by Richard Snow
Doenitz chose Lorient as the most promising of the ports he saw, and outside the town at Kernaval, he found a steep-roofed château that he picked as his future headquarters.
Not long after the admiral’s reconnoitering visit the first U-boat put into Lorient: Captain Lemp’s U-30, looking to take on torpedoes. For the rest of the war, Germany would wage its Atlantic campaign largely from Biscay ports.
Not long after Lemp paid his inaugural visit, construction crews began to arrive in Lorient. They were from the German state’s construction company, Organization Todt, named for the man who ran it, Fritz Todt. “Our dear Master Builder,” as Hitler once called him, had been in charge of the autobahn system. His position was more analogous to a general’s than an engineer’s because he had three hundred thousand men working for him. Now his job was to build bases where the U-boats could be refitted before being sent back on patrol. The result is the only vestige of the Thousand Year Reich that may really last a thousand years. As oppressively magnificent as the pyramids—and, like the pyramids, built mostly by slave labor—horizontal bunkers a third of a mile long began to take shape at Lorient and four other towns on the Biscay coast: Brest, La Pallice, St.-Nazaire, and Bordeaux. Before they were done, they would absorb a million tons of steel and 14 million cubic feet of concrete (the Hoover Dam, perhaps America’s closest equivalent in monumentality, contains 4.4 million). All the pens differed slightly, but the effect is uniform: U-boat garages in whose impregnable slots the craft could ride with thirty feet of water beneath them and thirty feet of working space overhead. Cranes that, according to their size, could lift out a periscope or a conning tower, ran up and down above the docked boats, and metal blast doors a yard thick protected them once they’d made their way inside.
The great dank, echoing pens were far more than parking space; they also enclosed repair facilities, barracks for up to a thousand men, fuel dumps, mess halls, all beneath a roof perhaps twenty-five feet thick, itself bearing another roof—or series of roofs—that would ensnare and explode and diffuse the blast of any bomb that might find them. The Royal Air Force tried to destroy the bunkers—at Lorient, with three hundred raids and twelve-thousand-pound Tallboy bombs designed specifically for the task. The town of Lorient disappeared. Only three houses were left standing by 1945 (one of them Doenitz’s château), but the submarine base was never put out of action and protected and serviced as many as twenty-eight boats simultaneously under the worst of the hammering.
None of the bases suffered any serious harm. When, in 1987, filmmakers needed a set for the popular submarine movie Das Boot, they simply moved into La Pallice, where the old machinery stood intact and dim Gothic lettering still proclaimed its exhortations and prohibitions from the unmarred walls.
Germany First
Planning America’s naval war, 1940
At the end of June 1940, Admiral Doenitz could claim the destruction of fifty-eight ships—the highest monthly tally of the war thus far. By early fall he had gotten his group tactics to work the way he had envisioned them, and his skippers entered the period they would remember as “the happy time.” In mid-October one of his boats, U-48, spotted a convoy, radioed its position, and attacked. The submarine sank two ships before being driven off, and the next day U-38 picked up the convoy, shadowed it until darkness, then sank one ship and nearly got another. U-38 had also radioed its position, and by the next night Doenitz had five boats waiting. This wolf pack—a term that would hold for the rest of the war (and possibly forever after)—came in on the surface, fast. Aided by a moon only three days past full, and later by burning vessels, the pack kept up an assault that began at nine and lasted eight hours straight. The next night, with the moon still helping, another wolf pack found another convoy. At the battle’s end, Doenitz reported, “By joint attack … over three days seven U-boats with 300 men have sunk 47 ships totaling about 310,000 tons—a tremendous success.”
If not quite as tremendous as he thought—it’s not easy to keep a precise accounting during a night action, and the actual number of ships sunk was thirty-two—it was big enough. Doenitz had not lost a single boat. And what must have been just as gratifying to him, he believed he had ratified the tactical theory that he had been working out for more than twenty years.
