The latest Royal Navy carriers had the most advanced radar
of the day. Aircraft communications systems and direction-finding homing were
steadily improved. The Royal Navy continued developing and refining the
techniques for long-range enemy raid detection and fighter direction that were
first tried in Norway and employed during subsequent operations in the
Mediterranean. Impartial testament to the quality of Fleet Air Arm operations
at this time came from an American observer, Commander E G Taylor (US Navy),
who served in the Fleet Air Arm in 1940 as a Royal Navy sub lieutenant. He
informed the US Navy that the Fleet Air Arm in the spring of 1940 was in a
desperate condition as regards pilots, aircraft numbers and quality, but did an
excellent job with what it had through skill, innovation and new technology.
Taylor described Fleet Air Arm fighter control techniques as very effective and
far in advance of the US Navy which, in his view, was still not tackling the
issue seriously at the end of 1941. Taylor subsequently played a part in Royal
Navy procurement of the Wildcat, drawing on his war experience. The US Navy was
later impressed with, and subsequently largely adopted, Royal Navy air defence
tactics demonstrated by the Royal Navy carrier Victorious when on loan to the
US Navy Pacific Fleet in mid-1943.
By mid-1941 the Royal Navy also had the basis of the action
information organisation (AIO) that would revolutionise the way naval
commanders used available information to drive operations. It would be followed
with only minor incremental changes in the Royal Navy and US Navy through to
the 1960s. The IJN had no radar at all before late 1942, totally inadequate
airborne communications, and no real concept of fighter direction. IJN combat
air patrols essentially ran themselves. This meant that IJN air defence was
inefficient and susceptible to surprise.
The Royal Navy had been experimenting with night flying
operations, including night torpedo attack, since the early 1930s. The scope
for night attack pre-war was, however, limited because of the difficulty of
conducting night searches before the advent of radar. It depended on night
shadowing of an enemy already located at dusk, at which the Fleet Air Arm
practised and became adept. However, during 1941, about half of the Royal
Navy’s strike aircraft were fitted with ASV, providing a genuine night search
capability for the first time. This enabled the Royal Navy carriers to
undertake attacks at night or in bad weather, conditions impossible for the IJN
or US Navy. Examples of night/bad weather operations were the attack on Taranto
in November 1940, a night attack at a range of around 180 miles from
Illustrious, and the previously mentioned bad weather attacks on Bismarck from
Victorious and Ark Royal on 24 May and in the afternoon and evening of 26 May
1941. ASV was arguably crucial to the success of the Bismarck attacks, as
emphasised by the commanding officer of 825 Squadron in Victorious. ‘ASV proved
to be of assistance beyond all measure. While remaining hidden from the enemy
by cloud, my observer was able to give me a clear picture of own and enemy
forces up to the very last moment of breaking cloud for attack’.
By mid-1941 the Royal Navy had, therefore, acquired a much
wider base of wartime experience in carrier operations than is often suggested.
Some of this reflected the application and elaboration of pre-war thinking. The
‘find, fix and strike’ role on behalf of the battle-fleet evident at Matapan
and the Bismarck operations fall into this category, and even the Taranto
operation drew heavily on pre-war plans. The Royal Navy had formed a special
committee to look at air attack on enemy bases in 1929, and investigated the
merits of specialised weapons for this. Mediterranean Fleet orders in 1936
included instructions for shallow-water torpedo settings for an attack on
Taranto. However, in air defence the Royal Navy was breaking new ground with
capabilities, not only radar but also VHF communications and ‘identification
friend or foe’ (IFF), which were not available before the war. It was also
becoming adept at exploiting the full range of carrier capabilities: search,
strike against land and sea targets, air defence, and anti-submarine, which all
featured in complex multi-threat scenarios such as Mediterranean convoy
operations.
