THE CAUSES
Every war brings to the surface areas of warfare that may form an intelligible whole but that do not—for a variety of reasons—come under the purview of a preexisting military organization. One test of the high command in any war lies in its ability to perceive (and if possible anticipate) such “problem-organization mismatches” and attempt to resolve them.
Immense obstacles to recognizing and coping with such mismatches always exist. The drive for organizational autonomy—a more potent force than any other, including the drive for organizational aggrandizement—may make organizations willing to abandon certain missions rather than dilute their independence. This in fact occurred in the case of the army air forces, which concluded their running dispute with the navy over control of land-based naval aviation by relinquishing it in the summer of 1943 rather than submit to navy operational control over AAF units.62 Moreover, this problem did not simply operate between services: Its effects were felt within the navy as well.
In World War II naval officers maintained (as they do today) their belief in systematic decentralization, hence their resistance to command arrangements that tended to reduce the autonomy of local commanders. Although this is largely true, it does not capture the full reality, which is that the navy simply centralizes differently than do land or air forces; that is, at the level of the ship, a far-more-centrally-controlled military unit in combat than a battalion or even a fighter squadron.63 Admiral King, in particular, believed strongly (though with some exceptions) in the virtues of delegation. He began a famous order (issued in January 1941, when he was commander in chief of the Atlantic Fleet) with the lines:
I have been concerned for many years over the increasing tendency—now grown almost to “standard practice”—of flag officers and other group commanders to issue orders and instructions in which their subordinates are told “how” as well as “what” to do. . . . It is essential to extend the knowledge and the practice of “initiative of the subordinate” until they are universal in the exercise of command throughout all the echelons of command.64
King had a particular horror (again, one commonly shared in the navy, though perhaps with less vigor than his) of entrenched central staffs, to which end as COMINCH he kept his own staff remarkably small—barely three hundred officers and as many enlisted personnel.65 He also made a point of rotating officers through Washington, trying not to keep any there much longer than a year, except in extraordinary cases.
This insistence on decentralization, so much a function of the traditions and the requirements of command at sea as well as King’s own personality, did not always square with the military problems that the U.S. navy faced. Indeed, the president and the secretary of the navy had recognized this in King’s dual appointment as chief of naval operations (CNO) and commander in chief, U.S. Fleet (COMINCH). In the latter position he had operational command over all U.S. naval forces—authority never granted General George C. Marshall vis-à-vis army forces. As the Royal Navy had discovered as early as World War I, the age of radio communications meant that both intelligence and command would, in many cases, thereafter be centrally controlled. This was every bit as painful a reversal of traditional attitudes for the Royal Navy as for the U.S. navy, both of which shared a reverence for the autonomy of the man on the spot. Henceforth, shore-based commanders would have to coordinate the actions of ships and planes operating hundreds of miles away: Admirals could no longer direct all operations from their flagships. Neither the United States Navy nor the Imperial Japanese Navy had adjusted to this fact by late 1941—indeed, King maintained a cruiser to act as his flagship and insisted that his staff be small enough to sail aboard it. Admiral Yamamoto sailed as commander in chief with the Japanese Combined Fleet to participate in the Battle of Midway and proved unable to control the fleet adequately there; his American counterpart, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, however, remained at Pearl Harbor and helped shape its successful outcome.
Nimitz’s behavior at Midway suggests that the U.S. navy did not simply refuse to change its traditional attitudes to command, painful as that might prove. The creation of the Sea Frontiers in 1941 provides some evidence along these lines as well, and so too, does the early use of civilian operations research analysts in support of antisubmarine warfare. As early as April 1942 the navy took some first steps toward centralization of ASW—the handing over of the operational research unit to COMINCH from the Atlantic Fleet, for example, although training doctrine remained (“of course,” as the directive put it) in the hands of local commanders.66 Within a year and a half of American entry into the war, a highly suitable organization for ASW had evolved, as we shall see. But why did this not happen sooner?
One partial answer has to do with what one might call the “55/95 problem”—the tendency to see that element of military difficulty that bulks largest (55 percent of your problem) as the whole of it (95 percent). In this case the initial shortages of escort vessels and aircraft made such an impression that they made it difficult to understand the nature of the organizational challenge facing the navy. As the Eastern Sea Frontier war diarist wrote in January, 1942,
The heart of the problem of anti-submarine warfare can perhaps best be stated in terms of mathematics. Effective application of the methods and efficient use of the weapons depends directly upon the numerical strength of the forces involved. The solution of this problem, therefore, must be arrived at primarily in terms of mathematics. Changes in principle or redesign of instruments will accomplish little if it is impossible to increase the numerical strength of ships and planes to the amount required.67
Five months later, however, the same war diarist would record that “a far more important factor in our present losses long hidden by the obvious fact of our great material weakness, is now, in the days of our material strength, becoming discernible. It is the factor of human error”68 Through the first three months of 1942 one could reasonably attribute failure to lack of resources, although as a number of contemporary observers pointed out, the problem lay deeper. Later, by the early fall of 1942, Doenitz had shifted the focus of his attacks once again, striking now at the North Atlantic convoy areas, which in September experienced half the merchant ship losses suffered in the Atlantic.69
The undeniable resource shortages of early 1942 helped conceal the underlying problems of American ASW; the swelling tide of Allied ship production thereafter further obscured them. By August 1942 construction of new shipping had begun to exceed losses: With one brief exception in November of 1942, it would continue to do so for the rest of the war. Even in the terrible month of March 1943, new merchant vessel construction would exceed sinkings by 300,000 gross tons.70 Moreover, the ships lost to the U-boats were older and for the most part slower, smaller, and less efficient than the new Liberty and Victory ships that replenished the fleet. Finally, as time went on, more destroyers, destroyer escorts, and long-range patrol airplanes would come to the fleet: These too could not fail to have an impact insofar as the preservation of shipping went.
