Dark Earth: The History of the Aircraft Carrier
Dec 30, 2019 14:19:02 GMT
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Post by simon darkshade on Dec 30, 2019 14:19:02 GMT
History of the Aircraft Carrier Part 1: 1900-1919
Warfare at the end of the 19th Century was undergoing several revolutions, the most significant of which was that if technology. On land, sea and air, massive advances were being made in the introduction of new and powerful machinery that replaced the labour of man and beast with far more potent artificial means. The invention and first flight of the powered aircraft in 1895 opened up new areas of potential development, offering the opportunity for far smaller flying machines than the ponderous steam airships and far less expensive than the cavorite vessels that plied the waves of the aether in space. Sir William Henson's initial ponderous flyers were very much experimental machines and it would take the breakthroughs achieved by the Wright Brothers in the United States at the dawn of the 20th Century to allow the advancement to an effective weapon of war.
However, the first use of flying machine operated from ships predated the aeroplane by almost a century. Both the British and French had employed kite ships and balloon ships during the Napoleonic Wars, although neither managed to find a decisive use for these niche vessels. It would take the American Civil War in the 1860s to see balloon tenders employed on a more effective scale, with the Union Army Balloon Corps operating off converted coal barges in the Potomac River, however these watercraft were purely littoral in nature and did not venture onto the high seas. The paucity of naval battles outside of the general vicinity of land throughout the conflict limited the role of balloon observation to action on land, primarily in the Peninsula Campaign. Balloons also encountered the distinct difficulty of operating in an environment where they could possibly face dragons and the advancing offensive threat of modern battle magics.
Some consideration was given by the Admiralty for the development of an iron steamship capable of supporting the independent operation of dragons in the late 1860s, but this was seen as an uneconomical solution to a problem that was largely absent in the light of Britain’s expanding network of coaling stations across the seven seas. Two Royal Navy balloon tenders, HMS Julia and HMS Emulous, were converted initially to support operations in China and Japan in 1869, but were then altered to support the initial flights of the Imperial Space Programme in man’s first steps towards the heavens. It was not to be an indicator of what was to come, with the last decades of the 19th Century being the age of the airship, which proved just as able in reducing the relative 'size' of the world as the steamship in the previous generation.
The first aeroplanes were flimsy, short-ranged contraptions of no apparent military utility beyond mere curiosity, but the evolution of their power, range and performance began to open new opportunities for their use, primarily as reconnaissance platforms. Progress of aircraft development in the first decade of the 20th Century was rapid, encouraged both by international conflicts in Southern Africa and Manchuria and the ongoing impact of the War of the Worlds. The Austrian Kress Drachenflieger represented the first operational aquatic plane, but was primarily used on rivers and reservoirs as it was gradually tested from 1902 to 1905. It was to be the French who developed the first seaplane proper in the form of the Hydravion of Henri Fabre in 1907, which was rapidly followed by similar developments in Britain and the United States, where aviation pioneer Glenn L. Martin broke distance and speed records in his Avalon Zipper. At this time, whilst the seaplane was rapidly developing into an obvious naval weapon of war, the very first take off from a naval vessel occurred when a specially adapted Royal Navy Short S.29 took off from a platform onboard the battleship HMS Dreadnought on March 14th 1908. Across the Atlantic, Eugene Ely was the first individual to successfully land an aircraft on a ship and take off, albeit on separate occasions, in early November 1908.
The first ships designed to support the new generation of aircraft were seaplane tenders, with the French La Foudre being converted from a torpedo boat tender in February 1909, being equipped with a deck, hanger and crane for lifting seaplanes. She displaced 7680t and carried six seaplanes, whilst still sporting a conventional gun armament of six Canon de 100mm Modele 1891 and four Canon de 75mm Modele 1904. It was successfully tested in fleet exercise in 1910, providing valuable service in extending the range and vision of the French battlefleet and warding off surprise attacks by torpedo boats. La Foudre was used to train increasing numbers of seaplane pilots and was fitted with a 10 metre long flying-off deck in 1912 for further experiments with wheeled landplanes, but this turned out to be too short for any optimal employment.
The Royal Navy rapidly followed suit, converting the old cruiser HMS Hermes into a seaplane carrier capable of supporting an initial complement of eight seaplanes. The 6400t vessel had a relatively high top speed of 20 knots and, in the manner of La Foudre and most other first generation carriers, was equipped with a strong array of guns in the form of six QF 6”, eight single QF 12pdrs and six QF 3pdr Hotchkiss anti-torpedo boat guns. She was recommissioned on May 6th 1911 and was initially attached to the Channel Fleet at Portland, carrying out extensive training and testing of various new seaplanes. Hermes followed by the similarly obsolescent Pegasus, Perseus, Aeolus and Hermione over the next two years. In the manner of the French, the Royal Navy primarily employed Hermes and her later sisters in an experimental role, both at Home and in the Mediterranean, examining the uses of seaplanes in fleet exercises and general reconnaissance, but additionally tested their use as armed platforms. The various seaplanes examined did not offer any great capability in terms of their bomb capacity or range and were thus considered not to be of immediate use as military flying machines.
In the United States, the protected cruisers Columbia and Baltimore were similarly converted to support seaplane operations, with the larger vessel providing a much more versatile platform, whilst the smaller cruiser retained more of her heavy gun armament. The two United States Navy seaplane carriers thus operated as a pair, with Columbia carrying nine seaplanes to Baltimore's four, and their participation in joint exercises with the United States Fleet gave valuable experience for the Navy's fliers. America's increasing rival in the Pacific, the Empire of Japan, also entered into the age of the seaplane carriers when the Imperial Japanese Navy acquired the captured Russian transport Wakamiya-Maru for experimental aviation purposes. She could carry a middling group of half a dozen seaplanes, but was equipped a lighter armament than the Continental vessels, with only a pair of 79mm guns.
Aeroplanes had seen combat use in the Mexican Uprising, the Italo-Turkish War and the Balkan Wars that saw Ottoman Turkey finally expelled from Europe after five centuries, but none of the combatants made use of seaplanes in a military context due to a combination of circumstances and their own limitations. The Royal Navy employed seaplanes operating from HMS Pegasus in a reconnaissance role over the Aegean in 1912 as it sought to protect the neutrality of British shipping and interests in the heated conflict, where the smaller amphibious aircraft provided a much more flexible option for aerial photography than the larger, higher-flying dirigible airships. The operation of aircraft from the sea, whilst it appealed directly to the world's largest navy, was not a development that was ignored by any of the Great Powers, with the most pressing need being regarded as extending the capacity of a battlefleet at sea to detect and outmanoeuvre their opponents. Military sorcerers carried out a range of divinations on that matter, all of which indicated that the operation of aeroplane carriers would be decisive in victory in a future conflict, which decided the matter for those naval establishments which could afford their acquisition; future interpretation of these decidedly unclear predictions have indicated that they may have been somewhat precipitous.
