Fighters over the Fleet: Naval Air Defence from Biplanes to the Cold War

by Norman Friedman

Fighters Over the Fleet is an account of the parallel evolution of naval fighters for fleet air defense and the ships they sought to defend. This volume concentrates on the three main advocates of carrier warfare: the Royal Navy, the U.S. Navy, and the Imperial Japanese Navy. Because radar was not invented until the mid-1930s, fleet air defense was a primitive effort for flyers during the 1920s. Once the innovative system was developed and utilized, organized air defense became viable. Thus major naval-air battles of the Second World War--like Midway, the "Pedestal" convoy, the Philippine Sea and Okinawa--are portrayed as tests of the new technology. However, even radar was ultimately found wanting by the Kamikaze campaigns, which led to postwar moves toward computer control and new kinds of fighters. After 1945, the novel threats of nuclear weapons and stand-off missiles compounded the difficulties of naval air defense. The second half of the book covers the U.S. and Royal Navies' attempts to resolve these problems by examining the U.S. experience in Vietnam and British operations during the Falklands War. The book then turns to the ultimate U.S. development of techniques and technology to fight the Outer Air Battle in the 1980s before concluding with the current state of technology supported carrier fighters.

Genres: World War II, History

466 pages, Hardcover

Published December 15, 2016

About the author

Norman Friedman is a prominent naval analyst and the author of more than thirty books covering a range of naval subjects, from warship histories to contemporary defense issues.

Reviews

[Casey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book, providing an in-depth history of Naval Aviation’s Fighters and Interceptors from WWI to the end of the Cold War. In characteristic Norman Friedman style this book covers all aspects of the ‘system’. It goes from detailed comparisons of Fighter plane characteristics to the changes technology placed on different aspects of their air combat capabilities, and goes through lengthy discussions of the sensors and controlling methods so essential to Fleet Air Defense and their implications on how the Fleet as a whole operated. The book is primarily a story of the use of aviation by the US Navy and Royal Navy, though the Imperial Japanese Navy before and during WWII does get some attention. This is helpful as the many differences in operating assumptions and technological priorities between the Navies provide a great contrast on what did and did not work over the years. The book sticks strictly to its titular topic area, defense of the Fleet with aircraft. The also evolving story of gun and missile defenses are regularly mentioned, but only as an adjunct, explaining how their capabilities affected aviation’s plans. In the early stages, up through the 1950s this separation of topics makes sense and was not noticeable. But by the time the book arrives in the 1960s the technological and tactical relationship between aviation and surface ship systems was so close that Friedman’s rigidity results in abrupt endings and missing explanations. That small detail aside, there are many lessons to be learned from this book. Friedman is a master of making sense of the many convoluted and interwoven acquisitions stories which are the core of these military technology histories. He also shows how the tactics of a Fleet, and indeed the strategies of a Navy, are shaped by the result of these acquisitions. The final chapter, on the Outer Air Battle and it’s place in the Maritime Strategy, is one of the best, full explanations I’ve had on that too-little understood topic. Sadly Friedman ends the book with end of the Cold War, not providing a full look ahead at how ongoing technical development will shape the next round of Fighter defense of the Fleet. A great book for those wanting to know more about the detailed technical and tactical side of Fleet Air Defense and their implication on Naval Operations.

[Shrike58 · Rating 4 out of 5]

What one has here is essentially two books. The first 2/5s takes you up to the battle of Okinawa, as the Big Three carrier navies tried to perfect area defense against a mass air attack. The back 3/5s starts with Okinawa, the Japanese "special attack" campaign, and the horrified discovery of the U.S. Navy that its systems were not really adequate to deal with an all-directions saturation air assault. From there, the rest of the book takes you up to the end of the Cold War, as the USN (and to a lesser degree the RN), tried to cope with this problem, with varying degrees of success. I would also note that the post-WWII portion of this work is really dense, and it's difficult to assimilate in one pass; though the reality that the F-14 Tomcat was not all its good press made it out to be was a major takeaway for me.

The question then becomes, since this is really a reference book (I managed to get an inter-library loan), is whether it's worthy of acquisition before it becomes a really expensive collector's item. On the whole, the answer is probably yes.

[Ari · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is billed as a history of "naval air defense", and particlarly the use of fighters for defense. But it's a thousand pages long and in danger of being a history of aircraft, and aircraft carriers, and naval tactics generally.

