The Cold War: A MILITARY History (37 page)

BRITISH CARRIERS

Between 1945 and 1990 the British navy had an astonishing record for originating some of the most exceptional new concepts in carrier design, even though its own force of carriers was rapidly diminishing and at one point almost reached zero. One British idea of the late 1940s for a flexible landing deck for use by aircraft without undercarriages was a failure, but the others were very successful, enabling carrier aviation, especially in the US navy, to flourish throughout the Cold War. Three of these British innovations appeared in the late 1940s, at a time when jet-propelled aircraft were coming into service; these were much heavier, much faster, and generally more difficult to take off and land than the previous generation of piston-engined aircraft.

The first British innovation was the angled deck, which was offset to port and enabled the take-off and landing areas to be separated, thus speeding up the aircraft handling rate, increasing the deck space available, and adding considerably to the overall safety of flying operations. Next came the steam catapult, which provided much greater energy to launch the heavier aircraft then entering service. Third, came the mirror deck-landing equipment, replacing the ‘batman’ who had stood on the flight deck, using brightly coloured bats by day and luminous sticks by night to assist the pilot in the final stages of his approach. This mirror system was very popular with pilots because it not only was much safer, but also put them back in charge of landing their aircraft. Some time later the British navy was the first to take the fixed-wing V/STOL aircraft to sea, and it also invented the ‘ski jump’, which dramatically increased the V/STOL aircraft’s take-off payload.

The British emerged from the Second World War with six fleet carriers, all of which had been hard worked throughout the war, and nine of the smaller light fleet carriers, with a further two fleet and six light fleet carriers in various stages of construction. Some of the light fleet carriers were sold to Commonwealth and foreign navies, and the navy then endeavoured to operate a viable force of carriers to support its role as a major sea power. As with the Americans, the situation was complicated by the advent of jet aircraft, and, while the British were not short of good ideas, they suffered the frustration of seeing most of them come to fruition aboard American carriers rather than their own. Great efforts were also devoted to developing British aircraft, but the numbers required were small and the British development programmes were very protracted by comparison with those in the USA, so that, in general, British aircraft came into service some years after their US equivalent and did not have such a good performance.

The one exception was the Blackburn Buccaneer low-level bomber, which originated in 1953 with an operational requirement for an aircraft capable of approaching the target
below
the enemy’s radar beam at a speed of some 890 km/h. At the time this was an unheard-of requirement, although it became commonplace thereafter, and the Buccaneer was so successful it was ordered by the UK air force (which had rejected it some twelve years earlier).

The British carrier fleet peaked in effectiveness and efficiency in the early 1960s, when the front-line strength consisted of five fixed-wing carriers (
Ark Royal, Eagle, Hermes
, the completely rebuilt
Victorious
and the light fleet carrier
Centaur
), plus two commando carriers. The fixed-wing carriers operated Scimitar fighters, Sea Vixen night fighters, Buccaneer strike bombers, Gannet anti-submarine and airborne-early-warning aircraft, and Whirlwind anti-submarine/rescue helicopters.

An important limiting factor, however, was that, as the aircraft became larger and heavier, the numbers embarked gradually decreased. Thus in the 1960s
Victorious
carried twenty-eight fixed-wing aircraft plus eight helicopters, which reduced in the last few years of her service to twenty-three fixed-wing plus five helicopters, while
Eagle
and
Ark Royal
operated thirty-five fixed-wing (plus ten helicopters). The smaller
Hermes
, which entered service in 1959, could operate only twenty-eight fixed-wing (no helicopters), and when it was realized that it would not be able to operate the F-4K Phantom it was converted to a commando carrier.

The situation was made worse by the troubled project for a carrier intended to replace
Eagle
and
Victorious
. Designated CVA-01, the new carrier project dragged on from 1963 to 1966, and many ingenious ideas were produced to design a ship which was within the size and financial limitations – a problem made more severe by the fact that the latter were not only stringent but tended to change regularly. In 1966, however, it was finally decided that CVA-01 should be cancelled and that the navy would cease to
operate
fixed-wing carriers when the current ships had wasted out. This duly took place, with the last of the fixed-wing carriers,
Ark Royal
, being paid off in 1978.

