Military Misfortunes

by Eliot A Cohen

  The British antisubmarine effort, clearly the most successful of any of the participants’ in World War II, succeeded in large part because of their ability to master these two requirements of ASW: efficient collection, collation, and communication of intelligence and development of appropriate doctrine. They accomplished the former in large part because of the efforts of the Royal Navy’s Operational Intelligence Centre, and in particular its submarine tracking room, under a lawyer turned naval reserve officer: Rodger Winn.46 The OIC received intelligence from all sources—decrypted radio intercepts (which it analyzed in raw form, unlike the arrangements made for land and air decrypts), land-based radio direction finding, prisoner-of-war interrogation reports, photographic intelligence, and all the many other forms of raw intelligence—which it received directly from intelligence collectors. Its small staff could not only communicate directly with field commanders: It established its credibility so fully that it received permission to disseminate not only “hard” intelligence about the location and activities of enemy units but “working fictions” as well-educated guesses, based on incomplete information and the judgment of the OIC analysts. Given the fact that OIC was a largely civilian operation, and given the jealous proclivity of naval commanders to make their own estimates of likely enemy action, this constituted a remarkable bureaucratic as well as analytic achievement. In the United States Navy, by contrast, the aggressive head of the CNO’s War Plans Division, Admiral Kelly Turner, successfully battled to take responsibility for intelligence estimates away from the Office of Naval Intelligence, making it part of the office of the CNO and later the office of COMINCH.47

  How did the OIC and naval intelligence contribute more generally to the Royal Navy’s successes in ASW? First, it allowed for the diversion of convoys away from waiting wolf packs—at least until the number of U-boats grew so large that diversion became completely impossible. Second, and probably more important, it enabled the British to concentrate their scarce and overworked escort vessels and aircraft to protect the most endangered convoys. Third, it enabled the British to develop a database on the tactics and habits of U-boats and their skippers, a database useful for future analysis.

  The success of British naval intelligence did not stem solely from technical accomplishments, and in particular decryption of German radio transmissions, important as those were.48 Rather, the British system worked because it had developed an organizational structure that enabled the Royal Navy and RAF to make use of all of the intelligence at their disposal, to analyze it swiftly and accurately, and to disseminate it immediately to those who needed to have it. The arrangements that allowed them to do so—the creation of an independent OIC within the Naval Intelligence Division, allowed to communicate directly with commanders at sea and staffed largely by civilian analysts temporarily recruited for the war—came into place in 1938, well before the outbreak of war and, interestingly enough, considerably before anyone suspected that cryptography would supply the enormously valuable services that it later did.49 All this came about because of British experiences in World War I, when the Royal Navy failed to make sufficient use of the brilliant cryptanalysts of Room 40, the forerunner of the OIC, for precisely these organizational reasons. Cut off from noncryptologic sources of intelligence, allowed to communicate only with the Admiralty in London rather than operational commanders at sea, discouraged by admirals from offering educated hypotheses about likely enemy behavior, Room 40 made a smaller contribution to that war than it might have done. The failure to deal a crippling blow to the exposed German High Seas Fleet at the Battle of Jutland stemmed directly from the bureaucratic and organizational relationships that prevented the appropriate use of intelligence.50

  British World War II ASW doctrine evolved in almost as centralized a fashion as did operational intelligence. Two organizations—the Royal Air Force’s Coastal Command and the Royal Navy’s Western Approaches Command—handled air and most naval ASW respectively. Because of the original bureaucratic disposition of naval aircraft to the Royal Air Force in the interwar period, all landbased naval aviation lay in the hands of Coastal Command; because of geography, most escort groups were based in Liverpool under CINCWA. Both had close links to OIC in London: both (particularly in the latter part of the war) operated under senior commanders in constant touch with one another. Both made efforts to develop standardized tactical procedures and equipment for ASW: both were increasingly successful, particularly in 1941 and after.

  In the case of Coastal Command the development of sound doctrine benefited from the early and successful use of operations research analysts, led in the summer of 1941 by P. M. S. Blackett, probably the most distinguished one of the war.51 OR analysts studied a variety of problems, which contributed to the solution of such problems as the organization of search and patrol and the most efficient tactics for attacking surfaced submarines. By 1941 OR analysts worked directly for the head of Coastal Command, rather than as previously for the chief scientist of the Air Ministry.

  Western Approaches Command took longer to apply OR to antisubmarine warfare—only in the spring of 1942, for example, did the Royal Navy ask Blackett to help organize the Royal Navy’s operations research effort.52 Western Approaches could and did, however, standardize training, in part by ensuring that new skippers would study the methods of successful commanders and in part by centralizing the various forms of classroom and open-water training.53 The Royal Navy may have resisted the use of operations research more than did the RAF; It succeeded equally, however, at discovering which tactics worked and at making sure that such procedures were taught and applied.

