Planning and Policy

In January 1943 Rear Admiral Denis Boyd was appointed to the post of Fifth Sea Lord replacing Admiral Sir Frederic Dreyer, the contentious choice as Chief of Naval Air Services since July 1942, and thereby reestablishing the position of naval aviation on the Admiralty Board. The use of the title ‘Fleet Air Arm’ and its potential abolition or the restriction of its use was discussed in a minute by the Head of Air Branch in March 1943 [161]. Objections had been raised to the title as a result of its association with the former term ‘the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Air Force’ and that it implied the Fleet Air Arm was not an integral part of the Royal Navy. However, the term was regarded with great affection by the public and widely used in official publications. While its use had been restricted by an Admiralty Fleet Order, any formal change would only be practicable after the war. The title Rear Admiral Lyster, a previous Fifth Sea Lord, had suggested to replace it was the Royal Naval Air Service.

As far as the future make-up of the fleet was concerned, Admiral Kennedy-Purvis, the Deputy First Sea Lord, laid out the Navy's Future Naval Building Policy in an important memorandum in January 1943 [142]. He acknowledged the central role of air power in naval warfare: ‘The increasing power of aircraft whether carrier-borne or shore-based must decisively affect the methods of applying Naval Strategy’ [142]. Perhaps most symbolic of the changes taking place was the assertion that in future the main role of the battleship was the Aircraft Carrier Heavy Support Ship while ‘the aircraft carrier must form an indispensable part of every naval force taking part in all operations other than purely minor and coastal ones’ [142]. Henceforth the completion of the new Fleet Carrier HMS Indefatigable was given priority over the battleship HMS Vanguard at John Brown's shipyard on the Clyde due to the former's importance and there was insufficient skilled labour to progress with the construction of both ships simultaneously [140]. There was a debate over the design of future carriers and whether the American open-sided design should be adopted for future Fleet Carriers in place of the British closed hangar design; key considerations were the operation of aircraft, the size and strength of the ship, protection against projectiles and fire risk [192, 198].

Planning and Policy

The post of Fifth Sea Lord and with it the Fleet Air Arm's representation on the Board of Admiralty was suspended upon the controversial appointment of Admiral Sir Frederic Dreyer, an officer with no aviation experience, to the post of Chief of Naval Air Services on 11 July 1942 [66]. Rear Admiral Lyster, the previous Fifth Sea Lord, became Rear Admiral, Home Fleet Aircraft Carriers. It was announced on 15 December 1942 that this unsatisfactory arrangement was to be brought to an end by the appointment of Rear Admiral Denis Boyd, formerly Rear Admiral, Mediterranean Aircraft Carriers and Captain of Illustrious at the time of the Taranto raid, as Fifth Sea Lord from 14 January 1943 [126].

The estimates of aircraft carrier requirements at the beginning of 1942 indicated that the biggest gap would occur with carriers to operate with the Fleet [3] and the limitations of naval forces without carriers were fully appreciated [17]. There was a growing realisation, fuelled by unfavourable comparisons with Japanese carriers [5, 30, 32, 32a], that to increase the numbers of carriers operating with the Fleet, simpler designs than the armoured Fleet Carriers were required [5]. In October, The Rt Hon. A.V. Alexander, the First Lord, acknowledged that less than half the required number of Fleet Carriers were available [95]. As a result proposals were put forward for the construction of Intermediate Aircraft Carriers, later known as Light Fleet Carriers, at the expense of a number of cruisers and conversion of the battleship Vanguard [52] and to replace the proposed construction of three cruisers with three Intermediate Carriers [88]. The aircraft repair ship Unicorn was to be commissioned as an operational carrier with only one-third of the complement of repair staff. It would take three months for the ship to reach full repair capacity once operations had been completed [85, 85a].

The lack of Fleet Carriers in the spring of 1942 saw consideration being given to approaching President Roosevelt for the loan of American ships, but Captain Lambe, the Director of Plans, recommended that given the threat faced by the Americans in the Pacific no such request should be made [34]. By the end of the year the situation was rather different with an assessment being made as to whether any British carriers could be spared for the South-West Pacific [106, 106a].

