26. See Keegan, “The Historian and Battle,” p. 145.
27. Some signs of the pendulum’s return include excellent operational histories written by nonacademic historians—Max Hastings’ Overlord, for example, as well as organizational/operational histories such as Williamson Murray’s Luftwaffe.
28. See Kaegi, “Crisis,” and Paret, “The History of War.”
29. See most notably Barton Whaley, Codeword Barbarossa (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1973).
30. Richard K. Betts, “Analysis, War, and Decision: Why Intelligence Failures are Inevitable,” in Klaus Knorr, ed., Power, Strategy, and Security: A World Politics Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 238–39.
31. Richard K. Betts, Surprise Attack (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1982), p. 4.
32. See, inter alia, Steve Chan, “The Intelligence of Stupidity: Understanding Failures in Strategic Warning,” American Political Science Review 73:1 (March 1979): 171–80; Gerald W. Hopple, “Intelligence and Warning: Implications and Lessons of the Falkland Islands War,” World Politics 36:3 (April 1984): 339–61; Janice Gross Stein, “Military Deception, Strategic Surprise, and Conventional Deterrence: A Political Analysis of Egypt and Israel, 1971–73,” in John Gooch and Amos Perlmutter, eds., Military Deception and Strategic Surprise (London: Frank Cass, 1982): 94–121, as well as the other essays in that volume.
33. Harold Wilensky, Organizational Intelligence: Knowledge and Policy in Government and Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1967), pp. viii-ix, 7, seems to take this view. Among other things, he asserts (pp. 24–32) that the bombing of Germany during World War II was an intelligence failure—neglecting the host of technical, tactical, organizational, and operational problems involved in conducting that effort.
34. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Michael Howard and Peter Paret, eds. and trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 198 (emphasis in the original). See his general discussion of surprise in book 3, chap. 9 of On War, pp. 198–201.
35. Ian Hamilton, A Staff Officer’s Scrap-Book During the Russo-Japanese War (1906; reprint, New York: Longmans, Green, 1912), p. v.
36. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Michael Howard and Peter Paret, eds. and trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 141.
37. Ibid., p. 61.
38. Ibid., p. 156.
39. Ibid., pp. 158–59.
40. Ibid., pp. 164–65.
41. Ibid., p. 156.
42. Ibid., p. 157.
43. Quoted in Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 341.
44. Clausewitz, On War, p. 166.
45. According to Cornelius Ryan, American forces lost some 1,500 dead, 3,200 wounded, and 1,900 missing. The Longest Day (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959), p. 303.
46. PHA Report, p. 253 (italics in the original).
47. Ariel Levite, Intelligence and Strategic Surprises (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 50–53 points out that Kido Butai’s radio silence and changes in Japanese ciphers temporarily blinded American intelligence. His comparison with the battle of Midway, though flawed, is instructive.
48. Gordon W. Prange, Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History (New York: McGraw Hill, 1986), p. 566.
49. PHA Report, p. 72.
50. Prange, At Dawn We Slept, p. 544.
51. PHA Report, pp. 66–68.
52. Prange, Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History, p. 47.
53. See PHA Hearings, Part 14, Exhibit 44, “Defense Plans,” pp. 1429–36, which includes the Joint Coastal Frontier Defense Plan dated April 11, 1941. See also pp. 1436–55, “Joint Estimate Covering Joint Army and Navy Air Action in the Event of Sudden Hostile Action Against Oahu or Fleet Units in the Hawaiian Area,” dated March 31, 1941.
54. Letter to Lieutenant General Walter C. Short, February 7, 1941. Larry I. Bland, Sharon R. Ritenour, and Clarence E. Wunderlin, eds., The Papers of George Catlett Marshall, vol. II, “We Cannot Delay.” July 1, 1939-December 6, 1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 413.
55. See PHA Report, pp. 118–20.
56. See their joint memorandum, “Cooperation in Joint Defense; formation of Joint Operations Centers in Coastal Frontiers,” dated December 31, 1941. PHA Hearings, part 17, p. 2744.
57. Memorandum from CinCPACFLT to CNO, PHA Hearings, part 17, p. 2739. See also Short’s and Bloch’s memos, which take precisely the same line, pp. 2737–38.