The above analysis might suffice to explain why it took the United States Navy until the spring of 1943 to evolve the appropriate organization and procedures for the conduct of antisubmarine warfare—had it not been for the issue of British experience. British antisubmarine organization in 1942 was by no means perfect, and it had not yet reached the high efficiency of 1943, when a participant could call it “a streamlined job, a smooth essay in destruction.”71 Nonetheless, the basic arrangements were in place, and the more-acute American observers had some sense of their value.72 We have seen, moreover, that the United States Navy made a serious and protracted effort to learn from British experience. Why did they fail in such a striking way?
The answer seems to lie in how the United States Navy defined learning, particularly in the context of preparation for war. In a nutshell, the navy’s leadership defined its problem as that of acquiring technical information, not assimilating new forms of organization. From the Ghormley mission in the
fall of 1940 to the American entry into the war, the emphasis in all American reporting from Britain fell on technical matters—the performance of sonars, new types of depth-charge throwers, attack trainers, and the like.73 Within this narrow sphere the United States Navy stood remarkably open to foreign ideas and contrivances: In October 1941, for example, it conducted a careful study of how the British had refurbished an American four-stacker destroyer acquired under Land-Lease—with a view to following suit.74 Later in the war, it would adopt British ship designs for the construction of destroyer escorts and landing ships. Neither did a few broad-spirited officers monopolize this openness: The General Board of the Navy had no hesitation about recommending that the United States acquire and learn to operate from the British such basic equipment as sonar.75
All this occurred, however, within this oddly narrow definition of learning, which in turn stemmed from the navy’s own definition of readiness, which was largely technical in nature. In three remarkable reports prepared in 1939, 1940, and 1941, entitled “Are We Ready?” the General Board of the Navy (a small group of senior admirals who reported to the chief of naval operations and the secretary of the navy), attempted, with remarkable honesty, to answer that question. Yet although the General Board discussed organization at the very highest level, calling for the creation of a joint general staff in order to coordinate national defense planning, it did not look at organizational requirements within the navy for war. Rather it focused its attention on numbers and quality of ships, planes, munitions, and supplies; although it addressed in a cursory fashion the adequacy of war plans, it did not ask whether the organization of the navy’s forces matched wartime requirements.
We can understand this predisposition to see readiness (and hence the lessons to be learned about readiness) in terms of technology if we consider the nature of navies in general, and the problems of navies in the mid-twentieth century in particular. A variety of technical innovations—radar, radio communication, and naval aviation in particular—had begun to force fundamental changes in the way the navy operated and planned. Under such conditions a fixation on technical rather than organizational-operational questions becomes understandable. But another factor as well affected the U.S. navy in learning from the British. In the one area in which the United States Navy knew about the impact of British organization on operations, the lesson had only a cautionary import.
One report that came back from London in January 1941 included an unambiguous suggestion: “Strongly recommend that we never entrust designing of construction of our Fleet aircraft to any but naval personnel.”76 British naval personnel, including the Fifth Sea Lord, had expressed their deep discontent with the quality of British naval aviation, which was controlled (in their view, neglected) until the late 1930s by the Royal Air Force.77 As a result, although new British aircraft carriers often had innovative features such as armored decks (which the United States Navy would later imitate), British naval aircraft could not compete with the basic land-based fighters of the Germans and the carrier-based aircraft of the Japanese. The basic torpedo plane of the Royal Navy, for example, was the Swordfish biplane, a suicidally slow aircraft of a design more appropriate to the First World War than the Second.
In addition, American officers knew about the Royal Navy’s dissatisfaction over the autonomy of RAF Coastal Command, and its relatively low priority compared with Bomber Command when it came to the allocation of long-range aircraft. Although the British ultimately overcame both problems, they did not do so until 1942–1943: Before that time British admirals chaffed under the arrangements that gave the RAF a great deal of say over the disposition of air power in the war against the submarine.78 Small wonder that Admiral King, worried about the aggrandizement of an embryonic American air force that had little interest in antisubmarine warfare, would growl to General Marshall that the model of a Coastal Command had nothing to offer the United States Navy.79 What the United States Navy knew about the impact of British organization on the success or failure of British operations, then, suggested that the British had little to teach on that score, save a host of cautionary lessons.
