On Seas Contested

The three main naval bases for the Royal Navy in 1939 were the historic ones of Devonport, Portsmouth and Chatham, which as part of the Nore Command also embraced Sheerness. Each of these was more than simply a port and a dockyard, but also included a number of shore stations for training and specialized aspects of the work of the fleet. Augmenting these bases were those at Rosyth, Pembroke Dock, and Gibraltar and Malta. During the Second World War, the Royal dockyards laid down over thirty new ships and carried out more than 97,000 refits. “T” class submarines were amongst those Second World War boats built at Chatham.

Devonport was the dockyard area of Plymouth and during the Second World War was ideally situated for protection of the Western Approaches, which also meant that it was within easy reach of German bombers, and much of its command work was relocated to Liverpool. In the same way, the advantages of Portsmouth, such as proximity to the English Channel, also worked against it during the Second World War since the approaches were easily mined and the dockyard was subject to bombing. Across the harbor from Portsmouth was the Royal Navy’s main submarine training center and base at Haslar, also known as HMS Dolphin. The main gunnery school was on Whale Island in Portsmouth Harbor, also known as HMS Excellent, while the diving and mine countermeasures base and training center was at HMS Vernon, which was largely relocated after one of the barracks blocks was bombed with heavy loss of life during the blitz.

While for most of British history, the threat had come from the south, by the early twentieth century it was clear that a newly united and ambitious Germany posed the biggest threat. Rosyth on the north bank of the Firth of Forth and not too far from Edinburgh, was chosen as the base for the future. Unlike Chatham, Devonport and Portsmouth, Rosyth was not a manning port, and did not undertake construction of warships but concentrated instead on refitting and repair work. Rosyth was not liked by many senior officers, being too far from the open sea and the railway bridge across the Firth of Forth was seen both as an obstacle to navigation in fog, a not infrequent problem in the area, and a likely obstruction if it was bombed. While it was a naval base, the RN forward base in two world wars at Scapa Flow was simply an anchorage without major repair facilities and, as it proved, inadequate defenses.

Londonderry became the main operational base for the escorts used on the Atlantic convoys, and a naval air station, HMS Gannet, was established close-by at Eglinton, which itself soon required a satellite airfield at Maydown, HMS Shrike, for the aircraft using the MAC ships.

The three main overseas bases for the Royal Navy in 1939 were Gibraltar, Malta and Singapore. The only one to remain fully operational throughout the war, Gibraltar provided refit and repair facilities, and its security was enhanced when a runway was built on the site of the racecourse. It was used as a base by Force H and provided easy access to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Had Spain entered the war on the side of the Axis, the base would have become untenable, and as it was, Spanish workers were sent home at nightfall to ensure security.

Despite the excellence of Malta’s dockyard facilities, heavy Axis air attack from June 1940 onwards made use of the base difficult, although it did sterling work in January 1941 in making emergency repairs to the stricken aircraft carrier, Illustrious. During the height of the war in the Mediterranean, Malta remained a base for light forces and also for submarines, but between June 1940 and April 1943, the main base for the Mediterranean Fleet was Alexandria in Egypt, although this port lacked adequate maintenance and repair facilities so that ships that were badly damaged were often sent to the United States for repairs.

Preoccupation with the war in Europe left Singapore neglected, despite promises made to Australia and New Zealand between the wars. After the fall of Singapore to Japanese forces in 1942, other bases became important, but these, such as Trincomalee in Ceylon, were effectively anchorages rather than main bases, although “Trinco” did have the advantage of nearby airfields for the Fleet Air Arm and the Royal Air Force. Kilindini (near Mombasa in Kenya), Capetown and Sydney were also used as bases, especially after the creation of the British Pacific Fleet. Addu Atoll, in the Indian Ocean and today known as Gan, was established as a secret refueling base for the British Eastern Fleet shortly after the outbreak of war, and proved invaluable after Japan entered the war.

