Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (5 page)

The organizational story on the Allied side was a lot less clear-cut. During the years of American neutrality, it actually had been simpler. Ensuring command of the seas was the traditional responsibility of the Admiralty in Whitehall, which then devolved defense of the Atlantic convoys to a particular authority, the Western Approaches Command, based in Liverpool. By the time our analysis begins, its chief was the formidable Admiral Sir Max Horton, like Doenitz a highly experienced submarine commander twenty-five years previously. The much smaller Royal Canadian Navy, operating out of ports such as St. John’s and Halifax, could, as before, fit under what was essentially a British imperial command structure. This was certainly not true of the U.S. Navy when it entered the conflict in December 1941. Admiral King was known for his keen sensitivities toward the British, and while it might be thought that the United States had so much to do in the gigantic
Pacific War that it might find it agreeable simply to leave some of its warships to operate under an Anglo-Canadian command structure in the Atlantic, this did not happen easily. In any case, for much of 1942 the greatest U-boat challenge had occurred in America’s own waters, off its eastern seaboard, and further south, in the Caribbean routes; the U.S. Navy clearly had to be centrally involved here. So, for all those Naval War College lectures about the benefits of having an integrated “command of the sea,” the Allied navies had decided to settle for three zones with identified handover points.

This position improved significantly in early March 1943 following the Atlantic Convoy Conference in Washington. What could have been a serious crisis among the Allies—King for a while wanted to withdraw
all
U.S. warships from the North Atlantic in order to protect the military supply routes to American forces fighting in Tunisia—ended in a sensible compromise. The U.S. Navy would have primary responsibility for the convoys to Gibraltar and North Africa and would also protect all Caribbean convoys, while the British and Canadian navies assumed responsibility for the major routes to the United Kingdom. More important still was that King agreed to lend some naval forces (including a new escort carrier) to the North Atlantic theater, and did not oppose increasing the numbers of squadrons of very long-range B-24 aircraft to RAF Coastal Command and to the fast-growing but overstretched Royal Canadian Air Force. The last additions, as we shall see, came just in time.

The necessarily important factor of intelligence and counterintelligence fitted well into these larger command structures. Older forms of gaining information about the enemy’s forces and possible intentions still operated in this war, and the British in particular used aerial reconnaissance, reports from their agents and anti-German resistance movements, and technical analysis of captured weapons systems to add to their miscellany of acquired knowledge. Both sides also developed some very sophisticated bureaus of operational research, whose analysts studied runs of data to figure out how best to utilize one’s own resources and dilute the foe’s. But it was in the 1939–45 struggles that signals intelligence, or “sigint,” took a major lead over human intelligence, or “humint,” in the great game of knowing one’s enemy. Nowhere did this seem more important than in the Battle of the Atlantic. For the U-boats
to know where the convoys were, or for the Allied navies to glean the disposition of the U-boats, made an utterly critical difference. Small wonder that the code breakers at Bletchley Park included a substantial naval intelligence section reporting directly to the Admiralty, or that Doenitz relied so heavily upon his invaluable B-Dienst.

Nonetheless, the warding off of a submarine attack and the destruction of the attackers had to be done through technology, that is, by defensive and offensive weapons platforms. It was true, obviously, in all theaters of war and at all times, but it is astonishing how much the exigencies of total war, and the terrible importance of winning the Battle of the Atlantic to both sides, led in the single year of 1943 to a staggering increase in the number of new ways of detecting an enemy and of deploying new weapons to kill him. This conflict was, more than any other battle for the seas, a scientists’ war.

But the acquisition of newer technologies to detect and beat off, or to pursue and destroy, called in turn for their most efficient application—for significant improvements in tactics and training, both by individual submarines, surface escorts, and aircraft and (especially) by groups of them working together. Here the U-boats had an early advantage. They had all-volunteer crews, with some of their commanders remarkably young yet very capable, and saw themselves as an elite branch. They had a single operational task—to sink, and keep sinking, Allied merchantmen, and then avoid being sunk themselves. For a long time they enjoyed the tactical benefit of Doenitz’s switching their mode of attack to nighttime surface encounters. They also possessed a very robust wireless communications system, so if one U-boat spotted a convoy, the other members of the wolf pack would very swiftly know about it and adjust their locations accordingly. Finally, the targets in question were usually very slow-moving and thus offered repeated chances for attack, so even if the submarines waited until the convoys were in the mid-Atlantic air gap, they still had lots of time.