This volume has a rather different character to that of Volume I which covered the operating years of the war between 1939 and 1941, not least on the account of Japan's entry into the Second World War on 7 December 1941 and the increased role which the Fleet Air Arm played in the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943. The struggle in the Mediterranean, which received widespread coverage in Volume I, continued and reached its peak with the efforts to relieve the siege of Malta in the summer of 1942. The Allied counter-offensive in that theatre gathered pace over the next twelve months with amphibious landings in North Africa, Sicily and finally Salerno in Italy, all of which were covered to varying degrees by carrier forces. Behind the scenes strenuous efforts were being made to expand the Fleet Air Arm in the face of inadequate shore facilities and major problems with aircraft production in Britain, both in terms of suitable types of aircraft and the ability to meet production targets. As the subtitle of this Volume, ‘The Fleet Air Arm in Transition’, suggests, the years 1942–43 marked a stepping stone between the small pre-war cadre operating from a small number of carriers to a naval air arm with modern aircraft types capable of operating a number of Fleet Carriers in the Pacific Ocean for sustained periods.

The aim of these volumes is to present an insight into the major planning and policy issues of concern to the Admiralty and extensive coverage of naval air operations. Hence the detailed introductions to Parts I and II are divided between coverage of planning and policy and that of operations. Whereas the majority of the documents in Volume I dealt with operations there is much more even balance in this volume between documents covering both key areas. This reflects the crucial nature of this period as the development and expansion of the Fleet Air Arm gathered pace, whilst also presenting coverage of an increasingly diverse range of operations.

As far as planning and policy is concerned the reader will gain a clear appreciation of the growing importance, indeed primacy, of the aircraft carrier within the proposals for the future composition of Royal Navy's surface fleet. In the short term both battleship and cruiser construction was sacrificed to expedite carrier construction, especially of what were initially referred to as Intermediate, later Light Fleet, Carriers.

The Ottoman Empire, the pre-eminent Islamic naval state of the early modern period, entered the age of fighting sail at a date much later than most Christian states but also later than a number of the smaller Islamic sea powers. Despite the issuing of a fatwa in 1650 that required the building of between twenty and thirty warships fully dependent on sail, ships propelled by oar continued to retain considerable significance. Only in 1701, with the issuing of a kanun, a state ordnance, was a more definite direction taken; it laid down that the navy's main fighting arm should be composed only of large sailing ships, with the Ottoman naval dockyards to begin or continue work upon the construction of fifteen galleons to enhance the twenty-five already completed. The term used on both occasions was kalyon, a general term for a large warship propelled by sail and not reflective of any particular ship type. Nevertheless, galleys were not totally abandoned, remaining of considerable importance in the Red Sea, while, in the Mediterranean, galleys continued in use for the towing of sailing ships when the winds were unfavourable and for directly supporting the army in a range of military operations.

In this opening section, while concentrating on the workings of the Ottoman state navy during the age of fighting sail, it will be necessary to give attention to the years immediately preceding the full introduction of sail in order to understand the reasons that lay behind this apparent delayed transfer to sail. A delimiting factor in this discussion, as reflected in the use of the term ‘to the west’, is that of focusing here on the operations of the Ottoman navy in the Mediterranean and Black Sea, with consideration of activities in the Indian Ocean (including the Red Sea and Persian Gulf) to be considered in a later section.

While the Ottoman navy in western waters had, during the age of fighting sail, often to compete with some of the most technically advanced navies of the world, the Ottomans were rarely deficient in technology appropriate to a naval power. Evidence will be produced to show that Ottoman warships during the age of fighting sail were the equal of those of Christian Europe, while ordnance and gunpowder carried were in no way deficient.

Direct English and Scottish interest in Mediterranean affairs began with the possibilities of trade and profit. The territorial advances of the Ottoman Empire in the Eastern Basin caused great disruption to the Italian cities’ trading systems, at first particularly that of Genoa, later of Venice, as the cities found themselves on the wrong side at various times in the frequent Ottoman wars. In the 1450s (about the time the Turks finally captured Constantinople) one British merchant, Robert Sturmy of Bristol, had attempted to trade there, carrying wool, cloth, tin, and wheat to Italy and the Levant, and purchasing spices and silk, and alum, in exchange – in effect copying the Venetian system in reverse. However, his two ventures both ended in disaster. In the first, his ship, having delivered 200 pilgrims to Jaffa in Palestine, was wrecked on the Greek coast on the return voyage; in the other, his ship was intercepted and looted by Genoese ships who disliked the competition; Sturmy was killed in the fighting. This seems to have deterred other ventures, but also pointed up the possibilities. By the end of the fifteenth century voyages by English merchants to Italy and the Eastern Basin – to Crete and the Levant – were frequent enough for a consul to be appointed to Pisa by King Henry VII. This was a port city subject to Florence, and so it was outside the range of hostility from Genoa and Venice; there were English merchants in several other Mediterranean ports at this time also.

