Why the Allies Won

by Richard Overy

  Yet within a few months the balance in the sea war began to move away from the Royal Navy. The German conquest of Denmark and Norway transformed the geography of the conflict by securing a long coastal flank for the movement of German vessels into the Atlantic. The German defeat of Belgium and France in June 1940 resulted in the nightmare that had haunted British governments since the days of Napoleon: control of the Channel coast and ports by a hostile power. Now German surface forces and submarines were able to operate from an Atlantic coastline against British trade. Hitler’s directive to his navy to ‘deal an annihilating blow to the English economy’, which looked hollow when it was published the previous November, began to fill up with early successes.11 The defeat of France was a double blow for the Royal Navy, for not only did it mean the loss of the French navy for the Allied cause, but it also invited Mussolini’s Italy to join in the war, hungry for spoils. Straddled across Britain’s vital imperial route through the Mediterranean, from Gibraltar at the western end of the sea to Suez in the east, was the Italian navy, half a million tons of hostile vessels, including more than a hundred submarines.12

  There was worse to come, for the real enemy of the British fleet was not on the sea but in the air. When war broke out, navies on both sides were still wedded to the traditional view of sea power, exercised by ships on or under the surface of the ocean. Few people foresaw how swiftly air power would render redundant naval strategies still rooted in the battleship age of Fisher and Tirpitz, who led the Anglo-German naval race before the First World War. The very first naval contest of the war, off the coast of Norway, was a rude shock. With secure air bases on the Channel coast by the summer of 1940, German bombers began to take a terrible toll of British shipping. When the German air force supplied the navy with a small group of converted long-range passenger aircraft, the Focke-Wulf Condor, attacks on shipping were extended far out into the Atlantic shipping lanes. In 1940 aircraft alone sank 580,000 tons of British shipping; the following year over a million tons, more than British dockyards could make good.13 In the Mediterranean, with its narrow channels and clear skies, ships made easy targets, first for the Italian air force, then from 1941 for the bombers and dive-bombers of the Luftwaffe, transferred there to secure the Balkans and to help Italian endeavours in North Africa. The persistent illusion, shared even by Churchill, that the big battleships could defend themselves against air attack ended with the destruction of the Italian fleet at Taranto on 11 November 1940 by a mere twenty Swordfish biplanes of the British Fleet Air Arm, the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck in May 1941, and the devastating destruction of the Prince of Wales and Repulse seven months later.14 Great ships that took years to build and commission were sent to the sea-bed in a matter of minutes, destroyed by a handful of bombs and torpedoes. The most remarkable mismatch of the whole war was the trial of combat between these great dinosaurs of the sea and the tiny aircraft that circled them like venomous insects, waiting to sting.

  The Royal Navy was soon stretched to the limit, fighting with shrinking resources in waters from the North Sea to Egypt, from the Arctic to the far reaches of the South Atlantic. The enemy avoided fighting face to face, for he had no main fleet. Instead he fought a bitter war of attrition, sapping away the lifeblood of the British merchant marine by sea and air, seizing any opportunity to sink naval vessels that came to its defence. During the course of 1940 the tables were turned on Britain: the blockader was blockaded. Though Hitler lacked the naval strength to invade Britain, he was easily persuaded by his naval chiefs that Britain’s war effort could be crippled, perhaps decisively, by cutting through the main artery of trade across the Atlantic sea-lanes. Though the German navy was able to send no more than ten or fifteen submarines into the area for the first eighteen months of war, these were sufficient to create a debilitating haemorrhage.

