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Main articles: History of the Royal Navy and Royal Scots Navy Development of England's navy 900–1500 The strength of the fleets of the Kingdom of England was an important element in the kingdom's power in the 10th century.[6] At one point Aethelred II had an especially large fleet built by a national levy of one ship for every 310 hides of land, but it is uncertain whether this was a standard or exceptional model for raising fleets.[7] During the period of Danish rule in the 11th century, the authorities maintained a standing fleet by taxation, and this continued for a time under the restored English regime of Edward the Confessor (reigned 1042–1066), who frequently commanded fleets in person.[8] The Battle of Sluys English naval power seems to have declined as a result of the Norman conquest.[9] Medieval fleets, in England as elsewhere, were almost entirely composed of merchant ships enlisted into naval service in time of war. From time to time a few "king's ships" owned by the monarch were built for specifically warlike purposes; but, unlike some European states, England did not maintain a small permanent core of warships in peacetime. England's naval organisation was haphazard and the mobilisation of fleets when war broke out was slow.[10] With the Viking era at an end, and conflict with France largely confined to the French lands of the English monarchy, England faced little threat from the sea during the 12th and 13th centuries, but in the 14th century the outbreak of the Hundred Years War dramatically increased the French menace. Early in the war French plans for an invasion of England failed when Edward III of England destroyed the French fleet in the Battle of Sluys in 1340.[11] Major fighting was thereafter confined to French soil and England's naval capabilities sufficed to transport armies and supplies safely to their continental destinations. However, while subsequent French invasion schemes came to nothing, England's naval forces could not prevent frequent raids on the south-coast ports by the French and their Genoese and Castilian allies. Such raids halted finally only with the occupation of northern France by Henry V.[12] 1500–1707 The standing "Navy Royal", with its own secretariat, dockyards and a permanent core of purpose-built warships, originated in the early 16th century during the reign of Henry VIII.[13] Under Elizabeth I England became involved in a war with Spain, which saw privately owned ships combining with the Navy Royal in highly profitable raids against Spanish commerce and colonies.[14] In 1588, Philip II of Spain sent the Spanish Armada against England to end English support for Dutch rebels, to stop English corsair activity and to depose the Protestant Elizabeth I and restore Catholicism to England. The Spaniards sailed from Lisbon, planning to escort an invasion force from the Spanish Netherlands but the scheme failed due to poor planning, English harrying, blocking action by the Dutch, and severe storms.[15] A Counter Armada, known as the English Armada, was dispatched to the Iberian coast in 1589, but failed to drive home the advantage England had won upon the dispersal of the Spanish Armada in the previous year. Victory over the Spanish Armada During the early 17th century, England's relative naval power deteriorated, and there were increasing raids by Barbary corsairs on ships and English coastal communities to capture people as slaves, which the Navy had little success in countering.[16] Charles I undertook a major programme of warship building, creating a small force of powerful ships, but his methods of fund-raising to finance the fleet contributed to the outbreak of the English Civil War.[17] In the wake of this conflict and the abolition of the monarchy, the new Commonwealth of England, isolated and threatened from all sides, dramatically expanded the Navy, which became the most powerful in the world.[18] The new regime's introduction of Navigation Acts, providing that all merchant shipping to and from England or her colonies should be carried out by English ships, led to war with the Dutch Republic.[19] In the early stages of this First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–1654), the superiority of the large, heavily armed English ships was offset by superior Dutch tactical organisation and the fighting was inconclusive.[20] English tactical improvements resulted in a series of crushing victories in 1653 at Portland, the Gabbard and Scheveningen, bringing peace on favourable terms.