Innehållsförteckning för Issue 7 från War at Sea

During the Second World War, the Brazilians, once again, played an active role in support of Allied forces scoring some notable successes such as the sinking of the German submarine U-199 off the coast of Rio de Janeiro with depth charges. It would take until 1956 for the Brazilian Navy to successfully campaign for a dedicated aircraft carrier to take aircraft out to sea in the South Atlantic. A great deal of the impetus behind the acquisition of the former British Colossus-class light fleet aircraft carrier HMS Vengeance, which had already served abroad with the Australian Navy for a short period between 1952 and 1955. Surplus to requirements for the Royal Navy she was offered for sale and the Brazilians purchased the ship at a bargain price of US$9million. Later…

Lieutenant Teste’s achievement was the culmination of a great deal of hard work and experimentation. Six years previously Rene Coudron, who would become a First World War ace conducted a series of experimental flights on May 8, 1914, when he took off in the bay of Saint-Raphael from a 34.70-metre long platform that had been constructed on the torpedo boat Foudre. This event made France the third nation after the United States and the United Kingdom to launch an aircraft from a ship. During the First World War, the French chose not to pursue this approach and poured their efforts into the development of seaplanes instead. After the end of the war, some small-scale tests were conducted with the Arras-class aviso Bapaume which was refitted with a temporary flight deck…

During the siege of the German colony of Kiaochow and its capital Tsingtao, four Japanese naval Maurice Farman seaplanes flying from the Wakamiya Maru dropped bombs on German ships in the harbour becoming the first offensive strike mission conducted by Japanese naval aircraft on 23 August 1914. In fact, it was the world’s first naval launched aerial raid. Throughout the interwar years, Japan poured resources into the development of both naval aircraft and the aircraft carriers to employ them. They developed quickly by closely monitoring the progress of the United States, Great Britain and France and emulating their successes. In 1920, Japanese representatives were on board the British aircraft-carrier HMS Furious during a demonstration flight and Japan then formally requested British assistance in developing its own naval air arm. While…

Modern Spanish Naval Aviation was created as recently as November 1954, but its history can be traced back to 1912, when alongside developments around the world Spanish innovators looked at the potential of aircraft as military weapons. In 1912, a cadre of young naval officers began their training to become pilots and observers at the Air Force Academy of Cuatro Vientos Air Base. During the next five years, the Air Force continued to train naval aviators but that changed on September 15, 1917, by virtue of a Royal decree signed by King Alfonso XIII as a direct consequence of lessons learned during the First World War and the Spanish military campaign against the North African Riff tribes. Three naval aeronautical stations were established at Cadiz, Ferrol, and Cartagena together with…

ANADOLU-CLASS AMPHIBIOUS ASSAULT SHIP Displacement: 24,660 tons (light carrier configuration), 27,079 tons (LHD configuration) Dimensions: 232m x 32m x 6.9m Propulsion: 5 x 8,000 kW Man Diesel Generators, 2 x 11 MW Siemens SiPOD, 2 x 1,500 kW bow thruster Speed: 21 knots Range: 9,000 nautical miles Armament: 5 x Aselsan 25mm STOP, 2 x Phalanx CIWS, 1 x RAM (Rolling Air Missile) Aircraft: 4 x T-129 ATAK, 8 x As532 or CH-47F, 2 x S-70B Seahawk, 2 x Anka or Bayraktar UAV/UCAV Boats: 4 x LCM or 2 x LCAC Anadolu-class Turkey is developing its own amphibious assault ships that can be configured to operate as light aircraft carriers in the Anadolu-class. The design is based on the Spanish Juan Carlos I-class, which has also been used as the…

The first tentative steps towards a fully-fledged naval air force occurred in the waters off Hampton Roads in Virginia when Eugene Ely bravely launched himself off the bows of the cruiser USS Birmingham. The biplane rolled off the gently sloping temporary structure built over the cruisers’ bows on November 14th, 1910. It was to be on the other side of the continent and two months later in San Francisco Bay that Ely would attempt to land the aircraft onto a deck. The cruiser USS Pennsylvania was chosen and a 119ft long platform had been constructed to attempt the hazardous operation. Progress towards a fleet of aircraft carriers was tortuously slow in the early years. Between Ely’s successful demonstration flights, very little substantial work was completed. However, the war years had…

So, it is not at all surprising that the PLAN leadership have, since the 1970s, planned for the eventual acquisition of an aircraft carrier capability within the Chinese fleet. It has been a long and sometimes arduous and occasionally highly secretive road to get the ships into service for the Chinese. When the Royal Australian Navy decommissioned the last of its conventional aircraft carriers HMAS Melbourne, China was interested in obtaining the ship. Despite HMAS Melbourne having been built at the end of the Second World War and possessing some quite dated technology, enough remained aboard for the Chinese to analyse and assess what was necessary for future developments. The Australian aircraft carrier was acquired principally for scrapping by the China United Shipbuilding Company and was towed to China to…

The impetus to build air capable warships for the Russian Navy emerged in the early 1960s. With the fall of the Nikita Khrushchev’s Presidency, Leonard Brezhnev took the nation in a completely new direction and with it the future design and composition of the Russian Navy. The Russian’s had no, real, history of operating aircraft carriers and even in official documents those that could operate aircraft were referred to simply as ‘aircraft carrying cruisers’. By the 1960s, the United States and her allies had established a heady lead in the development of aircraft carriers over the Russians, which persists to this day. America fields 11 supercarriers and 11 LHDs to Russia’s single carrier. Russia’s first foray into developing a creditable naval aviation capability emerged with the construction of the Moskva-class…

Displacement: 11,486 tons full load Dimensions: 182.65m x 30.5m x 6.12m Propulsion: 2 x General Electric LM2500 gas turbines + 2 Bazan MTU 16V1163 TB83 diesel engines Speed: 25.5 knots Range: 10,000 nautical miles Troops: up to 675 Armament: 2 x 0.5-inch machine guns, 3 x Sextuple Sadral launchers for Mistral surface to air missiles Aircraft: 6 x Sikorsky SH-60 Seahawk helicopters, 2 x MH-60 Knighthawk and up to 14 additional helicopters when required Complement: 62 officers, 393 sailors, 146 aircrew HTMS Chakri Naruebet Based on a 1970s American Sea Control Ship concept, this aircraft carrier was originally conceived in the late 1980s as a much smaller 7,800-ton vessel to be built in Germany by Bremer Vulcan. This contract was subsequently cancelled and replaced with one from Spain’s Bazan shipyard…

In 1911, the Royal Navy watched on with curiosity as they saw Eugene Ely fly from the deck of an American cruiser, but it was the outbreak of the First World War that truly gave the British the impetus to develop a true integration between ships and aviation. At first this integration was awkward, cumbersome, and deadly with many incidents and accidents claiming several lives. Trial and error led in turn to the development of the world’s first true aircraft carrier, HMS Argus, equipped with a full- length flight deck. Alongside this ship the three converted battlecruisers HMS’s Furious, Courageous and Glorious provided the Royal Navy with valuable experience of operating early aircraft types at sea. The ex-Chilean battleship Almirante Cochrane was similarly converted to become HMS Eagle, but in…