Harris, true to his convictions and his disdain for “panacea bombing,” did not hesitate to join sides with critics who were doubting that the air force was achieving much of anything by attacking L’Orient and Saint-Nazaire. That put him at odds with the U.S. air force as well as with his fellow RAF officers who were directing the operation against the U-boat ports.28 Yet few air senior officers took issue with Harris’s larger point, that the strategic bomber offensive was the core mission and raison d’être of the air forces. Blackett’s involvement in the argument reawakened the previous year’s dispute over bombing policy, and RAF officers closed ranks to defend their service. Blackett probably did not help matters by going toe-to-toe with Harris in an exchange of acerbic memoranda about fundamental war strategy; he began his reply to Harris’s March 29 memorandum, “I have read the paper by A.O.C. in C., Bomber Command, which is coloured by the same fundamentally false strategic conception displayed all through these discussions with the Air Staff.”
Even the new commander of Coastal Command, Air Marshal John Slessor, bridled when Blackett and Williams recommended to the Anti-U-Boat Committee the transfer of VLR aircraft from Bomber Command to increase patrols in the bay. Blackett had not bothered to discuss their paper with Slessor before presenting it to the committee, an amateurish political miscalculation. Slessor, offended, reacted by dismissing the scientists’ calculations of the effectiveness of patrolling the bay as “slide-rule strategy of the worst kind”—and later insinuated that Blackett’s real motive was that he “was intellectually and temperamentally opposed to the bomber offensive.” In his memoirs Slessor tried to justify his stance by suggesting that Blackett and Williams were simply out of their depth:
The operational research scientists had no stronger supporter than I, and these two were among the best of them. But they must stick to their lasts. Statistics are invaluable in war if they are properly used—in fact you can’t fight a modern war without them. But the Bay offensive was a battle, and a bitterly contested one, and nothing could be more dangerously misleading than to imagine that you can forecast the result of a battle or decide the weapons necessary to use in it, by doing sums. It is not aeroplanes or ships or tanks that win battles; it is the men in them and the men who command them. The most important factors in any battle are the human factors of leadership, morale, courage and skill, which cannot be reduced to any mathematical formula.29
In other words, calculations based on quantifiable data were invaluable—but a commander was always free to ignore them on the grounds that unmeasurable factors were still more important. The fact that Blackett’s and Williams’s “sums” had repeatedly tripled or quintupled the effectiveness of the men and their weapons apparently went right by the air marshal, as did the fact that nothing is more bracing for men’s morale than success.
Blackett was excluded from a meeting of the Anti-U-boat Committee on March 31 on the slim pretext that there were too many attendees. Picking up on Slessor’s line about “slide rule strategy,” Air Chief Marshal Charles Portal, the chief of the Air Staff, told the committee he was reluctant to transfer any aircraft from the bomber offensive to the Battle of the Atlantic based “on a theoretical calculation.” Harris added his familiar scorn and Cherwell backed him up with a sage pronouncement, based on no apparent facts whatsoever, that adding a modest number of aircraft to the bay offensive was unlikely to be effective. Outnumbered and outargued, the Admiralty representatives were forced to accept Portal’s token offer that “inexperienced” bomber crews could be used to continue the raids on the bay ports, as could the U.S. Eighth Air Force on days when clouds obscured the targets in Germany that the Americans hoped to strike with their daylight precision tactics.30
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THE MATTER, however, was being overtaken by events in Washington, and the mid-Atlantic.
