An RNAS Sopwith 1½ Strutter takes off from an improvised flying-off ramp mounted over the 12-inch ‘Q’ turret of the battlecruiser HMAS Australia. Sailors aboard ship and positioned in a rescue cutter look on anxiously, while stationed in the distance is a sister unit of the 2nd Battlecruiser Squadron. The aircraft identification number (5644) suggests this flight was one piloted by Flight Commander D.G. Donald, RNAS on 7th March 1918. The 1½ Strutter was one of several Sopwith aircraft designs that the Royal Navy experimented with during the latter stages of the Great War. In fact, most of the milestones of early aircraft carrier experimentation – the first successful landing on a moving warship; the first successful take-off from a battleship; the first shooting down of an enemy aircraft from a ship-launched warship; and the first coordinated aircraft carrier attack – were carried out by Sopwiths.
The Sopwith Aviation Company had been set up by the engineer and sportsman Tommy Sopwith in 1912. Sopwith had begun his flying career in 1910, becoming an early graduate of pilot training at The Royal Aero Club. This two-year period marked the beginnings of naval aviation with not only the development of sea-launched aircraft but also the conceptualisation of the aircraft carrier itself. In November 1910, the American aviation pioneer Eugene Ely had demonstrated the possibility of launching a wheeled aircraft directly from a ship, flying a primitive Curtiss ‘pusher’ off a platform over the bow of the light cruiser USS Birmingham moored in Hampton Rhodes. In another experimental flight early the following year, Ely succeeded in landing a plane on a stationary ship by means of a temporary deck laid over the stern of the armoured cruiser USS Pennsylvania.
These feasibility tests immediately attracted the attention of the Royal Navy, which initiated its own trials. On 10th January 1912, a Royal Navy airman named Charles Rumney Samson repeated Ely’s feat of taking off from a ship, piloting a Short Brothers’ S.27 off a platform laid across the bow and forward gun turret of the battleship HMS Africa in the River Medway. Three months later, using the same ramp and the same plane, he achieved his own ‘first’ by taking off from a battleship – Africa’s sister-ship Hibernia – that was underway. Short Brothers became one of the leading suppliers of military aircraft during WWI, but it was the Sopwith Aviation Company that would become synonymous with the air war, not only over land but also at sea.
A keen yachtsman, Tommy Sopwith’s pre-war focus was on producing flying boats. Nicknamed ‘Bat Boats’ – a term coined by Rudyard Kipling – these were essentially a small boat hull attached to a biplane wing frame and fitted with a pusher engine. Sopwith’s Bat Boats were extremely fragile but a pair were purchased by the naval wing of the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) – what in 1915 would become the Royal Navy Air Service (RNAS) – and used in early night-flying and bomb-dropping tests. Another machine was reportedly sold to the German Navy for training purposes.
Meanwhile, the company had been working on a land-based biplane called the ‘Tabloid’. Its impressive speed prompted an order by the War Office and the development of a seaplane variant capable of contesting the recently inaugurated Schneider Trophy. The resulting aircraft easily won the 1914 competition held in Monaco with an average speed of over 86mph. 36 land and seaplane Tabloids were eventually delivered to the RFC and RNAS. At sea, a handful were assigned to HMS Ben-My-Chree and HMS Engadine, two of the Royal Navy’s earliest seaplane carriers. However, attempts to use these aircraft as zeppelin interceptors over the North Sea proved impossible owing to volatile sea conditions.
Seaplane carriers were the Royal Navy’s first warships from which aircraft could be launched from offshore. They were usually either converted merchant ships or passenger ferries fitted with fore and aft hangers. Floatplanes were launched over the side by means of a large crane and retrieved in the same way. However, this tardy method of deployment and retrieval made the ships potentially vulnerable to attack by U-boats, and the launching method previously demonstrated by Ely and Samson was soon recognised as the more efficient. As a result, HMS Campania, a former Cunard transatlantic liner rescued from the breakers, became the Royal Navy’s first launch-capable aircraft carrier when, fitted with a 160ft flying off deck, she was commissioned in April 1915.
On 6th August, the first take-off from Campania’s inclined flight deck was attempted using a Sopwith Schneider, deemed the RNAS aircraft most suited to the task. In spite of the Schneider being light and fast, and in spite of the carrier steaming into the wind at 17 knots, it still required 130ft of deck before the machine, helmed by Flight Lieutenant W L Welsh and running on a jettisonable trolley, got airborne. This cliff-edge undertaking demonstrated the need for a longer flight deck and a higher take-off speed. This was achieved in a subsequent refit, which lengthened the take-off ramp to over 200ft and inclined it slightly towards the bow.
These modifications, completed in April 1916, together with advances in aircraft design, made it possible for Campania to operate a variety of machines from her flight deck, including the new Sopwith models and the world’s first purpose-built carrier aircraft, the so-called Fairy Campania. However, the Campania and similarly converted ships remained incapable of retrieving the aircraft they had launched except by having them ditch in the sea nearby, which was a potentially costly undertaking for both pilots and their machines.
To land an aircraft on a moving warship would require not only a safe landing platform but also a sufficiently light and manoeuvrable aircraft. The Sopwith Scout or ‘Pup’ proved to be both on its introduction in the autumn of 1916. The Pup, which started life as a ‘runaround’ for Sopwith’s chief test pilot Harry Hawker, was a smaller fighter variant of the company’s multi-purpose 1½ Strutter; hence its unofficial designation as a ‘Pup’. The RFC’s most celebrated fighter ace James McCudden described the Pup as ‘a remarkably fine machine for general all-round flying’, and famously said ‘that after a little practice one could almost land it on a tennis court.’
The chance to land one in an equally confined space aboard a moving ship would fall to no less a war hero, Squadron Commander Edwin Dunning. The ship chosen for Dunning’s experiment was HMS Furious. The warship had started life as a lightly armoured but heavily armed cruiser, constructed on the whim of Admiral Jackie Fisher for a grandly schemed and soon scrapped Baltic amphibious operation. By the time of her completion, the cruiser had already sacrificed her forward 12-inch gun turret for an aircraft hangar and a 160ft flight deck.
It was on this forecastle deck that Dunning volunteered to attempt a landing in early August 1917. This endeavour was compromised by the fact that the cruiser’s original funnel and mast structures obstructed a straight approach. In consequence, Dunning had to pilot his Pup on a parallel course before lining it up with the deck at the last minute. To assist Dunning in slowing the aircraft after touchdown, a landing crew were assembled whose job was to grab and haul on ropes attached to its rear. Dunning’s first successful landing on 2nd August was down not only to the skill and nerve of the pilot but also the technical merits of his aircraft. However, Dunning’s luck ran out on his third attempt when due to engine failure and a sudden updraft the Pup went over the edge of the flight deck and into the sea, killing the pilot.
In November of the same year, Furious was further modified, being given a 300ft landing deck aft. However, landings over the stern proved no less difficult for test pilots, owing to the air turbulence created by the funnel and superstructure while the ship was under steam.
By 1917, a vessel with a continuous flight-deck – one first envisioned by the shipbuilder and aircraft manufacturer William Beardmore in 1912 – was already under construction; she would be commissioned as HMS Argus shortly before war’s end. However, in the meantime the Admiralty had started experimenting with the idea of launching single aircraft from conventional warships to counter the increasing German threat from the air. Once again it was the technical qualities of Sopwith aircraft, in particular their short take-off distances, that would make this idea practical.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 