3. Industry
Despite the country’s small size, the United Kingdom has a heavily indented coastline with many ports, and during the first half of the twentieth century it had extensive shipbuilding facilities. Before war broke out, heavy engineering firms established the shadow factory system, under which their factories had counterparts duplicating their production, both to increase production and also guarantee against the complete interruption of materiel if the home factory was bombed. The shadow factories became available as, under wartime restrictions, production and the supply of raw materials, labor and power was limited to those industries contributing towards the war effort. Consumer goods virtually ceased to be made until later in the war when utility models prevailed.

Despite heavy bombing of the major industrial areas of the Midlands and the shipyards, production of major naval vessels rose from 52 in 1940 to 114 in 1942 and then fell back to 76 in 1944 as demand fell. Smaller craft rose from 375 in 1940 to 1,049 in 1942 and continued to rise to 1,651 in 1944 as the demands of invasion forces increased. Merchant vessels rose from 810,000 tons completed in 1940 to 1,301,000 in 1942, but as losses fell, production dropped to 1,014,000 gross tons in 1944. Aircraft production in terms of structural weight almost quadrupled between 1940 and 1944.

Many naval vessels were designed to make use of shipyards that would not normally work on warships, with boatyards producing motor torpedo boats and motor gunboats, and then the big merchant shipyards building the Colossus-class aircraft carriers.

Conscription went beyond the requirements of the armed forces, with all adults liable to be conscripted and a war-dictated focus of labor to relevant industries. Only the young, the elderly and mothers of young children were exempt. All women over the age of 18 years and under the age of 60 years were registered for war work. No combatant nation mobilized its people as thoroughly as the UK, with 22 percent of the population in the armed forces and 33 percent in industry. The Ministry of Labour maintained a record of all adults capable of work, while to coordinate the supply of raw materials to the factories and coordinate the equipment needs of the armed forces, a separate Ministry of Supply was created early in the war.⁶

IV. Recap
A. Wartime evolution
The Royal Navy had entered the war believing, as did the government and the other two services, that the Second World War would follow the lines of the First World War, with the British and French armies engaged with the Germans in France and Belgium. No one believed that France would fall, or foresaw the invasion of Denmark and Norway, or for that matter, the Netherlands. If there was one expected difference, it was that war would come with Italy, and there was surprise that Italy did not join Germany at the outset but instead waited until June 1940. The possibility of war in the Far East at the same time as war with Germany was not recognized until too late for an effective precaution. It was quite clear that the Royal Navy could only fight one war and would be hard pressed to cope with two theaters.

The First World War had displayed the necessity of a convoy system, with a need to counter a combination of U-boats and German surface raiders. History did not forecast that, not only would the Royal Navy have to fight on its own against Germany until the United States entered the war, but Germany would, for the first time, have open water ports in northern France and along that country’s Biscay coast on which to base its ships and submarines.

At first, with stretched resources, the Royal Navy had ships operating in small groups, essentially in squadron strength rather than fleet strength, and this was mainly a weakness in the Far East, where during the first few months of the war with Japan, British warships were picked off, one or two at a time, by the overwhelming might of the Japanese. This was a lesser problem in the Atlantic as the Germans themselves did not at any time send a fleet, let alone a balanced fleet, to sea. It was also a lesser problem in the Mediterranean as both the British Mediterranean Fleet and Force H were in effect balanced fleets.

Even before it had regained control over its own aviation from the Royal Air Force, British naval officers recognized that air power would be important. As early as 1935, when Italy invaded Abyssinia, plans were drawn up for a strike flown from the Mediterranean Fleet aircraft carrier Glorious against the Italian fleet in its major base of Taranto. Nevertheless, the Royal Navy lacked modern strike aircraft, and this was to continue until the arrival of the Grumman Avenger from the United States. Indeed, before Taranto, much had to be done to improve the launch and recovery of aircraft from carriers; even at this early stage, some US ideas had to be adopted, including the use of the flight deck crash barrier to protect aircraft parked forward from any which missed the arresting wires.

