Can we make a slightly smaller Fulmar as an improved carrier fighter?

RCAFson said:

The USN YE/ZB system was pilot operable, but to be fair it was not fully implemented until 1942 and even then pilots were often unfamiliar with it.

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Not only that, it required more altitude, and wasn't always reliably receivable even then, at least in SoPac.

yulzari said:

…..Hence the second crewman was normally a Telegraphist Air Gunner rating and not a navigator officer….

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Cool! My official job title on the railroad was "telegrapher".

Wild_Bill_Kelso said:

Weren't the kittyhawk tanks 75 gal?

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Lt Cdr Mike Crossley in his autobiography "They Gave Me A Seafire" was the CO of 880 squadron on Implacable at the time and noted them as 90 gallon.

In David Brown's "Seafire. The Spitfire that went to sea" they were described as "89 Imperial gallon (106.9 US gallons) tank". This is also the figure you will find on the Armoured Carriers site where there are also photos of them.

These were not the circular 75 gal tank of US manufacture more commonly associated with the P-40. Note the flattened shape. That conforms to the shape of tanks produced in Australia for SWPA aircraft. Ford of Australia even produced a 200 gal tank for 5th AF P-47s

Admiral Beez said:

That's why other navies used their torpedo or dive bombers for the recon and pathfinder roles. For the Royal Navy, the twin seat, monoplane, retractable undercarriage aircraft for distant scout work should have been the TSR or dive bomber not the fighter.

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Thing is AB, if you go back to the late 1920s / early 1930s the USN expected its fighters to escort its strike aircraft to the target (enemy carriers) then act in an AA suppression role diving on the target ship and strafing. For that they were equipped with small bombs as well as MG. And at that time they had both single and two seat fighters. See the Grumman FF.

Then as their doctrine developed, the two seater "fighters" evolved into "scouts" which in turn evolved into "dive bombers".

When it came to the "spotting" role again things were different due to the way in which each navy intended to operate its carriers.

For the USN the carriers were to operate individually, away from the Battleships. So the spotting function was offloaded to floatplanes carried by the Battleships and Cruisers as Carrier aircraft couldn't be guaranteed to be around. USN (& IJN) ships generally carried more aircraft for that role (2-4) in this period than RN ships (1-2) where the carriers were intended to operate as part of the main fleet.

So each nation was developing its carrier doctrines in different ways throughout the 1930s, and the aircraft they thought they needed along with that.

Shortround6 said:

And in the mid 30s you had a school in the RN that thought that the carriers should just button up their aircraft below their armored decks and let the guns shoot down the enemy planes. No actual "fighters" needed. So item #2 on the list can be discounted.

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It was not entirely as illogical as it might at first seem and when looked at from a 1930s perspective, forgetting everything that happened in WW2 and after.

No radar. So spotting an incoming attacker depended on the Mk.I eyeball and was therefore limited in range (even more so if cloudy) even if you placed escorting destroyers a reasonable distance out. Groups of aircraft were easier to spot than singletons. Faster attackers meant reduced warning times. Radios were unreliable. Numbers of fighter aircraft were limited on a carrier (usually 12 on RN carriers) so continuous CAP was impossible especially if some were reserved for strike protection.

But let's not forget that the USN faced the same problems. And their carriers only had a squadron of 18 fighters in this period. I've read in one source that by the mid-1930s they had given up on using their single seaters as strike escorts, keeping them for defence. But still continuous CAP was impossible. So they put a fighter or scout flight some distance up threat as an "aerial scout" to spot an incoming attack. Then hopefully scramble fighters in time to intercept. BUT the main reliance was still to be the carrier AA weapons and that of its escorting Cruisers. AND the expectation was that, while the carrier might not be sunk, it would probably be put out of action with its flight deck at least ripped up.

That last point was something that drove US Carrier design from Ranger to Essex. An open hangar to allow fitment of cross deck hangar catapults to allow launch of aircraft even if the flight deck was damaged. (They were planned for Ranger but not fitted as a cost cutting measure).

The advent of radar changed the entire question of how to defend a carrier and / or its supporting fleet.

