Even these statistics do not fully capture the shock that this “merry massacre,” as Samuel Eliot Morison has called it, exerted on those who witnessed it—bathers on southern beaches watching as tankers burned within sight of shore, merchant crews fleeing their sinking ships or perishing in the cold Atlantic waters, frustrated and baffled sailors and airmen able to rescue survivors but unable to smite their assailants. U-boat skippers looked through their periscopes at the brightly lighted skylines of American cities, and this is what they saw: “Before this sea of light, against this footlight glare of a carefree new world, were passing the silhouettes of ships recognisable in every detail and sharp as the outlines in a sales catalogue. Here they were formally presented to us on a plate: please help yourselves! All we had to do was press the button.”3 Small wonder that they would call this their second “happy time”—the first (and lesser) one having occurred in the summer and fall of 1940.
Winston Churchill, hardly a man given to panic, wrote to Harry Hopkins in early March 1942, “The situation is so serious that drastic action of some kind is necessary. . .” particularly in view of the slaughter of tankers in the Caribbean.4 The problem was as much—even more—a British as an American one: As an irate British intelligence officer told Rear Admiral Richard S. Edward, Admiral Ernest J. King’s chief of staff, “The trouble is, Admiral, it’s not only your bloody ships you are losing. A lot of them are ours.”5 Nor were responsible American officers any more complacent. On June 24, 1942, Captain Wilder D. Baker, the U.S. navy’s chief antisubmarine warfare expert bluntly told the commander in chief, U.S. Fleet, “The Battle of the Atlantic is being lost.”6
Merchant Ships Sunk by U-boats in the Atlantic, December 7,1941 to July 31,1942
SOURCE: Adapted from Samuel Eliot Morison, The Two-Ocean War: A Short History of the United States Navy in the Second World War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), p. 112.
As we shall see below, most American, British, and German contemporaries viewed the successful attack on American shipping in 1942 as something different in kind from—less explicable and far more disgraceful than—the hard-fought battles of the North Atlantic in 1940–41 and 1943. Moreover, the U-boat attack not only humiliated the Allies but threatened their chances of prevailing in the battles of 1942 and 1943. In Churchill’s words, “For six or seven months the U-boats ravaged American waters almost uncontrolled, and in fact almost brought us to the disaster of an indefinite prolongation of the war.”7 The shortage of tankers (caused by U-boat operations in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean) caused particularly acute difficulties for the Allies, imperiling the impending invasion of North Africa. Although the U-boats never came close, during this period, to severing Britain’s lifeline—its vital imports of food and fuel from the Western Hemisphere—there was a very real chance that offensive operations in Europe in late 1942 and 1943 would be crippled by the losses suffered in the American campaign.
To be sure, some additional merchant ship losses were to be expected once the United States entered the war as a belligerent. Yet no one expected that Allied shipping would suffer losses on so large a scale and for so long a time (nine months). In retrospect, the failure of American authorities, in particular the United States Navy, to prepare adequately for this attack became more rather than less puzzling. Knowing what we know today—about the relatively small scale of the initial German attack, (a bare half dozen U-boats took part at first) the U.S. navy’s correct anticipation of large-scale American participation in an antisubmarine warfare (ASW) campaign, and above all the extent of Anglo-American sharing of ASW-related information—the German success at first appears even less comprehensible than it did at the time.
THE INDICTMENTS
The assessments of this military misfortune made at the time and to this day tend, by and large, to fit the kind of categorization of military failure we have discussed in earlier chapters. True to the pattern discussed in chapter 2, contemporaries and historians have placed the blame either on an individual—Admiral Ernest J. King, commander in chief, U.S. Fleet—or on an entire institution—the United States Navy. In both cases, they have resorted either to accusations of sheer incompetence (“man in the dock” theories) or psychological diagnoses (“man on the couch” theories) to explain this military failure.
In both cases critics properly identify the critical failure as one of learning. Although a shortage of resources (convoy escorts in particular) helps account for the U-boat success of 1942, virtually all observers point to other, seemingly more important sources of failure. We shall discuss these below, but for the moment we shall merely point out the central problem: the failure to learn readily accessible lessons from the British experience of antisubmarine warfare. To take only the most glaring of examples: The British recognized even before the outbreak of World War II, that a convoy system would be required to protect merchant shipping against the depredations of the U-boats. Royal Navy officers repeatedly told their American counterparts about the value of convoys, and they in turn saw its effectiveness in action. Yet it was not until May 1942, nearly six months after the U.S. entry into World War II that coastal convoys were established along the American East Coast. Along the Gulf Coast it took several more months for such convoys to be arranged, and it was not until September 1942 that the complex Interlocking Convoy System was finally in place.8
One school of thought places blame squarely on the shoulders of one man: Admiral Ernest J. King.9 In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt made King, hitherto commander of America’s Atlantic Fleet, commander in chief, U.S. Fleet, or COMINCH (the abbreviation CINCUS being considered unpropitious!). In this capacity he held supreme command of U.S. naval forces throughout the world, subject only to the authority of the secretary of the navy and the president of the United States. On March 26, 1942, he received a second responsibility as chief of naval operations, charged with the “preparation, readiness, and logistic support” of these same naval forces.