Britain’s navy suffered, as did the other two services, from budgetary problems during the inter-war depression, made worse by a national strike arising from a longer-running strike by coal miners. But far worse was the constant interference in naval matters by well-meaning but naïve politicians attempting to reduce the size of warships and their armaments. British defense policy was also hampered by the Ten Year Rule, which maintained that the country would have ten years in which to prepare for war. As it happened, Hitler assumed absolute power in 1933 and the nation went to war in 1939. Financial constraints on re-armament were not eased until 1937.

While the Royal Navy in 1939 was smaller than that of 1914, and no longer had the overwhelming superiority over its opponents as the earlier navy, it was in many ways better prepared. Many of its senior officers had served in the earlier conflict and there was far less of the arrogance and inability to learn that had made the earlier conflict so costly. By and large, the ships were better designed, but inevitably there were mistakes. Anti-submarine sweeps in the pre-Ultra intelligence days were a waste of time, and as it turned out, a waste of an aircraft carrier, Courageous. On the other hand, there were examples of individual courage and flair, which saw the German U-570 captured intact with the secrets of the Enigma codes. While the withdrawal from Norway was costly, in two destroyer battles at Narvik and in the sinking of the light cruiser Konigsberg by shore-based naval aircraft, the Royal Navy performed well. From the start, in the Mediterranean it struggled against a stronger enemy, but won most of its battles against the Italian Regia Marina, often at great cost.

The Royal Navy in 1945 was a far better service than it had been in 1939. It had learnt how to use naval air power properly. It had learnt how to improvise, as with the MAC ships, and innovate as with anti-submarine devices such as Hedghog and Squid. It realized the need to provide heavy anti-aircraft defenses for its ships, to the extent that later late-war and post-war ships were sometimes criticized for their over-heavy armament. The British Pacific Fleet that joined the American Third/Fifth Fleet was the best balanced and most powerful fleet ever sent to sea by the UK. It had made significant strides in the operation of carrier-borne aircraft and in maintaining itself at sea for long periods.

US support and involvement helped greatly, at both national level and local level, where liaison between two rival navies was doubtless helped by the existence of alcohol in the wardrooms of British ships.

B. Assessment
The Royal Navy was one of the three strongest navies in the world in 1939 and 1940, but it was also the most stretched. It was meant to protect the largest empire the world had ever seen, but it lacked the resources for this role and the many others that were cast upon it. It was deficient in many areas. It had ignored the development of small fast craft, doubtless because it believed that in wartime, the Germans could be held in France and Belgium, as in the First World War. Its ships had suffered from inter-war governments attempting to reduce their size and their armament from even those limitations imposed by the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922. The recommendations of the Madden Committee in the mid-1920s that the Royal Marines be developed into a strong amphibious force had been ignored. In negotiating the Anglo-German treaty of 1935, the future foe was not only allowed a fleet increase to 35 percent of the Royal Navy’s total tonnage, but also granted 100 percent of the its submarine tonnage. Despite Germany’s rise, nothing was done to provide adequate base facilities on the East Coast of Scotland. The naval base at Rosyth had been closed for much of the inter-war period. Having spent the 1920s and 1930s fighting to regain control of its own air power, the Admiralty still lacked not only high-performance aircraft but also its own training system, being initially dependent upon the Royal Air Force, and then the United States Navy.

These weaknesses emerged largely from public opinion and the world’s economic situation. Successive British governments struggled to balance their budgets, and it was easy to ignore defense spending. The jingoism and lust for battle evident at the start of the First World War had evaporated and into war-weariness, the threat of starvation and defeat, and casualties far worse than anyone had expected. After the Armistice, the British public wanted to believe that it had been through the “war to end all wars,” and the desire to appease Hitler in 1938 was widely accepted. One survey of public opinion reported that: “The leadership which found the prospect of peace in our time in a small piece of paper, was a leadership intensely acceptable to a nation which had made up its mind in 1918 not to fight another war if it could possibly be avoided.”⁷

Additionally, as in 1914, the man in the street actually believed Britain’s armed forces to be stronger and better equipped than they really were. In 1939, the armed forces were rebuilding and recruiting as fast as they could, but it was a race against time. Many of the ships in service still dated from the previous war, and while many had been modernized, others hadn’t. Even the aircraft carrier fleet had four ships that were really too old and too small, and just one of the remaining three was a modern aircraft carrier.