[21] This was the first war fought largely, on the English side, by purpose-built, state-owned warships. The English monarchy was restored in May 1660, and Charles II assumed the throne. One of his first acts was to re-establish the Navy, but from this point on, it ceased to be the personal possession of the reigning monarch, and instead became a national institution – with the title of "The Royal Navy". As a result of their defeat in the First Anglo-Dutch War, the Dutch had transformed their navy and the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667) was a closely fought struggle between evenly matched opponents, with an English victory at the Battle of Lowestoft (1665) countered by Dutch triumph in the epic Four Days Battle (1666).[22] In 1667 the restored royal government of Charles II was forced to lay up the fleet in port for lack of money to keep it at sea, while negotiating for peace. Disaster followed, as the Dutch fleet mounted the Raid on the Medway, breaking into Chatham Dockyard and capturing or burning many of the Navy's largest ships at their moorings.[23] In the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674), Charles II allied with Louis XIV of France against the Dutch, but the combined Anglo-French fleet was fought to a standstill in a series of inconclusive battles, while the French invasion by land was warded off.[24] The Dutch Raid on the Medway in 1667 during the Second Anglo–Dutch War During the 1670s and 1680s, the Navy succeeded in permanently ending the threat to English shipping from the Barbary corsairs, inflicting defeats which induced the Barbary states to conclude long-lasting peace treaties.[25] Following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, England joined the European coalition against Louis XIV in the War of the Grand Alliance (1688–1697) in alliance with the Dutch. The allies were defeated at Beachy Head (1690), but victory at Barfleur-La Hogue (1691) was a turning-point marking the end of France's brief pre-eminence at sea and the beginning of an enduring English, later British, supremacy.[26] In the course of the 17th century, the Navy completed the transition from a semi-amateur Navy Royal fighting in conjunction with private vessels into a fully professional institution, a Royal Navy. Its financial provisions were gradually regularised, it came to rely on dedicated warships only, and it developed a professional officer corps with a defined career structure, superseding an earlier mix of sailors and socially prominent former soldiers.[27] Development of the British navy 1707–1815 HMS Victory, Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar, is still a commissioned Royal Navy ship, although she is now permanently kept in dry-dock Under the 1707 Acts of Union, which created the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707, the Royal Navy of the newly united kingdom was created by the merger of the three-ship Royal Scots Navy with that of the Royal Navy of England. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the Royal Navy was the largest in the world, but until 1805 its forces were repeatedly matched or exceeded in numbers by a combination of enemies.[28] Despite this, it was able to maintain an almost uninterrupted ascendancy over its rivals through superiority in financing, tactics, training, organisation, social cohesion, hygiene, dockyard facilities, logistical support and from the middle of the 18th century, warship design and construction.[29] During the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–1714), the Navy operated in conjunction with the Dutch against the navies of France and Spain. Naval operations in European waters focused on the acquisition of a Mediterranean base, contributing to a long-lasting alliance with Portugal in 1703 and the capture of Gibraltar (1704) and Minorca (1708), which were both retained by Britain after the war, and on supporting the efforts of Britain's Austrian Habsburg allies to seize control of Spain and its Mediterranean dependencies from the Bourbons. French naval squadrons did considerable damage to English and Dutch commercial convoys during the early years of the war. However, a major victory over France and Spain at the Battle of Vigo Bay (1702), further successes in battle, and the scuttling of the entire French Mediterranean fleet at Toulon in 1707 virtually cleared the Navy's opponents from the seas for the latter part of the war. Naval operations also enabled the conquest of the French colonies in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.[30] Further conflict with Spain followed in the War of the Quadruple Alliance, in which the Navy helped thwart a Spanish attempt to regain Sicily and Sardinia from Austria and Savoy, defeating a Spanish fleet at Cape Passaro, and an undeclared war in the 1720s, in which Spain tried to retake Gibraltar and Minorca. After a period of relative peace, the Navy became engaged in the War of Jenkins' Ear (1739–1748) against Spain, which was dominated by a series of costly and mostly unsuccessful attacks on Spanish ports in the Caribbean. During the Battle of Cartagena de Indias, the Navy deployed a huge force of over 27,000 men in 135 transports and 50 warships[31] against the Spanish port city of Cartagena in modern-day Colombia. The siege ended in defeat and huge losses for the British navy and army.