THE U.S. ELECTION was only three weeks away during those calamitous moonlit nights, and Britain was awaiting it with far greater interest than the nation had ever before shown in an American presidential contest. The English hoped that once it was over, America would join them in the fight against Germany.
That wasn’t going to be. President Roosevelt knew his country generally favored helping England—the mild response to his destroyer deal had shown that—but sending matériel and sending men were two very different propositions. FDR remained convinced that the nation was far from ready to go to war.
He had, however, been assembling a war cabinet of sorts. While the French army was disintegrating, the president had asked two prominent Republicans to come work for him.
Frank Knox, the publisher of Chicago’s Daily News, had served in the Rough Riders under Theodore Roosevelt during the war with Spain and had run for vice president on the Republican ticket in 1936. Roosevelt approached him to be secretary of the navy, and he accepted.
Henry Stimson had been just about everything: secretary of war under Taft, an artillery colonel in World War I, governor-general of the Philippines, Hoover’s secretary of state, chairman of the U.S. delegation to the London naval conference. He was seventy-three years old, he had absolutely nothing to prove, and he was rich. Roosevelt asked him to be secretary of war. Stimson, who had served four Republican administrations, thought about working for this Democratic one. If you’ll give me a free hand picking my subordinates, he said, I’ll do it.
A man wholly unintimidated by capable assistants, Stimson made good choices. Among the first was John McCloy, the incarnation of brusque and tireless energy, and in a few months to be promoted to associate secretary of war. Then Robert A. Lovett arrived. The son of the president of the Union Pacific Railroad, he had joined the navy in the last war and come out a lieutenant commander in charge of a naval air squadron. Although, like McCloy, he had spent many prosperous years on Wall Street, his interest in flight never waned, and he became assistant secretary for air.
Like Stimson, these men didn’t scare easily. One morning Lovett stopped in at his boss’s office while the secretary of war was growing increasingly infuriated by the opacity of some report he was going over. Stimson’s many admirable qualities did not include a tranquil disposition, and when Lovett interrupted him, he started yelling. His privacy had been violated for no reason; the intrusion was unbearably insolent and only added to the awful pressures on him. This sort of tirade had often brought law clerks to tears. Not Lovett, who merely backed out of the office, quietly closing the door behind him. As he did, he saw McCloy coming past on his way in to work. “Good morning, Jack,” said Lovett. “The secretary wants to see you right away.”
Another time, McCloy, at the White House with Knox’s undersecretary, James Forrestal, got an urgent phone call from his boss: “Where are my goddamn papers?”
“I haven’t got your goddamn papers,” said McCloy, and hung up. Forrestal took in the exchange and remarked that things certainly were not the same in the Navy Department.
Things weren’t the same anywhere in the government. Stimson, who would replace Harry Woodring, a firm isolationist, made his position clear in his confirmation hearing. At the very opening, he said he “did not believe that we shall be safe from invasion if we sit down and wait for the enemy to attack our shores.”
Roosevelt had the confidence to pick confident subordinates, and in choosing Stimson and Knox for their posts he had stolen a march on the Republicans as the election drew nearer. But there was more to it than that. Speaking to his secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau, about America’s joining the war, Roosevelt said, “I am waiting to be pushed into this situa
tion.”
With Stimson and Knox, he had brought aboard two men who were willing to push him hard.
NOT THAT FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT was so easy to push. His affable evasiveness once provoked his secretary of war into a complaint that ended in something approaching poetry. “Conferences with the President are difficult matters,” Stimson wrote. “His mind does not follow easily a consecutive chain of thought but he is full of stories and incidents and hops about in his discussions from suggestion to suggestion and it is very much like chasing a vagrant beam of sunlight around a vacant room.”
The thicket of jokes, irrelevant anecdotes, and deflections that the president inhabited was particularly vexing to Harold Stark, the new chief of naval operations. Ships were finite things—they could not be counted on to respond to an optimistic inspiration caught on the fly. Stark had spent his entire career dealing with unforgiving technical specifics that were a world apart from FDR’s hummingbird dart and glitter.
