Consultant editor Martin Windrow
ORIGINS OF THE AIR BRANCH
RECRUITMENT & TRAINING
COMMAND STRUCTURE
CAMPAIGNS
TACTICS
SOURCES & SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
PLATE COMMENTARIES
It was in 1903 – the same year that the Wright brothers pioneered powered flight in a heavier-than-air craft – that the Royal Navy first showed an interest in aviation. The American Samuel F. Cody approached the Admiralty with his designs for a ship-mounted kite which could be used for reconnaissance, signalling and direction of naval gunfire. Within five weeks, demonstrations began to show the potential of ship-mounted kites; a single aircrewman could be lifted to a height of 600 feet with a radio aerial, greatly improving the range of communications. The Admiralty was impressed by the results from the trials; but Cody asked for extortionate sums of money for his designs, so the Royal Navy purchased its first kites from another designer. Simultaneously, a naval committee was set up to investigate the possibility of using balloons for a similar purpose. While advances were being made in the field of conventional heavier-than-air machines, the Admiralty felt that the future of an air arm for the Royal Navy lay with balloons and airships, which had a superior endurance and load-carrying capacity.
It was for this reason that the Admiralty turned down an offer of patents from the Wright brothers in 1907. Only a year later, however, the Wrights had developed an aeroplane with a range of over 50 miles; and in November 1908, Cdr Dunne became the first RN officer to fly a heavier-than-air aircraft. Two years later Lt G.C. Colmore became the Royal Navy’s first qualified pilot – although he had had to fund his own training – and the Admiralty began to show an interest. In 1911 the British military boasted only six qualified pilots; but the RN had trialed its first seaplanes by the end of that year, and in January 1912 Lt C.R. Samson flew a Short S27 biplane from a platform on the bows of the battleship HMS Africa. Samson was appointed OC Naval Wing of the Army’s Royal Flying Corps in October that year.
Both the Netheravon flying school and the Royal Aero Club offered to teach naval officers to fly, and out of 200 volunteers three Royal Navy and two Royal Marine officers were selected to become the RN’s first Admiralty-funded pilots. In May 1913 the seaplane carrier HMS Hermes became the parent ship of the Naval Wing of the RFC; it operated the Short S64 Folder, the first aircraft ever to be designed with folding wings for stowage at sea. On 1 July 1914 the Royal Naval Air Service was formed, giving the Admiralty full control over its own air arm. In September 1914, Hermes was joined by HMS Ark Royal, a merchant ship converted into a seaplane carrier capable of embarking ten aircraft.
With the outbreak of war in Europe in August 1914 both seaplane carriers were immediately put into service; however, they were of only limited value, since they were only able to operate aircraft in calm waters and were limited to maximum speeds of some ten knots. Just two months after the outbreak of hostilities Hermes was torpedoed and sunk off Calais. However, the RNAS was soon to prove itself capable of much more than reconnaissance and communications. On Christmas Day 1914 seven seaplanes were launched from the decks of the carriers Engadine, Riviera and Empress to bomb the German airship hangars at Cuxhaven. Further advances were made when Short S184 seaplanes were modified to carry 14in torpedoes; on 12 August 1915, Flt Cdr C.H.K. Edmonds became the first man in history to sink a vessel under way at sea by an air-launched weapon, when his torpedo sank a 5,000-tonne Turkish merchant ship in the Gulf of Xeros.
The RNAS was not confined to the tasks which it had originally been formed to carry out; with the development of the ‘scout’ or fighter aircraft, many naval squadrons became involved in the growing air war along the Western Front, and in defending Britain itself from enemy aircraft, after the RFC directly asked for assistance. On the night of 6/7 June 1915, Flt S/Lt R.A.J. Warneford became the first naval pilot, and only the second airman, to be awarded the Victoria Cross when he became the first pilot to bring down a Zeppelin; he had diverted himself away from a bombing mission in order to use his bombs air-to-air against the German Army airship LZ37 (Olt Otto von de Haegen). Another notable naval pilot was the Canadian LtCdr Raymond Collishaw, DSO*, DFC, DSC, who ended the Great War as the leading RNAS (and the British air forces’ third-ranking) surviving ace, with an official tally of 60 aerial victories.
While RNAS pilots were proving their skills alongside their brothers-in-arms in khaki, many of the service’s greatest achievements were in the specific field of maritime aviation. As well as pioneering both the airborne torpedo and depth-charge attack, the RNAS landed the first aircraft on the deck of a vessel while it was under way, when SqnCdr E.H. Dunning sideslipped a Sopwith Pup on to the converted forecastle of the battlecruiser HMS Furious on 2 August 1917 (unfortunately, he was killed five days later while attempting to repeat the feat). But however great the contribution made by the RNAS to both the war effort and to pioneering the techniques of naval aviation, the service was not to survive even until the Armistice.
The British government commissioned the South African statesman Gen J.C. Smuts to investigate the most efficient usage of the air assets available to the armed forces. Smuts concluded that, since there was a significant overlap between the duties of the RNAS and the Army’s RFC, the two should be merged into an independent air force. Thus, on 1 April 1918, the Royal Air Force was born. The important place that aviation now held within the Royal Navy was strikingly demonstrated by the size to which the RNAS had grown in just four years: no fewer than 55,000 personnel and 2,500 aircraft were transferred to the fledgling RAF when the RNAS was dissolved.
