From this aspect the number of U-boat kills, not the tonnage safely transiting the Atlantic, constituted the chief measure of effectiveness. Even if the Allies protected their merchant shipping in the short run, they ran two dangers if they failed to sink large numbers of U-boats. First, the Germans would acquire a growing pool of experienced (hence more effective) skippers and crews. (As in other activities, skill in U-boat operations corresponded with increased experience.) Secondly—and perhaps more important—failure to control the numbers of U-boats threatened a catastrophic situation in 1943.
Figure 4–1 indicates the primary reason for this: the startling increase in German submarine production from mid-1940 through 1941 and the continued, though moderate, growth in production thereafter. Allowing for the delay between the completion of a U-boat and its operational deployment (that is, the months required for crew training and sea trials), these statistics foretold a grim situation in late 1942 and early 1943. And indeed, the average number of U-boats at sea rose from ten in 1940 to thirty in 1941, to nearly sixty in 1942, to over one hundred in early 1943; at the same time, the average life of U-boats at sea (their life expectancy, not the duration of particular cruises) rose from three months in 1940 to twelve in 1942.26 In 1941 and 1942 new U-boat construction exceeded sinkings by a wide margin; the result was a steady cumulative increase in the number of operational U-boats until early 1943 (see Figures 4–2 and 4–3).
From both points of view, however, that of merchant ship protection and that of U-boat destruction, American ASW in the first nine months of 1942 performed very badly indeed. At the beginning of this chapter we discussed the former; an examination of Figure 4–4 reveals the latter. In the first half of 1942 American forces sank barely half a dozen U-boats—in the course of the entire year they sank only sixteen. A comparison with British efforts at different points in the war makes these tallies particularly unflattering. First, American forces did slightly less well than the British had done in 1940, when ASW technique was far more rudimentary, and the numbers of both submarines and ships and planes to pursue them far fewer than in 1942. Second, as mentioned earlier, even though in terms of losses American areas bore the brunt of the U-boat offensive in most of 1942, British and British-controlled forces accounted for almost four times as many kills during that year as did their American counterparts. Moreover, the American contribution in 1942 looks particularly weak when compared with American efforts in the latter three years of the war, a period in which most U-boats operated again in areas of British ASW responsibility.
FIGURE 4–1. German U-boat Production, September 1939–April 1945 (Not including midget submarines)
SOURCE: United States Strategic Bombing Survey, German Submarine Industry Report (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1947), Exhibit B-2.
FIGURE 4–2. U-boat Construction vs. Sinkings, 1941–43
SOURCES: First Lord of the Admiralty, German, Italian and Japanese U-Boat Casualties During the War: Particulars of Destruction (London: HMSO, 1946), p. 35; United States Strategic Bombing Survey, German Submarine Industry Report (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1947), Exhibit B-2.
The Germans began the war with some thirty oceangoing U-boats.
FIGURE 4–3. Cumulative Increase in U-boats, 1939–43 (Sum of new construction minus losses)
SOURCES: First Lord of the Admiralty, German, Italian and Japanese U-Boat Casualties During the War: Particulars of Destruction (London: HMSO, 1946), p. 35; United States Strategic Bombing Survey, German Submarine Industry Report (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1947), Exhibit B-2.
It should be noted that American and British forces knew with a fair degree of certainty how many U-boats they had sunk during the war, not just at its end: When they erred they did so on the side of caution. Thus, in 1942 they estimated some eighty U-boats sunk; postwar assessments revealed that eighty-five had been sunk.27 The Allies knew quite well from the beginning how well (or poorly) they were doing in the U-boat war: all critical statistics—U-boat sinkings and construction, as well as their own losses and construction—seem to have been available promptly.
FIGURE 4–4. Sinkings of U-boats, by Nationality
SOURCE: Compiled from statistics in First Lord of the Admiralty, Germany Italian and Japanese U-Boat Casualties During the War: Particulars of Destruction (London: HMSO, 1946), p. 4. Included under British kills are all kills achieved by British, Dominion, Imperial, and Allied (other than U.S.) forces under British operational control; included under U.S. kills are kills achieved by all U.S. and Allied (other than British, Dominion, and Imperial) forces under U.S. operational control. This report represents the consolidated statistics produced by an Anglo-American committee formed at war’s end to reconcile these statistics.
On both scores, then, American ASW in early 1942 proved disastrously ineffective. The relatively small scale of the German attack made this failure more embarrassing at the time and makes it more puzzling for the historian. Operation Paukenscblag (“Drumbeat”), as Doenitz called it, mustered barely half a dozen U-boats at first, and he never threw more than a dozen at once at American shores.28 Forced by the campaign in the Mediterranean to keep several dozen submarines there, required by Hitler to deploy a score to fend off an expected attack on Norway, and further constrained by the time required for refit and transit to and from patrol areas, Doenitz could not bring to bear the force his two hundred operational U-boats should have exerted on the American coasts.29
Finally—and making all of the above even more inexplicable—the United States Navy had had access from the beginning of the war to British information about virtually every aspect of the antisubmarine war. It is indeed this fact that makes the disaster of 1942 so peculiar. To be sure, ASW did not receive adequate resources from the navy and the government more generally (we shall discuss this further below); to be sure, some initial losses were to be expected as the navy and the country went from peace to war; nonetheless, the fact remains that with respect to critical matters of doctrine (most notably convoying, but also the use of land-based aviation and the tactics of antisubmarine attacks) and organization (with particular regard to intelligence, but also to centralized control), the navy failed to learn lessons that were readily available from the British. And, to pile paradox on paradox, we must observe that the United States Navy had in fact made strenuous efforts to learn from the British. It is, however, in answering the how and why of such learning that we shall begin to understand the enigmas of American ASW in 1942.
