by Paul Kennedy
ALSO BY PAUL KENNEDY
The Parliament of Man
Preparing for the 21st Century
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
Copyright © 2013 by Paul Kennedy
Maps copyright © 2013 by David Lindroth, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Kennedy, Paul M., 1945.
Engineers of victory: the problem solvers who turned the tide in the Second World War / Paul Kennedy.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eBook ISBN: 978-1-58836-898-0
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4000-6761-9
1. World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Naval operations. 3. Naval convoys—Atlantic Ocean—History—20th century. 4. World War, 1939–1945—Aerial operations. 5. Bombing, Aerial—History—20th century. 6. Germany—Armed Forces—Organization. 7. Germany—Armed Forces—History—World War, 1939–1945. 8. World War, 1939–1945—Amphibious operations. 9. Amphibious warfare—History—20th century. 10. World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns—Pacific Area. I. Title.
D743.K425 2013
940.54—dc23 2012024284
Title-page image credit copyright © iStockphoto / © Todd Headington
www.atrandom.com
Book design by Mary A. Wirth
v3.1
To Cynthia
The young Alexander conquered India.
On his own?
Caesar defeated the Gauls.
Did he not even have a cook with him?
—Excerpt from Bertolt Brecht’s 1935 poem “Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters,” in which Brecht imagines a young German worker beginning to read a lot of history books and being puzzled that they are chiefly histories of great men
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Maps and Tables
Introduction
1. How to Get Convoys Safely Across the Atlantic
2. How to Win Command of the Air
3. How to Stop a Blitzkrieg
4. How to Seize an Enemy-Held Shore
5. How to Defeat the “Tyranny of Distance”
Conclusion: Problem Solving in History
Acknowledgments
Photo Insert
Notes
Bibliography
Credits
About the Author
Maps and Tables
Location of Merchant Ships of the British Empire, November 1937
The North Atlantic Air Gap and Convoys
U-boat vs. Merchant Ship Losses in the North Atlantic, 1943
The Fiercest Convoy Battle?
Fighter Command Control Network, Circa 1940
Increasing Escort Fighter Range
Losses of Luftwaffe Fighter Pilot Aces, March–May 1944
Anglo-American Armies Advance in Northern Africa and Southern Italy
The Rapid German Expansion in the East, July–December 1941
Red Army Advances During Operation Bagration, June–August 1944
British Landings in Madagascar, May 1942
The Anglo-American Maritime Routes for Operation Torch, November 1942
The D-Day Invasions, June 6, 1944
The Japanese Empire’s Expansion at Its Peak, 1942
The Four Options for Allied Counterattack Against Tokyo After 1942–43
The Geography of History: Allied Positional Assets in World War II
Introduction
This is a book about the Second World War that attempts a new way of treating that epic conflict. It is not another general history of the war; it does not focus upon a single campaign, nor upon a single war leader. It focuses instead upon problem solving and problem solvers, and chooses to concentrate upon the middle years of the conflict, from roughly the end of 1942 to roughly the high summer of 1944.
In a book as complex as this one, it is best to state at the beginning what it is not about and what it does not claim. It resists all efforts at reductionism, such as that the winning of the war can be explained solely by brute force, or by some wonder weapon, or by some magical decrypting system. Claims that the war was won by Royal Air Force (RAF) bombers, the Red Army’s T-34 tanks, or the U.S. Marine Corps’s amphibious warfare doctrine are treated with respect and care in the pages below, but none of these explanations dominates the book. Nor should they. The Second World War was so infinitely more complex, and fought out across so many theaters and by so many different means, that the intelligent scholar simply has to go for a multicausal explanation as to why the Allies won.
This complexity is reflected in the five large chapters below. Each chapter tells a story of how small groups of individuals and institutions, both civilian and military, succeeded in enabling their political masters to achieve victory in the critical middle years of the Second World War. It is about what the military-operational problems were, who the problem solvers were, how they got things done, and thus why their work constitutes an important field of study. The story begins at the Casablanca Conference of January 1943, when the earlier Allied strategic thinking was brought together into a much more cohesive and wider-ranging blueprint for the defeat of the Axis powers, and it ends around seventeen months later, in June/July 1944, when, remarkably, all five of those operational challenges either had been overcome or were headed for success. It is an analysis of how grand strategy is achieved in practice, with the explicit claim that victories cannot be understood without a recognition of how those successes were engineered, and by whom. In this sense, the word engineers here means not strictly people possessing a B.Sc. or Ph.D. in engineering (although the founder of the Seabees, Admiral Ben Moreell, and the inventor of the mine detector, Józef Kosacki, certainly did) but those falling under Webster’s wider definition: “a person who carries through an enterprise through skillful or artful contrivance.” The book’s potential transferability to large nonmilitary organizations will seem obvious.
