Military Innovation in The Interwar Period by Williamson Murray & Allan R. Millett

Author:Williamson Murray & Allan R. Millett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1996-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

Doctrine and the carrier program

These conceptions of battle had a considerable effect on the development of naval aviation. The priority given to seeking command of the sea through decisive battle, for example, inevitably lowered the priority on trade protection or escort carriers. Despite imaginative ideas about “mercantile aircraft carriers,” this scale of priorities combined with constrained economic and industrial resources meant that Britain, a great trading nation, went to war in 1939 without a single escort carrier. In an era when battle fleet needs were far from met, the Royal Navy suffered under an even greater neglect of the requirements of trade protection.

The British expectations that carriers would probably operate with the battle fleet, very possibly in Europe’s narrow, shore-bound waters, heavily influenced their approach to carrier design. This does much to explain Britain’s pioneering development of armored aircraft carriers. The inclination to build carriers capable of absorbing heavy damage underlined the navy’s lack of faith in the defensive capabilities of fleet fighters. Admiral G.C.C. Royle, the Fifth Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Air Service a bare two months before the Norwegian campaign of 1940, usefully summarized the Admiralty’s reliance on anti-aircraft fire. “The Fleet when at sea with its destroyer screen in place presents quite the most formidable target a formation of aircraft could attack and the presence of fighter aircraft to protect the fleet is by no means a necessity. They should be looked upon as an added precaution, if available.”57

This policy was disastrously mistaken. But it was the product, not so much of naval conservatism nor even of a priori doctrinal assumptions, but of a whole set of quite minor technical considerations and limitations, advanced more often than not by flyers themselves. These included a general preference for what Churchill called “knock-about aircraft for general purposes,” largely because the few aircraft the fleet could carry should be as versatile as possible. Delays in production of effective catapults and the general difficulties of carrier operations also tended to make the Air Ministry skeptical about the fighting potential of naval aircraft. Until radar’s advent in 1938–1939, countless exercises suggested that the few fighters carried with the fleet stood little chance of intercepting inbound enemy aircraft. Finally, long delays in acquiring effective, remotely controlled target aircraft (brought about by the Air Ministry’s desire not to endanger its pioneering work in missile technology) delayed the Admiralty’s discovery of its anti-aircraft weaknesses, although the truth was certainly beginning to dawn by 1939. Interestingly, around 1934, the Japanese also came to the conclusion that naval fighters were of limited utility, and for much the same reasons as the British. All of this would suggest that doctrine is largely a function of technical reality and that the existence or absence of quite small-scale technical developments often has disproportionately large-scale effect on the potentialities of innovation.

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