Date: 2024-12-21 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00019291
Military
Royal Navy
Did the Malta class aircraft carrier ever have a chance of being built or was it just a distant dream?
Peter Burgess
Former Analyst / Researcher / Recognition Editor at Jane's Defence
Did the Malta class aircraft carrier ever have a chance of being built or was it just a distant dream?
Yes they could have been built, it would have saved a great deal of money down the line.
Malta class
Towards the end of the war the Royal Navy did a head count of carriers. They assessed they needed eight carriers for post-war service. Two east of Suez and two west of Suez and two in turnaround. They also intended to keep two for anti-submarine, transport and maintenance work.
Audacious class
They had six armoured carriers in commission, two Audacious class half built, three more ordered and four Malta’s planned. They also had four Centaur class light carriers building with four more planned and no fewer than sixteen Colossus and Majestic class light carriers in service, building or planned. There was also the Unicorn maintenance carrier.
The Navy was already looking beyond its first generation jet aircraft and estimated that only the Audacious and Malta class would be capable of supporting modern aircraft in ten years.
Navy planners wanted four Audacious to be finished, the fifth to be switched to a Malta and then three more Maltas built. This was within Naval spending estimates in 1945. Especially as great savings and foreign currency could be made selling off or scrapping the rest.
Some of the Colossus class would be converted to antisubmarine carriers or turned into maintenance carriers and the Unicorn kept.
When the war ended the government decided tax revenue would pay for domestic spending, which they had dramatically increased to ensure plenty of jobs - subsidy was the key word and all industries including shipyards and steel got in on it. Defence spending was to come from overseas borrowing - the Anglo-American loan. Overnight new build defence projects became vastly more expensive.
The government wanted to switch shipyards onto the civilian export market - seemingly unaware there were thousands of redundant victory and liberty ships swamping the civil market. Many shipyard jobs would go, their workers found jobs elsewhere. Shipbuilding only survived with massive subsidy and never really recovered from the post-war glut.
More money was spent between 1945 - 1950 subsidising the shipbuilding and steel industry - making components for cars, bridges and prefab houses, scrapping older ships - than it would have cost to complete the four Audacious and build four Maltas.
Because of this iron curtain between domestic and defence spending, no one looked on the Navy’s carrier plans as domestic job creation.
But this argument wasn’t heard. Replacing the legacy fleet of six armoured carriers and umpteen light carriers - some less than two years old, was too expensive. These legacy carriers would be the bane of post-war naval planning for the next twenty years.
The legacy fleet
Illustrious, Formidable and Indomitable were all badly damaged by their war service. Formidable was in the unique position of having her flight deck holding her keel together - Implacable and Indefatigable had hangars that were too low, all had lifts that were too small - only Victorious was a going concern.
None would be capable of operating even modest increases in aircraft weight and size without re-building. Rebuilding costs were estimated as the same as building the four Audacious class. Only Victorious would be rebuilt and ended up costing substantially more than building a single new carrier.
HMS Victorious modernised at a cost of £30million between 1950 and 1958. It was supposed to cost £5 million, which even then was half the cost of a new ship.
Having slapped a huge surcharge on Naval shipbuilding, and keen to cut defence expenditure the government got shot of the Maltas quickly. Three Audacious, four Centaurs and one Majestic were also cancelled. Two Audacious and four Centaurs would linger on in slow build for years as dribs and drabs of funding were found to finish them.
The half complete Ark Royal would be left on the slip for several years without maintenance, leading to corrosion issues that would plague her for the rest of her life.
HMS Eagle £10 million to finish another £31 million to rebuild within five years
In the end two Audacious were finished as Ark Royal and Eagle. Albion, Bulwark, Centaur and Hermes would join them from the mid 50s. All were just a bit too small by 1965.
HMS Hermes £18 million to finish
The legacy armoured carriers were slowly decommissioned as they fell apart and the cost of repair and refit became greater than building new ships. Smaller ships like the Colossus class were used to fill the gap and did so with some spirit in Korea and Suez.
Keeping British carriers up to date would cost huge sums over the next thirty years and all would be limited in size and operations.