A Pennsylvanian who had graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1903, Stark was direct and friendly, a man eager to dispense compliments whenever he could. This, coupled with what might be described as a slightly matronly appearance, led some to believe him too mild for high command. Not FDR, though, who appointed Stark over fifty officers senior to him. He had been sworn into his new post the same month the European war began, and he knew the navy was not prepared to play any useful part in it. The freshly minted CNO had a great many concerns that required immediate attention, and a boss who had a genius for avoiding decisions.
On the other hand, at least he had regular access to the president, for the two men were genuinely close. They had first met in 1914, when Stark was a lieutenant commanding the destroyer Patterson and Roosevelt was assistant secretary of the navy. Stark had been ordered to take Roosevelt up to his New Brunswick summer home on Campobello Island. As they approached their destination and headed into a difficult channel, the assistant secretary appeared on the bridge and, never timid in maritime matters, told Stark he’d sailed these waters for years and asked to take the conn. “No, sir,” said the skipper. “This ship is my command, and I doubt your authority to relieve me.” Then, in a brave show of competence, Stark poured on twenty-eight knots and dashed safely through the tricky waters. A quarter century later, when he was made CNO, he wrote Roosevelt recalling the incident. He looked forward to sailing with him again, he said, and this time he would acknowledge his passenger’s right to command.
Stark knew his first job was to persuade the president to make the navy bigger. When he became CNO, 116,000 men were in the service. Roosevelt stingily suggested enlarging it by 6,000 more. By the end of the year, Stark had got him to agree to 54,000.
Then there was the question of ships to put them on. Stark asked for a 25 percent increase in the size of the fleet, which translated into three aircraft carriers, eight cruisers, fifty-two destroyers, and thirty-two submarines, along with a host of auxiliary vessels to feed and fix them. (Eight battleships were already in various stages of their four-year gestation.)
In the early months of 1940 Stark testified before the House Naval Affairs Committee. These ships had to be built now, he said: “Navies cannot be improvised. For the most part wars are fought and won or lost with the navies that exist at the outbreak of hostilities.”
Actually, Stark thought 25 percent wasn’t enough, but the president had refused to let him seek more. FDR’s instincts were sound, for by the time the naval expansion bill reached the Senate, the increase had been whittled away to 11 percent. When Stark bridled at that, the president assured him he would hold firm on the original figure. FDR held firm for several hours. The very next day he explained that in fact he, too, favored the 11 percent expansion. Stark kept his temper—he almost always did—and spent April patiently explaining the virtues of an 11 percent expansion to Congress.
Then came May and, with it, Hitler’s battalions. June, and the French fleet was no longer a dependable buffer between America and continental embroilments. It might even join the German fleet, giving the Third Reich the benefit in minutes at no cost of an extravagant twenty-year building program.
President Roosevelt signed the 11 percent expansion bill on June 15, a Saturday. Stark had spent Friday drafting another bill. In light of the catastrophe that had befallen Western Europe, he had, he said, decided to “go the whole hog” and ask for an American navy that could hold its own in two oceans at the same time.
What followed must have seemed dreamlike to Stark. He was back before the committee the next Tuesday asking for a 70 percent increase on top of the three-day-old 11 percent one.
This would cost $4 billion. The committee only wanted to know if Stark was sure that would be enough. The CNO was not quite certain about the particulars—things were moving fast, and the Naval Affairs Committee approved the bill a week after he’d begun writing it—but he guessed he was talking about 7 new battleships, 7 aircraft carriers, 43 submarines, 29 cruisers, and 115 destroyers.
President Roosevelt signed the bill into law on July 19 and thus gave birth to the fleet with which America would fight the war.
