All of the bombs available were feeble. The experience of the previous war suggested that the best weapon for an air attack on a submarine was a bomb carrying at least 300 lbs of high explosive. With the weight of the casing, that amounted to a bomb of 520 lbs. But in 1934, when a new stock of bombs was ordered, the sizes were 500 lb, 250 lb and 100 lb. Why they were chosen when so obviously inadequate was never explained. The puny effect of the hundred-pounders was demonstrated when an Anson dropped one by mistake on a submarine, HMS Snapper. The only damage suffered, it was said, was four broken light bulbs in the control room. Was the story true? Perhaps not, but the fact that it did the rounds gave some idea of the low regard those who would have to drop the bombs had for their destructive powers.
Coastal Command’s effectiveness was further hampered by the lack of on-board radar, so crews had only their eyes to depend on as, hour after hour, on North Sea patrol or convoy escort, they scoured the monotonous grey ridges below for signs of a small, dark shape. It was recognized that the activity could induce trances – similar to the ‘empty-field myopia’ experienced by pilots in the Falklands – which could have fatal consequences. On convoy duty the method was to fly back and forth across a fifteen-mile ‘box’ ahead of and on either side of the merchantmen. It was decided that it was good for morale if they remained in sight of the ship’s crews, so deeper searching was ruled out. At night there was no flying at all.
It was hardly surprising that of the eighty-five attacks carried out by Coastal Command against U-boats in the first eight months of the war, only one resulted in a sinking, and that was with the help of surface ships. During this period, as the official narrative admitted, ‘all we could do was harass and frighten,’ hoping to cause prowling U-boats to at least hang back.5 Depth charges, which were far more effective than bombs, eventually took their place. But it was not until 1941 that Coastal Command could claim a ‘kill’ of its own.
The change in fortunes began with the arrival of better aircraft and on-board radar. The aircraft flying to the rescue were American not British. The PBY Catalina flying boats and Liberators were both made by Consolidated Aircraft in California. The Catalina acted as a replacement to the Sunderland flying boat, which went out of production when the manufacturer, Short’s, were told to switch to churning out Stirlings. It was a marvellous aircraft, initially intended for reconnaissance and bombing over the vast spaces of the Pacific. It was slow but had formidable endurance and its twin Pratt and Whitney engines were famously reliable. It was also highly versatile. Flying boats did not need airstrips. They had two thirds of the earth’s surface to land on. A Catalina could spend two hours on station at a distance of 800 miles, 200 miles further than the Sunderland could manage for that amount of time. By June 1941 fifteen squadrons were due to be supplied with them.
The four-engined Liberator, which carried 2,500 gallons of fuel, could manage three hours patrolling at a distance of 1,100 miles. The Liberators’ great range was needed if the ‘Atlantic Gap’ was to be closed. This was the area of greatest peril for the convoys when they were beyond the reach of the air umbrellas that could be pushed out from Britain, Northern Ireland and Iceland on one side of the ocean and Canada on the other. These were slower to come and by the end of 1942 had reached only four squadrons. It was not until well into 1943 that some degree of cover could be provided by a combination of reconnaissance aircraft, bombers and long-range fighters.
Work on airborne radar had begun in 1936 and by 1940 twelve Coastal Command Hudsons carried an early version. The ASV (Air to Surface Vessel) Mark I was large and heavy. Its range was short and found it hard to distinguish between a ship and the myriad signals sent back by the sea’s surface. Work persisted and an improved version emerged. The ASV II had a more powerful transmitter and a more sensitive receiver and was more robust than its predecessor. It could scan twelve miles ahead and twenty miles to the side. Four thousand sets were ordered and by August 1942 most of the squadrons had them.
Although the land-based aircraft of Coastal Command belonged to the Royal Air Force, the Air Ministry had been sensible enough to cede effective control of it to the Admiralty. Relations between the two were good on the whole and the arrangements were recognized as a model of the not always easy practice of inter-service co-operation.
