A Strong Navy but Thinly Spread
In 1914 the Royal Navy was the world’s strongest but, according to Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher who returned from retirement to become First Sea Lord for the second time in October, it was ‘weak everywhere, strong nowhere’. By 1939, the Royal Navy was no longer the world’s strongest, but it was still thinly spread. Some of its historic commitments had been cut with Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa having created navies of their own, something that had already happened in Australia and Canada before the First World War and had developed further in the late 1930s. Nevertheless, there was still much for the Royal Navy to do and it remained based around the globe.
Despite the severe economic depression that in reality had dominated most of the interwar years, in 1939 the Royal Navy and Royal Marines totalled 129,000 men and on mobilization this figure rose to 202,000 men as members of the Royal Naval Reserve (RNR) and Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) were called up. Many of the RNR members were serving in the Merchant Navy and brought good navigational and engineering skills to the expanded wartime navy, while the RNVR consisted of many whose experience extended no further than yachting and perhaps not even that.
Each year had seen a flotilla of new destroyers introduced, often replacing older ships with seven, eight or even nine new vessels. Nevertheless, the service had been weakened from its high point of 1914. Lieutenant Commander E.C. Talbot-Booth reminded the readers of his book All the World’s Fighting Fleets, published almost on the eve of war, that by 1940 the Royal Navy would have just 21 capital ships, meaning battleships and battle-cruisers, as against 68 in 1914; 69 cruisers as against 103; and 190 torpedo craft as against 319. ‘With the exception of Germany, every other leading navy will be substantially stronger than before the last war,’ he added.
One point he did not make was that the 1939 cruiser was much larger and more capable than its counterpart in 1914 and the same could be said for the destroyers, some of which in 1939 were almost as large as the 1914 light cruiser.
The Royal Navy was still one of the leading navies in 1939, even though the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 had decreed that the Royal Navy and the United States Navy were to be equal in size and even in composition. The years of recession had seen new ships continue to join the fleet, but not in the numbers required as the threat of war came ever closer. What the recession had done had been to cut the United Kingdom’s industrial capacity, not least in shipbuilding. Admiral of the Fleet Sir Ernle Chatfield (later Lord Chatfield), First Sea Lord (the most senior naval officer) from January 1933 to November 1938, knew that a larger navy was needed. New warships were ordered, with a plan to modernize the carrier fleet, but the pace of expansion was stalled by a shortage of slipways and this became the limiting factor in naval shipbuilding from 1937 onwards, once funding for Britain’s armed forces was no longer restricted.
A Blue-Water Navy
Navies are generally divided into ‘blue-water’, ocean-going, or ‘brown-water’; the latter defines a service limited to coastal duties, in effect a glorified coastguard, or to operations in a largely enclosed sea such as the Baltic or the Black Sea. The Treaty of Versailles had tried to limit the new Reichsmarine to such a role, but even before Hitler’s rise to power, senior officers were planning the rebuilding of the German navy to the extent that they sought advice on planning and, even more important, managing the political fallout that rearmament was causing among liberal and communist politicians in the Reichstag (German parliament).
Before the First World War, the Kaiser had wanted Germany to have a ‘blue-water’ navy capable of rivalling the Royal Navy and indeed, by 1914 the Imperial German Navy was the world’s second-largest. It was no longer to be the junior service but to be on a par with the army. Those days had not been forgotten.
The Royal Navy was the consummate blue-water navy, spread around the world but also retaining the less prestigious but important tasks such as fisheries protection and keeping ports open during times of war by minesweeping. The United States Navy was also a blue-water navy, but it had the United States Coast Guard (USCG) for many of the more mundane home-based tasks. In wartime, the USCG passed under USN control.
By 1939, the Royal Navy had been through a number of reorganizations. The Grand Fleet of the First World War, the result of a policy of bringing home as many major fleet units as possible ready for a war with Germany, had become first the Atlantic Fleet and later the Home Fleet. The Inskip Award of 1937 handed naval aviation back to the Admiralty, which took control of the Fleet Air Arm in May 1939.
The main organization of the Royal Navy in 1939 was on a series of fleets and overseas stations. The largest of these was the Home Fleet with bases at Devonport, Portsmouth and Chatham, although these were also available for ships returning from overseas, and a forward base at Scapa Flow in Orkney. Then there was the Mediterranean Fleet with its main base at Malta and other bases at Gibraltar and Alexandria, which was probably the most popular posting of all. In the Far East there was the China Station based on Hong Kong, and the East Indies Station based on Singapore. In the west there was the American Station based on Bermuda, and the West Indies Station. Finally, there was the African Station based on Simonstown, the naval base near Cape Town.
One big difference between the Royal Navy and the British army and the Royal Air Force was that the sponsoring department, the Admiralty, was not just a government department but an operational headquarters as well. It could, and did, send orders direct; not just to the commanders of the two major fleets, but to individual ships when necessary. The First Lord of the Admiralty was a civilian, a politician and a government minister with a seat in the Cabinet. The service head was the First Sea Lord, with the Second Sea Lord being responsible for personnel. The major fleets were headed by a commander-in-chief, while the stations would have a flag officer, the title being, for example, ‘Flag Officer, East Indies’. The major fleets would have a number of flag officers such as flag officer, carriers, or flag officer, submarines.
