The Second World War

by John Keegan

  Postponement of Sealion did not evoke a termination of Eagle. For one thing, Goering had always regarded the two operations as quite separate and clung to the hope that this personal offensive against Britain could achieve a strategic result independent of the efforts of the army and navy. For another, Hitler wished to sustain the pressure on Churchill’s government, which he had persuaded himself must perceive the inevitability of an accommodation as clearly he did himself. Daylight attacks on London and other targets were therefore maintained throughout September and on some days inflicted heavy damage; on 26 September, for example, a surprise raid on the Spitfire factory in Southampton stopped production for some time. The equation of aerial effort, however, was speaking for itself. As Galland explained to a resistant Goering at the Reichmarschall’s hunting lodge, whither Galland had been bidden to shoot a stag in reward for his fortieth victory, on 27 September, ‘British plane wastage was far lower and production far higher than the German intelligence staff estimated and now events were exposing the error so plainly that it had to be acknowledged.’

  Acknowledgement was conceded slowly: daylight raids continued, at mounting cost, into October; but night raids – inaccurate though they were, besides inviting both retaliation and the accusation of ‘terror tactics’ which Hitler eschewed – began to become the norm. During October six times the tonnage of bombs was dropped by night as by day; and after November, in ‘the Blitz’ proper, night bombing supplanted daylight operations altogether. By then the Battle of Britain could be said to be over. It had been a heroic episode. ‘The Few’ deserved their epitaph: some 2500 young pilots had alone been responsible for preserving Britain from invasion. The majority were citizens; but significant numbers were Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans (including the icy ‘Sailor’ Malan, who tried to send German bomber pilots home with a dead crew, as a warning to the rest). A few were aliens, Irishmen and Americans, impatient at their countries’ neutrality, and a vital minority were refugees, Czechs and Poles; the latter, who formed 5 per cent of ‘the Few’, were responsible for 15 per cent of the losses claimed to have been inflicted on the Luftwaffe.

  The victory of ‘the Few’ was narrow. During the critical months of August and September, when the Battle of Britain was at its height, Fighter Command lost 832 fighters, the Luftwaffe only 668. It was the loss of nearly 600 German bombers which made the balance sheet read so disfavourably to the attacker. Had Hitler and Goering been privy to the extent of their success during the height of the battle, when a quarter of Fighter Command’s pilots became casualties and fighter losses for a period (11 August to 7 September) exceeded production, they would undoubtedly have surpassed their effort. Had they done so, the Luftwaffe might then have made itself the first air force to achieve a decisive victory in combat as an independent strategic arm, thus fulfilling the vision that Douhet and Mitchell had glimpsed in the dawn of military aviation. As it was, the pragmatism of Dowding and his Fighter Command staff, the self-sacrifice of their pilots and the innovation of radar inflicted on Nazi Germany its first defeat. The legacy of that defeat would be long delayed in its effects; but the survival of an independent Britain which it assured was the event that most certainly determined the downfall of Hitler’s Germany.

  FIVE

  War Supply and the Battle of the Atlantic

  Supply of food, of raw materials, of finished products, of weapons themselves, lies at the root of war. From the earliest times man has gone to war to take possession of resources he lacks and, when at war, has fought to secure his means of livelihood and self-protection from his enemy. The Second World War was no exception to this rule. In the view of Professor Alan Milward, principal economic historian of the conflict, its origins ‘lay in the deliberate choice of warfare as an instrument of policy by two of the world’s most economically developed states. Far from having economic reservations about warfare as a policy, both the German and Japanese governments were influenced in their decisions for war by the conviction that war might be an instrument of economic gain.’

  Milward’s judgement that economic impulsion drove Japan to war is incontestable. It was Japan’s belief that her swelling population, overflowing an island homeland deficient in almost every resource, could be supported only by taking possession of the productive regions of neighbouring China which had brought her into direct diplomatic conflict with the United States in 1937-41; it was America’s reactive trade embargoes, designed to hamstring Japan’s strategic adventurism, that in 1941 drove the Tokyo government to choose war rather than circumscribed peace as its national way forward. In the year of Pearl Harbor 40 per cent of Japan’s requirements of steel had to be imported to the home islands, together with 60 per cent of her aluminium, 80 per cent of her oil, 85 per cent of her iron ore and 100 per cent of her nickel. America’s threat to deny her oil and metals, against a guarantee of good behaviour as Washington should judge it, was therefore tantamount to strangulation. The ‘southern offensive’ was an almost predictable outcome.

