It is commonly assumed that the Royal Navy was excessively conservative regarding the battleship. Fixated by the big gun, the Admiralty clung to battleships for sentimental, traditional and cultural reasons. It kept them long after they had ceased to have any strategic role and had become too vulnerable to be useful. It was slow to embrace the aircraft carrier as their replacement, of which it retained a large fleet at the expense of capabilities needed against more pressing but less prestigious threats (notably aircraft and submarines), until finally compelled to modernise by its more enlightened political masters.
But, as with many popular narratives, this version of events doesn’t hold up to closer examination.
The strategic case for battleships
The truth is, the Admiralty had a carefully reasoned case for retaining battleships. Britain needed to be able to use the sea, which required the ability to defeat any naval threat. Despite the complacency of some senior political and military figures, the Soviet Navy included powerful surface warships, especially after the advent of the Sverdlov-class cruisers. These had to be countered and wartime experience had shown that land-based aircraft could not be relied upon to do this.
First, the RAF leadership preferred to focus on showing that strategic bombing could win the war independently. Second, when Bomber Command could be persuaded to assist in the campaign at sea, the general-purpose bomber force favoured by the RAF turned out to have great difficulty in finding warships and, even when they were in port, in hitting them; postwar exercises demonstrated that these limitations had still not been resolved.
While the Admiralty acknowledged that carrier air power, with its superior range and striking ability, would eventually prevail, experience during the war and exercises afterwards showed that aircraft had serious limitations in bad weather and at night — conditions common in northern European waters, where future naval wars would be fought. Carriers therefore continued, for the time being, to require the support of battleships that could destroy heavy warships in any conditions of weather or light. While the carrier would eventually take over the role, it was incapable of doing so just yet.
Just as in the Second World War, battleships were an essential complement to anti-submarine forces, providing cover against heavy warships. The post-war Admiralty was neither hankering after a new Battle of Jutland against the German High Sea Fleet of the First World War, nor seeking to emulate the US Navy against Japan in the Pacific campaign. Rather, it anticipated something closer to the threat posed by Germany in the Second World War, including powerful surface groups alongside submarines and land-based air power.
The final departure
The Admiralty could in practice have slowed the arrival of alternatives or held on to a larger battle fleet than was warranted, and for longer. In fact, it demonstrated surprising ruthlessness, rapidly shrinking its fleet: at the end of the war, the Royal Navy had 17 capital ships but by 1949 had disposed of 12 of them. The force it sought thereafter was one Active and four Reserve battleships, compared to seven Active and four Reserve aircraft carriers.
When the 1950 invasion of Korea shattered assumptions about the likelihood of war with the USSR, the Admiralty chose to allocate the additional funds not to modernising or returning battleships to the front line, but to anti-submarine frigates and minesweepers. It recognised the high cost of maintaining battleships, the strain of manning them, and their limited remaining lifespan. Far from exaggerating the threat of Soviet cruisers in order to justify battleships, Admiralty plans were consistent throughout this period in rating it well below the less ‘glamorous’ underwater and air threats.
What the Admiralty sought was capability – the ability to counter enemy heavy warships – rather than a particular means of providing it. The result was a consistent push to acquire modern strike aircraft for the Fleet Air Arm, in the teeth of fierce opposition from the Air Ministry (for which carriers were an uncomfortably successful violation of the sacred dogmas of air power). The Admiralty also devoted considerable resources to anti-ship missiles, which it saw as potentially giving far smaller vessels than battleships an equivalent offensive punch.
During the ‘radical reviews’ of 1953-1954, a small group of determined ministers sought to eliminate the fleet carrier from the Navy. Remarkably, this clique even resisted Admiralty attempts to phase out the battleships, hoping that a concession here might win its acquiescence in gutting the Fleet Air Arm. Again, the Admirals held their course. They resisted pressure to restore HMS Vanguard, the largest and last battleship of the Royal Navy, to the Active fleet after her refit, arguing that their preferred alternative of two cruisers had greater versatility in the Cold War.
The final departure of the battleships was delayed until after the 1955 retirement of Winston Churchill, that great capital ship of the political world. Rather than retaining Vanguard, the Admiralty then stated a preference to crew the alternative, which was the trials ship for guided weapons plus two anti-submarine frigates. The Vanguard was marked for disposal in 1959 and scrapped the following year.
The depiction of the postwar Royal Navy’s approach to the battleship as being driven by social, emotional and traditional factors, by bureaucratic conservatism and a lack of imagination, simply does not stand up to scrutiny. It remains achingly fashionable to ascribe military decisions first and foremost to cultural, social and emotional factors; rather more attention should be paid to rational analysis and strategic thinking.
For a more detailed exploration of the postwar retention and eventual disappearance of the battleship from the Royal Navy, read Dr Tim Benbow’s open access article in Historical Research.
Image: © Imperial War Museum (A 31508): HMS Vanguard fires a broadside, May 1949