The Fulmar was the size it was because it was based upon a light bomber. It was to fill the longer range/endurance gap left by the Sea Gladiator. God alone knows what the Roc was supposed to do. In practice the Roc used it's turret as defence when dive bombing the Dunkirk perimeter, bit I digress. The Sea Gladiator/Fulmar pair were interim until the RN got the long range single seater fighter they desired but could not get despite asking very, very hard. The deficiencies of the Sea Gladiator caused the Fulmar to shoulder most of the fighter task despite its speed. The enemy conveniently were generally flying towards them as it happens. If Fairey could have made a smaller, lighter single seat naval fighter they would have and the Fulmar would have been a Skua replacement as a spotter/dive bomber with an endurance fighter capacity whilst breaking up air attacks on the fleet being the task of the single seater which had no need for the rear TAG.

In the AH Fulmar world it would be the escort to torpedo Swordfish and Albacores with the Firefly taking over the role in due course, whilst undertaking strikes themselves.

What I am saying is that the Fulmar, as we know it, would be in service but with a different role whilst the fighter task would be something different to cover the thread role. It would not be an actual smaller, lighter single seat Fulmar but would be in that class. Up to 1942 a Sea Hurricane, with it's good deck landing behaviour, would be a sound basis and would serve until the Firebrand was to appear. The RAF is the enemy in that.

The organisation of the Fleet Air Arm inter-war when it was part of the RAF and the training its personnel received also played a part in the design of naval aircraft and the need for an Observer in the Fulmar.

Navigation
Inter-war all regular RN officers received extensive training in navigation from their earliest days in the service regardless of whether they would become navigation specialists or move into gunnery, engineering or the FAA. That included dead reckoning navigation which meant using celestial navigation (sun & stars). With experience they could learn to estimate wind drift speeds from the waves. In an aircraft the usual method if the sun or stars could not be used in an aircraft cockpit, then the procedure was to drop a smoke float or flare every hour or so and have the pilot fly a steady turn and see where you ended up in relation to the float / flare, and estimate the drift from that.

But inter-war most of the pilots (50%+) came from the RAF and were not given that degree of training or equipment. And training was an RAF responsibility not RN. Most RAF pilots navigated by map and road / railway line, both features notable by their absence over the open sea! The RAF did have a "Long Navigation Course" inter-war but it was intended for those Officers being assigned as navigators to the few flying boat squadrons with only about 2 per year undertaking it.

Another quirk was that the Observers (all RN officers) were considered part of the ship's crew and remained aboard when a squadron (with its pilots and TAGs) went ashore.

So in the eyes of the RN, the only way that an RAF pilot was going to find his way back to a carrier was by his aircraft having provision for an RN trained Observer to do the navigation to get him there.

Radio
The standard British aircraft radio from 1933 to 1940 was the HF T.1083/R.1082 combination. Voice radio range with that was limited to 35-40 miles ground to air and just 5 miles air to air. Beyond that communication had to be by morse code.

The Type 72 Homing Beacon was trialled in 1933 and the production version began to be installed in carriers from 1936 as they completed or became due for refit. But that was a process that was still ongoing in early 1942 (Eagle & Hermes). It was not only used by TAGs, RN Observers were also trained in its use. In the USA the first experimental YE beacon was installed in Saratoga in May 1938.

Crew composition
The TSR Swordfish had a crew of 3 (pilot/Observer/TAG). But, as at Taranto, when the overload fuel tank was fitted, which went in the Observer's compartment, it was the TAG that got bumped from the crew. Over Norway the policy seems to have been to fly them with Observers only in flight leaders aircraft.

Skua squadrons in 1940 were flying in flights of 3 with the rear seats in the aircraft occupied by TAGs (2) and an Observer (1).

When it came to the Fulmar squadrons, the rear seat was occupied by an Observer not a TAG.

RN inter-war exercise experience
To add to my earlier post about the logic of relying on AA guns, a couple of quotes from Friedman "Fighters over the Fleet" that I've posted before but are worth repeating to understand the 1930s fleet air defence problem:-

"..although it was impossible to prevent enemy reconnaissance aircraft from sighting and reporting a fleet, every effort should be made to attack them as soon as possible: 'the fact of shadowing aircraft being shot down, in itself constitutes protection against attack.

Looking back, the important observation in the 1934 edition [of Progress & Tactics] were that warning of impending air attack was difficult at best, that dive bombing was extremely difficult to counter and that attacks could be ruined by destroying shadowers (snoopers), without which they might not materialise at all……Later exercises showed that it might be difficult to deal with shadowers."

