“….it was as if the Royal Navy had never left its wooden walls. It still lingered in the shadow of the “Immortal Memory”, still hoping that Nelson, or someone like him, would magically appear at Portsmouth and lead the fleet to victory and glory. But he did not. Instead, the British navy would find its habit of “muddling through” its reliance on the habits of class and tradition, were no longer enough.”
Thus spake Arthur Herman in his great work of popular maritime history- To Rule the Waves: How the Royal Navy Shaped the Modern World. Though complimentary of the Royal Navy, Herman’s opinion of the navy’s experience of the 20th century mirrors that of many naval enthusiasts- gorged on its naval supremacy, the navy was unprepared for the trials of the world wars. Utterly incapable of changing unless staring annihilation in the face. Too reliant on traditional “battleship” weapons, and blindsided by emergent technologies like submarines and maritime aircraft. The navy thus lost its strength and sank beneath the waves, lost to history.
This view is consistent with the romantic vision of the rise and fall of empires- and it has some basis in truth. U-boats made a small dent in fleet numbers in the early months of the Great War because commanders failed to take precautions against them, and battleships were indeed kept on into the Second World War despite losses to aircraft and submarines, only to be abandoned postwar for more flexible platforms like fleet carriers. Even the great naval historian Arthur Marder subscribed to the view that the navy’s preparation for war in WW1 was amateurish, and incapable of adapting to the challenges of the century.
However, over the years I have begun to uncover evidence that the navy’s supposed decline is a simplistic generalization of a complex and ever-changing situation. Naval historians such as John Terraine and Paul Halpern have chronicled the admiralty’s attempts to cope with a swiftly changing technological and strategic situation that frequently threatened to upset the balance of power, all the while trying to use what equipment they had to best combat these threats. It is time to examine the navy’s fortunes with a more sympathetic eye.
Part One: the Queens of the Seas.
Let us start with the battleship. Lacking the stealth of the submarine and the “one hit KO” of the torpedo, in 1914 it would be easy for an armchair historian to dismiss these queens of the seas. However, the battleship had three things that that submarine lacked- speed, weapons’ range, and staying power. At full speed, dreadnoughts could and did outrun the U-boats that so optimistically set out to trap and sink them. A U-boat that exposed itself to battleships could also find the tables turn extremely quickly. Otto Weddigen, the submarine commander who in September 1914 had sunk three British cruiser with contemptuous ease, was killed by the very symbol of dreadnought power. Setting out to attack the Grand Fleet whilst it was on an exercise, his boat (U 29) was spotted by HMS Dreadnought. The battleship altered course to ram, and U-29 proved unable to manouvre out of the way of 18,000 tons of fast moving high quality steel. To add insult to injury, it had fired at HMS Neptune and completely missed the fast moving ship. Following this incident, when the opposing fleets clashed at Jutland in 1916, the line of U-boats that had been strung out in wait utterly failed to find and destroy the British line of battle. There was no “quick fix” against the might of the Royal Navy’s battleships.
As for weapons’ range and staying power, battleships provided vital support at Gallipoli and during the German offensives in the Black Sea. It was after one of those Baltic operations, the Battle of Moon Sound in 1917, that a Russian officer noted that the operation would have been completely impossible without the covering fire of nearby battleships.
Nor was World War Two evidence that the battleship held the British navy back. It is true that the loss of the Repulse and Prince of Wales to 88 Japanese aircraft might be taken to prove that multiple battleships could lose to a single carrier (keeping in mind that the average U.S carrier’s complement was 90 aircraft). That said, inferior does not mean useless. Under air cover, battleships proved to be excellent escorts for carriers, especially at Okinawa in 1945. Indeed, they were so useful, that once the British Pacific fleet’s battleships were withdrawn for a raid on the 4th of May, the carriers were badly hit by kamakazes that broke through the fighter screen. The battleships, for their part, successfully destroyed an airfield that carrier aviation had tried and failed to take out.
Furthermore, the battleship continued to play a vital role in environments unsuitable for carrier aviation on both sides of the conflict- whether around night-time Guadalcanal, or in the storm tossed seas that finally claimed the Scharnhorst.