All of this had demanded much tactical innovation and a new
approach to force composition. It was the Royal Navy which consolidated the
concept of the fast multi-role carrier task force in this period, of which
Force H was the supreme example. This model would not be embraced by the US
Navy until much later, because until its new build battleships (North Carolina
and Indiana classes) became available for the Pacific in late 1942, it had no
capital ships fast enough to operate with its carriers, and it also lacked the
oil tankers to support them until well into 1943. By contrast, the Royal Navy
not only had its battlecruisers, but also widely used the modernised Queen
Elizabeth class, significantly faster than their US Navy equivalents, alongside
its carriers in both the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean. This not only ensured
support against surprise surface attack, but also provided substantial
anti-aircraft firepower. Finally, as proof that it could conduct the most
advanced multicarrier operations, the Royal Navy undertook a four-carrier
operation against the most challenging opposition, air, surface and submarine,
in Operation Pedestal, the convoy to Malta, in August 1942. Both the IJN and US
Navy would have struggled to conduct a comparable operation against an
equivalent level of air attack at this time. Overall therefore, while the Royal
Navy could not hope to compete with the IJN in late 1941 in either carrier
numbers or quantity and quality of embarked aircraft, it would be quite wrong
to view it as left behind in the exercise of air power at sea. The Royal Navy
carrier force had significant strengths and experience to draw on.
Royal Air Force maritime strike
The 1937 agreement gave the Royal Navy full control of its
carrier air arm, but left land-based maritime attack with the Royal Air Force.
For the Royal Air Force, this role inevitably took lower priority in the first
phase of the war to the air defence of the British homeland, to strategic
bombing, and even within the maritime sphere to the anti-submarine effort. The
emphasis on strategic bombing reflected long-standing service doctrine and it
was the only immediate way of directly attacking Germany.
By late 1940 the Royal Air Force had nevertheless deployed a
new torpedo bomber, the Beaufort, for maritime strike. It was broadly
equivalent in capability to the IJN land-based torpedo attack bombers, albeit
with less range. However, a British equivalent of the IJN 11th Air Fleet would
have required a significant diversion of resources from Bomber Command to
Coastal Command that was never forthcoming, even in the face of the acute
threats in the Battle of the Atlantic and in the Indian Ocean in 1942. The
United Kingdom-based Beaufort torpedo force struggled, therefore, to reach four
operational squadrons by the end of 1941.226 The only overseas torpedo force at
that time comprised the two Malaya squadrons equipped with obsolete Vildebeest
biplanes. The parlous state of Royal Air Force torpedo strike in early 1942 was
summarised in a report for the Assistant Chief of Air Staff (Operations). This
stated that although torpedo attack was more effective against ships than
bombing, the Royal Air Force had neglected it for both technical and tactical
reasons. It highlighted lack of high-level commitment, shortage of torpedoes
and associated maintenance and support facilities, and inadequate training for
this specialised role, given constant diversion of aircraft and crews to other
tasks. This presented major difficulties in expanding the force.
The lack of high-level support for torpedo attack partly
reflected the scarcity of high-value warship targets accessible to the United
Kingdom force, since bombing was seen as adequate for interdiction of
commercial traffic. Bombing was also the preferred option for attacking naval
targets in port or dockyard. However, it mainly reflected the entrenched belief
across most of the Royal Air Force leadership that the strategic bombing of
Germany must take primacy and that everything else, with few exceptions,
represented a diversion from winning the war. Statistics did not help the
Coastal Command case for enhanced surface strike resources. They demonstrated
that surface strike was very expensive for only limited benefit. Between April
1940 and March 1943, Coastal Command conducted 3700 attacks which sank 107
vessels (almost all merchant) for the loss of 648 aircraft. Minelaying,
primarily by Bomber Command, sank three times the number of ships (369), for
about half the losses (329).
The poor Coastal Command surface attack record was painfully
underlined by the woeful performance of the Beaufort force during the escape of
the German battlecruisers through the Channel in February 1942. By contrast,
both Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were badly damaged by mines dropped along their
predicted track, and Gneisenau was wrecked by Bomber Command in dock at Kiel a
fortnight later. Nevertheless, despite limited resources, the Beaufort force
had some notable successes. An attack on 6 April 1941 crippled Gneisenau
alongside in Brest, and a night operation on 13 June seriously damaged the
pocket battleship Lützow. This attack on Lützow off the Norwegian port of
Egersund took place at a range of about 400 miles, only slightly less than the
later IJN attack on Force Z. It was the first successful attack by a land-based
torpedo force on a capital ship at sea and a harbinger, therefore, for the
attack on Force Z. The Lützow operation obviously contrasted with the poor
performance by all three available United Kingdom Beaufort squadrons against
the German battlecruisers six months later, but this reflected incompetent
communication, command and control, rather than any deficiency in aircraft
performance.
