The Super Summary of World History (74 page)

Eastern Front 1942 and 1943—Advance to the Black Sea from Stalingrad

War In The Atlantic

January
1942
and
beyond

In January 1942, Admiral Donitz sent his U-boats west to attack shipping along the Atlantic seaboard of the wholly unprepared United States. Only a few submarines were available for this task, and the long voyage was a difficult mission for the Germans. The German submariners packed every inch of their undersea boats with food and supplies. To assist the assault, the Germans thought up special types of submarines called
Mulch
Cows
that carried supplies to the central Atlantic and resupplied the submarines on station, thereby allowing them to remain in the critical war zone much longer.
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This assault on US shipping in American home waters was a phenomenal success. US merchant ships sailed alone,
no
convoys
, and often sailed at night while US cities continued to burn their lights, creating perfect silhouette targets for the Germans. Often, the subs attacked at night on the surface using deck guns rather than the more valuable and limited torpedoes.
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The British hounded the United States to adopt the convoy system, which Admiral King, commander of the US Navy, refused to do in spite of the fact the US Navy knew from WWI that convoys worked.
Three
hundred
and
ninety-seven
(
397
) cargo ships hit the ocean bottom between January and June of 1942. This was a naval and logistics disaster.
Admiral
Earnest
King
was the man
solely
responsible
for the failure to adopt convoys, a
known
remedy
for submarine attacks. As merchant ships sailing along the US Atlantic coast plunged to the ocean floor, King steadfastly maintained that he did not have enough escorts for convoy protection and stated that a weakly protected convoy was worse than no convoy.
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King’s argument was pure rubbish. The English and the US had the experience and proof that
convoys
alone
(without
escorts)
cut
shipping
losses
tremendously
. Every naval officer in WWI, in both the Royal and the US Navy, knew these facts. This is so because the submarine has problems locating ships. Locating one ship is about as hard as locating an entire convoy, because the convoy does not take up much more sea space. By sending ships out singly, it gives the submarine many targets. By sending out convoys the submarine has fewer targets because they are all concentrated in one relatively small area. After adopting convoys enemy submarines look at a lot of empty sea. Admiral King had to know this, but
why
did
he
block
effective
action
while
this
Atlantic
slaughter
was
going
on?
There is no answer to this question. There is no excuse for failing and refusing to adopt convoys immediately to prevent the loss of so many vital cargo ships and their crews. This situation grew so critical that General Marshall, the general in charge of the entire war effort, asked President Roosevelt to order Admiral King to start using convoys. Apparently, it never came to that because a strongly worded letter from Marshall to King turned the tide. King adopted convoys. Nonetheless, King’s actions cost the Allies dearly in lives and material.

All this causes one to wonder, how many men does a leader get to needlessly slaughter before being relieved of command? Admiral King slaughtered many, Generals MacArthur and Clark many more, and the Generals of World War I on the Allied side hundreds of thousands more. Somehow, these “leaders” literally get away with murder. It is easy to understand how ruthless dictators such as Hitler and Stalin can throw away lives, but how can military leaders of democracies get away with such dim-witted brutality?

As 1943 began the Battle of the Atlantic came to a head. Admiral
Max
Horton
determined he could protect the convoys from German wolf packs, and he was ready to prove it.
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The turning point came in April and May of 1943 with convoy ONS-5 that was made up of forty-three merchant ships. ONS-5 was attacked by thirty U-boats in a coordinated wolf pack assault. After the battle’s end thirteen merchant ships were gone, but six U-boats were lost. Such losses were unacceptable to Donitz, but it would get even worse for the U-boats. In May of 1943 these Allied efforts paid off with the sinking of thirty German submarines in one month with the corresponding loss of only a few Allied cargo ships. Admiral Donitz would continue to send his submarines out to fight, but these would increasingly become suicide missions. The German submarine branch suffered a higher percentage loss rate than any branch of any other service of any warring nation (over 70 percent).

Some argue the German submarines failed as a strategic threat because the vast majority of supplies and troops crossed the Atlantic without a problem (about 98 percent), and the Germans never came close to sinking even the tonnage they calculated in 1939 as necessary to win the war at sea. However, this overlooks one important point: the
Allies
themselves
at
the
Casablanca
Conference
designated
the
defeat
of
the
German
submarines
as
the
number
1
priority
.
Thus, the submarines were a strategic threat because the leaders of the Allied nations thought so. The U-boat defeat in 1943 is traceable to the Allied decision assigning the Atlantic victory top priority, followed by the dedication of vast resources to achieve the goal. Germany’s top priorities vacillated with Hitler’s whim, and he failed to assign a high priority to the submarine fleet and its Atlantic struggle. Because the Allies decided to defeat the submarines first and the Germans adopted dissimilar priorities, there were far different end results. These decisions, one to give the fight top priority and the other to give the fight a much lower priority, shows what a difference alternate decisions can make. Germany’s submarines failed in 1943 because of the different priorities set by the two warring sides.

