Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (2 page)

But the teaching of grand strategy has, by its very nature, to address strategy and politics from the top. Therefore, what transpires at the middle level, or the level of the practical implementation of those policies, is often taken for granted. Great world leaders order something to be done, and lo, it is accomplished; or lo, it stumbles. We rarely inquire deeply into the mechanics and dynamics of strategic success and failure, yet it is a very important realm of inquiry, though still rather neglected.
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To give but a few examples: historians of Europe know that for a staggering eighty years, Philip II of Spain and his successors sought to quell the Dutch Protestant Revolt, far to the north of Madrid and separated by Europe’s many rivers and mountain chains, but we rarely inquire into just how that military campaign was pursued so successfully and impressively along the “Spanish Road.” Scholars know also that the Elizabethan navy outmaneuvered and outshot the far larger Spanish Armada of 1588, but rarely are they aware that only Sir John Hawkins’s drastic redesign of the queen’s galleons a decade earlier gave those vessels the necessary speed and firepower to do just that. The astounding growth of the British Empire in the course of the great eighteenth-century
wars is recorded in many a book, but usually without explaining the degree to which it was financed by the merchants of Amsterdam and other European capital centers. When Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914, historians will tell us that that same empire was put immediately upon military alert across the globe, but they say little of the astonishing undersea cable communication system that executed that order.
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Grand strategists, leaders and professors alike, take a lot of things for granted.

By the same token, historians of the Second World War also know that in January 1943, following the successful North African landings, Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff met at Casablanca to decide upon the future ordering of the war; and that from those intense debates emerged both the political and the operational guidelines to future Anglo-American grand strategy. Politically, the enemy would have to offer unconditional surrender. With Germany recognized as the most formidable of their enemies, victory in Europe would make the first claim upon resources, but Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King ensured that this ruling should not exclude comeback operations in the Pacific and Far East at the same time, however ambitious that may have seemed. The Russian ally would have to be given all possible help in resisting the Nazi blitzkrieg, even if that help couldn’t include direct battlefield assistance on the Eastern Front. More immediately, the Western navies, air forces, and armies would have to figure out how to achieve their triple operational mission: (1) win control of the Atlantic sea-lanes, so that the convoys to Britain could get through safely; (2) attain command of the air over all of west-central Europe, so that the United Kingdom could act not only as the launching pad for the invasion of the continent but also as the platform for the systematic aerial destruction of the Third Reich; and (3) force their way across Axis-held beaches and carry the fight to the European heartland. With all this agreed upon, the U.S. president and British prime minister could pose for the conference photographs, approve these strategic directives, and fly home.
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We also know that, little more than a year later, all of those operational aims were either accomplished or close to being realized (the “unconditional surrender” part would take another year). North Africa was taken, then Sicily, then all of Italy. The policy of unconditional surrender
was maintained, except for pulling Mussolini’s collapsing empire out of the war and neutralizing Italy. The “Germany first” principle was kept intact, and, as hoped, the United States showed that it was also able to commit such enormous military resources to the war in the Pacific that Japan’s surrender followed a mere three months after the fall of the Third Reich. The Atlantic sea-lanes were made safe. Aerial dominance over Europe was established, and with it came the increased strategic bombing campaign against German industry, cities, and people. Russia was given further aid, though its own fortitude and resources were by far the greatest reason for its ultimate victory on the Eastern Front. American forces surged across the Pacific. France was finally invaded in June 1944, and less than a year later the Allied armies met along the Elbe River to celebrate their mutual, hard-fought victory in Europe. What was ordained at Casablanca had really come about. This book attempts to explain how and why.

As so often, appearances are misleading. No straight causal line connects the confident Casablanca statement of Allied war strategies and their realization. For the plain truth was that at the beginning of 1943 the Grand Alliance was in no position to carry out these declared aims. Indeed, in many of the fields of war, and especially in the critical struggles for command of the sea and command of the air, things deteriorated in the months following the Casablanca conference. The ultimate wartime victory of 1945 has all but erased this truth, much as the final victories over Philip II of Spain and Napoleon tended to obscure how difficult things seemed—and were—for their opponents in the middle years of those conflicts.

