Engineers of Victory

by Paul Kennedy

  By the time of the Casablanca conference, there was at least some good news regarding this form of combat. At the far western borders of Cairo, around El Alamein, British-led armies had stopped the charismatic General Erwin Rommel’s advance, damaged his most important military units, and begun to roll back the German forces along the North African shores. At almost the same time, the Red Army’s counteroffensive in the southern sector of the Eastern Front had mired the brutal and imposing German offensive in Stalingrad, retaken that city house by house, and captured General Friedrich Paulus’s entire Sixth Army.

  Yet, shocked by these twin defeats on land, the Third Reich threw off its complacency and reorganized itself. Its armaments production in 1943 was well over twice that of 1941; its output of aircraft in that earlier year had been about half of Britain’s, but by 1943 it was surging ahead again. The various German armed services were receiving better aircraft, better tanks, better submarines. Hitler’s worried reaction to the Anglo-American landings in North Africa (November 8, 1942) was to seize control of all of southern (Vichy) France and pour crack divisions into Tunisia. As the Allied leaders were flying home from Casablanca, Rommel’s newly arrived forces were punishing the inexperienced U.S. units in the Kasserine Pass. After Stalingrad the Red Army’s frontline forces had run out of steam, and as early as February and March 1943, Erich von Manstein’s reinforced panzer armies had blunted the Russians’ offensive, had retaken Kharkov, and were assembling a vast armored force for their own summer assault toward Kursk. If, in addition, Berlin really could continue to interrupt the Atlantic convoys, destroy the Western aerial offensive, and deny the Anglo-American armies entry into France, then presumably it could concentrate more of its massive forces on the Eastern Front, until perhaps even Joseph Stalin would admit a compromise settlement.

  Another major operational challenge was the task of ensuring the defeat of Japan. This was clearly going to be an American enterprise, if not exclusively then overwhelmingly so. To be sure, British and British-Indian troops would attempt the recovery of Burma, Thailand, and Malaya, and Australian divisions would join Douglas MacArthur in taking New Guinea and pushing on to the Philippines. Yet the most sensible operational route was actually to avoid the jungles of New Guinea, Burma, and Indochina and instead to hop across the Central Pacific directly westward from Hawaii to the Philippines, then China, then Japan. Innovative U.S. officers had toyed with this “War Plan Orange” throughout the interwar years, and on paper it seemed most promising; it was, after all, the only campaign plan that didn’t have to be tossed away or severely amended in consequence of the Axis’s great successes of 1939–42.

  The problem once again, as in the case of invading France, was always the practical one. How exactly did one land on a coral atoll, its inshore waters strewn with mines and obstacles, the beaches infested with dynamited booby traps, the enemy holed up in deep bunkers? As late as November 1943, Central Pacific Command began its long-awaited offensive with an assault in overwhelming force against the Japanese garrison holding Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands. The result was not in doubt, because Imperial General Headquarters had decided that the Gilberts lay outside its “absolute national defense sphere” in the Pacific, and the garrison numbered a mere 3,000 men, but the losses among the American marines stranded under heavy fire on the outlying coral reefs shocked the public back home. Whichever way one came across the Pacific, the indicators were grim. It was all very well for General MacArthur, with his flair for publicity, to promise “I shall return” to the Philippines when he left early in 1942, but the Japanese garrison in those islands now totaled 270,000 men, none of whom would surrender. How long, then, would it take to get to Japan’s own shores? Five years? And at what cost, if the enemy garrisons in the Philippines were twenty or fifty times as large as those on Tarawa?