  Theoretically, after April 1941, Coastal Command came under the operational control of the Royal Navy for the prosecution of ASW. Not surprisingly, sailors and airmen have disputed the significance of this arrangement.54 It is more important to note that the headquarters of CINCWA stood side by side with those of the Coastal Command’s Fifteenth Group, which provided most of the antisubmarine convoy escorts, and that the two commands worked extremely closely. In addition, Western Approaches Command concentrated exclusively on the antisubmarine war, and Coastal Command largely so. Although from time to time Coastal Command aircraft raided German coastal shipping or had to provide cover for naval operations in British waters, most of its attention—and its own sense of purpose—focused on the problem of ASW.

  British arrangements were far from perfect, to be sure. The friction between the Royal Navy and the RAF over control of Coastal Command and, more importantly, allocation of resources to it, flared up throughout the war. More could probably have been done earlier to develop the tactical doctrine required for the prosecution of ASW. Nonetheless, British antisubmarine warfare worked remarkably well throughout the war, and largely because of the organizational arrangements that supported it. As we shall see, in late 1942 and early 1943 the United States Navy duplicated these arrangements—thereby dramatically improving its anti-submarine effectiveness. Proper organization constituted the critical problem for the conduct of antisubmarine warfare. While individual decisions and disputes had short-term impacts on the conduct of the American antisubmarine war, none had anything like the cumulative impact of the larger organizational disfunctions we shall discuss below.

  To demonstrate, let us take four of the most frequently offered “single-problem” explanations of the failures of 1942, beginning with the infamous absence of a coastal blackout until April 1942.55 Heinous as this failure was, it cannot account for the continued heavy rates of sinking after the imposition of a blackout, nor does it account in any way for the second kind of failure—the low kill rates of 1942 compared with 1943 and 1944. It came about in part because of divided command (the coastal blackout was the concern of the army, not the naval Sea Frontier commanders), but dramatic as it was it cannot explain why British ships and planes could find and destroy U-boats and American ships and planes could not. The same holds true of convoy (or rather the absence of convoy), probably the single most important
mistake made by the United States Navy in 1942: It too does not account for low kill rates following sub contacts. More important, the decision not to introduce convoy was not simply a thoughtless blunder but an agonizing decision made with full awareness of the possible cost. The Eastern Sea Frontier war diarist wrote in the entry for February 1942:

  To defend merchant shipping against submarine attacks there is one classic procedure. The history of the first world war demonstrated that ships, men and weapons, could be brought into most successful combination against the U-boats through the operation of the convoy system. British experience in the early years of this war has served only to confirm this lesson of the past.56

  Yet various factors—above all, the number of ships requiring protection and the number and quality of airplanes available for escort work—seemed to argue against immediate introduction of convoy. The issue did not focus on the abstract merits of convoy; Everyone agreed on that. The difficult questions were: Under what conditions? How large? With what kinds of escort? These issues did not go away in 1942 for either American or British naval authorities: the size of convoys, the appropriateness of allowing very fast merchant ships to sail independently, and the distribution of warships between escort and supporting hunter groups remained contentious from 1939 through 1945.57

  A third “single-problem” analysis—more common at the time perhaps than now—looks at critical weapons, which might have tipped the ASW balance either way. The secretary of war, for example, believed that airborne radar (which could detect submarines on the surface) would enable the Allies to turn the tide against the U-boats.58 In this view, the failure to introduce a critical system—airborne radar—promptly accounts for the failure of 1942. Yet particularly in the Battle of the North Atlantic, no weapon ever proved decisive. Before the war the Royal Navy thought that sonar had virtually eliminated the submarine threat: Surface attacks and adroit tactics negated much of its value. The Germans thought that torpedoes that homed on a ship’s propeller noises would turn the war around: The Allies developed a device to spoof it. So too for airborne radar. The Germans managed to acquire or develop radar-warning receivers enabling U-boats to submerge before the airplane arrived, and by developing the snorkel (an air funnel which allows a submarine to recharge its batteries without surfacing completely) they were able to reduce greatly the time U-boats had to spend on the surface. Each technological advance was necessary, and without unremitting technical competition the Allies could not have won the Battle of the North Atlantic. But no single weapon or family of weapons proved fatal to the U-boats.

  This brings us to the fourth “single-problem” explanation of the disaster of 1942—the dispute over the use of land-based naval aviation. One cannot say that aircraft proved the most effective enemies of U-boats, although they may have accounted for marginally more kills than surface vessels operating alone (see Figure 4–5). As mentioned above, no single weapon system turned that U-boat threat around, and ship sinkings of U-boats continued to rise until the last year of the war, when all destruction of U-boats fell off. The sheer presence of escort vessels could force U-boats to act in ways that would subsequently make them vulnerable to air power. Nonetheless, air power exerted a major influence on the outcome of the Battle of the North Atlantic: Airplanes operating from ships and shore accounted for a bit less than half of the U-boats sunk by Allied forces; others located U-boats or by their sheer presence forced them to operate inefficiently. Given the promise and the reality of the aerial contribution to ASW, it is not surprising that serious disputes arose between the organizations responsible for handling it.