As these developments were occuring, the true birth of the aircraft carrier was imminent. As early as 1908, the French inventor Clément Ader had postulated the essential features of an aeroplane-carrying vessel in his prescient work L'Aviation Militaire, stating that "An airplane-carrying vessel is indispensable. These vessels will be constructed on a plan very different from what is currently used. First of all the deck will be cleared of all obstacles. It will be flat, as wide as possible without jeopardizing the nautical lines of the hull, and it will look like a landing field." These observations were shared by American and British officers on either side of the Atlantic, leading to the Admiralty acquiring a large merchant freighter recently laid down by the Blyth Shipbuilding Company in Northumberland in March 1913. This new ship was built from the frames up as a specialist vessel for the operation of both aeroplanes and seaplanes and was commissioned as HMS Ark Royal, a long and storied name, redolent in history, on December 29th 1913. Displacing 12,460t and armed with four BL 4" Mk VIII and eight QF 12pdr 12 cwt guns, Ark Royal had a top speed of 17 knots and could carry an initial group of 16 aircraft, usually made up of a mixture of seaplanes and wheeled aeroplanes. Two further merchant liners, Argus and Eagle, were acquired for similar development, being commissioned in May and July of 1914 respectively. These ships were capable of launching wheeled landplanes whilst underway at sea, but lacked the ability to recover them after their flight, fundamentally limiting their tactical utility.
The other major naval powers followed the example of the Royal Navy in the acquisition of aeroplane carriers over the course of the latter part of 1913 and 1914, their rapid development being very much a consequence of the heated naval arms race of the time. France converted the liner La Rochelle to a composite aeroplane/seaplane carrier in late 1913, christening it with the warlike name of Oriflamme to reflect its new position. She had a greater displacement and speed than Ark Royal, capable of a top speed of 19 knots, but only supported an air group of twelve aeroplanes. Across the Atlantic, the French developments were followed in the United States by the old battleship Indiana, which was converted to an aeroplane carrier from May 1913 to February 1914. She was capable of operating fourteen aeroplanes, but her arrangement of her flying-off platform was not seen as completely optimal. The Japanese, Russians and Germans began the conversion the battleship Fuji, the protected cruiser Admiral Kornilov and the armoured cruiser Friedrich Carl to experimental aeroplane carriers in early 1914, but all three operated smaller aircraft groups than the earlier ships.
Upon the outbreak of war in Europe in August 1914, the fleets of the belligerent Great Powers were mobilised and placed onto a war footing. Unlike some prewar predictions made by civilian experts and journalists, the war did not begin with a grand naval battle, as both the Royal Navy and Imperial German Navy exercised decidedly cautious strategic approaches. The widely anticipated close British blockade of the German coast, upon which many pre-war plans in Berlin were based, did not occur, with a distant blockade at the other end of the North Sea preferred. The main battlefleet of the Royal Navy was concentrated at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys, along with the three aeroplane carriers, even though they were viewed as lacking speed for proper fleet employment. In the south, the British Expeditionary Force was successfully transported to France under the guard of the battleships and cruisers of the Channel Fleet, whilst the Royal Navy's seaplane carriers transported aircraft to France and provided aerial reconnaissance cover to the huge convoys of troopships. A number of civilian vessels were taken up from trade for conversion to seaplane carriers by the Admiralty, consisting of the Cross-Channel packet ships Riviera, Empress, Engadine and Ben-My-Chree, the liner Campania and the seized German freighters Rabenfels and Aenne Rickmers, later renamed Raven and Anne. Two additional liners, Aragon and Cantabrian, were requisitioned for conversion to aeroplane carriers, but this process was to be rather more protracted than planned due to the sheer volume of work undertaken in the Royal Dockyards at the beginning of the war.
The first use of aircraft carriers of any sort in combat occurred at the First Battle of Heligoland Bight on August 20th 1914, where Admiral Sir David Beatty lead a force of battlecruisers, cruisers and destroyers on a successful ambush of patrolling German cruisers and torpedo boats. In addition to the surface action, which was acclaimed by many at home as a harbinger of future British victories at sea to come, Hermes, Ark Royal and Eagle launched a total of 25 seaplanes to attack the German fortress island of Heligoland. The raid itself had only a pinprick effect on the German defences due to cloudy conditions and sporadic anti-aircraft fire, but demonstrated the feasibility of aircraft striking from the sea. Twenty of the aircraft were recovered, with the crews of the others being taken onboard destroyers and submarines and their planes scuttled due to the urgency of the need to draw back to Britain with the battlecruiser force.
In the Far East, the German concession of Kiautschou Bay and its model Teutonic port city of Tsingtao stood out as one of the jewels in the crown of the German colonial empire and a threat to the British and Allied position in China. Upon a request from their British allies, the Japanese issued an ultimatum to Germany on August 12th to withdraw its forces and ships from Chinese and Japanese waters and to transfer the port of Tsingtao to Japanese control. The majority of the heavy ships of the German East Asia Squadron had broken out to the Pacific at the beginning of hostilities, where they would be hunted down and destroyed by British and Dominion battlecruisers, but four older cruisers remained in Tsingtao, blockaded within its harbour by a force of Imperial Japanese Navy and Royal Navy predreadnoughts. The Japanese deployed a reinforced infantry division, several batteries of their heaviest artillery, two dragons and a not-insubstantial battlefleet, whilst Britain dispatched the old predreadnoughts Canopus, Empress of India, Nelson and Duke of Wellington and an ad hoc division of British and Indian troops from Hong Kong. Wakamiya launched several waves of airstrikes from its seaplane preceding the initial naval bombardment on August 25th as the Imperial Japanese Army began to land its forces and move up to the intended siege lines and these raids were followed on a near daily basis over the next month. The formal siege and bombardment of Tsingtao began on September 30th and culminated with a devastating barrage on October 12th, as the Anglo-Japanese battlefleet, the 280mm and 305mm howitzers of the land forces and the dragons rained ruin down upon the city. Tsingtao would finally capitulate on October 29th as the remaining 1600 German troops marched into Japanese captivity. Wakamiya and Fuji would see action alongside Allied forces as the Chinese Front developed in 1915, but other events would overshadow their role.
On Christmas Day 1914, German and British troops took part in a spontaneous truce that marked that last gasp of peacetime niceties, but at sea, there was no let up from hostilities. The Royal Navy's Harwich Force sortied in strength, covered by the Battle Cruiser Fleet, in an operation escorting the seaplane carriers Hermes, Empress, Engadine, Riviera and all three of the operational aeroplane carriers in a strike on the Zeppelin sheds at the Imperial German Navy's base at Cuxhaven. 39 aircraft were launched, with 30 reaching their targets and dropping their loads of four 25lb bombs. Just as over Heligoland, the impact of the raid was limited by issues of accuracy and poor weather, but marked the first large attack by naval aircraft on a base in the enemy's homeland. The German reaction in the form of the authorisation of the first Zeppelin raids on Britain in January 1915 was the first escalation that would culminate in the newly established Royal Air Force's strategic bombing campaign against German cities in 1918. There was some consideration given to use of German naval aircraft to strike against England after the Kaiser's personal suggestion, but this was not seen as an optimal employment of German naval forces at this time due to the disadvantageous correlation of forces in the North Sea, particularly in the light of the British victory at the Battle of Dogger Bank at the end of January.