And then:-

"Exercises in 1935 called the value of fighter defence into question. In a 1935 Mediterranean Fleet exercise ('SE') fighters got into range of the attacking torpedo bombers only after the attackers were within fleet gun range. Fleet gunfire was considered so much more effective that such action was unacceptable. A later exercise showed that fleet could be saturated by well synchronised attacks and therefore that there was an urgent need for some form of anti-aircraft co-ordination….."

The fundamental problem with this was that pre-war ALL navies were overestimating the ability of AA guns to defend their fleets. That did not become obvious until revealed in the heat of battle in WW2.

Blackburn Roc
Objective of the design was to use a turret with 4x0.303MG to compensate for the lack of performance in the airframe.

Sea Gladiator
Having made the decision to acquire the "interim" Fulmar as a Skua replacement as a fighter, then the Sea Gladiator was an "emergency" puchase in March 1938 with delivery from Dec that year to make up for slow deliveries of Skua / Roc. AIUI it was intended to prvide only 3 squadrons for use in Furious, Courageous & Glorious. Friedman notes that this should not be viewed as the Admiralty advocating a switch to single seater fighters as they offered the CO of Courageous Skuas to guide them (he turned it down as he did not want a third aircraft type on board). The SG was then the only alternative option of carrier capable fighter as the surviving Nimrods & Ospreys were worn out.

Successors
N.8/39 & N.9/39 Specs were intended to generate replacements for the Fulmar & Roc respectively. By late 1939 the RN (now having complete control of the FAA) rejected all the proposed designs and started again. At that point there was even talk of single & two seaters based on the same airframe. By that time they had also acquired a new responsibility that the RAF had decided it couldn't handle - defence of naval bases like Scapa Flow. In Jan 1940 they selected a two seat Fairey design that led to the Firefly on the one hand and a Hercules engined single seat Blackburn proposal that eventually morphed into a request for a Sabre engined 400mph aircraft that became the Firebrand.

I wonder what the AM, RN and FAA would have specified for aircraft if the intended opponent in the 1935-40 period was assumed to be the IJN. This would assume a neutral or contained Italy and Germany. For Germany, either Weimar works, likely with a renegotiated Versailles and reparations, or the Occupation of the Rhineland continues into the mid-1930s as part of a much more activist, less passive Allied oversight. As for Italy, the Allies must counter Mussolini's aggression in Africa.

Okay, that's a lot of changes to history, but my thinking is to get us to a place where the Royal Navy sees Japan as its primary adversary for the FAA and its aircraft carrier fleet. In this scenario, with the British in the late 1930s seeing the A5N and B5N along with British intel advising on the coming A6M and D3A, I don't see the Fulmar coming to pass.

Shortround6 said:

The British also seemed to think this was a issue in the North Atlantic too,

The British have a few problems in the 1930s.
They had single seat fighters , with crappy radios (everybody did) in the early/mid 30s, those Nimrods and Fireflies, but they had short range/little endurance and could not get as far away from the carriers. In peace time you take less chances than in war time= don't fly in bad weather. And the radio beacon didn't exist in the early 30s.
The Skua may have been the first "fighter" with the homing system, welcome correction on this
British may have used two fighter system as suggested, "Leaders" and the actual combat element.

Problem here is the size of the British carriers.
Until you get to the Implacable class the British only had ONE carrier that was planned to have more than 48 planes, The Ark Royal.
For the US, no carrier after the Langley, was planned for less than 63 aircraft. Even the Ranger and Wasp were supposed to carry 76.
We may or may not be counting spares here?
However the British could not afford to carry very many 'special' aircraft, without cutting into their limited air group.
Planning and reality were often different things and many times the British didn't even have full compliments of aircraft.
4 aircraft seems to be about the minimum for specialty aircraft if you want 1-2 available at all times for several days/weeks at a time due to maintenance and even accidental loss.

I am not saying if the Leader/pathfinder idea is good or bad, just pointing out possible impact on numbers of of "combat" aircraft deployed.