The decision to return control of ship-borne aircraft to the navy had been made in July 1937. This brought to an end the highly complicated and unsatisfactory sharing arrangement that had existed with the RAF since 1942. But it left the Admiralty with only two years in which to recruit and train air and ground crews and build or adapt shore bases and aerodromes to support their extended duties. At this stage it was not clear what exactly they would be. The navy had few trained pilots at senior levels and – unlike the navies of the United States or Germany – had devoted very little time to thinking about where naval aviation was heading. Initially it was thought that its passive tasks would be confined to reconnaissance and shadowing and spotting for the fleet’s guns. Its active roles would include attacking a faster enemy in order to slow it down until the pursuing force could catch up, and fighting off hostile aircraft and submarines. These would turn out to be only a few of the functions they would be called on to perform. In time they would be involved in convoy protection, covering amphibious landings, attacking enemy ships in harbour and cutting enemy supply lines. It became in the words of Hugh Popham, a FAA fighter pilot and historian, ‘one of the hardest worked of any of the services’. For most of them, however, it was ‘severely – and for some of them, ludicrously – ill-equipped’.6
One thing the navy did have was suitable ships. A new, modern aircraft carrier, Ark Royal, went into service in 1938 to add to the existing six older ones, and between 1936 and 1939 three more were laid down. Plans were made to train up the men and form the squadrons to fly off them. They envisaged a front-line strength of 540 aircraft and 1,570 aircrew by 1942. A recruitment drive for short-service commission officers was launched and air-minded ratings started pilot- and observer-training. By the time the war started and the FAA was fighting its first actions, these men were squadron and flight commanders. Beneath them were the men of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, who, like their RAF counterparts, had signed up when war loomed. The result was that the squadrons were full of ‘lawyers and teachers, draughtsmen and geologists, actors and civil servants’, who all took the rank of Temporary Sub-Lieutenant (A).7
Among the short-service officers was Charles Friend, an ex-grammar schoolboy who was working as a laboratory assistant in the Paint Research Station in Teddington, near London, and ‘apparently set to earn my bread in useful industrial scientific work’ when the Munich crisis broke. Friend spent those anxious days with the rest of the staff, ‘digging an enormous hole outside with the intention of getting in it when the bombs began to fall’. The experience gave him a ‘full realization that the war was coming. I decided that I would not wait to be conscripted, but that I would volunteer.’ The decision set him off on a career that was packed with adventure and peril.8
In March 1939 he joined the carrier HMS Hermes at Plymouth to start training. Friend had been impelled into the FAA primarily by a desire to fly, but it was made very clear that it was the navy he was joining. He and the rest of the intake spent their initial time ‘exhaustedly pulling boats around the harbour before breakfast to sailing them for both duty and pleasure; from proper behaviour in the Gunroom or Wardroom mess to the necessity to snatch a tiddy-oggy [pasty] at action stations’, before moving on to specialized training as an air observer at Portsmouth.
They started on simulators. In ‘mock-up cockpits which bumped, yawed and generally gave a realistic impression of flying, we looked at a green floor through binoculars. Model ships manoeuvred on it and spots of light were projected down around them as shell splashes.’ They reported in Morse code to instructors who marked their ability and progress. It was three months before they actually took to the air.
The new boys we
re a mixture of grammar and public school boys entering an enclosed world peopled by officers who had been in the navy since they were thirteen. Like many of the outsiders thrust into the services by the advent of war, Friend found much to like and admire in the environment. The ‘loss of complete independence inherent in service life at all levels was compensated for by an abiding sense of belonging to an organization with a purpose’.
Friend first saw action in what was to be the FAA’s first big engagement of the war. In April 1940 he was attached to 801 Squadron aboard Ark Royal and in the thick of Britain’s calamitous military debut on the still winter-bound shores of Norway.
He was flying as observer in a Blackburn Skua, the navy’s first monoplane aircraft, which was intended as a dual-role bomber and fighter, with a fellow midshipman A. S. Griffiths as pilot. Their first mission was with a flight of six Skuas that set off to bomb a frozen lake that the Germans were using as an airfield. They were carrying under their wings eight 100 lb anti-submarine bombs. ‘The flight bombed the lake in line astern,’ he wrote. ‘The ice split satisfactorily into large slabs. The aircraft parked on it slid into the water. As we – “tail-end, Charlie” – pulled up from our dive, some tracer bullets came up past us. Griffiths said, “Someone’s firing at us – let’s go back and fire at him,” and then turned to dive back, firing the front guns at a machine-gun position on the edge of the lake.’ As well as its four front-firing Brownings, the Skua had a Vickers mounted in the rear cockpit from which Friend did his observing. Griffiths invited Friend to have a go and ‘flew back low past it whilst I fired half a pan of bullets at it too’. He had no idea whether or not he hit anything, but ‘it was pleasing to see the Germans running for shelter when we made our dive on them’.