It’s hard not to see that a post-war investment in the newer, bigger ships would have saved a lot of money and provided a lot more jobs had they been finished.
Edit: Some have questioned whether the Illustrious class couldn't have been better re-built for service into the 70s. Very hard to agree. They were small ships, limited in displacement and because of their armoured hangars rebuilding the top half was structurally complex and therefore very expensive.
The upper picture is the Ark Royal’s hangar space. She was designed along similar lines to the Illustrious class with an enclosed hangar that formed half the structural strength of the ship. She also had more than twice the hangar size of Illustrious.
Middle picture shows the Essex class open hangar. Not only was it bigger in area, it was only superstructure, not structure, you could cheaply and easily cut down to the main deck and rebuild. Essexes so rebuilt would serve into the early 70s, but couldn't operate the most advanced aircraft like A-6 Intruder and F-4 Phantom.
Bottom picture is the Malta. It was roughly the same size as the Midway class, which operated F-4 and A-6 with straightforward rebuilding. The last of the Midway’s were still operating into 1991 with F/A-18.
No one knew the F-4, A-6 or F/A-18, Buccaneer or Sea Vixen would exist in 1945. But they knew the promise of jet aviation meant aircraft were getting bigger, heavier and more thirsty. Building Malta’s didn’t guarantee service to 1991, but sticking with ships half its size prohibited it.
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Edit: A further point on closed hangars vs open hangars.
Its not armour that limits, it’s where you put the strength deck.
On the Illustrious to Audacious class the strength deck was the flight deck. It made the structure a very light, very strong closed hangar. There was no other way such a small ship could carry an armoured flight deck that high without. In engineering terms it was brilliant.
It was only the hangar roof and sides that were armoured, turning the hangar into an armoured box like a magazine. This also became a huge square section girder that provided much of the ship’s strength.
You couldn’t change that girder without changing the bottom half of the ship as well and then you're effectively into a new build. Even enlarging the lift wells (designed small as possible so as not to weaken the strength deck) required major work as it completely threw off all your stress/strain figures.
To do any of the post-war modifications - angled deck, steam catapults, bigger lifts, increased size of aircraft, the closed hangar of the British ships was a engineering nightmare that become too expensive.
The Essexes and the Midways had their strength deck at the hangar floor. As did the Malta. This meant all that superstructure above that level could be chopped off, replaced or altered easily. Compare the converted Essexes to our Audacious conversions, took a fraction of the time and cost - and resulted in larger air wings.
Cost is what killed the RN Carrier fleet - having four hulls in the late 50s you could cheaply rebuild to modern standards would have made the whole force viable.
The USN did indeed like our armoured decks - but they only copied the protection concept not the structure. We would copy their structural philosophy for Malta and it was the structure that kept the Midways viable into the 90s. Most of the armour, and guns, had been removed by then to compensate for modifications. But that was easy work.
So Midway and Malta were very similar in design - their strength deck was the hangar floor, flight deck was superstructure. When it came time to build in angled decks, big steam catapults, bigger arrestor gear, deck edge lifts and the aircraft got bigger - Midway and the Maltas had the bulk and the superstructure to allow for all that growth.
Audacious did not - it would always be expensive and tight fitting to keep Ark Royal and Eagle in service. The smaller British carriers never stood a chance.
Victorious took eight years and the cost of almost two new build carriers to rebuild to Buccaneer standard - and yet she only carried nine of them with nine Sea Vixens. Because the position of her forward lift was structural it couldn't be moved. This put a huge restriction on the length of catapult that could be fitting over the bows.
Hermes was finished with a forward deck edge lift to get around this restriction - it was costly and heavy. Eagle was going to have her bows lengthened to make room for the longer catapults - but it was deemed too expensive.
The Solution for Ark Royal and Eagle was to put one cat on the angled deck the other shifted to one side of the lift. These not only interfered with each other - you couldn't launch from the waist cat before the bow cat - they also negated the greatest advantage of the angled deck which was simultaneous launch and recovery.
The Audacious class would have done well in the 40s and 50s, but with four Maltas available to rebuild at a fraction of the cost they would have been scrapped by the mid 60s. Maltas could've been kept on till the 90s, and suddenly the Royal Navy’s budget looks doable.