[32] In 1742, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was driven to withdraw from the war in half an hour by the threat of a bombardment of its capital Naples by a small British squadron. The war was subsumed by the wider War of the Austrian Succession (1744–1748), once again pitting Britain against France. Naval fighting in this war, which for the first time included major operations in the Indian Ocean, was largely inconclusive, the most significant event being the failure of an attempted French invasion of England in 1744.[33] The subsequent Seven Years' War (1756–1763) saw the Navy conduct amphibious campaigns leading to the conquest of French Canada, French colonies in the Caribbean and West Africa and small islands off the French coast, while operations in the Indian Ocean contributed to the destruction of French power in India.[34] A new French attempt to invade Britain was thwarted by the extraordinary Battle of Quiberon Bay in 1759, fought in a gale on a dangerous lee shore. Once again the French navy was effectively eliminated from the war, abandoning major operations.[35] In 1762, the resumption of hostilities with Spain led to the British capture of Havana, along with a Spanish fleet sheltering there, and Manila.[36] The Battle of the Saintes. On the right, the French flagship, the Ville de Paris, in action against HMS Barfleur In the American Revolutionary War, the small Continental Navy of frigates fielded by the rebel colonists was obliterated with ease, but the entry of France, Spain and the Netherlands into the war against Britain produced a combination of opposing forces which deprived the Navy of its position of superiority for the first time since the 1690s, briefly but decisively. The war saw a series of indecisive battles in the Atlantic and Caribbean, in which the Navy failed to achieve the conclusive victories needed to secure the supply lines of British forces in North America and cut off the colonial rebels from outside support.[37] The most important operation of the war came in 1781 when, in the Battle of the Chesapeake, the British fleet failed to lift the French blockade of Lord Cornwallis's army, resulting in Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown.[38] Although this disaster effectively concluded the fighting in North America, it continued in the Indian Ocean, where the French were prevented from re-establishing a meaningful foothold in India, and in the Caribbean. Victory there in the Battle of the Saintes in 1782 and the relief of Gibraltar later the same year symbolised the restoration of British naval ascendancy, but this came too late to prevent the independence of the Thirteen Colonies.[39] The Bombardment of Algiers in 1816, to support the ultimatum to release European slaves Losses from disease, particularly scurvy, were of catastrophic proportions in the Royal Navy.[40] The eradication of scurvy from the Royal Navy in the 1790s was due to the efforts of Gilbert Blane, chairman of the Navy's Sick and Hurt Board, ordered fresh lemon juice to be given to sailors on ships. Other navies soon adopted this successful solution.[41] The French Revolutionary Wars (1793–1801) and Napoleonic Wars (1803–1814 and 1815) saw the Royal Navy reach a peak of efficiency, dominating the navies of all Britain's adversaries, which spent most of the war blockaded in port. The Navy achieved an emphatic early victory at the Glorious First of June (1794), and gained a number of smaller victories while supporting abortive Royalist efforts to regain control of France. In the course of one such operation, the majority of the French Mediterranean fleet was captured or destroyed during a short-lived occupation of Toulon in 1793.[42] The military successes of the French Revolutionary regime brought the Spanish and Dutch navies into the war on the French side, but the losses inflicted on the Dutch at the Battle of Camperdown in 1797 and the surrender of their surviving fleet to a landing force at Den Helder in 1799 effectively eliminated the Dutch navy from the war.[43] The Spithead and Nore mutinies in 1797 incapacitated the Channel and North Sea fleets, leaving Britain potentially exposed to invasion, but were rapidly resolved.[44] The British Mediterranean fleet under Nelson failed to intercept Napoleon Bonaparte's 1798 expedition to invade Egypt, but annihilated the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile, leaving Bonaparte's army isolated.