In 1939 Commander-in-Chief, Home Fleet was Admiral Sir Charles Forbes. His command included 5 battleships, 2 battle-cruisers, 2 aircraft carriers, 3 squadrons with a total of 15 cruisers between them, 2 flotillas each with 8 or 9 destroyers, and some 20 or so submarines. In addition, also in home waters, another 2 battleships and 2 aircraft carriers were based in the English Channel with 3 cruisers and a destroyer flotilla; and another 2 cruisers and a destroyer flotilla were based on the Humber. Additional escort vessels, meaning destroyers and sloops, were based on Devonport, the naval base at Plymouth, and at Portsmouth.
Wartime started to change the structure of the Royal Navy. New commands were created for the North Atlantic and the South Atlantic. Six home commands were also created: Orkney and Shetland, which included Scapa Flow; Rosyth; Nore; Dover; Portsmouth; and, finally, the Western Approaches, originally based on Plymouth but under the pressure of heavy German bombing, moved to Liverpool. On 2 December 1941, the China Station evolved into the British Eastern Fleet with a commander-in-chief, and after the fall of Singapore it moved first to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and once that was attacked, to Kilindini (or Mombasa) in British East Africa (now Kenya).
The Royal Navy in 1939 had far closer links with the navies of the British Empire than is the case today. The relationships varied, with the Canadians taking a far more independent view than the Australians or New Zealanders. The four main Empire navies were the Royal Australian Navy, the Royal Canadian Navy and the Royal Indian Navy, which had been known as the Royal Indian Marine as late as 1935; there was also the New Zealand Division, which in wartime grew to become the Royal New Zealand Navy. In addition, the Royal Egyptian Navy was commanded by a British admiral as even though officially Egypt was an independent kingdom and not part of the Empire, it was heavily influenced by the UK.
No other navy had such a wide spread of responsibilities. It could be fairly said that where the Royal Navy had fleets, the French navy – the Marine Nationale – had squadrons.
Imposing Limitations on the Royal Navy
Of course, there were a number of reasons for this, of which the poor state of the economy was just one. Another was the inclination of British politicians to do more in the way of reducing defence expenditure than was required by international efforts to encourage disarmament. This went down well with an electorate that was determined to avoid war at almost any price. After the First World War, a major conference convened in Washington also introduced limits on the size of the main navies. No longer could the United Kingdom strive to maintain a navy that was the equivalent of any two other navies, the so-called ‘Two-Power Standard’. The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 stipulated that the Royal Navy and the United States Navy were to be the same size, with not only the total tonnage of ships defined but also the maximum tonnage of each type of warship and limits placed on the maximum size of any type of warship.
Cruisers, for example, could not be heavier than 10,000 tons displacement; battleships and battle-cruisers were limited to 35,000 tons; and aircraft carriers could not be more than 27,000 tons, although as a concession the RN and USN were each allowed two carriers of up to 35,000 tons. These two navies were limited to a total warship tonnage of 525,000 tons each, with Japan, a First World War ally, limited to 315,000 tons, while France and Italy were both limited to 175,000 tons.
This was all very well, but each of the three largest navies had battleships and battle-cruisers in excess of their permitted tonnage, and all three took the same option: that of each converting two battle-cruisers to aircraft carriers. The Imperial Japanese Navy lost one of its battle-cruisers while under conversion as the shipyard was devastated in an earthquake, so a battleship was converted instead.
The British government decided that new cruisers should have a maximum tonnage of 8,500 tons rather than 10,000 tons, and that aircraft carriers should be no heavier than 23,000 tons. While this was happening – and some ships were built with weaknesses as a result – the future Axis powers adopted the opposite course, consistently understating the tonnage of new ships and even building two ships unofficially while stating that just one was under construction. The UK, despite having battleships of First World War vintage with main armament of 15in calibre and two more modern ships with main armament of 16in calibre, decided that the King George V-class battleships should be built with a main armament of just 14in calibre. Reducing the calibre of the guns not only meant that they packed less of a punch, but also had a slightly shorter range.
At the London Naval Conference of 1930, Japan pressed for a total tonnage that was the same size as that allocated to the Royal Navy and the United States Navy. When this did not happen, in 1934 the country formally notified the other Washington Naval Treaty signatories that she no longer considered herself bound by the restrictions.
Germany was also increasingly concerned with rebuilding her military strength. The Paris Air Agreement of 1926 allowed the country to build commercial aircraft and operate air services, but after Hitler came to power in 1933 work on building a new air force started, while the six elderly coastal battleships allowed under the Treaty of Versailles started to be replaced by modern Panzerschiffe. The London Naval Treaty of 1936 allowed the reconstruction of the German navy, granting the country a total tonnage of 35 per cent of that of the Royal Navy but, inexplicably, allowing parity with the Royal Navy in submarines!
