The Fleet Air Arm & The Second Word War
 

I received the following initial assessment from a British expert on a volume published by the (British) Naval Records Society that may be of interest:

Dr. Ben Jones's The Fleet Air Arm and the Second World War Vol. 1 1939-1941 (Ashgate Publishing Limited for the Navy Records Society, 2012) contains a mixture of documents on policy and operations.

Documents 32-32a seem to explain the origins of the Blackburn Roc fighter (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackburn_Roc and the link there at note 2). At the time that the specification was issued, the Admiralty was convinced that naval fighters would always be outperformed by land-based aircraft, so a fixed-gun (forward-firing) fighter would be useless in air combat. A "free-gun" (turret) fighter could still use its weapons.

There are other fascinating details such as a reported shortage of Swordfish torpedo racks and bomb carriers.