  British preparations were undone. Though the navy took over the organisation of all British shipping in a remarkable feat of global planning, German cryptographers succeeded in unmasking the British naval codes that carried the directives. German submarines were able to compensate for their small number by the foreknowledge of convoy movements. The convoy escorts relied on the use of ASDIC, a sound-detecting instrument first developed in the Great War, which betrayed the presence of submerged submarines. To counter this threat the German submarines adopted the simplest of counter-measures: they attacked at night on the surface, where they could neither be seen by the escort look-outs, nor detected by ASDIC. Deprived of their eyes and ears, their position on the ocean betrayed, the ships were easy prey. The submarines were helped by the British decision not to convoy ships with speeds of less than 9 knots or more than 13; during 1940 sixty per cent of ships sunk were not sailing in convoy. In that same year 992 ships were sunk, totalling 3.4 million tons, a quarter of British merchant shipping.15 By careful use of brief radio transmissions it proved possible for the Germans to gather large numbers of submarines together in ‘wolfpacks’ to snap at the heels of intercepted shipping. In the first four months of 1941 almost 2 million tons of shipping were destroyed, over half in the North Atlantic. For German submariners these were ‘die glückliche Zeiten’, fortunate times.16

  German forces succeeded against British sea power beyond their wildest expectations. British trade was slowly bled white: 68 million tons were imported in 1938, 26 million in 1941.17 When figures of sinkings for February were released Churchill was finally moved to give anti-submarine warfare priority over everything else. On 6 March he announced that Britain was now fighting ‘the Battle of the Atlantic’ which he regarded with justice as ‘the real issue of the war’ for Britain.18 The concentration of British minds on the naval war produced some positive results. British cryptanalysts at the code and cypher school at Bletchley Park succeeded in breaking enough of the German naval code to be able to steer convoys away from the gathering wolves for the summer months. Desperate efforts were made to provide better air cover for convoys and escort vessels for the whole of the North Atlantic run, and a submarine Tracking Room set up in London succeeded through a combination of secret intelligence and intelligent guesswork in steering large numbers of convoys clear of danger altogether.19 But losses continued to mount elsewhere. By late 1941 the British merchant fleet began to decline steadily, while the long hauls necessary to avoid danger-spots wasted vital shipping capacity. Over the year 1,299 ships were sunk, and over half their crewmen were lost.20 Still bereft of naval allies, Britain faced the prospect of isolation from American supplies and the loss of the Mediterranean. Already all that linked her with her Empire in the east was the long 8,000-mile haul around the Cape of Good Hope, into seas increasingly threatened by Japanese aggression.

  It was with this gloomy outlook that Churchill sat down to supper with Averell Harriman and the American ambassador, John Winant, on the evening of 7 December 1941. Harriman found the Prime Minister ‘tired and depressed’. Churchill said little throughout dinner, deep in thought, ‘with his head in his hands’. Just before nine o’clock his butler brought in a small radio for the evening news from the BBC. He was slow to switch it on and missed the opening headlines. Then minutes later the news reader returned to the opening story, which had reached him shortly before going on air: ‘Japanese aircraft have raided Pearl Harbor.’ Churchill leapt out of his chair and banged the radio. He telephoned at once to Roosevelt: ‘What’s this about Japan?’ Roosevelt confirmed that Japan and America were now at war: ‘We are all in the same boat now.’21 Churchill promised to declare war on Japan the next day. The two largest navies in the world were now ranged side by side, an alliance for which Churchill had worked hard for two years. It was impossible for British leaders not to feel a sense of relief at the news. General Ismay, secretary to the British Chiefs-of-Staff, told a companion the following day that the alliance made ‘ultimate victory certain’. But in the short term Britain and the United States faced what Ismay later called a ‘cataract of disaster’.22

  There was no disguising what a
disaster it was. Within a matter of weeks Japan crippled the American Pacific Fleet and eliminated the British and Dutch navies in the Far East. British, Dutch and American possessions were seized one after the other, their fragile defences swept aside with contemptuous ease. The Indian and Pacific Oceans lay wide open to Japanese sea power. None of the world’s broad seaways could be safely sailed, or easily defended. ‘If we lose the war at sea’, observed Britain’s naval chief Admiral Sir Dudley Pound in March 1942, ‘we lose the war.’23

