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The Postwar Fleet, Volume 2; 1950 – 1957

Vol 173 (2026), Jeremy Stocker

This is the second volume edited for the Navy Records Society to deal with the post-1945 Royal Navy. It begins in June 1950 and the outbreak of the Korean War, an event which upset many previous planning assumptions and initiated a short-lived rearmament programme. It concludes with the publication of the 1957 Defence White Paper, named after its principal author, the Minister of Defence, Duncan Sandys. Subsequent volumes will continue the narrative until the end of the Cold War in 1990.

The 1950s saw what the naval historian Norman Friedman calls ‘The Postwar Naval Revolution’, a period of rapid technological developments at sea. It was also an unprecedented time in strategic terms as the Cold War solidified, became partially ‘hot’ in Asia, and Britain also faced the twin challenges of rapid decolonisation and postwar economic recovery. The growing nuclear threat also posed questions for the continuing utility of naval forces in a major war.

Despite this complex background, the Royal Navy of the early- to mid -1950s was largely living off the fat of the residual wartime fleet, some of it extensively modernised. Most new ships joining the Fleet were actually delayed wartime construction, especially a new generation of aircraft carriers. Only towards the end of the period did the RN start to receive ships of postwar design.

The rapid technological, strategic and financial changes in these years meant that there was, in effect, a new Defence review almost every year and naval planners could never assume that they had a settled basis on which to work. Even the Korean War rearmament programme was, so far as the Navy was concerned, something of a misnomer. It amounted to little more than an acceleration of existing plans and was soon found to be unaffordable anyway. Major statements of Defence Policy and Global Strategy in 1950 and again in 1952 were soon followed by a two-stage ‘Radical Review’, then a ‘Way Ahead’ and then a ‘Long Term Review’. Throughout, the aim was to devise forces to meet still huge overseas commitments within a constrained defence budget.

During these years the Navy remained the smallest of the three Services, in terms of both manpower and budgets. This was because of the priority accorded to building up the UK’s first-generation nuclear deterrent in the form of the RAF’s medium bomber force, and the substantial requirements for Army garrisons in Germany and across large parts of the dwindling Empire.

The sometimes uncertain role of naval forces in thermonuclear war meant that the Admiralty increasingly stressed the Navy’s tasks in peace and limited war. This approach appeared to be vindicated by the Suez intervention in November 1956, but this demonstration of the utility of naval forces in meeting the unforeseen had, at best, mixed results for the Navy’s future force structure. Something similar was to be true a generation later after the Falklands campaign.

The Naval Staff did, however, manage to neutralise the more extreme views of the anti-carrier Duncan Sandys, such that the outcome of the 1957 Defence Review seemed to provide a sustainable basis, finally, to plan for the future.

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