Captain Seafort wrote:BigJKU316 wrote:Why was British Naval Aviation not nearly on the level of Japanese or American during WWII?
Three reasons, none of which have anything to do with problems with senior officers.
1) Until 1937 the Fleet Air Arm was a branch of the RAF. This meant that all procurement came of of the Air Staff budget, who were far more interested in UK Air Defence and the Strategic Bomber force than the requirements of fleet aviation. The result was that the FAA got pretty gash equipment - Skuas were great aircraft in their day, but they were trying to do too many jobs, and were out of date by the time the war came along. Stringbags were obsolete from the start - it was only the quality of the aircrew that allowed them to pull off what they did.
This was a cause of many technical issues, on that I will agree (and I should have stated more clearly that it was the overall way in which the RN perceived and dealt with airpower issues both offensive and defensive). However it also stripped the RN of pretty much all of its officers with practical experience of actually flying off of carriers and hobbled the development of carrier doctrine (both offensive and defensive) within the Royal Navy.
This manifested itself in a number of manners but I will stick to one to keep this somewhat brief.
In 1926 the Imperial Defense Committee on Anti-Aircraft Defense met to determine the most likely method of attacking ships with aircraft and suggest solutions. It concluded that aircraft could only do so by flying straight and level. This view was re-stated by the Naval Anti-Aircraft Gunnery Com in 1931.
Setting aside the failure to develop divebombers if we want to place blame with the RAF the RN is still open to criticism that its highest levels accepted this position as correct when it clearly was at odds with other powers. Both the Japanese and United States focused on the Dive Bomber from the 1920's on as a primary means of hitting ships underway from the air (along with torpedo bombers). Very little of this was a secret.
The lack of really experienced voices in naval aviation within these groups led to this problem. Within the RAF postings to the FAA were hardly the route to quick advancement. Within the RN very few had practical experience trying to hit a ship with a bomb from an airplane.
This lack of vision by its senior leaders in these two meetings led directly to the development of HACS (High Angle Control System) which was the RN's primary fire control system for anti-aircraft fire at the outset of the war. It was designed to deal with one threat, that of the level flying, high-altitude bomber.
In essence they built a system that could not compute and correct for change of altitude, speed and course. If the target was moving in a nice flat, straight line at a constant speed it would work fine. But against dive bombers it was next to useless. Additionally the guns on the vast majority of ships could not even elevate high enough to engage dive bombers in terminal dives anyway. This was in contrast the the US Mk. 37 FCS which was fully tachymetric and could handle changes in all three of those directions.
Now the people in the British military are not stupid. There were likely plenty of people with practical experience that could have told you that the most likely threat to ships would be dive bombers rather than level bombers. After all, the UK invented dive bombing. But not enough of these people got into positions of power to make a difference. As a consequence RN ships went ot sea with some of the worst Anti-Aircraft capabilities in the world. It was not that they could not build a better system, they just did not have people around to tell them they were building the wrong damn thing.
This is not the same as allowing officers to just sit in positions, clogging up advancement opportunities for younger minds, but the stripping off of aviators from the RN to the RAF (where they were bastard children and not listened too) had the same net effect. You had no one who properly understood and had practical experience with the threat around at a high enough level to force a correct assessment, and you got HACS as a result.
That is the short term danger of allowing officers to sit on spots if there is a dramatic change in military tactics and technology over say a 10-20 year period. Many of the most senior are not likely to have as good of a grasp on it as those working their way up who have practical experience with the threat and countering it.
We were too good too early. That meant that while the Royal Navy of the 1920s had the best carrier strike force in the world by a huge margin, by the late thirties we were relying on cruiser and battleship refits that didn't have the capacity of the US and Japanese big refits and purpose-built ships. The Ark was out only decent carrier until the I-class started being commissioned in decent numbers, by which time we'd dropped behind in practical experience. We still built by far the best carriers of the war.
Now we are likely way off topic but what the heck. I am always up for a naval history discussion.
My presumption is that you are refering to the debate between armored flight decks and unarmored flight decks. Your conclusion is quite common but does not really stand up to a more detailed analysis of what did in fact happen with the ships in questions.
Formidable and Illustrious were written off due to war damage. The first had center shaft damage which will get any ship in any era for the most part.
Illustrious is a different case. She had an aircraft handling accident and burned within her hanger deck, which deformed the hull of the ship too badly to continue. This illustrated the main drawback of the enclosed, armored hanger deck in which the flight deck was the strength deck of the ship and it would rear its head a few more times for this type of design.
The same thing would get the Indomitable after the war, a fire in the hanger deck would distort the hull, rending the ship beyond repair.
The ships had an unexpected issue. The void of the enclosed hanger deck tended to deform when being hit. As the ships took damage their hull structures twisted beyond reasonable repair efforts. This, coupled with the known drawbacks of smaller air-groups, lower ceilings in the hanger (14 feet in the last three I types limited what they could carry as far as aircraft and meant the most modern British carriers could not carry the F4U, which was their best fighter option at that time) and most importantly the small size of lifts and complete lack of deck edge lifts (which limited the ability to rapidly sortie planes compared to US designs) really limited the utility of British carriers both at the end of WWII and in the post-war period.
Most importantly they really gained very little from the armored flight decks to begin with. The bombs they were designed to stop were far smaller than those in use by the time of WWII so they would do little good there. The primary difference is that it severly limited air group size, and thus made them much less of an offensive threat.
The British admitted as much by desigining their last WWII era carriers along the lines of an enlarged Essex with the Malta Class, which had the hanger deck as the strength deck where the majority of the armor was carried in an effort to operate a larger group of planes and avoid the kind of crippling damage dealt to the open box hanger structure necessitated by having the flight deck be the strength deck of a ship.