As with many experiencing their first taste of combat, Friend ‘had no sense of dangerous conflict as we were doing all this. Either of us could have and possibly did hit the men below, but I did not understand the enormity of my actions until long after, when I had seen the results of similar deeds by others – wounded pilots, observers and air-gunners, aeroplanes so damaged that they crashed, and ships damaged or sunk.’
For all its shortcomings, the Fleet Air Arm was to achieve early glory in a spectacular action which showed what could be achieved with enough planning, preparation and skill, even with the limited aircraft and weapons available. In the Mediterranean, the loss of the French fleet (and the sinking of a significant part of it by Britain at Mers-el-Kébir) had sharpened the necessity to deal with the Italian navy. Various plans had been drawn up to attack the Italian navy, the Regia Marina, at its home base of Taranto, a bowl-shaped inlet tucked inside the heel of Italy. In the autumn of 1940 it was activated. The operation was preceded by extensive reconnaissance and the men detailed to take part were among the most experienced aviators in the service. On the evening of 11 November from the brand-new carrier Illustrious, which had just arrived in the Mediterranean, twenty-one Fairey Swordfish from 813, 815, 810 and 824 Naval Air Squadrons took off in two waves from a position off Cephalonia about 200 miles to the south, armed with torpedoes and bombs.
The first wave was led by Lieutenant Commander M. N. Williamson, to be followed an hour later by the follow-up force under Lieutenant Commander ‘Ginger’ Hale, a former England rugby player. Charles Lamb of 815 Squadron was charged with dropping flares to illuminate the targets. As he and his observer Sub-Lieutenant Kiggell approached at 5,000 feet, Lamb ‘realized that I was watching something that had never happened before and was unlikely to be repeated ever again. It was a one-off job. 815 Squadron had been flying operationally for nearly twelve of the fifteen months of the war and for the last six months, almost without a break, we had attracted the enemy’s fire for an average of at least an hour a week; but I had never imagined anything like this to be possible.’9
The intense reconnaissance of the preceding days had alerted the Italians to what was coming. ‘Before the Swordfish had dived to the attack, the full-throated roar from the guns of six battleships and the blast from the cruisers and destroyers made the harbour defences seem like a sideshow . . . into that inferno, one hour apart, two waves of six, then five Swordfish, painted a dull bluey-grey for camouflage, danced a weaving arabesque of death and destruction with their torpedoes, flying into the harbour only a few feet above sea level – so low that one or two of them actually touched the water with their wheels as they sped through the harbour entrance.’
The Italian gunners had had three levels of attacking aircraft to fire at: the low-level torpedo planes, the dive-bombers and the flare-droppers. But if they aimed at the sea-skimming attackers, they would hit their own ships and positions. They kept their guns angled upwards, allowing the Swordfish to weave underneath the umbrella of fire and drop their ‘fish’. As Lamb turned away, he saw burning craft ‘surrounded by floating oil, which belched from the ship’s interiors as the bottoms and sides and decks were torn apart’.
One torpedo ripped an enormous hole below the waterline of the battleship Conte di Cavour. Two other battleships were also sunk at their moorings. They were eventually repaired, but the Cavour was out of action for the rest of the Italians’ war. The Swordfish made their own way home. ‘All the way back to our rendezvous with the ship off Cephalonia the moon was on my starboard bow, which helped me to relax,’ Lamb recalled. ‘The clouds had all dispersed and the shimmering path of watery gold, lighting up the sea’s surface from the horizon to the water below us made night flying easy.’ A terrible thought kept troubling him. He spoke to his rear-gunner, Grieve, over the voice pipe. ‘“I’m a bit worried,” I said. “We may be the only survivors.’” His fears were unfounded. Incredibly, only two aircraft were lost. Williamson’s Swordfish was shot down, but he survived with his observer to be taken prisoner. Another, from the second wave, was destroyed by flak and the crew killed.