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Yes, I agree with all this. And I'll take it a step further - in the actual carrier battles and carrier vs. land battles in the Pacific, even with a compliment of 65-70 aircraft per carrier, and multiple carriers, there were still never enough aircraft. Strike aircraft (for the US meaning mainly the SBD when it came to attacking enemy ships) were also used as scouts and sometimes for ASW and even, as we know, emergency fighters. On average, if you had 10 or 12 SBDs diving on an enemy fleet, you had a pretty good chance to get some hits. Even in the scout role, with 2 planes attacking, they often got hits. So the temptation is to send all of them on a strike. But you need recon, and you definitely need ASW patrols too. As terrible as the IJN submarines supposedly were, they damn sure hit a bunch of USN carriers. The SBD scout program was actually quite successful, but they got rid of them for two reasons, the first being they wanted more bomber squadrons. The second I'll circle back to in a minute.

With the fighters it was even worse. You needed fighters for CAP, you needed some for your strike missions, and you needed to hold some in reserve for a second wave of strikes (sometimes waiting to spot more enemy ships). CAP didn't just mean flying over the fleet - it meant flying some low and some high, (and with Wildcats the planes flying low may never get to higher altitude in time) some close to the ship, some further out. They were spread thin. Often the escort flights for the bombers were badly undermanned 6 planes or less in some (vital) missions. A lot of the protection for strike aircraft on the raid was down to the strike aircraft themselves. In the Pacific that often meant escaping into the clouds. But the more escorts you had the better off they were - and the fighters were also used for flak suppression (with their guns).

But I would say if you have an aircraft which can enhance your strikes so your detection of enemy ships and strike missions increased significantly, your range and speed of detection increased, and your attrition to lost aircraft (i.e. due to navigation problems) decreased, your coordination between fighter and strike aircraft increased (they often missed each other) improved, and the rate at which your strike missions actually found their targets, you might actually want to put those 4 recon planes on the ship. I think this was the reasoning of the IJN when they created the C6N.

Some kind of aircraft that could do radio coordination to help direct the CAP to the right targets would have also been enormously helpful though I don't know if a Fulmar or C6N are the right planes for that or not in WW2. Something with some extra radio capability and long endurance.

For the British, I think this could have been enhanced earlier on by putting radar on a Fulmar or whatever came after the Fulmar. Radar, as we have discussed many times, was a significant advantage for the British and they got it working on planes earlier than anyone else as far as I know. This helped make the Swordfish more effective, but the Swordfish was painfully slow, had limited range and was dead meat against a Zero. What if you had strike aircraft (and / or navigation pathfinders) which were equipped with radar AND could fly twice or three times as far as a Swordfish or Albacore, and twice as fast.

Shortround6 said:

The US did, at times, use SBDs or TBDs as leaders if they sending out a large fighter formation that was not escorting a strike group.

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Yes, especially early on with the SBD scout squadrons. TBDs had very short range and were even slower than the SBDs but were also sometimes used. I think over time during the war part of the reason the SBD scouts went away, was that the perceived need for the carrier based scouts was decreased due to the fairly rapid proliferation of flying boat scouts - the famous PBYs and the less well known but also quite useful PBM, and the smaller ones like the OS2U and even the Grumman Goose. The British also had their quite good Sunderland for this role, and the Japanese had the H6K and H8K, and their seaplane scouts like E13 and F1M.

The US also had heavy bombers and later these were augmented by the navy use of B-24s and the more customized PB4Y. The British used the Wellington the same way and the IJN used their Betty's. These all helped a lot in finding enemy ships and submarines. But it's debatable whether a carrier borne recon / coordination aircraft was valuable enough to take up hangar space on a carrier. Postwar the USN decided they were (both recon and electronic warfare / communication aircraft)

Shortround6 said:

The RN was ill served by the Air Ministry for much of the 1930s and WW II.
They were handing out Hurricanes to just about any country can came, hat in hand, to ask for a handful. (exaggeration)
But countries that were at least asking for them were South Africa, Canada, Poland, Yugoslavia, Belgium, Finland, Romania, Persia and Turkey,
This does not include countries that got them from 1941 and on.
But no attempt to even investigate the Hurricane as even, yet again, other interim carrier fighter, while handing out a contract for 136 Blackburn Rocs, which was sub-contracted to Boulton Paul.
At some point in early 1940 it should have been fairly obvious that the Firebrand was at least a year and half from even flying (really turned out close to 2 years) let alone go into service even if things went well. The Interim Gladiators were pretty much hopeless in 1940 something needed to done to help the Fulmars, just trickling into production.
Britain does have the order for the Buffalo in place, but there is some dispute even when ordering them about how useful they would be and they were ordered as land planes in any case. Britain does not inherited Grumman fighters from France until after France surrenders. Paper work completed at the end of July, And they have to make it across the Atlantic.