The voyage to the Mediterranean lay past Portugal and Spain, and in both countries there was a longstanding English political and mercantile connection. An alliance of sorts between England and Portugal had existed since 1398, but the connection went back to the Second Crusade centuries earlier; in Spain there was a fluctuating presence of English merchants, particularly in the Andalusian area, since the fourteenth century, centred on Seville, its outport of San Lucar, and at Cadiz. There, they knew of the discovery and settlement of the Canary Islands from the 1390s. English traders were familiar with the islands, where some settled and bought estates, and with Madeira, which was settled from Portugal in the mid-fifteenth century, eventually to be the source of sugar and a much-appreciated wine.

This is not a book about ships, nor is it a book about naval sea battles. On these there is already a great deal of published material, and the most useful of these are referenced in the bibliography and notes. Mention is certainly made when pertinent of specific ships and particular battles but only for the purpose of highlighting the actual subject of the book – Islamic state navies during a period that runs, very approximately, from the sixteenth century through to the mid-nineteenth century. So as not to be held hard and fast to an exact set of dates, I have simply used the cover-all term ‘age of fighting sail’. Of intent, this is a book which examines how the three great Islamic empires, Ottoman, Mughal and Persia, together with a number of smaller states and sultanates, set about establishing navies during the age of fighting sail, and the purpose and function of those navies.

The term ‘fighting sail’ in itself refers to an age in which high-sided, squarerigged, timber-built sailing ships, armed with cannons mounted broadside, dominated the sea lanes of the world. In origin, such ships go back to the early fifteenth century, when European nations with an Atlantic seaboard began to develop such vessels for the purpose of extending trading links into more distant waters. This is a point that has to be fully recognised from the outset, that all of the Islamic states included in this study were prompted into the construction of high-sided, square-rigged warships by those developments taking place in Western Europe. Essential, therefore, is an understanding of how this technology was transferred and how quickly the Islamic states adapted themselves to the design, construction and handling of such ships.

Little in the English language has previously been written on the subject of Islamic navies, and that which has fails to address the whole epoch of fighting sail, concentrating on specific events or tightly managed periods. In particular, this is a direct result of an ethnocentric approach led by naval historians, who often take a nationalistic view towards their subject. When writing about navies of the Islamic world, English-language naval historians most frequently do so as a result of a western navy of interest making direct contact in some way, possibly through battle or a temporary alliance, with a navy from the Islamic world.

It might be thought that with the Portuguese having become, during the sixteenth century and beyond, such a considerable threat to the Islamic communities of the Indian Ocean and the trading web upon which those communities thrived, more attention might have been given to neutralising that threat. Putting aside the Ottoman and Persian empires, whose naval expeditions against the Portuguese have already been discussed, there was one other major Islamic empire during the age of fighting sail that could have turned itself into a significant maritime power in this region, that of the Mughals, an empire that dominated India from the mid-sixteenth century through to the early eighteenth century. While the Mughals did develop a navy, this based on the port town of Surat, with the vessels built there adopting European technical developments, on only a few occasions were these ships directly employed against the Portuguese or any other European navy. Instead, ships of the Mughal navy were invariably deployed in defending the empire against internal opposition. The Dutch and English, who could well have been viewed as a threat equal to that of the Portuguese, were seen as potential allies, for no other reason than that these two European nations had no more liking for the Portuguese than had the Mughals. In Surat, the British and the Dutch were permitted to build, maintain and repair ships, allowing the Mughals to gain an insight into methods of European ship construction.

It was with the EIC that the Mughals formed a particularly important alliance, ships of the Company sailing with Mughal traders for the purpose of safeguarding them from attack. Here the enemy was either the Portuguese or pirates from the west, the latter, in common with the Portuguese, possessing large, heavily-armed, square-rigged sailing ships. Antony notes that western pirates by the late seventeenth century had become quite numerous in the Indian Ocean, with Madagascar infamous as a pirate retreat and some Europeans going native and joining forces with indigenous sea raiders.

