The British Carrier Strike Fleet. David Hobbs
during the war all exercised their command from Sasebo in Japan, only embarking to ‘get a feel’ for the operational area with a small staff on relatively infrequent occasions. The chief difference between the American and British systems lay in the rigidity of the former at the time. Orders were extremely detailed and direct communication on a junior level with another Service or even another task force were not normally permitted. All communications were expected to go back up the chain of command, through the top and then back down again. The information addressees on signals did not take action until ordered to comply by their superior authority, even when it was obvious that such action would have to be taken. Practically no discretion was left to the ‘man on the spot’. In the British Commonwealth command structure of the time, on the other hand, anticipation and initiative were expected and exercised. USN ships attached to the west coast task force very much appreciated the reduced reliance on signals, instructions and demands for situation reports. Relations between the USN and RN over the coming decades were to benefit greatly from the perceptions of mutual confidence that grew out of the Korean conflict.
Another specific difference between the USN and the RN is worth explaining. In the USN it was a rule that the officer in tactical command of a carrier task force must himself be a qualified aviator.31 It was accepted that this might leave the flag officer less expert in anti-aircraft and anti-submarine screening tactics. The RN view was that any admiral, not necessarily an aviator, could command a carrier task force and that his staff would cover any shortfall in personal experience, as they would do on non-aviation matters in the USN. In fact none of the three FO2s that served in the Korean War was an aviator and this made it difficult for the Commander Seventh Fleet to understand how they could command a task force that contained two light fleet carriers. At one stage it was even suggested that the carriers should be taken out of FO2’s task force and placed under the operational command of TF 77, the USN carriers that normally operated in the Sea of Japan. The RN politely vetoed this idea and operations continued as they normally did in RN carrier task forces. This difference was to become an issue in later NATO Strike Fleet operations, however.
The British Perception of the Air Interdiction Campaign in Korea
Complete interdiction of a battlefield has always proved difficult but circumstances in Korea seemed to offer special opportunities.32 The complete blockade enforced by the overwhelming UN naval forces entirely ruled out the possibility of enemy supply by sea and the meagre rail and primitive road communications of North Korea seemed vulnerable to the UN air offensive. Additionally, important road and rail centres on the east coast were close to the shore and vulnerable to naval bombardment. Further, the vulnerability of the rail system seemed to be enhanced, as we saw earlier, by the large number of bridges and tunnels necessitated by the mountainous terrain of the east coast of northern Korea. After the Chinese offensive had been contained, the main effort of UN air operations centred on interdiction of the Communist lines of supply. This was the primary responsibility of the US 5th Air Force, supported by Allied contingents and all available naval and USMC aircraft. The efforts of the USN and USAF were never co-ordinated at theatre level due to the lack of a unified US command structure. It gradually came to be accepted, however, that the USN would deal with the east coast railway and highway systems and the USAF would deal with the west coast where it interacted with RN carrier operations. Except when circumstances dictated other temporary uses of aircraft, this policy continued for twenty months. Immense damage was unquestionably inflicted on the enemy communications systems, and movement by rail or road was confined to the hours of darkness, but the full interdiction of the battlefield was never achieved. Throughout the campaign, the Communists were always able to launch an offensive when they wished, largely because they needed far less supplies than Allied troops.
The causes of this failure, in British eyes, were primarily due to inhibitions accepted by the UN for political reasons, but tactical and operational conditions were also partly to blame. Politically, the ban on attacking Communist sources of supply in Manchuria robbed aircraft of targets that could have been decisive and the static war, accepted during the protracted armistice negotiations, enabled the Communists to keep their strongly-fortified front lines supplied to a degree they could never have achieved in a war of movement reacting to Allied amphibious assaults. The enemy was allowed to fight on his own terms and this negated many of the advantages possessed by the Allied forces. When it was initiated in January 1951 the object of the interdiction campaign was to impede the Communist advance. Though this line of reasoning was justified at the time, it was opposed by Vice Admiral Arthur D Struble, commander of TF 77, who felt his aircraft could be used better to provide close air support for troops on the ground. Continuation of the interdiction campaign throughout the long armistice negotiations savoured dangerously of trying to win the war by the use of air power alone, while the Army and Navy were relegated to relatively static and defensive roles. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that this strategy, which certainly suited the Communists, was continued for too long and that better results would have been obtained if a more aggressive strategy had been implemented with the Allied Services working together in close co-operation to capitalise on the UN strengths. With hindsight, had the UN forces continued to exert the mobility and flexibility given to them by their command of the sea, as they had at Inchon in 1950, the enemy would have been forced into a war of movement he could not have sustained and aircraft would have played a critical part in joint operations. This stood more chance than an air interdiction campaign, on its own, of compelling the enemy to accept more satisfactory armistice conditions at an appreciably earlier date.
Logistics
The US Military Sea Transportation Service brought 95 per cent of the US troops that fought on the ground in Korea into the war zone without interruption from enemy action because of the UN command of both the sea and the air above it. In the three years of war the Service delivered five million servicemen, 52 million tons of cargo including ammunition and 22 million tons of petrol and oil. Every US soldier landing in Korea was accompanied by 5 tons of equipment and needed 64lbs of supplies per day to keep him there. For every ton of air freight flown into Korea, 270 tons were delivered by sea and 4 tons of fuel for the transport aircraft’s return trip had to be brought into Korea by sea.33
The Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) played a prominent role in keeping the carriers and all the other Commonwealth warships at sea. A total of thirteen tankers and five stores issuing ships were deployed in support of operations off Korea. When FO2 returned to Sasebo after the initial series of carrier strikes he found Admiral Brind’s chief of staff, Commodore G F Burghard RN, waiting for him to discuss ‘the whole gamut of needs and troubles, refit programmes, personnel and logistics’.34 COMNAVFE generously urged the RN to make use of USN facilities in Sasebo but the principal British requirements for oil, food, stores and ammunition were well catered for by the FEF’s own logistic organisation. Later in the war, when fighting intensified and pre-positioned stock in the Far East was used up, there were some delays shipping replacement stock from the UK and the carriers, for instance, had to use USN bombs with their different attachment lugs which had to be modified. There were also shortages of radio and radar valves which caused problems but overall the system worked very well and FO2 commented that the fleet logistic staff ‘almost seemed to possess the power of thought reading’ so well did they meet his ships’ needs.
An Overview of the Carriers’ Achievement
At the outset of the Korean War Admiral Andrewes said that it would be wrong to regard a single light fleet carrier as representative of what naval aviation was capable of achieving in any theatre. Even taking into account the limited nature of air and naval opposition, however, the performance of the British and Australian light fleet carriers between June 1950 and July 1953 was remarkable. The intensity of flying and the hard lessons learned throughout the long campaign, during the whole of which one ship had been deployed on station despite the recent manpower crisis, brought the ships, squadrons and their people to a high level of professionalism and efficiency that was matched in few other elements of the British armed forces. It built upon the experience of the BPF to maintain a highly-effective Fleet Air Arm that was well placed to move onto the new generation of jet aircraft and helicopters as well as the technical innovations that would revolutionise carrier aviation in the next decade.
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