However much Harris, Arnold, Eaker, or other airmen might entertain visions of victory through aerial bombardment alone—and however much they complained about chasing geese and searching for needles—that was not a view that enjoyed much sympathy among the men busily planning for the greatest landing operation in the history of war. The U.S. Army high command was becoming increasingly alarmed over what the U-boat threat was doing to its plans for D-Day. On March 1, 1943, a conference in Washington was convened that brought together a host of British, American, and Canadian sea and air officers to discuss the convoy situation. Admiral Percy Noble, the chief of the British naval staff in Washington, headed the British delegation to the Atlantic Convoy Conference and he noted in his opening remarks, “The submarine menace, to my mind, is becoming every day more and more of an air problem.”31
Edward L. Bowles, an MIT electrical engineer who had become “Expert Consultant to the Secretary of War” on radar—and, increasingly, the main scientific adviser on antisubmarine air operations by the AAF in general—provided a memorandum to General Marshall on March 3 warning that the ability to launch and supply a land offensive on the continent depended crucially on solving the U-boat problem. Given how much of the total Allied shipping capacity was fully committed just to maintaining Britain’s basic necessities such as food and fuel, even a small change in the number of available ships translated into a huge difference in the number of extra men and weapons that could be transported across the Atlantic. Bowles calculated that reducing the rate at which ships were being lost from the current 2.6 percent per month to 1.5 percent would increase by 2 million the number of U.S. troops who could be sent overseas and supplied by the end of 1944. The army’s plans for future operations in Europe assumed at a minimum cutting the losses to 2.15 percent.
Bowles, who had drawn on both Blackett’s and Morse’s work in preparing his memorandum, noted as well that aircraft were ten times as effective as surface ships in sighting a U-boat, and about as effective in sinking a U-boat once it was sighted. The key was to increase sightings. That inescapably meant more aircraft, especially centimeter-wave-radar-equipped VLR aircraft.32
The conference had little difficulty agreeing that 260 VLR aircraft were immediately needed for antisubmarine operations, versus the 52 currently available. Making it happen was, as always, another matter. That depended on decisions that were, in the military argot, above the conferees’ pay grade. The conference subcommittee charged with “implementation” put it cautiously:
In view of the shortages of aircraft in all theaters of active operation it would be most undesirable to divert to ASW any large number of aircraft now earmarked for these theaters, but the urgent need for a total of 260 VLR for A/S operations justifies the recommendation that the Combined Chiefs of Staff explore the possibilities of diverting 128 to ASW in addition to the 132 which are to be assigned by 1 June in accordance with present plans.33
Bowles was stunned a few weeks later when General Arnold insisted to him that a letter from his own staff the previous summer agreeing to assign even those 132 B-24s to antisubmarine operations “means nothing.” The allocation of aircraft, Arnold said, was a decision for the Joint Chiefs, and they had not yet acted on the matter. Bowles rightly suspected that part of the reason they had not acted was that Arnold and the AAF brass had made sure the issue never came up. “To me the shocking aspect of this,” Bowles wrote Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, “is that, since the conference I had with you and General Arnold on August 10, 1942, we have been struggling to obtain an honest-to-goodness allocation of long range aircraft to antisubmarine warfare.”34
Events at sea, however, were beginning to speak louder than the words of staff officers in Washington. On March 10, the Bletchley code breakers suddenly stopped being able to read the U-boat Enigma signals, the result of the Germans’ switch to a new weather short-signal book. Almost simultaneously, the B-dienst broke back into the Allied convoy code, which it had been having trouble cracking since December when a new, more secure procedure was introduced in that system. On March 16, forty U-boats converged in the mid-Atlantic on two eastbound convoys that had sailed fro
m New York the first week of the month. Twenty-two merchantmen were torpedoed and sunk in a single action that cost Dönitz a single U-boat. The tonnage loss was 146,000.