  There was, then, a truly daunting list of difficulties to be overcome by the Grand Alliance, a list made all the more formidable because almost all of these challenges were not fully separate but depended upon gains being made elsewhere. Hopping across the Pacific islands, for example, first required gaining command of the sea, and that in turn depended upon command of the air, and then upon building giant bases on top of meager coral islands—and a great disaster in the Atlantic or Europe would have produced urgent calls for a relocation of U.S. resources from the Pacific to those theaters instead (and a furious row among the Chiefs of Staff). Invading France was impossible until the German U-boat menace to the Atlantic convoys had been defeated. Only when Allied shipyards could produce enough of the new, odd-looking assault vessels to surmount obstacles and fight their way onshore could a maritime invasion take place in any theater. Although Stalin would never admit it, the Red Army’s successes in the field were helped significantly by the fact that the Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign compelled Germany to allocate enormous amounts of manpower to the antiaircraft, civil control, and emergency rebuilding programs required to keep the Third Reich in action. The vital Dodge and Studebaker trucks, the workhorses for the Soviet divisions in their westward advance, could not be transported from America to Russia unless maritime lines of communication were preserved by the Royal Navy. Conversely, it is difficult to see how the Anglo-American armies in the west could have made much progress at all had not scores of battle-hardened Wehrmacht divisions been pinned down (and decimated) in the east. In short, whereas one advantage gained by the Allies could help campaign(s) elsewhere, a serious defeat could damage the chances of the other aims being achieved.

  Remarkably, all five separate though interconnected challenges were overcome between early 1943 and the summer of 1944—roughly, between Casablanca and the quadruple successes of Normandy, the fall of Rome, the Marianas landings in the Central Pacific, and Operation Bagration on the Eastern Front. Some strategic problems (aerial control over Germany, island-hopping across the Pacific) took longer than others (controlling the Atlantic sea-lanes, blunting the blitzkrieg), but in the space of something like seventeen months, the tide turned in the greatest conflict known to history.

  Why was that so, and how did it happen? One reply lies close to hand, in the sense that the Fascist aggressor nations were rash enough to attack the rest of the world. Because of their earlier arms buildups in the 1930s, the Axis powers gained wide and stunning successes, but they could not succeed in defeating any one of their three major enemies. When the rest of the world recovered from those batterings, it steadily applied its far greater resources, fought its way back, and achieved final victory.a

  Yet there is another equally important point to be pursued, namely, exactly how did the Allies recover and fight their way back? The relative productive capacities held by each side by 1943–44 do indeed point to the likely winners. But what if the U-boats had not been defeated in summer 1943, or if the Luftwaffe had not been destroyed early in 1944, or if the Red Army had not found ways to blunt German panzers? What if the legendary “turnaround” weapons such as the long-range fighter and miniaturized radar—whose arrival on the battlefields in 1943–44 most historians seem to take as a given—had not come into play at the time they did, or had not been developed at all?

  At the very least, all this suggests that the “inevitable” Allied victories could have occurred much later than in May and August 1945, and that they would have been accompanied by far higher losses in the field. The story of the second half of the Second World War presumably would have looked very different than it does to us today. What we explore here, then, is a common conundrum: how does one achieve one’s strategic aims when one possesses considerable resources but does not, or at least not yet, have the instruments and organizations at hand?

  This is the story, then, of that strategic, operational, and tactical turnaround from early 1943 to mid-1944. From the beginning, it was obvious that the investigation proposed here had to move downward from the Combined Chiefs of Staff’s declarations to a detailed analysis of the process of carrying out the proclaimed missions. It was one th
ing to assert that defeating the German U-boat threat was paramount. How, actually, did one go about defeating it? Again, it was no doubt fine (and politic) for Washington and London to assure an irritated Stalin throughout 1942 and 1943 that a second front would soon be launched in France. But how? Certain individuals and certain organizations had to answer those questions; it was they who must solve these problems and thus make feasible the efforts of the millions of Allied soldiers, sailors, and airmen.