  * * *

  No one was more surprised by the speed and completeness of Japanese success than Japanese leaders themselves. They had expected a campaign of six months or more, not twelve weeks; they had anticipated losing a quarter of their fleet, but lost only three destroyers. It took only a dozen divisions to capture the entire southern region.24 Whatever qualms existed before Pearl Harbor, they evaporated; most Japanese became intoxicated with triumph, ‘victory-drunk’ as they called it. The temptation to capitalise on that success was overwhelming. Japanese self-confidence was riding high. On New Year’s Day 1942 Admiral Matome Ugaki, Chief-of-Staff of the Japanese Combined Fleet, saw a year ahead brimming with promise: ‘The future is filled with brightness. The course of events this year will determine the fate of the war … The main thing is to win, and we surely will win.’25

  There were now so many options open that Japanese army and navy leaders began to squabble about which one to take. Some wanted to drive through to Australia to complete the conquest of the whole south-west Pacific. There was talk of moving westwards to join up with the Germans in the Middle East, driving the British from Asia. The army rejected them both because it lacked the manpower for operations on such a bold scale. The Combined Fleet led by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto favoured a more modest but strategically significant move: the extension of Japan’s new Pacific perimeter to embrace the western Aleutians in the north, the island of Midway in the central Pacific, and a circle of bases north of Australia – Port Moresby in Papua, Ocean Island and Nauru. The object of these operations was to cut sea communications between the United States and the western Pacific, and to tempt the crippled American Pacific Fleet to a final showdown where it would be annihilated by the larger Japanese force.26 The Japanese admirals were obsessed with the traditional rules of sea warfare, the pursuit of a great fleet engagement like the one they had won against the Russian navy in the Straits of Tsushima 37 years before, when Yamamoto was a young midshipman. Only the decisive defeat of the American main fleet could make the Pacific a Japanese lake.

  The plan was first to seize the south-western islands in May, while the bulk of the fleet and its carrier forces rested, regrouped and prepared for the main operation against Midway in June. The attack on the Aleutian islands, seizure of which would safeguard Japan’s northern flank, was scheduled for the same time, in the hope of dividing American forces at a critical point in the confrontation. The core of the Japanese strike force was provided once again by the large aircraft carriers and the small force of highly trained naval pilots which had inflicted so much damage at Pearl Harbor. Armed with the highly effective ‘Zeke’ or Zero fighter, faster and more manoeuvrable than anything yet available to the Allies, and with ‘Long Lance’ torpedoes, fuelled with liquid oxygen to give them a speed and range unrivalled by any other navy, the Japanese approached the coming battles with a dangerously arrogant sense of invulnerability.

  On the other side of the Pacific Japanese victories produced a frenzied response, part fury, part fear. The American public, used to regarding the Japanese as their racial and cultural inferiors, was suddenly faced with an enemy apparently unstoppable, whose military skills bordered on the magical. The thirst for vengeance was unquenchable.27 This posed difficulties for Roosevelt and the military chiefs. Ever since 1940 the assumption in Washington was that Germany was the chief enemy; Roosevelt had reiterated to Churchill at Placentia Bay the commitment to fight ‘Germany first’ if America found herself at war. Japanese aggression challenged this commitment. It was not simply a question of satisfying the bloodlust of ordinary Americans, powerful lobby though it was. The real issue was the imminent collapse of America’s position throughout the Pacific basin. This required an urgent response. Admiral Ernest King, appointed Commander-in-Chief of the US navy in 1941, pleaded for the priorities to be reversed: Japan first, then Germany. In the end Roosevelt settled on a compromise: Britain was given a guarantee that the defeat of Hitler was still the primary ambition, but the Pacific got the lion’s share of naval and army resources. By the middle of 1942 there were almost 400,000 American soldiers in the Pacific theatre; against Germany and Italy there were only sixty thousand.28 King had another bee in his bonnet: he did not want to share the Pacific war with the British, against whose naval ambitions he displayed a powerful prejudice. There was little the Royal Navy could do in the Pacific with unlimited commitments elsewhere, and in March Churchill agreed to divide oceanic responsibilities, America to operate in the Pacific, Britain in the Indian Ocean, and both states in uneasy condominium in the Atlantic.