Two days later FDR sent a note to King and Marshall. Referring to the code names for the Allied invasion of Sicily planned for the summer and the buildup of U.S. forces in England in preparation for a cross-Channel invasion of France, the president wrote, “Since the rate of sinking of our merchant ships in the North Atlantic during the past week has increased at a rate that threatens seriously the security of Great Britain, and therefore both ‘Husky’ and ‘Bolero,’ it seems evident that every available weapon must be used at once to counter the enemy submarine campaign.”35
Pressure was also mounting from both the British and the U.S. Army for a total overhaul of the U.S. antisubmarine air effort, much as Captain Baker had urged almost a full year before, to unify the still woefully fragmented command structure. Despite the foot-dragging by Arnold and the other top AAF commanders in allocating additional aircraft, the army had nonetheless taken serious steps to embrace the job as its own. It had renamed the I Bomber Command the Army Air Forces Antisubmarine Command in October 1942 and established a close working relationship with the sea frontier and naval district commands, as well as informal liaisons with the navy’s ASWORG scientists. On March 22, 1943, one of the army Liberators at St. Eval sank the group’s first U-boat; their success affirmed the army fliers’ growing restlessness with what they saw as the U.S. Navy’s excessively defensive use of air power to escort convoys.36
On April 19, Marshall sent his most strongly worded plea yet for breaking the impasse over the supply of VLR aircraft and giving the whole antisubmarine effort the urgency it needed. His memorandum was addressed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff but it was really aimed at King:
I am deeply concerned with the matter of the present organization and technique for the employment of aircraft in the antisubmarine effort, and I therefore propose that this be considered by the Joint U.S. Chiefs of Staff in all of its ramifications.… I personally am now strongly of the opinion that the ultimate solution for the employment of the Air arm in connection with antisubmarine operations, particularly, and possibly exclusively as applied to VLR aircraft, should be based on an organization under a unified command responsible for temporary allocation and technique of employment. This would result in overriding what appears to me to be the limiting effect of its present employment under the system of naval districts and sea frontiers.
The navy’s geographical command system was the nub of the problem, making it nearly impossible to quickly shift aircraft from one area to another. The entire arrangement was built around King’s still limited view of aircraft as fundamentally escorts for convoys. Marshall proposed organizing at least a “highly mobile striking force” of VLR aircraft “for offensive action,” which would be placed directly under the Joint Chiefs in a manner analogous to a theater command—in other words, taking the unit out of the navy or army chain of command altogether. He suggested that in addition to the 75 army and 60 navy VLR B-24s already allocated to antisubmarine operations, each service would provide an additional 12 per month in May, June, and July to bring the total up to just over 200.37
King was playing several games. He still was adamant about avoiding any joint command that would place a British officer in charge of the Battle of the Atlantic. At the Convoy Conference, his opening remarks pointedly vetoed any such suggestion. He said that it was his “very strong personal opinion” that any command structure with “mixed forces” was to be avoided. They offered “only the form and not the substance of unified effort,” he insisted. King also poured several buckets of cold water on offensive air operations against U-boats. “I have heard something about ‘killer groups,’ ” he told the conference, and then dismissed them just as Eaker had, as a search for the “proverbial needle in a haystack.” King had not kept pace with either tactical or technical developments. His justifiable skepticism about surface “killer groups” simply did not apply to the demonstrated value of radar-guided air search. Bowles, now joined by Vannevar Bush, kept trying to point this out; on April 6 he wrote Stimson about another of King’s pronouncements on the matter, “Dr. Bush and I both feel that the great weakness of his position lies in his minimizing of the importance of the air attack.” From London, where he was currently serving as the ASWORG liaison to Britain, Arthur Kip weighed in later that spring with the latest evidence showing that Blackett and Williams’s calculations on the effect of radar-equipped aircraft in the bay had been almost precisely borne out in preliminary trials. “The point I wish to stress is the extreme importance of acting at once in getting more B-24’s over here,” Kip wrote, noting that both the Admiralty and Coastal Command were convinced, too. In late May, Admiral Stark, the commander of U.S. Naval Forces in Europe, joined Slessor and Pound in formally requesting the immediate transfer of seventy-two American B-24s from antisubmarine bases on the east coast of America to Britain to join the bay offensive. Even Slessor was by now sold on the idea.38
King kept balking and equivocating. For one thing, he had his eyes on the Pacific, where he was nursing ideas of edging the army out of the long-range bombardment mission; the navy had been sending much of its allotment of new B-24s to the Pacific theater, equipped not as sub hunters but as bombers.
Only King could afford to stiff the president of the United States. He tended to view FDR as just another meddling civilian, and his resolute policy was to ignore meddling civilians. King routinely refused to see the Navy Department’s civilian assistant secretaries (“I didn’t have time to educate those people,” he disdainfully explained), and when Secretary Knox once sheepishly sent a mutual friend of the two men as an emissary to complain that the admiral never told him anything that was going on in his department, King shot back, “Why should I? The first thing he does is to tell the reporters everything he knows.” King felt he knew how to handle the president, too, whom he never warmed to. “Roosevelt was a little tricky,” King later remarked, “and in some ways the truth was not always in him.”39
King was himself a master of the backdoor bureaucratic game, however, and it was becoming clear to him that Marshall’s proposal to place the antisubmarine air forces under a single command was going to prevail unless King found a way to get it off the table once and for all. Just when it looked like he would have to give way, King surprised everyone by announcing that he had established a new navy command that would take charge of the entire Battle of the Atlantic.
