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The postwar naval revolution
Book by Friedman, Norman
- GenresMilitary Fiction
240 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 1986
About the author
Norman Friedman
102 books32 followersNorman Friedman is a prominent naval analyst and the author of more than thirty books covering a range of naval subjects, from warship histories to contemporary defense issues.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 18, 2016
The warships of 1960 look quite different from those of 1945. In 1945, gun-armed battleships and cruisers were important weapons systems and the primary anti-aircraft weapon was a heavy machine gun. Aircraft carriers had straight decks and propeller aircraft. Depth charges were the major anti-submarine weapons. By 1960, the gun-armed surface combatant was largely obsolete, and missiles were the new anti-aircraft weapon. Carriers were much larger and differently laid out, and antisubmarine warfare required highly specialized vessels, primarily relying on mortars and torpedoes.
This book describes, in detail, the transformation from one to the other. The focus is primarily on the UK and the US, with heavy attention to how the different circumstances of the two navies led to separate designs. There are only occasional nods to other NATO powers, and no material about the USSR.
The book is well-illustrated and the narrative heavily detailed. Unfortunately, the reader is easily lost in a mass of minutia about the twists and turns of British destroyer and frigate designs post-war. Friedman includes detailed tables of weight allocation and internal layout for many designs, both constructed and not. This might be interesting to specialists, but I didn't know what to make of it. I would have preferred more analysis and less detail.
Even so, there's a lot of insight in the narrative. Some of the key points I took away -- the naval leadership after 1945 all understood that they needed new designs to cope with fast submarines, fast aircraft, and modern electronics. The US had bigger and newer war-built ships and much bigger budgets, so the USN could more or less respond to this in the ways they wanted. The Royal Navy didn't have the money and their existing ships were just too worn-out and special-purpose; as a result, the postwar history of the RN is basically one of thrashing around looking for workable compromise designs, without ever really finding them.
Another major theme is the trichotomy between "cold war" show-of-force missions, major conventional war with the USSR, and nuclear war. Each of these required a different mix of weapons, and therefore a different mix of ships, and naval staff had trouble reconciling these constraints.
Friedman is best when he explains what the tactical consequences were of new technology, and in turn their influence on ship design. For instance, I hadn't understood how much submarine speed mattered. During the war, submerged submarines were slow and had limited range; as a result, a smallish escort could detect a sub, charge, force it to submerge, and then prosecute a depth charge attack. The German Type XXI changed all this. A streamlined submarine with big batteries could outrun most WW2 convoy escorts *while submerged* and could move fast enough that it could evade depth charges while they were sinking. As a result, ASW escorts needed to be faster and needed long-distance weapons, such as mortars, seeking torpedoes, and ultimately, helicopters. Given the fixed range constraint of the North Atlantic, this required much bigger ships.
Likewise, in the air, jet planes, particularly jet planes with standoff missiles, required new anti-air escorts with new equipment. During the war, an aircraft carrier could directly control its own fighters. In the postwar era, the intent was for defending fighters to patrol much farther out, meaning that incoming enemies would be over the horizon from the carrier. This implied a need for the outer radar pickets to have height-finding radar and room for a fighter-direction staff. This in turn required a much bigger ship than WW2-era radar pickets. The US was able to convert existing cruisers; the UK had a much older cruiser fleet, with smaller ships.
If you are interested in the evolution of warships and naval thinking, you should read this book. But if you don't already have a reasonably good grip on the topic, and the basic parameters of mid-20th-century navies, you will be lost. And I suspect anybody but the very most hardened reader will find themselves glossing over some points of detail.
This book describes, in detail, the transformation from one to the other. The focus is primarily on the UK and the US, with heavy attention to how the different circumstances of the two navies led to separate designs. There are only occasional nods to other NATO powers, and no material about the USSR.
The book is well-illustrated and the narrative heavily detailed. Unfortunately, the reader is easily lost in a mass of minutia about the twists and turns of British destroyer and frigate designs post-war. Friedman includes detailed tables of weight allocation and internal layout for many designs, both constructed and not. This might be interesting to specialists, but I didn't know what to make of it. I would have preferred more analysis and less detail.
Even so, there's a lot of insight in the narrative. Some of the key points I took away -- the naval leadership after 1945 all understood that they needed new designs to cope with fast submarines, fast aircraft, and modern electronics. The US had bigger and newer war-built ships and much bigger budgets, so the USN could more or less respond to this in the ways they wanted. The Royal Navy didn't have the money and their existing ships were just too worn-out and special-purpose; as a result, the postwar history of the RN is basically one of thrashing around looking for workable compromise designs, without ever really finding them.
Another major theme is the trichotomy between "cold war" show-of-force missions, major conventional war with the USSR, and nuclear war. Each of these required a different mix of weapons, and therefore a different mix of ships, and naval staff had trouble reconciling these constraints.
Friedman is best when he explains what the tactical consequences were of new technology, and in turn their influence on ship design. For instance, I hadn't understood how much submarine speed mattered. During the war, submerged submarines were slow and had limited range; as a result, a smallish escort could detect a sub, charge, force it to submerge, and then prosecute a depth charge attack. The German Type XXI changed all this. A streamlined submarine with big batteries could outrun most WW2 convoy escorts *while submerged* and could move fast enough that it could evade depth charges while they were sinking. As a result, ASW escorts needed to be faster and needed long-distance weapons, such as mortars, seeking torpedoes, and ultimately, helicopters. Given the fixed range constraint of the North Atlantic, this required much bigger ships.
Likewise, in the air, jet planes, particularly jet planes with standoff missiles, required new anti-air escorts with new equipment. During the war, an aircraft carrier could directly control its own fighters. In the postwar era, the intent was for defending fighters to patrol much farther out, meaning that incoming enemies would be over the horizon from the carrier. This implied a need for the outer radar pickets to have height-finding radar and room for a fighter-direction staff. This in turn required a much bigger ship than WW2-era radar pickets. The US was able to convert existing cruisers; the UK had a much older cruiser fleet, with smaller ships.
If you are interested in the evolution of warships and naval thinking, you should read this book. But if you don't already have a reasonably good grip on the topic, and the basic parameters of mid-20th-century navies, you will be lost. And I suspect anybody but the very most hardened reader will find themselves glossing over some points of detail.
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