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Among the most significant aspects of twentieth century military affairs has been how naval and land-based air power have transformed maritime operations. Today, much of the maritime arena is controlled, monitored, or exploited by aerospace systems. The capital ships of the modern era are the aircraft carrier and the missile-armed submarine, both weapons of three-dimensional warfare. The worlds sea lanes are monitored by aircraft and helicopters flown from the decks of aircraft carriers and other vessels, and, especially, by long range maritime patrol aircraft operated by the worlds navies and air forces. The primary weapon at sea is no longer the projectile hurled by a big gun ship, or the torpedo from a submarine; rather, it is the smart missile, fired from aircraft, helicopters, ships, or submarines.
As precision warfare has transformed land warfare and the worth of the large fielded army, so too has precision attack at sea transformed the nature of naval combat and the relative value of large standing fleets. In the modern era, the large surface vessel is more vulnerable than at any previous time to precision attack by weapons launched from tens or even hundreds of miles away. At the same time, new applications of aerospace technology for the maritime environment promise to enhance and strengthen naval mission such as littoral warfare, amphibious operations, and maritime transport. All this has come about through about one hundred years of evolution of maritime air warfare. This essay will seek to trace the development of maritime air warfare throughout the past century, paying particular attention to the Second World War and development after that war.
The impact and usefulness of maritime air warfare will be explored, both in past wars and in the future, along with possible alternative naval futures. As with the worlds more advanced armies, the leading navies of the western world were largely supportive about aviation in the years prior to the First World War. However, navies initially anticipated that the major, and perhaps only, value of aviation would be in the reconnaissance and observation role. Navies generally underestimated the significance of the submarine as well, considering it primarily as a means of coastal defense warfare. Yet the advent of both the airplane and the submarine ushered in the era of large-scale ship sinking in naval history. In earlier eras of the wooden ship, warfare disabled ships, but only rarely sunk them.
The navies before World War I had opted to use long range and endurance inherent in lighter-than-air dirigibles and small non-rigid blimp airships. Supporting these airship forces were small float-equipped seaplanes. By the time WWI broke out, both Britain and the United States of America had already experimented with launching small aircraft from ships, and the first trials were underway of specialized torpedo-carrying strike aircraft. The war caused a rapid acceleration in development and innovation, and by its end, aircraft and warships had already been employed for maritime reconnaissance and patrol, and for direct attack upon surface vessels and submarines. For example, in the Dardanelles campaign, British Short 184 float seaplanes launched from a crude seaplane tender, the Ben-my-Care, torpedoed several Turkish vessels. German reconnaissance Zeppelins furnished tactical information to the High Seas Fleet during the Battle of Jutland and subsequent operations off the British East Coast.
The Royal Navy made the first tentative use of aircraft carriers, crude though they may have been; in 1918, for example, six British Sopwith Camel fighter-bombers from the carrier H. M. S. Furious raided the German airship at Tondern, destroying two Zeppelins in their sheds. In these ways and others, aircraft and airships contributed to the war at sea. While aviation's impact was far less than it would be in subsequent years, it nevertheless pointed to a future where the surface ship and submarine would be far less secure.
Imperial Germany had even experimented with crude command-guided anti-shipping missiles. As Admiral Lord Fisher, whose name was synonymous with the emergence of the dreadnought battleship, remarked after the Armistice that the prodigious and daily development of aircraft had utterly changed naval warfare. The Emerging Technology of Maritime Air Warfare Significant developments during the interwar years took the airplane from functioning as a mere participant in naval warfare to decisively determining the outcome of naval combat. Fear of air attack was a powerful motivation of four notable naval developments in the leading naval nations after WWI; armoring battleships and other surface warfare craft and equipping them with increasingly heavy antiaircraft batteries; developing dual-purpose antiaircraft and anti ship gun systems; designing new classes of antiaircraft cruisers to protect fleets by barrage antiaircraft fire; and last, but certainly not least, the development of radar as a means of affording warning of air attack. But despite such changes, analysts continued to think of naval combat as they had in the past. As in Lord Nelson day, the ultimate expression of naval war would continue to be the big gun slugfest between ships at sea.
Naval and land-based maritime air forces could be expected to support fleet operations, but not to dominate them. During the interwar period, the aircraft carrier emerged as a major element of the worlds leading navies. By the late 1930 s, the carrier had developed the generic features typified by a flight deck surmounting a hanger deck, large elevators to transport aircraft from hanger deck to flight deck, an offset bridge island and stack system, and a landing area crossed by arresting landing wires. Navies that operated the aircraft carriers also operated generally similar types of aircraft too. Fighters to protect the fleet, dive bombers to attack enemy ships as precisely as possible, and torpedo planes to attack from just over the surface of the water. These aircraft tended to have features tailored for carrier operations, such as long-stroke rugged landing gear struts and wheels, an arresting hook stinger lowered during final approach, and folding wings for reduced storage space requirements aboard ship.
With space on ships at a premium, all were single-engine designs, even those with over two crewmen. As a general rule, the increased weight of naval aircraft, coupled with their single-engine layout, gave them inferior performance when compared to their lighter land-based contemporaries. However, air power at sea involved far more than aircraft carriers. By the end of the First World War, long-range land-based aircraft and seaplanes had clearly proven their potential, if not always their value. In 1919, the American Curtiss NC- 4 seaplane and a British Vickers View bomber had both crossed the Atlantic. By the late 1930 s, the American, British, and Japanese already had in service the three great long-range seaplanes that they would use for wartime maritime patrol; the Consolidated-Vultee PBY Catalina, the Short Sunderland, and the Kawanishi H 6 K.
