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Aviation History
1945
1945 - 1064.PDF
MAY 3IST, 1945 Despite the use' of arrester gear in pre-war days, it was a long time before high-performance fighters, such as the Seafire, were used on British aircraft carriers. Lessons of the Air War Part III—Air Power and Sea Power By MAJOR F. A. de V. ROBERTSON, V.D. ONE of the great lessons of the late war with Germany ,and also of the present war with Japan is that seapower must be supported by air power. It cannot do without it. Aircraft are as necessary as destroyers in the composition of a fleet. To send out warships without the support of aircraft is to ask for trouble, as the Royal Navy learnt to its cost in the grievous loss of two capital ships off Malaya. Perhaps it is somewhat of an exaggeration to say that this is a lesson of the recent and present wars, for the principle was accepted before 1939 ; but the German and Japanese wars have provided proof that the principle was correct. They also led to much development of the sup- port which air power could give to sea power, and showed up one or two limitations of the new weapon—limitations which perhaps were only of a temporary nature. The survival of the German warships Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen in Brest Harbour, and their subsequent escape marked at the time a limit to the powers of bomber aircraft. But during that time the British aircraft which attacked the ships had not at their disposal bombs weigh- ing 12,000 lb., let alone ten-tonners. If those missiles had been available then, the story would almost certainly have had a very different ending. "Find, fix, strike," are the words which the Fleet Air Arm has adopted as its motto. The views of the Admiralty on naval air power were shown before the war by the equipment provided for that arm It consisted of two classes of aircraft: (1) fighters, and (2) T.S.R. machines. Those initials stand for torpedo-spotter-reconnaissance. Any fleet air force must have, fighters; that is now universally accepted. Their business is the defence of the fleet from air attack, and on other occasions the escorting of the T.S.R. machines. The latter were multi-purpose aircraft, and the old proverb is sometimes justified which says that a Jack-of-all-trades is master of none. But the Navy, while showing that it had clearly envisaged the various tasks which its aircraft would have to do, was hampered by hangar limitations on the existing carriers. It had very few carriers, and the biggest and best of them, H.M.S. Ark Royal, was only commissioned a short time before the outbreak of war. Therefore, in order to pro- vide for reconnaissance, spotting for the guns, and attack1-' with bomb and torpedo, as well as for air defence, it was necessary to use multi-purpose aircraft. Aircraft Carriers Before going farther, it will be as well to note that naval air power does not consist only of carrier-borne air- craft. It needs also shore-based squadrons, some equipped with flying boats and others with landplanes. These wen- provided by Coastal Command of the Royal Air Force, which we shall consider later on. One of the main points to note in the recent and present wars is the great increase in the reputation of the aircraft carrier. We have remarked that in 1939 the Royal Navy had very few of them, and only one of those few was modern. Others were being built, and in due course they came to play their part in the naval war. It would prob- ably be unfair to attribute this shortage in 1939 to a lack of foresight on the part of the Lords of the Admiralty or to doubts about the utility of the carrier. It was mainly due to the policy of disarmament and economy which had prevailed for so many years before the Munich crisis. In other quarters, however, grave doubts were felt about the utility of the carrier. Everyone admitted that
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