The Restoration of the British monarchy in 1660 in the person of the bachelor Charles II produced a Europe-wide intrigue to provide him with a wife. In fact, almost from the beginning the Portuguese Princess Catharine of Braganza was the likely bride, and the international competition simply enabled Charles to increase his terms in the treaty of betrothal. From the first the English wanted the Portuguese North African port of Tangier as part of those terms.

Situated on the northwest corner of Africa, Tangier was a walled town and port, and had been Portuguese since 1471. It was not very strongly defended, and would probably have fallen to the local Moroccans in a few years if the Portuguese had kept it; nor was its port either commodious or particularly safe, being too shallow for larger ships. But its location, on the southern lip of the mouth of the Mediterranean, made it particularly attractive to fighting seamen in the light of experience gained in the previous decade. Edward Mountagu, now Earl of Sandwich, and Admiral Sir John Lawson, two eminent commanders who had been instrumental in bringing Charles across the North Sea to London, and both former officers of the republican navy, were enthusiastic advocates; unlike the king, they had actually seen the place, so their opinions carried some weight.

There were numerous other terms in the dowry in the betrothal treaty, including the transfer of Bombay, a reasonably large cash payment (never completely paid) and a military and naval alliance, intended to defend Portugal against Spanish attack, and which led to the presence of a considerable English military force in the country for the next ten years. But from the point of view of this book, it is Tangier which is the most interesting item.

The extent of the crisis which the prospect of the marriage produced is indicated by the fact that Lawson, in command of a fleet, having returned from Algiers, took up station in the Strait to deter any Dutch or Spanish interference in the transfer, and a defeat of the Portuguese in Tangier by the Moors precipitated a preliminary, precautionary occupation of the town by a force of English sailors to prevent a Moorish conquest.

The great loser in the treaty settlements at the end of the Spanish Succession War was Spain itself. Not only did it lose the Spanish provinces in Italy and Flanders, and found its trade monopoly with the overseas empire opened to British merchants and ships, but it had to cede control over two parts of its metropolitan territory, Gibraltar and Minorca, to Britain. These territorial losses eventually rankled particularly, as did that of Oran, taken by the Algerines in 1708. Spanish resentment at these, and its Italian losses, meant that these matters became the centres of British concern in the Mediterranean in the thirty years after 1713.

For Spain the enemies were all too numerous: Austria, which held the former Spanish provinces in Italy and Sardinia; Savoy, which held Sicily; Britain, holding Gibraltar and Minorca; Algiers, holding Oran; France, whose king Louis XIV died in 1715 and had cut the Spanish King Felipe V out of the succession to the French kingship and out of the regency for his young successor. Italy and its islands became Spain's target of choice for recovery. This was in part because of the influence of King Felipe's second wife, the Italian princess Isabella of the Farnese dynasty of Parma, and his latest chief minister Cardinal Alberoni. The king did not in fact need much wifely persuasion, nor did the Spaniards generally, to work for the recovery of other lost lands. This ambition became one of the dominant international political themes of the next generation.

Queen Isabella – referred to as ‘Elizabeth Farnese’ by British historians – was a strong-willed woman married to a man who was liable to devastating fits of depression. As a result she became one of the most effective powers in Spain for much of her husband's reign. One of her main ambitions was to see that her sons by King Felipe achieved their own kingdoms – he had a son by his first wife, who eventually succeeded him. The former Spanish provinces in Italy, and her own homeland of Parma, were to her particularly apt targets for her sons.

With the naval reforms adopted by Kapudan Paşa Cezayirli Gazi Hasan still gathering pace, a further war with Russia broke out in August 1787, prompted by various Russian infringements into Ottoman territory and an awareness in Istanbul of Catherine's ultimate goal, that of re-establishing the old Byzantine Empire through the seizure and division of all Ottoman lands. It is more than possible that war would not have been declared if the tasks given to Hasan had not been so extensive for, at the time the declaration of war was under discussion in the Divan-ı Humayun, he was with the fleet in Egypt quelling a local uprising. For this reason, he was not present in Istanbul and so unable to explain that, with reforms to the navy only just beginning to take effect, the navy was not ready for war. Instead, lacking the advice of the Kapudan Paşa, the war faction of the Divan, convinced that war against the infidel overrode any concerns of practicality, won the argument. Among those who opposed this rationale was Ahmed Resmi, a diplomat who favoured negotiation and peace over Holy War. He accused those who had influence of being ‘ignorant scoundrels’ who did not respect ‘this desirable and customary law’, bluntly adding that the ‘simple-minded ones, not known for their thinking ability, engineered the Russian campaigns of that earlier war that broke out in 1768.

