If you were the Sea Lord in charge of the Fleet Air Arm with money no object and able to buy from any aircraft company in any country how would you equip your carriers and other assorted aircraft carrying ships.:
WW1
interwar
WW2
What aircraft would you stick on your CAM Ships, MAC ships ,Seaplane Carriers . What would be your dive bombers, torpedo bombers etc.
Why, in WW-2, the Bristol Hercules-equipped Sea Maryland III did a brilliant job in the Channel with its rockets, various bomb loads, and with the D-variant, it's gun nose did its fair share to return peace to the land. Or, sea as it were.
would have taken the role of Costal Command as well so would have goten Catalina and Sunderland.
Bought American fighters earlier so would have had Wildcats much earlier
Hmm...would have to talk to Grumman and Northrup about the Tigercat and Black Widow development and purchase.
The thing you have to do in the interwar period is get your crystal ball gazing right, which the FAA pretty much didn't. The reason they had mostly crap aircraft at the start of WWII wasn't because the British aircraft industry couldn't have produced good ones, it's because the FAA wrote crap specification for them to work to and they just gave the customer what he asked for.
My 20/20 hindsight plan to sort out Bristol engines provides the means to a better end. Basically, they had too many projects on the go to develop any of them quickly enough, so my suggestion would be that they scrap the small-bore Aquila/Taurus line and focus all their energies on:
a) getting the Perseus in service quickly and developing it fully,
b) making the Hercules a full 18-cyl "twin Perseus" from the start, which will probably have enough potential to through WWII without having to go to the long-stoke Centaurus at all.
With decent British radial engines available, you can then design decent naval aircraft around them. I see two generations, the first for early experience and the second for the "heavy lifting" for most of the war:
1st Gen, all with a 1000+ bhp "super Perseus":
Fighter: single-seat Skua with a reduced wingspan.
Dive Bomber: two-seat, re-stressed version of the above, with the ability to carry a 1000lb bomb.
Torpedo/recce: essentially a fixed Albacore with the same engine as above. This may seem odd, but the slow-flying/long endurance of a biplane will come in handy in ASW/shadower roles long after it's superceded in the torpedo role.
2nd Gen, all with a Herc-18 of 1500-2000+ bhp:
Fighter: Bearcat-style lightweight, probably based on Bristol or Boulton-Paul designs.
Dive/Torpedo bomber: designed principally as a dive-bomber, the available engine power should enable it to carry a torpedo if required. It would probably be something like a Fairey Spearfish.
Fighter:
And would they have solved the oil leak issues on the 'Big Hercules' so they didn't get even worse than those on the Centaurus? ;D
My Dad's description of a Centaurus included the phrases '...... a Hercules with 4 more cylinders, 20 more litres, 1000 more horsepower and million more oll leaks!' ;D :lol:
Course they would, 'cos they'd have had longer to work on it with more people.... ;) ;D
Seafire 47 in 1942...
I actually gave this quite a bit of thought a few months ago and here's what I came up with.
Carrier Planes
B5N "Kate" 1937
F2A Buffalo 1939
SBD Dauntless 1940
F4F Wildcat 1940
F5F Skyrocket 1941
TBU Sea Wolf 1942
D4Y Suisei "Judy" 1942
F4U Corsair 1943
B7A Ryusei "Grace" 1943
F6F Hellcat 1943
F7F Tigercat 1945
F8F Bearcat 1945
Sea Planes
J2F Duck 1936
PBY Catalina 1936
H6K "Mavis" 1938
Ar 196 1938
PBM Mariner 1940
E13A "Jake" 1941
PBB Sea Ranger 1943
E16A Zuiun "Paul" 1944
Engines
R-1820 Cyclone
R-1830 Twin Wasp
Kinsei (Ha-33)
R-2600 Twin Cyclone
R-2800 Double Wasp
R-3350 Duplex-Cyclone
Armament
MG 15 7.92mm
MG 17 7.92mm
MG 81 7.92mm
MG 81Z 7.92mm
M2 Browning 12.7mm
Berezin UB 12.7mm
Oerlikon FFL 20mm
Berezin B-20 20mm
MK108 30mm
Mind you, this was for a totally unaffiliated country in a scenario that had to allow for Pacific combat. British naval aircraft are just too short-legged in general compared to their US and Japanese counterparts. For my lists of land-based aircraft, the UK had a very strong showing in both airframes and engines, but their naval aircraft were really only well-suited to European combat, and even then not as well as foreign types. The types I chose allowed for greater versatility in both role and deployment. I tried to stay true to first flight and rough development dates, so some of the above are just interim types. I also didn't extend it past 1945. Had I done so, you may have seen the Sea Fury and the Sea Hornet on the list, both fantastic naval fighters that just came too late.
