Neglected Skies

Neglected Skies uses a reconsideration of the clash between the British Eastern Fleet and the Imperial Japanese Navy’s First Air Fleet in the Indian Ocean in April 1942 to draw a larger conclusion about declining British military power in the era. In this book, Angus Britts explores the end of British naval supremacy from an operational perspective. By primarily analyzing the evolution of British naval aviation during the interwar period, as well as the challenges that the peacetime Royal Navy was forced to confront, a picture emerges of a battle fleet that entered the war in September 1939 unready for combat. By examining the development of Japan’s first-strike carrier battle group, the Kido Butai, Britts charts both the rise of Japan as a wartime power as well as the demise of the Royal Navy. Japan, by concentrating their six largest aircraft-carriers into a single strike force with state-of-the-art aircraft, had taken a quantum leap forward in warfighting at sea. Simultaneously, British forces found themselves outmatched in this Eastern theatre and Britts makes the case, by looking at a set of key battles, that this is where the global supremacy of Britain’s naval power ended. The second is that the story of British naval and imperial decline did not end with the fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942, but rather reached its climax in the subsequent conduct of Japan’s Operation C, where for the first time in history, a British fleet was compelled to retire from the battlefield in the face of opposition from a force which, though similar in size, possessed a measure of modern aerial firepower which was quite beyond the capability of the British to effectively counter in any form then available to the British Admiralty.