Modelling > Scenarios
Realistic alternative RAN FAA options
Volkodav:
Whoops stuffed up there!
A favourite, pre-war, carrier option would be a County Class cruiser hull and machinery used for a light carrier or flight deck cruiser.
For pre-war re-armament, a repeat Ark Royal. This ship and its crew would be loaned to the UK for the early part of the war but return to Australian waters following Pearl Harbour.
Volkodav:
What was Australia's financial position in the late 40s?
What state was the economy in, were there funds available to do more than was actually done in defence i.e. follow through with existing plans vs. the cuts that happened or were the original plans actually too modest in the light of the Korean war and we could and should have expanded them?
What were the options to expand them, i.e. Centaurs instead of Majestics, or even a pair of Audacious class CVs to operate proper strike groups instead of ASW groups?
Were the cancelled Centaurs and Audacious Class ships actually available for completion, what was the cut off date to order them?
Would the UK have some them or even the actual completed ships and then built something new for themselves?
Could Australia have afforded the cost of operating and then modernising Implacable and Indefatigable?
Could Australia have afforded cruisers in addition to destroyers and frigates to escort the carriers?
Could the Majestics have been converted and retained as strike carriers and additional ships acquired to serve as CVS (possibly with straight decks to keep costs down)?
Old Wombat:
Late-1940's Australia was still recovering from the war, not so much financially (we were actually quite well off in this respect) but had to rebuild its farming base (1944/45 the 2nd AIF was repatriating soldiers from the war effort to try & maintain food production & Australian rationing was actually tighter than the UK's - despite/because of the amounts we were exporting to our allies & their armies) & there was a major need to rebuild basic infrastructure which had been neglected in the post-recession/WW2 period.
1950's & Australia started to kick ahead with a bang, largely based on mining & other primary industries, which had recovered to full production. However, our manufacturing base was still suffering from its first post-war down curve, as there was so much ex-WW2 stuff floating around on the market.
Volkodav:
During my apprenticeship I did some repairs on a radial arm drill that had been bought second hand in 1948 from the UK and I am not sure but I believe it was surplus there because it was pre War, possibly even WWI vintage, we had a lot of old machines like that operating side by side with near new CNCs etc.
Its a shame we had to invest so much in primary industry when the creation of the EU ripped the heart out of the market just over a decade later. A smarter move would have been to build on our hard won heavy engineering and manufacturing and become a global exporter before Korea and China took off. instead we killed much of what we had built through tying support to jobs, not innovations.
Rickshaw:
Australia's economy in the 1940s and 50s was severely hampered by a lack of foreign exchange. It was why Petrol Rationing was still in force in 1949 and removing it was one of Menzies' key platform promises in that election. When he carried through with it, it resulted in a small recession. Throughout the 1950s, Menzies never really had a grasp on the economy. The Korean War wool boom however helped him to hide a lot of the deficiencies and by the time that finished we saw another recession in agriculture. Somehow this reminds me of today...
Anyway, as Guy suggested, we came out of the war reasonably well off. We had a massive lend-lease credit (most nations had deficits which took decades to pay off), because of our agricultural exports. We basically fed, along with the US and Canada Western Europe. We also fed a large part of Japanese occupied Asia. This all told in our favour but there still wasn't much in the way of cold foreign exchange coming in. Hence the proposal to nationalise the Commonwealth Bank which doomed Chifley in 1949. People were fed up with austerity and so they voted Ming the Merciless in.
What you really need to provide funds for massive naval expansion is a mining boom. Something that everybody needs but can't get very easily and which can only be found here really cheaply.
Then you have to address the manpower problem. The RAN was strapped for manpower throughout the late 1940s and 50s, much for the same reasons it is today. Why go to sea when you can work in civilian industry (and that was without a boom!)? Civilian full employment makes life very hard for a military relying on volunteers. While National Service was introduced in the late 1940s, it wasn't efficient, particularly as far as the Navy was concerned.
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