range of r/t and was particularly unpopular afloat. The Navy eventually allowed GDR (Gunnery Direction Radar) afloat at Churchill’s insistence, in time for its use at the beginning of the war in so-called ‘AA Cruisers’. But ADR (Air Direction Radar) was not much in use — or very effective — until the first of the armoured carriers of the Illustrious Class was in service in 1941.
The Royal Navy’s faith in its gunnery as a means of defence against air attack was even more optimistic than its faith in its ability to hit warships. In 1916, for instance, the actual effectiveness of the battlefleets’ main armament at Jutland was 2.2 per cent hits (light damage) and 0.3 per cent hits (heavy damage). (These are German figures obtained after the Great War.) The same guns were in use in the 1939-45 war. They were designed to shoot against slow-moving and very large targets, in a single plane and within their sight more often than not. In 1939, the same design of firing piece — with its surface accuracy of 0.3 per cent hits — was then pointed at targets of ten times the speed, one twentieth the size and manoeuvring in three planes with great rapidity, and it was still expected to hit!
So the position the day war was declared, founded no doubt on unrealistic peacetime practice, was that AA gunnery would suffice for all normal occasions, and in case a large enemy formation was encountered, this would somehow be dealt with by the RAF ashore, 200 or 300 miles away! Had I known this, I should have doubtless waited for the RAF, like Ralph Kirker. I had never bothered to consider the unlikely situation that Naval fighters were to be numbered in their ones and twos, biplanes at that, and that they would be used only for visual interceptions of ‘snoopers’ in conditions of r/t silence.
The first mini-encounter on the lines envisaged by Inskip occurred a few days after the war started. Naval AA gunnery was therefore almost the first weapon in the Naval armoury to be put to the test. In it, Ark Royal was attacked by a formation of Dornier 17s and Ju 88s. The Courageous had already been sunk and the subject of vulnerability of aircraft carriers, roaming the sea in so-called ‘hunter-killer’ groups and unprotected as they were allowed to be, was a tricky one, particularly in the House of Commons. So that when the Fleet returned to Scapa from its first trip into the North Sea, the “first brush with the enemy” (as Churchill described it) was a subject of great interest.
The Fleet had been at sea on 26 September 1939, hoping to tempt the German Navy out of harbour in just the same manner as Jellicoe, a quarter of a century earlier. This time, however, German Zeppelins had been replaced by the far more effective reconnaissance Do 17, and our Fleet was spotted almost immediately. The appropriate number of bombers was then sent by Goering to deal with the Ark Royal. She was a priority target, because, even at that stage in the war, the Germans considered her to be the main threat. They almost ignored the battleships with her.
A hit was claimed with a 1000 pound bomb on her bow. In the next two hours the Fleet was reported again while plodding its way back to Scapa. However, on this recce, the German pilot could not see the Ark in company (she was 20 miles off) and he claimed her as “missing, believed sunk”. The final aircraft sent over confirmed she was still missing and the pilot of the Dornier 17 who had scored the (near) miss was decorated and promoted for having sunk the Ark Royal. Lord Haw-Haw repeated this every evening for a fortnight on the German radio.
When Churchill in the Admiralty heard of this incident, he sent the first of many War Memos to Admiral Sir Dudley Pound:
“The first brush with the enemy against the Fleet passed off very well and useful data was obtained, but we do not want to run unnecessary risks with our important vessels until our anti-aircraft fire has been worked up to the required standard against aircraft flying at 250 miles an hour.”
Churchill’s faith in Naval AA gunnery had not yet been shaken sufficiently for him to start to insist on more interceptors aboard the carriers. However, he was sufficiently worried to ask the Navy to ensure that its training methods were more realistic. Unfortunately, the Naval Gunnery Department was entirely fact-proof where criticism of their gunnery was concerned and did very little to improve the realism of their AA gunnery practices. The only action taken by the Navy to implement Churchill’s answer to the problem, was to buy two US Navy Maryland bombers and convert them to towing targets at speeds above 160 knots — the speed in universal use throughout the country.
It was not until late 1943 when the American VT-fuzed 40 mm and the gyro-sighted 20 mm guns came into service in very large numbers in the Navy surface fleets, and their TOSXs (Throw-off shooting exercises) allowed realistic practice, that an effective form of short range AA gunnery came into being. The gyro gunsight was particularly useful, for it showed the inexperienced gunners by how much they would have missed their real-life targets (flying at double the speed of their practice targets) had they been shooting in a real-life situation. Long range AA gunnery — 3.7″ and larger — remained entirely ineffective throughout the war. It was no more than a frightening nuisance to us aviators.