Russia would be the first of the major belligerents to employ naval aircraft in the next year, using Grigorovich seaplanes from Admiral Kornilov to attack Turkish coastal shipping around Trebizond. This would be a precursor to the most notable use of aircraft carriers to date in the great Mediterranean campaign launched by Britain and France to break through to the beleagured Byzantine capital of Constantinople. Planning for such an operation had been underway since the beginning of the war, with Ottoman Turkish entry into the war on the side of Germany presenting a significant challenge. January saw the dispatch of Raven, Hermes, Empress, Engadine, Ben-My-Chree, Ark Royal and Eagle to the Mediterranean, where they joined Oriflamme and La Foudre in build-up of forces prior to the Gallipoli Campaign. The aerial reconnaissance capacity of the carriers would prove instrumental in the successful coordinated landing operations at Anzac Cove, Suvla Bay, Cape Helles and Bulair, providing useful spotting for naval gunfire support through the agency of new arcane wireless communication sets and harassing Turkish coastal defence positions as the 25 Allied battleships and over 100 smaller vessels forced their way through the Dardanelles. The 18" shells of the new super dreadnoughts Queen Elizabeth and Warspite, sent to the Mediterranean to undergo testing and working up under fire, proved devastating to Ottoman defences. As the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force battled their way up the peninsula and along the coast of the Sea of Marmara, a Short 184 seaplane piloted by Flight Commander Charles Edmonds operating off Ben-My-Chree became the first naval aircraft to attack and sink an enemy vessel underway at sea with an aerial torpedo on May 23rd. This success was somewhat offset by the loss of HMS Hermes to a German U-Boat in the Aegean on June 28th. The relief of the besieged city of Constantinople on September 12th 1915 would bring the campaign to a successful end and the assembled forces were once again dispersed, with the seaplane carriers deployed to Egypt to support the advance of Sir Edmund Allenby's Middle Eastern Expeditionary Force into Palestine, whilst the Royal Navy aeroplane carriers would return to Malta and thence to Britain.
Oriflamme would join with the new Italian aeroplane carrier Alessandro Volta to operate along the Otranto Barrage, which defended the strategic straits from the Adriatic to the broader Mediterranean from any attempted breakout by the surface fleet of the Austro-Hungarian k.u.k. Kriegsmarine and the few surface vessels of the Imperial German Navy that had fled for the relative safety of the former's fortress in Pola. Consideration was given to a carrier attack upon Pola, but the tactical problems involved with forcing a heavily escorted surface force to within range of Istria in the face of heavy torpedo craft and submarine opposition proved to be insurmountable given the forces available and their limited capabilities. Proposals were also raised for their deployment to the Aegean to support the static fighting along the Salonika and Thrace fronts, but their possible contribution was viewed as comparatively minimal compared to the risk of their loss. The Italian and French carriers would operate alongside each other in support roles over the next two and a half years before they would be risked in pitched battle in the Adriatic.
Upon their return to Britain, the earlier Royal Navy aeroplane carriers were docked for refurbishment and expansion of their flying off decks in line with the newly commissioned Aragon and Cantabrian, which were equipped with three-quarter length platforms that had allowed them to operate more effective wheeled landplanes whilst at sea with the fleet. They were equipped with a mixture of aircraft, including Sopwith Camel fighting planes, Blackburn TB anti-Zeppelin destroyers, Short 225 torpedo planes and Fairey Fleetwood general purpose scouts. All of the aeroplane carriers were grouped together into a specific fleet scouting force, with a secondary role of attacking enemy warships with aerial torpedoes after the successes encountered at Gallipoli. This was fortuitously timed, as the High Seas Fleet had now come under the command of Admiral Von Scheer, who supported far more aggressive action by Germany on the North Sea in order to wear down the numerial advantage of the Royal Navy. The main method of this was to be a series of raids on British ports that would lure out the Grand Fleet into concentrated submarine ambushes and engagements that would attrit their numbers. A large operation, incorporating the German surface fleet, U-Boats and Zeppelins, was planned for the end of May 1916, in order to gain a significant advantage prior to the expected entry of the United States of America into the war on the Entente side.
Unfortunately for the Germans, their wireless communications and ciphers had been deciphered by British naval intelligence due to the capture of a German codebook and Room 40, the secret cryptological analysis section of the Admiralty, had indicated that the High Seas Fleet was definitely preparing to sail on May 31st. Upon receipt of this information, Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet, decided to sortie the fleet and position it to take up a position off the southern coast of Norway to intercept the Germans. Jellicoe sailed from Scapa Flow with 32 dreadnoughts, 54 cruisers, 42 frigates and 136 destroyers at 22:30 on May 30th, linking up with an additional force of 4 super-dreadnoughts, 6 cruisers and 18 destroyers from Cromarty, whilst Sir Horace Hood's Battlecruiser Fleet of 12 battlecruisers, 28 cruisers, 18 frigates and 48 destroyers departed the Firth of Forth before dawn on the 31st. The two forces were scheduled to rendezvous 100 miles west of the mouth of the Skagerrak in the afternoon; the egress of the British battlecruisers was detected by German picket U-Boats on station off the coast of Scotland, but the Grand Fleet evaded detection through the sheer strength of its anti-submarine screen.
The Aircraft Carrier Force, consisting of the five aeroplane carriers and four seaplane carriers, operating detached from the main battle force with an escort of armoured cruisers and frigates, put up a continual aerial screen to aid the reconnaissance capacity of the Grand Fleet, in conjunction with twelve airships of the Royal Naval Air Service. The outer elements of both fleets met from 13:30 on the afternoon of May 31st, with the initial clashes taking place between the light cruiser screens and then the armoured cruiser forces, just as the Battle Cruiser Fleet ran directly into the German counterparts. Imperial German Navy Zeppelins seeking out the main body of the Grand Fleet were harassed by Sopwith Camels launched from the Royal Navy carriers, but none were badly damaged due to the limited armament of the British aeroplanes. 16 torpedo bombers were launched from Eagle and Aragon to attack the German aeroplane carrier Friedrich Carl and succeeded in scoring one hit on the enemy vessel, forcing it from the growing mayhem of the battle. When the main fleet action commenced at 1740 with Jellicoe crossing Scheer's T, a moment noted by German survivors as one where the entire arc of the horizon erupted in an enormous sea of fire as the Grand Fleet began to pour broadside after broadside through the smoke and mist into the unfortunate Hoche See Flotte, the role of the various aircraft carriers was sidelined, with the loss of HMS Cantabrian and 537 of its crew to a German U-Boat being on of the more greivous losses suffered on the day.
The Battle of Jutland has been rightly called the 'Second Trafalgar' due to the decisive nature of the British victory and whilst the role of the aircraft carrier is considered distinctly secondary to the exploits of those daring battlecruisers, the 'Splendid Cats', the performance of the Iron Dukes and of course the deeds of the new Queen Elizabeth and Royal Sovereign class super dreadnoughts, particularly the great HMS Warspite, but it also marked the first clash of aircraft carriers at sea. Amid the public acclaim and fanfare, the Admiralty noted the potential capacity brought by the new vessels to both inflict damage and also defend the vital battlefleet from the depredations of enemy aeroplanes and airships. The extent of the triumph opened up a number of new offensive options for the Grand Fleet as well as allowing the release of destroyers and frigates to augment the convoy escort forces in the deepening Battle of the Atlantic against the U-Boat menace and First Sea Lord Sir John Fisher, who was to be created the Duke of Somerset in recognition of his role in the victory, had particular plans for the employment of aircraft carriers in these future operations.