58. PHA Report, p. 240. (Emphasis in the original).
59. See chapter 4, “Failure to Learn: American Antisubmarine Warfare in 1942,” pp. 88–89.
Chapter 4
FAILURE TO LEARN
American Antisubmarine Warfare in 1942
1. See Peter Padfield, Doenitz: The Last Führer (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), pp. 239–42.
2. Statistics from earlier periods of the war also include American and other neutral shipping, hence the change in American belligerent status does not affect these figures. Statistics are taken primarily from two sources: Charles M. Sternhell and Alan M. Thorndike, Antisubmarine Warfare in World War II Operations Evaluation Group Report No. 51 (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, 1946), pp. 83–87; and Samuel Eliot Morison, History of the United States Naval Operations in World War II, vol. 1, The Battle of the Atlantic, September 1939-May 1943 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1947), pp. 410–19. “Gross tonnage is the entire internal cubic capacity of the ship expressed in tons of 100 cubic feet each. Net tonnage is derived by subtracting from the gross tonnage the cubic capacity of certain internal spaces not available for carrying cargo such as machinery compartments, crew’s and passengers’ quarters, etc. Deadweight tonnage is the carrying capacity of a ship in long tons of 2240 pounds each—not, as many suppose, the avoirdupois weight of the ship itself. But the tonnage of warships is stated in terms of the vessel’s weight, and is generally called displacement. Sinkings of merchant vessels in our statistics are expressed in gross tons. Deadweight tonnage (weight capacity) is roughly 50 percent more than gross (cubic capacity) in freighters, even more in the case of tankers.” Morison, Battle of the Atlantic, p. 292.
3. Peter Cremer, U-Boat Commander: A Periscope View of the Battle of the Atlantic. Lawrence Wilson, trans. (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1984), p. 69.
4. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 4, The Hinge of Fate (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), p. 119.
5. Patrick Beesly, Very Special Intelligence (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977), p. 302. Remark attributed to Rodger Winn, the director of the submarine tracking room of the Royal Navy’s Operational Intelligence Centre.
6. Tenth Fleet Records, Anti-Submarine Measures Division, Box 27, U.S. Navy Operational Archives, Washington Navy Yard.
7. Churchill, Hinge of Fate, p. 109.
8. See Morison, Battle of the Atlantic, pp. 252–65.
9. On King see William Robert Love, “Ernest Joseph King,” in William Robert Love, ed., The Chiefs of Naval Operations (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1980), pp. 137–79; King’s own rather stilted memoirs also repay a close reading. Ernest J. King and Walter Muir Whitehill, Fleet Admiral King: A Naval Record (New York: W.W. Norton, 1952).
10. King and Whitehill, Fleet Admiral King, p. 413; reproductions of FDR correspondence.
11. Martin Middlebrook, Convoy (New York: William Morrow, 1977), p. 310.
12. Ernest J. King to chairman of the General Board, July 30, 1941. General Board Serial 420–22. Microfilm, U.S. Naval War College Historical Collection.
13. King and Whitehill, Fleet Admiral King, p. 298. This claim is borne out by an examination of the General Board hearings on the subject.
14. See, for example, Robert L. Eichelberger, Jungle Road to Tokyo (London: Odhams Press, 1951), p. 40.
15. Ladislas Farago, The Tenth Fleet (New York: Ivan Obolensky, 1962), pp. 90–104, recounts a number of anecdotes—some probably apocryphal—along these lines.
16. See
, for example, John Slessor, The Central Blue (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1957), pp. 491–92.
17. Ibid., p. 491.
18. Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York: Harper, 1947), p. 506.
19. See Love, “Ernest Joseph King.”
20. Morison, Battle of the Atlantic, p. 200.
21. Padfield, Doenitz, p. 237. See also the British official history: S. W. Roskill, The War at Sea, vol. 2, The Period of Balance (London: HMSO, 1956), pp. 91–114.
22. Stimson, On Active Service, p. 506.
23. “Hemisphere Defense and Joint Army-Navy Basic War Plans: Joint Board Action and Recommendations November 1938-May 1939,” United States-British Naval Relations, 1939–1942, COMNAVEU Historical Monograph, n.d. (1946?), section 1, part D, Chap. 4, Appendix A. U.S. Naval War College Naval Historical Collection, Newport, R. I. Juergen Rohwer points out that the Americans had already been using ULTRA intelligence to pursue U-boats in 1941. “Allied and Axis Radio-Intelligence in the Battle of the Atlantic: A Comparative Analysis,” manuscript, November 1988.