In the battle for control of the Atlantic sea-lanes, the campaign that Churchill confessed gave him more cause for worry than any other during the entire war, merchant ship losses intensified in the months after Casablanca. In March 1943, for example, Admiral Karl Doenitz’s U-boats sank 108 Allied vessels totaling 627,000 tons, a rate of loss that horrified the Admiralty’s planners, especially as they knew they would face even larger numbers of German submarines in the summer ahead. Thus, far from the convoys easily providing massive amounts of men and munitions for a second front, there were fears of Britain not getting
enough commercial bunker fuel to survive. Unless and until this danger was beaten off, there could be no question of an invasion of Europe.

As 1943 unfolded, things also went from bad to worse in the Allied strategic bombing campaign of Germany. Under Albert Speer’s extraordinary reorganization of German war industries, the Luftwaffe doubled its number of night fighters. Air Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris’s famous thousand-bomber raids dealt a few dramatic blows (Cologne, Hamburg) to German industry, but so many of the RAF’s bombers were destroyed when they moved on to attack more distant Berlin that the force came to the brink of paralysis. In the sixteen massive aerial attacks upon the Nazi capital between November 1943 and March 1944, Bomber Command lost 1,047 planes and sustained damage to another 1,682. The daylight raids of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) led to an even higher attrition rate per operation. In the famous raid of October 14, 1943, for example, 60 of the 291 Flying Fortresses attacking the vital ball-bearing plants at Schweinfurt were shot down and a further 138 were damaged. Both air forces had to wrestle with the blunt fact that the interwar saying “The bomber will always get through” was wrong. In consequence, Allied command of the air had become as illusory as command of the sea. But without both, the defeat of Germany was impossible.

In any case, the Western Allies hadn’t worked out how to achieve their third military task—how to land on an enemy-held coastline possessing the defensive capacities of the “Atlantic Wall,” how to repel the inevitable and massive Wehrmacht armored counterattacks against the bridgeheads, and how to push two to three million soldiers from the Channel beaches to the heart of Germany. The North African landings that had preceded Casablanca were relatively easy, since the Vichy French naval and political opposition there was negligible, which perhaps ironically contributed to the general confidence exuded by Roosevelt and Churchill at Casablanca (less so by canny practitioners such as Alanbrooke and Dwight Eisenhower). But cracking the German fortifications along the Atlantic shore was a totally different matter, as the Chiefs of Staff must have known, since the one exploratory venture to test those defenses—the catastrophic Dieppe Raid of August 1942—resulted in the death or capture of the majority of Canadian troops deployed. In consequence, the conclusion drawn by Allied planners
from that raid was that it would be virtually impossible to take a well-defended enemy harbor. But if that was the case, where exactly could one land millions of men and thousands of ships? On an open beach, battered by the usual Atlantic storms? That also seemed impractical. So how, then, was the West successfully to invade France—or, for that matter, to invade Japan amid turbulent Pacific tides?

The challenge of defeating German counterattacks upon the beachheads brings up a further large question: how does one stop a blitzkrieg? For particular historical and operational/technical reasons, the German armed services in the late 1930s and early 1940s had hit upon a form of mixed-weapons warfare (shock troops, mobile small arms, motorized infantry units, tanks, tactical support aircraft) that swiftly carved through their opponents’ defenses. The Polish, Belgian, French, Danish, Norwegian, Yugoslav, and Greek armies were rent asunder. In 1940–41 the proud British Army was tumbled out of Europe (Norway, France and Belgium, Greece and Crete) in a fashion that had not happened since Mary Tudor lost Calais.

By the time of the Casablanca conference, there was at least some good news regarding this form of combat. At the far western borders of Cairo, around El Alamein, British-led armies had stopped the charismatic General Erwin Rommel’s advance, damaged his most important military units, and begun to roll back the German forces along the North African shores. At almost the same time, the Red Army’s counteroffensive in the southern sector of the Eastern Front had mired the brutal and imposing German offensive in Stalingrad, retaken that city house by house, and captured General Friedrich Paulus’s entire Sixth Army.

