Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (56 page)
Read Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War Online
Authors: Paul Kennedy
Tags: #Technology & Engineering, #International Relations, #General, #Political Science, #Military, #Marine & Naval, #World War II, #History
Wood poses a set of important questions, and his work has received proper respect. But the answer to them has to be no. Once the United States had been treacherously mauled at Pearl Harbor, there was no going back for the Americans, no compromise, nothing but the unconditional surrender of the aggressor nation. Japan, counting only its frontline aircraft, warships, and army divisions and seeing them all so strong, had chosen to attack a country that had ten times its economic power (in terms of GNP) but which had not yet mobilized for total war. When that country was fully energized, the defeat of Japan would come, because America had no reason to compromise. Curiously, both Yamamoto and Churchill knew that. The former talked of America as a “sleeping giant, yet to be aroused”; the prime minister fondly referred to a “gigantic industrial boiler” that was not fully stoked up.
But gigantic productive power means little in wartime unless it is harnessed and its resources are directed to the right places. Total steel output means nothing at all until it is directed toward well-designed
Essex
-class carriers. Aluminum and rubber and copper mean nothing until they are given to the B-29 construction program. Skilled workers mean nothing until Ben Moreell organizes them. Flat-bottomed Everglades boats mean nothing until the marines convert them to landing craft. Sophisticated torpedoes mean nothing until someone figures out why they are not working and fixes the problem. Long-range carrier operations mean nothing until there are long-range oil tankers. Somebody—some organization, some team given a free hand to experiment—has to come up with solutions and then put them into practice.
a
The Japanese emperor was descended from God and was not to interfere in politics. But he was also the supreme warlord, and the army and navy (theoretically) reported only to him. The services were not to be controlled by civil authorities—so the power of the cabinet and the Diet (parliament) in matters of war and peace was limited.
b
On the map, an advance upon northern Japan via Alaska and the Aleutian Islands seems a fifth option (it is, after all, the great-circle route for airliners flying from New York to Tokyo today). But the appalling and continuous storms and mists of the North Pacific would heavily curb America’s airpower advantage and make large-scale amphibious operations virtually impossible.
c
By “ease,” I mean not that the actual operations were easy but that the targets themselves were small specks in the Pacific Ocean and, once the garrisons were isolated by superior American air- and sea power, they could either surrender or die where they stood. This was not like the much more open-ended assaults upon, say, Anzio and Normandy.
d
Actually, only twenty-four carriers were completed; the other orders were canceled as the war’s end came into sight. As with the B-29s (below), and unlike the cavity magnetron, there were vast teams of engineers involved, not a single group.
e
The fabulous steel-drum musical culture of the Caribbean is a direct result of the arrival of the fuel drums, found at the outskirts of all the new airfields that the Seabees built across the islands. The gigantic Carlsen airfield on Trinidad had no fewer than eighty paved runways; one can imagine how many empty steel drums were around by the end of the war when the American planes flew away.
f
British and Dutch submarines also took their toll, chiefly in the Indian Ocean and the waters surrounding the Dutch East Indies, but the American share of the sinkings was overwhelming. During the war U.S. forces sank 2,117 Japanese merchantmen, totaling a massive 8 million tons of shipping, and 60 percent of that (5.25 million tons) was atttributed to American submarines. Anglo-Dutch subs sank another 73 merchantmen, of 211,000 tons.
g
This was not solely an American blunder. HMS
Ark Royal
’s Swordfish torpedo planes were first equipped to attack the
Bismarck
(May 1941) with acoustic torpedoes; when they failed, the Royal Navy reverted to contact torpedoes, with a stunning result.
h
LeMay and his USAF bomber commanders claimed that the B-29s also could have forced the Japanese to surrender by prolonging the mass firebombing attacks. Perhaps yes, perhaps no. The only thing that seems certain is that the starving of the Japanese nation by submarine blockade or the blasting of Japanese populations by low-altitude bombing would have caused far greater losses of life than did the A-bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The German prisoners of war marching through the streets of Moscow in July 1944.
O
n July 17, 1944, an enormous force of approximately 57,000 German soldiers—a full twenty abreast—marched along the main streets of Moscow.
The photograph of this dramatic scene must remind viewers of similar Wehrmacht units marching through the Arc de Triomphe four summers earlier. But look more closely. This was not Hitler’s dream fulfilled. It was Stalin’s calculated revenge.
When Roman emperors defeated the Germanic tribes, they brought their captives back to the imperial capital to give the applauding populace the physical proof of the great victory. So was it also in Moscow in July 1944. The 57,000 marching troops, carefully guarded on each side by Russian riflemen, were the survivors of the German Fourth Army that had been beaten, surrounded, and “
Kesselschlacht
-ed” during Operation Bagration. The German barbarians were again being displayed, in their full humiliation, before being dispatched to execution or captivity.
Masses of Japanese were never displayed in such a way because very few of them surrendered, and the American and British Commonwealth armies preferred to organize their own victory parades through Rome, Paris, Brussels, and the other captured capitals. Different expressions of triumph with a single meaning. At the June 1944 collapse of Axis perimeters in four different theaters of the war, there was no doubt about the result of this titanic conflict, and the victors could already prepare for the ceremonials of May 1945 and August 1945.