  Hitler could not argue economic insufficiency to justify his strategic adventurism. In 1939, when a quarter of the population was still employed on the land, Germany was almost completely self-sufficient in food, needing to import only a proportion of her consumption of eggs, fruit, vegetables and fats. She also produced all the coal she consumed and a high proportion of her iron ore, except for armaments-grade ore which was supplied from Sweden. For rubber and oil – commodities for which coal-based substitutes would be found during the war – she was wholly dependent on imports, as she was also for most non-ferrous metals. However, through peaceful trade, her high level of exports (particularly of manufactures such as chemicals and machine tools) easily earned the surplus to fund and make good those deficiencies. Had it not been for Hitler’s social-Darwinian obsession with autarky – total national economic autonomy – Germany would have had no reason to prefer military to commercial intercourse with her neighbours.

  Paradoxically it was Germany’s adversaries, Britain and France, and her half-hearted ally, Italy, which had the better economic reasons for going to war. Italy was a major energy importer, while her industry, particularly her war industry, was rooted in a tradition of craftsmanship quite inconsistent with the ruthless mass consumption of the modern battlefield. Italian aero-engines were works of art – no consolation to the Regia Aeronautica pilots when replacement aircraft failed to come off the production-line at a rate to match attrition in the skies over Malta and Benghazi. France, too, maintained military arsenals run on artisan principles; and, though the country fed itself with ease and exported luxuries in plenty, it depended on its empire and its trading partners for many raw materials and some manufactured goods – for advanced aircraft, for example, from the United States in the crisis of 1940, and for rubber from its colonies in Indo-China.

  Britain’s case was the most paradoxical of all. In high gear, its industry could produce all the weapons, ships, aircraft, guns and tanks that its mobilised military population could man on the battlefield. As it had demonstrated in the First and events would prove in the Second World War, moreover, it could continue to find a surplus of armaments to export (to Russia) or to re-equip exile forces (Poles, Czechs, Free French), even at the nadir of its military fortunes. However, it could do so only by importing much of its non-ferrous metal and some of its machine-tool requirements to supply its factories, all its oil, and – most critically of all for an overpopulated island – half its food. At a pinch the Japanese, by living on unhusked rice, could survive at near-starvation level. The British, if deprived of North American wheat, would in the few months it would take to exhaust the national strategic reserve of flour and powdered milk have undergone a truly Malthusian decline and halved in numbers.

  Hence Winston Churchill’s heartfelt admission, once victory came, that ‘the only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril. . . . It did not take the form of flaring battles and glittering achievements, it manifes
ted itself through statistics, diagrams and curves unknown to the nation, incomprehensible to the public.’ The most important statistics were easily set out. In 1939 Britain needed to import 55 million tons of goods by sea to support its way of life. To do so it maintained the largest merchant fleet in the world, comprising 3000 ocean-going vessels and 1000 large coastal ships of 21 million gross-register (total capacity) tons. Some 2500 ships were at sea at any one time: the manpower of the merchant service, a resource almost as important as the ships themselves, totalled 160,000. To protect this fleet the Royal Navy deployed 220 vessels equipped with Asdic – the echo-sounding equipment developed by the Allied Submarine Detection Investigation Committee in 1917 – consisting of 165 destroyers, 35 sloops and corvettes and 20 trawlers. The ratio between merchant ships and escorts was thus about 14:1. Convoy, the practice of assembling merchant ships in organised formations under naval escort, was no longer a controversial procedure as it had been in the First World War; the Admiralty was committed to it before war broke out and it was introduced on the oceanic routes immediately and in coastal waters as soon as practicable.

  U-boats and surface raiders

  The principal enemy of convoy was the submarine, or U-boat (Unterseeboot). As in 1914 the Germans also deployed a number of surface commerce raiders, including both orthodox warships and converted merchantmen, but their number was small; between September 1939 and October 1942 less than a dozen auxiliary raiders gained great waters, of which the most successful, Atlantis, sank twenty-two vessels before interception and destruction by HMS Devonshire in November 1941. Germany’s battleships, battlecruisers, pocket battleships and cruisers occasionally raided the sea lanes, but they too were few in number, and judged too valuable, to be risked often, particularly after the humiliating defeat of the pocket battleship Graf Spee off Montevideo by three British cruisers in December 1939. German aircraft achieved some success as ship destroyers – in May 1941, a peak month, they sank 150,000 tons (the average displacement of a Second World War merchant ship was 5000 tons) – and mines, whether laid by aircraft, surface ship or submarine, were a constant menace. German fast coastal craft, known to the British as E-boats, were prolific minelayers in British coastal waters in 1941-4, and constituted a relentless threat to coastal convoys; in April 1944 a raid on an American troop convoy practising disembarkation for D-Day at Slapton Sands in Devon drowned more GIs than were lost off Normandy on 6 June itself. However, the attacks of aircraft and surface ships, large and small, on merchant shipping were extraneous to the real battle at sea in European waters in the Second World War. That was one, as Winston Churchill rightly denoted, between the convoy escort and the U-boats.