King, who is reputed to have remarked in early 1942 that “when the war starts they bring on the sons-of-bitches,” was a difficult man. Demanding and ruthless in his treatment of staff and subordinates, brusque to the point of rudeness with American and foreign colleagues, his character had no soft edges. President Roosevelt remarked that King was so tough that he shaved with a blowtorch and trimmed his toenails with torpedo net cutters.10 His intelligence, energy, and organizational abilities won the respect of all those who worked with him; unlike his Army counterpart, George C. Marshall, however, he never gained their reverence or affection. His jealous protection of the independence of the U.S. navy from the army and the embryonic air force were well known; so too was what struck many observers as an instinctive antipathy to the British.
Thus, it is not surprising that many writers, particularly Englishmen writing about the failure of American antisubmarine operations in 1942, see the problem as the fault of King and King alone. The following passage is typical:
This officer, of such determined character, showed on many occasions two facets of his thinking—that he regarded the Pacific as the prime theatre of operations for the United States, despite the joint Allied decision that victory over Germany should take priority over the Pacific war, and that, in fighting the U-boat, he was not willing to follow British experience hard-won in more than three years of war at the same time as he retained personal control over his navy’s antisubmarine operations.11
These twin indictments—that King ignored the Atlantic because he had no interest in the European war, despite his government’s policy, and that he hated the British so ferociously that he refused on principle to learn from them—do not, however, hold up to a careful examination.
King did not, either before or after the American entry into the war, disregard Atlantic operations. An active proponent of the invasion of Europe in 1943, he agreed with Marshall and the army in their ultimately unsuccessful opposition to British desires to delay the full-fledged return to Europe. More import
ant, a survey of the officers that King appointed to various commands in the Atlantic suggests that he spread his scarcest resource—capable captains and admirals—around in both hemispheres. Low (chief of staff of Tenth Fleet), H. Kent Hewitt, Royal E. Ingersoll, Richard L. Conolly—all were men of whom King thought well and who contributed greatly to the success of Allied operations in North Africa, the Mediterranean, and Northwest Europe.
In addition, although King certainly saw the main challenge to the United States Navy in the Pacific, throughout 1940–43 he concerned himself with the problems of securing adequate resources to fight properly in the Atlantic. For example, when asked by the General Board in the summer of 1941 to provide a priority list for naval construction, he placed destroyers for the Atlantic convoy war second only to submarine building for a prospective war against Japanese sea-lanes—both ahead of additional carrier, cruiser or battleship construction.12 Earlier, as a member of the General Board himself, King had supported construction of Hamilton-class cutters in lieu of larger and more expensive destroyers, specifically in order to fight the Atlantic convoy battle.13
Though King did, undoubtedly, battle for resources to fight the war in the Pacific, he had a strategic rationale for this. First, he argued that it would be enormously costly to allow the Japanese to dig in on the defensive perimeter they had seized in the first months of 1942. Only by engaging in an immediate counterattack could the United States prevent the Japanese from consolidating their gains and developing the bases and fortifications that would make an eventual American offensive extremely costly. In this he was right: It was not until September 1943 that the Japanese began in earnest the fortification of the island chains they had seized so swiftly in the first four months of the war. Moreover, by forcing the Japanese to fight (particularly for Guadalcanal), American forces could begin the long process of wearing down Japanese strength, particularly in such critical areas as the supply of trained pilots.
Second, King appreciated the enormous logistical difficulties posed by any kind of operation in the Pacific. To cope with the vast distances involved, and the primitive infrastructure that characterized the region, the American armed forces would have to pour men and machines into the area if they were to have any hope of beating back the Japanese. And as it was, American forces in the Pacific, particularly in the early stages of the war, were often convinced that they were the last to receive modern equipment and supplies.14
Anglophobia did, no doubt, animate King in some measure: On a number of occasions he went out of his way to inform admirals of the Royal Navy that Britannia no longer ruled the waves and that the United States Navy was the largest and best in the world. He rejected British cooperation in the final drive on Japan (partly on logistical grounds)—a rejection later overruled, luckily for American forces in the Pacific. It is even said that he wished to change the navy uniform in an effort to eradicate any resemblance to Royal Navy uniforms. One might add that King occasionally displayed a no-less-petty attitude toward the U.S. army and above all the U.S. army air force.15 Indeed, one school of students of the failure of American ASW in 1942 focuses on King’s antipathy toward air forces, and particularly the USAAF, rather than King’s hostility to the British.16
For all of this, however, King’s undoubted antipathies and dislikes did not often overwhelm his judgment. Not all British officers who came in contact with him thought him anti-British so much as “excessively pro-American.”17 Similarly, King did not always indulge in a reflexive rejection of interservice cooperation—it was he, for example, who initially suggested that the navy share the Pentagon with the army.18 Indeed, the larger impression one gets of King is of a bitter and choleric man who nonetheless had the intelligence and will to discipline his own unsociable character.19 None of this should suggest that King had no responsibility for the ASW failure of 1942: As we shall argue below, he did, but in a way quite different from that often presented.