On the other hand, the Royal Navy included many officers at all levels that recognized the problems and were determined to win. They knew that the German Kriegsmarine was no match for its surface fleet, even though the surface raiders posed a threat. They saw that the U-boat posed the real threat to the country’s survival. The Admiralty recognized the shortage of flight decks momentous enough to consider converting the ocean liners Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, the world’s two largest ships, into aircraft carriers - a move certain to shake public opinion, but ultimately the ships proved even more valuable as troopships.

While there were still those who refused to recognize either the potential of the airplane or the threat that it posed, or those such as Admiral Sir Tom Phillips who maintained radio silence and lost his battle squadron as result, there were others who took daring challenges and won. The fact that a heavy cruiser and two light cruisers, with nothing heavier than 8-in guns, could fight, trap and eventually see scuttled, a German Panzerschiff with 11-in guns in the Battle of the River Plate, showed that initiative and courage wasn’t lacking.

To overcome its weaknesses, the Royal Navy needed US support in the form of the “Town” class destroyers, transferred in return for the use of British bases in the Caribbean; in the form of ships and aircraft under Lend-Lease; and in the USN escorting convoys to a mid-Atlantic handover point even before the United States entered the war. One can even include the Wasp’s two aircraft delivery runs to the beleaguered island of Malta in this. On the other hand, the Royal Navy was eventually capable of coping with both Germany and Italy, even without the support of the French fleet.

The RN even had technology to offer, with the less well-known Reverse Lend-Lease that saw asdic made available to the USN.

Where the RN did need to learn was in the Pacific where the really big naval battles of the Second World War took place. US help in getting British naval aviation into gear was invaluable with improving deck landing and take-off rates, mounting massed attacks with aircraft from more than one carrier at a time, and with fighter cover. Many British naval aviators admired the Americans, but claimed that by the end of the war they were as good as, if not better, than their allies! Friendly, and sometimes not-so-friendly, rivalry persists.

It was in the Pacific that many lessons were learnt. The commander-in-chief of the United States Navy did not want the British in the Pacific as the USN was capable of finishing the job itself. Many other officers agreed with him. Many Americans also resented helping a colonial power to regain its territories, for after all, were they not liberating people from German and Japanese occupation?

The British, on the other hand, had scores to settle with Japan, and they did not want their dominions, Australia and New Zealand, to feel the “Mother Country” had abandoned them. They had ruled in much of the East for a long time, and while they had recognized that some colonies, especially India, would have to be granted independence as soon as possible after the war, they knew that others were not so ready, or even so insistent.

The British Pacific Fleet was the largest and most powerful ever sent to sea by the Royal Navy. It was also the best-balanced, and for the first time a serious effort was made to ensure that bases could be made available quickly and the fleet train could provide all of the support needed. They even went so far as to have a ship converted into a floating brewery.

The Royal Navy ended the war with a different balance itself, relatively stronger in submarines than in 1939, with a fifth of the service accounted for by naval aviation. The Royal Marines had developed into a flexible amphibious fighting force, and combined operations were placed under the control of a senior Royal Navy officer. Such innovations such as “Chariot” human torpedoes and miniature submarines were sideshows, but the importance of fighting war under the waves and above them, and of amphibious assault, were changes that became permanent.

The irony of it all was that in the early years of the twentieth century, a First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Jacky Fisher, had forecast that the future of naval warfare lay under the waves and in the air above it - something that would be relearned painfully and expensively thirty-five years after he became First Sea Lord.

1 The dominions differed from the colonies in being self-governing and in effect having an equal status with the UK itself. In 1939, the dominions were Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa.

2 The day after war was declared, 4 September 1939, the British Expeditionary Force, BEF, was moved to France, with an initial strength of 152,000 men supported by the RAF.

3 Imperial War Museum

4 Imperial War Museum figures

5 Imperial War Museum

6 Churchill, Winston S. The Second World War, Vol. 1: The Gathering Storm, Cassell, London, 1948.

7 Mass Observation 1940 report on British attitudes to World War II. Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex