Chapter LXXXV: Jacks of Trades.
For the men of the Fleet Air Arm the New Year brought the prospect of a budgetary wrangle with the Treasury, made all the more tricky as it would have to be contested indirectly via an Admiralty and Navy Board who had their own views on the matter and moreover were engaged in their own negotiations over the 1937 Navy Estimate as a whole. There were essentially two views on the state of the FAA, one held by the Treasury and one by the FAA themselves, and while they agreed on the major points they drew entirely different conclusions, hence the wrangling. The Treasury view was that the Fleet Air Arm had done really rather well the previous year, receiving not one but two new aircraft types rushed into squadron service with yet another on the way. Quite aside from this were the sums lavished on setting up an independent FAA support system separate from the RAF; training schools, engineering facilities and the myriad other shore based establishments needed to support a modern air force. The Treasury therefore believed that, as the FAA would soon have a fleet of new modern aircraft and equally new infrastructure to support them, funding could be cut back as the existing spending programmes ended. Naturally the FAA disagreed vehemently with this interpretation, while they conceded they had new aircraft they argued the Gloster Gladiator and Fairey Swordfish could in no way be considered modern, certainly not in comparison to the designs the RAF was putting into service. The 'yet another' type however was a different matter, while the Blackburn Skua was certainly a more 'modern' design than the biplanes just mentioned the internal arguments it generated in the FAA amply demonstrated that while the Naval Air Staff were clear what they didn't want they were far less clear on what they actually did want.
To understand the Skua we need to look at it's predecessors, in particular the aircraft it was intended to replace in FAA service the Hawker Nimrod and the Hawker Osprey. These two venerable aircraft were navalised version of the once ubiquitous Fury fighter and Hart bomber, the RAF following their grand tradition of denying the FAA purpose built carrier aircraft wherever possible. The single seat Nimrod was intended as a pure fighter while the two seater Osprey was initially used in the spotter/reconnaissance, however it soon became apparent that the Osprey was by far the more useful aircraft, being only fractionally slower than the Nimrod but possessing a longer range and capable in multiple roles (fighter, bomber, reconnaissance and spotter). While the attraction of the Osprey to pilots and Air Operations Officers was obvious (a bomber or reconnaissance aircraft that could defend itself almost as well as a fighter was clearly quite a prize) the Admirals had their own reasons for appreciating multi-role aircraft; worried about aircraft capacity on the smaller carriers and the ever present threat of Treasury (or Air Staff) cuts a multi-role design was thought to allow more punch for the same hangar space and more importantly the same money. The problem was that the change to single wing aircraft and the general development of aeronautic and engine technology left that view badly out of date and the FAA, deliberately denied connection with aircraft design and development by the RAF, was completely unaware of such changes. It is therefore not surprising that when given the chance to develop their own specification the FAA went for a multi-role design, an approach the Air Staff tacitly approved of as a chance to reduce the number of aircraft the FAA 'stole' from the RAF.
A Fleet Air Arm Hawker Osprey flying over HMS Eagle. The Osprey's flexibility attracted considerable foreign interest which Hawker were able to translate into moderate sales success. The float-plane version had a particularly varied career, serving in environments from the Indian Ocean on board Portuguese colonial guard ships to the frozen north as the air wing on the Swedish seaplane cruiser Gotland. The conventional wheeled version also gained sales abroad with Spain taking out a licence for production of the 'Spanish Osprey', a modified version with a Hispano-Suiza engine in place of the Rolls-Royce Kestrel.
The specification for the Skua, O.27/34, was drawn up, as the name suggests, in 1934, a time when the RAF was somewhat interested in dive bombing; specification P.4/34 (which would produce the Fairey Battle and Hawker Henley light bomber prototypes) was issued at around the same time. More significantly it was during one of the periodic defence scares over Japan, the proclamation of the 'Great Empire of Manchuria' (or the illegal puppet state of Manchukuo as the rest of the world more accurately called it) had been accompanied by a string of bellicose announcements from the Japanese about their 'sphere of influence' in China and the East in general. To counter the concerns of both Houses of Parliament and the press the government responded with a modest increase in defence spending; Singapore's progression from 'merely' a vast naval base into a legendary fortress was accelerated, the Royal Navy began the design of the 'T' class submarine for Pacific service and the Fleet Air Arm began work on O.27/34. Having only received funding on the basis of the threat from Japan the FAA was obliged to justify it's design on those terms, thus the official purpose of the design was sinking enemy (Japanese) aircraft carriers. At first sight this is somewhat out of character for the Admiralty, certainly it seems a quite amazing piece of foresight to predict the need for an aircraft dedicated to sinking carriers, however this would be a somewhat erroneous conclusion to draw for two reasons. Firstly, as we will see many times when looking at defence procurement, the official mission is primarily a political statement that doesn't always correlate with what the services actually intend to use the equipment for. Secondly the mission was in fact a good fit with Royal Navy doctrine of the time, with carriers being only support vessels the Japanese were expected to keep them well clear of any battle fleet and it would be tricky to force such swift vessels into gunnery combat. The logical conclusion for such thinking was the need for aircraft to strike at the carriers that couldn't be brought to a decisive battle and that could be a threat unless hunted down and sunk.
The Imperial Japanese Navy aircraft carrier Kaga prior to her 1934 refit. The Japanese expansion of their carrier force had accelerated considerably during the early 1930s, aside from the refit to Kaga the light carrier Ryujo had been commissioned the previous year while the purpose designed fast fleet carrier Soryu would be be laid down before the end of 1934. Traditionally the Royal Navy had assigned such targets to submarines and the torpedo bombers of the Fleet Air Arm, however there were concerns that the proliferation of bulges and bulkheads could render torpedoes less effective weapons against warships. The Admiralty responded with a twin pronged approach, a new generation of heavier and faster 'burner-cycle' torpedoes to overpower the new protection and the FAA's dive bomber as a backup should that fail.
The specification was, the Admiralty believed, decidedly ambitious calling for an all-metal monoplane with enclosed cockpit and retractable under-carriage, all feature entirely new to the FAA. In keeping with standard naval practice the engine had to be radial and in line with RAF thinking on self defence for bombers a rear gun was specified with attendant TAG (Telegraphist Air-Gunner) to man it. It was at this point that things began to go wrong for the design as a heavy (for the time) forward armament of four .303 machine guns was also specified, twice as many as the then front-line Hawker Nimrod fighter carried. While not a problem per se this requirement loaded unrealistic expectations of fighter-esque performance onto the design that it would never be able to meet. The problems continued with the TAG who was given precious little to justify the Telegraphist part of his title; no radio was specified, communication back to the carrier was to be by morse code and communication to another Skua was by hand signals or Aldis-lamp, hardly ideal for a supposedly modern bomber let along a fighter. On the dive bombing front a load of 500lb was specified, identical to that in the RAF's light bomber specification and more than enough to penetrate an un-armoured carrier deck, though even the AP version would scarcely dent a well protected cruiser. Despatched to the manufacturers for tender only the Blackburn design met with enough approval to be put forward to prototype, the other tenderers dropping out or producing design that weren't consider 'fighter' enough, a reaction that clearly should have started ringing alarms bells but unfortunately didn't. Indeed so much faith was shown in the Blackburn design that a large order was almost placed in early 1936, only the diversion of funds into emergency programmes for the Sea Gladiator and Swordfish stopped the order going ahead.
Thus it was at the start of 1937 that Blackburn finally unveiled the Skua to a world that had changed considerably since pencil was first put to paper for the design. As the first prototype was put through it's paces it became apparent quite how much the world had moved on, quite simply the Skua was abysmally slow. With a top speed of barely 225mph it was outpaced not only by the RAF's light bombers but even by the biplane Sea Gladiator which could beat 250mph. Compared to the Spitfire and Hurricane, which also had their roots in a 1934 specification, the Skua was markedly inferior; almost 100mph slower, with half the forward armament and decidedly unpleasant handling characteristics it was clear any modern land based fighter was leagues ahead. For the old FAA this would not have been a problem, it was never expected that carrier aircraft would encounter much in the way of opposition, chasing away fleet shadowers and attacking the stragglers from a torpedo attack was the limit (it naturally being assumed that a fleet had more than enough AA power to defend itself during an attack). Post-Abyssinian the Admiralty had changed it's tune, the raid on Taranto and the missions in support of the Army's advance along the coast of North Africa had shown that carriers could be called on to operate close to the shore and thus be in range of land based fighters. So serious were the problems that not only was the fate of the Skua in the balance but the entire concept of multi-role aircraft was also reconsidered.
The first victim of the rethink that followed the Skua's first flights was it's sister aircraft the Blackburn Roc. A turret fighter in the mould of the Bolton-Paul Defiant it had been ordered in 1935 as the FAA was dragged along in another of the RAFs passing interests. As the Roc shared the same airframe and powerplant as the Skua it was predicted to be at least as slow, if not slower once the weight and drag of the turret took it's toll, performance the post-war FAA believed to unacceptable. The Skua itself survived though as it proved to be a superlative dive bomber, with excellent visibility from the low sided cockpit and very large Zap flaps the Skua could level out from a vertical dive in barely 200 ft of height and moreover could perform such a feat safely and at very low levels. However while the basic airframe may have survived it was still sent back to Blackburn for many radical changes; the nose was lengthened, the wing trailing edges swept up, a radio and self-sealing fuel tanks were added and the forward armament was thinned out to only two .303s with their ammo load cut from the ambitious 600 rounds per gun (twice that of a Hurricane) to a more realistic level. As is often the way of these things one of the forced changes, switching from the in-demand Bristol Mercury (as used on the heavily produced Bristol Blenheim) to the un-tested Bristol Perseus, would be amongst the most beneficial, the sleeve-valved Perseus had far more development potential than the older Mercury. At the time however it was cursed as an example of Air Ministry bias and somewhat resented as the RAF once again appeared to be getting preferential treatment.
The Blackburn Skua. One of the most common misconceptions of the Skua is the role of the second crewman. Contrary to popular believe the TAG was not a navigator, indeed as the TAGs were not required to attend pre-flight briefings it was not unknown for them to have no idea where a mission was going until they got there. Navigation was the responsibility of the pilot who kept the maps and compass in his cockpit and who was ultimately responsible for finding the target. It's also worth emphasising the TAG was not responsible for spotting or reconnaissance, that job was left to specially trained Observers. One of the best example of the FAA division of labour is the Fairey Swordfish with it's three man crew; pilot, observer, TAG, each with a defined role. That said the Skua was the first FAA aircraft to use the new 'homing beacon' technology, a rotating beacon installed on the carrier transmitted brief radio signals that, provided one knew the rotational speed and sequence of the beacon, could guide an aircraft home. This system was operated by the TAG who fed the information to the pilot, it is perhaps this system that caused the popular misunderstanding.
Before we leave the Skua it is worth considering one of the more popular 'might have beens' of the Fleet Air Arm. After the initial flights of the prototype the Admiralty serioulsy considered dropping the Skua completely and, as word of this spread through the tight-knit world of aviation, they received an intriguing offer from Hawker. Essentially the plan was a rehash of an old tradition, equipping the FAA with navalised versions of RAF aircraft, in this case a Sea Hurricane and Sea Henley. There was much to recommend the scheme, the Hurricane was leagues ahead of the Gladiator while the Henley, if perhaps not as good a dive bomber as the Skua, was far faster and longer ranged. From the logistical view point the Henley and Hurricane shared a common base, greatly reducing maintenance costs and the number of spares needed while on the cost point co-opting the Hurricane would have saved the FAA the cost of specifying and designing a brand new fighter, to say nothing of the savings from leaveragig the far larger Hurricane production run. Of course the performance advantages may not have survived the navalisation process and it was unclear if the design would be amenable to folding wings, an important consideration for the smaller lifts on the older carriers, but it was not hard headed considerations like this that killed the idea. It was politics, empire building and fear.