The seaborne element in this new war against Russia was primarily fought in the coastal waters of the northern Black Sea shoreline, where the Russians were attempting to secure unrestricted entry into the Black Sea through the capture of Ottoman-held fortresses that stood at the mouth of the Don and Dnepr estuaries. Catherine, since the previous war with the Ottoman Empire that had been brought to a conclusion in 1774, had continued to improve the standing of her fleet, using the proclaimed independence of the Crimean Kharnate, now effectively under full Russian protection, to establish an additional naval base at Sevastapol.

The repeated campaigns against Algiers and the other Barbary states by English (and other) naval forces had been, above all else, a defence of their merchant ships trading in the Mediterranean. For states with Mediterranean coasts there was also the even nastier issue of the kidnapping and enslavement of their people who lived along those coasts. This was also an issue, if a lesser one, for the English and Scots, whose citizens were taken from the captured ships and enslaved; freeing such captives by raising cash ransoms became a major charity activity in both countries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The treaty with Algiers agreed by Admiral Herbert meant that the English had now no intention of establishing a permanent English naval presence in the sea, despite English rule in Tangier. With the evacuation of Tangier in 1684, there was no requirement for an English naval presence; no English warships sailed that sea until 1690.

In the year the new war began, 1688, the French demonstrated very clearly their naval power in the sea. Their Mediterranean fleet, annoyed at the Algerine depredations in previous years (while the English and Dutch treaties were in force) turned their bomb vessels on the city, destroying much of it; a dozen Frenchmen who were in the city at the time, including the consul, were executed in revenge, by being fired from the Algerine guns. It was all pointless, for, as Louis XIV became involved in the European war (using a similar policy of frightfulness, such as the ravaging of the Palatinate, which simply angered his victims and horrified others), he sent a secret envoy to Algiers to make peace, and the dey successfully extracted very favourable terms. Algiers was at war with its Barbary neighbours in Tunis and Morocco at the time, and any defeat tended to mean the deposition and probable execution of the ruling dey – including the man who made the French peace. The real result was a powerful and continuing hatred of France by the Algerines.

An English naval squadron returned to the Mediterranean in 1690 because of the new French war, the Nine Years’ War (or War of English Succession, or War of the League of Augsburg).

After 1783 both Britain and France were exhausted yet again, but the British financial and commercial systems were better organised and more robust than those of France, so its recovery was correspondingly quicker and less disruptive. France even by 1787 was incapacitated by increasing internal difficulties, and soon sank into its revolution. One of the casualties of these difficulties was the French navy, an expensive institution. In Britain, by contrast, even though the country had been defeated and was internationally isolated during and after the American War, a mainly stable government and an active diplomacy brought it back into play in the European system fairly quickly. With its power reduced, and chastened by defeat, it did not seem so dangerous.

The Royal Navy was one of the elements in the British system which was, for once, well attended-to during the peace. The number of its line-of-battle ships rose from 117 in 1785 to 145 in 1790, and cruisers from 82 to 131, which made it the most powerful single naval force in the world. This was largely the result of defeat in the preceding war, no doubt, during which on several occasions enemy fleets had reached the Channel in sufficient strength to force the Channel Fleet to avoid a fight – the ‘fleet-in-being’ option normally despised by British sailors; the need for a fleet to dominate the Channel had thus been demonstrated in the most graphic way. After 1783, however, Britain was also in naval competition with other countries, almost all of whom were busy building up their ship numbers at the same time; together, the fleets of Britain's most persistent enemies, the allies Spain and France, outnumbered the Royal Navy by 1790. In Europe as a whole the number of line-of-battle ships of the major naval powers, except Britain, increased by well over a hundred between 1780 and 1790, to which a dozen or more built by minor powers could be added.

Three crises between 1783 and 1793 signalled the re-emergence of Britain on to the international scene, and at the same time, brought an end to the Franco-Spanish association for a time.