Against such a strong hand the Allies had initially very few trumps. What limited number of aircraft carriers the Royal Navy possessed (often as few as only three or four) had to be deployed for aerial cover of the battle fleets and the Mediterranean convoys. Those same high-profile tasks also consumed the energies of the flotillas of the speedy fleet destroyers. The convoys were thus protected by a tiny group of
smaller, slower, and often nearly obsolete craft, lacking aerial protection in the middle stretches, most of them lacking detection equipment, and armed with what were essentially weapons of the First World War. A U-boat could actually outrun most of the early Allied escorts, at least on the surface, if its commander was willing to accept the risk of being spotted—though of course neither hunter nor hunted could go at full speed in the massive Atlantic storms. Much-improved equipment was promised, and some was in the pipeline, but could it be gotten to Liverpool and Halifax and the air squadrons in time?

Two other inestimably important factors at play in battles of such strain, anxiety, and loss as the convoy shoot-outs were leadership and morale. As we shall see below, the element of morale did turn significantly to one side’s favor later in the Atlantic campaign, after mid-1943, but on the whole the bodies of combatants were fairly evenly matched in this dimension. Doenitz and Horton were worthy opponents, and the latter received a great reinforcement when Air Marshal Sir John Slessor took over as C in C of RAF Coastal Command in February 1943: Slessor was dedicated to defeating the U-boats and a firm advocate of air-sea cooperation even if it involved frequent fights with Harris at Bomber Command over the allocation of planes. Doenitz had an extremely competent deputy, Rear Admiral Godt, for the day-to-day management of the U-boats, though very few middle-ranking staff. An enormous responsibility was thus placed upon the U-boat commanders themselves, many of whom became legends, not unlike the First World War fighter aces, with an instinct for both killing and surviving despite the very high loss rate—until the strain became too great. As we shall see, there was little evidence that Allied morale, whether of captains or crews, Royal Navy personnel or merchant sailors, ever sagged even when losses and general conditions were at their worst. Moreover, the Western Allies simply possessed far more trained officers of the captain and commander rank, not to mention naval reserve officers who could be thrown into any breach.

The remaining factor has to be that of relative force strengths and endurance. It was not just the measure of crews’ physical and mental stamina during a fourteen-day convoy struggle; it was also a matter of sustaining each side’s campaign through reinforcement, sending fresh numbers to replace those lost, and steadily building up the fighting
punch of one’s service. This was total, industrialized war, measured most clearly by the flows of new U-boats vis-à-vis Allied warships and aircraft, of merchant vessels, and of fresh crews. Here again, one might have assumed that by early 1943 the odds were tilting in Doenitz’s favor; certainly the steady buildup in U-boat numbers pointed to that conclusion. Moreover, while German shipbuilding production could concentrate ever more narrowly on submarines and lighter attack craft (E-boats), British yards were being stretched to produce light fleet carriers for future Far East operations, newer classes of cruisers and destroyers, landing gear, and the Royal Navy’s own submarines. Had it not been for the stupendous gearing up of American war industries as 1942 unfolded into 1943, this could have been a very one-sided production battle. In any event, at the time of Casablanca no one on the Allied side was very cheery about how the naval odds looked in the Atlantic.