  FIGURE 4–5. Sinkings of U-boats at Sea, by Cause *

  * This table excludes sinkings by bombing raids, naval mines, submarines, and other or unknown causes. Bombing did not account for any substantial destruction until late 1944 and early 1945, when 22 and 40 U-boats, respectively, were destroyed from the air. During the last three years of the war submarines accounted for barely half a dozen U-boats a year. Mines (laid by ship and by plane) accounted for a dozen U-boats each in 1944 and 1945, but only several a year before then. In 1944 large numbers of U-boats (some 40 in all) were lost to unknown causes, which from 1940–1942 accounted for some half a dozen U-boats a year.

  SOURCE: First Lord of the Admiralty, German, Italian and Japanese U-Boat Casualties During the War: Particulars of Destruction (London: HMSO, 1946), p.4.

  In 1942 the United States Navy and the Army Air Force (which controlled most, but by no means all, of the aircraft useful for long-range antisubmarine warfare) had very different views about the proper role of aircraft. As the Army Air Force official historians put it:

  Naval doctrine emphasized the basically defensive functions of convoy escort and the patrol of more or less fixed sectors of the coastal waters . . . Army Air Force students of the problem expressed an equally marked preference for the offensive.59

  This dispute, however, mirrored an equally violent disagreement between sailors and airmen in Great Britain- one equally incapable of resolution. In point of fact, aircraft, whether based on shore or on carriers, and warships as well, participated in both escort of convoy and so-called hunter-killer operations. While convoys undoubtedly provided the magnet that attracted U-boats and hence provided the targets for the antisubmarine forces, at various points pure hunter-killer operations proved successful as well—the 1943 Bay of Biscay offensive, for example, which interdicted U-boats attempting to break into the Atlantic from their French bases. Despite the extreme language on both sides, neither sailors nor airmen practiced purely offensive or purely defensive operational concepts. Moreover, disruptive as these disputes were, they did not (in the British case, at any rate) spill over into the day to day functioning of antisubmarine warfare: working relationships between operational commanders, and in particular CINCWA and the commander of the Fifteenth Group remained close. In the United States in 1942, however, abstract doctrinal disputes folded into a much more serious absence of working cooperation in the field—which returns us to our central thesis.

  THE MATRIX

  Figure 4–6 presents the failure matrix for this chapter. In it we have broken down the functions which the Navy (and the Army Air Forces, in some measure) into four: resource allocation, coordination and communication, control and command, and doctrine and technique. Along the vertical axis we have four levels of command responsibility. In the first row we have the highest civilian and military authorities, plus the support agencies (e.g., the Bureau of Ships or the Office of Naval Intelligence). In the second, we have the operational commanders such as the commander of the Eastern Sea Frontier and First Bomber Command (the army air force units responsible for ASW). In the third row we have an intermediate level of command, represented by the commanders of the naval districts, who had charge of escort units in the major ports, plus control of shipping in and around those ports; and in the fourth row, the actual operators—the skippers and crews of the ships and airplanes that went out to attack enemy submarines.

  Arrows indicate causal links.

  FIGURE 4–6. Matrix of Failure

  We can begin our analysis in the usual fashion, by looking at the sharp end of the organization—the forces actually in contact with the enemy. At this level we find neither failure of communication (that is, ships not communicating adequately with one another) nor of command (ships or airplanes failing to do as they were told). Rather, we find ships and airplanes improperly distributed, fruitlessly patrolling sea-lanes in search of submarines, for example. As mentioned above, we also find doctrine and technique inadequately standardized and developed. Air crews, for instance, which had only one or two chances of actually attacking a submarine in the course of their operational experience, had few opportunities to learn by doing: They needed sound doctrine the first time because they might never have more than one chance to apply their knowledge.60

  The next level of command, that of Naval District Command, ostensibly controlled local escort operations thr
ough the spring of 1942, when the commander Eastern Sea Frontier recommended a reorganization of the ESF that would have reduced their operational responsibilities considerably.61 The naval district commanders occupied an impossible position, in which they had to juggle responsibility for harbor security (no mean task), administrative control of naval shore facilities in their areas plus the local defense forces used to hunt submarines. Moreover, they rarely had any direct liaison with the army air force (which insisted on working directly with ESF, if not indeed altogether independently), at least through official channels. As a result, these intermediate commanders failed to coordinate their efforts or to use what assets they had effectively.

  Ironically, the operational level of command, that of the Eastern Sea Frontier and its counterparts (Gulf Sea Frontier, and so on) had been designed expressly to forestall some of the problems that later emerged. Created in early 1941 in order to unify the splintered peacetime organizational arrangements (which divided the seaboard into naval district commands, usually based on major ports), ESF in particular grew steadily, encompassing more and more of the Atlantic Coast all the way down to Florida. The Sea Frontiers had prime responsibility for the conduct of coastal ASW in 1942. The most notable failures at this level occurred in the areas of doctrine and technique (in particular, the decision not to go with weak convoys sooner, rather than wait for stronger escorts) and in the communication of prompt and reliable intelligence to local commands.

  It is at the highest level that the source of failure becomes most explicable, or at least most readily apparent. Two central problems set up the difficulties under which all three lower levels of command operated. These were first and foremost the failure to understand and act on the mismatch between the organizational structure for conducting ASW and the nature of the problem itself and second, the failure to learn from the British experience how to rectify that mismatch.