Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (36 page)

Thus, for all the pre-1914 talk by Admiral Jacky Fisher and others about the army being a “projectile” fired onshore by the navy, it wasn’t clear where that missile could be fired, even if the British generals agreed to be so dispatched (which, once settled in France, they didn’t). Taking over Germany’s colonies in Africa and the Southwest Pacific was relatively uncontested, except for a disastrous amphibious operation in November 1914 by British-Indian forces against the Tanganyikan port of Tanga, which should have been a salutary lesson in how poor training, communications, equipment, and leadership can turn an imaginative strike into a fiasco.
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But lessons are salutary only if they are learned.

Alas, the lessons of Tanga were not, as was most readily demonstrated in the greatest example of a failed amphibious invasion of the twentieth century: the 1915–16 Gallipoli campaign, as notable a conflict as the Athenian assault upon Sicily, and just as disastrous. Even today, Gallipoli receives much attention, not just on account of its historical resonances (as witnessed at every ANZAC Day commemoration in Australia and New Zealand, or in the Turks’ celebration of Mustapha Kemal, later known as Ataturk) but also because of our fascination at the spectacular gap between its grand strategic purpose and its disastrous execution. Perhaps no operation other than this one better illustrates the feedback loop—in this case, a wholly unfavorable one—between what happens on the ground and at sea, and how the general course of the war can be affected by tactical mishap.
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By the single stroke of pushing a force through the Dardanelles, its principal advocate (Churchill) maintained, a tottering Russia would have its sea-lanes to the West restored and thus be kept in the war; on the other side, the supposedly fragile Turkish power (it had joined Germany in November 1914) might be pushed into collapse, and the Balkan states of Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania might be tempted out of their neutrality.

While the strategic reasoning was attractive, the operation itself was a catastrophe. It began with a purely naval attempt in March 1915 to rush the Straits; by the time the Allied fleet escaped from the Turkish-laid minefield, it had lost four capital ships (three British and one French), with a further three badly damaged—an outcome worse than the Royal Navy’s losses at Jutland a year later. After that, infantry units were assembled from various sources—French regiments in the Mediterranean, British units from Egypt, India, and the home country,
brand-new Australian and New Zealand divisions en route to the Western Front. In late April 1915, having given the Turks plenty of time to bring up reinforcements, they began to land on the craggy, ravined, thorn-covered hills of the Dardanelles Peninsula. Try as they might, the Allied forces could never get control of the higher ground and suffered appalling losses. Each side threw in more and more divisions, but the situation did not change. In December and January, in swift nighttime moves that surprised the Turks, the Allies pulled away from the beaches, admitting defeat, and sailed for home. They had lost 44,000 men and had another 97,000 wounded (more than all U.S. losses in the Korean War). Turkey’s casualties were even higher, but they had won.
⁸

The Western nations had proved to be much better at getting off a Dardanelles beach than landing on one, let alone moving on from their early lodgement to their chief inland destination. In retrospect, the reasons for this defeat became clear. The weather in the Straits was always extremely fickle, ranging from the intense heat of the summer months (without adequate water supplies, an army withers like a bush, and the sickness rate soars) to the intense storms and blizzards that poured out of the Bosphorus as winter advanced. The topography is intimidating, with steep slopes, sudden crevasses, and thornbushes everywhere. The landing areas, especially where the Australian and New Zealand units came ashore, were inhospitable and virtually impossible to move out from. Allied intelligence about what to expect was weak, the forces had not been trained for this kind of operation, and fire support from the offshore vessels was incomplete, in part because it was hard to see where the Turks were, in part because the bombarding squadrons were steadily forced away by enemy mines and submarines (three further capital ships were sunk within the next month). The landing craft that brought the men to the shore were, apart from a few prototypes, not landing craft at all. Finally, both the weaponry and the tactics of the raw units ordered to advance up this craggy terrain were simply inadequate for the job. Supervising this unfolding fiasco was a command structure that brought back memories of Sir Richard Strachan and the Earl of Chatham—except that this time the casualties and the immensity of the failure were far, far greater. In consequence, the line to Russia could not be opened, Turkey stayed in the war and fought to the end, Bulgaria
joined the Central Powers, and the other Balkan states stayed neutral. Slightly over a year later, imperial Russia began its collapse.