24. United States-British Naval Relations, p. 314.
25. Arthur Marder, From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: The Royal Navy in the Fisher Era, 1904–1919, vol. 5 Victory and Aftermath (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 77–120.
26. Sternhell and Thorndike, Antisubmarine Warfare in World War II, p. 84.
27. See Morison, Battle of the Atlantic, app. 2, “Monthly Sinkings of German and Italian Submarines,” p. 415. This conservatism by the navies involved about their own effectiveness contrasts with the wild claims made by the commanders of the Allied heavy bombing forces about the effectiveness of their forces: to be fair, the intelligence problem involved was probably a simpler one. The Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty deserves some credit for this, particularly since their refusal to inflate kill statistics initially brought Churchill’s wrath upon them. See Patrick Beesly, Very Special Admiral: The Life of Admiral J. H. Godfrey, C.B. (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1980), pp. 124–31. American estimates seem to have been equally stringent.
28. Cremer, U-Boat Commander, pp. 52–53; Morison, Battle of the Atlantic, pp. 126–28.
29. See Sternhell and Thorndike, Antisubmarine Warfare in World War II, p. 83, for numbers of operational U-boats. As a rule of thumb, normally one-third of the U-boat force at any one time was on station, one-third transiting to or from patrol areas, and one-third engaged in overhaul or training.
30. “Memorandum of informal conversation held at the residence of the Chief of Naval Operations at 17—,” June 14, 1939, Strategic Plans Division Records, Series 7, Box 116, U.S. Navy Operational Archives, Washington Navy Yard.
31. See, inter alia, “United States-British Staff Conversations: Report,” March 27, 1941, Ibid. For the following discussion I have drawn on Patrick Abbazia, Mr. Roosevelt’s Navy: The Private War of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, 1939–1942 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1975), and James R. Leutze, Bargaining for Supremacy: Anglo-American Naval Collaboration, 1937–1941 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977); as well as COMNAVEU, United States-British Naval Relations, 1939–1942 and the relevant files at the Operational Archives.
32. See Leutze, Bargaining, pp. 57–70; and Donald McLachlan, Room 39: A Study in Naval Intelligence (New York: Atheneum, 1968), pp. 216–22.
33. Thomas Parrish, The Ultra Americans: The US. Role in Breaking the Nazi Codes (New York: Stein and Day, 1986), pp. 60–65. See “Report of Technical Mission to England,” April 11, 1941, in “Collection of Memoranda On Operations of SIS Intercept Activities and Dissemination,” SR-145, Record Group 457, Records of the National Security Agency, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
34. For the recollections of one such observer see John B. Hattendorf, ed., On His Majesty’s Service: Observations of the British Home Fleet from the Diary, Reports, and Letters of Joseph H Wettings, Assistant U.S. Naval Attaché, London, 1940–1941. (Newport, R.I.: Naval War College Press, 1983).
35. Letter reproduced in COMNAVEU, US.-British Naval Relations, vol. 1, p. 215. See also Ghormley’s letters to Stark in Strategic Plan Division Records, Series 7, Box 117, U.S. Navy Operational Archives, Washington Navy Yard.
36. Hamlin A. Caldwell, “Using and Fighting Submarines,” US. Naval Institute Proceedings 110:8, 978 (August 1984): 62.
37. “Status of Available Surface Forces, North Atlantic Naval Coastal Frontier,” December 22, 1941, Eastern Sea Frontier War Diary, December 1941, p. 30, U.S. Navy Operational Archives, Washington Navy Yard. (Henceforth ESF War Diary.) King refers to the initial shortage of escorts as well: Fleet Admiral King, p. 446.
38. All figures from ESF War Diary.
39. Morison, Battle of the Atlantic, p. 241.
40. This is discussed in part in Stetson Conn et al., Guarding the United States and its Outposts (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1964), p. 95. The availability question is discussed at some length in Morison, Battle of the Atlantic, pp. 229–47.
41. Baker to King, June 24, 1942. In the course of research for this chapter the author could discover no observer, participant, or historian who claimed that the matter was primarily one of inadequate escort vessels and aircraft—a remarkable negative consensus, given the range of disagreement about the causes of the failure.
42. War Diaries of the German Submarine Command, 1938–1945, microfilm (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1984), PG 30302, January 11, 1942, entry. The translation appears to have been done by the Royal Navy’s Naval Intelligence Department. See also “Report of the Commanding Admiral, Submarines at Fuehrer Headquarters on 14 May 1942 in the Presence of the Commander in Chief, Navy,” in Fuehrer Conferences on Matters Dealing with the German Navy, 1942 (Washington, D.C.: Office of Naval Intelligence, 1946), pp. 82–85.