Cheers,
Logan
A very fair point about intended theatres. The FAA was mostly thinking about North Sea and Mediterranean scenarios in the interwar period, so they developed the doctrine of armoured carriers that dealt with a land-based air attack by striking down their aircraft and fighting it out with AAA rather than "inevitably inferior" naval fighters. The price they paid was limited air groups and small lifts that were hard to enlarge, because the only way to get serious armour on something as big and tall as a carrier was to make the armoured flight deck the upper strength member of the hull, so they couldn't then just cut bigger holes in it willy-nilly.
With the 20/20 hindsight goggles on again, the best 1930s carrier would have an armoured deck, unarmoured hangar sides, side lifts and an angled deck layout (no technical reason it couldn't have been done then). In Tony Williams The Foresight War, his expert from the future advises just that.....
Did the British have any pre-WWII carrier admirals like Nimitz and Yamamoto? The split control until IIRC 1937 with the RN providing the carriers and the RAF providing the aircraft and aircrew seems to me like guaranteed career dead end for a naval airpower advocate. Actually with their North Sea/Med scenario, I can't see carriers as anything more than auxilliaries, and a case could be made for the money spent instead on dedicated AAA ships.
Quote from: royabulgaf on February 14, 2012, 04:36:42 PM
I can't see carriers as anything more than auxilliaries, and a case could be made for the money spent instead on dedicated AAA ships.
Bismarck and Taranto...
Quote from: Caveman on February 16, 2012, 12:02:54 AM
Quote from: royabulgaf on February 14, 2012, 04:36:42 PM
I can't see carriers as anything more than auxilliaries, and a case could be made for the money spent instead on dedicated AAA ships.
Bismarck and Taranto...
..... and the Atlantic convoys with the escort carriers too. Not to mention the Malta re-supply missions.
There you go, PR19. Auxiliaries.
I disagree.
The escort carriers were vital to provide some sort of air support to the convoys across the mid-Atlantic Gap. They didn't need to be large fleet carriers, they just had to carry enough Swordfish to keep the U-Boats heads down, and they did. I don't consider that an 'auxiliary' task.
For sure disabling the Bismark or attacking Taranto weren't 'auxiliary' either.
Not saying Brit carriers/carrier planes were distinctly bad, as such, but the amalgamation of the RNAS & RFC into the RAF put the RN on the back foot as far as developing their own requirements for aircraft & carriers went because (from what I can gather) they were at the mercy of the RAF approving/vetoing aircraft related projects; therefore their Lordships of the Admiralty were loath to push for significant budget expenditure on what they considered RAF equipment &, as a young service, the RAF was wary of modernising/prioritising Naval aviaton assets.
If, on the other hand, the RNAS had remained seperate to the RFC/RAF then I think that the RN hierachy may well have developed different ships, aircraft & tactics to those they had.... Not necessarily better, not necessarily worse, just different.
I have no doubt that the amalgamation of the two services was daft, and set Naval avaition in the UK back quite a bit. Just as the similar move with the Invincible class carriers and the 'Joint Force Harrier' scheme did more recently. In both cases the move was driven by economic 'necessity', or at least what the Government of the day saw as a 'necessity'. As usual it's a matter of priorities.