[45] The emergence of a Baltic coalition opposed to Britain led to an attack on Denmark, which lost much of its fleet in the Battle of Copenhagen (1801) and came to terms with Britain.[46] The Battle of Trafalgar, depicted here in its opening phase During these years, the Navy also conducted amphibious operations that captured most of the French Caribbean islands and the Dutch colonies at the Cape of Good Hope, Ceylon and in the Dutch East Indies; but, except for Ceylon and Trinidad, these gains were returned following the Peace of Amiens in 1802, which briefly halted the fighting.[47] War resumed in 1803 and Napoleon attempted to assemble a large enough fleet from the French and Spanish squadrons blockaded in various ports to cover an invasion of England. The Navy frustrated these efforts and, following the abandonment of the invasion plan, the combined Franco-Spanish fleet which had been gathered was smashed by Nelson in the Battle of Trafalgar (1805).[48] This victory marked the culmination of decades of developing British naval dominance, and left the Navy in a position of uncontested hegemony at sea which endured until the early years of the 20th century. After Trafalgar, large-scale fighting at sea was limited to the destruction of small, fugitive French squadrons and amphibious operations which again captured the colonies which had been restored at Amiens, along with France's Indian Ocean base at Mauritius.[49] In 1807, French plans to seize the Danish fleet led to a pre-emptive British attack in the second Battle of Copenhagen, resulting in the surrender of the entire Danish navy.[50] At the time of Trafalgar, over half of the Royal Navy's 120,000 sailors were pressed men.[51] The impressment of British and American sailors from American ships contributed to the outbreak of the War of 1812 (1812–1814) against the United States, in which the naval fighting was largely confined to commerce raiding and single-ship actions.[52] The brief renewal of war after Napoleon's return to power in 1815 did not bring a resumption of naval combat.[53] 1815–1914 Between 1815 and 1914, the Navy saw little serious action, owing to the absence of any opponent strong enough to challenge its dominance. During this period, naval warfare underwent a comprehensive transformation, brought about by steam propulsion, metal ship construction, and explosive munitions. Despite having to completely replace its war fleet, the Navy managed to maintain its overwhelming advantage over all potential rivals. HMS Warrior, the first iron-hulled, armour-plated warship Due to British leadership in the Industrial Revolution, the country enjoyed unparalleled shipbuilding capacity and financial resources, which ensured that no rival could take advantage of these revolutionary changes to negate the British advantage in ship numbers. In 1889, Parliament passed the Naval Defence Act, which formally adopted the 'two-power standard', which stipulated that the Royal Navy should maintain a number of battleships at least equal to the combined strength of the next two largest navies. HMS Dreadnought The first major action that the Royal Navy saw during this period was the Bombardment of Algiers in 1816 by a joint Anglo-Dutch fleet under Lord Exmouth, to force the Barbary pirate state of Algiers to free Christian slaves and to halt to the practice of enslaving Europeans. During the Greek War of Independence, the combined navies of Britain, France and Russia defeated an Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Navarino in 1827, the last major action between sailing ships. During the same period, the Royal Navy took anti-piracy actions in the South China Sea.[54] Between 1807 and 1865, it maintained a Blockade of Africa to counter the illegal slave trade. It also participated in the Crimean War of 1854-56, as well as numerous military actions throughout Asia and Africa, notably the First and Second Opium Wars with Qing dynasty China. On 27 August 1896, the Royal Navy took part in the Anglo-Zanzibar War, which was the shortest war in history. The end of the 19th century saw structural changes brought about by the First Sea Lord Jackie Fisher who retired, scrapped, or placed into reserve many of the older vessels, making funds and manpower available for newer ships. He also oversaw the development of HMS Dreadnought, launched in 1905. Its speed and firepower rendered all existing battleships obsolete. The industrial and economic development of Germany had, by this time, overtaken Britain, enabling the Imperial German Navy to attempt to outpace British construction of dreadnoughts. Britain emerged triumphant from the ensuing arms race, in as much as it was able to maintain a substantial numerical advantage over Germany, but for the first time since 1805 another navy now existed with the capacity to challenge the Royal Navy in battle.