Things are not looking good for the FAA.

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I agree! This is why we have to help them in our alternative timeline!

Admiral Beez said:

I wonder what the AM, RN and FAA would have specified for aircraft if the intended opponent in the 1935-40 period was assumed to be the IJN. This would assume a neutral or contained Italy and Germany. For Germany, either Weimar works, likely with a renegotiated Versailles and reparations, or the Occupation of the Rhineland continues into the mid-1930s as part of a much more activist, less passive Allied oversight. As for Italy, the Allies must counter Mussolini's aggression in Africa.

Okay, that's a lot of changes to history, but my thinking is to get us to a place where the Royal Navy sees Japan as its primary adversary for the FAA and its aircraft carrier fleet. In this scenario, with the British in the late 1930s seeing the A5N and B5N along with British intel advising on the coming A6M and D3A, I don't see the Fulmar coming to pass.

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But it doesn't matter who you are fighting, the air interception problem remains the same for both the RN and the USN and for that matter the IJN.

IJN carrier doctrine was based around groups of generally no more than 2 carriers, when they were available, striking their enemy (principally seen as the USN) at as long range as possible with the objective of taking out his carriers.

Friedman notes in "Fighters over the Fleet" in relation to the IJN that:-
"The last entirely pre-war monoplane naval fighter (the A5M 'Claude') seems to have been envisaged more for the defence of fixed bases than for carriers."

And
"The new aircraft technology promised attack aircraft of such performance that it seemed impossible for any opponent to intercept them. The Imperial Navy had always foccussed on attack, so it saw its fighters primarily as a means of protecting its attack aircraft. If bombers were fast enough, fighters might be obsolete. Some senior Japanese aviators argued that they were no longer worthwhile, a view echoed in the US Navy and in the Royal Navy of the mid-1930s."

By way of example, here is Kaga's airgroup (excluding spares) during the 1930s:-

1 Feb 1932 - 16 Nakajima Type 3 A1N2 fighters and 32 Mitsubishi Type 13 B1M3 attack aircraft.
June 1935 (post reconstruction) - 16 Nakajima Type 90 A2N1 fighters, 16 Aichi Type 94 D1A "Susie" dive bombers and 28 Mitsubishi Type 89-2 B2M2 attack planes.
15 Aug 1937 - 16 A2N1 fighters, 16 Yokosuka Type 92 B3Y1 and 22 B2M2 attack planes, 16 D1A1 "Susie" carrier-bombers.
26 Sept 1937 - 16 A5M "Claude, 32 B4Y1 "Jean" and 16 D1A2 "Susie"

From Dec 1938 to Nov 1940 she is either in reserve or under refit

18 Nov 1940 - 12 Mitsubishi A5M4 fighters, 24 Aichi D1A2 bombers and 36 Yokosuka B4Y1 attack planes.

Hosho has only a small airgroup of bi-plane types throughout this period
Akagi is under reconstruction between Oct 1935 & Dec 1938.
Ryujo only has a small air group of mainly biplanes into 1938 when the A5M turns up.
Soryu doesn't complete until the end of 1937 and gets A5M & B5N but still has biplane dive bombers.
Hiryu doesn't complete until July 1939.

So the IJN carrier fleet is nowhere near as scary as it became after the formation of the Kido Butai on 10 April 1941.

Hey Admiral Beez,

re "I wonder what the AM, RN and FAA would have specified for aircraft if the intended opponent in the 1935-40 period was assumed to be the IJN."

As I know you are aware the "Rn vs IJN" thread focuses on this issue. IMO the primary difference would revolve around the idea of open ocean war in the PRTO vs the constricted waters of the North Sea and MTO - in terms of doctrine, and carrier and aircraft design.

I have mentioned in other threads the problem I and some of my fellow wargamers tried to solve in some of the WWII naval campaigns.

In the early-war campaigns, one major problem was engine power (as has been mentioned by Shortround6 and others). The only ~practical solution i came up with was a developed Rolls Royce 'R' engine worked on through the 1930s, or the Griffon engine not being put on the back burner in 1940 (though maybe the actual Griffon engine was too late for the timeline of this thread?).