Meanwhile, as the war on land, sea and air showed no sign of a swift ending, the naval construction programmes of the Great Powers changed in response to the nature of the war. The Royal Navy had viewed its current battlecruiser programme of the eight King Alfred and Renown class as sufficient to counter known German construction, but First Sea Lord Fisher had formulated a daring notion of penetrating the Baltic Sea and landing a force of Royal Marines and British Army troops on the shores of Pomerania, supported by over 700 ships, including new, shallow draft battlecruisers equipped with very heavy guns. His strident support lead to the laying down in early 1915 of four large light 18" battlecruisers, the Courageous class, and two even larger ships to be equipped with guns of the incredible calibre of 20", named the Incomparables by Admiral Fisher, who was ever fond of such rhetorical gestures. Whilst these under construction, the circumstances of the war and Allied grand strategy in the aftermath of Jutland shifted away from the viability of the so-called Baltic Project in favour of two much more circumspect objectives - the seizure of the German fortress island of Heligoland and a 'Great Landing' on the Belgian coast to eliminate the increasing scourge of German U-Boat bases in Flanders. Such plans did not called for quite the same forces as originally envisaged, resulting in the second pair of the Courageous class, Furious and Fearless, being converted whilst under construction to aeroplane carriers and the suspension of work on the Incomparables so that priority could be shifted to monitors and lighter forces; this also lead to the slowing of work on the so-called 'super-battlecruisers' of the Admiral class, which Admiral Fisher fought ferociously hard to preserve.
In the United States, their preparations for full engagement in the World War had accelerated to fever pitch upon the declaration of war against Germany on March 3rd 1916 and the U.S. Navy began an unprecedented mobilisation. Sixteen super-dreadnought battleships and eight battlecruisers were under construction or ordered in addition to the existing fleet of two dozen battleships and eight battlecruisers as part of President Theodore Roosevelt's plan to build a navy second to none and bring about the complete defeat of Imperial Germany. Even with the German defeat at Jutland, the necessity for the sheer numbers of capital ships was only somewhat reduced, with the attachment of four US Battleship Divisions to the Grand Fleet being a definitive sign of the growing Anglo-American relationship, but the necessity for the large battlecruiser force was reconsidered in favour of new aircraft carriers to provide for a fully rounded fleet. Four seaplane carriers were under conversion from large fleet colliers and an intended replacement for the prewar conversion of Kearsarge in the form of a combined aeroplane and seaplane carrier similar to the British Ark Royal was underway in New York, with the 21,000t USS Wright commissioned on March 24th 1917. Most significantly, the Department of the Navy began studies on the possible conversion of some or all of the planned Lexington class super-battlecruisers into aircraft carriers and also laid down the Langley, the first dedicated aircraft carrier built from the keel up as such in September 1916.
Japan, whilst it was increasingly focussed on the confused Chinese Front and the maintenance of the Japanese Expeditionary Force in France, also put great emphasis on the continued development of a modern fleet, even now in the midst of war looking forward to the changed strategic circumstances of peacetime where their relations with their erstwhile American and British allies may not be quite as salubrious as those of war. The service of the four Kongo class battlecruisers with the Royal Navy Grand Fleet from July 1916 and the ongoing deployment of the battlecruisers Tsukuba, Ikumi, Ibuki and Kurama with the Allied Mediterranean Fleet provided the IJN with a valuable opportunity to observe the use of British, French and Italian aircraft carriers at sea and this information was transmitted back to Tokyo for extensive consideration. Fuji and Wakamiya had been joined by two other converted cruisers in 1915 and 1916, Matsushima and Nisshin, forming the Shina Kantai (China Fleet) alongside older dreadnoughts and cruisers and they had proved adept at the projection of naval airpower along the Chinese coast. Whilst Japan's much reduced resources compared to the British Empire and United States precluded it from the same level of wartime construction programme, the Empire of the Rising Sun placed considerable emphasis on quality over quality. A new construction aeroplane carrier with a full length flight deck was ordered in December 1916 and laid down in May 1917.
The aftermath of defeat at the Battle of Jutland had been the cause of much introspection in the German Empire. The High Seas Fleet could deploy but 17 predreadnoughts, 14 battleships and 4 battlecruisers to cover both the North Sea and the Baltic and the current construction programme of five super-dreadnoughts and four super-battlecruisers had slowed to a crawl in the latter half of 1916 as the Royal Navy blockade began to bite. One project that did proceed was the conversion of the 27,000t passenger liner SS Graf Zeppelin into an aeroplane carrier from August 6th 1916, with the intent of using a combination of aircraft and U-Boats to deal a resounding blow of vengeance to the 'treacherous English', as they had been memorably characterised by Kaiser Wilhelm II in his period of shock following the death of Grand Admiral Von Tirpitz from apoplexy upon receipt of the news of Jutland. Work upon the Graf Zeppelin continued steadily until the shock of the British seizure of Heligoland in July 1917, where 95 seaplanes took part in a predawn bombing raid prior to an assault landing by the Royal Naval Division covered by the guns of the Grand Fleet and ten dragons. Possession of Heligoland permitted the Royal Navy to substantially tighten the blockade of Germany, albeit at an increased cost of light surface vessels to the continual menace of mines, torpedo boats, U-Boats and German naval aircraft. By the end of the war, Graf Zeppelin was nominally complete save for its armament and it would be allotted to the United States in the postwar division of spoils, whereupon it would serve many roles before being converted to a specialist dragon support ship USS Flambeau in 1931 and remain in service until 1959, becoming in the process the last surviving warship of the Imperial German Navy.
The effective neutralisation of the German High Seas Fleet by the naval effort of the Allies by mid 1917 put paid to some of the more expansive plans for the aggressive employment of aeroplane carriers, such as a surprise attack by over 240 of the new Sopwith Cuckoo torpedo bombers on Wilhelmshaven never reached fruition. Many military historians have considered the comparatively slower pace of aircraft carrier development in the latter years of the war as being directly connected to the reduced threat of the German surface fleet. The Royal Navy's carrier force engaged extensively in support of the Royal Marines' landings on the coast of Flanders, providing effective spotting for naval gunfire and striking at enemy torpedo boats in the crowded waters, with HMS Aragon and HMS Campania being lost to a German mine and coastal artillery in the process. Perhaps the most effective aeroplane carriers operated by the Royal Navy in the fighting of 1917 was HMS Furious, which became the first carrier to launch and recover an airstrike of wheeled aeroplanes whilst underway at sea in July. Upon Germany's acquiescence to the Allied armistice on November 11th 1918, Ark Royal, Argus, Eagle, Fearless and Furious made up the Aircraft Carrier Force of the Grand Fleet which received the surrender of the High Seas Fleet at sea. They were accompanied by a new ship, the Royal Navy's first purpose built full deck aircraft carrier, HMS Arion, which had been commissioned just three weeks earlier.
At war's end, the aircraft carrier had given extensive proof of its potential future value to the navies of the world, albeit without ever quite getting the opportunity to prove their mettle in the same manner as other wartime inventions such as the tank and the strategic bomber. The elimination of the Imperial German Navy from the calculations of international military power and the effective removal of Russia as a major naval player due to the terrible civil war which even now raged within its borders had created a new world in so far as the naval balance of power was concerned. The United States, Britain and Japan all operated brand new purpose-built aircraft carriers in addition to their array of prewar and wartime conversions, although in the cases of all three nations, they were still distinctly regarded as experimental vessels. As the clouds of war cleared in the hopeful light of peace as 1919 began, it was not yet apparent what shape this new world would take, nor if this war to end all wars meant the end of the great battle fleets of the victorious nations.
