Churchill & the Fleet Air Arm.

Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty at the start of the war. My question is this, if when he saw what the FAA was equiped with he spat out his dummy and demanded rapid changes what could they do quickly. My own opinion is that they should use navalised Hurricanes and Henlies as fighters and dive bombers. Not sure about torpiedo aircraft, could the Fulmer be adapted?
 

Markus

Banned
With the Hurricane and the Henley you certainly picked planes that are available right away. Though the Wildcat is a good candidate too. The first entered british service in mid-1940 already, she has a better range than the Hurricane(144 gal. of fuel vs. app.90) and a year later Wildcats with folding wings become available. Given the small hangars of RN carriers I´d go Wildcat by that time. I´m not seeing a good alternate torpedo bomber in 1939, so Albacore it is. At least until you can get the TBF Avanger.
 
I was just flipping through the archives of "Flight" magazine up to 1940, ( It takes a while) and with reference to the FAA and global naval air power, the stated that only the RN and USN had serious air arms. France and Japan were disregarded as minor. I have given some thought and some time investigating what would have been required to turn the FAA into an effective force. It would have been an unlikely event. Churchill was a greatly admired war leader, and made good speeches, but his military leadership was not outstanding. Serious leadership in naval aviation did not occur until Adm. Boyd. The FAA was a bastard child, whose aircraft were required in uneconomical numbers, and held the lowest priorities imaginable. Naval Air doctrine was that carrier fighters would never be able to face land-based fighters. Aircraft carriers could not operate within range of land-based fighters. Most people within the halls of power believed this to be truth. Hurricanes lacked folding wings and didn't crash gracefully on water due to the underbelly radiator. Henleys were built with the crappiest Merlin engines available and didn't tow targets for long. Fulmars were altered Battles and, although superior in every way to the Skua fighters, were totally inadequate. There was a Gloster monoplane fighter which could have been developed into a ship-board fighter with Hercules engines suitably modified like post-war commercial engines but this required priorities that it never was to receive. Gloster was busy building biplane Gladiators.
 

Markus

Banned
although superior in every way to the Skua fighters
Skua Fighter??? I though she was a dive bomber? Sukas did sink a german CL in Norway.


Gloster was busy building biplane Gladiators.
What about a Sea Gladiator with the 870hp Mercury of a Miles Master II than? If the engine is supercharged and the fuel has at least 92 octane, the Gladiator should do more than good enough until sufficient Wildcats get into service.
 
Skua Fighter??? I though she was a dive bomber? Sukas did sink a german CL in Norway.

The Skua was supposed to be both, but as you can imagine, wasn't all that great at either mission. There was also a turret-fighter variant, the Roc, which was even worse. Two more examples of how shafted the FAA was due to FUBAR procurement and being the bastard stepchild of the RAF for so long.
 

Markus

Banned
The Skua was supposed to be both, but as you can imagine, wasn't all that great at either mission.

On the one hand better than no dive bomber at all, especially given the quality of the torpedo bombers but on the other hand a payload of a 500lb bomb is a bit "light" and having three different types of planes was bad enough on the more spacious US carriers. A Hurricane could also serve as a light bomber if she had bomb racks for 500 pounders but getting that by 1939 would be a bit of a stretch. In OTL Hurribombers came into being in late-41.

Unless someone un-messes the situation before 1939 american planes look like the best sollution to me.

1940: Wildcat
1942: Avanger
1943: Corsair, Barracuda
 
You're right about Churchills military faults, as for the experts opinions well he was a maveric prone to wild sceams. If he were to get a bee in his bonnet there was no telling what he would do. As for the Hurricane and Henley I suggested them as quick fixes until something better was available. Anything had to be better than what they had even dare I say it the Buffalo. (Ducks and runs for cover).

By the way what was the head of the navy doing developing tanks.
 
The Sea Hurricane was a quick fix but without proper folding wings, it was a poor substitute for a naval aircraft. The Buffalo, even if built properly, still had weak undercarriage, and would mimic the performance of the Seafire in Med service, where they ran out of planes in 3 days. Incidentally, I'm still trying to determine the veracity or verifiability of a NACA dive test of a Buffalo to 575 mph.( 1943 ) The Henley couldn't be built because Hurricanes had priority. Witness the career of the Blackburn Firebrand. The FAA did have the sense to buy as many Martlet/Wildcat fighters as they could, but the USN had priorities too.
 