After Gallipoli, British interest in amphibious operations waned, not surprisingly. More and more resources were needed for the colossal struggles along the Western Front, and in consequence exotic and difficult landings from the sea were now frowned upon. At French urging, an Allied army did establish a beachhead in Salonika later in 1915, but it never really got very far from the shore for the next three years—the battalions there were aptly named the “Gardeners of Salonika.” By the next spring the French were fighting for survival in Champagne and Flanders, and therefore opposed all eastern adventures. If the British were much more tempted to campaign for the territories of the Ottoman Empire after 1915–16, it was by large-scale
land
assaults, eastward from Egypt, northward from Basra. The army leadership simply wasn’t interested in its divisions being dropped off on hostile shores; the navy was concentrating upon bottling up the High Seas Fleet in the North Sea and trying to avoid losing the Atlantic convoys’ battle against the U-boats. The Zeebrugge Raid of 1918, however well executed, was just a raid, nothing more. Nor did the American entry into the war change attitudes; millions of doughboys sailed safely into Le Havre and were marched overland to the front. During 1917–18 the U.S. Marine Corps was located far inland, fighting along the Aisne and the Meuse rivers.

In sum, the First World War discredited the notion of amphibious warfare. And when the dust of war had settled and the new global strategic landscape revealed its contours—roughly by 1923—there were obvious reasons this type of operation had few followers. To be sure, in a badly defeated and much-reduced Germany, in a badly damaged and scarcely victorious France and Italy, and in an infant Soviet Union, there were many thoughts of war, but none of them involved the projection of force across the oceans. Japan was in a liberal phase, and the military had not yet exerted its muscle—even when it moved to take Manchuria in 1931, that was a land operation that had nothing to do with attacking beaches or seizing ports. By the late 1930s things would be different, with large Japanese merchant ships carrying landing craft and vehicles during their attack upon the lower Yangtze. During this
post-1919 period, then, only two of the seven great powers gave any thought to amphibious warfare.

One of those two powers was Britain, although economic stringency and the embarrassment of Gallipoli (refought in many a wartime memoir) pushed combined operations into a dark and dusty corner; the result was the occasional small-scale training exercise, a theoretical training manual, and three prototype motor landing craft. Only the 1937 Japanese invasion of mainland China and then the 1938 crisis over Czechoslovakia would force a resumption of planning and organization. On paper, things began to improve. The Inter-Service Training and Development Centre (ISTCD) was set up, specialized landing craft and their larger carrier ships were designed, and the manual for amphibious assaults was updated. But this was all
theory
. The midlevel officers worked well together and had fine, advanced ideas, but they still lacked the tools. A large-scale exercise off Slapton Sands, Devon, in July 1938 was badly affected by near-gale conditions and ended in chaos. This galvanized the ISTCD into further serious planning, and it is to their credit that they anticipated virtually all of the practical difficulties that amphibious operations would throw up during the Second World War itself. Yet at the outbreak of that conflict, remarkably, this truly interservice unit was disbanded. The army was off to France, the air force was bombing Germany, and the navy was awaiting high-seas battle with the Kriegsmarine—so where on earth would one carry out combined operations? And who was interested? All but one of the ISTCD officers returned to their fighting units in September 1939.
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The other country interested in amphibious warfare was the United States, because of its lengthy shores, multiple harbors, and flat beaches; because of its cherished memories of the War of 1812; and because it had possessed, since the founding of the Republic, its own Marine Corps with special campaign memories (“From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli”). But the story of the U.S. Marine Corps before and during the 1941–45 war in the Pacific is more properly kept for
chapter 5
of this book, where both the similarities and differences with amphibious warfare in Europe will be apparent. This chapter will focus on the European theater alone.

