by Paul Kennedy
But those duels were no longer fought for control of the Atlantic routes; they were contests that took place chiefly across the North Sea and in British and Canadian coastal waters. These were not easy contests, for the U-boats were now much harder to detect when in inshore waters, possessed far more sophisticated weaponry, and often steamed on the surface in small groups for protection. At one stage, squadrons of RAF tank-busting Typhoons supporting the military campaign in the Netherlands and northwest Germany were actually diverted to reinforce Coastal Command’s Beaufighters and Mosquitos against U-boats fighting it out on the surface, near the Dogger Bank and Jutland. But dogfights are not convoy battles, and in the last five months of the war only forty-six Allied merchant ships were lost worldwide (one-seventh the rate of 1942); as usual, most of those losses were of ships sailing independently rather than in convoy. By contrast, another 151 submarines were destroyed. During the war as a whole, the casualty rate among the U-boat crews was a staggering 63 percent, or 76 percent if captured sailors are included. No other major service in the struggle came close to these terrible rates of loss.48
The larger point was not that the German submarine forces were too few, by any measure, but that they had reemerged too late to win the critical campaign of the Central Atlantic. The striking power of their enemies kept increasing and, besieged in those closing months from both west and east, the U-boats had, like the Third Reich itself, nowhere to go. The last act for this proud service was to surrender. When British troops reached U-boat harbors such as Flensburg in May 1945, they found rows and rows of submarines either tied up alongside the jetties or partly sticking out of the water, sunk by Allied bombing or by their own crews. Many crews deliberately scuttled their submarines offshore rather than obey the order to turn themselves in. Across the oceans, German vessels steamed into Allied ports flying the black surrender flag, or into neutral harbors to be interred. It is ironic that the final order to abandon the fight and surrender peacefully, drafted by the British Admiralty on May 8, 1945, came from the man who had been appointed by Hitler as his successor: Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz.
Final Thoughts
Is the story of the Battle of the Atlantic yet another, and very famous, example of victory simply by brute force? Many historians, almost mesmerized by the staggering output of new merchant ships from the American yards after 1942 onward—overall, Anglo-American shipyards laid down 42.5 million tons of vessels between 1939 and 1945—believe that it was.49 This account seeks to place a caution against that assumption.
Clearly, the material advantages were in the Allies’ hands by the summer of 1943 onward, although the continued capacity of Doenitz’s submarines to sink merchantmen stayed challenging, and Horton and Slessor felt that they could never relax against this most formidable enemy, even when the odds were becoming more favorable to them. Churchill was right when he talked about “the proper application of overwhelming force.” Sheer numbers meant a lot, but mass could not be turned into victory without two other vital ingredients: organization and quality. Without them, the strategic directives given by the men at the top were as nothing. (After all, Mussolini issued grand strategic orders frequently, but to what effect?) Nor could the men at the bottom of the chain of command be expected to win even a single encounter with a U-boat, not to mention a weeklong convoy battle, if they did not have the right tools for detection and destruction and if they were not properly organized so that those tools could be used effectively.
Time and again in this particular story we see how the “proper application” of resources led to endeavors that gave the frontline forces the instruments for winning, and how those victories in the Atlantic and more distant seas steadily tilted the overall campaign balance in favor of the Allies and thus toward the fulfillment of the January 1943 grand strategy. Time and again, too, we can identify where the newer applications became turning points: where a certain idea was turned into reality, which people and/or organizations were responsible, and how their breakthroughs directly affected the field of battle.
Among those many advances, four were described above: the coming of very long-range and heavily equipped bombers that could stay with the convoys all the way; centimetric radar, and the successive roles of the original Birmingham University team, the Tizard Mission, and thereafter Bell Labs and the MIT Rad Lab; the Hedgehog mortar, from a quirky schoolboy’s dream, via the Admiralty’s unusual DMWD, to its use at sea by Allied escorts; and the creation of the hard-hitting convoy support groups, which under commanders such as Gretton and Walker married the newer weaponry with the more effective stalking tactics they had developed. Not all of these participants were engineers per se, but all helped to engineer the Allied victory.
