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.

On 21 July 1940 Hitler referred to attacking the Soviet Union for the first time. It was in a conversation about the continuation of the war with the head of the German army, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch and it was noted in a report sent to Colonel-General Franz Halder, the Chief of the Army General Staff. Halder, in turn, noted in his diary, ‘To smash the Russian Army.’ Between eighty and 100 divisions would be enough to annihilate between fifty and seventy-five ‘good’ Soviet divisions. The attack would be able to take place very early in autumn: everything would depend on the efficiency of the Luftwaffe over England.

From 1147 to 1149 Friedrich Barbarossa participated in the ill-fated Second Crusade serving under his uncle Conrad III (1093–1152). Forty years later, as Holy Roman Emperor, Friedrich called for a new Third Crusade to the Holy Lands, which he led in 1189. His soldiers came from across the empire’s vast European domain, which at that time spanned from Flanders to Moravia and from the Baltic Sea down into northern Italy. For his battlefield acumen, his political astuteness and his resolute determination, Friedrich was arguably the greatest of the Holy Roman Empire’s medieval emperors. Accordingly, recruitment for what he referred to as his ‘army of the Holy Cross’ was described by one contemporary as being led ‘by his own example, he inspired all the young men to fight for Christ’.

It was Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano who awakened Benito Mussolini with a telephone call in the early morning hours of 22 June 1941 to tell his father-in-law, then at his seaside retreat, that Hitler had officially informed his alliance partner that the Wehrmacht had launched an attack on the Soviet Union. No consultations had taken place between the two Axis powers; the German Reich presented Italy with a fait accompli, although this line of action was blatantly contrary to ‘the spirit and the letter of the “Pact of Steel” of 22 May 1939’.

In the 1930s National Socialism gained absolute dominance in Germany. In the Netherlands, there was a distinctly different political environment. The Netherlands had long since lost its prominent position on the world stage and had more or less denounced any form of militarism. The defence of the country was no longer a priority, and the army was also severely outdated. It had remained neutral during the First World War and hoped to do so again in any future conflicts. In the 1930s the Netherlands was a stable democracy based on a constitutional monarchy, in which the different political parties worked together on a collaborative basis.

Following Nazi Germany’s invasion of Norway in 1940, Hitler entrusted Vidkun Quisling and his marginal fascist party Nasjonal Samling with the task of forming a collaborationist regime. Despite grand visions and initial optimism, Quisling and his party soon suffered a series of disappointments, and by the summer of 1941 disillusionment was already rife. Arguably, no other event during the occupation sparked as much enthusiasm within Nasjonal Samling as Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Within days of the attack, the party, in cooperation with German agencies, had launched a massive campaign to recruit Norwegian volunteers to a Norwegian legion, which was meant to take part in the ‘crusade against Bolshevism’.

Romania was driven into alliance with Nazi Germany by fear of the Soviet Union. ‘Nothing could put Romania on Germany’s side’, remarked a member of the Romanian Foreign Ministry to the British Minister Sir Reginald Hoare in March 1940, ‘except the conviction that only Germany could keep the Soviets out of Romania’. That conviction was quick to form after the collapse of France in May 1940, the Soviet seizure from Romania of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina at the end of June, and the loss of northern Transylvania to Hungary under the Vienna Award in late August.

In post-war Soviet historiography the question of collaboration with the German occupation forces was not posed as such. In the official memoirs of Soviet partisans and commanders, and in some works published in the West, there were oblique mentions of ‘turncoats’, of ‘these renegades and scum’, of ‘people with their roots in the former exploiting classes’, and of the creation of anti-Soviet formations from among local populations. The participants in these formations were almost always presented as former criminals and nationalists.

Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians shared some common goals for participating in Adolf Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, but others were singular, products of particular circumstances. Some reasons for fighting were of recent origin, dictated by developments leading up to the campaign and then the vagaries of war, while others could be traced to the distant histories of these people and their region. In examining the motives for joining Hitler one is mistaken to regard the Baltic States and their peoples as a heterogeneous entity.