With the Griffin II (1460 BHP at 13,500 ft) a cleaned-up Fulmar as it was would barely exceed 300 mph TAS. Obviously, a clean sheet design should do much better.

yulzari said:

The Fulmar was the size it was because it was based upon a light bomber. It was to fill the longer range/endurance gap left by the Sea Gladiator. God alone knows what the Roc was supposed to do. In practice the Roc used it's turret as defence when dive bombing the Dunkirk perimeter, bit I digress. The Sea Gladiator/Fulmar pair were interim until the RN got the long range single seater fighter they desired but could not get despite asking very, very hard. The deficiencies of the Sea Gladiator caused the Fulmar to shoulder most of the fighter task despite its speed. The enemy conveniently were generally flying towards them as it happens. If Fairey could have made a smaller, lighter single seat naval fighter they would have and the Fulmar would have been a Skua replacement as a spotter/dive bomber with an endurance fighter capacity whilst breaking up air attacks on the fleet being the task of the single seater which had no need for the rear TAG.

In the AH Fulmar world it would be the escort to torpedo Swordfish and Albacores with the Firefly taking over the role in due course, whilst undertaking strikes themselves.

What I am saying is that the Fulmar, as we know it, would be in service but with a different role whilst the fighter task would be something different to cover the thread role. It would not be an actual smaller, lighter single seat Fulmar but would be in that class. Up to 1942 a Sea Hurricane, with it's good deck landing behaviour, would be a sound basis and would serve until the Firebrand was to appear. The RAF is the enemy in that.

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In the AH I would also like to see either the creation of a better strike aircraft than Gladiator EDIT: Swordfish or Albacore, and a superior carrier fighter to Fulmar or Sea Hurricane (or Seafire).

Plus probably keep Fulmar and / or something similar to it as a scout / navigator / command plane.

E EwenS - I value your contributions here very much.
Questions, though, about what Friedman says:

EwenS said:

Friedman notes in "Fighters over the Fleet" in relation to the IJN that:-
"The last entirely pre-war monoplane naval fighter (the A5M 'Claude') seems to have been envisaged more for the defence of fixed bases than for carriers."

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'Seems' to whom? Also, what about the aggressive use, ie. fighter sweeps and/or escort of strike packages?

EwenS said:

"The new aircraft technology promised attack aircraft of such performance that it seemed impossible for any opponent to intercept them. The Imperial Navy had always foccussed on attack, so it saw its fighters primarily as a means of protecting its attack aircraft. If bombers were fast enough, fighters might be obsolete. Some senior Japanese aviators argued that they were no longer worthwhile, a view echoed in the US Navy and in the Royal Navy of the mid-1930s."

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"Some senior Japanese aviators argued" - who were those, and where they in position of decision making? Were they vocal just within the IJN, or their position was also publicly known?

tomo pauk said:

E EwenS - I value your contributions here very much.
Questions, though, about what Friedman says:


'Seems' to whom? Also, what about the aggressive use, ie. fighter sweeps and/or escort of strike packages?



"Some senior Japanese aviators argued" - who were those, and where they in position of decision making? Were they vocal just within the IJN, or their position was also publicly known?

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Sorry but I don't have answers to those questions. No names were mentioned.

But these were exactly the same kinds of discussion going on in the RN & USN at the time, so it is not surprising to me that they were also occurring in the IJN since everyone was facing the same problems. With limited numbers of fighters (12-18) on each carrier how do you simultaneously provide strike escort & AA suppression for your level / dive / torpedo bombers as well as retaining sufficient fighters for CAP with the limitations of the 1930s that they had to operate under. And also while having a, with hindsight, mistaken confidence in what the gunnery experts were saying was possible.

Another quote from Friedman re the USN this time:-

"Overall, in the mid-1930s some in the US Navy doubted that carrier fighters had a future. The same new engines which made fast dive bombers practicable also made fast bombers possible. These aircraft in turn dramatically reduced the warning time that lookouts could provide. If there was no warning and if standing patrols were effectively useless, were new fighters worth developing? In 1934 Admiral Reeves himself wrote that he saw little point in continuing fighter development merely 'to keep up with the Joneses'. This was hardly a denial of the value of carrier air power, but rather acceptance that the carriers were strong offensively but weak defensively."