Anglo-American discussions about cooperation with respect to ASW began before World War II. As early as June 1939 then-Chief of Naval Operations Admiral William D. Leahy presided over a discussion with the British naval attaché in which Leahy tentatively agreed that the United States would cooperate in Atlantic ASW in the event of war.30 The so-called ABC meeting of spring 1941 formalized these vague commitments, resulting in an agreement that American forces in the Atlantic would participate in the convoy war.31 In the interim, American naval observers had gone to Great Britain in large numbers, headed after August 1940 by Rear Admiral Robert C. Ghormley, former director of the War Plans Division of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. Although previously the American naval attaché, Captain Alan G. Kirk (later head of the Office of Naval Intelligence) had had friendly relations with a number of British officers, the British had hitherto shown some restraint in sharing ASW information. Following the conjunction of the fall of France and the beginning of the first U-boat blitz, however, sources opened up.32 The Ghormley mission inaugurated the extraordinary sharing of information that would characterize the Anglo-American war effort as a whole.
Ghormley (titled Special Naval Observer) arrived in August 1940 in time to participate in the meetings of the Bailey Committee, named after Admiral Sir Sidney Bailey of the Royal Navy, former director of planning for the Admiralty. Although nominally a British committee only, it met in the presence of the American observers to make recommendat
ions to the British chiefs of staff and the American military on Anglo-American cooperation. The Bailey Committee ranged over a host of issues pertaining to Anglo-American strategic, operational, and tactical cooperation, and its report set the tone for the overall relationship between the two countries.
In short order a flood of information—some channeled through the Office of Naval Intelligence, some passed directly to the Chief of Naval Operations by Ghormley—came to the United States. Even in that most sensitive of all areas, cryptography, American and British officers exchanged information with unprecedented (although not yet complete) openness—in autumn 1940 the Americans informed the British that they had broken into “Purple,” the Japanese cipher; in January 1941 the British took two U.S. army and two U.S. navy observers to Bletchley Park, the home of their cryptanalytic effort.33 In the meanwhile scores of American naval officers sailed with Royal Navy ships, toured British facilities, and interviewed British officers.34 A steady stream of memoranda, prototypes, and visitors crossed the Atlantic—in both directions. Shortly after his arrival in Britain, Ghormley wrote back to Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Harold Stark. “I am impressed with the fact that under present conditions we are getting advantage of priceless information from actual war laboratory which will not be available to us in case of German victory.”35 Ghormley’s description of the Royal Navy’s experiences as a “war laboratory” recurs constantly throughout his correspondence and that of his staff. The ominous phrase, “in case of German victory,” reminds us that the Americans felt a particular urgency to learn as much as possible from the British. Not only might the United States need such information if it entered the war on Britain’s side, its military chiefs feared greatly that they might have to fight the war alone. At this time (autumn 1940 and through the first half of 1941) many American officers did not believe that Britain could escape invasion and ultimate subjugation by the Nazis. Even if the English could beat back such an onslaught, they might yet find themselves forced by the Luftwaffe and the U-boats—as well as their own sense of the futility of the struggle—to make a compromise peace with Hitler.
“The U.S. Navy was able to assimilate Royal Navy wartime ASW knowledge as rapidly as it was bitterly gained.”36 We shall argue below that this verdict is radically incomplete, if not in one sense profoundly wrong. Still no one can justifiably accuse the navy as a whole, or its leadership, of ignoring the British experience or dismissing it as irrelevant.
THE PROBLEMS
We have thus far sketched out the scope of the disaster of 1942 and attempted to dispel the most common broad-brush explanation for it, namely a willful failure to learn from the British experience of 1940–42. We can now examine what went wrong in rather greater detail. Curiously enough, few of the participants or historians who reviewed the failure of Americans ASW after mid-1942 attributed the disaster to the absence of adequate escort vessels and aircraft. Initially, however, the shortages were severe: two weeks after the beginning of war but three weeks before the U-boats arrived off the Eastern Sea Frontier, Admiral Adolphus Andrews, commander ESF, reported to the Chief of Naval Operations that he had at his disposal barely one and a half dozen escort craft, none of which could outdistance (and many of which could not outgun) submarines operating on the surface. His dour report that “should enemy submarines operate off this coast, this Command has no forces available to take adequate action against them, either offensive or defensive” proved grimly prescient.37 In February Andrews argued that to introduce convoy he would require 64 escort vessels, which he did not have, a requirement rising in a March report to nearly 80. By May, however, over 110 vessels (many, to be sure, too small and slow to be of much use) were on hand in the Eastern Sea Frontier alone, plus 45 more under repair, plus 16 destroyers sporadically available for escort and patrol duties.38 Similar deficiencies in numbers of aircraft disappeared equally quickly: In the Eastern Sea Frontier alone the several dozen ill-assorted army and navy patrol planes of January 1942 gave way to 165 by the end of March, and more than 300 by the end of July.39 Overseas reinforcements also arrived speedily: By the beginning of March the Navy also had the use of 22 Royal Navy antisubmarine trawlers, complete with experienced crews, provided by the British.