As for Pearl Harbor, a surprise attack on a nation’s main military base was bound to result in lost ships. Note that U.S aircraft barely dented the initial waves of Japanese bombers and the base’s air complement was devastated. Any claims that this attack made the battleship obsolete should be dismissed as illogical and ludicrous.
So we may safely dispense with the myth that battleships were useless. What really did for large surface capital ships was post-war austerity. The admiralty could choose between a traditional capital ship with minimal air defences, or the fleet carrier with its long range striking power and large fighter screen. The money was too tight to have both (and we eventually had to do without the fleet carriers as the budget tightened even more). Had we had the money like the Americans and Russians, then perhaps we too would have modernized or built ships like the Iowa or Kirov class capital ships- the former now being replaced by 15,700 ton Zumwalt class “destroyers”. Under air cover, such large non-carrier combatants have remained useful to this day. The Royal Navy’s tenacious retention of dreadnoughts until 1945 was absolutely justified.
Part Two: The Submarine Threat.
Let us turn to the second popular assertion- that the Royal Navy underestimated the submarine threat and did nothing for most of the war. Again, there is some truth in this- before the war, not enough thought was put into anti-submarine warfare, despite the fact that the navy had more submarines than Germany in 1914, and had put much thought into its technical development. Even when the submarine was realized to be a threat, early methods of U-boat destruction were few and far between. Instead of convoying merchant ships, the navy allowed them to proceed singly through the ocean to their doom, while vast numbers of destroyers were squandered in futile searches for submarines. The admiralty consistently refused to implement convoys until the last two years of the war, which were eventually shown to have been the precise measure needed to protect ships against submarines.
However, the admiralty had one particularly good reason for failing to implement convoy. The submarine was sufficiently novel as a weapons platform, that its effectiveness against traditional forms of defence was unknown and untested. Faced with a weapon that had sunk three British cruisers in quick succession on the 22nd September 1914, the admiralty did something that few commentators have accused them of- they tried to fight the next war. Convinced that submarines could find any convoy and sink every ship in quick succession, all manner of other methods were tried to find U-boats. The navy tried trained sea lions, attempts to block German sea bases, the active patrols, teardrop-shaped R class “attack” submarines, and hydrophone stations. All these and more were used- and the latter three methods remain in the admiralty playbook to this day, in the form of Fleet submarines bottling up Russian submarines in the North Sea with the help of seabed SOSUS sonar arrays. In overestimating the power of the submarine, the admiralty of World War One was effectively fighting a war sixty years too early with technology hopelessly unequal to the task. Their methods may have been wrong, but they did not underestimate the submarine by any means.
Does this excuse their unwillingness to test the use of convoy against submarines? No, it does not. Even in a limited form, we now know that convoys would have saved ships and lives. With high freighter losses early in the war, the navy had little to lose by grouping ships together. That said, once convoys were adopted, losses dropped.
It is a great irony that one of the most modern weapons of the day was defeated by one of the oldest defensive measures in naval warfare. Convoys can be traced as far back as the battle of Economus (256 BC) during the Punic Wars. What is even more ironic is that another tactic from those times was also adopted against submarines with great success. Unable to manouvre well on the surface, often slower than the merchant ships they targeted, a U-boat that missed its target often had to crash dive to avoid being rammed by its former victim. Ramming contributed roughly the same U-boat losses as depth charging and gunfire. Indeed, so successful was this measure, that an entire class of sloop –the P class- was commissioned with three collapsible bulkheads on its bow designed to ram enemy U-boats. Armchair admirals have long mocked the Royal Navy’s attempts to create a “torpedo ram” in the late 19th century, but the P-sloop’s successful combination of steam power with hardened ram bows has remained an undeservedly obscure footnote in the history of the Great War.
