- Author
- A.N. Other and NHSA Webmaster
- Subjects
- Ship design and development
- Tags
- RAN Ships
- None noted.
- Publication
- June 1990 edition of the Naval Historical Review (all rights reserved)
In 1914 the Royal Navy found itself in dire need of such surrogates. Large liners were converted to Armed Merchant Cruisers; 18 initially but no fewer than 69 at one time or another by 1918. Similar numbers of smaller ships were taken up and converted to Armed Boarding Vessels for Contraband Control. Presenting large, slow and relatively under-armed targets to the enemy’s warships, these ships could not be used offensively but even when employed on escort and patrol duties their losses were high, 33 of the 109 being sunk during the war.
Large as these numbers were, they dwindled into near insignificance beside the huge number of ships requisitioned for the ‘non-traditional’ tasks created by the new forms of warfare, particularly mines and submarines. One hundred and fifty-one ships of all sizes were commissioned as AWS escorts and Q-Ships and 84 were taken up as minesweepers, but besides these there were yachts, trawlers and drifters of the Auxiliary Patrol – 3,301 of these were wearing the White Ensign by January 1918, 235 of them based on Dover alone.
Outside the terms of the Hague Convention were the ships which were not intended for combat but which formed the Fleet Train. The first oil-burning battleship was completed in 1906 and from that time the demand for fuel grew to dominate the fleet’s logistic requirements so that by 1914 the Navy needed 342 mercantile oilers to supplement the RFA; on the other hand a mere 184 merchant ships sufficed for all victualling, ordnance and naval stores-carrying purposes. And then there was the Army, which needed over 360 Expeditionary Force Transports (some of them sailing vessels) to carry the soldiers and their kit to and fro.
Such an enormous Train to support a Navy which expanded to 586 cruisers and destroyers and 134 sloops, plus a myriad of minesweepers, could only be provided by an enormous Merchant Navy, backed by the most productive shipbuilding industry in the world. This mercantile marine and the industrial capacity still existed in 1939, when the Admiralty was again obliged to call heavily upon it.
Fifty Armed Merchant Cruisers were commissioned before the end of 1939 (needed nearly 300 pre-1918 6 in guns and 100 3 in AA guns from the pursers come-in-handy lay-apart store), as well as about 30 boarding vessels. But the most numerous STUFT category was, once again, the armed trawler/drifter/yacht, patrol and escort vessel, of which nearly 1,300 were requisitioned.
Interestingly, the initial logistic train requirement was less demanding than it had been in 1914-18, largely because the Admiralty had managed to build up major fuel and stores depots ashore at the many crossroads of Empire. But when it came to Pacific operations with the US Navy, the Royal Navy had to learn again the necessities of really long-range, long-endurance logistic support – lessons which enabled the Royal Fleet Auxiliary to reach apotheosis in 1982, but with dependence as ever on the availability of Red Ensign tankers.
Another WW2 example of STUFT was to set the trend for the future. The very first Ro-Ro vessels were a trio of requisitioned Maracaibo tankers converted to a Bath design to provide the basis of all subsequent conventional LSTs. Merchant marine conversions comprised about half of the assault shipping which was to fire the Royal Navy’s traditional projectile – the British Army – at a wide variety of beaches between 1942 and 1945.
Since 1982, much attention has been devoted to the ‘problems of STUFT’, both within the Navy and without. From within, the questions have mainly focussed on whether the dwindling Merchant Fleet is going to be there in sufficient numbers when the time comes. Others have wondered why it should be necessary to rely on STUFT to such a large extent. Taking a look at this from the history perspective does at least make one thing clear – ‘….twas ever thus’.