[55] Reforms were also gradually introduced in the conditions for enlisted men with the abolishment of military flogging in 1879, amongst others.[56] 1914–1945 During the two World Wars, the Royal Navy played a vital role in protecting the flow of food, munitions and raw materials to Britain by defeating the German campaigns of unrestricted submarine warfare in the first and second battles of the Atlantic. During the First World War, most of the Royal Navy's strength was deployed at home in the Grand Fleet, confronting the German High Seas Fleet across the North Sea. A few inconclusive clashes took place between them, chiefly the Battle of Jutland in 1916. These exposed the deficiencies of a British approach to capital ship design, which prioritised speed and firepower, as against the German emphasis on resilience, as well as the inadequacies of Britain's hastily assembled munitions industry. However, the Germans were repeatedly outmanoeuvred and the British numerical advantage proved insurmountable, leading the High Seas Fleet to abandon any attempt to challenge British dominance. Elsewhere in the world, the Navy hunted down the handful of German surface raiders at large. During the Dardanelles Campaign against the Ottoman Empire in 1915, it suffered serious losses (mainly of obsolete pre-dreadnought battleships)[citation needed] during a failed attempt to break through the system of minefields and shore batteries defending the straits. Upon entering the First World War, the British immediately established a blockade of Germany. The Navy's Northern Patrol closed off access to the North Sea, while the Dover Patrol closed off access to the English Channel. The Navy also mined the North Sea. As well as closing off the Imperial German Navy's access to the Atlantic, the blockade largely blocked neutral merchant shipping heading to or from Germany. The blockade was maintained eight months after the war had ended to force Germany to sign the Treaty of Versailles.[57] The most serious menace faced by the Navy came from the attacks on merchant shipping mounted by German U-boats. For much of the war this submarine campaign was restricted by prize rules requiring merchant ships to be warned and evacuated before sinking. In 1915, the Germans renounced these restrictions and began to sink merchant ships on sight, but later returned to the previous rules of engagement to placate neutral opinion. A resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917 raised the prospect of Britain and its allies being starved into submission. The Navy's response to this new form of warfare had proved inadequate due to its refusal to adopt a convoy system for merchant shipping, despite the demonstrated effectiveness of the technique in protecting troop ships. The belated introduction of convoys sharply reduced losses and brought the U-boat threat under control. HMS Ark Royal In the inter-war period, the Royal Navy was stripped of much of its power. The Washington and London Naval Treaties imposed the scrapping of some capital ships and limitations on new construction. In 1932, the Invergordon Mutiny took place over a proposed 25% pay cut, which was eventually reduced to 10%. International tensions increased in the mid-1930s and the Second London Naval Treaty of 1935 failed to halt the development of a naval arms race. By 1938, treaty limits were effectively being ignored. The re-armament of the Royal Navy was well under way by this point; the Royal Navy had begun construction of the still treaty affected and undergunned new battleships and its first full-sized purpose-built aircraft carriers. In addition to new construction, several existing old battleships (whose gun power offset to a significant extent the weakly armed new battleships), battlecruisers and heavy cruisers were reconstructed, and anti-aircraft weaponry reinforced, while new technologies, such as ASDIC, Huff-Duff and hydrophones, were developed. The Navy had lost control of naval aviation when the Royal Naval Air Service was merged with the Royal Flying Corps to form the Royal Air Force in 1918, but regained control of ship-board aircraft with the return of the Fleet Air Arm to Naval control in 1937. However, the effectiveness of its aircraft lagged far behind its rivals, and around this time the Imperial Japanese Navy and the United States Navy began to surpass the Royal Navy in air power. British battlecruiser HMS Hood At the start of Second World War in 1939, the Royal Navy was still the largest in the world, consisting of 15 battleships and battlecruisers with five under construction, seven aircraft carriers, 66 cruisers with 23 more under construction, 184 destroyers with 52 under construction, 45 escort and patrol vessels with nine under construction and one on order, and 60 submarines with nine under construction.