Why did the early deficiencies occur? We can attribute part of the problem to the suddenness of the outbreak of war in the Pacific. The American high command stripped Atlantic naval and air forces in order to provide badly needed escorts and reinforcements for the hard-hit garrisons in the Far East.40 Moreover, the famous agreement to transfer fifty obsolescent World War I-era destroyers to the British deprived the U.S. navy of craft which, though outmoded and excruciatingly uncomfortable for mid-Atlantic convoy work, would have made very useful coastal escorts. The reluctance of the Bureau of Ships to spend money during the naval expansion of the late 1930s on escort vessels (as opposed to multipurpose destroyers, which could help the battle fleet as well) hurt; so too did the division (about which more below) of responsibilities for antisubmarine air patrol between the navy and the army air forces.
Nonetheless, when all is said and done we cannot conclude that the first nine months of losses came about because of insufficient resources. As we see, such material deficiencies disappeared with remarkable speed—within several months of the outbreak of war—and yet losses continued at a high rate until the introduction of a complete convoy system, and submarine kills did not rise sharply until 1943. The enemy did not (as was the case in the North Atlantic convoy battles of the next winter and the spring of 1943) swamp the defenses by sheer numbers—most of the execution was done by seven or eight U-boats operating at a time, and individually rather than in wolf packs. Although air cover remained far from perfect, commanders of the sea frontiers had far more airplanes available for surveillance and escort work than did escort commanders on the main North Atlantic convoy routes. Above all, few professional observers, from Morison to the senior commanders dealing with ASW in late 1942, saw the problem chiefly in terms of resources. Thus, Captain Baker’s June 24, 1942, “the Battle of the Atlantic is being lost” memorandum to Admiral King mentioned “insufficient vessels and aircraft” as the third of a list of five reasons for those losses—and even then argued that such deficiencies were aggravated by other, less tangible failings.41 As we shall see, though, the initial professional judgment—that the problem was largely a material one—had great significance; subsequent reflection and analysis did not bear this out.
Of particular interest are the judgments made by Admiral Doenitz and his staff in Lorient—then headquarters of the German U-boat command. (Doenitz insisted on full and prompt reports from his skippers, which were then transcribed into the command’s war diary.) The Germans believed that organization and doctrine, not lack of matériel, were the roots of the American problem. The war diary contains such entries as “enemy air patrols heavy but not dangerous because of inexperience.”42 “[The enemy is not] able to make allowances and adjustments according to the prevailing submarine operations.”43 “The American airmen see nothing, and the destroyers and patrol vessels proceed at too great a speed to intercept U-boats, and likewise having caught one they do not follow up with a tough enough depth charge attack.”44
These German assessments point the way to the core issues. It is quite true that both the quantity and quality of American ASW equipment in the first few months of 1942 were poor, but as German records indicate, these were not the most important failings. Two major needs went beyond technology, and in both the United States Navy in 1942 did poorly and the Royal Navy excelled. The first was operational intelligence. In the words of a distinguished historian who observed these matters firsthand during World War II, “The war against the submarine . . . was, in one manifestation, a contest between systems of information, an intellectual exercise demanding the collection, organization, interpretation and dissemination of many different kinds of data.”45 To wage the antisubmarine war well, analysts had to bring together fragments of information—
direction-finding fixes, visual sightings, decrypts, and the “flaming datum” of a U-boat attack—for use by a commander to coordinate the efforts of warships, aircraft, and convoy commanders. Such synthesis had to occur in near–“real time”—within hours, even minutes in some cases. The navy also needed intelligence of a larger if less urgent kind—study of enemy procedures and tactics, even the quirks of particular commanders. Furthermore, the Navy needed a systematic study of its own methods, their strengths and weaknesses in order to adjust one’s own force composition and doctrine to the changing threat.
But analytic success, which the navy already had in some measure, could not achieve anything in the absence of organizational efficiency. A prompt and accurate intelligence assessment would mean nothing if the analysts could not communicate that assessment directly to commanders on the scene, if those commanders did not have operational control over the various air and naval assets they required to protect shipping and sink U-boats, if they saw no reason to heed that intelligence, or if they had no firm notion what to do about it. The working out of correct standard tactics required, for example, to attack a U-boat seen submerging a mile from a destroyer could have no impact if destroyer skippers did not know or would not apply them. Moreover, as the U-boats changed their tactics and equipment (and they did so often—a benefit of their centralized control by Doenitz), the antisubmarine forces needed to adopt compensating tactical changes and technological innovation.
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