All had exceptional range, could attack submarines and shipping with bombs and torpedoes, but their primary roll was that of reconnaissance to literally act as the eyes of a fleet and thus to extend a battle fleet commanders awareness and control. When war erupted in 1939, the clashing powers clearly had visions of using air power at sea both for defensive and offensive purposes. Having the machines and technology for such warfare, however, was not the same as having operational doctrines to properly use such power. Thus there was, as with other aspects of the air war, a lengthy period of learning what worked and what didnt.
The three major European combatants (prior to the American entry in the war) all had remarkably similar battles between and within their services over the value and role of air power. The general viewpoint reflected a general tendency reflected throughout the twentieth century air-land warfare; namely that warfare opponents fear an enemies air forces far more than they respect their own. The freedom of maneuver and execution that they envied in an enemies operation were qualities they restricted in their own air forces. However, WW II brought about a partnership of intelligence and air warfare and intelligence and submarine warfare. This partnership proved to be decisive. It doomed U-boats and commerce raider, set the stage for the destruction of Rommels convoys, and was no less decisive against Japan Overall, European and Mediterranean operations confirmed the emergence of three-dimensional attack (from above and below the oceans surface) as the greatest threats to ships at sea.
As one Italian naval historian wrote, In the final analysis-and such affirmation does not seem to be overstated-the really decisive struggle in the Mediterranean War was fought between the Italian Navy and the Anglo-American air forces. No matter how bitter the naval war was, the Italian naval forces would still have been able to carry it on properly and for a long tome, if the Navy had not been both directly and indirectly overcome by the overwhelming enemy power in the air. Allied air attacks caused shortages in fuel, ammunition, weapons, and equipment at critical stages in operations. Air attack, however, worked both ways, and the Axis attacks against shipping were disturbingly productive.
The Luftwaffe scored notable successes forcing Allied countermeasures. In March, April, and May 1941, Luftwaffe crews sank 179 ships totaling 545, 000 tons. Because maritime operations did not typically involve the risk of encountering enemy high performance fighters (except along an enemy coastline or after the emergence of an escort carrier) that deep-penetration missions into an enemy's heartland did, single or multi engine aircraft of modest performance could often make contributions all out of proportion to their true abilities. The statistical record of Allied air operations against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy bears out the significance of Allied power at sea. A postwar investigation of sinking of German coastal traffic from the Bay of Biscay to the North Cape over the time period September 1939 -January 1945 concluded that of 920 sinkings, submarines and surface vessels were responsible for 22. 7 % of this total, while direct air attack and mining claimed the remaining 77. 3 %. The official history of the Royal Navy attributes 60 sinkings of 149 Nazi warships of minelayer size or larger to direct air attack, a total of 40 %; this does not include those that were destroyed by air-dropped mines, nor does it include submarines.
In conjunction with direct bombing and torpedo attacks, RAF mining operations seriously constrained the movement of German capital ships, minimizing their use to the Reich. Of the 785 submarines Germany lost in the Second World War, 368 were sunk exclusively by air attack. A further 48 U-boats fell to combined air and surface ship attack. The appearance of long-range maritime patrol aircraft over the mid-Atlantic doomed the U-boat campaign. Beyond direct destruction of U-boats, one of air power most significant attributes was simply in forcing U-boats to remain submerged, hindering their mobility and time at sea. To degree far greater than even the war in Europe and the Mediterranean, the pacific theatre was a theatre characterized by air power.
More specifically, it was a war characterized by the projection of three-dimensional power the power of the submarine and the power of the airplane against the Japanese Navy and Japanese shipping. The war against shipping was perhaps the most decisive singular factor in the collapse of the Japanese economy and the logistic support of Japanese military and naval power. By the spring of 1945, American army and naval aviators had demolished Japans civilian and military industries, sunken most of the Japanese fleet, and established a virtual blockade of the Japanese islands. Ground and purely naval forces had served mainly to seize and hold forward bases for the projection of air power. A great irony of Pearl Harbor was the use by Japan of no less than six carriers to attack the perceived naval center of gravity, the American battlefield, which was put out of action, if not totally destroyed. Many view the real center were the aircraft carriers out at sea.
Japanese planners seem to have deliberately ignores the grave threat posed to their own futures by the instrument of their own victory (the aircraft carrier). Within days, Japanese airmen had emulated the success of their European contemporaries, though on a much grander scale. They had amply demonstrated the vulnerability of unprotected ships both in harbor and at sea to both carrier-based and land-based air attackers using bombs and torpedoes. By late summer 1942, one significant lesson of Pacific combat was already clear to all combatants: ships required powerful defensive forces to remain viable as weapons. This need resulted in a transformation of the battleship; no longer the means whereby a nation would secure its victory upon the ocean, it now served as a mobile antiaircraft gun platform to help protect the vessel that would secure the victory: the aircraft carrier The Pacific maritime air war must be evaluated in light of Japans serious misuse of its air power and aviation industrial base, so that, by the end of 1942, it found itself everywhere on the defensive, and in 1944 -- 45, destroyed.
Industrially, Japan could not match the U. S. in production. Secondly, Japanese military officials made some critically poor choices in the years prior to the Second d World War.
Among these was an overemphasis upon the battleship as the principle means whereby a maritime nation would achieve its victory in war. The idea was that it took a battleship to sink a battleship. The symbiotic relationship between carrier planes, land planes, and submarines were a significant one. In February 1944, for example, submarine attacks had bottled up Japanese shipping in Truk harbor, permitting two days of carrier raids to sink 186, 000 tons of shipping.
Navy Privateers reconnoitered Singapore harbor, monitoring the progress of repairs on damaged Japanese ships, and when the moment was right and the ships left port, submarines promptly sank them. Japans response to the growing threat posed by the allied coa...
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