The British navy is nothing if not ingenious, however, and very rapidly produced a totally new concept in order to retain a fixed-wing capability. A design was already under preparation for a helicopter-carrying cruiser displacing 12,700 tonnes, and the design was steadily amended until it had become a V/STOL carrier, capable of embarking five Sea Harriers and nine Seaking ASW helicopters. Three of these ships were ordered, joining the fleet in 1980, 1982 and 1985. The oldest carrier,
Hermes
, was converted to a helicopter carrier in 1977 and then into an interim Sea Harrier carrier in 1980. The effectiveness of the Sea Harrier-carrier concept was demonstrated during the Falklands War in 1982, but an additional benefit was shown when air-force Harriers were able to fly direct to the Falklands and then operate from the carriers there – something which would not have been possible with any other type of aircraft. The soundness of the concept was also shown by its adoption by the Indian, Italian and Spanish navies.

SOVIET CARRIERS

Unlike its US and British counterparts, the Soviet navy had no tradition of operating aircraft at sea, and its first efforts involved fitting some destroyers to carry one or two helicopters in the late 1950s. When the USSR found itself faced by US Polaris-armed SSBNs in the Mediterranean, however, it designed two dedicated helicopter carriers, the Moskva class, the first of which was commissioned in 1967. This was greeted in the West with some admiration, as not only was the purpose-built Moskva a far more efficient design than the former cruisers which had been converted to helicopter carriers in several European navies, but it also carried an impressive missile armament on the foredeck.

The Soviet navy’s dynamic leader, Admiral Gorshkov, was, however, determined to catch up with the US navy in every respect, including the construction of a force of fixed-wing carriers. Intense efforts were devoted to espionage and other methods to derive as much information as possible from US and British sources, and Soviet warships and intelligence-collecting auxiliaries (AGIs) regularly deployed with NATO carrier task groups to monitor every detail of their activities.

Next to appear was the Kiev class, the first of which was commissioned in 1975. This again was unusual, in that it had a flight deck aft angled to run abreast the superstructure (which was offset to starboard), leaving the fore-deck covered in guns and reloadable missile launchers. Most Western observers considered that the ships were designed to defend the SSBN bastions
in
the Sea of Murmansk and the Sea of Okhotsk, using helicopters to counter US and British SSNs, Yak-38 VTOL fighters against ASW aircraft such as the P-3 Orion, and missiles against surface ships. Whether they would have been effective in such a role is difficult to assess.

The final carriers to be produced by the Soviet navy were the two ships of the Kuznetsov class, the first of which entered service as the Cold War was ending. They had a displacement of 67,000 tonnes, were fitted with a large, angled flight deck, and carried a predominantly fixed-wing air group. As so often, however, the Soviet navy produced some surprises, including launching the conventional-take-off aircraft over a ‘ski jump’
^fn4
and a missile battery inset in the flight deck. The air wing, however, numbered only some eighteen fixed-wing aircraft and twelve helicopters, which was about one-quarter of that of a US carrier. One vessel only,
Kuznetsov
, was completed, giving the Soviet navy the world-class aircraft carrier it had hankered after for so long, but it was too late.

OTHER NAVIES

In the early years of the Cold War a number of other navies appreciated the value of sea-borne air power and established naval air arms to exploit it. Virtually all were based on the British light fleet carrier, a design prepared in 1943 for utility ships which would last until the end of the war. Fifteen were laid down and, of these, nine were completed for overseas navies, only three of which belonged to NATO, the recipients being Argentina (one), Australia (two), Brazil (one), Canada (two), France (one), India (one) and the Netherlands (one).
^fn5
Like the British navy, most of these found great difficulty in keeping their carriers up to date, and, as a result, several countries ended their involvement with carriers: Argentina in 1985, Australia in 1982, Canada in 1970 and the Netherlands in 1968.

Meanwhile, France operated one British-built and one US-built carrier until they were replaced by two French-designed and -built carriers in the early 1960s. Italy had made several false starts into naval aviation, but eventually succeeded with a very handsome V/STOL carrier,
Giuseppe Garibaldi
(13,850 tonnes), operating AV-8B Harriers, which entered service in 1985. Spain also saw the Harrier as a means of gaining a fixed-wing capability and acquired a surplus US carrier for this purpose in 1967. This was replaced in 1968 by a Spanish-built ship,
Principe de Asturias
, which was based on the US navy’s earlier Sea Control Ship design.