One way of beginning to understand how the Western Allies, at least, turned defeat into victory is through a detailed perusal of the diaries of Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, Churchill’s chief military aide during the Second World War. From his handling of his own army divisions’ retreat through Dunkirk after the disastrous Battle of France in June 1940 to his appointment as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, from his place in all the important Anglo-American conferences on their coalition strategy to his monitoring of how his beloved British armed forces received so many further batterings (Greece/Crete, Tobruk, Singapore) before the long hard road to recovery, Alanbrooke has provided later generations with a candid account of how the war slowly turned from Axis triumph to Allied victory. When in 1957 and 1959 the patriotic historian Sir Arthur Bryant produced his two-volume edited version of those diaries—titled
The Turn of the Tide 1939–1943
and
Triumph in the West 1943–1945
—the reader could already appreciate Alanbrooke’s intellectual powers and capacity for wide-ranging though acerbic judgments.
1
But it was not until the more extensive and even more candid (because unexpurgated) edition of
War Diaries 1939–1945
appeared in 2001 that one gained a fuller grasp, naturally from Alanbrooke’s own perspective, of the many wearying demands upon his time: handling the army, handling his fellow British Chiefs, handling the Americans, and above all handling his own mercurial, difficult, and brilliant War Lord, Churchill.
2
Masters and commanders, indeed.
3
Yet what is also striking about the diaries is the extent to which Alanbrooke so frequently delves below the higher politics of the war to wonder about whether the machinery and personnel for an eventual victory over the Axis were good enough. Perhaps it was the experiences of Dunkirk and Crete that haunted his mind, for he clearly worried each day about whether the middle levels of the British Empire’s sprawling machine could withstand the terrifying demands placed upon it, and whether the Grand Alliance could withstand further setbacks. His concerns (though never defeatist) turned out to be absolutely invaluable. They restrained Churchill from bizarre ideas about a large-scale invasion of northern Norway, they tempered the unrealistic American desire to invade France in 1943, and, above all, they established a ruthlessly pragmatic litmus test for all proposed new operations: “Where will it be? Can it be done? Who will do it? Are there enough forces, equipment, training?” Alanbrooke, though he would have hated the comparison, had a very Leninist approach to things—his “who, whom” practicality was of the essence.
As it turned out, all that had to be done was done, in due fulfillment of the Casablanca operational directives, albeit at heavy cost and with many a setback in every theater of the war. In the middle of fighting in so many regions of the globe, on land, at sea, and in the air, it must have been hard to recognize when the tide was turning, when the setbacks were fewer and the victories more plain. It is noteworthy that not until July 25, 1943—as Mussolini surrendered, the Red Army blasted its way around Orel, and Patton took Palermo—could Alanbrooke allow in his private nighttime diary that there might have come about “at least a change-over from ‘the end of the beginning’ to ‘the beginning of the end.’ ”
4
Yet for another full year he would feel deep unease about the setbacks in Italy, the defeats in Burma, the ineffectiveness of the bombing campaigns, and the planned invasion of France at what he believed might be a premature moment. Like another cautious realist, Eisenhower (see
this page
), he worried to the last minute that
the Normandy operation could turn out to be a horrible, massive disaster. Thus in June 1944 it was an emotional moment for Alanbrooke to stand again on the French soil from which he and his divisions in the BEF had been expelled four years earlier.
5
By then, even this cautious, acerbic, tough-minded man could see that the end of the struggle was in sight.
This awful war would claim many more military and civilian victims between then and August 1945. Still, it is time now to turn to some general reflections of how and when and why the tide changed in the five great campaigns analyzed above. Each chapter has tried to recapture how it looked to the problem solvers without assuming that the tide would turn. Now we can look back at the whole.
No single or monocausal argument can be drawn from the analysis. If an overall judgment had to be made, it would be to caution against our instinctive human desire to simplify. Societies are highly complex organisms. Wars are complex endeavors. Military systems and armed services have millions of moving parts, as do modern economies. They also operate at many levels. Thus while critical factors such as leadership, morale, and national and ideological fervor in wartime are definitely important, they are intangible rather than measurable, and any discussion of the “how” factor cannot remain at that level. And each year, amazingly, there appear new archival sources, alongside fresh insights, controversies, and approaches, that should compel us to rethink earlier assumptions.
A lot of scholars tend to divide themselves into either “lumpers” or “splitters”—those who see a single overriding cause for what goes on, and those who see only confusion or multitudinous parts.
6
The second usually appears in some general or textbook form (that is, everything is included), the former in some tunnel-vision work with a sensationalist title (“the weapon that won the war”). Neither is very satisfactory. Surely it is possible to offer an analysis of how the tide of the Second World War turned in the Allies’ favor without either claiming a single reason or offering a sanitized narrative in which everything is mentioned. It makes sense to think that some select parts of the tale have greater explanatory power than others. In this analysis of the Allies’ gaining dominance in the war during the central eighteen months between January 1943 and June-July 1944, the selective process has been
pursued. Not all contributions to the Allied victory count as equal. The claims of certain new methods, battles, individuals, and organizations as having been vital for victory have to be demonstrated.