And then a short while later:-
"... There was suddenly increased interest in defending carriers, whether or not the naval aviators continued to espouse pre-emptive strikes. In May 1935 the commander of VF-5B wrote to BuAer that protection of carrier flight decks included greater emphasis on defensive fighters. he thought that during the recent Fleet Problems two-seat fighters had proven superior to single-seaters for all missions, including defence against enemy aircraft. Higher fleet echelons disagrred and re-emphasised that the single mission of the fighter was to fight enemy aircraft....."

Again I have to emphasise this is a period of trial & experimentation in all navies about the use of carriers with many points of view being espoused and fought over. The early years of WW2 along with the advent of radar chnaged everything. The problem with these "what ifs" is trying to discard all we know of carrier operations in WW2 in assessing what was possible in the 1930s. Unfortunately some posters just don't get how different everything was in the 1930s from the reality of WW2. And all navies had their own problems to add into the mix.

EwenS said:

Sorry but I don't have answers to those questions. No names were mentioned.

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Thank you anyway

You will hopefully understand my position (not that it matters anything; there is no hope that I'd make a book worth buying) on words like 'some people', 'it seemed', 'it was felt', without providing the names of people and/or without footnotes - it diminishes the value of a work, be it 10 page essay, or a 500 page 'bible'.
Unfortunately, it is just a recent practice (20 years? I'm an old fart) for authors to provide actual sources and to quote actual people.

ThomasP said:

Hey Admiral Beez,

re "I wonder what the AM, RN and FAA would have specified for aircraft if the intended opponent in the 1935-40 period was assumed to be the IJN."

As I know you are aware the "Rn vs IJN" thread focuses on this issue. IMO the primary difference would revolve around the idea of open ocean war in the PRTO vs the constricted waters of the North Sea and MTO - in terms of doctrine, and carrier and aircraft design.

I have mentioned in other threads the problem I and some of my fellow wargamers tried to solve in some of the WWII naval campaigns.

In the early-war campaigns, one major problem was engine power (as has been mentioned by Shortround6 and others). The only ~practical solution i came up with was a developed Rolls Royce 'R' engine worked on through the 1930s, or the Griffon engine not being put on the back burner in 1940 (though maybe the actual Griffon engine was too late for the timeline of this thread?).

With the Griffin II (1460 BHP at 13,500 ft) a cleaned-up Fulmar as it was would barely exceed 300 mph TAS. Obviously, a clean sheet design should do much better.

Click to expand...

As I posted in a query upthread- I think so many aircraft designs basically died because they were being engineered for an engine which didn't yet exist, and which in fact never came into being.

More successful projects were based around engines which at least existed and had been proven to work, and which gradually increased in power over time (with better fuel and higher boost ratings, in some cases, better superchargers in others, or with other mechanical changes).

It was a serious question which I'll repeat here. How many aircraft designs in WW2 were severely delayed or never came into being because they were pegged to some new engine design which either never panned out, or took so long that the aircraft either missed the war or had a greatly reduced impact on the outcome of the war than it would have if it had started life with an engine which was already working.

Conversely, there are also of course many designs which were built around an older, weaker engine which turned out not to be upgradeable or just wasn't upgraded for various reasons, and were either never put into service or whose service life was drastically limited or cut short due at least in part to the limitations of the original engine, which couldn't then handle the inevitable weight increases.

Overall I think there were far more of the former.

And I don't think a bigger engine is necessarily needed for a better FAA carrier fighter. You could definitely make one with a Merlin.

Wild_Bill_Kelso said:

In the AH I would also like to see either the creation of a better strike aircraft than Gladiator or Albacore, and a superior carrier fighter to Fulmar or Sea Hurricane (or Seafire).

Plus probably keep Fulmar and / or something similar to it as a scout / navigator / command plane.

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I presume the Gladiator as a 'strike' aircraft was a finger trouble moment but the closest predecessor to the Fulmar was the Skua which itself was the replacement for the Osprey as a strike fighter. Stressed and trialled for the strike task, albeit without the steepest dive crutch of the Skua, the Fulmar would be replaced by the Firefly which also was strike tasked. That the Fulmar was solely employed as a fighter as the main role was an accident of history. If the RN had a purpose carrier fighter then the Fulmar would have carried much the same tasks as the Firefly. We should see the Fulmar as a better Skua and not a poor Hurricane. An early Firefly not Seafire.

