Fade out
February 19th, 2010 | Books Royal Navy | Posted by Phil Ewing
The destroyer Daring sailed into the sunset on a training exercise off Portsmouth // Royal Navy
The plight of the Royal Navy today has been building for a very long time, according to a recent book that recounts the story of the modern service from 1957 until now.
From the very first pages of “Safeguarding the Nation” — an account of the Senior Service by the White Ensign Association, a U.K. booster group, and one of the books in the spring catalog of the Naval Institute Press — it’s clear that the Royal Navy has had to defend its existence for decades.
Prince Charles himself (styled “Admiral His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales KG, KT, OM, GCB, AK, QSO, ADC” in the forward) writes that one early big stroke came from a 1957 Defence Review, “Duncan Sandy’s axe,” which “called for very substantial reductions in the fleet and for naval manpower to be cut by 26,000 in four years.”
An axe was about to fall again in the early 1980s under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, writes author John Roberts, when a government review recommended deep chops to the fleet:
“First the big ships were to go, with the new carrier Invicible being sold to Australia and the carrier Hermes phased out. The two remaining amphibious assault ships, Fearless and Intrepid, were to be withdrawn earlier than planned without any replacements. At the same time there was to be a 30 percent reduction in frigates and destroyers, with the scrapping of all the Rothesay and Leander class frigates. Also the ice patrol ship Endurance was to be withdrawn from Antarctica and scrapped, a decision which was to have an enormous political consequence out of all proportion to any financial savings.”
Interestingly, as Roberts points out earlier in the book, it was the crew of Endurance who discovered an Argentine camp on South Thule in December of 1977, one of the things that set the stage for you know what. When the Falklands War did heat up, Britain was glad it still had the ships it had planned to eliminate, although, as Roberts writes, it “was a war which was certainly not anticipated and for which the Royal Navy was not well prepared owing to severe cuts in the defence budget and changes in government defence policy.”
Still more cuts came, however, as well as decisions by British leadership to mortgage much of its fleet against the promise of its two new Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers. Even Roberts’ final words in the volume are a plea for support for the Royal Navy, and a caution that UK policymakers might not be able to rely on American naval support in a future military operation as much as they think:
“[I]t would be extremely foolhardy to rely entirely on the USA for our survival,” he writes. “Whilst we have a common cause and operate together we derive considerable advantages from their military power, but history has repeatedly demonstrated that we cannot depend on allies always being on our side.”
Comments
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The Scoop Deck – The softer side of seapower Says:
April 21st, 2010 at 9:17 am[...] interesting to see what effect Dunkirk 2 has on public support for the Royal Navy, which has been declining over the past few years. At very least, goodwill from the rescues could stave off a fate like this. [...]