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NOTE ON NOMENCLATURE
The following abbreviations are used in
this article: AA (antiaircraft), A/S (antisubmarine), DC
(depth charge), FAA (Fleet Air Arm), HA (high-angle
antiaircraft gun), HMS (His Majesty's Ship), MG (machine
gun), RAF (Royal Air Force), RN (Royal Navy), TT (torpedo
tubes).
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On the eve of war in 1939, Britannia no
longer ruled the waves, as she had twenty-five years earlier
at the beginning of World War I. The costs of that war, the
subsequent financial crisis, economic stagnation, and a
national malaise compounded of exhaustion and
disillusionment combined to impose limits on the size and
power of the Royal Navy (RN). That despite such constraints
the RN performed as well as it did in 1939-45 is a tribute
to the traditions and fighting spirit of the Senior
Service—virtues preserved intact despite the troubles of the
interwar period.
In the immediate aftermath of the World
War I the government of the day, convinced that Britain
could no longer win a naval arms race, participated in the
negotiations that led to the Washington Naval Treaty (1921).
The world’s major naval powers agreed to limit the size of
their navies by specifying maximum tonnages for capital
ships (battleships and battlecruisers), aircraft carriers
and smaller warships, with gun calibers being capped at 16in
for capital ships and 8in for other warships. For the RN,
Britain’s signature on this treaty meant the cancellation of
the revolutionary “G3” battlecruisers, four of which were on
order, and the acceptance of naval parity with the United
States. The size of the battle fleet was fixed at eighteen
battleships and four battlecruisers. Two new battleships,
reduced editions of the “G3” design, were permitted to be
built, and when they entered service four older battleships
were to be retired. The service life of capital ships was
set at twenty years, and no new ones were permitted to be
constructed by any of the signatory powers until 1931.
Battleship HMS Warspite of the "Queen
Elizabeth Class after her 1934-37 reconstruction.
Modifications included a new tower bridge, secondary battery
reduced to 8 x 6in guns, addition of 8 x 4in HA in four twin
mounts and 32 x 2-pounder pompoms in four octuple mounts as
light AA . (Imperial War Museum)
The RN was thus compelled to discard all
of its older capital ships, nineteen of which were
decommissioned and scrapped between 1922 and 1928. A large
number of smaller warships went to the breakers as well and
the interwar fleet, if not quite a shadow of its former
self, was much reduced. But in the circumstances of 1919-22,
the Washington Naval Treaty was a sensible measure. Indeed,
it seems likely that many of its mandated reductions would
have been necessary in any case, given Britain’s parlous
financial condition at the time.
The onset of the Great Depression (1929)
led to another attempt at naval disarmament: the London
Naval Conference of 1930. The British government pressed for
further reductions. Battleships were to be limited to fifteen
apiece for Britain and the US, with nine for Japan. Caps
were also placed on total cruiser and destroyer tonnages.
The agreement required the RN to cut its cruiser force from
70 to 50 ships and discard many older destroyers. But
neither France nor Italy accepted the new agreement and
thanks to the deteriorating international situation,
it was eventually repudiated by all signatories.
The London Naval Conference reflected a
constant preoccupation of successive British governments
between 1919 and 1930: the need to reduce military spending
to an absolute minimum. This need was met by the so-called
Ten Year Rule, first adopted in 1919. Defense planning was
to be based on the assumption that Britain would not be
involved in a major war for the next ten years, with the
term extended each year. So in 1919 it was assumed that
there would be no major war before 1929, in 1920 the
terminal year was advanced to 1930, and so on. This was
convenient for the politicians, but the ten-year assumption,
valid enough in 1919, became more and more dubious with the
passage of time. The Ten-Year Rule was not formally
abandoned until 1932, and then only with many misgivings.
Thus strict budgetary limits were set on
the RN’s ability to profit from the lessons learned between
1914 and 1918. During the war, for example, the RN had
pioneered the development of naval airpower, but
subsequently its
potential could not be exploited to the full. To be sure,
the RN commissioned the world’s first aircraft carrier
designed as such from the keel up: HMS Hermes, laid
down in 1918 and completed in 1924. The soundness of her
basic design is evident from a glance at any photo or
drawing of the ship: She is clearly the direct ancestor of
the aircraft carriers in service today. Hermes
followed the very similar HMS Eagle
into service. That carrier was a conversion of the
incomplete battleship Almirante Cochrane,
which had been under
construction in Britain for the Chilean Navy in 1914. The
outbreak of the war caused her construction to be suspended
and in 1918 she was purchased by the Admiralty for
conversion to an aircraft carrier. Along with HMS
Argus, an earlier
conversion that had entered service in 1918, Eagle
and Hermes
proved very successful in service and survived to fight—and
be sunk—in World War II.
Four
more carriers joined the fleet before the outbreak of World
War II. Three of them were the converted “large light
cruisers” Furious,
Courageous
and Glorious.
The former had actually undergone a makeshift carrier
conversion in 1917 but this proved unsatisfactory and in
1922 she was rebuilt. The other two were converted in
1924-28. As carriers these ships were faster than
Eagle and
Hermes and could carry
more aircraft. Finally there was HMS Ark Royal,
the RN’s second carrier
to be designed as such. She was much better than the other
six, able to carry a larger air group and mounting a
powerful antiaircraft armament. All but Argus
and Furious
were lost during World War II.
