During the summer of 1943 Churchill was, as usual, trying to settle the demands of war fairly upon the three Services. In July he had issued a very interesting memo:
“I think it rather a pregnant fact that out of 4,000 officers in the Fleet Air Arm, only 30 should have been killed, are missing or have been taken prisoner during the three months ending 20 April 1943.”
It would indeed have been a pregnant fact if the figures had been anything like correct. The staff officer who made them up had failed to include the numbers lost at sea in Avenger and Dasher and had included all Fleet Air Arm officers as aircrew serving in first line squadrons, whether flying training or administrative. As no Naval Staff Officer would make such a basic error, it can only be assumed that the figures came from a non-Naval source. The figures should have been 200 casualties out of 1500 aircrew officers, not 30 out of 4,000.
Churchill had a difficult task to settle inter-Service rivalry. The misleading figures given to Churchill probably came from RAF sources. RAF casualties, particularly in Bomber Command, had recently been very serious. The Germans were using night fighters, against which the Lancasters, Halifaxes and Stirlings of AVM Harris’ night offensive had little protection. Coupled with this, the FAA had recently complained about the lack of Sea Hurricanes. The RAF response was that the FAA made little use of the ones it had got, giving Churchill the ‘pregnant’ figures above. AVM Harris was also worried. He had promised Churchill that with his 1000 bomber offensive, he could shorten the war. He wanted to justify this assertion. He therefore wanted less German night fighters. The only way in which the number of German night fighters could be reduced was for an early start to be made in the American day bomber offensive and a large increase in Fighter Command activity over France, to tempt the Luftwaffe into the air and so inflict casualties. There were to be no spare fighters for the FAA.
The FAA had indeed not been particularly ‘closely engaged’ in the first three months of 1943, for they had been engaged in a massive regrouping programme. They had also been training and providing the entire air defence for the landings in Sicily scheduled for July and for the forming of squadrons for a further six carriers for the September landings at Salerno in Italy.
The latter involved retraining, on Seafires, of no less than 15 squadrons. Another ten squadrons were re-forming on American aircraft in the USA. Victorious had been loaned to the hard-hit American Pacific Fleet until September 1943. Although the Russian convoys had been suspended from March to September 1943 due to the shortage of suitable carriers and fighters, the Atlantic battle against the submarine was being reinforced. MAC ships (Merchant ships modified to take Swordfish plus fighters in small numbers) were being manned from March 1943 onwards. Nineteen would be in service by the end of 1944. With the impending demise of Mussolini and his Navy, the Mediterranean and Malta would shortly be able to spare the Illustrious, Formidable and Indomitable for service in the Indian Ocean, the East Indies and the Pacific, using new American aircraft and American-trained pilots where possible.
Of course, Churchill was not intending to judge military success and activity by the length of a list of casualties. There could be no parallel between the carnage of the Western Front in World War I and that of the high technology air battles in World War II. Casualties in air battles have never been a sign of success, very much the reverse. Neither have they necessarily been a sign that fighting was taking place. Many of the most successful involvements of the Fleet Air Arm, at Taranto and at the attack by Barracudas and Corsairs against Tirpitz on 3 April 1944, were completed almost without casualties. Thus it was a shame that this great and busy man, Churchill, should have been used in this way to make a party point in the inter-Service rivalry. Churchill could easily be misled on technical matters and it was often the case that his first interventions did more harm than good as a consequence.
Whereas there was no just cause for the RAF to complain of Fleet Air Arm slackness in Europe, there might well have been cause for complaint by the Americans of our Naval efforts in the Indian Ocean and Pacific at this time. Our inactivity in that area was, in fact, part of a conscious policy of conservation on the part of Admiral Somerville. He knew, even if those in the Admiralty did not, that his four ancient, 18 knot battleships and his under-equipped carriers were no match for the Japanese Admiral Nagumo’s 30 knot fleet — complete with a fleet of four fast carriers with six times the number of aircraft, with a proper fleet train in support. The Royal Navy in the Far East was therefore unable to make the slightest impression, either as a deterrent or as an attack force, with or without American naval assistance, during 1943 and the early part of 1944.
However, help was at hand. As far back as 1940, the MAP had sent a buying mission to the USA for more fighters. Although they mistakenly bought the Brewster Buffalo — which, in spite of Boscombe Down’s damning opinion, the RAF consigned to the defence of Singapore — the Navy bought the Grumman Wildcat F4F-3. The order also included a redundant French order for a non-folding, Cyclone-engined version. All of this order was delivered by July 1941, 804 Squadron receiving the first of the 60 French aircraft by August 1940. Meanwhile the Buffalo predictably failed to perform in the Far East and Somerville was forced to use his depleted carriers to ferry more RAF replacement Hurricanes: too late, as it happened, for them to come into action. When Lease-Lend was well under way, Their Lordships were at last persuaded that there was a shortage of fighters in the FAA by Winston Churchill and by their own Director of Naval Air Production — Captain Caspar John. In 1943, they appointed him Assistant Naval Air Attaché, Washington, to supervise the introduction of new US Navy fighters — the Corsair, Hellcat and the strike aircraft, the Grumman Avenger, into the FAA. Assisted by two other officers taken from ‘the remaining flashes of brilliance’ who had stayed in the FAA — Commanders Richard Smeeton and Charles Evans — and a team of potential squadron commanders, eg Dicky Cork and Jacky Sewell, he was able to re-equip Somerville’s carrier force by the beginning of 1944 so that he could resume the offensive in the Indian Ocean.
By the spring of 1944, the situation in the Far East began to improve and Somerville, later relieved by Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, could, by August 1944, prove to Admiral Ernest J. King, the highly sceptical Chief of Naval Staff, USN, in Washington, that the British could indeed look after themselves in that area and be very useful.
Of course we knew nothing of this in the spring of 1944 at Henstridge. All we knew was that we were beginning to win in the Mediterranean. Although the Atlantic battle against the U-boat had taken a brief turn for the worse following the German U-boat improvement in underwater range and speed, by the invention of the Schnorkel, our use of search radar from the air more than offset this advantage. We had also heard about the great American sea battles in the Pacific against the Japanese, of the Coral Sea and of Midway. Here, the Americans, with the inestimable advantage of ADR and the ‘stop-me-and-buy-ones’, now using up to four carriers in a single fleet and combined into Carrier Air Groups, had achieved a high casualty rate upon the Japanese aircrews which they could not replace quickly enough.
Nevertheless we were under no illusions that the war was won. We had read of the fanatical ‘Kamikaze’ bravery of the Japanese. The Kamikaze was a weird form of terrorism which seemed to us to deserve nothing but a painful death and eternal damnation. With their clever, decoy-led, low-level approach below the radar of the carrier air defence, it was worrying to think that 100 per cent kills would be necessary before a sure defence could be provided. Each one of these part-trained, one-way aviators could park a 500 pound bomb within a few feet of his aiming point if he was allowed to get within a few miles of the Fleet. However, we felt that the Seafire of all aircraft, would be the best possible defence in such circumstances, and we were not too frightened provided we could see them coming.
So far as RAF participation in the forthcoming Pacific War was concerned, it seems we neither saw nor heard anything of them and after late 1944, the FAA seemed to have achieved a remarkable degree of self-sufficiency of supply and training from America and Australia.