[58] During the early phases of the Second World War, the Royal Navy provided critical cover during British evacuations from Dunkirk. At the Battle of Taranto, Admiral Cunningham commanded a fleet that launched the first all-aircraft naval attack in history. Later, Cunningham was determined that as many Allied soldiers as possible should be evacuated after their defeat on Crete. When army generals feared he would lose too many ships, he famously said, "It takes the Navy three years to build a new ship. It will take three hundred years to build a new tradition. The evacuation will continue."[59] The Royal Navy suffered huge losses in the early stages of the war, including HMS Courageous, HMS Glorious, and HMS Hood in the European Theatre, and HMS Hermes, HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales in the Asian Theatre. Of the 1,418 men on the Hood, only three survived.[60] Over 3,000 people were lost when the converted troopship Lancastria was sunk in June 1940, creating the greatest maritime disaster in Britain's history.[61] There were, however, early successes against enemy surface ships, at the Battle of the River Plate in 1939, and off Norway in 1940. In May 1941, with the sinking of the Bismarck, Germany effectively lost her surface ship capabilities. As well as providing cover in operations, it was also vital in guarding the sea lanes that enabled British forces to fight in remote parts of the world such as North Africa, the Mediterranean and the Far East. Naval supremacy in the Atlantic was vital to the amphibious operations carried out, such as the invasions of Northwest Africa, Sicily, Italy, and Normandy. Royal Navy ships also provided an important role in escorting convoys across the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, and to other countries on the allied side, protecting them from air, surface and submarine attack. The German battleship Scharnhorst was one capital ship sunk while trying to attack an allied convoy in 1943. The Royal Navy (RN) is the principal naval warfare service of the British Armed Forces. Tracing its origins to the 16th century, it is the oldest service and is known as the Senior Service. From the end of the 17th century until well into the 20th century, it was the most powerful navy in the world,[1] playing a key part in establishing the British Empire as the dominant world power. Due to this historical prominence, it is common – even among non-Britons – to refer to it as "The Royal Navy" without qualification. Following victory in the First World War, the Royal Navy was significantly reduced in size,[2] although at the onset of the Second World War it was still the largest in the world. By the end of the Second World War, the United States Navy had emerged as the world's largest. During the course of the Cold War, the Royal Navy transformed into a primarily anti-submarine force, hunting for Soviet submarines, mostly active in the GIUK gap. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, its focus has returned to global expeditionary[3] operations around the world.[4] The navy maintains a fleet of technologically sophisticated ships[5] including an an amphibious assault ship, two amphibious transport docks, four ballistic missile submarines (which maintain the UK's nuclear deterrent), six nuclear fleet submarines, six guided missile destroyers, 13 frigates, 15 mine-countermeasure vessels and 22 patrol vessels. As of 28 August 2014, there are 77 commissioned ships in the Royal Navy, plus 13 commissioned ships of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA); there are also four Merchant Navy ships available to the RFA under a private finance initiative. The RFA replenishes Royal Navy warships at sea, and augments the Royal Navy's amphibious warfare capabilities through its three Bay-class landing ship vessels. The total displacement of the Royal Navy is approximately 362,000 tonnes (797,000 tonnes including the Royal Fleet Auxiliary and Royal Marines). The Royal Navy is part of the Naval Service, which also comprises the Royal Marines. The professional head of the Naval Service is the First Sea Lord, an admiral and member of the Defence Council of the United Kingdom. The Defence Council delegates management of the Naval Service to the Admiralty Board, chaired by the Secretary of State for Defence. The Royal Navy currently operates three bases in the United Kingdom where commissioned ships are based; Portsmouth, Clyde and Devonport, Plymouth, the last being the largest operational naval base in Western Europe. |
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