There's a Fuck-up on the Flight Deck

DESCRIPTION: "There's a fuck-up on the flight deck, and the Wavy Navy done it. There's a prang on the gangway and they don't know who to blame." The song describes many mistakes made aboard an aircraft carrier on a mission.
AUTHOR: music ("The Hut Sut Song") by Leo V. Killion, Ted McMichael, Jack Owens (1941)
EARLIEST DATE: 1987 (Tawney-GreyFunnelLines-RoyalNavy)
KEYWORDS: technology navy battle
FOUND IN: Britain(England(South))
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Tawney-GreyFunnelLines-RoyalNavy, pp. 104-105, "There's a Fuck-Up on the Flight Deck" (1 text, tune referenced)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "The Hut Sut Song" (tune)
NOTES [640 words]: The Fairey Albacore is a particularly fit airplane to be singled out for criticism in this song. When World War II began, the standard British carrier torpedo bomber was the Fairey Swordfish, a biplane with a top speed of 138 miles per hour that was so old that even the British knew that the "stringbag" needed to be replaced (Munson 68). So they came up with the Fairey Albacore. Which was, ahem, another biplane. In 1940. The Albacore was slightly faster than the Swordfish, and had a slightly longer range, and had an enclosed cockpit (more comfortable for the pilot), but otherwise, it was such a flop that the Swordfish "remained in service alongside, and eventually outlasted, the [Albacore]" (Munson, p. 62).
Brown, p. 60, reports, "In retrospect, the Albacore epitomised the ascendancy of the conventionalists over the visionaries; the least adventurous approach that could possibly have been made to solving the problem of replacing the venerable and patently obsolescent Swordfish. That the authorities should have opted to perpetuate the biplane configuration at a time when the imminence of its final demise in all operational roles was surely obvious to all is difficult to comprehend today, forty years on." He adds that the defects of the Albacore were its lack of maneuverability, its unresponsive controls, and its large size that made it harder to handle and easier for enemy gunfire to hit. It was a good plane as long as there were no enemies around, but too easy a target in combat.
Munson, p. 62, adds, "Production ceased in 1943 after 803 Albacores had been built, but by the end of that year all but two squadrons had been re-equipped with Barracudas or American Avengers. One of the squadrons, however, handed on their Albacores to the R.C.A.F., by whom they were employed in the D-day landings of June 1944." Fortunately for the Canadians, there were few Axis fighters to take advantage of the Albacore's pitiful lack of speed; for this plane, at least, the conditions of British landing fields were danger enough!
The Fairey Fulmar was another British flop. No, it wasn't just that Fairey was a lousy plane designer; other British manufacturers were bad, too, often because the government wrote ridiculous specifications. So it was with the Fulmar: "The FAA requirement of two seats for its fighters guaranteed their inferiority" (Worth, p. 80). (It is noteworthy that the most successful British plane of the war, the de Haviland Mosquito, was not a government project; De Haviland built it, and the government almost failed to take it!) It didn't help that the Fulmar was a rush job (Munson, p. 65). It did at least have decent firepower and maneuverability. But they did sink a lot -- they were one of the planes used on "CAM ships," or merchant ships with a catapult to launch a fighter to deal with enemy bombers (Gunston, p. 36), which however had to ditch after making its flight.
Brown seems to be the only writer with anything good to say about the Fulmar: "It was to be said of the handsome Fairey monoplane that it lacked the fighter's first essential -- speed. There is no gainsaying that it was slow by then contemporary land-bases single-seat fighter standards, but it was not short of other qualities and, if incapable of taking on a Messerschmitt Bf 109 on anything like equal terms, its advent was, in so far as the Fleet Air Arm was concerned, very welcome indeed" (p. 69).
For the King George V, see also the notes to "The Sinking of HMS Hood."
The Fulmar went into service in 1940, and began to be phased out in 1943; it was most widely used in 1942, which was also the height (or depth) of the Albacore's career. So I'd guess this song dates from that year. This matches fairly well with the use of the Hut Sut song as the tune, since that was published and became popular in 1941. - RBW
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