Baltasar wrote:Zart Arn wrote:1. You are reading my thoughts. No, even better: you are reading my posts. It's exactly as I said: late in 1941 the UK was concerned with its own survival. That is why it did not start building new carriers that year. That is why Churchill was so submissive at the Atlantic Conference. As it became clear, that the USSR would hold on, Britain came to be concerned with other matters. That's why in 1942 we see new carriers laid down en masse.
Which has nothing at all to do with the massive submarine threat the UK is facing or the new war in the Pacific where the UK is also involved? Especially as the Colossus carriers were designed with ASW and convoy protection in mind?
2. Only, that it was a big light carrier. Probably 2 ships of this type were a trade off for one Essex.
See above, the Colossus was not designed as what we might call a strike carrier.
Very true, the real - as opposed to the Fantasyland™ reasons for the way the British carrier construction program went is very well expressed by Postan in
British War Production (pp. 63-64, 289-291, & 294).
"The decision represented a compromise with the emergency programmes, but one of the results of the compromise was to jettison important new extensions of long-term plans. There was in Admiralty circles a growing body of opinion which favoured the construction of more fleet aircraft carriers and was prepared to conceded them a priority second only to destroyers. It had been suggested that two should be laid down in 1941 and two more in 1942 to make up the deficiency as soon as possible, since the course of the war in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean had conclusively demonstrated the effectiveness of aircraft with the fleet both for defence and offence. But during discussions of the 1941 programme and of the supplementary proposals in the autumn, it was concluded that the building of more cruisers and the completion of the Vanguard were of more fundamental importance than the construction of fleet aircraft carriers. Not only were not more of the latter ordered, but the laying down of the carrier in the supplementary programme was postponed. The fleet aircraft carrier was the only class of naval vessel in which no new ships at all were laid down between the spring of 1939 and that of 1942.
...
The emphasis on battleships was not, however, destined to last. At the beginning of 1943 the battleship position no longer appeared disturbing. The danger of French battleships falling into German hands had gone; the Anson and the Howe had been completed during 1942; and with the British capital ship strength at fifteen the Naval Staff were better prepared to agree again to the postponement of the Lion and of the other battleships on order for the sake of new demands which were becoming urgent.
Some of the urgency had passed to the aircraft carriers.
If the construction of carriers had hitherto been somewhat neglected, the neglect was due not so much to lingering doubts about the importance of ship-borne aircraft as to the Admiralty's reluctance to lay down new aircraft carriers until their designs could embody the lessons of the loss of the Ark Royal. By mid-1942 the new design was available, and above all the strategic and tactical value of the aircraft carrier had been strikingly demonstrated in the six months of war in the eastern oceans. Not only had carriers proved a most powerful weapon of naval warfare, but they were also proving very effective in convoy service.
Naval opinion was therefore running very strongly in their favour—so strongly that the Naval Staff was now prepared to set its aims as high as an eventual force of fifty-five to sixty-two carriers of all types and sizes.
In the new conception of the Fleet Air Arm large fleet carriers were, to begin with, to play a predominant part, and the mid-1942 plans envisaged a force of some thirteen to twenty fleet carriers, or seven to fourteen more than were at that time in service or under construction.26 Industrial conditions however made it impossible to contemplate an immediate addition of very large ships, while military considerations were against undue concentration on ships that might take five to six years to build and would not be ready in time for operations in the war. So in the end, of the 1942 programme only one large carrier, the Audacious, was laid down, to be completed in April 1946. Two other aircraft carriers, the Implacable and the Indefatigable due to be completed in 1943 and 1944 respectively, were not to be given high priority, while the two remaining fleet carriers of the 1942 programme, the Eagle and the Ark Royal, though ordered, were not laid down. Four more were included in the 1943 programme, but the Naval Staff took it more or less for granted that they would not be laid down in 1943 or the following year.
The need for aircraft carriers was to be mainly satisfied by auxiliary and, above all, by light fleet carriers. The former—essentially escort vessels—were little more than fast merchantmen converted to carry a small number of aircraft. Their provision therefore depended very largely on the supplies of fast merchantmen, and they were mostly to come from the United States. In so far as they were to be provided from British sources their story is closely interwoven with that of the repair and conversion of merchant ships, and will be mentioned again later.
On the other hand, the light fleet carriers were specially designed and fully-equipped aircraft carriers suitable both for escort duty and service with the fleet. They were sometimes described as 'intermediate' in that they were less slow and helpless in combat then the auxiliary carriers but small than the large fleet carriers and therefore enjoyed the advantage of easier and speedier construction. The minimum period they took to build was two years compared with the minimum of three years for a large fleet carrier. They were therefore to form a large and ever-increasing part of naval programmes for the rest of the war and were to be given priority over cruiser, battleships and even over large carriers. Four light fleet carriers were ordered in the spring of 1942, and twelve more by the end of the year. Of these sixteen, ten were actually laid down by January 1943 and were expected to come into service in late 1944 and 1945.
The shipyard capacity for larger ships thus came to be mainly engaged on aircraft carriers. There was however no question now of enlarging it at the expense of smaller ships as had seemed possible at the turn of 1941 and 1942. In the course of 1942 the need for escort and anti-submarine ships of every kind was becoming more and not less urgent than before. In June the enemy attacks on shipping in the Atlantic reached their highest point, and losses of merchant shipping and of escort vessels were exceptionally and alarmingly large. Moreover the expectations of American supplies had to be drastically lowered. Now that the United States were at war and their shipping routes were everywhere under direct attack ,they proceeded to divert to their own use most of the escort ships they were building for Britain. The War Cabinet and the Admiralty were thus compelled to revive and to reinforce the earlier emphasis on Britain's own output of small vessels. Towards the end of the summer of 1942 the Naval Staff estimated the minimum requirements of ocean-going escort vessels at 1,050, but in October of that year only 445 such vessels were available and of these about 100 were old destroyers of 1914–15 vintage. The deficiency was great, and at current rates of production and losses it threatened to be persistent as well as high; it was estimated at 352 by the end of 1944 even if American assignments were honoured in full. Additions therefore had to be made to British production programmes for every type of small vessel capable of escorting merchant ships or of fighting the submarine—minesweepers, sloops, corvettes, frigates, and, above all, destroyers.
...
Equally trouble some, though in a different way, were the landing ships (L.S.T.s) which, contrary to an earlier understanding with the United States, had now to be introduced into the British programme. There was not enough space in the shipyards to allow boats as large as the L.S.T. to be laid down, and in order to make space, the Admiralty was compelled to remove the keels of naval vessels which had already been laid down. This was done with one of the battle-class destroyers, with the aircraft carrier Eagle, and with two submarines."
Isn't it amazing what you can learn if you rely on some basic research instead of imagination? BTW, while the Colossus-class were intended to be completed in 22 months each, the average completion time was 27 months...yet another sign of the "overstretch" that our interlocutor cannot understand.