No longer limited to having a coastal defence force, the Germans started to prepare, laying down new battleships and battle-cruisers, including building one battle-cruiser, Gneisenau, sister of Scharnhorst, secretly. Two aircraft carriers were planned but only one, the Graf Zeppelin, was actually built and never entered service. At headquarters, the German navy started to plan for expansion far beyond what was permitted by the London Naval Treaty. As previously described, first came Plan X which was superseded by Plan Y, and the latter overtaken by Plan Z; even this last plan was modified to allow for an increase in the number of U-boats.
As also mentioned above, after the First World War and the abdication of the Kaiser, the German navy went through a process of renaming. It was no longer the Kaiserliche Marine or Imperial German Navy, but instead became the Reichsmarine or State Navy. Hitler then changed this to Kriegsmarine or War Navy.
The Royal Navy of 1914 had its own aircraft, with the Royal Naval Air Service growing throughout the war, but on 1 April 1918 this was transferred with the Army’s Royal Flying Corps to form the new Royal Air Force. The RNAS had by this time grown to 55,000 personnel and 2,500 aircraft. This meant that the navy that had invented the aircraft carrier and conducted trials with catapult-launching found itself with just the few aircraft that could be launched from battleships, battle-cruisers and cruisers, and was providing aircraft carriers for an air force to use. The RAF even invented the Fleet Air Arm as part of RAF Coastal Area, which later became Coastal Command.
Nevertheless, this anomaly was being rectified. In 1937, it was decided that the Royal Navy should have the Fleet Air Arm, although the change did not actually happen until May 1939. Many of the RAF personnel serving with the RN volunteered to remain, becoming the Royal Navy’s Air Branch.
This was not simply a matter of administration or of which budget naval aviation was funded from, but of denying the Royal Navy senior officers with any practical knowledge of aviation and how to use air power effectively at sea. By contrast, the United States Navy had progressed to the point where only a naval aviator could command an aircraft carrier. It was only the Royal Navy whose senior officers believed that high-performance aircraft could not operate from an aircraft carrier; the Japanese and the Americans knew differently.
To many, it seemed that the Admiralty and the rest of the government had forgotten Lord Fisher’s dictum that the future of naval warfare would be in the air and under the sea. By the air, Fisher had meant airships, but when he became First Sea Lord for the first time in 1904, it was still not known that the Wright brothers had been making their first flights and this did not become public knowledge until 1908. In the early 1920s, the magazine Punch ran a cartoon showing Britannia ‘in holiday mood’ at her ease on a seashore, asking Mr Punch what the wild waves were saying. He replied: ‘They are saying, ma’am, that if you want to rule them you must rule the skies above them as well.’
In short, the Royal Navy still clung to the belief that any future war would consist of major fleet actions dominated by the battleship, and officers continued to be taught the ‘lessons’ of Jutland. The lessons of Jutland, or rather the mistakes, were to be of little value as the war that lay ahead was indeed going to be fought largely beneath the waves and above them.
The British government had seen that the Royal Navy had played fair between the wars and abided by international treaties, and indeed had them enforced on it ever more strictly by successive governments that had drawn the strings of the public purse tight and suffered from an unnecessary and dangerous desire to reduce the size of ships and the quality of their armament. In 1939, it was expected to face opponents who had treated their treaty obligations with contempt and whose expansion plans had never been limited by money – even if, as in the case of Germany, their economies were failing – but only by shipbuilding capacity and the availability of raw materials.
The stresses of the interwar depression had reached right down from the top of the Royal Navy to the bottom. Ill-thought-out across-the-board pay cuts during the financial crisis of 1931 had resulted in a mutiny among ratings aboard the ships of the Atlantic Fleet at Invergordon on the east coast of Scotland. Senior officers were desperate to get a sea-going command as there were so few. An officer without a ship or a posting ashore awaiting him all too frequently saw their careers interrupted by a spell on half-pay, and this unpleasant aspect of service life and family finances was a danger for officers as senior as rear admiral.
It was not until the realities of the deteriorating international situation began to dawn on the British government that half-pay was abolished in 1938, the same year that officers over the age of 30 received a marriage allowance for the first time. As a further sign that a time of great national danger was coming, the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS or ‘Wrens’) was also reintroduced after having been abandoned after the end of the First World War. Other actions were taken as well, with volunteers sought from those already serving in the Royal Navy to allow expansion of the Fleet Air Arm and of the Submarine Service, with both always kept separate from the rest of the RN or the ‘General Service’.
War Looms
Few, if any, in the Royal Navy were surprised as war approached. Many in the service had expected war as early as October 1935, after Italy had invaded Abyssinia. The League of Nations was expected to sanction war against Italy but this did not happen, partly because the United States was not a member and at the time was also more interested in isolationism than interventionism, but even more importantly because France did not want to face up to a war in the Mediterranean and on one of her borders.
Tensions had also been increased by the crisis over Czechoslovakia and then Italy’s seizure of Albania. Having been granted leave to take the Czech Sudetenland in 1938, Germany finished the job by taking the rest of Czechoslovakia in 1939, by which time it had also absorbed Austria.