The Royal Naval Air Service in the First World War

The Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) was the air arm of Britain’s navy, the Royal Navy, from July 1914 to April 1918. Its seaplanes, airships and flying boats patrolled the seas around the British Isles and hunted U-boats, while its landplanes attacked the bases of German airships and until 1916 defended the country against air raids. Naval airmen also fought over Belgium, on the Western Front and over the Dardanelles. On 1 April 1918 the RNAS was merged with the army’s air arm into the Royal Air Force.

Origins (1910–1914)

At the end of 1910 the Admiralty accepted an offer from the Royal Aero Club, which lent the navy aircraft and its airfield at Eastchurch. Out of two hundred applicants, four officers were chosen for the first course, among them Charles Samson. In 1912 the fleet’s airmen joined the new Royal Flying Corps as its Naval Wing, but the Admiralty developed the wing in its own way. In the summer of 1912 it set up an Air Department under Captain Murray Sueter, built seaplane and airship stations, and in the fleet manoeuvres of 1913 aircraft operated from the converted cruiser Hermes.

On 1 July 1914 the Admiralty made the Royal Naval Air Service part of the navy’s Military Branch. The Air of Authority website, devoted to the history of RAF organisation, points out that this was only the date of a circular, and that the formation of the RNAS was formally confirmed by an Admiralty order of 29 July 1915. In August 1914, according to the English Wikipedia, the RNAS had 93 aircraft, six airships, two balloons and 727 men. From the first days of the war its aircraft and airships patrolled the English Channel, covering the crossing of the troops to France.

Belgium and the hunt for the Zeppelins (1914–1915)

On 27 August 1914 Samson’s squadron from Eastchurch flew in to Ostend together with a brigade of marines, the first RNAS unit on the Continent. It moved to Dunkirk, where its men patrolled the area in armed and soon armoured cars. In the autumn the naval air arm began building some of the first British armoured cars on Rolls-Royce chassis.

When the army’s air arm flew off to France, the Admiralty, headed by Winston Churchill, took over the air defence of Britain at the beginning of September. Churchill believed that airships were best destroyed before they took off. On 22 September RNAS aircraft from Antwerp attacked Germany for the first time, and on 8 October Lieutenant Reginald Marix burned the airship Z IX in its shed at Düsseldorf, the first destroyed by an aircraft. On 21 November three aircraft bombed the Zeppelin works at Friedrichshafen, but the damage turned out to be slight.

On Christmas Day seven seaplanes from three converted ferries, seaplane carriers, took off to attack the airship base near Cuxhaven. The sheds were not found, but it was the first raid in history by aircraft brought to the scene by ships. The airmen of No. 1 Wing at Dunkirk also hunted airships. On 7 June 1915 Reginald Warneford destroyed LZ 37 with bombs over Ghent, and the same night other airmen burned LZ 38 in its shed.

Home defence and bombers (1915–1917)

Home defence went less well. When on the night of 31 May to 1 June 1915 an airship bombed London for the first time, RNAS aircraft flew more than a dozen sorties, but only one pilot sighted the raider. Soon afterwards the new First Lord of the Admiralty, Arthur Balfour, asked the War Office to take over the defence. On 10 February 1916 the government decided that the army would take over defence on land, and the navy would deal with aircraft and airships approaching over the sea.

Naval airmen from the coastal stations went on shooting down Zeppelins, and in 1917 they also took off against the Gothas over London.

The Admiralty was also building its own bomber force. In 1916 a squadron of Sopwith 1½ Strutters became the nucleus of No. 3 Wing RNAS, which flew from the airfield at Luxeuil with the French to bomb German armaments works. Before the Battle of the Somme, however, the navy had to hand over 62 Sopwiths to the army’s air arm, and in 1917 the wing was disbanded.

The two air arms competed for engines and aircraft. The RNAS fighter squadrons on the Western Front received new Sopwith Pups, Triplanes and Camels before the army’s squadrons did. The government tried to reconcile the two sides through Lord Curzon’s Air Board, set up in May 1916, but gave it no executive power.

At sea and over the Dardanelles (1915–1918)

At the Dardanelles seaplanes from the carrier Ark Royal and a balloon from the ship Manica helped to direct the ships’ fire. On 12 August 1915 Charles Edmonds, flying a Short 184 seaplane from the seaplane carrier Ben-my-Chree, dropped a torpedo on a Turkish ship in the Sea of Marmara, although the ship had most probably been disabled earlier.

In April 1916 RNAS aircraft from Mudros bombed Constantinople, and in January 1918 they attacked the Goeben for a week after she ran aground in the Dardanelles following the Battle of Imbros.

Over the North Sea the fight against the U-boats became the main task. From 1917 H.12 flying boats, joined in November by the Felixstowe F.2A, flew from the stations at Felixstowe, Great Yarmouth and Killingholme to patrol the so-called Spider Web, a grid covering 4,000 square miles of sea. According to the English Wikipedia, in 1917 alone RNAS airmen sighted 175 U-boats and attacked 107. They sank few, but their reports helped the warships. Flying boats also shot down several airships.

The navy also wanted to take wheeled aircraft to sea. On 2 August 1917 Edwin Dunning became the first to land on the deck of a ship, the Furious, and five days later he was killed on another attempt. On 21 August Bernard Smart took off from a platform on the cruiser Yarmouth and shot down the airship L 23.

The end (1917–1918)

In the summer of 1917, after the daylight Gotha raids on London, General Jan Smuts recommended the creation of an independent air service, and in November Parliament passed the Air Force Act. On 1 April 1918 the RNAS and the RFC were merged into the Royal Air Force. According to the naval historian Stephen Roskill, the naval air arm brought 55,066 officers and men, 2,949 aircraft and 126 coastal stations into the new service. Its squadrons received new numbers, increased by 200: No. 1 Squadron RNAS became No. 201 Squadron RAF. The navy handed over its airship service only in October 1919.