Despite considerable background here, I learned a great deal and have a new perspective on the topic. Some things that came to me:

In Britain before WW2, carrier aircraft and pilots were part of the RAF, not the Navy. And as a result, the leadership in the interwar navy were comparatively willing to take no for an answer when they asked what the best possible aircraft were, or the fastest landing cycles. They convinced themselves a large carrier air group was a mistake because they couldn't get that many planes up and down in a timely way, and as a result the carrier would have to maneuver dangerously long while conducting flight operations.

In contrast, the US Navy put aviators in charge of the carriers and aeronautics bureau, and they figured out how to get much more powerful aircraft to sea and to land them quickly. As a result, the US Navy was attentive to the possibility of large carrier strikes, and drew doctrinal inferences accordingly.

The thing the British consoled themselves with is that for an air strike to hit a maneuvering carrier group, it would need not just a spotter report, but a shadower to maintain the contact and guide the attackers in. So the defenders don't need enough fighters to stop a strike, but juts enough to get the shadowers. And that explains why they tolerated their small fighter groups and slow fighters.

Similar thinking justified Harriers and small interceptors on small ASW-mostly carriers. If you can shoot down the Bear, the enemy subs can't find you.

Radar physics is deep and interesting. Turns out power is a basic limit and trades off with spatial resolution and scan rate. So back in the day, the big search radar was only accurate to N degrees and only gets a look at each point every minute. A fast jet or a missile can go 10-20 miles a minute; that’s enough that you might get confused which blip is which—real bad if you mix up the defending fighters with the incoming raiders. And this is the problem that tracking radars solved: they keep a separate beam on each blip that needs tracking. And this is great until you have more blips than tracking radars…

WW2 CICs were very manual. Somebody reads blips off the radar and puts them on a plot, somebody else figures out which blips are a track, and starts projecting forward, and then makes a guess where to vector the CAP. Converting blips to track was hard and manual. And then conning defenders to intercept, also manual. And hard.

NTDS, the Naval Tactical Data System, was conceived in the 1950s to manage incoming radar data and worked decently well even with very limited compute. Deduplicating tracks was the hard part, at least until GPS.

[Mac McCormick III · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fighters Over the Fleet: Naval Air Defence from Biplanes to the Cold War by Norman Friedman is not a book that the general public would find interesting, but it is certainly one that anyone with an interest in military aviation or naval warfare. Friedman details the development of fleet air defense from the inception of aircraft carriers through the Cold War. Through World War II, he writes about how the British Royal Navy, the Japanese Imperial Navy, and the United States Navy defended their fleets from aerial threats; post World War II, he continues with how the Royal Navy and US Navy developed fleet air defense. As the title indicates, he devotes a lot of time to carrier fighters and how they evolved from propeller-driven biplanes to propeller-driven monoplane to jet monoplane. He explains how command and control systems, including radar and computers, evolved as aircraft became faster, longer-ranged, and air-to-surface missiles developed. I think some MilCom hobbyists would also be interested in this book because it explains the history and background of what we're hearing when we listen to some of the carrier and air defense nets. Although I'm not an expert on fleet air defense, the book seems to be comprehensive and well documented and Friedman includes numerous photos of the aircraft and radar systems that he writes about. What I enjoyed most about this book is that Friedman concentrates not just on the equipment but how they're used - theory, techniques, and practices as well. It can get dry at times and it's easy to get bogged down in acronyms and system designations, but at the same time, it remains interesting. As I mentioned above, anyone interested in naval warfare, military aviation, or military communications should consider reading Fighters Over the Fleet.

[Al Lock · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an extraordinarily detailed book on the evolution of naval fighters, radar and the control procedures for naval fighters in the US Navy, the British Navy and the Japanese Navy (the IJN portion only covers through WWII). If this is something you are interested in, this is a very enlightening book. It outlines the issues that occur in acquisition, the trade-offs that are made in design, the limitations of projected assumptions and how important control systems and tactical innovations are. Far more important than the specifications of the aircraft.

[John Lomnicki, · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very technical evaluation

Fascinating well documented information on airframe development as well as carriers, armaments and propulsion systems. I was especially interested in the section of the Falklands War.

[Nishant Pappireddi · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent and very very detailed (though thus very dense) book about how fighters defended their own aircraft carriers.

[Nestor Roman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I in formative, What those pilots had to put up with and all the suffering they went through.