43. War Diaries of the German Submarine Command, PG 30305a, March 13, 1942, entry.
44. Ibid., PG 30309a, 14 May 1942 entry.
45. Elting E. Morison, Turmoil and Tradition: A Study of the Life and Times of Henry L. Stimson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), pp. 567–68. Morison was the author of the ESF War Diary, a splendidly clear and thoughtful recounting not only of the events of 1942, but of how the navy interpreted them. Turmoil and Tradition is particularly interesting on the subject at hand, because although Morison is a sympathetic, indeed, an admiring biographer, he is familiar as well with the weaknesses of Stimson’s argument.
46. Much of what follows is based on three books by Patrick Beesly, a member of OIC: Very Special Intelligence, Room 40, and Very Special Admiral; as well as McLachlan, Room 39, and the official histories edited by F. H. Hinsley, British Intelligence in the Second World War, 3 vols. (London: HMSO, 1979–88).
47. The turf battles (which ONI lost) are discussed in Jeffery M. Dorwart, Conflict of Duty: The U.S. Navy’s Intelligence Dilemma, 1919–1945 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1983), pp. 151–59.
48. German operational ciphers in the Atlantic were hard to crack: “Hydra” for example, which was used until February 1942 was only read promptly after August 1941. “Shark,” introduced in February 1942 and used through May 1943 (through the height of the Battle of the North Atlantic, in other words), was only broken in December 1942, and thereafter was frequently broken late. Hinsley, British Intelligence, vol. 3, part 1, pp. 662–67.
49. See Beesly, Very Special Intelligence, pp. 10–16.
50. See Patrick Beesly, Room 40. British Naval Intelligence 1914–1918 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), pp. 151–68, 309–12.
51. See C. H. Waddington, O.R. in World War 2: Operational Research Against the U-Boat (London: Elek Science, 1973); see also P. M. S. Blackett, Studies of War: Nuclear and Conventional (New York: Hill and Wang, 1962), pp. 169–234.
52. National Defense Research Committee, A Survey of Subsurface Warfare in World War II. Summary Technical Report of Division 6, NDRC, vol. 1. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1946), pp. 82
–84.
53. See W. S. Chalmers, Max Horton and the Western Approaches (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1954), for a description of Western Approaches through the life of its most famous commander, exsubmariner Sir Max Horton. The groundwork for Horton’s efforts was laid by Sir Percy Noble, who was CINCWA from February 1941 to November 1942. For an account of the methods of the most successful escort group commander of the war, see D. E. G. Wemyss, Walker’s Groups in the Western Approaches (Liverpool: Liverpool Daily Post and Echo, 1948).
54. See Stephen Roskill, The War At Sea, vol. 1, pp. 359–62, and John Slessor, The Central Blue, pp. 481–82 for diametrically opposed views on this score.
55. See Conn et. al., Guarding the United States, pp. 95ff.
56. ESF War Diary, February 1942, chap. 4, “The Convoy System Considered,” p. 1.
57. See Roskill, The War at Sea, vol. 1, pp. 44–45, for a discussion of British perplexities in 1939–1940—problems unresolved at war’s end, when German submarines again attacked British coastal shipping. See also John Winton, Convoy: The Defence of Sea Trade, 1890–1990 (London: Michael Joseph, 1983).
58. See Morison, Turmoil pp. 561–80; Stimson and Bundy, On Active Service, p. 509.
59. Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate, The Army Air Forces in World War II, vol. 1, Plans and Early Operations, January 1939 to August 1942 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 545–46. The ASW dispute with the Navy is discussed in pp. 514–53. The Navy point of view is laid out in COMINCH, “Tentative Doctrine for Anti-Submarine Warfare by Aircraft,” October 17, 1942, in Tenth Fleet Records, Anti-Submarine Measures, Box 3, U.S. Navy Operational Archives, Washington Navy Yard. It reads in part, “the primary function of an aerial escort is defensive and not offensive.”
60. This was one of the discoveries of the operations research analysts. See Philip M. Morse, In at the Beginnings. A Physicists Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977), pp. 195–96.
61. See ESf War Diary, April 1942, chap. 8, “The Reorganization of the Frontier,” pp. 1–5. In modified form these proposals were implemented in May 1942.
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