Thus was the first operational objective of the Casablanca statement achieved, although no one on the Western planning staffs was counting their winnings even at the end of 1943. The strategic air campaign against Germany had failed throughout that entire year. Plans for an invasion of France were repeatedly postponed as the difficulties and complexities of such a vast operation became more daunting, especially to the British chiefs. The Mediterranean campaign was going far too slowly. The mid-Pacific campaign was still in its early stages, and all operations through the Southwest Pacific or Southeast Asia were painfully slow. Only in the grinding maw that was the Battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943 was there another indicator that the tide was turning against Germany. In the great expanses of the Atlantic, and in the limitless fields of western Russia and the Ukraine, there were the early hints of Goetterdaemmerung, the signs that the Second World War was swinging, after years of brutal conflict, in favor of the Grand Alliance.
a The British practice of allowing someone elevated to the peerage to alter or conflate his name has been confusing here. For much of the war he was General (later Field Marshal) Sir Alan Brooke—or, simply, Brooke. When elevated to the peerage in 1945, he became Viscount Alanbrooke—or, simply, Alanbrooke. Thus for the war he was really Brooke, though so many later historians—Danchev, Bryant, Roberts—have preferred Alanbrooke that it is difficult to resist using the better-known name.
b The increasing flood of U.S. and Canadian troops to Britain was transported by an entirely different method—the great liners of Cunard, which, when stripped inside to the bone, could each carry 15,000 GIs at a speed that even a fleet destroyer couldn’t keep up with, let alone a U-boat. But, to repeat an earlier question, what would two to three million fresh soldiers do in the United Kingdom if they lacked food, fuel, and munitions?
c One returns, then, with wonderment and humility to that classic black-and-white movie The Cruel Sea (based on a book written by the great novelist Nicholas Montserrat, with a screenplay by the American crime writer Eric Ambler), in which the actor Jack Hawkins portrays a convoy commander, in his little Flower-class corvette, enduring the attacks upon convoy after convoy across the Atlantic, and watching so many merchant ships blow up and their crews drown without being able to do much about it. Montserrat captained Atlantic escorts himself.
d This did not mean that the convoys (as opposed to the independent hunter-killer groups) would deliberately seek out the wolf packs. If Admiralty routing gave them a journey free of attack, nothing could be better. But if the U-boats moved in on a convoy, they would be vigorously counterattacked, with improved weaponry.
e In 1941 airpower was everywhere—the Bismarck chase, Crete, the Malta convoys, Pearl Harbor, the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse.
f So the story goes. Or possibly not—the rumor is that the two Royal Navy lieutenants attached to this experiment were extraordinarily handsome, and they persuaded Churchill’s youngest daughter, Sarah, who was also watching that day, to get her father to stay on and see the Hedgehog in action.
CHAPTER TWO
HOW TO WIN COMMAND OF THE AIR
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
&nbs
p; Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue.
—ALFRED LORD TENNYSON, “LOCKSLEY HALL”
In the early morning of October 14, 1943, an armada of 291 American B-17 bombers (Flying Fortresses) took off from airfields in the eastern flatlands of England and began their long journey to drop bombs on the cities of Schweinfurt and Regensburg, home respectively to the manufacturers of such critical German wartime items as ball bearings and Messerschmitt fighters. Viewers who watched their takeoff and rise into the skies were witness to what was probably the twentieth century’s greatest demonstration of military power to date (not even the A-bombs would compare in terms of the number of lives destroyed). They were also witness to what would be a mission of failure and much unnecessary loss. This was not the first time those squadrons had attacked Schweinfurt (an earlier raid had taken place on August 17), but it was going to be the last for quite a while.