Small size and lack of dedicated expertise in the United
Kingdom Beaufort force constrained the development of a torpedo strike force
overseas. However, two squadrons were deployed to Egypt via Malta in early 1942
to compensate for the planned departure of the Alexandria battle-fleet. This
was destined for the Indian Ocean following the Japanese attack, although the
ships were badly damaged by Italian frogmen before they could be released. This
planned substitution of Beaufort torpedo bombers for battleships was an almost
exact analogy of Yamamoto’s use of the 22nd Air Flotilla to counter Force Z. It
demonstrated that the Royal Navy leadership recognised the strategic impact
that an appropriate land-based strike force could achieve. However, the
Beaufort force was too small, and its crews insufficiently trained, to stand
real comparison with its IJN counterpart. The force took some while to achieve
operational efficiency in the theatre and there were insufficient resources for
an additional force in the Indian Ocean, although one of the Egypt squadrons
would be deployed onward to Ceylon at the end of April. The Chief of Air Staff
accepted that torpedo bombers were the most pressing need in the Far East, but
the only way of providing these was to replace the remaining two Beaufort
squadrons in UK with obsolete Hampdens. The remaining Beauforts would then be
deployed to the Middle East, releasing the two squadrons already despatched
there to go on to India. Clearly, the impact of just two squadrons would have
been limited, although still a significant contribution to the defence of
Ceylon.
The Far East also suffered problems with the planned
production of Beauforts in Australia. Australian Beauforts were to replace the
Vildebeests in Malaya by mid-1941 as part of the ‘336’ reinforcement plan. When
Brooke-Popham took stock of planned reinforcements following his arrival as
Commander-in-Chief Far East at the beginning of 1941, he expected to have two
squadrons of Beauforts and reserves, comprising fifty aircraft by the end of
the year. However, he was aware, following a visit to Australia, that this
reflected an estimated output in Australia of twenty aircraft by October and
seventy at the end of the year. Given the embryonic state of the Australian
aircraft industry, he should perhaps have anticipated that the targets would
slip, even without problems in the American supply chain. Shortages of key
parts from the United States meant that only seven aircraft were completed by
the end of 1941, when production halted for six months. Even if the original
target had been met, the new Beaufort squadrons could not have achieved
operational efficiency until well into 1942, not least due to a shortage of
suitable torpedoes. The modernisation of the Malaya strike force on which Far
East commanders placed much emphasis was, therefore, always compromised
although neither the chiefs of staff nor Far East commanders seem to have known
this. Following the Japanese attack, they repeatedly pressed the Australian
government to expedite the provision of Beauforts to Malaya.
There is no doubt that British maritime air power was quite
inadequate to take on the IJN in December 1941. However, this situation cannot
be reduced to simple explanations. The Royal Navy’s overall record and
experience in 1940 and 1941 demonstrates a good grasp of the risks and
opportunities presented by modern air power at sea, and often showed remarkable
innovation with limited resources. In rebalancing its naval programme in 1940,
the Royal Navy cut battleships, not carriers. The Royal Navy knew its Fleet Air
Arm aircraft were inadequate. It made reasonable and timely decisions to
address this, but fell victim to production priorities in the United Kingdom
and United States it could not foresee. The Royal Air Force’s Beaufort force
had similar potential capability to the IJNAF, but suffered the limitations of
small size, multiple roles and inadequate training for the specialised maritime
environment. The Royal Air Force could have invested more in the Beaufort force
at the expense of bombing. For decision-makers in 1941 that trade-off was hard
to justify, but it made it difficult to build up the force when it was urgently
needed overseas in 1942. Matters did begin to change from mid-1942 with the
decision to develop a variant of the well-proven Beaufighter as a replacement for
the Beaufort. This was the Beaufighter TFX, known as the Torbeau, which became
a very successful maritime strike aircraft, with the first squadron going
operational in the United Kingdom in November that year. The Royal Air Force
should, however, have been quicker to spot the problems with the prospective
Australian Beaufort force, given its importance to Far East reinforcement.