SO THE SHIPS WERE coming. Now Stark began figuring out what to do with them. When planning theoretical operations, the navy far preferred the Pacific to the Atlantic. Those immense blue distances meant that a war fought there would have to be a proper naval one, with fleets meeting in decisive, clear-cut battles. What was shaping up in the Atlantic was messy and ill defined. But it was in the Atlantic that an immediate threat to America was gathering, and Stark had the discipline to turn his mind from the war he would prefer to fight to the one on offer at the moment.
If it became a shooting war before a strategy had been devised, decisions would be made in reaction to events; if a plan was in place, perhaps the decisions could affect the events, rather than the other way around.
On a morning in late October Stark sat down at his desk and started writing. He worked straight through until two o’clock the next morning and spent the following week going over the result with Frank Knox and the army chief of staff, George Marshall. Then he returned to his desk, hoping to produce a final draft that would persuade the president to decide on a course to take the country through the crisis. What he came up with may be the single most important document of the American effort in World War II.
In it, Stark set down what he saw as the four significant options open to the U.S. forces, assigning each a letter of the alphabet. (A) was to protect our own shores while continuing to send material aid to Britain, but generally keeping out of the fight itself. (B) had us going on the defensive in the Atlantic while attacking the Pacific. (C) was to join Great Britain to the full extent of our ability in both oceans; and (D) was to hang on in the Pacific while attacking in the Atlantic.
Stark assessed each of these choices with brisk vigor—no military passive voice in this memorandum—and concluded, “I believe that the continued existence of the British Empire, combined with building up a strong protection in our home areas, will do best to ensure the status quo in the Western Hemisphere, and to promote our principal interests.” He said why he thought so at the outset: “If Britain wins decisively against Germany, we could win everywhere; but … if she loses the problem confronting us would be very great; and while we might not lose everywhere, we might possibly not win anywhere.”
Despite all the lures of the Pacific, Stark favored (D): “The United States could eventually develop a strong offensive as an ally and maintain a defensive in the Pacific.”
Knox and Marshall backed the plan; Stimson backed it, too. The president, though as usual not eager to commit himself on paper, backed it. Despite Pearl Harbor, despite the terrible island fighting that followed it for years, the American high command would never abandon what came to be called the “Germany first” strategy.
In the system of military phonetics worked out to ensure clarity in communications, the letter d is “dog,” and Stark’s recommendation took its place in th
e high annals of the world under the homely name of Plan Dog.
A Length of Garden Hose
FDR sells Lend-Lease, 1940
The ships were on the way and we knew how we were going to use them. But America was not in the war yet, and so Plan Dog’s strategy to bulwark Britain was purely theoretical. Although the cash-and-carry improvisation had been getting England matériel, it would not keep doing so for long. Lord Lothian, the British ambassador to Washington, summarized the problem with startling directness when he returned from a brief trip to confer with Churchill in November. To the waiting reporters, he said, “Well, boys, Britain’s broke; it’s your money we want.”
A few days later, Frank Knox, talking with Henry Morgenthau, said, “We are going to pay for the war, are we?” FDR had just authorized $2 billion to outfit ten British divisions, and the treasury secretary asked if this should be allowed to go through. It turned out Knox had been speaking rhetorically. “Got to,” he went on, “no question about it.”
But the law was clear: no credit for Britain. This was not a problem Knox or Morgenthau could solve; it had to be addressed on the highest level.
The highest level had gone fishing. The 1940 election had finally come, bringing Roosevelt a third term. Understandably worn down by the last few months, the president had slipped away for two weeks on the USS Tuscaloosa—he loved a cruiser—but Churchill tracked him down there with a four-thousand-word cable. Mostly it was a magisterial survey of the current state of the war, and a look toward the year ahead: “The decision for 1941 lies upon the seas. It is therefore in shipping and in the power to transport across the ocean, particularly the Atlantic Ocean, that in 1941 the crunch of the whole war will be found.” One paragraph, though, dealt with Britain’s financial situation almost as bluntly as Lord Lothian had: “The moment approaches when we will no longer be able to pay cash for shipping and other supplies.”