Lastly, the navy made extensive use of radio to direct convoys around U-boats that had been tracked by Room 40. With the British reading German wireless transmissions, the U-boat fleet could only track convoys in the vastness of the Atlantic by signaling to each other when a group was sighted. The British subsequently routed convoys around those now exposed enemy units. Essentially, the British merchant navy was now centrally directed by remote control, foreshadowing current developments in drone technology,
Thus, the picture before us suggests that the admiralty was far more technologically progressive than has been suggested. Instead of being stuck in the past, once the submarine was revealed as a formidable weapon of war, the admiralty sought to utilize the latest technologies to defeat them. Tragically, it was their modernism rather than hide bound tradition that was their undoing. Cutting edge methods were so obsessively sought after, that the war against the submarine went worse than had traditional methods been adopted sooner. Once convoys finally happened, the U-boat was defeated. It is therefore fatuous to claim that the admiralty was stuck in the past, and did not take the submarine seriously.
Part Three: Post War Blues.
The third myth concerns the last sixty years of the navy. In many books, it is not a happy tale. Budget cuts, retreats from foreign stations, and the cold realization that this downward trajectory would go on forever.
This isn’t entirely true.
If there is one area where the Royal Navy exceled, one area where it started from nothing and soared upwards, it is in the area of nuclear submarines. While the British, like other post-war navies, acquired or retained large fleet carriers and aircraft, and then lost them to budget cuts, the nuclear submarine has remained a constant presence in our arsenal. What’s more, few navies have managed to build them, meaning that we have a weapons platform that is almost unique outside of the superpowers.
Said platform proved its worth during the Falklands War. Had the SSN HMS Conqueror not managed to sink the Belgrano, it would have coordinated its missile strikes with the Argentine carrier’s air wing, threatening the taskforce further. As the Argentines did not have equipment sophisticated enough to seek out such craft, their navy was forced to return to port or risk destruction. Thus the war might not have ended in victory had it not been for HMS Conqueror.
Due to their formidable torpedo load, and the inherent quietness of nuclear powered craft, our SSNs are perhaps the most powerful asset alongside the new fleet carriers, and could probably destroy any opposing naval unit anywhere in the world. The only powers that could successfully resist such craft would probably be the Chinese (with sophisticated equipment), and the Russians (through sheer numbers of outdated submarines, plus a few more modern platforms).
The new fleet carriers are another case in point. The Royal Navy had noted the importance of offensive aviation since 1914, and though their carrier fleet was often lacking in size and fighter quality, they had nonetheless invested in fleet carriers throughout the 20th century. After austerity forced the postwar navy to continue utilizing outdated carriers until they wore out, Britain could afford three small escort carriers. They were very well suited to an anti-submarine force in the North Atlantic, but the fleet carriers required to properly reflect the navy’s aspirations had to be much larger.
The subsequent renaissance has occurred slowly but inexorably. The new Queen Elizabeth class carriers have taken much time to come together. Their crews had to be trained, planes purchased, and the escorts for them designed and constructed. The carriers themselves were designed to be extremely tough, partly with the help of an automated loading system and minimal crew requirements. Just as importantly, they cost a quarter of an American Ford class carrier, for at least half of the sortie rate and aircraft complement. We have effectively designed and built a supercarrier for half the price. That can split in half.
Already the Indians have inquired as to whether they could construct a carrier based on the Queen Elizabeth design. The Japanese have also shown interest, and the Americans have begun to debate as to whether it would be useful to make their own low-cost non-nuclear carrier design as a complement to the Ford class, potentially doubling the size of their carrier force. We could compare our carrier design to the cost-effective and powerful 74-gun ship of the line that transformed European navies in the 18th century, the design that delivered naval supremacy to the Royal Navy. The QEC is a full-circle revolution.
Not quite “irreversible decline”, eh?
This is not to say that our post-war forces have always been well managed. The latest report by the National Auditing Office suggests that cuts must be made to the MOD’s current equipment stock due to project mismanagement. The COVID deficit will not have helped either. If the NAO is right (and it should be remembered that watchdogs are not perfect), then both escort numbers and certain capabilities will experience an uncertain future.
The times ahead will challenge our policymakers to their utmost, but there is much to look forward to, and much to be proud of. All this article aims to do is to make clear that one of our oldest institutions has had a far better century than might be claimed by newspaper commentators and historians. Fighting decline is a noble endeavor, but don’t go so far as to unfairly talk down the institutions that you aim to save.
The Little Conservative 