  In the early months of 1942 American strategy crystallised into a single objective, to keep some kind of military foothold in the southern Pacific as a springboard for a future offensive. Australia was the obvious choice and it was here that the American commander General Douglas Macarthur, rudely expelled from the Philippines, gathered together the ragged remnants of the retreating armies for the desperate task of halting the Japanese onslaught. On 30 March Roosevelt appointed him Supreme Commander, South-west Pacific. At the same time King appointed Admiral Chester Nimitz Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Ocean Area. On these two men fell the responsibility for keeping open the lifeline from America; Macarthur, flamboyant, ambitious, a jealous guardian of army responsibilities, and Nimitz, a more modest personality, a man of method and good sense, a solid organiser.

  Both men could see that Japan was unlikely to stop after the first flush of victory. By mid-April Nimitz had reliable intelligence that enemy forces were once again on the move south towards Australia, almost certainly intending to seize Port Moresby on the south-east coast of New Guinea, a short flight from Queensland, and probably to take the remaining necklace of islands bordering the Coral Sea. On 16 April Nimitz despatched the aircraft carriers Lexington and Yorktown from Hawaii to rendezvous with a motley assembly of smaller warships to form a task force to oppose the Japanese assault. The Japanese moved down in four groups, organised according to a complex schedule of operations. There were two invasion forces, one for Port Moresby, the other for the ring of islands, stretching from the Solomons to Ocean Island. They were accompanied by a covering force of larger warships. The main striking force, built around the large aircraft carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku, steered farther to the south-east, to try to catch American ships in a pincer movement. The whole assault was to take four days, from 3 May to 7 May.29

  Japanese soldiers had already landed on Tulagi in the Solomon Islands on 3 May when the American task force, commanded by Rear Admiral Frank Fletcher, sailed into the Coral Sea. No stretch of water more deserved its name. Calmer and much bluer than the ocean, the sea was ringed with coral islands dotted with tropical greenery. Along the southern coast lay the 1,500-mile Great Barrier Reef, which produced a fringe of white foam around the azure waters. Neither side had accurate intelligence on the whereabouts of the other, and squally, grey weather made aircraft reconnaissance difficult. Both forces circled round, anxious to make contact. When they finally did so there followed a catalogue of errors on both sides. The Japanese carrier force under Admiral Takagi mistook the American fuelling ship Neosho for the enemy task force, pounding the unfortunate vessel with the full weight of an aerial assault. American reconnaissance aircraft mistook the light naval force supporting the Port Moresby invasion for the Japanese carriers. Fletcher sent off his own aircraft, which by mere chance found the larger covering force on their way. They attacked and sank the light carrier Shoho, the first of its kind lost by Japan. This was
enough to halt the attack on Port Moresby. The assault force retreated north-west, its air cover lost. On 7 May the weather was too poor for successful air attack, but Takagi sent off his aircraft regardless. Reaching the end of their fuel supply, his fighter bombers were continuing to hunt for the American ships when they were attacked by enemy fighter aircraft. Nine were shot down. In gloomy weather the remainder turned for home. Some tried to land on the Yorktown, mistaking it for their own ship. Short of fuel the rest were forced to land in the sea. Only one-fifth of the force returned safely.

  3 Battle of the Coral Sea, 5–7 May 1942

  The following day both fleets knew that they must be close enough to each other to make contact. American aircraft found the two large Japanese carriers in cloudy weather. They attacked in two waves, beginning at just before 11 a.m. The result was disappointing: neither carrier was sunk. The Zuikaku avoided any serious damage; the Shokaku was hit by just three bombs – this was however sufficient to destroy her engine repair shops and damage her flight deck severely enough to send her on a long haul back to Japan for repairs. At almost the same time Japanese airmen found Fletcher’s ships. Both American carriers sustained severe damage, but were not sunk. Only later in the day did the Lexington, listing badly, suffer a massive internal explosion. At eight in the evening she was put out of her misery by an American destroyer. Her crew watched from nearby rescue ships as she finally went down, ‘crying and weeping like young girls’.30