Of course, the five individual chapters themselves do not, and cannot, begin in January 1943, for in each case there is an antecedent tale to help the reader understand the background and contours of the analysis that follows. Still, there is not a simple, mechanistic structure to every chapter. Convoying merchant ships across the oceans (chapter 1) and landing on an enemy-held shore (chapter 4) were such long-standing military challenges, and drew upon so many lessons and principles from past fighting, that those chapters deserve a lengthier historical introduction. By contrast, grappling with the Wehrmacht’s armored-warfare techniques (chapter 3) and being shot out of the sky by enemy fighters (chapter 2) were so recent an experience that those two chapters begin with anecdotes of clashes in 1943 itself. Chapter 5 sits somewhere in between. Trying to figure out how to move large forces across the Pacific after 1941 certainly demanded new weapons and organizations, but the operational challenge had been pondered for a full two decades beforehand and needs its own introduction.
By contrast, each chapter falls away quite rapidly after it reaches June/July 1944. There is brief coverage of how fighting led all the way to Berlin and Hiroshima, but the arguments in this book are complete by around July 1944. The tide really did turn in those critical eighteen months of the war, and no desperate actions by Berlin or Tokyo could block the oncoming waves.
Authors come to write the books they do for many rea
sons. In my case, a long detour in research and writing during the 1990s, to help compose a study to improve the effectiveness of the United Nations, probably was the reason I became more interested in the idea of problem solvers in history.1 Later, a class in grand strategy that I taught each year at Yale further spurred this intellectual interest. That class is a remarkable twelve-month course that examines the great classics (Sun Tzu, Thucydides, Machiavelli, Clausewitz) together with a number of historical examples of grand strategies that went right or wrong, and then concludes with an analysis of contemporary world problems.2 The pedagogical justification for such a course is a strong one: if we are teaching talented future leaders in the realms of politics, the military, business, and education, the period of their lives when they are advanced undergraduates and graduate students is probably the optimal time for them to grapple intellectually with enduring writings and historic case studies. Very few prime ministers or CEOs have much time to study Thucydides at the age of fifty or sixty!
But the teaching of grand strategy has, by its very nature, to address strategy and politics from the top. Therefore, what transpires at the middle level, or the level of the practical implementation of those policies, is often taken for granted. Great world leaders order something to be done, and lo, it is accomplished; or lo, it stumbles. We rarely inquire deeply into the mechanics and dynamics of strategic success and failure, yet it is a very important realm of inquiry, though still rather neglected.3 To give but a few examples: historians of Europe know that for a staggering eighty years, Philip II of Spain and his successors sought to quell the Dutch Protestant Revolt, far to the north of Madrid and separated by Europe’s many rivers and mountain chains, but we rarely inquire into just how that military campaign was pursued so successfully and impressively along the “Spanish Road.” Scholars know also that the Elizabethan navy outmaneuvered and outshot the far larger Spanish Armada of 1588, but rarely are they aware that only Sir John Hawkins’s drastic redesign of the queen’s galleons a decade earlier gave those vessels the necessary speed and firepower to do just that. The astounding growth of the British Empire in the course of the great eighteenth-century wars is recorded in many a book, but usually without explaining the degree to which it was financed by the merchants of Amsterdam and other European capital centers. When Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914, historians will tell us that that same empire was put immediately upon military alert across the globe, but they say little of the astonishing undersea cable communication system that executed that order.4 Grand strategists, leaders and professors alike, take a lot of things for granted.
By the same token, historians of the Second World War also know that in January 1943, following the successful North African landings, Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff met at Casablanca to decide upon the future ordering of the war; and that from those intense debates emerged both the political and the operational guidelines to future Anglo-American grand strategy. Politically, the enemy would have to offer unconditional surrender. With Germany recognized as the most formidable of their enemies, victory in Europe would make the first claim upon resources, but Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King ensured that this ruling should not exclude comeback operations in the Pacific and Far East at the same time, however ambitious that may have seemed. The Russian ally would have to be given all possible help in resisting the Nazi blitzkrieg, even if that help couldn’t include direct battlefield assistance on the Eastern Front. More immediately, the Western navies, air forces, and armies would have to figure out how to achieve their triple operational mission: (1) win control of the Atlantic sea-lanes, so that the convoys to Britain could get through safely; (2) attain command of the air over all of west-central Europe, so that the United Kingdom could act not only as the launching pad for the invasion of the continent but also as the platform for the systematic aerial destruction of the Third Reich; and (3) force their way across Axis-held beaches and carry the fight to the European heartland. With all this agreed upon, the U.S. president and British prime minister could pose for the conference photographs, approve these strategic directives, and fly home.5
We also know that, little more than a year later, all of those operational aims were either accomplished or close to being realized (the “unconditional surrender” part would take another year). North Africa was taken, then Sicily, then all of Italy. The policy of unconditional surrender was maintained, except for pulling Mussolini’s collapsing empire out of the war and neutralizing Italy. The “Germany first” principle was kept intact, and, as hoped, the United States showed that it was also able to commit such enormous military resources to the war in the Pacific that Japan’s surrender followed a mere three months after the fall of the Third Reich. The Atlantic sea-lanes were made safe. Aerial dominance over Europe was established, and with it came the increased strategic bombing campaign against German industry, cities, and people. Russia was given further aid, though its own fortitude and resources were by far the greatest reason for its ultimate victory on the Eastern Front. American forces surged across the Pacific. France was finally invaded in June 1944, and less than a year later the Allied armies met along the Elbe River to celebrate their mutual, hard-fought victory in Europe. What was ordained at Casablanca had really come about. This book attempts to explain how and why.
