The British Carrier Strike Fleet. David Hobbs
old ships including Nelson, Renown and Queen Elizabeth and the gradual reduction of the King George V class to reserve after a spell in the Home Fleet Training Squadron.
Throughout the Cold War, Allied intelligence agencies had a tendency to overestimate Soviet capability but, despite this, the view was taken in 1948 that the danger of an all-out war in the next five years was small. By 1957, however, the Soviet Union was expected to have created a greatly increased arsenal of nuclear weapons together with the means to deliver them. By then the threat of war was expected to be grave and British re-armament with weapons reflecting new technologies would be needed. Since some years would elapse before the period of maximum danger, government policy tended to concentrate on the longer-term development of weapons systems that were believed to offer the most effective means of fighting a major conflict after 1957. In the short term, the armed forces in general, including the RN strike fleet, were to make do with adequate aircraft and ships procured in minimal numbers and to ‘skip a generation’ of development. If, by miscalculation or design, war was forced on Britain before then, the nation would have to fight with such forces and weapons as it possessed.4 The Government’s top defence priority at this time was stated to be the creation of a medium bomber force equipped with nuclear weapons as quickly as possible; second priority was the reconstruction of the RN with powerful air and anti-submarine elements to oppose Soviet surface warships and submarines in the North Atlantic.
A war against the Soviet Bloc in the late 1940s or early 1950s would almost certainly have seen nuclear weapons used from the outset but they were neither powerful enough nor numerous enough to win the conflict outright. They would, instead, have changed the way in which a largely conventional war would have been fought and the period up to 1952 can be thought of as an initial phase of the Cold War. SAC calculated, probably very optimistically, that it would take it a minimum of six weeks for a bombing campaign to force the Soviet Union to halt a conventional attack against Western Europe and allow the Allies to dictate the terms for a ceasefire and subsequent peace settlement. Large conventional forces were still required to hold ground and buy time for the bomber offensive to gain momentum. Powerful navies were still required to fight convoys across the Atlantic with reinforcements, ammunition and food. In this phase the USA gradually built up its nuclear arsenal to the extent that such weapons could be used tactically as well as strategically. The Soviet Union had nowhere near the same number of nuclear weapons in 1952 and was deterred from making a conventional attack against NATO in Europe by the threat of ‘massive’ US nuclear retaliation. The first British atomic bomb was detonated in the frigate Plym near Monte Bello island off the remote north-west coast of Australia in 1952.
While nuclear weapons caught the popular imagination and would have changed the manner in which a largely conventional war would be fought, other new technologies had a greater short-term impact. These included fast submarines, jet fighters and guided weapons. Each of these, in their own way, rendered obsolete large numbers of warships that had successfully fought the recent war and required countermeasures that would be time-consuming and expensive to develop. All of the threats needed to be detected, intercepted and destroyed over large areas of ocean and carrier-borne aircraft were recognised as the most effective and economical method of achieving this aim, reinforcing the importance of naval aviation to the modernised RN. Of interest, it was soon appreciated that all three of these new threats were difficult to counter in the final stages of an attack on a task force or convoy and that they would more effectively countered ‘at source’ by destroying submarine bases and the airfields from which aircraft could attack the fleet. At the very least, fleet fighters would need to destroy aircraft carrying guided missiles before they reached a position from which they could detect the fleet and launch them.
Political Theories and a Series of Defence Studies
In the latter part of 1948 an Inter-Service working party was set up under the chairmanship of Edmund Harwood, a senior civil servant who had spent the war years in the Ministry of Food and was considered expert in the achievement of economy. The RN representative was Rear Admiral Charles Lambe, who had commanded the aircraft carrier Illustrious in the BPF and was to be a future First Sea Lord. The committee considered the role to be played by the armed forces in the years from 1950 to 1953 and took as its baseline the expenditure ceiling placed on the armed forces’ budgets for that period by the Treasury, £700 million. At the time the UK was spending 10.8 per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP), on defence compared with about 3.8 per cent by the USA.5 The report was submitted to the Minister of Defence in February 1949 and recommended that the UK must continue to meet its existing commitments and wage the Cold War effectively. Beyond that it confirmed the existing priorities by recommending that some new weapons should be procured as limited insurance against the possibility of accidental war in the short term but maximum effort should be devoted to developing longer-term weapons against the more likely threat of war in 1957 or soon after. Harwood placed the greatest emphasis on the RN capability to defend sea communications to the UK, perhaps naturally given his wartime experience with food imports, and it was taken for granted there would be American support from the outset of a major war. The Review also recommended drastic reductions in the number of ships deployed outside the UK in the Far East, Middle East, Mediterranean and West Indies. This was seen as a risky policy by Alexander and the Chiefs of Staff, however, who argued that the withdrawal of support for Commonwealth countries would place them at risk from Communist influence. In July 1949, therefore, a further working party was established under the chairmanship of Sir Harold Parker, Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence.6
The result of this committee’s deliberations was a recommendation that led to a scheme for a ‘revised, restricted fleet’ of adequate shape and size to meet the RN’s wide-ranging tasks. It was accepted in turn by the Admiralty Board, Ministry of Defence and Cabinet in late 1949 and represented the status quo in 1950 when the Korean War broke out. Eagle and Ark Royal plus the four 1943 light fleet carriers were to be completed and it was hoped, optimistically, to have them in service by 1952. There was also to be a modest expansion in the size of the air groups available for embarkation in them. The decision, recommended by successive studies, to insure against short-term conflict led to production orders for some aircraft that had only been expected to fly in prototype form. These included the Supermarine Attacker, sixty-three of which were ordered to contract 6/Acft/2822/CB.7(b) on 29 October 1948.7 Subsequent batches were ordered in small numbers but it is worth noting that the Admiralty’s slow procurement of new aircraft types was not due, as some critics have claimed, to a lack of interest in aviation but rather to an attempt to keep pace with the strategy and cost ceiling required by the Ministry of Defence. The Sea Venom was ordered as a short-term priority to replace the obsolescent Sea Hornet in the night fighter role although interest remained in a longer-term ‘definitive’ night fighter.
The Korean War and the return of Churchill as Prime Minister led to a further study of British defence policy in 1952. The exercise began with a meeting of the Chiefs of Staff8 at the Royal Naval College Greenwich in February 1952. Significant input was also made by Sir Ian Jacob, formerly the military assistant secretary to the War Cabinet during the Second World War, who had subsequently become Director General of the BBC. Churchill demanded9 his appointment to the Ministry of Defence as chief staff officer. He was released by the BBC as the chiefs of staff produced their initial draft and, on reading through it, felt that it was too obviously an uneasy compromise between the Services, with the mark of three different authors. He asked for the chiefs and their secretary, Brigadier F W Ewbank, to produce a more coherent document that could be put before the Prime Minister. Discussion about a revised draft continued through the spring; Sir Pierson Dixon of the Foreign Office became involved and the first part of the revised paper was amended on his advice. The result was a document known as the Global Strategy Paper which set in context the Conservative government’s defence policy until the next review which was planned for 1957.
The Paper contained three principal objectives, the first of which, ‘to provide the forces required to protect our worldwide interests in the Cold War’, was straightforward and implied an emphasis on conventional peacekeeping and limited war forces. The second was also logical and required little argument: ‘to build up with our allies in NATO forces of a strength and composition likely to provide a reliable