  This is where the present work may set itself apart, because it seeks to tell the story of such individuals and organizations, not just in some anecdotal or romantic or military-history-buff sort of way, but as a key part of understanding the larger epic of how the tide was turned. Many readers will have some knowledge of the story of the Ultra decryption team at Bletchley Park and their equivalents in the Pacific. Some will know the story—as portrayed in the film The Dam Busters—of how Barnes Wallis invented the bouncing bombs that blew up the Ruhr Valley dams. Only a few are familiar with the eccentric Percy Hobart’s creation of the weird tanks that could push right through D-Day coastal minefields and barbed wire, or with the individuals who devised the Mulberry harbors. Very few Western readers will have an inkling of the renowned T-34 tank’s truly pathetic capacities, or know instead of the extremely important role of the Red Army’s antitank weaponry. And only some will understand the significance of the cavity magnetron, or why putting a Rolls-Royce Merlin 61 engine into a rather limp P-51 Mustang fighter was such a critical step, or the significance of the extraordinary career of the founder of the American Navy’s Seabees. Much of that World War II folklore is fascinating in itself to those who do know those stories. But the point being made here is that we have rarely if ever stepped back and understood how their work surfaced, was cultivated, and then was connected to the problems at hand, or appreciated how these various, eccentric pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fitted into the whole.6

  This book seeks, through the chapters that follow, to make a contribution to such understanding. In many ways, it is a return to the research and writing done some forty years ago for Sir Basil Liddell Hart’s own History of the Second World War, although this time I hope I am seeing through the glass more clearly than in that earlier time.b Yet the present study is intended not as a form of personal pilgrimage but rather as an effort to widen the debate about decision making and problem solving in history. It seems a story worth telling. And if that is true, it is a mode of inquiry that may be worth applying elsewhere.

  a This is, after all, the argument in my 1988 book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 347–57.

  b See the acknowledgments for further details.

  There is a tide in the affairs of men.

  Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune:

  Omitted, all the voyage of their life

  Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

  On such a full sea are we now afloat,

  And we must take the current when it serves,

  Or lose our ventures.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Julius Caesar, Act IV, Scene 2

  CHAPTER ONE

  HOW TO GET CONVOYS SAFELY ACROSS THE ATLANTIC

  Thus was the stage set for Germany to fling into the Atlantic struggle the greatest possible strength.… It was plain to both sides that the U-boats and the convoy escorts would shortly be locked in a deadly, ruthless series of fights, in which no mercy would be expected and little shown. Nor would one battle, or a week’s or a month’s fighting, decide the issue. It would be decided by which side could endure the longer; by whether the stamina and strength of purpose of the crews of the Allied escort vessels and aircraft, watching and listening all the time for the hidden enemy, outlasted the will-power of the U-boat crews, lurking in the darkness or the depths, fearing the relentless tap of the asdic, the unseen eye of the radar and the crash of the depth charges. It depended on whether the men of the Merchant Navy, themselves almost powerless to defend their precious cargoes of fuel, munitions and food, could stand the strain of waiting day after day and night after night throughout the long, slow passages for the rending detonation of the torpedoes, which could send their ships to the bottom in a matter of seconds, or explode their cargoes in a searing sheet of flame from which there could be no escape. It was a battle between men, aided certainly by all the instruments and devices which science could provide, but still one that would be decided by the skill and endurance of men, and by the intensity of the moral purpose which inspired them. In all the long history of sea warfare there has been no parallel to this battle, whose field was thousands of square miles of ocean, and to which no limits in time or space could be set.

  —S. W. ROSKILL, The War at Sea, 1939–1945

  As Churchill and Roosevelt journeyed to and from Casablanca in January 1943, the weather in the North Atlantic had become as violent as any experienced sailor could remember. For much of December and January, huge storms at sea cramped naval and air activity. Merchant ships, pounded by giant waves, had heavy cargoes breaking loose and sliding around inside their hulls. Smaller warship escorts such as corvettes were tossed around like corks. Warships with heavier upperworks and gun turrets rolled from side to side. German U-boats, when they surfaced, could see nothing across the hundred-foot-high waves and were happy to submerge into quieter waters or to head south. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of sailors were hurt, and not a few killed by accidents or washed overboard. In some extreme cases, the commander of a convoy was forced to order a return to base, or at least to send damaged ships back. General Sir Alan Brooke (later Viscount Alanbrooke) records in his diary that he, the other British Chiefs of Staff, and Churchill himself had their flight (or surface sailing) plans from London to Casablanca changed time and again.a

