In 1916, the British began to develop torpedo bombers. Airplanes offered a unique way to get at the Germans despite their unwillingness to go to sea. By 1918, it seemed clear that the German fleet would remain in harbor, tying down the British, preventing them from using their sea power offensively. The British seem uniquely to have appreciated the offensive potential of their sea-based aircraft. This was not too different from the later understanding that it took carrier fighters to destroy enemy bombers, ships’ anti-aircraft weapons generally driving them off or dealing with missiles they launched. The lesson the British took was that they had to take fighters to sea to shoot down Zeppelins (which were outside the range of ships’ guns). The Germans used Zeppelins for scouting in August 1916, a Zeppelin’s warning saved their High Seas Fleet from interception by the British Grand Fleet.
At the same time, all British capital ships were fitted with flying-off platforms for fighters. The first ship to be designed as a carrier from the outset, she showed her importance to the Royal Navy in that the resources she consumed could alternatively have gone into a heavy cruiser. The British also laid down a cruiser-size carrier, HMS Hermes. She was the scene of the first British carrier landing, in 1917, but the air eddying around her superstructure caused serious problems, including the death of the first carrier-landing pilot. The “large light cruiser” Furious received first a flying-off deck forward (in place of one of her two 18-inch guns) and then a flying-on deck aft. They seemed so important that the Royal Navy chose to complete a new battleship, HMS Eagle, as a carrier (her sister ship was the battleship HMS Canada). The British in particular demonstrated that carriers (and shipboard aircraft in general) had become a necessary part of fleets. Several, most notably the British, converted merchant ships into primitive aircraft carriers during World War I. Several ships were so modified, carrying large seaplanes that would land alongside when they returned.Īt about the same time in 1911, other navies were experimenting with launching aircraft from ships. Instead, work proceeded on a catapult whose fixed track would cover the after guns of a large cruiser. However, landing-on and flying-off decks at both ends of a ship were seen as an excessive sacrifice. officers were impressed they understood that aircraft could change naval warfare by giving fleet commanders much wider vision. 18, 1911, he landed on the cruiser USS Pennsylvania, whose fantail had been partly covered by a temporary deck equipped with what we might now call arresting gear ropes. 14, 1910, when an intrepid aviator named Eugene “George” Ely strapped bicycle inner tubes across his chest as a crude flotation device and, so equipped, flew his Curtiss pusher aircraft off a temporary deck rigged over the bow of the cruiser Birmingham. The story of naval aviation, however, can be said to go back even further, to Nov. Ford-class aircraft carriers represent the newest chapter in a story that began a century ago with the commissioning of USS Langley (CV 1), the nation’s first aircraft carrier, on March 20, 1922.
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