WHICH was the largest British naval engagement of World War II? Was it the defeat of the pocket battleship, Admiral Graf Spee, at the Battle of the River Plate in December 1939? No. Was it the sinking of the giant battleship Bismarck? No. Was it the attack on the Vichy-controlled French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir in Algeria after Admiral Francois Darlan refused to yield control to Britain? No. Was it the Battle of Taranto in Italy when the British Navy launched the first all-aircraft attack by any country on an enemy fleet? No.
Readers may be surprised to learn that today marks the 80th anniversary of the start of the Battle of Okinawa, when the British Pacific Fleet (BPF) sent no fewer than 11 carriers with 251 aircraft to do battle with Japan. The BPF’s two battleships included HMS King George V which served as the flagship for Sir Bernard Rawlings, the Cornish-born fleet Admiral.
The carriers were protected by five cruisers, 12 destroyers and ten submarines. A 60-strong logistical flotilla sailed behind consisting of oilers, ammunition ships, food tenders and their escorts.
How did the British Pacific Fleet come about? It is usually forgotten that Japan’s attack on the US was presaged by an invasion of British Malaya. Just an hour before Japan’s Kido Butai (carrier attack fleet) launched waves of bombers at America’s naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Japanese landing craft began to unload General Tomoyuki Yamashita’s army at Kota Bharu in northeast Malaya. What was the British Navy to do?
Britain’s home fleet was tied up by the threat of the Kriegsmarine whose ships including the super battleship Tirpitz (Bismarck’s twin) were hidden in the Norwegian fjords. The threat, never realised, was that they would escape into the Atlantic and disrupt the convoys from America that were the lifeline of Britain’s survival. Meanwhile the British Navy, apart from protecting the Atlantic and Arctic convoys, had to deal with the marauding threat of the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in the Atlantic. Naval service was also needed in the Mediterranean to support Gibraltar, Malta and the supply routes of the Suez Canal.
Pre-war, the British Navy had been designed to operate on two fronts, Europe and Asia. Protection of India, Burma and Malaya was considered essential; so too was the commitment to Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. To this effect, in 1923 the British government initiated the construction of the world’s largest new naval facility on the island of Singapore.
It was designed as an impregnable fortress that would house Britain’s Far Eastern fleet and protect its imperial assets. Established on December 8, 1941, Britain’s Eastern Fleet (later the British Pacific Fleet) could not have got off to a worse start. On December 10, Britain’s newest battleship HMS Prince of Wales ventured out into the South China Sea with the aim of disrupting Japan’s invasion of Malaya.
Fixed in the pre-war belief that capital ships were invulnerable to aircraft, Prince of Wales and its battlecruiser companion, HMS Repulse, went to sea with no air cover. Japanese bombers picked them off like fish in a barrel with the loss of 840 lives. Winston Churchill, who had been taken by Prince of Wales to Newfoundland to meet President Roosevelt for their Atlantic Conference a few months earlier, admitted, ‘I never received a more direct shock.’
In the months after this ignominious naval defeat, and the even more humiliating surrender of Singapore to a Japanese army that did not outnumber the British and colonial troops on the island, Britain’s severely diminished Eastern Fleet hid first in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and then in Kenya. Fortunately, the powerful incursion of the Budo Kitai into the Indian Ocean in January and February 1942 failed to draw the British fleet into a major battle.
Losses here and at the Battle of the Java Sea, where a combined British, American and Dutch force was routed, were not existential. Despite these setbacks, Britain’s Eastern Fleet had, by May 1942, been reinforced and consisted of two aircraft carriers, five battleships, six cruisers and 12 destroyers.
Could the Eastern Fleet have helped at the Battle of Midway? Probably not. The British fleet aircraft, consisting of the Fairey Albacore fighter and the Fairey Swordfish Torpedo plane, were at that point antiquated. Only the carrier Victorious which was refitted with updated communications and US planes in Norfolk, Virginia, served with the US South Pacific fleet. After traversing the Suez Canal in February 1943, HMS Victorious, painted in US colours and temporarily renamed USS Robin, joined the American carrier USS Saratoga in operations in the South Pacific including the invasion of South Georgia in the northern Solomon Islands.
However, by the end of 1944 the situation in both Europe and the Pacific had changed completely. In Europe, Scharnhorst had been sunk by HMS Duke of York at the Battle of the North Cape in December 1943. In successive naval battles, the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot in June 1944, and the Battle of Leyte Gulf, October 1944, the Imperial Japanese Navy was annihilated. In November the second of the Bismarck class battleships, Tirpitz, was hit and sunk by two bombs from a Lancaster bomber.
In these improved circumstances why did Britain need to send a fleet to help out the United States in the Pacific? Churchill was looking to the future: ‘I was determined that we should play our full and equal part. What I feared most at this stage of the war was that the United States would say in after-years “We came to your help in Europe, and you left us alone to finish off Japan”. We had to regain on the field our rightful possessions in the Far East and not have them handed back to us at the peace table.’
Thus, at the Second Quebec Conference on September 13, 1944, Winston Churchill grandly offered to send a British fleet to support the American operations against Japan. Roosevelt accepted immediately. Admiral Ernest King, the US Chief of Naval Operations in Washington, glowered furiously. He did not want to share any glory with the Brits. When Churchill asked King point blank: ‘The offer has been made. Is it acceptable?’ Roosevelt intervened and answered, ‘It is’. Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham wrote, ‘King, with the other American Chiefs of Staff against him, eventually gave way, but with very bad grace.’
In the event the British fleet proved an unlikely Godsend. The British Royal Navy, labelled Task Force 57, put out of action the Japanese airfields based on the Sakishima Gunto Islands 250 miles southwest of Okinawa. Japanese airfields on Formosa (Taiwan) were also destroyed. Moreover, the British Task Force served as a bulwark to protect Admiral Raymond Spruance’s US fleet from kamikaze attack from this direction. Against the kamikaze threat, Britain’s aircraft carriers had a superpower – steel flight decks. Unlike the wooden decks of US carriers, bombs and kamikaze planes could not penetrate them. They bounced off. As Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser noted in his despatch to the Lords of the Admiralty on May 9 1945, ‘The toll taken by the suicide bombers on the more lightly armoured American carriers led to an increase in the proportionate effort provided by our carriers . . .’
After the war Admiral Spruance, commander of the US fleet at Okinawa, reported that although ‘Admiral Rawlings and I had no chance for personal conference before the operation, Task Force 57 did its work to my complete satisfaction and fully lived up to the traditions of the Royal Navy’.
The 80th anniversary of the Battle of Okinawa is worth remembering, and not just for reviving memories of Britain’s glorious naval past. It is a reminder that Britain should be more than a sclerotic bureaucratic welfare state with an emasculated navy attached.
