Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (13 page)

If it was difficult, almost impossible, for the U-boats to deal with Walker, it was hardly less dangerous for them to go against the U.S. escort carrier groups on the Gibraltar and North Africa routes. Although the U.S. Navy had come into anti-U-boat warfare in a woefully unprepared state, it had learned fast (and despite the far larger calls upon its attention and resources from the Pacific War). By 1943 a stream of new, small, but powerful escort carriers was pouring out of the Tacoma, Washington, shipyards, their crews and aircrews going into intensive training, steaming through the Panama Canal, then forming the core of the escorts for the enormous numbers of American troops, munitions, and other supplies heading toward the Mediterranean theater as the invasions of Sicily and Italy developed. The first three of the
Bogue
class—USS
Bogue
itself, USS
Core,
and USS
Card
—had particularly aggressive and competent aircrews; in a sort of variant of Walker’s creeping attacks, two of their planes would strafe a U-boat on the surface, obscuring the fact that a third aircraft was approaching with bombs or homing torpedoes. Roskill’s official naval history records the USS
Bogue
’s aircraft sinking six U-boats on these 1943 Gibraltar runs, and the total kills achieved by the USS
Card
’s aircraft and close escorts was even higher: at least ten U-boats, perhaps an eleventh.
⁴⁶

Overall, the escort carriers destroyed many fewer enemy submarines during the war than did land-based aircraft, yet their role in driving away U-boats from the North Atlantic convoys in the critical months of spring and early summer 1943 was great, and their protection of the flow of American troops and goods to North Africa and the
Mediterranean was absolutely invaluable. Later in 1943, some escort carriers were detached to ambush U-boats meeting at refueling points in the Central Atlantic. Although British naval intelligence agonized about the risk of their Ultra source being detected—how many coincidences could there be of U.S. planes arriving in the bare oceans just when a U-boat was being refueled by the “milk cow” vessel?—the attacks certainly destroyed a disproportionately large share of refueling submarines, leaving the regular boats perilously low on supplies and forced to return to base early.

From these dire trends the German submarine fleet could not recover. Though it resumed its attacks on Allied convoys in the first five months of 1944, including a renewed series of onslaughts upon the North Atlantic routes against the awful odds, it could never again achieve the success rate of its glory years of 1942 and early 1943. Its failure was evident, in spectacular form, on D-Day itself. There, as we shall see in
chapter 4
, the balance of forces—in the air, at sea, even on some of the contested beaches—was totally disproportionate. Not only were the German high command’s few Luftwaffe squadrons promptly destroyed, but the same was true of the Kriegsmarine’s “iron coffins”; Werner recounts how he and a group of highly experienced U-boat commanders, amazed at being held back in early June, were then ordered to attack the D-Day landings, including ramming an enemy ship like a kamikaze. Nothing could have been more remote from a submarine’s true vocation. Five of the eight U-boats so ordered were destroyed in such vain attacks; the other three limped back, damaged and ashamed.
⁴⁷
Allied control of the air and the waters was complete, and between June and August 1944 Doenitz’s submarines sank only five vessels during the greatest amphibious invasion of all time (one of those sunk, alas, was HMS
Pink
).

But the failure of the U-boats to destroy, or even dent, Operation Overlord was not just a mark of an imbalance of power at the local, tactical level. It was also evidence that, whatever their earlier remarkable and sustained successes, the German submarines had failed to stop the gigantic surge of troops, munitions, fuel, food, and all the other vital goods being brought from the New World to the Old. The submarines had done their best—U-boat “aces” such as Kinzel were extraordinary fighters—but they had been beaten by a well-organized, multiple-armed
counterattack in the middle of 1943. Because of the new Allied strengths, the convoys were getting through, increasingly unscathed; because they were unscathed, the island fortress of Great Britain was turned into an enormous launchpad for the invasion of Europe; and because that invasion took place without severe (or even much) disruption and the Allied armies could push ahead and into the Third Reich, the days of the U-boats were numbered. Their home bases, whether in western France or northern Germany, would be captured from the landward side.

It is true that the German military-industrial complex was, in 1944 and early 1945, still pouring out dozens and dozens of newer, larger U-boats. Moreover, German scientists were working on some remarkably advanced types of U-boat (Hellmuth Walter’s brilliant designs, and the Type XXI “elektro-Booten”), which concerned the Admiralty all through the last year of the war in Europe. Doenitz’s U-boat fleet was still receiving and sending new boats out as late as April 1945, despite the more intensive Allied bombing of their construction yards and railway supply routes. The German submarines fought to the very end, impressively and ferociously. Since they made little impression upon the ceaseless flow of men and munitions across the Atlantic—and by the autumn of 1944 the new U.S. divisions could sail directly to France—their story fades into the background in most histories of the Second World War. Yet the period from January to April 1945 witnessed some of the fiercest duels ever between the U-boats and their long-lasting foes, RAF Coastal Command, the Royal Navy, and their Canadian equivalents.