As Hitler’s attack upon Poland in September 1939 led to the Anglo-French declarations of war, the strategic situation in the Atlantic basin and across western Europe was eerily similar to that of a quarter century earlier, when the Entente Cordiale and its empires had gone to war in response to Germany’s invasion of Belgium. A small British Expeditionary Force (BEF) once again crossed the Channel to stand with the French armies. The other countries of Europe remained neutral, as did the United States, due to congressional fiat. Most of the British dominions (that is, Australia, Canada, Newfoundland, New Zealand, and South Africa, but not, unhappily, de Valera’s Eire) joined the struggle, as did the dependent parts of the Anglo-French empires. The Royal Navy assembled its surface fleets at Scapa Flow and Dover to close the two egresses from the North Sea, except of course to a small number of German commerce raiders already in the wider oceans. The broad impression that history was indeed repeating itself was fully captured, symbolically and physically, by Churchill’s return to the revered cabinet position of First Lord of the Admiralty, the position he had occupied in 1914. “Winston is back!” went out the message to the fleet.

The strategic position at sea could not have been worse for the German
navy, headed by Raeder. His service did indeed have plans (the famous Z Plan) for a massive transoceanic battle fleet, with giant battleships, aircraft carriers, and all, but even Nazi Germany’s formidable production capacities could not produce such a force—or even a quarter of it—by 1939. Another four or five years at least were needed, and Raeder had believed the Fuehrer would keep out of a major war for that long. He, like a lot of Wehrmacht generals, was badly mistaken. The German navy thus went to war with a force completely inadequate to match the Allied navies, with a service starved of the resources allocated to the German army and the Luftwaffe. Even its U-boat arm was weak, small in numbers, short in range, and forced to go all the way around northern Scotland to reach the broad Atlantic. The overall odds looked hopeless.

Those odds changed, in the most dramatic ways possible, during May and June 1940. The collapse of France and Belgium, and the escape of the battered BEF through Dunkirk, meant there was no longer a Western Front. Worse still, the Luftwaffe could now operate against England out of forward bases in Pas-de-Calais, while the German navy could steam in and out of Brest and the Gironde. To compound these disasters, there was the staggeringly fast Nazi takeover of the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway, with all the consequent strategic and geopolitical implications. Now all the waters beyond the Channel and North Sea were open to German surface ships and submarines. The odds tilted further when Mussolini, cagily neutral in September 1939, opportunistically declared war on the British Empire and a falling France on June 10, 1940. An entire new navy, including one of the world’s largest fleets of submarines, entered the war on Berlin’s side, just as most French warships were abandoning hostilities and anchoring in Toulon and the North African ports.

The result was that—after the Battle of Britain and the survival of the island nation itself in 1940—the Battle of the Atlantic became the center of the western struggle. Once the immediate German invasion threat diminished, the various British countermoves—such as the maritime relief of Gibraltar, Malta, and Cairo, the preservation of the Cape routes to the East, the military buildups (including dominion and empire forces) in Egypt, Iraq, and India, and the development of the early strategic bombing offensive against the Third Reich—were, while critically
important, impossible to sustain unless a constant flow of foodstuffs, fuel, and munitions reached the home islands from across the seas and new British divisions and weaponry were carried from the home islands to Africa and India. That simple strategic fact did not change when Germany attacked the USSR in June 1941, or when Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and Hitler’s reckless declaration of war against the United States turned a European war into a global conflict. Indeed, the importance of winning the Battle of the Atlantic was only reinforced by the Anglo-American decision to build up a force of millions of men in the United Kingdom for the future invasion of western Europe.

Thus the struggle to defend the sea-lanes simply to preserve the British Isles now became a gigantic fight by the Allied navies as the first step in ensuring Germany and Italy’s unconditional surrender. Fortunately for the British, the German surface threat could never reach full fruition (just as Raeder had warned). The sinking of the giant battleship
Bismarck
in May 1941 eliminated the greatest single danger, and the “Channel Dash” of the other German heavy ships from Brest back to Germany in February 1942, though highly embarrassing to the Royal Navy’s pride, put those warships once again into constricted waters, to be continually screened by the Home Fleet at Scapa and bombed repeatedly by the Royal Air Force. Futile and rather halfhearted sallies against Arctic convoys offered no challenge to the Allies’ command of the sea. Only the submarines could do that.