Finally, if the United States Navy had thought seriously about adapting its organization to the challenges of ASW in a fashion similar to that chosen by the British, it would have required major changes in how existing organizations operated, and in no case would this have been more true than that of intelligence. The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), the counterpart of Britain’s Naval Intelligence Division (NID), had nothing like its purview. Traditionally, ONI served a number of useful functions, primarily involving the collection of static intelligence (order-of-battle information, that is, the numbers and characteristics of enemy ships), serving as a “post office” for naval attachés, and providing domestic security services.80 In one bruising bureaucratic battle for turf after another it lost responsibility for the making of strategic estimates to the CNO’s War Plans Division under the aggressive Admiral “Kelly” Turner, and lost control of communications intelligence to the Office of Naval Communications.81 ONI’s own administrative historian came to the conclusion that ONI had, during the interwar years, forgotten the words of Franklin Roosevelt as assistant secretary of the navy in 1919: “[The first duty of intelligence is] the collection and compilation of prompt, reliable, and accurate information concerning the approach, arrival, movements, and position of enemy naval forces.”82 As a result, ONI had no responsibility for, or interest in, operational intelligence. Whereas the Royal Navy had an organization to analyze and communicate operational intelligence promptly—an organization in close touch with the agencies that actually fought the war, and treated by them as an equal—the United States Navy did not. Instead, COMINCH and his subordinates had small combat intelligence units, which maintained map rooms and current intelligence files but had no organizational base in naval intelligence. Hopeless as ONI had become by 1942, it could not be resuscitated: A different solution had to be found.
Three factors, then—a predisposition to define learning and readiness in technical terms, a reinforcing belief in the inadequacy of critical British organization, and the fact that an attempt to mirror British organization would have required transformation of existing institutions—explain the navy’s stubbornly schizophrenic attitude toward learning from the British. Eager to acquire and assimilate technology and low-level tactics, it did so; unfortunately, these alone could not make American ASW efficient.
ADAPTATION AND SUCCESS
Nonetheless, the navy did eventually adapt organizationally to the challenges of ASW. While so doing, in some measure it not only adopted but surpassed some British practices. This process culminated in the creation in May 1943 of a unique organization: Tenth Fleet.83 Nominally headed by Admiral King himself, it bore the imprint of the man who had served since April as his Assistant Chief of Staff for Anti-Submarine Measures, Rear Admiral Francis S. Low. He supervised directly only three small divisions, formed from pre-existing organizations: an operations unit, the Convoy and Routing Section, and Anti-Submarine Measures (this latter including the civilian scientists of the Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Research Group, or ASWORG). In all, Tenth Fleet included directly fewer than a hundred officers, plus supporting enlisted and civilian personnel. At the same time, Commander Tenth Fleet had responsibility not only for ASW training (including the use of the various training establishments as Tenth Fleet’s “laboratories”), but for the direction of operations at sea as well:
The Commander, Tenth Fleet, is to exercise direct command over all Atlantic Sea Frontiers, using sea frontier commanders as task force commanders. He is to control allocations of anti-submarine forces to all commands in the Atlantic, including the Atlantic Fleet, and is to reallocate forces from time to time as the situation requires. In order to insure quick and effective action to meet the needs of the changing A/S situation, the Commander, Tenth Fleet, is to be given control of all LR (Long Range) and VLR (Very Long Range) aircraft and certain groups or units
of auxiliary carriers, escort ships, and submarines which he is to allocate to reinforce task forces that need help, or to employment as “killer groups”—under his operational direction in appropriate circumstances.84
In effect, Commander Tenth Fleet could override the dispositions of any naval commander in the Atlantic in the conduct of antisubmarine operations. Although King envisaged appointing someone else as Commander Tenth Fleet, he soon saw that it would be best to have it remain one of his functions, with day to day operations conducted by Low. In practice, Tenth Fleet staff refrained from issuing orders to local commanders, relying instead on carefully phrased “recommendations”—which were rarely if ever ignored.85
This arrangement, which fused operational intelligence, the control of convoys, the allocation of all antisubmarine units, and the direction of all establishments charged with the development of doctrine and technology, had no parallel elsewhere. At the end of the war the British commander in chief of the Western Approaches, who most closely approached this level of control, would write unhappily in his final report: “I am more than ever convinced that my original conception was correct, and that there was a pressing need for the appointment of a Chief of Anti-U-Boat Warfare with scope analogous to that of Admiral Doenitz.”86
This concentration of power in one organization, though occasionally proposed in England, never received official approval there.87 In the United States, however, it quickly brought results. As Farago points out, in the eighteen months before the creation of Tenth Fleet the United States Navy sank thirty-six U-boats; in the six months after, it sank seventy-five. This could not have occurred, to be sure, without the advent of the new antisubmarine aircraft carriers and the general improvement of men and matériel for the antisubmarine war. Nonetheless, the organizational framework of Tenth Fleet allowed the navy not only to create a uniform tactical doctrine but to see to it that commanders applied it; it also enabled the navy to adjust that doctrine to changing circumstances. The work of ASWORG, in particular, which had existed in various forms since early 1942, benefited greatly from the Tenth Fleet arrangement.88 Only when the diverse data generated by the antisubmarine war could be centrally processed, disseminated, and acted upon could the efficiency of American antisubmarine operations increase.89
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