British Naval Policy - World War II 1939-1945
By September 1939 the worst British re-armament deficiencies had been rectified. While the Royal Navy entered the Second World War with the world's largest fleet, the naval staff recognised that it could not fight Germany, Italy and Japan simultaneously. In fact when war came it was against Germany alone. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) had safely arrived in France and the RAF began carrying out leaflet raids on German towns. For the Navy the war was real from the outset. On the first day the Donaldson Liner 'Athenia' was torpedoed without warning. Quickly dispatched convoys shepherded merchant vessels across the danger zone, but a German submarine managed to penetrate the Royal Navy's wartime base and the battleship 'Royal Oak' was sunk with heavy loss of life.
The Allies tightened the economic blockade on Germany; blocking the supply of Swedish iron ore via Norway was considered particularly galling for the Germans. In April 1940 the British and French took action to prevent the Germans gaining access to Swedish iron ore via the Norwegian port of Narvick. By sheer coincidence the Germans decided to invade Denmark and Norway at the same time. The Germans moved more quickly than the Allies and Denmark was overrun in a day. Despite Norwegian fighting, the Germans soon established themselves around Oslo, Trondheim, Bergen and Narvick, and seized airfields from where they operated their own aircraft.
The Cabinet were forced to change their thinking with regards to acceptable ways of waging modern warfare. British submarines were now authorised to carry out unrestricted submarine warfare in the waters around Denmark and Norway. The RAF and Fleet Air Arm were also allowed to carry out attacks on any shipping found in those areas.
Battle of the Atlantic
France's defeat gave Germany's U-boats new Atlantic bases in their battle against the convoys from North America which kept Britain supplied. The Battle of the Atlantic which lasted from 1939-1945 was one of the most important and fiercely fought campaigns of the whole war.
The German navy had not expected to fight until 1944 and was totally unprepared for war. Only two major surface ships were available for commerce raiding, one of which, Admiral Graf Spee, was scuttled after being damaged in action by three British cruisers in the Battle of the River Plate in December 1939. The British largely succeeded in containing the German surface fleet which usually acted, as in the First World War, as a 'fleet in being' to tie down the Royal Navy.
The German pocket battleships 'Graf Spee' and 'Admiral Scheer' were discovered at sea preying on Allied shipping. The Royal Navy cornered the Graf Spee off the River Plate. The German vessel fled to neutral waters where the Captain scuttled his ship. The Admiral Scheer also escaped capture yet despite this, it was largely due to British naval supremacy that invasion of Britain was still considered unlikely.
The Germans occupied Norway in 1940. Their air force made it difficult for the British Fleet, defended by guns alone, to counter attack successfully. Where there was no air cover, however, the Germans suffered heavy losses, ten destroyers being sunk in the battles at Narvik. Fleet Air Arm dive-bombers flying from the Orkneys sank the cruiser Konigsberg, the first major warship to be sunk by aircraft. Germany's conquest of France in 1940 led to a major naval evacuation at Dunkirk and Hitler considering an invasion of Britain. The Royal Navy made such an enterprise impossible. Forces of destroyers and other small ships were massed to deal with the threat and it is unlikely that the German Air Force could have prevented them inflicting fatal damage on any invasion fleet.
While the Blitz raged, German aircraft and U-boats caused heavy losses of merchant shipping in the north-western approaches to Britain. By March 1941 the situation was seen as so severe that Churchill issued his 'Battle of the Atlantic Directive' and directed all government attention towards the Atlantic.
The most successful German ship was the battleship Bismarck which sank the largest British capital ship the battlecruiser Hood, as she broke out into the Atlantic in 1941. In May 1941 in the Denmark Straits, the German battleship Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen destroyed HMS Hood (the pride of the Royal Navy) with a massive magazine explosion, and escaped. Three days later the Royal Navy sunk the Bismarck while it was attempting to reach the safety of Brest. Bismarck was crippled by Swordfish torpedo bombers from the carrier Ark Royal and then pounded to a wreck by the battleships King George V and Rodney. The Battle of the Atlantic continued.