Compared to the other modern fighters the Buffalo was disasterous, but compared to the Sea Gladiator, Skua and Roc the Fleet Air Arm were saddled with it looks alot more attractive.
 
Since the FAA was indeed the stephchild of British Aviation, it did quite well, with what was available. Its planes were absolutely out of date compared to the high performance Luftwaffe, but were not so badly obsolete, compared to the Italian Airforce in the Med.

The available Fairy Swordfish was slow and sluggish, but rocksteady and multipurpose in nature. Its weakness was its advantage, as the very slow speed often was miscalculated by AA gunners on enemy ships, while its capability to survive hits was due to the absense of a metal skin, which tended to poverize, when hit, while fabric remained mainly intact. The Albacore was basically simmilar.

The equally multipurpose Skua was a poor mans aircraft, being designed to act as fighter and divebomber in one, making it poor in both jobs, as it had a modest payload and too slow a speed to give chase. Its lack of range complicated things even more, so the plane was doomed from the beginning, although it scored one succes, albeit against a weak target.

What was realy needed was a pure fighter to protect the fleet against airattacks. The Fulmar was good, but not realy perfect in this role, as were the first addapted Hurricanes, due to their non folding wings, resulting in fewer of them aboard carriers. Grumman Wildcats were designed to operate from carriers, but were also more compact and capable than the first addaptions, although still not high performance, as they were not a match for the Luftwaffe's landbased fighters of the period. With the comming of the Seafire, Corsair and Sea Fury, the problem was finally solved. These were high speed, hard hitting and manouvrable warplanes of equal quality to landbased fighters.
 
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The truely heartbreaking thing about the Fleet Air Arm in 1939 was that before the formation of the R.A.F the R.N.A.S was the best and most inovaitive airforce in the world.
 
Truly interesting reading on the topic is "To War in a Stringbag" by Cdr. Charles Lamb. The last pilot to land on HMS Courageous, he set a standard in moral character that made you wish that he fought with better equipment. "Wings of the Navy" by Cdr Eric "Winkle" Brown pretty well defines all the equipment, since he flew more aircraft than anyone else, and made more carrier landings than anyone else. With regard to Churchill's shortcomings, you have to plod through 6 substantial volumes of his history of WW II. Lots of dreck with occasional eye-openers.
 
Doubt if Churchill's intervention at this late stage would have made much difference.
It is surprising that in OTL Hawker didn't make an offer of a navalised version to supercede the Skua as a Fighter/Dive-Bomber i.e. with added wing guns.
In September '39 the RAF had 122 in service - to quote Owen Thetford Aircraft of the Royal Air Force since 1918:
There will always be speculation as to why the high performance Henley was never issued to firstline light bomber squadrons as it could carry 750 lb of bombs and was much superior to the The Fairey Battle.
It had a longer range than the Hurricane, according to Thetford - 950 miles, and with the same engine as the Hurricane had a max speed between 290 & 300 mph.
As has been said, the FAA had a fixation about aircraft needing to be two-seaters - in order to be able to navigate back to the carrier. In theory, the avoidance of land-based fighters should've been a problem - yet if Britain took action against Italy regarding Eithiopa (?) - encounters in the Med would have been certain, so that should have been enough to question that policy.
Re: the Wildcat/Martlet you've got to wonder what the British Purchasing Commission was doing - Aug 8, '39 the USN placed an order for 78 aircraft after its redesign had achieved a max speed of 335 mph at 21,300 ft, with a ceiling of 33,500 ft. Grumman offered export models - which were ordered by the French and the Greeks. It was the French ordered aircraft that came to the FAA. If they had been ordered for the FAA (or indeed the RAF) probably they could have been in service several months earlier.
 
tyou've got to wonder what the British Purchasing Commission was doing - Aug 8, '39

Panicking, and given a sizable chunk of the aircraft it ordered in the panic stage didn't reach us until after Lend Lease, and therefore we had to pay for them, an expensive panic.

Interestingly, it is said in John Terraine's 'Right of the Line' the original proposal was for three or four squadrons of each type of aircraft until Shadow Factory production had kicked in, not the wholesale of ordering anything with at least one engine and two wings.
 
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