Although some authors have attempted to assess the blame for the failure of American ASW in terms of Admiral King’s individual responsibility, many more have held the United States Navy as a whole accountable. Among those adhering to this view is no less a personage than Samuel Eliot Morison, the Navy’s foremost historian:
This writer cannot avoid the conclusion that the United States Navy was woefully unprepared, materially and mentally, for the U-boat blitz on the Atlantic Coast that began in January 1942. He further believes that, apart from the want of airpower which was due to prewar agreements with the Army, this unpreparedness was largely the Navy’s own fault. Blame cannot justly be imputed to Congress, for Congress had never been asked to provide a fleet of subchasers and small escort vessels; nor to the people at large, because they looked to the Navy for leadership. Nor can it be shifted to President Roosevelt, who on sundry occasions prompted the Bureau of Ships and the General Board of the Navy to adopt a small-craft program; but, as he once observed, “The Navy couldn’t see any vessel under a thousand tons.” In the end the Navy met the challenge, applied its energy and intelligence, came through magnificently and won; but this does not alter the fact that it had no plans ready for a reasonable protection to shipping when the submarines struck, and was unable to improvise them for several months.20
For the most part, criticisms of this kind take the same general approach as do those leveled against King. Once again, British authors are the most bitter on the subject: “Nothing had been done either in training, routing, or command organization to take advantage of the experience the British had gained in the hardest school over three grueling years. . . . It is not realized, perhaps, how much the U.S. Navy, like the German, gained expansionary wind from jealousy of the Royal Navy. . . .”21 Henry Stimson, the American secretary of war, sketched the most biting portrait of hidebound American admirals, adamant in their refusal to look at the experience of others or even common sense, men who “frequently seemed to retire from the realm of logic into a dim religious world in which Neptune was God, Mahan, his prophet, and the United States Navy the only true Church.”22
This failure to learn readily available lessons about the conduct of ASW seems all the more culpable in view of the Navy leadership’s own realistic prewar assessment of the probability of having to fight an antisubmarine battle in the North Atlantic. Even before the outbreak of World War II in Europe, the forerunner of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Joint Board, had discussed the navy’s need to be able to conduct ASW in the Atlantic.23 By early 1941 the Navy had already begun searching for German U-boats in American and international waters. In April 1941 the chief of naval operations, Admiral Harold Stark, wrote to his principal fleet commanders, “The question as to our entry into the war now seems to be when, and not whether.”24
Yet this institutional indictment falls into the same traps we discussed in chapter 2. A close examination of the navy’s attitudes and responses to ASW reveals very different behaviors among its component organizations. Moreover, the personnel involved in ASW remained pretty much the same throughout the war; the navy’s critics give scant attention to why and how the macropathology disappeared. Within a bit more than a year the navy had adapted very well to the ASW problem—including learning such lessons as the British had to offer.
THE FAILURES
All of which brings us to the central question: What was the nature of the failure in 1942? At the time, implicitly or explicitly, military authorities worked from two quite different measures of success or failure—sinkings of Allied merchant ships and sinkings of German U-boats. Whether one focused more on the former or latter determined, in part, one’s reaction to the events of the first half of 1942.
The larger purpose of command of the sea in the Atlantic was to shuttle men and matériel to Great Britain for use against Germany. From that perspective it made little difference how many U-boats escaped destruction, provided that they did not do too much damage. In World War I, after all, German U-boats grew in number until the very end of the war, but the introduction of
convoy and other antisubmarine measures kept their depredations under control.25 This strategic point of view had a tactical counterpart. Often, by their mere presence, escorting ships and planes could prevent U-boats from attacking a convoy. Early in the war the appearance of American and British “scarecrow” patrols—unarmed airplanes—forced U-boats to dive. Since a submerged submarine had barely a fourth or a fifth the speed it had on the surface, and since it had a slower speed than that of even the slowest convoy, submergence usually meant that it would temporarily lose contact with its potential victims.
On the other hand (and unlike the Allied experience in World War I) the sheer numbers of U-boats available for service made a large difference in their effectiveness. Not only were the U-boats of World War II more effective than their World War I predecessors but they worked from a better operational concept. Controlled by a small-but-efficient central staff in France, the U-boats could concentrate their efforts in wolf pack attacks—and escorts found the attacks of a half dozen submarines working together far more difficult to handle than those of the same number attacking individually. Once their numbers grew large enough (particularly in late 1942, when more than a hundred a month roamed the seas), they could form patrol lines convoys could not avoid by evasive routing.
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