To give it the maximum authority, King designated the new organization a fleet within the navy command structure—and promptly named himself its commander. The Tenth Fleet had no ships of its own but assumed operational control of all antisubmarine forces in the Atlantic. King then proposed a simple “horse trade,” as its critics disparagingly but accurately described it: he would give to the army the navy’s pending allocation of B-24s in exchange for the army’s existing seventy-seven antisubmarine-equipped versions of the planes, and the army would just get out of the ASW business altogether. It was a bureaucratic and institutional solution rather than a military one and Marshall, who had tried to keep the discussion focused on substance rather than service politics, was clearly dismayed, but accepted it as the only way to break the impasse. The agreement was formally accepted on July 9.40
ASWORG moved to the Tenth Fleet with the reorganization. It found a solid champion in the man King had brought in as his deputy, Rear Admiral F. S. “Frog” Low, whom King had recalled from a command in the Pacific to take the job. (The admiral’s nickname, Phil Morse noted, “referred to his voice, not his manners.”) Low largely accepted ASWORG’s views on doctrine, tactics, and even offensive air operations in the bay and incorporated them wholesale into the doctrine and policy papers he issued for the Tenth Fleet, where necessary skirting King’s sensibilities simply by employing cryptic or evasive wording (such as calling the bay offensive an attack on “focal areas of concentrations”).4
1
ASWORG’s role by the summer of 1943 was becoming so routine that it scarcely even raised eyebrows anymore that a bunch of very nonnaval civilians was setting policy on the most minute details of naval operations and doctrine. In December 1942 the group had acquired a roomful of IBM machines and now had a complete set of attack records punched onto IBM cards, which could be sorted and analyzed to answer new questions that arose. The scientists continued to crank out studies assessing such questions as the optimal height of patrol aircraft to fly, the most effective allocation of a plane’s payload between fuel and depth bombs, and the right spacing and pattern for depth charges fired by new weapons being developed for ships that could throw a salvo of charges over the bow so that an escort vessel could attack a U-boat ahead of the ship without losing sonar contact. For that last problem George Kimball had hit on an innovative technique of using the IBM equipment. He drew an outline of a submarine onto an IBM card, punched it out, then traced the pattern onto a series of other cards, repositioning it each time according to a table of random distributions. He then had a set of submarine silhouettes that could be “attacked” with different depth charge patterns and the number of hits counted for each. It was an early example of using computing machinery for what was called a Monte Carlo simulation, a useful technique when an analytical solution using mathematical formulas was too complex. Slessor’s barbed metaphor was out of date. Strategy by slide rule had become strategy by IBM machine.42
EVEN BEFORE the recommendations of the Convoy Conference and the reorganization of the U.S. antisubmarine command structure could be implemented, a remarkable turnaround in fortunes had occurred in the Atlantic. On March 18, 1943, after two weeks of frantic efforts, the Bletchley code breakers resumed reading the U-boat Enigma signals by employing their longest shot yet; piecing together cribs from short-signal messages transmitted by the U-boats to report convoy sightings or their position or fuel supplies, they managed to break back into the system, in many cases by making truly inspired guesses at the contents of the messages to build up a crib to run on the bombes. Signals that reported a U-boat’s location might be cribbed by direction-finding fixes on the boat that independently established its longitude and latitude; the signature within the signals that gave the boat’s number was in many cases cribbed with help from the Operational Intelligence Centre’s tracking files and by putting together a catalogue of each boat’s individual radio fingerprint—the background radio noise unique to individual transmitters and the slight individual eccentricities in each radio operator’s “fist,” the way he varied the length of his Morse code dots and dashes or paused between letters or words.43
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