The chief feature of amphibious warfare during the first three years of the Second World War was
not
the West’s implementation of their interwar plans but the extraordinary success and shock of the Axis victories across so much territory, very often coming by sea.
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Thus, for example, by all physical and technical measures, the Wehrmacht’s successful conquest of Norway in a couple of months of 1940 against a potentially vastly superior Anglo-French opposition was (and remains) one of the greatest surprise strikes in military history. Just glancing at the map—with the harbors and airfields of the entire eastern Scottish shoreline from Rosyth to Scapa Flow having been pre-positioned for decades to block a German drive to the north—makes one gasp at the Allied failure to respond to Hitler’s strike at this strategically critical possession. It is true that in the naval battles offshore, and in the Narvik fjord, Admiral Raeder’s fleet received a battering from which, perhaps, it never fully recovered but the Royal Navy simply could not deal with Luftwaffe attacks farther south, and the Anglo-French military units put ashore usually found themselves against better-positioned and better-trained Alpine troops.

Above all, then, soldiers from the sea found themselves for the first time up against hostile airpower. This was not understood by the sometimes overly historically minded Churchill, whose daily urgings for action in Norway were accompanied by a dire lack of appreciation of the confusion on the ground and the intimidating effect of German medium bombers and dive-bombers.
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Perhaps the only good thing that came out of the Norwegian fiasco was the parliamentary vote against Chamberlain’s government and the prime minister’s replacement by Churchill himself in the crowded days of May 1940. Yet even if the new, hyperactive, and imaginative war leader of the British Empire was only a few months later to watch how the Germans’ failure to gain aerial control over the Channel rendered completely impossible
their
amphibious operation, Sealion, he had not yet come to understand that the same restriction applied to the Royal Navy itself. Without secure air cover, even the most powerful warships could not operate securely off an enemy-held shore. What the Turkish minefields had done off Gallipoli,
Nazi dive-bombers could now do along all of western Europe’s coastal waters.

This lesson was rubbed in during 1941 and 1942, the years when the Empire suffered defeat after defeat. The large-scale British attempts to assist in the defense of Greece and then to hold Crete ended in calamity. Perhaps no army in the world could have stopped the horde of mechanized and armored divisions that an enraged Hitler had ordered into the Balkans in April and May 1941, bursting their way through Yugoslavia to southern Greece in an amazingly fast time. But the British, having completely intimidated the Italian fleet earlier, did have command of the sea, and Crete was an island. Without airpower, however, that mattered little. The German landing of 3,000 paratroops around Maleme on May 20 unhinged the defending battalions, and the Luftwaffe heavily punished the Royal Navy’s efforts to either reinforce the garrison or, just a couple of weeks later, pull off the exhausted troops. This time there were no Hurricanes and Spitfires present, as there had been over the skies of Dunkirk, and thus none of Churchill’s exhortations to stand firm could prevent a 250-pound bomb going through the deck of the destroyer HMS
Kashmir,
which sank in two minutes (five other destroyers and three cruisers suffered the same fate). The Royal Navy had no point defense and forward-picket warships, as the U.S. Navy was to deploy off Okinawa to blunt kamikaze attacks in the summer of 1945. A mere six months later (December 9, 1941), bombers of the elite 22nd Air Flotilla of the Japanese Naval Air Arm ripped apart the new British battleship HMS
Prince of Wales
and the battle cruiser HMS
Repulse
off the coast of Malaya in under three hours. The newer warship had been designed to handle Billy Mitchell–type claims that planes could sink battleships, and possessed 175 antiaircraft guns that could pump out 60,000 shells a minute.
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But even that was ineffective against well-executed aerial attacks.

What worked was aerial control over the shoreline and over the approaching waters. Airpower in the Second World War created winners and losers; either they had it or they didn’t. For the Norway operation the Luftwaffe deployed 800 combat aircraft and 250 transport planes, while the British had far fewer of both and the French none. For the invasion of Crete, the German air force had 500 transport planes (and 100 gliders), 280 bombers, 150 dive-bombers, 180 fighters, and 40
reconnaissance aircraft. All these planes created a logistical nightmare on the cluttered southern airfields of Greece. No doubt the British would have welcomed such a problem.
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The Japanese deployed 34 high-level bombers and 51 torpedo bombers in one single strike against the
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse;
there was no RAF land-based cover, and the Royal Navy aircraft carrier intended for the squadron, HMS
Indomitable,
had been damaged by grounding on trials. At exactly the same time as the sinking of the British capital ships, Japanese planes from Formosa knocked out almost all the modern U.S. aircraft at Luzon, thus allowing a virtually uninterrupted amphibious assault on the Philippines and farther afield.