The German invasion of Russia on 22 June 1941 was a mixed blessing for the British. They now had another ally, but an unco-operative one that demanded massive support from the stretched British economy. In August 1941 the first convoy of aid left Britain for Russia and by the end of the 1941, eight convoys had been dispatched.
It would be wrong, however, to think of Britain as standing alone between July 1940 and June 1941 without outside support. Limited support was received from America. First came the 'destroyers for bases' deal in September 1940, which was followed by the lend-lease package of March 1941 that poured equipment into Britain.
The first few months of 1942 were disastrous for Britain at sea. The entry of America into the war allowed the Germans rapidly to redeploy their U-boats from the North Atlantic convoy routes to American waters. They found that the ships the British had painfully escorted across the Atlantic to Halifax (the 'Sydney' and 'Nova Scotia') were completely undefended by the Americans.The Germans then pulled off a propaganda coup by withdrawing their capital ships from Brest through the English Channel to Germany. Uncoordinated and frantic British naval and air attacks followed but the German ships were not sunk.
From mid-1942 to May 1943 the fighting in the Atlantic was savage. The Allies made excellent use of intelligence and introduced new weapons and sensors - especially anti-submarine aircraft. The result was defeat for the U-boats. In late May 1943 after heavy losses, the Germans withdrew from the Atlantic and lost their advantage. Allied sea communications were now secure and preparations for the liberation of France went ahead.
The maritime air battle against U-boats was waged in cooperation with the Admiralty and RAF's Coastal Command. The Navy requested air raids against U-boat operating bases and construction yards, and the transferral of aircraft from Bomber Command to Coastal Command. Bomber Command and the Air Ministry were unwilling to give resources. A Cabinet-level compromise was eventually worked out and the Navy and Coastal Command were given enough resources to defeat the U-boats in May 1943.
On 26 December 1943 the battlecruiser Scharnhorst was sunk off the North Cape by the Home Fleet, commanded by Admiral Bruce Fraser in the battleship HMS Duke of York. This was the Royal Navy's last big ship versus big ship gunnery duel.
Bomber Command was used for special operations, and in November 1944 Lancaster bombers armed with special bombs sank the battleship Tirpitz.
Opening Moves in the Far East
British strategy in the Far East centered on the dispatch of a balanced fleet to Singapore. The Army's role was essentially an Imperial garrison. Unfortunately, financial pressures in the 1930s had delayed the completion of Singapore as a major naval base with full ship repair facilities. At the start of hostilities in Europe, matters deteriorated particularly for the Royal Navy in the Atlantic, home waters and Mediterranean. An economically constrained rearmament program meant the Royal Navy now faced a crippling lack of modern warships for the Far East.
The first Japanese assaults followed the Imperial Japanese Navy's surprise attack on the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour. On 8 December the Japanese army crossed into the New Territories of Hong Kong, and by 12 December British and Imperial troops had been forced back onto Hong Kong Island, which the Japanese assaulted six days later. By Christmas Day, it was clear that further resistance was impossible, and what was left of the garrison surrendered. The British and Imperial performance in Malaya was perhaps the worst of the war. The army, civilians and government were psychologically unready to resist the Japanese.
The British response immediately met with disaster at sea with the destruction of Force Z (the new battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battle cruiser HMS Repulse) by land-based Japanese naval aircraft. As a result, there was no way of stopping the seaborne invasion force. Soon the British were forced back on to Singapore Island. With no fleet to base in Singapore, and no aircraft to defend it, efforts were made to demolish the new naval base before the Japanese captured it. On 15 February, after an uncoordinated defence, Singapore surrendered.
War in the Mediterranean
The defeat of France created problems in the Mediterranean. The French fleet was there to look after Allied interests. Now that fleet might fall into German hands. A new British fleet, Force H, was created under Admiral Somerville both to replace the French fleet and attacked it at Mers El Kebir in one of the Royal Navy's unhappiest operations. Italy also entered the war. Admiral Cunningham's Mediterranean Fleet soon asserted its superiority over the Italians both at sea and in disabling half of their battleships in the daring night air attack on Taranto . The Germans were forced to come to Italy's aid with aircraft, and later submarines, which caused the British much difficulty and damage.