This would be the first great question of the peace.
Warfare at the end of the 19th Century was undergoing several revolutions, the most significant of which was that if technology. On land, sea and air, massive advances were being made in the introduction of new and powerful machinery that replaced the labour of man and beast with far more potent artificial means. The invention and first flight of the powered aircraft in 1895 opened up new areas of potential development, offering the opportunity for far smaller flying machines than the ponderous steam airships and far less expensive than the cavorite vessels that plied the waves of the aether in space. Sir William Henson's initial ponderous flyers were very much experimental machines and it would take the breakthroughs achieved by the Wright Brothers in the United States at the dawn of the 20th Century to allow the advancement to an effective weapon of war.
However, the first use of flying machine operated from ships predated the aeroplane by almost a century. Both the British and French had employed kite ships and balloon ships during the Napoleonic Wars, although neither managed to find a decisive use for these niche vessels. It would take the American Civil War in the 1860s to see balloon tenders employed on a more effective scale, with the Union Army Balloon Corps operating off converted coal barges in the Potomac River, however these watercraft were purely littoral in nature and did not venture onto the high seas. The paucity of naval battles outside of the general vicinity of land throughout the conflict limited the role of balloon observation to action on land, primarily in the Peninsula Campaign. Balloons also encountered the distinct difficulty of operating in an environment where they could possibly face dragons and the advancing offensive threat of modern battle magics.
Some consideration was given by the Admiralty for the development of an iron steamship capable of supporting the independent operation of dragons in the late 1860s, but this was seen as an uneconomical solution to a problem that was largely absent in the light of Britain’s expanding network of coaling stations across the seven seas. Two Royal Navy balloon tenders, HMS Julia and HMS Emulous, were converted initially to support operations in China and Japan in 1869, but were then altered to support the initial flights of the Imperial Space Programme in man’s first steps towards the heavens. It was not to be an indicator of what was to come, with the last decades of the 19th Century being the age of the airship, which proved just as able in reducing the relative 'size' of the world as the steamship in the previous generation.
The first aeroplanes were flimsy, short-ranged contraptions of no apparent military utility beyond mere curiosity, but the evolution of their power, range and performance began to open new opportunities for their use, primarily as reconnaissance platforms. Progress of aircraft development in the first decade of the 20th Century was rapid, encouraged both by international conflicts in Southern Africa and Manchuria and the ongoing impact of the War of the Worlds. The Austrian Kress Drachenflieger represented the first operational aquatic plane, but was primarily used on rivers and reservoirs as it was gradually tested from 1902 to 1905. It was to be the French who developed the first seaplane proper in the form of the Hydravion of Henri Fabre in 1907, which was rapidly followed by similar developments in Britain and the United States, where aviation pioneer Glenn L. Martin broke distance and speed records in his Avalon Zipper. At this time, whilst the seaplane was rapidly developing into an obvious naval weapon of war, the very first take off from a naval vessel occurred when a specially adapted Royal Navy Short S.29 took off from a platform onboard the battleship HMS Dreadnought on March 14th 1908. Across the Atlantic, Eugene Ely was the first individual to successfully land an aircraft on a ship and take off, albeit on separate occasions, in early November 1908.
The first ships designed to support the new generation of aircraft were seaplane tenders, with the French La Foudre being converted from a torpedo boat tender in February 1909, being equipped with a deck, hanger and crane for lifting seaplanes. She displaced 7680t and carried six seaplanes, whilst still sporting a conventional gun armament of six Canon de 100mm Modele 1891 and four Canon de 75mm Modele 1904. It was successfully tested in fleet exercise in 1910, providing valuable service in extending the range and vision of the French battlefleet and warding off surprise attacks by torpedo boats. La Foudre was used to train increasing numbers of seaplane pilots and was fitted with a 10 metre long flying-off deck in 1912 for further experiments with wheeled landplanes, but this turned out to be too short for any optimal employment.
The Royal Navy rapidly followed suit, converting the old cruiser HMS Hermes into a seaplane carrier capable of supporting an initial complement of eight seaplanes. The 6400t vessel had a relatively high top speed of 20 knots and, in the manner of La Foudre and most other first generation carriers, was equipped with a strong array of guns in the form of six QF 6”, eight single QF 12pdrs and six QF 3pdr Hotchkiss anti-torpedo boat guns. She was recommissioned on May 6th 1911 and was initially attached to the Channel Fleet at Portland, carrying out extensive training and testing of various new seaplanes. Hermes followed by the similarly obsolescent Pegasus, Perseus, Aeolus and Hermione over the next two years. In the manner of the French, the Royal Navy primarily employed Hermes and her later sisters in an experimental role, both at Home and in the Mediterranean, examining the uses of seaplanes in fleet exercises and general reconnaissance, but additionally tested their use as armed platforms. The various seaplanes examined did not offer any great capability in terms of their bomb capacity or range and were thus considered not to be of immediate use as military flying machines.
In the United States, the protected cruisers Columbia and Baltimore were similarly converted to support seaplane operations, with the larger vessel providing a much more versatile platform, whilst the smaller cruiser retained more of her heavy gun armament. The two United States Navy seaplane carriers thus operated as a pair, with Columbia carrying nine seaplanes to Baltimore's four, and their participation in joint exercises with the United States Fleet gave valuable experience for the Navy's fliers. America's increasing rival in the Pacific, the Empire of Japan, also entered into the age of the seaplane carriers when the Imperial Japanese Navy acquired the captured Russian transport Wakamiya-Maru for experimental aviation purposes. She could carry a middling group of half a dozen seaplanes, but was equipped a lighter armament than the Continental vessels, with only a pair of 79mm guns.
Aeroplanes had seen combat use in the Mexican Uprising, the Italo-Turkish War and the Balkan Wars that saw Ottoman Turkey finally expelled from Europe after five centuries, but none of the combatants made use of seaplanes in a military context due to a combination of circumstances and their own limitations. The Royal Navy employed seaplanes operating from HMS Pegasus in a reconnaissance role over the Aegean in 1912 as it sought to protect the neutrality of British shipping and interests in the heated conflict, where the smaller amphibious aircraft provided a much more flexible option for aerial photography than the larger, higher-flying dirigible airships. The operation of aircraft from the sea, whilst it appealed directly to the world's largest navy, was not a development that was ignored by any of the Great Powers, with the most pressing need being regarded as extending the capacity of a battlefleet at sea to detect and outmanoeuvre their opponents. Military sorcerers carried out a range of divinations on that matter, all of which indicated that the operation of aeroplane carriers would be decisive in victory in a future conflict, which decided the matter for those naval establishments which could afford their acquisition; future interpretation of these decidedly unclear predictions have indicated that they may have been somewhat precipitous.
