But What Use are They?
‘Six crashes in thirty-eight landings, and three of them fatal!’, exclaimed Commodore Bragg, the new chief of the Royal Naval Air Service’s Aviation Ship flotilla.
‘Yes Sir’, replied the Lieutenant flatly.
‘This has to stop’, continued Bragg, turning away and then back in exasperation.
Since receiving his new appointment, the Aircraft Carrier HMS Argus had begun to conduct her first air trials in the Moray Firth. Experiments on marked-out areas of ground, and even Argus’ first harbour trials had been broadly successful, but this next stage was what really mattered.
Everyone knew that landing an aircraft on a moving ship was never going to be easy, but the initial results were terrible. Bragg had seen lower casualty rates during his time in France, when the skies had been full of German ‘ace’ fliers.
‘It’s the winds on approach Sir’, stated the Lieutenant, ‘I know I was caught by them the last time I came in. I was lucky to make it; sorry to say I wrecked the kite.’
Bragg’s expression calmed. The young man in front of him was only the messenger, and in truth they’d all had high hopes for the success of Argus. Her slab-like shape, pointed only at the bows, had given her the nickname ‘flat iron’ in the Fleet, but the pilots’ version was ‘flat top’, as her top deck was completely free of obstructions.
He’d been aware of the experiments last year with the converted cruiser Cavendish, which had been a complete failure. The funnels had made the air too turbulent over the landing platform behind them, and a pilot who missed the relatively short deck would likely crash straight into either the sea or the superstructure. Now it seemed Argus had similar problems.
‘I think it’s two things, Sir. When chasing her to land, the smoke from the funnels can obscure the view, and then there’s no reference point.’
‘Ehh?’, interrupted Bragg with a frown.
‘Oh, I mean Sir, you can see the ship alright; but she’s so flat and featureless that you can’t judge distance. Then when you come close, you can’t tell how far you are above the deck. On top of that, the heat from the funnels makes it difficult to control the aeroplane just as you cross the stern.’
‘Hmmm’, mulled Bragg.
He could picture what the young pilot was saying, but he needed to know more. A few moments later, he had decided what to do.
‘Well, I suppose we’d better try it, then you can show me.’
‘Are you sure you want to take that risk Sir?’, asked the young lieutenant cautiously, ‘I mean, there’s only eight chaps who’ve landed on her … and three of those are, well … you know.’
‘Well, now’, replied Bragg, ‘I think the head of the Aircraft Carrier program should have landed on one at least once.’
Then he smiled, and added, ‘and the Admiralty aren’t going to change a ship just because a couple of young pilots say so!’
Thank God the RN was still in command of its own aircraft, thought Bragg as the Lieutenant departed. Toward the end of the war, there had been a proposal to merge the Navy’s Air Service with that of the Army, to create an entirely new force … ‘Royal Air Fleet’ or some such name, Bragg remembered. It had a certain appeal in wartime, allowing a focussed new service to dictate new designs and concentrate an ‘aerial attack’ on Germany.
However, as soon as peace had broken out, Chiefs in both services had sensed the danger in allowing their men and their budgets to be transferred to a new ‘competitor’.
-o-
Some weeks later, having survived a hair-raising descent onto Argus’ deck, Bragg was up in London, reporting his findings to the Admiralty.
‘Beardmore’s can move the funnels and add a side deckhouse in a couple of days. They’ve already built what they call a Conning Tower for the port side, and they say they can quickly use a crane to lift it onto the ship. Smart chaps, I must say … building bits of a ship then putting them altogether.’
There were nods of approval and agreement, before the usual dissent started to set in.
‘Do we really need these dedicated “aircraft carriers”?’, muttered a disapproving voice, ‘I mean, what are aeroplanes really good for?’
Bragg knew such a statement was out-of-date, as was the man who said it; aircraft had shown their potential during the war, even if it was still early days. He also knew such a statement was bound to provoke reactions from among the younger or brighter officers, and so it did.
‘You can’t land on an ordinary ship you know, and float-planes have their drawbacks.’
‘But a whole ship, even bigger than a cruiser, just to carry a dozen aeroplanes…?’
‘If we can take-off and land reliably, those dozen planes could do the scouting work of three or four cruisers – and you know how short we are of those.’
‘Huh!’, said the old Rear-Admiral, ‘…utter rot. I was with Jellicoe when he ordered an aerial search before Stavanger – a couple of those flying chaps went up. One of them we never saw again, poor chap; the other came back with a report of a fleet of ships.
Couldn’t tell us who they were, or exactly where they were though!’
Bragg felt that now was the time to step in, before the old fool really got going.
‘That was a good example of how not to do aerial reconnaissance, Admiral’, he said carefully. There was nothing like agreeing with your detractors to take the wind out of their sails.
‘We’ve come a long way since then – our newest aircraft have more powerful wireless and better instruments, and we have established search rules. Aircraft stay in contract with the fleet, so they can function as effective scouts.’
‘So we need a ten- or fifteen-thousand-ton ship to do the job of three 5,000-ton cruisers? … and it doesn’t work at all when there’s more than a slight breeze, ehh?’
Bragg tried once again, with a slightly different tack,
‘No Sir, no-one is suggesting replacing our cruisers. Aeroplanes can’t reliably do that. Maybe one day they will be able to fly hundreds of miles away from a fleet, or even engage enemy warships, but I’m a practical man. If we can halve the size of our scout forces by using aeroplanes, that saves us money and manpower for the rest of the fleet.
More importantly, Sir, there’s the consideration that our enemies are likely to use aerial reconnaissance too. That was proven during the war. If our fleets are equipped with fighter planes, we can deny the enemy that advantage.’
As the meeting drew to a close, he could see this was going to be like sailing upwind. Here they were, in the New Year of 1920, still having many of the same arguments that the Navy were having five years ago. Bragg was only glad that the First Sea Lord had been supportive so far, and with Admiral Beatty as his obvious successor, that would likely continue. It was obvious that aircraft were going to become more and more useful, and even become a threat as time went on, if the experiments with torpedo-dropping aircraft continued to show progress.
As he walked away down the Mall, Bragg could see that his problem was he couldn’t defend Argus as more than an experiment. Even if she worked perfectly, which she didn’t … yet … she wasn’t a traditional warship, she was effectively just a support vessel. Hopefully the rebuild of Cavendish would produce an alternate solution – a ‘flat top’ cruiser with both guns and aircraft, and therefore capable of working in all weathers.
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