Taranto signalled the beginning of the end for the Regia Marina. ‘Thus was British maritime power reasserted in the central basin of the Mediterranean in no uncertain fashion,’ recorded the official historian of the war at sea, Captain Stephen Roskill.10 The following year the rest of the Italian fleet was neutralized at the Battle of Cape Matapan and the Allied navies had mastery of the Mediterranean.
The victory of Taranto was remarkable. It was an extraordinarily destructive action given the featherweight lightness of the attacking force. ‘Taranto Night’ is celebrated by the Fleet Air Arm each year with the same fervour that the navy marks Trafalgar Day. It was, however, a singular event. Success on this scale was never repeated, although, as we shall see, six months later the FAA played a key part in another famous victory.
Much of the work the naval fliers did in the Mediterranean was routine, protecting convoys on ‘club runs’ that supplied aircraft to Malta and war supplies from Gibraltar to Alexandria. For much of the time it was quite congenial. John Moffat joined Ark Royal as a Swordfish pilot shortly after Taranto. This was the last stop in a journey that began when, suffering the ‘soul-destroying boredom’ of a job with a bus company in Kelso, he answered a newspaper advertisement for volunteers for the navy’s air service.
He found that even in the middle of war there were still moments of ennui and that ‘much of my time flying was not the heart-stopping drama of a dive-bombing attack or the stomach-turning tension of a torpedo run, but long uneventful patrols over mile after mile of flat, featureless ocean’. There were compensations, such as when ‘the sun was just striking the tops of the mountains of Spain and beginning to burn off the haze lying over the surface of the Mediterranean. [Then] I would feel that upsurge of exhilaration that I have always associated with flying . . . the open cockpit of the Swordfish was marvellous for the full experience, which really did sometimes seem like a miracle.’ Then there were the times when ‘the clouds were low and dark, and the sea was a cold, white-flecked steel grey, and the rain beat against my face [and] the patrols became an endurance test’.11
In May 1941 Moffat was propelled into a drama t
hat provided more than enough excitement. Both he and Charles Friend were aboard Ark Royal when it was sent north to join the hunt for the battleship Bismarck, which had fought its way through to the Atlantic via the Denmark Strait and now, damaged but very much afloat, was running for the safety of Saint Nazaire. By mid-morning on Monday, 26 May, she was only a day from port and the pursuing British fleet had lost the scent.
The sequence which led to her destruction began with a coup by Coastal Command. At 10.30 a.m. a Catalina operated by 209 Squadron from Lough Erne saw Bismarck through a hole in the ragged clouds, about 790 miles north-west of Brest. The men at the controls were not British but Americans. US Navy Flying Officer Dennis Briggs and Ensign Leonard B. Smith had volunteered to go with an assignment of Catalinas supplied to the RAF under the Lend-Lease agreement and help train crews. In their anxiety to get close they came under fire from the battleship. Bullets and shells punched through wings and fuselage and one round smashed through the floor of the pilot’s cabin, but then they were swallowed up in cloud and radioing back the sensational news. From then on Bismarck was under constant air surveillance.
Ark Royal was about a hundred miles away when news of the sighting came through. Swordfish were flown off and soon located the target. Admiral James ‘Slim’ Somerville, the commander of the force, reckoned his own ships were too slow and old to be able to offer battle with any chance of success. The best hope was to slow Bismarck down until the pursuing fleet could catch up and deal with her. At 2.50 p.m. fifteen Swordfish from 818 and 820 Squadrons took off to attempt an attack. The weather had been foul all day. Even Ark Royal, which stood sixty feet above the water, had waves coursing over her bow and down the flight deck. The business of getting to their aircraft was a trial. ‘The after-end of the flight deck was pitching something like fifty feet up and down,’ said Charles Friend. ‘The take-offs were awesome in the extreme. The aircraft, as their throttles were opened, instead of charging forward on a level deck were at one moment breasting a slippery slope and the next plunging downhill towards the huge seas ahead and below.’12
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