At the Armistice in November 1918, Britain had the largest air force in the world, with 22,647 aeroplanes and just under 291,000 personnel of all ranks; but immediately following the end of hostilities, the RAF was reduced to a mere 12 squadrons. Facing difficulty in finding a role in peacetime to justify its very existence, the RAF concentrated mainly on bombers and the support of ground forces; as a result, Britain’s leading place in naval aviation was completely lost. The RAF simply had no interest in maritime aviation, and only reluctantly took on this role. Naval aircrews and ground crews were still very much a part of the RAF, though now going to sea wearing RAF rank and uniform. Some Royal Navy officers – particularly observers after 1921 – were still trained by the RAF as aircrew, the majority of them operating seaplanes from battleships, although some still flew alongside RAF aircrews aboard carriers.
In 1923 the Balfour Committee was established to investigate this problem, and on 1 April 1924 a Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Air Force was officially formed with five squadrons of aircraft. While the Air Ministry still retained administrative control of the FAA, the Royal Navy and Royal Marines now provided 70 per cent of its pilots and all observers and telegraphist air gunners; however, naval pilots were now required to hold commissions in both the RN and RAF, since officially only RAF officers were allowed to qualify as pilots… For the naval officer flying was seen as a somewhat career-limiting choice, as promotion prospects were less favourable than within the executive branch.
While the RAF had greatly hampered progress in the field of specifically maritime aircraft, the few aviation-conscious minds within the Admiralty had at least done their best to advance the idea of the aircraft carrier. By the time of the birth of the Fleet Air Arm the Royal Navy had converted four ships into aircraft carriers; HMS Argus, completed in 1918, was the first flush-decked carrier; HMS Eagle and Hermes sported the first starboard-mounted island superstructures; and the British developed the ‘round down’ at the rear of the flight deck, to reduce turbulence on finals to land.
Naval aviation spent the majority of the interwar period in the hands of the RAF. The 1920s and early 1930s were a time of limited growth in military aviation across the board, but perhaps nowhere more so than in the FAA; even so, British carriers were the first to develop damage control measures such as hangar sprays and fire curtains. By the mid 1930s, when RAF Fighter Command was readying itself for delivery of its first modern, eight-gun Spitfire and Hurricane monoplane fighters, the FAA was still operating only biplanes with fixed undercarriages. The conservative and parsimonious Air Ministry believed that the Royal Navy could be protected from enemy land-based bombers by the RAF’s land-based fighters, thus convincing the Admiralty that the only target for a naval fighter would be an enemy spotter aircraft.
With war in Europe looming the bickering between the RAF and RN over control of maritime aviation only increased. Sir Thomas Inskip, the Minister for Coordination of Defence, issued a report to the government in July 1937 in which he recommended that naval aviation be handed back to the Royal Navy in full. However, it was not until 24 May 1939 that the Fleet Air Arm was officially disbanded, and replaced with the Air Branch of the Royal Navy (although readers should bear in mind that the Fleet Air Arm title was retained unofficially by RN personnel throughout World War II, and the two terms will therefore be used interchangeably throughout this text).
Compared with the service that the Royal Navy had bequeathed to the new Royal Air Force in 1918, what it got back in 1939 was a fraction of the size and equipped almost completely with obsolete aircraft. An interesting comparison can be drawn with the United States Navy, which retained control of its own aviation assets throughout the interwar period. The US Navy was, by 1939, the world leader in naval aviation, with a large and modern force of aircraft carriers and embarked aircraft which, in some cases, outperformed their land-based contemporaries. In Britain, Air Branch entered World War II with just 232 outdated aircraft and 360 pilots, and a few air stations; Royal Naval Air Station (RNAS) Yeovilton in Somerset was still under construction at the outbreak of the war. Of the Royal Navy’s total force of seven aircraft carriers, four were due to be paid off. Assistance was provided by the RAF in terms of loaned ground crews and training for new Air Branch personnel, but years of neglect and misuse at the hands of the RAF meant that Air Branch entered the war in a lamentable state of readiness for modern operations.
At the outbreak of the war a large number of the officers and men of the FAA had transferred directly across from the RAF following the Inskip Report. Even so the service remained significantly undermanned, and 1,500 aircraft mechanics had to be ‘borrowed’ from the RAF.
The normal route for regular RN officers was through the Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth (BRNC). This entailed joining the Navy as a cadet, either at the age of 13 or straight from school at 18; this intake formed the bulk of pre-war officers, but contributed only a limited percentage during the course of the war. There was no officer aircrew option as such for men joining the interwar Navy; however, seamen officers had the option to transfer branches, to pilot battleship-launched flying boats or to the observer branch, both of which were trained by the RAF.
Similarly, rating air mechanics were trade-trained by the RAF, following basic training at either HMS Collingwood in Fareham or HMS Royal Arthur in Skegness, and specialist training at HMS Gosling near Warrington. The air mechanic branch was separated into two tiers: ‘artificers’ were the more highly skilled, and underwent a longer period of training than the more numerous ‘naval air mechanics’. Before the outbreak of war, telegraphist air gunners (TAGs) were exclusively volunteers from other branches within the RN; joining the Navy as a TAG from the outset was not a recognized route, and during the interwar years TAG training was also carried out by the RAF.