As so often, appearances are misleading. No straight causal line connects the confident Casablanca statement of Allied war strategies and their realization. For the plain truth was that at the beginning of 1943 the Grand Alliance was in no position to carry out these declared aims. Indeed, in many of the fields of war, and especially in the critical struggles for command of the sea and command of the air, things deteriorated in the months following the Casablanca conference. The ultimate wartime victory of 1945 has all but erased this truth, much as the final victories over Philip II of Spain and Napoleon tended to obscure how difficult things seemed—and were—for their opponents in the middle years of those conflicts.
In the battle for control of the Atlantic sea-lanes, the campaign that Churchill confessed gave him more cause for worry than any other during the entire war, merchant ship losses intensified in the months after Casablanca. In March 1943, for example, Admiral Karl Doenitz’s U-boats sank 108 Allied vessels totaling 627,000 tons, a rate of loss that horrified the Admiralty’s planners, especially as they knew they would face even larger numbers of German submarines in the summer ahead. Thus, far from the convoys easily providing massive amounts of men and munitions for a second front, there were fears of Britain not getting enough commercial bunker fuel to survive. Unless and until this danger was beaten off, there could be no question of an invasion of Europe.
As 1943 unfolded, things also went from bad to worse in the Allied strategic bombing campaign of Germany. Under Albert Speer’s extraordinary reorganization of German war industries, the Luftwaffe doubled its number of night fighters. Air Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris’s famous thousand-bomber raids dealt a few dramatic blows (Cologne, Hamburg) to German industry, but so many of the RAF’s bombers were destroyed when they moved on to attack more distant Berlin that the force came to the brink of paralysis. In the sixteen massive aerial attacks upon the Nazi capital between November 1943 and March 1944, Bomber Command lost 1,047 planes and sustained damage to another 1,682. The daylight raids of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) led to an even higher attrition rate per operation. In the famous raid of October 14, 1943, for example, 60 of the 291 Flying Fortresses attacking the vital ball-bearing plants at Schweinfurt were shot down and a further 138 were damaged. Both air forces had to wrestle with the blunt fact that the interwar saying “The bomber will always get through” was wrong. In consequence, Allied command of the air had become as illusory as command of the sea. But without both, the defeat of Germany was impossible.
In any case, the Western Allies hadn’t worked out how to achieve their third military task—how to land on an enemy-held coastline possessing the def
ensive capacities of the “Atlantic Wall,” how to repel the inevitable and massive Wehrmacht armored counterattacks against the bridgeheads, and how to push two to three million soldiers from the Channel beaches to the heart of Germany. The North African landings that had preceded Casablanca were relatively easy, since the Vichy French naval and political opposition there was negligible, which perhaps ironically contributed to the general confidence exuded by Roosevelt and Churchill at Casablanca (less so by canny practitioners such as Alanbrooke and Dwight Eisenhower). But cracking the German fortifications along the Atlantic shore was a totally different matter, as the Chiefs of Staff must have known, since the one exploratory venture to test those defenses—the catastrophic Dieppe Raid of August 1942—resulted in the death or capture of the majority of Canadian troops deployed. In consequence, the conclusion drawn by Allied planners from that raid was that it would be virtually impossible to take a well-defended enemy harbor. But if that was the case, where exactly could one land millions of men and thousands of ships? On an open beach, battered by the usual Atlantic storms? That also seemed impractical. So how, then, was the West successfully to invade France—or, for that matter, to invade Japan amid turbulent Pacific tides?
The challenge of defeating German counterattacks upon the beachheads brings up a further large question: how does one stop a blitzkrieg? For particular historical and operational/technical reasons, the German armed services in the late 1930s and early 1940s had hit upon a form of mixed-weapons warfare (shock troops, mobile small arms, motorized infantry units, tanks, tactical support aircraft) that swiftly carved through their opponents’ defenses. The Polish, Belgian, French, Danish, Norwegian, Yugoslav, and Greek armies were rent asunder. In 1940–41 the proud British Army was tumbled out of Europe (Norway, France and Belgium, Greece and Crete) in a fashion that had not happened since Mary Tudor lost Calais.