But those duels were no longer fought for control of the Atlantic routes; they were contests that took place chiefly across the North Sea and in British and Canadian coastal waters. These were not easy contests, for the U-boats were now much harder to detect when in inshore waters, possessed far more sophisticated weaponry, and often steamed on the surface in small groups for protection. At one stage, squadrons of RAF tank-busting Typhoons supporting the military campaign in the Netherlands and northwest Germany were actually diverted to reinforce Coastal Command’s Beaufighters and Mosquitos against U-boats fighting it out on the surface, near the Dogger Bank and Jutland. But dogfights are not convoy battles, and in the last five months
of the war only forty-six Allied merchant ships were lost worldwide (one-seventh the rate of 1942); as usual, most of those losses were of ships sailing independently rather than in convoy. By contrast, another 151 submarines were destroyed. During the war as a whole, the casualty rate among the U-boat crews was a staggering 63
percent, or 76 percent if captured sailors are included. No other major service in the struggle came close to these terrible rates of loss.
⁴⁸

The larger point was not that the German submarine forces were too few, by any measure, but that they had reemerged too late to win the critical campaign of the Central Atlantic. The striking power of their enemies kept increasing and, besieged in those closing months from both west and east, the U-boats had, like the Third Reich itself, nowhere to go. The last act for this proud service was to surrender. When British troops reached U-boat harbors such as Flensburg in May 1945, they found rows and rows of submarines either tied up alongside the jetties or partly sticking out of the water, sunk by Allied bombing or by their own crews. Many crews deliberately scuttled their submarines offshore rather than obey the order to turn themselves in. Across the oceans, German vessels steamed into Allied ports flying the black surrender flag, or into neutral harbors to be interred. It is ironic that the final order to abandon the fight and surrender peacefully, drafted by the British Admiralty on May 8, 1945, came from the man who had been appointed by Hitler as his successor: Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz.

Is the story of the Battle of the Atlantic yet another, and very famous, example of victory simply by brute force? Many historians, almost mesmerized by the staggering output of new merchant ships from the American yards after 1942 onward—overall, Anglo-American shipyards laid down 42.5 million tons of vessels between 1939 and 1945—believe that it was.
⁴⁹
This account seeks to place a caution against that assumption.

Clearly, the material advantages were in the Allies’ hands by the summer of 1943 onward, although the continued capacity of Doenitz’s submarines to sink merchantmen stayed challenging, and Horton and Slessor felt that they could never relax against this most formidable
enemy, even when the odds were becoming more favorable to them. Churchill was right when he talked about “the
proper
application of overwhelming force.” Sheer numbers meant a lot, but mass could not be turned into victory without two other vital ingredients: organization and quality. Without them, the strategic directives given by the men at the top were as nothing. (After all, Mussolini issued grand strategic orders frequently, but to what effect?) Nor could the men at the bottom of the chain of command be expected to win even a single encounter with a U-boat, not to mention a weeklong convoy battle, if they did not have the right tools for detection and destruction and if they were not properly organized so that those tools could be used effectively.

Time and again in this particular story we see how the “proper application” of resources led to endeavors that gave the frontline forces the instruments for winning, and how those victories in the Atlantic and more distant seas steadily tilted the overall campaign balance in favor of the Allies and thus toward the fulfillment of the January 1943 grand strategy. Time and again, too, we can identify where the newer applications became turning points: where a certain idea was turned into reality, which people and/or organizations were responsible, and how their breakthroughs directly affected the field of battle.

Among those many advances, four were described above: the coming of very long-range and heavily equipped bombers that could stay with the convoys all the way; centimetric radar, and the successive roles of the original Birmingham University team, the Tizard Mission, and thereafter Bell Labs and the MIT Rad Lab; the Hedgehog mortar, from a quirky schoolboy’s dream, via the Admiralty’s unusual DMWD, to its use at sea by Allied escorts; and the creation of the hard-hitting convoy support groups, which under commanders such as Gretton and Walker married the newer weaponry with the more effective stalking tactics they had developed. Not all of these participants were engineers per se, but all helped to engineer the Allied victory.

Thus was the first operational objective of the Casablanca statement achieved, although no one on the Western planning staffs was counting their winnings even at the end of 1943. The strategic air campaign against Germany had failed throughout that entire year. Plans for an invasion of France were repeatedly postponed as the difficulties and complexities of such a vast operation became more daunting, especially
to the British chiefs. The Mediterranean campaign was going far too slowly. The mid-Pacific campaign was still in its early stages, and all operations through the Southwest Pacific or Southeast Asia were painfully slow. Only in the grinding maw that was the Battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943 was there another indicator that the tide was turning against Germany. In the great expanses of the Atlantic, and in the limitless fields of western Russia and the Ukraine, there were the early hints of Goetterdaemmerung, the signs that the Second World War was swinging, after years of brutal conflict, in favor of the Grand Alliance.