The Allied commanders foresaw the potential for the submarines to restrict the flow of supplies to England. They realized the submarine threat could prevent the assets of the United States from reaching Europe in quantity.
The
projection
of
US
power
across
the
Atlantic
was
the
most
important
logistic
factor
for
winning
the
war
in
Western
Europe.
Knowing the submarines could impair this essential effort, their defeat won top priority.
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North Africa

Allied
Victory—1943

As Rommel retreated toward Tunisia after El Alamein, American and English landed on the west coast of Africa in Morocco, and began moving east, along with French forces that joined the Allies. The German and Italian formations were soon crushed, and in
May
of
1943
the Axis force in Africa capitulated. The conquest of North Africa was an epic victory. The scale of the conquest was beyond all expectations. Along with the capture of approximately
275,000
Axis soldiers, one-half of which were German, (equal to10 divisions or more, which is on a par with the debacle at Stalingrad in January 1943) the Western Allies had captured the initiative in the Mediterranean. Once the Axis lost the strategic initiative in the West their lack of manpower began to damage their ability to resist the next Allied moves. Everything was turning in favor of the Allies.
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Sicily and Italy

The Western Allies decided Sicily, a large island near the boot of Italy, was their next Mediterranean objective. It was an unpopular decision in the American military. The British, at the Casablanca Conference, convinced President Roosevelt that action was required in the Mediterranean; however, American military commanders wanted to invade the continent (France) at once. The English successfully argued that American strategy was much too ambitious; moreover, while the Allies built up their forces they could move against what Churchill called the “soft underbelly of Europe.” Good sounding phrase, but a total misconception. Anyone looking at a map could easily tell the soft underbelly was really a tough old gut. Finding good ground for defense is not always easy, but here in Southern Europe the ground was tailor made for defensive fighting. Why Churchill failed to recognize this is often debated, and it is another reason the Americans thought he was more interested in protecting the British Empire than winning the war quickly.

Figure 62 Invasion of Italy 1943

The American military voiced at least two objections to invading Sicily: First, Sicily and Italy’s terrain were ideal for defense. There were rugged mountains throughout, the river valleys were steep, the rivers were fast flowing, and they cut across the line of advance. Second, such an undertaking was secondary to the goal of destroying the German Army. Americans believed, as US Grant demonstrated against Lee in the American Civil War, the key to victory was the destruction of the enemy army (Clausewitz would have agreed). Britain wanted to whittle down the Nazi army before an all or nothing confrontation.

US military experts distrusted Churchill, whom they thought might be more interested in protecting the English empire than in defeating Germany. Churchill, for his part, was already worrying about the postwar world and the escalating power of the USSR. He was trying to convince the Americans that a move through the Balkans (the area north of Greece) might cut off the Soviet advance in that area preserving more free territory in Europe.

The Americans refused to wait around worrying about postwar Europe. They wanted to engage the Nazis, defeat them as soon as possible, and then go home. In the event, the Americans folded at Casablanca because Roosevelt insisted the United States immediately get into the ground action and stay in it. Waiting around to build up forces in England for six months to a year, while doing little else, was political suicide. Thus, the United States and England invaded Sicily after the conquest of North Africa and then moved on to Italy. Originally, the invasion agreement only included Sicily with the decision on Italy coming later. However, the conquest of Sicily went faster than expected making the invasion of Italy automatic.

The invasion of Sicily went well considering how new everyone was at massive amphibious operations. The true problem with the capture of Sicily was the
escape
of
the
Axis
divisions
across the strait to Italy with their supplies and equipment. With the Allies having local air control and total control of the sea allowing the Axis escape was a paramount blunder. To this day it is unclear how the Allies allowed this to happen. It was crucial to trap and destroy the Axis armies on Sicily.
Apparently,
the
capture
of
the
German
and
Italian
armies
on
Sicily
was
not
foreseen
or
planned.
The Germans who escaped from Sicily played key roles in holding up the Allied advance up the Italian boot.
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