Among the almost three thousand fliers that day was Elmer Bendiger, a former journalist turned navigator. Thirty-seven years later, and after visiting a poppy field in England that once had bordered his USAAF base, he published his account of that day.1
Bendiger, a professional writer, had a gift for words (“The cloud cover stopped close to the English shore, and the Channel sparkled. White froth curled over the blue waves”), so the reader has to make sure he keeps close to the hard narrative amid the magical language. The P-47 Thunderbolt escort fighters were “like shining angels,” but after Aachen they waggled their wings and flew home, because of their limited range. Only then—of course—did Adolf Galland, the head of the German fighter arm and like Doenitz an utter professional, order in the waves and waves of attacking aircraft; once each squadron of Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts had finished its run, it flew to the nearest airfield, refueled and rearmed, and came up again. Even if some B-17s (amazingly) got through to bomb the intended targets, the real issue of the Schweinfurt-Regensburg raids became less what happened to German ball-bearing production than the question of how many Flying Fortresses could be shot down.
As it turned out, twenty-nine Fortresses were lost that day before they reached the targets, and another thirty-one on the way home: sixty aircraft and 600 fighting men, a loss of well over 20 percent in one mission. Coincidentally, the August raid on Schweinfurt also had led to the destruction of exactly sixty B-17s. The raids on the following days simply deepened the losses. “In six days of warfare,” notes Bendiger, “we had lost 1,480 crewmen over Europe.” Only three or four of his squadron of eighteen planes got back to Kimbolton that night; others limped in during the next day, and “six of our planes were burned-out hulks somewhere in Europe.” A little later he adds, “We airmen of ’43 had demonstrated in our own flesh and blood the fallacy that a formation of heavily armed bombers, alone and unescorted, could triumph over any swarm of fighters.… It may now be asked whether in fact we had vindicated Billy Mitchell”—a tart comment on the well-known American theorist of airpower.2
In the autumn of 1943, the Luftwaffe was clearly winning against the attacking armadas of American aircraft; exactly the same setbacks were occurring in the parallel and even longer-lasting strategic bombing campaign carried out by RAF Bomber Command across western Europe every night.3 Even as late as March 30, 1944 (fewer than ten weeks before D-Day and fourteen months after Casablanca), 795 RAF bombers were sent to attack Nuremberg. While the British squadrons steadily lost direction and coherence—some of them, ironically, bombed Schweinfurt, 55 miles away from the planned target—the German night fighter counteroffensive was superbly orchestrated, slashing away at the Lancasters and Halifaxes. The veteran Pathfinder leader Wing Commander Pat Daniels (on his seventy-seventh mission) later recorded: “So many aircraft were seen to blow up around us that I instructed my crew to stop recording aircraft going down for my navigator to log them because I wanted them to spend their time looking out for fighters.”4
The result was that a colossal total of ninety-five RAF bombers failed to return, another dozen were scrapped when they got back to England, and fifty-nine were badly damaged. But the loss of the machines paled in importance beside the slaughter of the trained crews, whose attrition rate was higher than that among British junior officers during the 1916 Battle of the Somme. Similarly, “a young American … had a better chance of surviving by joining the marines and fighting in the Pacific than by flying with the Eighth Air Force in 1943.”5 As the later American and British official histories admit, by early 1944 things were actually going backward. Most of the nonofficial histories are much more scathing. Quite the grandest of the Anglo-American stratagems for winning the war had collapsed.6
The Theory and Origins of Strategic Bombing
Well before the Wright brothers had stunned the world with their flying achievements of 1903, mankind had speculated about the coming of extraordinary machines that would not only transport humans and commerce through the air but also be capable of inflicting terrible damage and panic upon an enemy. Tennyson was not the first to foresee air warfare—Leonardo da Vinci dabbled with some heavier-than-air machines in his military sketches—and the massive technological advances of the nineteenth century only fueled these futuristic speculations.7 Alfred Gollin records that within only a few years of the historic flights at Kitty Hawk, the war ministries of Europe and the United States were planning for aerial forces and knocking at the Wright brothers’ door. And during a public debate in April 1904 about Britain’s global strategic fate, the prescient imperialist Leo Amery had argued that in the not-too-distant future airpower would join (if not overtake) power on land and sea as an instrument of national policy.8
It is important to realize that even in its early years airpower wore many faces and could be thought of in many different ways.9 The period 1880–1914 witnessed a staggering number of new inventions or vast improvements in earlier, eccentric prototypes—the wireless, the torpedo, the submarine, destroyers, the machine gun, high explosives, calculating machines, the automobile, and the aircraft itself. It is therefore understandable that some commentators thought of the airplane as just another addition to the armory of weapons for combating the enemy’s soldiers and sailors (much as, perhaps apocryphally, President Truman thought that the atomic device was simply another big bomb). Aircraft, in this conception, were a sort of aerial cavalry, useful chiefly for reconnaissance or gun spotting—pre-1914 navies, grappling with the problems of modern fire control, were particularly interested in this aspect. Pilots could perhaps machine-gun the enemy’s troops or toss a few grenades onto their heads, but the skimpy aircraft could not carry any heavy weaponry. Those views would change as planes became stronger and their engines much more powerful, and as airships revealed their vulnerabilities, but the basic point remained: these newfangled instruments were chiefly to be used for observation of, or direct attack upon, the enemy’s forces.