As these developments were occuring, the true birth of the aircraft carrier was imminent. As early as 1908, the French inventor Clément Ader had postulated the essential features of an aeroplane-carrying vessel in his prescient work L'Aviation Militaire, stating that "An airplane-carrying vessel is indispensable. These vessels will be constructed on a plan very different from what is currently used. First of all the deck will be cleared of all obstacles. It will be flat, as wide as possible without jeopardizing the nautical lines of the hull, and it will look like a landing field." These observations were shared by American and British officers on either side of the Atlantic, leading to the Admiralty acquiring a large merchant freighter recently laid down by the Blyth Shipbuilding Company in Northumberland in March 1913. This new ship was built from the frames up as a specialist vessel for the operation of both aeroplanes and seaplanes and was commissioned as HMS Ark Royal, a long and storied name, redolent in history, on December 29th 1913. Displacing 12,460t and armed with four BL 4" Mk VIII and eight QF 12pdr 12 cwt guns, Ark Royal had a top speed of 17 knots and could carry an initial group of 16 aircraft, usually made up of a mixture of seaplanes and wheeled aeroplanes. Two further merchant liners, Argus and Eagle, were acquired for similar development, being commissioned in May and July of 1914 respectively. These ships were capable of launching wheeled landplanes whilst underway at sea, but lacked the ability to recover them after their flight, fundamentally limiting their tactical utility.
The other major naval powers followed the example of the Royal Navy in the acquisition of aeroplane carriers over the course of the latter part of 1913 and 1914, their rapid development being very much a consequence of the heated naval arms race of the time. France converted the liner La Rochelle to a composite aeroplane/seaplane carrier in late 1913, christening it with the warlike name of Oriflamme to reflect its new position. She had a greater displacement and speed than Ark Royal, capable of a top speed of 19 knots, but only supported an air group of twelve aeroplanes. Across the Atlantic, the French developments were followed in the United States by the old battleship Indiana, which was converted to an aeroplane carrier from May 1913 to February 1914. She was capable of operating fourteen aeroplanes, but her arrangement of her flying-off platform was not seen as completely optimal. The Japanese, Russians and Germans began the conversion the battleship Fuji, the protected cruiser Admiral Kornilov and the armoured cruiser Friedrich Carl to experimental aeroplane carriers in early 1914, but all three operated smaller aircraft groups than the earlier ships.
Upon the outbreak of war in Europe in August 1914, the fleets of the belligerent Great Powers were mobilised and placed onto a war footing. Unlike some prewar predictions made by civilian experts and journalists, the war did not begin with a grand naval battle, as both the Royal Navy and Imperial German Navy exercised decidedly cautious strategic approaches. The widely anticipated close British blockade of the German coast, upon which many pre-war plans in Berlin were based, did not occur, with a distant blockade at the other end of the North Sea preferred. The main battlefleet of the Royal Navy was concentrated at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys, along with the three aeroplane carriers, even though they were viewed as lacking speed for proper fleet employment. In the south, the British Expeditionary Force was successfully transported to France under the guard of the battleships and cruisers of the Channel Fleet, whilst the Royal Navy's seaplane carriers transported aircraft to France and provided aerial reconnaissance cover to the huge convoys of troopships. A number of civilian vessels were taken up from trade for conversion to seaplane carriers by the Admiralty, consisting of the Cross-Channel packet ships Riviera, Empress, Engadine and Ben-My-Chree, the liner Campania and the seized German freighters Rabenfels and Aenne Rickmers, later renamed Raven and Anne. Two additional liners, Aragon and Cantabrian, were requisitioned for conversion to aeroplane carriers, but this process was to be rather more protracted than planned due to the sheer volume of work undertaken in the Royal Dockyards at the beginning of the war.
The first use of aircraft carriers of any sort in combat occurred at the First Battle of Heligoland Bight on August 20th 1914, where Admiral Sir David Beatty lead a force of battlecruisers, cruisers and destroyers on a successful ambush of patrolling German cruisers and torpedo boats. In addition to the surface action, which was acclaimed by many at home as a harbinger of future British victories at sea to come, Hermes, Ark Royal and Eagle launched a total of 25 seaplanes to attack the German fortress island of Heligoland. The raid itself had only a pinprick effect on the German defences due to cloudy conditions and sporadic anti-aircraft fire, but demonstrated the feasibility of aircraft striking from the sea. Twenty of the aircraft were recovered, with the crews of the others being taken onboard destroyers and submarines and their planes scuttled due to the urgency of the need to draw back to Britain with the battlecruiser force.
In the Far East, the German concession of Kiautschou Bay and its model Teutonic port city of Tsingtao stood out as one of the jewels in the crown of the German colonial empire and a threat to the British and Allied position in China. Upon a request from their British allies, the Japanese issued an ultimatum to Germany on August 12th to withdraw its forces and ships from Chinese and Japanese waters and to transfer the port of Tsingtao to Japanese control. The majority of the heavy ships of the German East Asia Squadron had broken out to the Pacific at the beginning of hostilities, where they would be hunted down and destroyed by British and Dominion battlecruisers, but four older cruisers remained in Tsingtao, blockaded within its harbour by a force of Imperial Japanese Navy and Royal Navy predreadnoughts. The Japanese deployed a reinforced infantry division, several batteries of their heaviest artillery, two dragons and a not-insubstantial battlefleet, whilst Britain dispatched the old predreadnoughts Canopus, Empress of India, Nelson and Duke of Wellington and an ad hoc division of British and Indian troops from Hong Kong. Wakamiya launched several waves of airstrikes from its seaplane preceding the initial naval bombardment on August 25th as the Imperial Japanese Army began to land its forces and move up to the intended siege lines and these raids were followed on a near daily basis over the next month. The formal siege and bombardment of Tsingtao began on September 30th and culminated with a devastating barrage on October 12th, as the Anglo-Japanese battlefleet, the 280mm and 305mm howitzers of the land forces and the dragons rained ruin down upon the city. Tsingtao would finally capitulate on October 29th as the remaining 1600 German troops marched into Japanese captivity. Wakamiya and Fuji would see action alongside Allied forces as the Chinese Front developed in 1915, but other events would overshadow their role.
On Christmas Day 1914, German and British troops took part in a spontaneous truce that marked that last gasp of peacetime niceties, but at sea, there was no let up from hostilities. The Royal Navy's Harwich Force sortied in strength, covered by the Battle Cruiser Fleet, in an operation escorting the seaplane carriers Hermes, Empress, Engadine, Riviera and all three of the operational aeroplane carriers in a strike on the Zeppelin sheds at the Imperial German Navy's base at Cuxhaven. 39 aircraft were launched, with 30 reaching their targets and dropping their loads of four 25lb bombs. Just as over Heligoland, the impact of the raid was limited by issues of accuracy and poor weather, but marked the first large attack by naval aircraft on a base in the enemy's homeland. The German reaction in the form of the authorisation of the first Zeppelin raids on Britain in January 1915 was the first escalation that would culminate in the newly established Royal Air Force's strategic bombing campaign against German cities in 1918. There was some consideration given to use of German naval aircraft to strike against England after the Kaiser's personal suggestion, but this was not seen as an optimal employment of German naval forces at this time due to the disadvantageous correlation of forces in the North Sea, particularly in the light of the British victory at the Battle of Dogger Bank at the end of January.