In his delightfully worded Memo to Pound, Churchill made no mention that the Skua fighters on Ark’s deck had not been used at all in the engagement. This was not only because of the wording of the Inskip Report, which made it an RAF task to protect the Navy in its foray over the North Sea, but because there was no radar to give Ark warning of the position of the German bombers. They were taken by surprise. The Skua was almost entirely useless as a fighter against the Ju 88 and this may have influenced the Captain of the Ark against maintaining a ‘standing patrol’.
Following this episode and perhaps in a further effort by Churchill to disentangle the job specification in the Inskip Report, he wrote the following:
“Naval aircraft should be confined to three main duties: (i) air reconnaissance over the open spaces of the ocean, (ii) spotting for Naval gunfire, (iii) launching torpedo attacks upon the enemy.”
This confirmed that the carrier-borne aircraft were to be confined to finding and disabling the enemy fleet, so that it could be “brought under the guns of the Fleet” for its coup de grace. There was never any question that the aircraft themselves might be capable of inflicting this coup de grace or that Naval interceptor fighters might be required as air defence.
There was, however, ample evidence that aircraft bombs could sink capital ships. Tests in America had convinced “all except wilful men” that they could, with ease. The Navy’s answer was, predictably, to provide more ‘AA cruisers’ and more deck armour. The fact that the Americans themselves had a 1000 pound bomb which could, when dropped from 7000 feet, pierce no less than 12 inches of deck armour, was ignored.
Conceived in 1934, the Illustrious Class of carriers had been coated with 1500 tons of armour plate specially imported from foreign sources. Designed for another Jutland, they were crowded with guns in turrets, further limiting stowage space for aircraft, reducing their radius of action without refuelling and making living conditions for their full complement of men almost unbearable for periods longer than a few days. The three to five inches of deck and hangar sidewall armour was designed as a shelter from enemy shellfire in a cruiser action, so that they could still operate their aircraft in the reconnaissance and torpedo role while under fire. The ‘high-angle’ and time-fuzed, dual-purpose gunnery was intended to provide them with AA protection as well as anti-surface gunnery. Their close-range weapons — a few multi-barrelled, low velocity, 30 mm ‘pom-poms’ were also intended to provide AA support at ranges of 5000 yards or less. It was not until they signally failed in this — particularly in the Repulse and Prince of Wales’ action — that they were replaced by the much more effective high velocity Oelikon 20 mm cannon, demanded in vain by Lord Mountbatten as early as 1934. The protection afforded by the armour on their flight decks was designed to withstand plunging fire from 8″ armament, not bombs from aircraft. Such forward thinking had not occurred to their designers. The deck armour was not designed to withstand, nor could it, 1000 pound AP bombs. It could, however, withstand a 500 SAP bomb more or less ‘placed’ upon it and still attached to a diving Kamikaze. This fortuitous circumstance enabled the BPF to survive the Kamikazes better than the wooden-decked American carriers. The mere 300 knots of a Kamikaze — the first ‘thinking’ guided missile — was insufficient to pierce 3″ of armour, although the German Stuka’s 1000 AP bomb, released to strike the flight deck near its terminal velocity and at near 90 degrees penetration angle, was far too much for it. No practical amount of armour had a chance of stopping 1000 AP bombs dropped in this manner, as was repeatedly pointed out by the Naval Ship Construction Branch at Portland during the war. The Americans said that 12 inches of armour would be required, sufficient to capsize a battleship or carrier with ease.
In 1939, the Fleet Air Arm had its own dive bomber — the Skua. The Fleet Air Arm was keen to prove this new weapon both for its own and Their Lordships’ benefit, to show what an aircraft could do against surface ships when used correctly and where there was no fighter opposition en route. They did not have long to wait.
On the morning of 10 April 1940, a total of 17 Skuas of 803 and 800 Naval Air Squadrons, operating from the Orkneys, sunk the German heavy cruiser Königsberg while she was alongside at Bergen. They sank her with several hits and near-misses from their 500 pound bombs, dropped in steep dives. Surprise was achieved in a dawn attack; only one Skua was lost on the way back. The leader of the Skuas in 800 Squadron, Major R. T. Partridge, DSO, RM, describes the action in his book Operation Skua. One of the main characteristics was the extreme accuracy achieved, an average error of 20 yards. These hits were the equivalent of a shell from a 15 inch battleship gun, but at a range of 300 miles and with an accuracy 2000 times greater. It also proved that whatever its other serious shortcomings, the Skua was a good dive bomber in terms of aiming ability.