Still, there was the further possibility that, because planes could fly over the enemy’s lines, they might also be used to launch attacks in the rear, against supply lines, wagon trains, rail lines, bridges, or even army headquarters. In an era when armies in battle used up an unprecedentedly large amount of munitions and other supplies every day, wrecking a road or destroying a depot 20 miles behind the front lines might really influence the fighting, and very quickly. One might not be very accurate in such attacks, but one certainly could be very disruptive, forcing troops and wagons off the roads, possibly compelling them to march only at night. One might, of course, also provoke the other side to deploy aircraft to shoot down one’s own aircraft. Both of these options were soon to be described as tactical air warfare, and they called for their own, appropriate weapons systems. To be sure, any fighter plane could swoop down to strafe a column of enemy soldiers on the march, but it
s true function was to shoot opposing fighters out of the skies; if one wanted to have a serious tool for ground attacks, far better to construct more heavily armed and heavily armored aircraft, equipped with rockets and bombs, to roam low across and behind the battlefield in a campaign of disruption.
All this was pure theory in 1918, and scarcely in sight throughout the 1920s; by the advent of the Second World War, it was beginning to become true, and would be manifested in the Luftwaffe’s Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers, the RAF’s Typhoons, and the USAAF’s Thunderbolts. Yet since an aircraft’s range theoretically knew no limits (depending upon sufficient fuel capacity), early airpower enthusiasts also envisaged deploying them much farther afield and in a very different capacity, against the sources of the enemy’s fighting capacities: the industrial plants and shipyards, hundreds of miles behind the front lines, that were pouring out guns, ammunition, trucks, ball bearings, sheet steel, warships, and so on. These would be aerial attacks upon the enemy’s homeland, perhaps a great distance from the fields of battle or the naval struggles, and called for other, different types of aircraft, ones that would be larger, heavier, multiengined, and capable of carrying bombs over long distances. Since such bombers would be slower than the nimble fighters, they would also carry, in addition to a navigator and a bombardier, several gunners to beat off aerial attacks—thus vastly increasing the demand for aircrews.
The military implications here were revolutionary. To airpower theorists, the newer long-range bombers should no longer play a supporting role over some future putative Western Front or in support of fleets in the North Sea. They were an independent third force, and had to be organized as such. Their mission was no longer tactical and short-term; it was strategic, because it independently struck at the enemy’s capacity to fight, and could bring war to the home front. This was the revolutionary part, the revolutionary appeal: longer-range bombing would cut the enemy’s arteries, starve his armies of supplies, and shorten the war. It was, its advocates insisted, a far better investment than the slow slaughter of trench warfare and grinding maritime blockades; it could, they said, avoid the losses of hundreds of thousands of soldiers’ lives in land campaigning. This was not just a new offensive instrument, then, but a fighting arm that one day would relegate armies and navies to a secondary role—hence the resistance of traditional generals and admirals to independent air forces from the early 1920s on, and their profound mistrust of their advocates.