Russia would be the first of the major belligerents to employ naval aircraft in the next year, using Grigorovich seaplanes from Admiral Kornilov to attack Turkish coastal shipping around Trebizond. This would be a precursor to the most notable use of aircraft carriers to date in the great Mediterranean campaign launched by Britain and France to break through to the beleagured Byzantine capital of Constantinople. Planning for such an operation had been underway since the beginning of the war, with Ottoman Turkish entry into the war on the side of Germany presenting a significant challenge. January saw the dispatch of Raven, Hermes, Empress, Engadine, Ben-My-Chree, Ark Royal and Eagle to the Mediterranean, where they joined Oriflamme and La Foudre in build-up of forces prior to the Gallipoli Campaign. The aerial reconnaissance capacity of the carriers would prove instrumental in the successful coordinated landing operations at Anzac Cove, Suvla Bay, Cape Helles and Bulair, providing useful spotting for naval gunfire support through the agency of new arcane wireless communication sets and harassing Turkish coastal defence positions as the 25 Allied battleships and over 100 smaller vessels forced their way through the Dardanelles. The 18" shells of the new super dreadnoughts Queen Elizabeth and Warspite, sent to the Mediterranean to undergo testing and working up under fire, proved devastating to Ottoman defences. As the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force battled their way up the peninsula and along the coast of the Sea of Marmara, a Short 184 seaplane piloted by Flight Commander Charles Edmonds operating off Ben-My-Chree became the first naval aircraft to attack and sink an enemy vessel underway at sea with an aerial torpedo on May 23rd. This success was somewhat offset by the loss of HMS Hermes to a German U-Boat in the Aegean on June 28th. The relief of the besieged city of Constantinople on September 12th 1915 would bring the campaign to a successful end and the assembled forces were once again dispersed, with the seaplane carriers deployed to Egypt to support the advance of Sir Edmund Allenby's Middle Eastern Expeditionary Force into Palestine, whilst the Royal Navy aeroplane carriers would return to Malta and thence to Britain.
Oriflamme would join with the new Italian aeroplane carrier Alessandro Volta to operate along the Otranto Barrage, which defended the strategic straits from the Adriatic to the broader Mediterranean from any attempted breakout by the surface fleet of the Austro-Hungarian k.u.k. Kriegsmarine and the few surface vessels of the Imperial German Navy that had fled for the relative safety of the former's fortress in Pola. Consideration was given to a carrier attack upon Pola, but the tactical problems involved with forcing a heavily escorted surface force to within range of Istria in the face of heavy torpedo craft and submarine opposition proved to be insurmountable given the forces available and their limited capabilities. Proposals were also raised for their deployment to the Aegean to support the static fighting along the Salonika and Thrace fronts, but their possible contribution was viewed as comparatively minimal compared to the risk of their loss. The Italian and French carriers would operate alongside each other in support roles over the next two and a half years before they would be risked in pitched battle in the Adriatic.
Upon their return to Britain, the earlier Royal Navy aeroplane carriers were docked for refurbishment and expansion of their flying off decks in line with the newly commissioned Aragon and Cantabrian, which were equipped with three-quarter length platforms that had allowed them to operate more effective wheeled landplanes whilst at sea with the fleet. They were equipped with a mixture of aircraft, including Sopwith Camel fighting planes, Blackburn TB anti-Zeppelin destroyers, Short 225 torpedo planes and Fairey Fleetwood general purpose scouts. All of the aeroplane carriers were grouped together into a specific fleet scouting force, with a secondary role of attacking enemy warships with aerial torpedoes after the successes encountered at Gallipoli. This was fortuitously timed, as the High Seas Fleet had now come under the command of Admiral Von Scheer, who supported far more aggressive action by Germany on the North Sea in order to wear down the numerial advantage of the Royal Navy. The main method of this was to be a series of raids on British ports that would lure out the Grand Fleet into concentrated submarine ambushes and engagements that would attrit their numbers. A large operation, incorporating the German surface fleet, U-Boats and Zeppelins, was planned for the end of May 1916, in order to gain a significant advantage prior to the expected entry of the United States of America into the war on the Entente side.
Unfortunately for the Germans, their wireless communications and ciphers had been deciphered by British naval intelligence due to the capture of a German codebook and Room 40, the secret cryptological analysis section of the Admiralty, had indicated that the High Seas Fleet was definitely preparing to sail on May 31st. Upon receipt of this information, Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet, decided to sortie the fleet and position it to take up a position off the southern coast of Norway to intercept the Germans. Jellicoe sailed from Scapa Flow with 32 dreadnoughts, 54 cruisers, 42 frigates and 136 destroyers at 22:30 on May 30th, linking up with an additional force of 4 super-dreadnoughts, 6 cruisers and 18 destroyers from Cromarty, whilst Sir Horace Hood's Battlecruiser Fleet of 12 battlecruisers, 28 cruisers, 18 frigates and 48 destroyers departed the Firth of Forth before dawn on the 31st. The two forces were scheduled to rendezvous 100 miles west of the mouth of the Skagerrak in the afternoon; the egress of the British battlecruisers was detected by German picket U-Boats on station off the coast of Scotland, but the Grand Fleet evaded detection through the sheer strength of its anti-submarine screen.
The Aircraft Carrier Force, consisting of the five aeroplane carriers and four seaplane carriers, operating detached from the main battle force with an escort of armoured cruisers and frigates, put up a continual aerial screen to aid the reconnaissance capacity of the Grand Fleet, in conjunction with twelve airships of the Royal Naval Air Service. The outer elements of both fleets met from 13:30 on the afternoon of May 31st, with the initial clashes taking place between the light cruiser screens and then the armoured cruiser forces, just as the Battle Cruiser Fleet ran directly into the German counterparts. Imperial German Navy Zeppelins seeking out the main body of the Grand Fleet were harassed by Sopwith Camels launched from the Royal Navy carriers, but none were badly damaged due to the limited armament of the British aeroplanes. 16 torpedo bombers were launched from Eagle and Aragon to attack the German aeroplane carrier Friedrich Carl and succeeded in scoring one hit on the enemy vessel, forcing it from the growing mayhem of the battle. When the main fleet action commenced at 1740 with Jellicoe crossing Scheer's T, a moment noted by German survivors as one where the entire arc of the horizon erupted in an enormous sea of fire as the Grand Fleet began to pour broadside after broadside through the smoke and mist into the unfortunate Hoche See Flotte, the role of the various aircraft carriers was sidelined, with the loss of HMS Cantabrian and 537 of its crew to a German U-Boat being on of the more greivous losses suffered on the day.
The Battle of Jutland has been rightly called the 'Second Trafalgar' due to the decisive nature of the British victory and whilst the role of the aircraft carrier is considered distinctly secondary to the exploits of those daring battlecruisers, the 'Splendid Cats', the performance of the Iron Dukes and of course the deeds of the new Queen Elizabeth and Royal Sovereign class super dreadnoughts, particularly the great HMS Warspite, but it also marked the first clash of aircraft carriers at sea. Amid the public acclaim and fanfare, the Admiralty noted the potential capacity brought by the new vessels to both inflict damage and also defend the vital battlefleet from the depredations of enemy aeroplanes and airships. The extent of the triumph opened up a number of new offensive options for the Grand Fleet as well as allowing the release of destroyers and frigates to augment the convoy escort forces in the deepening Battle of the Atlantic against the U-Boat menace and First Sea Lord Sir John Fisher, who was to be created the Duke of Somerset in recognition of his role in the victory, had particular plans for the employment of aircraft carriers in these future operations.
