August 16, 2007
The First Torpedo Bombers Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:35 PM EST More on anniversaries: paging through a book of (mostly Japanese) naval history yesterday afternoon, I learned that on this date 92 years ago, the Royal Navy’s Flight Lieut. W. L. Walsh flew a Sopwith Schneider float-plane off the 120-foot flight deck of the converted liner Campania as she steamed into a wind of 17 knots, becoming the first pilot to successfully take off from a ship at sea in wartime. That seemed plausible enough; in 1911 Eugene Ely, a U.S. Navy airman, had taken off from and landed on the USS Philadelphia, and 1915 sounded right for someone doing it for the first time under less controlled conditions. What astonished me was a preceding sentence, which claimed that a couple of days earlier, on August 12 Flight Cdr. C. H. K. Edmonds had become the first man to launch an aerial torpedo against an en enemy ship. The ship was a Turkish merchantman off the Dardanelles, and Edmonds, flying at 75 miles an hour, had to descend to 15 feet off the surface to launch his torpedo at range of 300 yards. He scored a direct hit. When an officer of the Royal Navy destroys an adversary it is normally seen as a case of dog bites man, so the astonishing part was that 1915 sounded a couple of decades too early for anyone to have done it with an air-launched torpedo, of which more below. Historical records are funny things, and people can be picky. It came out that the merchantman had actually been put out of action four days earlier by a submarine, which meant that Edmonds had not been the first pilot to sink a functioning enemy ship with a torpedo, so Edmonds went out again on August 17 and hit a Turkish supply ship under way in the Sea of Marmora. Less than an hour later another British pilot, Flight Lieutenant G .B. Dacre, torpedoed another moving ship, a Turkish steam tug. That made it all stranger—apparently aircraft were using torpedoes at sea on a daily basis in 1915. I’d not realized that anyone had torpedoed an adversary from the air until the Second World War, and when I called a friend, fellow-blogger, and editor, someone who knows more about navies than I do, he thought exactly the same thing. I think the main reason for our astonishment is that the standard story of naval aviation describes the effectiveness of carriers at Pearl Harbor as the great and shocking technological surprise of naval history. In this version of history, the deadliness of carriers was prefigured only by the Royal Navy’s devastating raid on the Italian fleet at Taranto on the evening of November 11 to 12 1940, the attack that gave the Japanese the idea for Pearl Harbor. In the conventional wisdom, carriers made battleships obsolete overnight, but now it turns out that carriers had been launching torpedo bombers for decades. I think another reason for our surprise was that World War I is normally seen as a sterile period in naval innovation, other than in the case of submarines. Wrong again. A third reason for our surprise is that if you have ever seen the first aircraft used in the war, a lot of them are spidery, minute, and fragile machines, some not much bigger than the pilots who flew them. A torpedo, by contrast, is a large and heavy weapon, and neither of us could imagine a First World War aircraft able to take off from a carrier possibly carrying one. Surprise: By the end of the war, the Royal Navy had deployed the Sopwith Cuckoo, with a 46-foot wingspan (and folding wings, being purpose-built for aircraft carriers), which carried a torpedo 18 inches in diameter (and mounted a warhead weighing more than 300 pounds). Some lessons from all of this: Technological history does not necessarily conform to the simplified versions of it you remember from school, where great innovations change the world overnight. Another lesson is that the First World War was not a case of complacent British generals and admirals hostile to innovation slaughtering their own men because of their inability to innovate under pressure. First World War British elites, both naval and military, deployed most of the innovations that would be associated with the Second World War, from the tank to tactical airpower to combined arms operations to the aircraft carrier, and they won. We do not associate them with extremely effective military innovation; we reserve that honor, if not too many others, for twentieth-century German elites, who indeed fielded, as the British author Peter Fleming once dryly observed, the mightiest and most innovative army ever to be defeated in war. But that is a mistake. Blundering Anglo-American armed forces, almost entirely composed of people who would rather have been civilians, are generally imagined to have simply muddled along, until, as a Hollywood screenwriter had a notional Frenchman put it in Casablanca, wrong in detail but correct in spirit, they blundered all the way into Berlin.
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