Much as I would like to see how fast the butterfly can flap with a snort of cocaine, it is difficult to find a plausible POD to get a more powerful motor into a service Fulmar in 1940 or even 1941/2. However the airframe is a sound multi role one save the torpedo launching. I just wonder if it could be possible to, with as little change as possible, squeeze a torpedo under a Fulmar?


I personally have severe doubts but if one could then the RN only needs one type on its carriers. The multi role Fulmar. Fairey had proposed more than one torpedo carrying monoplane alternative to the Swordfish to Their Lordships. The wing area should lift it off the deck. However, I digress well beyond the OP.

yulzari said:

I presume the Gladiator as a 'strike' aircraft was a finger trouble moment

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yes I meant Swordfish

yulzari said:

... but the closest predecessor to the Fulmar was the Skua which itself was the replacement for the Osprey as a strike fighter. Stressed and trialled for the strike task, albeit without the steepest dive crutch of the Skua, the Fulmar would be replaced by the Firefly which also was strike tasked. That the Fulmar was solely employed as a fighter as the main role was an accident of history. If the RN had a purpose carrier fighter then the Fulmar would have carried much the same tasks as the Firefly. We should see the Fulmar as a better Skua and not a poor Hurricane. An early Firefly not Seafire.

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Interesting point. And I agree that Fulmar wasn't designed to be an interceptor. But in the Fulmar I see the better (not fantastic mind you, but better) range that was lacking in the Sea Hurricane and the Seafire. I want a fighter with that kind of range.

yulzari said:

Much as I would like to see how fast the butterfly can flap with a snort of cocaine, it is difficult to find a plausible POD to get a more powerful motor into a service Fulmar in 1940 or even 1941/2.

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I don't want a larger motor, I think the gradually increasing power of the Merlin would be enough. A carrier fighter with a Merlin XX would do very well I think, if it was a decent design (without too much drag or say, 47' wings)

yulzari said:

However the airframe is a sound multi role one save the torpedo launching. I just wonder if it could be possible to, with as little change as possible, squeeze a torpedo under a Fulmar?
View attachment 744294

I personally have severe doubts but if one could then the RN only needs one type on its carriers. The multi role Fulmar. Fairey had proposed more than one torpedo carrying monoplane alternative to the Swordfish to Their Lordships. The wing area should lift it off the deck. However, I digress well beyond the OP.

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That's a very nice drawing there. What aircraft is that?

You raise another interesting point, but one which points up a paradox. Later in the war, for a variety of reasons, the US was certainly using fighters as their main strike aircraft. Corsairs in particular were well suited for the job, Hellcats did Ok as well. Both were better in the long run than Helldivers or TBFs, at least given the reduced threat of IJN carriers and carrier aircraft... i.e. they were being used mainly to attack ground targets or poorly defended ships. Helldivers, TBFs, and Barracudas were slower and often also larger, didn't necessarily carry a lot more ordinance and were much more vulnerable to (now mostly land based) enemy fighters.

The RN eventually used Fireflys in the same or similar role, again for a variety of reasons (I think strike was not really the main role intended for the Firefly, but rather one of several, though it ended up being it's main role). Both Corsair and Firefly went on to do fairly well in the Korean war as strike aircraft. And were eventually replaced by a family of light strike aircraft that were a bit like modified fighters, including the AD and the A4 Skyhawk as examples, as well as the continued use of fighters in the strike role (like the F9, F2H, later the Phantom).

The paradox comes in when you see attempts to create fighters as strike aircraft from the specs onward, and specifically the "torpedo fighter". Arguably the best attempt at this was a variant of the Italian G55, which came too late to play a role. Other planes like the Firebrand, Firecrest, Spearfish, Martin AM Mauler etc. either came too late for the war, or just didn't work out. Or both.

It seems like some aircraft which were designed as fighters later turned out to also be good fighter bombers (Corsair, P-40, P-47, Hurricane, Typhoon, Tempest). These probably had a better record in that role than many purpose built strike aircraft or light bombers, let alone hybrid strike / fighters.

Wild_Bill_Kelso said:

I think so many aircraft designs basically died because they were being engineered for an engine which didn't yet exist, and which in fact never came into being.

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It's too bad a single engined fighter aircraft was not prepared in advance for the introduction of the Hercules. Aircraft were designed for the dead end RR Exe and Vulture engines, but no one thought to build a single engined fighter to run the Hercules?

Can you expand on that a little? What are the specs, basic traits. Size etc.