The British Carrier Strike Fleet. David Hobbs
in service. In the short term the Colossus class light fleet carriers with their greater hangar height and modern facilities were capable of operating the last generation of piston-engined fighters more efficiently economically than the fleet carriers and they continued to do so throughout the Korean conflict. All six ships of the Illustrious group had survived the war but some of them bore the scars of considerable damage and extensive worldwide service.35
Indomitable and Implacable were the only fleet carriers to embark operational air groups in the immediate post-war years, both having undergone limited refits to improve their capabilities. The single-hangar ships had hangars only 16ft high; Indomitable’s upper hangar was only 14ft high and the smaller lower hangar only 16ft. In the last two ships both hangars were only 14ft high. The first four ships could operate aircraft weighing up to 14,000lbs; the last pair aircraft up to 20,000lbs. Aircraft fuel stowage was totally inadequate to support jet operations and the small lifts of the earlier ships, intended to minimise intrusions that would weaken the armoured flight deck, were a significant limitation. Newer carriers had all been designed to operate aircraft weighing up to 30,000lbs with hangar heights of 17ft 6in and these criteria were accepted as the minimum to which the old fleet carriers should be rebuilt. The question of closed or open hangar design had been an issue that had delayed the design of the Malta class but by 1947 the naval staff accepted that the closed option represented the better design philosophy. The decision was influenced by the USN shift to closed designs after experience with typhoons in the Pacific during 1945 and the conclusions drawn from the Bikini Atoll atomic bomb tests in 1946 which clearly demonstrated that aircraft needed to be protected from the blast effect of a distant atomic explosion.
A committee under the chairmanship of Rear Admiral G N Oliver, ACNS (Air), considered reconstruction issues and came firmly to the conclusion that only a full modernisation could be justified since this would give the ships a further twenty years of operational life which would keep them effective ‘into the mid-1960s for about half the cost of a new carrier’ for each ship. It was hoped that all six ships could be rebuilt in the order Formidable, Victorious, Indomitable, Illustrious, Implacable and Indefatigable, but the committee noted that some had a considerable number of unrectified defects that would complicate their reconstruction. In 1947 the committee recommended the initial full reconstruction of Formidable and Victorious to the Admiralty Board, describing the end result as resembling ‘a fast, armoured, Hermes type’ capable of operating forty-eight aircraft. Board approval was given in January 1948 after Treasury sanction which concurred with the presumption that the modification of existing ships represented better value for money than new construction in the short term. Detailed work on the design, which would have to involve dismantling the hull down to hangar deck level and building a ‘new’ ship on top of the old lower hull, began in February 1948 and was not completed until June 1950. By then both ships had been surveyed and it had been found that Formidable had a distorted flight deck, propeller shaft defects and a considerable amount of internal structure that had been damaged by Kamikaze hits and fire in 1945 but only hastily repaired or painted over. Since March 1947 she had been left in un-maintained reserve and her hull was found to have deteriorated significantly as a consequence. In 1950, therefore, it was decided to modernise Victorious first. She had been running as a training ship until recently and her hull was found to be in far better shape.36
Victorious shortly after the completion of her modernisation in 1958. A Skyraider is lined up on the angled deck for a free take-off and Sea Venoms are parked close to the island and in Fly 4 to port of the angled deck right aft. Sea Venoms were small and much easier to park than their larger replacements. (Author’s collection)
There were good reasons why ships from the early group of the Illustrious class were chosen first. Apart from the fact that that they were the oldest ships, there were three of them and design drawings for reconstruction would, therefore, apply to several hulls. Similarly the last group comprised two ships, making them a more a more attractive prospect; drawings for Indomitable would only have applied to the one hull. The impact of the new carrier technology on Victorious’ reconstruction also had a considerable impact and the design had to be re-cast several times to incorporate steam catapults, a fully-angled deck, mirror landing aids and the large Type 984 three-dimensional radar and its associated comprehensive display system. Eagle, Ark Royal and three of the 1943 light fleet carriers, Albion, Bulwark and Centaur, were all completed to interim standards which meant that by 1956 Victorious had to be completed since she was the only ship designed to take all the new equipment in its optimal form. She was too important to cancel but her reconstruction took eight years and cost more than a new ship would have done. No other ships of her class were rebuilt although Eagle was modernised since she was too large and valuable a hull to discard and the 1943 light fleet carrier Hermes was rebuilt on the slipway to a design similar to Victorious. Plans to modernise the remaining 1943 light fleet carriers to a standard similar to Hermes were discarded after the defence review in 1957, although by then Centaur had been fitted with steam catapults. Her two sisters, Albion and Bulwark, were modified into commando helicopter carriers and both were to give valuable service in the 1960s.
5 ‘Cold War’, NATO and the Middle East
The years after 1945 saw the RN matched against a new threat as the relationship between the Western Powers and the Soviet Union deteriorated. Its ability to react to that threat was constrained by limited funds, the post-war manpower crisis and the need to develop and absorb new and emerging technologies.1 There were many analysts who believed that the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 had rendered all conventional forces, especially navies, obsolete and that the concentration of ships into task forces or convoys merely provided more suitable targets for atomic weapons dropped from land-based bombers. In reality, however, the early atomic bombs were not available in large numbers.2 Numbers were so limited, in fact, that if war had broken out before 1952, the newly-formed USAF Strategic Air Command (SAC), planned to use the few atomic bombs that it did have in an opening shock attack against the Soviet Union to be followed by a conventional bombing campaign using the weapons and tactics of the Second World War. The supply of weapons-grade uranium took a considerable time to build up and for this reason the USAF strongly opposed USN plans for nuclear-powered submarines because the provision of material for their fuel would slow the rate at which bombs could be manufactured.
The Cold War
Early in 1948 the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia stimulated a sense of imminent crisis in the West3 which was heightened in June when Soviet forces tried to cut off the Allied sectors of occupied Berlin which lay many miles to the east of what had already been referred to by Churchill as the ‘Iron Curtain’. The subsequent Berlin Air Lift by Allied transport aircraft carried food and fuel into West Berlin for over a year before a negotiated settlement ended the immediate crisis. The British Cabinet’s Defence Committee held a series of urgent meetings throughout 1948 to consider the national response. They decided that the economic reconstruction of the nation must come first but that the UK must be sufficiently strong at sea and in the air to act as a deterrent to a hot war and to provide a foundation for fighting the Cold War at a political level. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), was formed in the same year to counter the possible threat of a conventional attack on Western Europe by the Soviet Union. Significantly this was the first time that the world’s two largest navies, the USN and RN, had joined a peacetime alliance to act together against a potential aggressor and the alliance was named after the ocean that linked the member states together. The chiefs of staff were asked for their views but the recently-appointed Minister of Defence A V Alexander, who had been the wartime First Lord of the Admiralty, put forward his own less expensive proposals for the size of the fleet that was to be retained in commission and these were the ones accepted by the Cabinet. His decision not to retain battleships in commission