The 1940s and early 1950s were a stormy period for the Royal Navy's capital ships. They were the target of a great deal of criticism from sources at a high level in government, both political and military. These attacks were far more than the usual scrutiny of service programmes and amounted to fundamental questioning of whether the capital ship still had a role in naval strategy or in national strategy more broadly. Its role was debated during the war but was fought over even more intensely afterwards, when the evidence of the wartime years was deployed on both sides of a bitter and high-stakes debate over current and future policy.

This chapter explores the controversy over the role of the capital ship – defined simply as the most important unit of the fleet and specifically in this period meaning battleships, battlecruisers and, increasingly, aircraft carriers. It looks briefly at how the experience of the First World War foreshadowed the challenges that were to come, before examining the role of the capital ship during the Second World War, when the challenge truly manifested. Finally, it surveys the debate through the first post-war decade when the dispute not only intensified but also broadened to call into question the very need for naval power.

The battleship retained a central albeit evolving place in naval strategy during the war and afterwards until (as the Admiralty foresaw on the horizon) its role could be better performed by other means. As the battleship declined – a process far slower than its critics suggested – its role as capital ship was taken on by the carrier. The latter could perform the classic role of neutralising enemy capital ships but also offered other capabilities, countering new threats and adding a whole new dimension to power projection. However, the ambitions of the air enthusiasts, both uniformed and civilian, complicated this transition and ensured that for long after the period covered in this chapter, the place in British strategy of the new capital ship, and of the navy in general, would be anything but plain sailing.