Unfortunately, Their Lordships, though impressed with the bravery, ignored the technique and military significance of this novel form of attack. They did not even announce it as a Naval action and allowed the RAF to reap the media rewards. They were busy using the carrier Furious, the proper home for the two Skua squadrons, as an air transport ship for RAF Hurricanes and Gladiators for the Norwegian Campaign. The senior Admiralty officer responsible for such matters was Admiral Tom Phillips. He it was who was later sent from his Admiralty desk to take command of the Prince of Wales and Repulse, where they were immediately sunk by air attack off eastern Malaya. He was a convinced battleship man and there is no record that the manner of the sinking of the Königsberg made the slightest impression on him.
Not so the Luftwaffe. They immediately perceived its importance and trained up a complete Fliegerkorps, 200-300 aircraft, in dive-bombing and ship-sinking techniques. Sixty of Fliegerkorps X’s pilots spent some time in Sicily to work up on ship-sinking techniques. The high cloud base and reliable weather made this a pleasurable business, and in all such environments, new ideas flourish. Their new idea — or so they thought — was to saturate the AA defences by, first, concentrating on a single target — the carrier, if any. The second was to make a co-ordinated attack with up to 30 Stukas, completing their attack from different directions within a few minutes, diving at the steep angle of 70 degrees to obtain maximum bomb penetration. Neither could any gun from their target elevate to that dive angle, so they would come under fire only on their approach and getaway. Simple arithmetic told them that by sharing the risk amongst all 30 aircraft for, say, three minutes at the most, it gave the individual Stuka pilot and his crew exactly 30 times fewer bullets aimed at him than if each Stuka came in separately on the same heading. They also realised that with the ability of the British radar to spot them a good distance off on their slow climb to push-over height of 8000 feet, they must fly to the target in a tight bunch, escaping at zero feet to return out of radar contact. They also practised using decoys. These pretended to be torpedo-carrying aircraft coming in at low level from a direction opposite to that of the dive-bombers. The fighter (Fulmar) defence would then be caught at low altitude when the high-flying Stukas approached.
The Norwegian campaign had shown the Germans that the British had very few ‘naval’ fighters to protect their ships and they thought that it might even be safer using the Stuka against shipping targets than against tanks on the battlefield. Once in the Mediterranean, the Luftwaffe were certain they could end the rout of the Italians in the North African campaign and if they could replace the ineffective high bombing techniques of the Italians, they could rout the British Fleet as well. They even began to train Heinkel IIIs to drop torpedoes in pairs. Nevertheless, as if to show the immensity of the mistake made by Their Lordships on not having sufficient fighters in the Mediterranean in 1940-41, the very few that there were in Illustrious — 806 Squadron of nine Fulmars commanded by Charles Evans — struck terror into the hearts of the Stukas and the Italian Air Force for the short time that the Fulmars survived, and the Stukas determined to remove Illustrious as soon as possible. This they did in two months, using their well rehearsed techniques, without much assistance from the Italians.
When experts, unthreatened by outsiders, meet together, they tend to disagree. As technical disagreements concerning air defence in wartime could have fatal consequences, the subject of Naval air power became of interest to outsiders. One of these was a Naval historian called Douhet. He wrote a book about Naval Air Power. He divided the various options into four groups. These opinions are still of interest today, for the arguments between the missile and the manned aircraft continue unabated. In 1938, the various leaders — Pound, Tovey, Cunningham, Vian, Troubridge, Boyd, Fraser, Rawlings, Tedder, Harris, Dowding and others, all seemed to belong to one of the four Douhet Groups. These are outlined below.
Group 1. Entire wars could be won by aircraft. The relative importance between bombers and fighters would be determined by the composition of the likely opposition. Civilians and industry would be the main targets, as well as any fast moving enemy military units likely to give trouble. Lord Trenchard and AVM Sir Arthur Harris might have been supporters of this Group. For instance, the latter wrote to Churchill in June 1942: ‘’We can knock Germany out of the war in a matter of months. The use of the 1000 bomber plan has proved beyond doubt in the minds of all but wilful men that we can dispose of a weight of attack which no country . . . can survive.”
His assertion that a complete war could be won or greatly shortened by area-bombing, presupposed — amongst many suppositions — that there would be an almost unlimited supply of aircraft and aircrew. The bombing may have lengthened the war, in fact, for no thought seems to have been given to a more sensible utilisation of the available aircraft and crews. A quotation from Brassey’s Annual makes this point: “It has been estimated that in its lifetime of 30 sorties, a Liberator used by Coastal Command over the Atlantic could save three merchant vessels from destruction by U-boat. The same Liberator used over Berlin could perhaps destroy a few houses and kill a couple of dozen enemy civilians. The difficulty was to get anyone to believe these figures at the time.”
