The Fleet Air Arm Between the Wars
The Fleet Air Arm is part of the Royal Navy NOT the Royal Air Force, but between the Wars in fact it was part of the RAF. In 1918, the Royal Air Force was set up by the unification of the Royal Naval Air Service and the Royal Flying Corps. General Smuts, a great soldier and statesman, was the sponsor — and Mr. Lloyd George, the Prime Minister of the day, was one of the backers. There were many committees, presided over by great people. Lord Salisbury was one and Sir Eric Geddes another. I was Chief of the Air Staff for nearly twelve years, and during that time there were at least ten inquiries into this question.
At the end of the Great War, in 1918, the Navy had an immense Naval Air Service, consisting of about 55,000 men and something like 2,500 machines in some fifteen squadrons. They were a unique unit, the most up-to-date and powerful unit of their kind in the whole world. They possessed the heavy night bombers which were the envy of the Royal Flying Corps; they possessed the best fighters in the world, and powerful day bombers as well. The reconnaissance craft used photographic apparatus which was designed by my ingenious predecessor, and they were 200 to 300 per cent. ahead of anything else in existence at the time. All that was swept away when the Royal Air Force was born.
Leadership and influence of the naval air arm proved insufficient after the Great War, primarily due to transfer of the force to the RAF in 1918. During the period, naval aviation was treated almost as an afterthought, with land-based strategic bomber forces enjoying the resources and interest of the defense establishment. It was for some years the Cinderella of the Senior Service. It may well be that in the Senior Service there was a battleship mentality, on the one 1328 hand, or a dockyard mentality, on the other. Certainly, there was no aircraft mentality. Influence within the RN had ebbed as well; throughout the 1920s, a lowly captain led the small Naval Air Section in the Admiralty. The US Navy aviators fought two battles between the wars: the internal battle to provide an appropriate place for air capabilities within the naval structure, and the external battle to retain control of its own air assets. The Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm lost both of these battles during the inter-war years.
The Fleet Air Arm, or FAA, became a pawn in a larger competition between the Royal Navy (RN) and the RAF – one in which the ?resolution of the most inconsequential of issues could easily require Herculean efforts. Since the establishment of the RAF, the Royal Navy (RN) had been fighting for its own air arm, the Fleet Air Arm, and attempting to get the RAF to recognize the need for air support outside of traditional strategic bombardment and pursuit aviation. The inte- war period was marred by inter-service rivalries that left the maritime force of the RAF without an effective torpedo bomber and no long-range fighter for escort and general reconnaissance purposes. Not only did these equipment shortfalls hamper operations, but the lack of navigator training made operations hazardous.
The supply of aircraft for the Fleet Air Arm was governed by the decisions of the Balfour Committee of 1923, when that Committee decided that the Air Ministry must provide all the material required by the Admiralty, that the Air Ministry should carry out research experiment and design in consultation with the Admiralty, but that the Admiralty was to put forward suggestions as to types for the Air Ministry to embody in designs and then obtain specifications and tenders from the trade. At all stages the Admiralty was to be kept informed. That went on till 1940, when the Ministry of Aircraft Production was instituted and played the same part in relation to the Admiralty that the Air Ministry had played up till then.
There is a controversy between those who say that the Admiralty did not get what it wanted for the Fleet Air Arm and those who say that the Admiralty was not very clever at explaining what exactly it was that it wanted. Air Marshal Dowding went on record in 1943 as saying that the Admiralty got precisely the types which it specified and demanded. Whatever may be the rights and wrongs of this controversy there is certainly no doubt whatever about it that war found the Fleet Air Arm equipped with extremely bad aircraft.
The Admirals who were trained in masts and yards certainly resented the introduction of steam, and the submarine was very much looked askance upon. Similarly, the air weapon has had great difficulties to contend with in the Navy from the older generation of officers whose minds were not sufficiently flexible to enable them to appreciate the full impact of the air weapon upon sea warfare. But, however these things may be, the fact remains that the Fleet Air Arm was badly equipped when the war broke out and was very insufficiently equipped, and the responsibility must lie somewhere.
The Admiralty had shown that in the matter of ships it always had a tendency to try to develop a ship as nearly as possible into the next class above it. The destroyer became something approximating to the light cruiser, and so on, and there was always a tendency to fill the ships with every conceivable type of apparatus and equipment so that many ships are really very reminiscent of the White Knight, who had to walk into battle because he could not possibly have ridden his war horse, having hung far too much equipment on to it. The same thing very much happened in the sphere of aircraft. The aircraft required and specified by the Admiralty had in many cases been required to fulfill far too many purposes. They were hybrids instead of aircraft designed for one particular function.
Another difficulty was that Admiralty orders had of course always been small as compared with Air Force orders, and consequently the Fleet Air Arm had had to rely upon some of the smaller firms of the industry. Altogether, only something like ten percent of the industry is devoted to work for the Fleet Air Arm. Out of that very small percentage of industry available for the work of the Fleet Air Aria difficulties had arisen in regard to two firms. There is the firm of Faireys. Sir Richard Fairey, had been in America since 1940, employed in work for the British Purchasing Commission. In November, 1941, the shop stewards of Faireys laid all the controversies before Press representatives and what was said was very remarkable indeed. There had been protest strikes and discussions with the management because men were standing idle, and skilled men Were complaining of being idle upon night-shifts. Men were so idle that they asked to be allowed to go elsewhere but were refused permission to go. Another Fleet Air Arm factory is Blackburn's, and Blackburn's workers feel that the Fleet Air Arm is very much neglected. They feel they are a Fleet Air Arm factory and it is a matter of great regret in the factory that their war effort seemed to be so very disappointing. Here there was a real feeling of frustration at the fact that they have no up-to-date efficient aircraft to manufacture for the Fleet Air Arm.
RAF Coastal Command was founded in 1936 as the RAF's premier maritime arm. Its primary task was to protect convoys from the German Kriegsmarine's U-Boat force, known as the "wolfpacks". It also protected Allied shipping from the aerial threat posed by the Luftwaffe. Naval aviation was neglected in the inter-war period, 1919–1939, and as a consequence the service did not receiv resources it needed to develop properly or efficiently. This continued until the outbreak of the Second World War, during which it came to prominence.
Though the Royal Navy successfully repatriated fleet air in 1937, the changeover took two time-consuming years to complete. There was a new charter drawn up between the Aircraft Ministry and the Fleet Air Arm at the time that the Churchill Ministry was formed in 1940. Under that charter the Fleet Air Arm has full relationship with the Aircraft Ministry, and was freed altogether from any responsibility to the Air Ministry.
Lord Beaverbrook [Mr Max Aitken] said in 1943 [he had been Minister of War Production in 1942] "The best production I ever saw was a job with which the Ministry had nothing to do, nothing at all.... It is imperative that the Ministry should not have too many planners. They are very dangerous people, planners, dangerous to design, development, and production. They sit in committees all day long. They go into session in the early morning, and they are there all day. They have a paper output that is unexampled. I assure your Lordships that no director can read all the paper he gets every day. It is impossible, absolutely impossible. A director is given instructions to produce a weapon, and before he gets down to business he will be compelled to consult some-times as many as ten committees. Please do not think I am blaming my predecessors. I was in it too. I was in the committee business very heavily."
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