The lack of adequate maritime air resources to meet the IJN
is invariably presented as a consequence of over-stretch. However, the problem
was less one of overall capacity than strategic choices. Britain chose to
prioritise its air resources in 1941 on Fighter and Bomber Commands at home and
in the Middle East, and deliberately to carry risk in the Far East. For a whole
series of reasons outside the scope of this book, which included steady
attrition, production failings, and the need to re-equip the whole frontline,
Bomber Command took a long time to reach a size with which it could have any
hope of strategic effect. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris stated that, when
he took over the command in February 1942, when prospects in the Far East were
most grim, immediate strength was 378 aircraft of which only sixty-nine were
heavy bombers and fifty were light bombers. His primary force was, therefore,
250 medium bombers, about the same as those in the Middle East and those
planned for India by the autumn. Against this background, in the spring of 1942
Pound, with partial support from the new Chief of the Imperial General Staff,
Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, argued forcefully for air resources to be
diverted from bombing to protection of sea communications. Pound’s primary
concern here was the Atlantic, but he also emphasised the need to improve the
defences of the Indian Ocean. He met vigorous opposition from Portal as Chief
of Air Staff, and the Harris numbers help to explain why.
The subsequent argument has been described as one of
Whitehall’s most notorious battles of the war. The debate ran for three months
before a compromise position was reached in July, which provided Pound with
only a limited part of what he had sought. Four factors have been suggested to
explain why Pound substantially conceded:
– The attitude of the prime minister, which was broadly
behind Bomber Command;
– Production limitations, which made it impossible for a
diversion to maritime air to achieve results in a meaningful timescale;
– Shifting strategic perceptions in favour of bombing U-boat
bases and focusing effort on the Bay of Biscay;
– Improved efficiency in Coastal Command by mid-1942.
Portal also had sound reasons for rejecting demands from
Attlee, Beaverbrook and Wavell, as well as Pound, for more bombers to be sent
overseas at this time beyond those currently planned. These included the
obvious constraints in time and shipping space inherent in any move of large
air forces; the technical teething problems with the latest aircraft which
would raise immense serviceability issues outside United Kingdom
infrastructure; the ‘strategic immobility’ caused by the need to replace Bomber
Command’s frontline; and the impossibility of adapting heavy bombers to a
torpedo strike role. These constraints did not reflect well on previous Royal
Air Force planning and procurement, but as ‘we are where we are’ arguments they
were powerful. Also important was the impact of Midway, and the drastic
reduction in the threat to the Indian Ocean. In effect, a slow or even minimal
air build-up in the East was now tolerable.
The striking point is how little was really changed by this
debate. Minimal Admiralty requirements in the Atlantic area were met by the end
of 1942, and arguably in the Indian Ocean too, but more from the impact of
American production than any shift in British priorities. Figures drawn from
the British Official History put the debate in context and underline the
limited scope for more diversion from Bomber Command. In September 1942 Royal
Air Force strength was allocated as follows:
At this time the US Army Air Force also had two bomber
groups with ninety-six heavy bombers in the United Kingdom, three squadrons in
the Middle East and two in India.
A final perspective is provided in post-war remarks from Dr
Noble Frankland, the official historian of Bomber Command, to Admiral Sir
Algernon Willis, Somerville’s second in command in the Indian Ocean during
1942.245 Frankland described Bomber Command during the first part of the war
until mid-1943 as a small, undernourished force, which did not grow at all in
1942, partly due to re-equipping the frontline, but also substantial diversions
to Coastal Command and overseas. Any further diversion might have led to the
collapse of the offensive. Frankland did not believe either Portal or Churchill
harboured illusions that bombing alone would win the war, but they did doubt it
could be won without it, and they may have been right. Harris may have had
illusions that bombing alone would do it, but much of his bombast was also
aimed at maximising resource share. Frankland also stressed the need to
understand that the strategic air offensive embraced many aims and achievements
beyond the general attack on German industry. Initially, reducing the scale of
German air attack on the United Kingdom was a priority, while in 1941–43 a
large part of its effort went on the Battle of the Atlantic, directly or
indirectly. If the results were disappointing, the lesson was not that the
strategy was wrong, but that the force was operationally inadequate. That reflected
poor Royal Air Force equipment and training decisions before the war. Frankland
accepted that by switching more resources to Coastal Command (and by
implication wider strategic communications), success at sea might have come a
little earlier. But the resulting excess resources could not easily have been
switched back later to an effective strategic air campaign. The Battle of the
Atlantic had to be won, but winning this was no good on its own.