Yet, shocked by these twin defeats on land, the Third Reich threw off its complacency and reorganized itself. Its armaments production in 1943 was well over twice that of 1941; its output of aircraft in that earlier year had been about half of Britain’s, but by 1943 it was surging ahead again. The various German armed services were receiving better aircraft, better tanks, better submarines. Hitler’s worried reaction to the Anglo-American landings in North Africa (November 8, 1942) was to seize control of all of southern (Vichy) France and pour crack divisions into Tunisia. As the Allied leaders were flying home from Casablanca, Rommel’s newly arrived forces were punishing the inexperienced U.S.
units in the Kasserine Pass. After Stalingrad the Red Army’s frontline forces had run out of steam, and as early as February and March 1943, Erich von Manstein’s reinforced panzer armies had blunted the Russians’ offensive, had retaken Kharkov, and were assembling a vast armored force for their own summer assault toward Kursk. If, in addition, Berlin really could continue to interrupt the Atlantic convoys, destroy the Western aerial offensive, and deny the Anglo-American armies entry into France, then presumably it could concentrate more of its massive forces on the Eastern Front, until perhaps even Joseph Stalin would admit a compromise settlement.

Another major operational challenge was the task of ensuring the defeat of Japan. This was clearly going to be an American enterprise, if not exclusively then overwhelmingly so. To be sure, British and British-Indian troops would attempt the recovery of Burma, Thailand, and Malaya, and Australian divisions would join Douglas MacArthur in taking New Guinea and pushing on to the Philippines. Yet the most sensible operational route was actually to avoid the jungles of New Guinea, Burma, and Indochina and instead to hop across the Central Pacific directly westward from Hawaii to the Philippines, then China, then Japan. Innovative U.S. officers had toyed with this “War Plan Orange” throughout the interwar years, and on paper it seemed most promising; it was, after all, the only campaign plan that didn’t have to be tossed away or severely amended in consequence of the Axis’s great successes of 1939–42.

The problem once again, as in the case of invading France, was always the practical one. How exactly did one land on a coral atoll, its inshore waters strewn with mines and obstacles, the beaches infested with dynamited booby traps, the enemy holed up in deep bunkers? As late as November 1943, Central Pacific Command began its long-awaited offensive with an assault in overwhelming force against the Japanese garrison holding Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands. The result was not in doubt, because Imperial General Headquarters had decided that the Gilberts lay outside its “absolute national defense sphere” in the Pacific, and the garrison numbered a mere 3,000 men, but the losses among the American marines stranded under heavy fire on the outlying coral reefs shocked the public back home. Whichever way one came
across the Pacific, the indicators were grim. It was all very well for General MacArthur, with his flair for publicity, to promise “I shall return” to the Philippines when he left early in 1942, but the Japanese garrison in those islands now totaled 270,000 men, none of whom would surrender. How long, then, would it take to get to Japan’s own shores? Five years? And at what cost, if the enemy garrisons in the Philippines were twenty or fifty times as large as those on Tarawa?

There was, then, a truly daunting list of difficulties to be overcome by the Grand Alliance, a list made all the more formidable because almost all of these challenges were not fully separate but depended upon gains being made elsewhere. Hopping across the Pacific islands, for example, first required gaining command of the sea, and that in turn depended upon command of the air, and then upon building giant bases on top of meager coral islands—and a great disaster in the Atlantic or Europe would have produced urgent calls for a relocation of U.S. resources from the Pacific to those theaters instead (and a furious row among the Chiefs of Staff). Invading France was impossible until the German U-boat menace to the Atlantic convoys had been defeated. Only when Allied shipyards could produce enough of the new, odd-looking assault vessels to surmount obstacles and fight their way onshore could a maritime invasion take place in any theater. Although Stalin would never admit it, the Red Army’s successes in the field were helped significantly by the fact that the Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign compelled Germany to allocate enormous amounts of manpower to the antiaircraft, civil control, and emergency rebuilding programs required to keep the Third Reich in action. The vital Dodge and Studebaker trucks, the workhorses for the Soviet divisions in their westward advance, could not be transported from America to Russia unless maritime lines of communication were preserved by the Royal Navy. Conversely, it is difficult to see how the Anglo-American armies in the west could have made much progress at all had not scores of battle-hardened Wehrmacht divisions been pinned down (and decimated) in the east. In short, whereas one advantage gained by the Allies could help campaign(s) elsewhere, a serious defeat could damage the chances of the other aims being achieved.