It'd be interesting to speculate how a more separate FAA would have developed by the time of WWII if they'd been allowed to go their own way.
As a starter for 10 there might still be a RNAS Cranwell...
Quick wiki search chucked this interesting snippet up
"Urgently required Sopwith 1½ Strutter two-seaters had to be transferred from the planned RNAS strategic bombing force to RFC squadrons on the Western Front because the Sopwith firm were contracted to supply the RNAS exclusively. In fact this situation continued - although most of Sopwith's post-1915 products were not designed specifically as naval aircraft. Thus RNAS fighter squadrons obtained Sopwith Pup fighters months before the RFC - and then replaced these first with Sopwith Triplanes and then Camels while the hard-pressed RFC squadrons soldiered on with their obsolescent Pups"
And of course there are the RNAS armoured car sections which provided some influence on the Landships committee!
That explains HAWKER Sea Harriers then........ ;) ;D
Hmmm - you can blame some of it on the RAF/RN merger, but some of the daft pre-war ideas were all the Navy's own. The idea that all fighters needed two seats was one of them, but IIRC, they also concocted a mandatory requirement that ALL naval aircraft, even those which were primarily intended to operate from carriers, had to have a slow-enough stalling speed to be launched from the low-powered cordite catapults on cruisers and the like, which lead to vast wing areas and slow maximum speeds.
You've got to wonder if that wasn't a ploy to get these jumped-up RAF types to drop the whole "all 'planes are our 'planes" attitude though by making it so none of their pilots wanted to fly for the Navy. :wacko:
Still, if the Navy had its own aircraft & had conducted exercises with the RAF as aggressors, would that attitude have continued when RAF bombers were running rings around their fighters?
Okay, it seems the RN was uncomfortable with unprotected carriers that the USN favored. It makes sense for the North Atlantic and Med, sort of. What though, was their thinking for the Pacific? The RN was much more familiar with the IJN that the US was, and certainly would not underestimate their capabilities. Was there much of an idea of carrier task forces in the Pacific? This was where fleet carriers became the new capital ships, and at the beginning of the Pacific war the RN had only one, stationed in the Indian Ocean.
Pre-war, all the Western powers greatly underestimated the Japanese, partly through poor intelligence and partly through sheer, condecending racism. They were regarded as very much a second-rate threat, so whatever worked against a European power "must" work against them.... :banghead: :banghead: :banghead:
In any case, it wasn't at all clear pre-war, even to the Americans and Japanese, that carriers were going to be "the new capital ships". Even the most rabid enthusiasts for them went no further than to suggest that they'd be useful and effective rather than totally dominant. The capability of shipboard aircraft to sink capital ships at all wasn't really proven until Taranto, and their capability to sink maneuvering ships that returned fire had to wait for Coral Sea for proof.
It was largely a matter of luck that the inter-war treaty system pushed the Japanese and the Americans into building a small number of large carriers to use up battlecruiser hulls that couldn't be completed, in a way that wasn't true for the Royal Navy. Those large carriers then gave them the ability, nay neccessity, to develop techniques for handling large air groups that would pay of so handsomely a few years later. The RN's choice of ships to convert and preference for armoured hangars on new-builds, meant that large air groups wern't an option, so tactical thinking developed along different lines.
That's an interesting point - what if one or more of the G3 battlecruisers (or even Hood and/or her sisters) were were far enough along that the RN ended up with a big Akagi/Lexington type carrier?
Thanks, Weaver. That explains a lot.
Quote from: pyro-manic on February 19, 2012, 06:41:09 AM
That's an interesting point - what if one or more of the G3 battlecruisers (or even Hood and/or her sisters) were were far enough along that the RN ended up with a big Akagi/Lexington type carrier?
I have pieces from two different HMS Hood models that I will be turning into a CV or BB/CV.