The Mediterranean campaign revolved around the island of Malta, where the British based surface ships, submarines and aircraft to attack the supplies for Italian and German armies in North Africa. In April 1942 the increasing air attacks on Malta forced the evacuation of the Royal Navy's strike forces based there. The British were forced to run convoys of supplies to Malta and were heavily attacked by Axis aircraft, submarines and surface ships. After a disastrous convoy in June 1942 (the 'Vigorous' convoy) the British didn't attempt another convoy from Alexandria to Malta until November. In August efforts to re-supply the island centred on a convoy from Gibraltar, Operation Pedestal. Major convoy operations were mounted to sustain Malta and the island narrowly survived. However, in re-supplying the island with enough materials to allow the fight to continue, the Royal Navy suffered crippling losses.
As the balance tilted against the Germans and Italians, major landings were carried out in North Africa which led to the Mediterranean finally being re-opened as a shipping route. After the invasion first of Sicily then of Italy itself, Italy changed sides. The decision to invade Sicily was made by Britain and America at the Casablanca conference in January 1943, before Tunisia had been cleared of Axis forces. The combined British and American landings took place on 10 July on the southeast corner of the island, but German defence slowed the initial success down. By 18 June a decision was made to invade Italy. The invasion took place in two phases. On 3 September 1943 the British 8th Army crossed the Straits of Messina to the toe of Italy. On the 9 September, just hours after the formal announcement of the surrender of Italy, the Anglo-American 5th Army landed hundreds of miles up the coast at Salerno. On 22 January 1944, in order to break the stalemate in front of the Gustav Line, the Allies decided on an amphibious descent on the western coast at Anzio.
Amphibious warfare
The Second World War saw amphibious warfare undergo enormous development. Fleets of new ships and craft were developed for operations that grew from mere raids to fully fledged invasions. The greatest operation of all was 'Neptune', the maritime side of Operation 'Overlord', the landings in Normandy that began on 6 June 1944. This was commanded by the Royal Navy's greatest exponent of amphibious warfare, Admiral Bertram Ramsay , and most of the warships, from battleships to infantry landing craft, were British.
War in the Far East
Fully stretched by war against both Germany and Italy, the Royal Navy could do little to halt the Japanese onslaught that began in December 1941. The battleship Prince of Wales and battlecruiser Repulse were sent to Singapore to try to deter Japan but were sunk by Japanese Navy torpedo bombers. Singapore fell and the Royal Navy was driven from the waters of South East Asia. Only late in the war with the defeat of enemy naval forces in Europe did the Royal Navy reappear in Asia-Pacific waters in strength. In 1945 a large British Pacific Fleet commanded by Admiral Fraser and based around a powerful carrier force fought alongside the Americans in Japanese waters. Forces in the Indian Ocean were also scoring successes against major Japanese warships.
Conclusion
With Britain secure by land, sea and air and with men to use, ships, munitions and aircraft were produced and sent to the Middle East, the Mediterranean and the Far East. Finally Britain was the launch pad for the liberation of Europe in Operation Overlord. Operation Overlord was the codename for the Allied invasion of northwest Europe which began (operationally) on June 6 1944 with the invasion of Normandy.
The Second World War was a major success for sea power. Germany had to be defeated on land but this was achieved by the amphibious landing of forces in the west and the Soviet forces in the east were kept in action by maritime supplies. Throughout the war the Royal Navy ran convoys to the Russian Arctic ports braving atrocious weather as well as attacks by aircraft, submarines and surface ships.
The Royal Navy fought well in the Second World War, better than in the First, but the price was high. Some 1,525 vessels of all sizes were lost, including 224 large warships. Over 50,000 British naval personnel lost their lives, a total more than all the men and women currently serving in today's Royal Navy and Royal Marines, and 20,000 more than in the First World War.
By 1945 the Royal Navy had grown to almost 900 major warships and a force of 866,000 men and women. Women had been allowed to serve in shore appointments the First World War but the Womens Royal Naval Service (WRNS) had been wound up afterwards. It was reformed for the Second World War and 'Wrens' became permanent features of a service that now faced the challenges of a troubled peace.
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