ANTI-CARRIER WARFARE

The Soviet Union considered itself particularly vulnerable to the threat posed by the US navy’s extremely powerful carrier task groups – a belief which originated with the AJ-1 Savage, and which was responsible for the development of the Northern Fleet over the years 1950–72. Marshal Sokolovskiy, first writing in the late 1960s, described how it was ‘essential to attempt to destroy the attack carriers before they can launch their planes … these units are highly vulnerable during ocean crossings, during refuelling, at the moment they are preparing to launch their planes, and also when the planes are landing again on the carriers’.
¹
He then went on to describe how such attack carriers were vulnerable to nuclear strikes and to attacks by torpedoes with nuclear warheads, by naval and long-range aviation using air-to-ship missiles, and from coastal missile batteries. This agreed with the perceived strategy of the Northern Fleet in the 1950s, which was to seek to prevent US carrier task groups from reaching the launch areas, using co-ordinated attacks by aircraft, surface ships and diesel-electric submarines.

In the late 1950s, with the entry into service of the A-3 Skywarrior, with its 3,220 km radius of action, the launch point was moved beyond the reach of current Soviet land-based aircraft, which meant that Soviet naval strategy was forced to swing towards attacks by nuclear-powered submarines and by specialized, long-range, anti-shipping aircraft, operated by the navy. When the US naval threat changed yet again, to Polaris missiles launched from SSBNs, the increasing range of the missiles took the launch submarines further from the northern waters, but the threat from US carrier groups remained, both in the north against Soviet SSBN bastions and in the Mediterranean and Pacific against the Soviet land mass and against fleets at sea.

Thus the Soviet navy developed an ‘anti-carrier warfare’ concept, which was regularly practised in major seagoing exercises. The submarine component of this concept was the specialized cruise-missile submarine, of which there were two versions: the diesel-electric Juliett class and a succession of nuclear-propelled classes (SSGNs). (The US navy had briefly deployed such specialized missile-carrying submarines, but in the land-attack role, and the Soviet navy was the only one to develop this type of submarine for anti-ship missions.)

The original Soviet anti-carrier weapon was the SS-N-3 missile, which entered service in 1963. It was very large, weighing 4,500 kg, carried a 350 kT nuclear warhead, and was launched in pairs from a surface warship, a surfaced submarine or a Tupolev Tu-95 Bear-B patrol aircraft. Its range was some 450 km, and it cruised at Mach 1.2 and a height of some 4,000 m. The SS-N-3 was tracked and guided by the launch vessel until the missile’s own radar acquired the target, whereupon it began a diving attack. The system
had
several inherent drawbacks. First, a submarine had to surface in order to perform three functions: deploy its radar, obtain the latest target information from a co-operating aircraft (usually a Bear-D), and, finally, launch the missiles. Second, the ship or submarine radar was unable to track more than two missiles at once, and had therefore to continue with one pair of missiles until their onboard radars had locked on to the target before the next pair of missiles could be launched. Despite these disadvantages the SS-N-3 weapon system was formidable for its time and certainly posed a substantial threat to US carrier task groups. Its effectiveness was further enhanced when some of the submarines (Echo IIs and Julietts) were fitted with the Punch Bowl satellite targeting system.

The anti-ship SS-N-3 weapons system was carried by two types of submarine: the Echo II nuclear-powered submarine (twenty-nine built) carried eight missiles, while the diesel-electric-powered Juliett (sixteen built) carried four. Both designs suffered from large, blast-deflecting cut-outs in the hull sides, which generated much noise when submerged, making them easily tracked by Western submarines.

In the submarine-launched role, the SS-N-3 was complemented by the SS-N-7/SS-N-9, which was launched from Charlie I/II submarines. This was a short-range system with a range of some 40 km and cruised at a height of some 90 m at a speed of Mach 0.9, but it possessed a major advantage over SS-N-3 in that it was launched from a submerged submarine. These weapons compounded the problems facing a US carrier task group, since it now had to defend itself against two different missile threats.