Group 2. This Group considered that in any surface encounter of Naval units, the air above and surrounding the airfields should first be cleansed of enemy aircraft. Command of the sea could only come after command of the air above it. This Group relegated the battleship to night or poor visibility actions (a prophetic assertion made possible, even then, only by the British invention of radar) and it was not popular with the Navy. The Americans and Hitler adopted this Group’s thinking. The latter, it will be remembered, refused to risk his army to invade Britain before he took command of the air over the Channel. He also turned back Tirpitz from convoy PQ17 when Victorious put to sea. Admiral Iachino, the Italian C-in-C, supported the carrier and continually complained about the lack of support from Mussolini’s Air Force. Doenitz also supported the use of carrier-borne fighters — not considering strike aircraft at all — but Goering put a stop to the completion of the Graf Zeppelin carrier.
A British example of this Group’s thinking was their brilliant use of aircraft in arming the ‘Harpoon’ and ‘Pedestal’ convoys — the two 1942 convoys to Malta from the western end of the Mediterranean — with an effective complement of carrier-borne fighters and only a few A/S Swordfish in addition. Naval officers senior enough to make their voices heard at this time were Dennis Boyd and Tom Troubridge. They both considered that command of the air was not only part of the battle for command of the sea, but was a vital prerequisite.
Group 3. This Group considered that command of the sea could be obtained separately from command of the air. They considered that a Fleet carrier should be capable of taking her place alongside the light/heavy cruiser force (sent ahead as at Jutland) and capable of fighting off cruiser and destroyer opposition with her own guns and armour-plate. The carrier’s complement — half that of contemporary US carriers — should be limited to TSR aircraft and a few fighters to escort them and to shoot down snoopers, using visual interception in radio and radar silence. The enemy fleet would then be “brought under the guns of the battlefleet” for the coup de grace. As for the surface Fleet itself, it was considered — until 1943 at least — that it could look after itself by AA gunfire and that the air battle could still be left to the RAF if “a considerable enemy air force were encountered.”
There are numerous examples in WW II of this Group’s misuse of carriers. One example occurred on 10 January 1941. This was when the new Illustrious was dive-bombed off Sicily and disabled for a year. Two months later, her replacement, Formidable, received the same treatment in the Aegean. In both actions neither carrier was carrying more than a few Fulmar fighters and their hangars were full of Swordfish or Albacores. The Swordfish from Illustrious were intended to cripple the Italian fleet and Cunningham had therefore refused the request of his carrier Captain to allow him to hold the carrier out of range of the Stukas as it passed Sicily. In the case of Formidable, the Albacores were intended to interdict Aegean airfields to try to halt the Luftwaffe’s carnage of our Mediterranean Fleet in the withdrawal from Greece. She only had three serviceable Fulmars as fighter protection in an area where German airpower was supreme. So far as this Group’s faith in RAF assistance was concerned, even if the RAF fighters were planned to be available as they were on two or three important occasions in ‘Pedestal’ and ‘Harpoon’, the RAF were unable to prevent the Luftwaffe sinking most of the remaining convoys as they approached Malta after the carriers had left due to the lack of Naval fighter direction ships. In the case of the ‘Second Battle of Sirte’, the Navy’s ability to mentally separate the Naval battle from the air battle was well demonstrated. Admiral Vian was knighted for his “brilliant victory” when his westbound convoy to Malta, scattered and delayed though it was by a foray by the Italian fleet, managed to get within 200 miles of Malta unscathed, through the brilliant action of Vian’s destroyer escort. This almost bloodless skirmish was not a victory in truth, for the entire convoy either turned back or was sunk before it reached its goal, in the last 200 miles of its journey. We heard about this “victory” while in Eagle at Gibraltar. Although we did not believe Vian’s claims of having shot down 25 German aircraft with the destroyer’s AA, we believed that most of the convoy had been sunk by the failure of the RAF to protect it, not realising how difficult their job was — having no ADR ships to control them and with the remnants of Vian’s convoy spread over a thousand square miles of sea.
Group 4. By 1943, very few of this Group remained in the Navy. They had believed that the gun could deal entirely with the air threat — until the loss of the Repulse and the Prince of Wales proved otherwise. However, they have begun to resurrect themselves. They are beginning to put their trust in the missile and the anti-missile missile. Their claims are hard to shoot down for their views cannot hope to be tested properly except in war conditions. When these occur and show that the existing arsenal of Naval missiles is inadequate to cope on its own against an air attack, they either make immense claims for enemy losses which cannot be verified, or they say that there were unexpected disadvantages which made the situation “abnormal”. They are indeed the original diehards but, because their missiles are cheaper to buy and operate in peacetime, their view prevails with the politicians. (See also Appendix 3.)