Carrier HMS Courageous in 1935
(Imperial War Museum)
But
though the RN had a respectable carrier force by the late
1930s, interservice rivalry conspired with budgetary
restrictions to impair the development of effective naval
combat aircraft. When the Royal Air Force was established as
an independent branch of the armed forces in 1918, it
absorbed the Royal Naval Air Service. Henceforth, though the
RN owned the aircraft carriers, the aircraft themselves and
their aircrew belonged to the RAF. And unfortunately, the
RAF’s leadership had little interest in or commitment to
naval aviation. Senior airmen championed the doctrine of
strategic bombing—which, they claimed, would reduce the Army
and the Navy to auxiliaries of the Air Force. This
unsatisfactory state of affairs was rectified only in May
1939, when control of the RAF’s Fleet Air Arm reverted to
the RN, but by then the damage was done. At the beginning of
World War II the FAA had only twenty squadrons with 232
combat aircraft, numbers insufficient to provide all
existing carriers with effective air groups.
Hermes, for instance,
serving with the Channel Force, had only twelve aircraft
embarked—eight to ten fewer than her maximum complement.
The
aircraft themselves were hardly modern. The principal
fighters were the Sea Gladiator, a navalized version of the
RAF’s last biplane fighter, and the Skua, an underpowered
monoplane two-seater that doubled as a dive bomber. The
torpedo bomber was the Swordfish, a biplane of decidedly
antique appearance that nevertheless served throughout World
War II (and compiled a surprisingly impressive record in a
number of roles).
The "Stringbag," as the Fairey Swordfish
was nicknamed, was the RN's carrier-based torpedo bomber at
the beginning of the war (Imperial War Museum)
The
submarine was another new weapon that had proved itself in
World War I, but aside from a few boats of the wartime “L”
class that were completed in 1919-20, only fifty were built
up to 1939. Thus the RN’s submarine fleet shrank as older
classes were withdrawn from service. The prewar program
followed a policy of gradual improvement, culminating in the
“S,” “T” and “U” classes. These submarines, built between
1934 and 1939, were repeated with improvements for the much
larger wartime construction program.
World War
I had shown the need for small A/S escorts along the lines
of the “Flower” class fleet sweeping sloops of World War
I—some of which were retained in the postwar fleet—but once
again budget constraints prevented much from being done. No
new escort sloops appeared until 1928 and by 1939
thirty-five had been built. This modest program was
justified on the grounds that such ships were useful for
peacetime colonial service, but they were designed with the
wartime escort mission in mind. Several of the new sloops
were allotted to the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) and the Royal
Indian Navy. As with submarines, the last sloops built
prewar were repeated with improvements in the wartime
building program. Many destroyers were fitted with DC racks
and throwers as well as Asdic (sonar), but unfortunately the
various A/S mortars used in World War I were not further
developed.
HMS Penzance, one of the four
sloops of the "Hastings" class, was commissioned in 1931 and
served as an escort in World War II (Imperial War Museum)
After
the two reduced “G3” ships (Nelson
and Rodney)
entered service in 1927, no new battleships joined the RN
before the outbreak of World War II. In 1932 the battle
force consisted of those two ships, five of the “Queen
Elizabeth” class, five of the “Royal Sovereign” class and
three battlecruisers: fifteen in total. The thirteen older
ships were all modernized to some extent, for instance
receiving a more-up-to-date antiaircraft (AA) armament.
Of the 56
cruisers extant in 1919, about half were disposed of between
1926 and 1935. Only the later “C” class, the “Hawkins”
class, the “D” class and the “E” class survived to fight in
World War II. Several of the “C” class were refitted as AA
escorts with an armament of 4in HA guns, but otherwise the
older cruisers were little altered. Fifteen heavy cruisers
armed with 8in guns were built between 1926 and 1931; their
general design and armament conformed to the restrictions
laid down by the Washington Naval Treaty. They were followed
by twenty-two light cruisers, armed with 6in guns, built
between 1931 and 1939. Two of the heavy cruisers and three
of the light cruisers were allotted to the RAN.
Light cruiser HMS Dispatch off the
Panama Canal Zone in 1939 (US Navy Heritage and History
Command)
It was
much the same story with destroyers. The oldest of them were
disposed of immediately after World War I, and most of the
others were gradually retired between 1926 and 1938. By 1939
only some of the “S” and “V & W” classes remained, around 35
ships in total. Destroyer production resumed in 1926 and
accelerated after 1932 but even so numbers remained
insufficient. As with cruisers, a number of destroyers, old
and new, went to the RAN. The interwar destroyers mostly had
a main armament of 4 x 4.7in guns and 8 or 10 x TT in
quadruple or quintuple mounts.
A major
weak spot for the RN was in the area of AA defense. As
constructed, most of the interwar cruisers had only 4 x 4in
HA guns. Close-range AA weapons were the 2-pounder (40mm)
pom-pom in single, quadruple and octuple mounts and the
caliber .50 AA MG in a quadruple mount. The former had
adequate if not particularly impressive performance, but the
latter was practically useless. As built, many of the
interwar destroyers had only a pair of quad .50 AA MG; their
4.7in guns had insufficient elevation to be effective in the
AA role.
Though by
1935 the necessity of naval rearmament was recognized by the
British government, it nevertheless proceeded at a glacial
pace. The 1936-37 building program included two battleships,
two aircraft carriers, seven cruisers, eighteen destroyers,
eight submarines and ten smaller ships. Few of the larger
ships would enter service before 1939-41, however, so that
the RN would face the test of war with barely adequate
numbers and some critical material deficiencies.
(For
additional information on RN warship classes of World War I,
see Warships of
the Great War Part One and
Warships of the Great War Part Two.)
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