destroyers with wings: TORPEDO-BOMBERS

Sea Classics, Oct 2007 by Gault, Owen

Envisioned as the ultimate attack aircraft, the torpedo-bomber became a victim of its own publicity when confronted with the harsh realities of near-suicidal modern warfare

The development of Naval aviation in the US Navy might well have read more like a Jules Verne novel had R/Adm. Bradley A. Fiske remained on active duty to create the torpedo-carrying attack aircraft he conceptualized in 1912, bare months after the Navy procured its very first aircraft.

An esteemed inventor, visionary and Naval tactician, Bradley Fiske had played a key role in the early development of Naval radio communications. As head of the Navy's Bureau of Ordnance, Fiske had overseen the testing of compressed air "dynamite" guns on the USS Vesuvius. Among his many accomplishments, this 1885 graduate of the Naval Academy designed the first degaussing coils that demagnetized warship hulls and he later became a very vocal proponent of Naval aviation's immense potential as an assault force.

In 1912, Fiske obtained patents for a torpedo-carrying aircraft and lightweight aerial torpedo which he proclaimed were capable of defending entire military complexes such as the Panama Canal, the Philippines, or even cities such as New York. By building a network of airfields within ten shoreside Naval districts, Fiske maintained that 50 torpedo planes at each of the ten bases would be the equivalent of a fleet of "flying destroyers" some of which would also be armed as "battleplanes" with , the experimental 3-in/76mm Davis recoilless rifles then being evaluated.

Unfortunately for the Navy and its embryonic aviation force, Fiske faced mandatory retirement upon reaching age 62 in June 1916. His replacement, R/Adm. William S. Benson, the Navy's first Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), favored a much more conservative view of aviation's future in the Navy and promptly dissolved the Office of the Director of Naval Aviation, a setback which had the deleterious consequence of depriving Naval aviation of effective leadership until well after the end of World War I.

Although the US Navy made considerable strides in the design and operation of large flying boats during the Great War, there were few advances in other types of Naval aircraft. Sadly, Fiske's brainchild was stillborn, for, by 1918, no single aircraft in the Naval inventory was capable of carrying a torpedo large enough to sink a warship. However, this was not the case in Great Britain. Almost from the day the Royal Navy took wing, its leaders readily saw the advantages of mating the airplane and torpedo into a promising assault team. By 1915, Royal Navy flyers were operating Short 184 twin-float seaplanes capable of carrying a small torpedo or four 115-lb bombs. Flying from the seaplane carrier HMS Ben-My-Chree during the Gallipoli campaign, the frail, two-man Short 184s - a fleet workhorse throughout WWI - earned out history's first airborne torpedo attacks. In an assault against the Turks which the British claimed to be amazingly successful, three gunboats were sunk out of three torpedoes launched. While these losses were refuted by the Turks, they proved significant in that they not only dramatically demonstrated the possibilities of aerial launched torpedoes, but also the inherent dangers and deficiencies of this form of airborne assault.

The deficiency was the very limited payloads of early aircraft which, in the case of the Short 184s, often necessitated repeated and prolonged water runs just to become airborne owing to its underpowered Sunbeam engine. Conversely, any sort of sea condition above a strong breeze altogether negated the launching and recovering of seaplanes, a factor that in their absence effected the outcome of more than one engagement in the prolonged, ill-fated Gallipoli campaign. The danger became evident when it was soon found that, in leveling off to launch its torpedo within the required parameters of airspeed and altitude, the stabilized aircraft itself became ripe targets for a ship's guns. The difficulty here was exacerbated by the shorter range of smaller aircraft torpedoes which demanded that they be launched much closer to the target, thereby drastically increasing the chances of being hit by a warship's counter-fire. Here too, another problem arose for, in attempting to make aerial torpedoes fight enough for the aircraft to be able to fly, the weight of the explosive warhead had to be so reduced that the torpedo was a less-destructive weapon than an equivalent-sized aerial bomb.

Though tactics and technology were eventually devised to sufficiently overcome both problems, these factors would in essence forever remain the primary deterrents to torpedo-bombers achieving the tactical prominence envisioned by Adm. Fiske. For example, the Germans addressed the problem of torpedo weight by building giant twin-engined floatplanes such as the Gotha WD-14, of which 69 were built. But they were so slow and unwieldy maneuvering close to the water that they found few targets and even less success in the stormy North Sea. Late in the war, the Brits evolved the single-seat folding-wing wheeled Sopwith T-I Cuckoo as a built-for-the-purpose torpedo-bomber for use aboard the first true aircraft carrier, HMS Argus. A stout capable design, the Cuckoo unfortunately did not enter service in time to demonstrate its possibilities in combat. With the armistice signed before any further strides were made in torpedo-bomber development, the boxscore of their entire wartime activities remained the three Turkish gunboats sunk, a few minor ships damaged and no hard proof that the concept had a future in Naval warfare.