The British Carrier Strike Fleet. David Hobbs
It was the third that was most open to argument about interpretation although the stated objective ‘to make reasonable preparations for a hot war should it break out’ seemed straightforward enough. By then the first phase of the Cold War was ending as the USA had built up a sufficiently large stockpile of nuclear weapons to plan on using them for tactical, as well as strategic, strikes. The Soviet Union exploded its first atomic weapon in 1949, some years earlier than expected by the Western powers but it was still unlikely that a sufficient stockpile of nuclear weapons would be ready before 1957. In 1952 the USA exploded its first hydrogen bomb and work on similar weapons was being carried out in the UK and Soviet Union. At first these weapons were massive and only large bombers such as the B-36 or B-52 could carry them, but work to reduce their size continued as a matter of the highest priority.10 The first US production H-bombs appeared in 1954 and SAC stockpiles increased steadily. The Soviet Union surprised the West by detonating a prototype H-bomb in 1953 although this was a crude device and it took several years to produce operational bombs in quantity. The first British H-bomb was not detonated until 1958.
The period between 1952 and the later 1950s constituted a second phase of the Cold War in which Western governments calculated that the large stockpile of atomic bombs and the growing number of H-bombs were capable not just of inflicting major damage on the Soviet Union but of destroying it. At the same Soviet medium bombers and intermediate-range missiles were capable of destroying the UK and most of western Europe although few Soviet systems had the capability to reach the USA. A war between the West and the Soviet Union, therefore, was no longer seen as a nuclear exchange followed by a prolonged period of conventional warfare but came to be seen as a single, mass-destructive strike against the Soviet Union using the resources available at the outbreak of war whilst using such resources as there were left to counter the riposte. The term ‘mutually-assured destruction’ came into use and adequately described this concept. A war that would end in days, possibly even hours, meant that there would be no need for reinforcements or convoys to bring them across the Atlantic. The creation of the H-bomb led to renewed questions about the need for conventional weapons and the global strategy paper was already out of date. Rather than wait, the Government ordered a new review of UK defence which evolved into the radical review described in the next chapter.
The Royal Navy in 1954
While all this political argument was going on, the RN had emerged from the years of manpower crisis and was playing a major part in the British war effort in Korea. The dockyards were full of warships, although many of these were wartime hulls laid up in low-category reserve. Many more ships were retained in dispersed reserve bases at harbours and shipyards up and down the country. These would have been required in a prolonged war but there was no need for them in a short nuclear exchange. The following figures11 give an idea of the size of the RN in February 1954 as the first phase of the Cold War ended:
The number of ships operating on ‘trials and training’ duties demonstrates the Admiralty’s success in keeping ships running with reduced complements so that they could be brought forward rapidly for operational service if needed in the danger period expected after 1957. Triumph, for instance, had replaced the cruiser Devonshire as the training ship for cadets from the Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. Extra accommodation, classrooms and a gunroom were built into the forward and central hangars but a flight of Boulton Paul Balliol trainers was embarked and struck down into the after hangar. Capable of both catapult launch and arrested landing, these aircraft were used to give air experience to cadets, an ideal arrangement in the new air age but one that proved too expensive to sustain and frigates took over the training task in 1956. Implacable and Indefatigable had been kept running in the Home Fleet Training Squadron to maintain them in satisfactory condition for modernisation but by 1954 it was recognised that work on the scale required was neither technically nor financially feasible with Victorious still some years from completion. Ocean and Theseus, both far cheaper to run, were modified for service as training ships. Several light fleet carriers were being completed for the RAN and RCN but Hercules12 and Leviathan13 were laid up incomplete.
Soviet Threats to be Countered
The Cold War threats that the RN had to face came in all three elements; Sverdlov class cruisers on the surface, medium bombers of the Soviet Naval Air Force including the Tupolev Tu-16 ‘Badger’ in the air and ‘W’ class submarines below the surface. The Sverdlov class cruisers were designed with noticeable influence from captured German technology and Allied intelligence was aware that large numbers were under construction with the first vessels launched in 1950.14 Eventually seventeen were launched but only fourteen were completed for active service. They were armed with twelve 5.9in guns in four triple turrets, twelve 3.9in guns in six twin turrets, thirty-two 37mm anti-aircraft guns and ten 21in torpedo tubes in two quintuple mountings. They had mine-rails on the quarterdeck as a standard fitting and were reputedly able to carry up to 250 mines although what other weapons would have to be sacrificed when the full load was carried was never clearly understood in the West. Powerful machinery of 130,000shp gave a maximum speed of 34 knots and they had a complement of just over 1000. These were clearly powerful ships but little was known about them until 1953 when Sverdlov attended the Coronation Review at Spithead and one of her sister-ships visited Sweden.
Given the recent wartime experience of the German attack on shipping, the Admiralty had to assume that these vessels were intended, if a ‘shooting war’ broke out, to sever the Atlantic link between America and the UK by attacking convoys. The RN could not hope to retain enough cruisers in service to seek them out and engage them individually and so the threat posed by the growing number of new Soviet cruisers gave added impetus to the requirement for a new generation of carrier-borne aircraft to find them and attack them from long ranges. The new surface-search capability offered by the Skyraider AEW 1 was obviously critically important and impetus was added to the development of the NA-39 strike aircraft. Whilst Wyverns could attack with conventional bombs and rockets, it would take a large number of them to score sufficient hits to neutralise a Sverdlov. Airborne torpedoes remained an option but closing in to 1000 yards when opposed by radar-laid medium-calibre gunfire appeared to be an increasingly suicidal method of attack. The need to sink or badly damage a 19,000-ton cruiser with the minimum number of attack aircraft meant that they had to be equipped with the most accurate weapons delivery system available. The NA-39 specification required the aircraft to use its search radar to provide data for an accurate toss-bombing technique that would allow bombs to be released beyond the maximum effective range of the target’s anti-aircraft guns.15 As the potential for the UK to produce a relatively small, tactical nuclear bomb became apparent in the mid-1950s, the resulting Red Beard weapon was added to the specification. Using the standard toss-bombing technique, a single Red Beard could destroy or severely incapacitate an enemy cruiser even if it missed by several hundred yards.
The Admiralty was also concerned that some protection would need to be given to naval task forces that did not include an aircraft carrier. This is why Vanguard was retained in commission and some of the King George V class retained at reasonably short notice into the early 1950s, to provide heavy, radar-laid gunfire far beyond the range of a Sverdlov. The wartime cruisers also had some value as escorts and as flagships on the various naval stations around the world. Both battleships and cruisers were expensive to run, however, and their numbers declined rapidly through the 1950s as re-equipment programmes had to be funded. The Soviet Navy also retained battleships into the early 1950s. Two dated from 1914 and the third was the former Italian Giulio Cesare, ceded to the Soviet Union under the terms of the Italian peace treaty in 1949. None of them were regarded as mechanically reliable by Western intelligence agencies. Over 100 new ‘Kotlin’ and Skoriy class destroyers were being completed in this period, giving the Soviet Union a considerable sea-going fleet which was numerically larger than the Royal Navy but much less capable in terms of striking power. The US Navy remained pre-eminent in terms of both size and it ability to strike targets at sea and on land.
German U-boats with high underwater speed went into service too late in the Second World War to affect