  The result, quite naturally, was that convoy activity upon the storm-whipped North Atlantic routes was much less than normal in these midwinter months. Quite separate from this physical interruption, there was a second and cheerier reason the regular convoy traffic fell away at this time. Operation Torch itself demanded a vast number of escorts to assist the occupation of the Vichy states of Morocco and Algeria—the Royal Navy contributed 160 warships of various types to it—and in consequence the Gibraltar, Sierra Leone, and Arctic convoys had to be temporarily suspended.1 Since ships carrying Allied troops, landing equipment, and immediate supplies were bound to get the highest level of naval protection, and the Axis was ill-prepared for the Operation Torch invasion because of its obsessions with the Eastern Front and Egypt, it is scarcely surprising that the invading forces met with little or no U-boat opposition on North African shores.

  The other, understandable consequence was that Allied losses to enemy submarine attacks fell dramatically during midwinter. If there were fewer Atlantic convoys at sea in the first place, those that did sail, while battered by storms, were often protected by the same lousy weather conditions. Some were routed far to the north in a sort of great circle, trading physical damage by ice floes for distance from the wolf packs. The Admiralty’s monthly toll of shipping losses captured this dramatic decline well. For example, in November 1942 the Allies lost 119 merchant ships totaling 729,000 tons, and while many of these vessels were sunk in more distant waters, off South America, those supply lines were also part of an integrated effort aimed at sustaining and enhancing Anglo-American power in the British Isles. The sinking of British oil tankers coming from Trinidad would, as a consequence, hurt the buildup of the U.S. bomber groups in East Anglia; everything hung on command of the seas.

  Because of the rough weather, U-boat sinkings in December and January fell to a mere 200,000 tons of Allied shipping, most of which also occurred on more southern routes (e.g., Trinidad to Gibraltar, to supply the Operation Torch armies). But the tallies for those months were exceptional, for the reasons explained above, and thus when the prime minister and president met at Casablanca they were under no illusion as to how serious the crisis over shipping losses had become. The Allied merchant fleets had lost
a staggering 7.8 million tons in the course of 1942, almost 6.3 million of which had been sunk by that most formidable weapon, the U-boat. The amazing American mass production shipyards were still gearing up to full strength, but even their output in 1942 (around 7 million tons) meant that total available Allied shipping capacity had declined in absolute terms, and now had to compete with the even greater demands of the Pacific War. By early 1943, therefore, British imports were one-third less than those in 1939, and U.S. Army trucks and box-bound aircraft now competed with colonial foodstuffs, ores, and petroleum for space on the endangered merchant vessels. This grim fact imperiled everything in the European war strategy. It threatened the British war effort; if things got worse, it threatened mass malnutrition for the islanders. The heavy losses suffered by oil tankers meant that only two to three months of fuel remained in Britain’s storage tanks, but how could the country fight, or live, without fuel? This crisis also threatened the Arctic convoys to aid Russia, and the Mediterranean convoys to aid Malta and Egypt. It threatened, by extension, the entire Egyptian campaign, for Britain could scarcely send military reinforcements via Sierra Leone and the Cape of Good Hope to Suez if its own lifelines were being crushed. It even threatened unrest in parts of East Africa and India that had come to rely upon seaborne food imports. And it absolutely threatened the assumptions behind Operation Bolero (later renamed Overlord), which called for a rapid and massive buildup of the U.S. Army and the Army Air Forces in the British Isles in preparation for a second front in Europe; it would have been ironic to have sent 2,000 American heavy bombers and millions of GIs to England only to find that they had no fuel. Churchill later stated in his memoirs that, of all struggles of the war, it was the Battle of the Atlantic that he most worried about; if it was lost, so too might be Britain’s gamble to fight on in 1940.