Meanwhile, as the war on land, sea and air showed no sign of a swift ending, the naval construction programmes of the Great Powers changed in response to the nature of the war. The Royal Navy had viewed its current battlecruiser programme of the eight King Alfred and Renown class as sufficient to counter known German construction, but First Sea Lord Fisher had formulated a daring notion of penetrating the Baltic Sea and landing a force of Royal Marines and British Army troops on the shores of Pomerania, supported by over 700 ships, including new, shallow draft battlecruisers equipped with very heavy guns. His strident support lead to the laying down in early 1915 of four large light 18" battlecruisers, the Courageous class, and two even larger ships to be equipped with guns of the incredible calibre of 20", named the Incomparables by Admiral Fisher, who was ever fond of such rhetorical gestures. Whilst these under construction, the circumstances of the war and Allied grand strategy in the aftermath of Jutland shifted away from the viability of the so-called Baltic Project in favour of two much more circumspect objectives - the seizure of the German fortress island of Heligoland and a 'Great Landing' on the Belgian coast to eliminate the increasing scourge of German U-Boat bases in Flanders. Such plans did not called for quite the same forces as originally envisaged, resulting in the second pair of the Courageous class, Furious and Fearless, being converted whilst under construction to aeroplane carriers and the suspension of work on the Incomparables so that priority could be shifted to monitors and lighter forces; this also lead to the slowing of work on the so-called 'super-battlecruisers' of the Admiral class, which Admiral Fisher fought ferociously hard to preserve.
In the United States, their preparations for full engagement in the World War had accelerated to fever pitch upon the declaration of war against Germany on March 3rd 1916 and the U.S. Navy began an unprecedented mobilisation. Sixteen super-dreadnought battleships and eight battlecruisers were under construction or ordered in addition to the existing fleet of two dozen battleships and eight battlecruisers as part of President Theodore Roosevelt's plan to build a navy second to none and bring about the complete defeat of Imperial Germany. Even with the German defeat at Jutland, the necessity for the sheer numbers of capital ships was only somewhat reduced, with the attachment of four US Battleship Divisions to the Grand Fleet being a definitive sign of the growing Anglo-American relationship, but the necessity for the large battlecruiser force was reconsidered in favour of new aircraft carriers to provide for a fully rounded fleet. Four seaplane carriers were under conversion from large fleet colliers and an intended replacement for the prewar conversion of Kearsarge in the form of a combined aeroplane and seaplane carrier similar to the British Ark Royal was underway in New York, with the 21,000t USS Wright commissioned on March 24th 1917. Most significantly, the Department of the Navy began studies on the possible conversion of some or all of the planned Lexington class super-battlecruisers into aircraft carriers and also laid down the Langley, the first dedicated aircraft carrier built from the keel up as such in September 1916.
Japan, whilst it was increasingly focussed on the confused Chinese Front and the maintenance of the Japanese Expeditionary Force in France, also put great emphasis on the continued development of a modern fleet, even now in the midst of war looking forward to the changed strategic circumstances of peacetime where their relations with their erstwhile American and British allies may not be quite as salubrious as those of war. The service of the four Kongo class battlecruisers with the Royal Navy Grand Fleet from July 1916 and the ongoing deployment of the battlecruisers Tsukuba, Ikumi, Ibuki and Kurama with the Allied Mediterranean Fleet provided the IJN with a valuable opportunity to observe the use of British, French and Italian aircraft carriers at sea and this information was transmitted back to Tokyo for extensive consideration. Fuji and Wakamiya had been joined by two other converted cruisers in 1915 and 1916, Matsushima and Nisshin, forming the Shina Kantai (China Fleet) alongside older dreadnoughts and cruisers and they had proved adept at the projection of naval airpower along the Chinese coast. Whilst Japan's much reduced resources compared to the British Empire and United States precluded it from the same level of wartime construction programme, the Empire of the Rising Sun placed considerable emphasis on quality over quality. A new construction aeroplane carrier with a full length flight deck was ordered in December 1916 and laid down in May 1917.
The aftermath of defeat at the Battle of Jutland had been the cause of much introspection in the German Empire. The High Seas Fleet could deploy but 17 predreadnoughts, 14 battleships and 4 battlecruisers to cover both the North Sea and the Baltic and the current construction programme of five super-dreadnoughts and four super-battlecruisers had slowed to a crawl in the latter half of 1916 as the Royal Navy blockade began to bite. One project that did proceed was the conversion of the 27,000t passenger liner SS Graf Zeppelin into an aeroplane carrier from August 6th 1916, with the intent of using a combination of aircraft and U-Boats to deal a resounding blow of vengeance to the 'treacherous English', as they had been memorably characterised by Kaiser Wilhelm II in his period of shock following the death of Grand Admiral Von Tirpitz from apoplexy upon receipt of the news of Jutland. Work upon the Graf Zeppelin continued steadily until the shock of the British seizure of Heligoland in July 1917, where 95 seaplanes took part in a predawn bombing raid prior to an assault landing by the Royal Naval Division covered by the guns of the Grand Fleet and ten dragons. Possession of Heligoland permitted the Royal Navy to substantially tighten the blockade of Germany, albeit at an increased cost of light surface vessels to the continual menace of mines, torpedo boats, U-Boats and German naval aircraft. By the end of the war, Graf Zeppelin was nominally complete save for its armament and it would be allotted to the United States in the postwar division of spoils, whereupon it would serve many roles before being converted to a specialist dragon support ship USS Flambeau in 1931 and remain in service until 1959, becoming in the process the last surviving warship of the Imperial German Navy.
The effective neutralisation of the German High Seas Fleet by the naval effort of the Allies by mid 1917 put paid to some of the more expansive plans for the aggressive employment of aeroplane carriers, such as a surprise attack by over 240 of the new Sopwith Cuckoo torpedo bombers on Wilhelmshaven never reached fruition. Many military historians have considered the comparatively slower pace of aircraft carrier development in the latter years of the war as being directly connected to the reduced threat of the German surface fleet. The Royal Navy's carrier force engaged extensively in support of the Royal Marines' landings on the coast of Flanders, providing effective spotting for naval gunfire and striking at enemy torpedo boats in the crowded waters, with HMS Aragon and HMS Campania being lost to a German mine and coastal artillery in the process. Perhaps the most effective aeroplane carriers operated by the Royal Navy in the fighting of 1917 was HMS Furious, which became the first carrier to launch and recover an airstrike of wheeled aeroplanes whilst underway at sea in July. Upon Germany's acquiescence to the Allied armistice on November 11th 1918, Ark Royal, Argus, Eagle, Fearless and Furious made up the Aircraft Carrier Force of the Grand Fleet which received the surrender of the High Seas Fleet at sea. They were accompanied by a new ship, the Royal Navy's first purpose built full deck aircraft carrier, HMS Arion, which had been commissioned just three weeks earlier.
At war's end, the aircraft carrier had given extensive proof of its potential future value to the navies of the world, albeit without ever quite getting the opportunity to prove their mettle in the same manner as other wartime inventions such as the tank and the strategic bomber. The elimination of the Imperial German Navy from the calculations of international military power and the effective removal of Russia as a major naval player due to the terrible civil war which even now raged within its borders had created a new world in so far as the naval balance of power was concerned. The United States, Britain and Japan all operated brand new purpose-built aircraft carriers in addition to their array of prewar and wartime conversions, although in the cases of all three nations, they were still distinctly regarded as experimental vessels. As the clouds of war cleared in the hopeful light of peace as 1919 began, it was not yet apparent what shape this new world would take, nor if this war to end all wars meant the end of the great battle fleets of the victorious nations.
This would be the first great question of the peace.