Quite simply the newly independent FAA was unwilling to co-operate with the RAF and was determined to have it's own aircraft as a point of principal, this dislike of co-operation was reciprocated by the RAF's Air Staff who feared being dismembered and generally saw 'working together' with the other services as a first step towards extinction. Whether this was truly a lost opportunity is unclear, given the patchy history of land based monoplanes converted to carrier service it could just as easily have been a lucky escape. It does however illustrate that despite the best efforts of the Ministry for Defence Co-ordination inter-service rivalry remained alive and well and would continue to play a large role in defence procurement and planning for years to come.
To conclude the FAA's negotiations with the Treasury being surprisingly favourable, due in no small part to the redesign of the Skua. The final agreement saw the budget frozen for the 1937 Estimate, the outline plan being for programmes to be rolled over rather than cancelled. As such the existing Sea Gladiator and Swordfish contracts would be completed then funding transferred to Skua procurement at the end of the year when the redesign would be complete. While far from ideal, the RAF after all had cancelled all it's biplane work, the tooling and ramp-up costs had already been incurred under wartime emergency contracts so there was little money to be saved by cancellation, only the (relatively) small marginal cost of each frame could be recouped. More interesting was the development budget the FAA had carefully carved out, initially allocated to the Skua redesign it would be rolled over for a second project later in the year, the Treasury conceding that biplanes were in fact perhaps not modern aircraft after all. The question for the Naval Air Staff would be which aircraft most desperately needed replacing, a debate that would force the Royal Navy into further consideration of carrier doctrine.
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Notes;
But a mere 3,000 words. And in only just over 10 days. It's a triumph I tell you, a triumph.
Starting big picture; RN carrier doctrine. It's still a bit hazy, mainly as the Admiralty can't/won't project forward aircraft development and so are still taking small steps grudging steps towards using carriers more. In terms of the FAA motto they're happy with 'Find' and 'Fix' but are putting great limitations on 'Strike'. Hitting ports, unarmoured ships and the like is OK, but attacking a battlefleet is right out. To be fair in a Skua and Swordfish that's probably the correct idea, it really wouldn't be pretty unless darkness and luck was on the FAA's side.
The question is will doctrine evolve with technology or not? OTL the FAA was so far behind the Admiralty never got a chance till it was really too late. With more modern planes they can hardly fail to do better, though it will take something very special to shift the battleship from centre stage.
Onto specifics. The Skua, poor maligned beast. Terrible fighter of course, awful in fact, but I had no idea till I started this quite how good a dive bomber it was. The diving ability was quite excellent in the hands of an expert, far, far better than a Stuka for instance. The problem was it wasn't really an idea aircraft to transition from biplane to monoplane with, which is what the FAA was forced to do. Hence a lot of the problems of that transition (stalls on take off, excessive spins, etc) got loaded up on the Skua when it really wasn't the aircraft's fault, at least not in the eyes of the RAF pilots who flew it.
The Skua emerges on schedule and with the OTL problems (no radio and comms by lamp!). Most of the redesign is OTL as well, but with a few war time lessons learnt as well, like radios and the fact it's just too damn slow as a fighter. Should emerge a little faster and with better handling than OTL, but it will still be easy prey for almost any modern fighter. But then what 1st gen dive bomber wasn't?
The Roc though is dead, an aircraft that managed the seemingly impossible and was in fact worse than the Boulton Paul Defiant. While balance required me to have one I refuse to have both and the Roc was just one of the many dreadful aircraft that cemented Blackburn's pre-war reputation for being reliably awful.
The question of the next FAA aircraft is still up in the air, for now we must reward the faithful men of tanks. The time had come for tanks, trucks and other things probably not beginning with 'T'. It's the army update next and I have a feeling it will probably end up a two parter. At least...