  In September 1939 Karl Dönitz, the German U-boat admiral, had fifty-seven U-boats under command, of which thirty were short-range coastal types and twenty-seven ocean-going. The German navy’s pre-war expansion programme, the ‘Z-plan’, called for the construction of a fleet of 300, with which Dönitz claimed he could certainly strangle Britain to death. He was to achieve that total in July 1942, allowing him to maintain 140 boats on operations and sink shipping at an annual rate of 7 million tons, a figure which exceeded British building of replacement shipping more than five times. By then, however, thanks to the inescapable dynamic of warfare, almost every term in the equation by which he had calculated the inevitability of Britain’s strangulation by U-boat tactics had changed to his disadvantage. Requisition and chartering of foreign ships had added 7 million tons to the British merchant fleet, the equivalent of a year’s torpedoing. American shipyard capacity, enormously expanded by an emergency mobilisation, had been added to the British, promising an output of 1500 new ships in 1943 (including many of 10,000-15,000 tons), more than three times as many as the U-boats were sinking. Naval construction in the United States would add 200 escorts a year to the fleet between 1941 and 1945. Over 500 of these would go to join the Royal Navy’s escort fleet in the North Atlantic which, having reached a strength of 374 in March 1941, had almost doubled since the outbreak. Long-range aircraft based in North America, Iceland and Britain were progressively reducing the ‘air gap’ in which U-boats could safely operate on the surface, their preferred mode because of their low submerged speed; and integral aircraft protection for convoys, provided by ‘escort carriers’, was soon to level a direct threat against attacking U-boats. Only in facilities for basing his boats had Dönitz’s position improved; in electronic and cryptographic warfare the conflict hung in the balance; the promise of secret underwater weapons, which favoured Germany, could not be realised for some years. Nevertheless the U-boats had already inflicted severe material and psychological damage on the Allied, particularly the British, war effort; and in mid-1942 the eventual outcome of the Battle of the Atlantic was evident to no one. The ‘statistics, diagrams and curves’ were pregnant with menace.

  Thus far the Battle of the Atlantic (Churchill had coined the term) had passed through four distinct phases. From the outbreak of the war until the fall of France, the U-boat fleet had been confined by geographical constraints and Hitler’s concern for the sensitivities of neutrals to operating within the immediate vicinity of the British Isles. After June 1940, when Germany gained possession of the French Atlantic ports (where in January 1941, with remarkable prescience, Hitler ordered the construction of bomb-proof U-boat ‘pens’ to begin), the fleet began to operate in the eastern Atlantic, concentrating in particular on the ‘Cape route’ to West and South Africa and occasionally penetrating into the Mediterranean, since the Italians were proving themselves inept submariners. From April to December 1941, thanks to their increasing expertise in anti-convoy tactics, and despite the delineation of an American ‘Neutrality Zone’ in which the United States Navy gave notice of its intention to attack marauding submarines, the U-boat captains began to extend their operations into the central and western Atlantic; after June 1941, when Britain began to run convoys to North Russian ports with war supplies, the U-boats, frequently supported by German warships and shore-based aircraft, also began to operate in Arctic latitudes. Finally, after December 1941, Dönitz’s men carried the submarine war to the Atlantic coast of the United States and into the Gulf of Mexico, where, during a gruesomely named ‘Happy Time’ of several months caused by the US Navy’s temporary inability to organise convoy on coastal routes, they sank coastwise shipping by hundreds of thousands of tons.

  Until June 1940 the U-boats had been confined by the same facts of geography as had kept the German High Seas Fleet close to their home bases during the First World War. Using the Baltic as their training ground (as they were to do throughout the war), they attacked British shipping in the North Sea but were denied egress via the Channel by the mine barrier in the Dover Straits and could reach the Atlantic only by making the long passage round the north of Scotland – if, that is, they had the range to do so. Few had that range. Only eight of the Type IX were truly oceanic, with a range of 12,000 miles; eighteen could cruise as far as Gibraltar; the remaining thirty could not leave the North Sea. Despite these limitations the U-boats had some notable successes, including the sinking of the battleship Royal Oak in the Royal Navy’s main base at Scapa Flow in October 1939 and the aircraft carrier Courageous which was sunk while flagrantly neglecting anti-submarine precautions in home waters. From the outbreak of war to the fall of France, total merchant sinkings in the North Atlantic did not exceed 750,000 tons and 141 ships.

  The capture of the French Atlantic ports in June 1940, however, transformed the basis of U-boat operations. Possession of Brest, Saint-Nazaire, La Rochelle and Lorient put Dönitz’s boats on the doorstep of Britain’s trade routes, thus ensuring that the pattern of sinkings, thitherto arbitrary and sporadic, should become regular and consistent. As soon as his crews cleared the Bay of Biscay they found themselves astride the route from Britain to the Cape along which travelled Nigerian oil and South African non-ferrous ores; and by reaching out only a little further into the Atlantic they could attack convoys carrying meat from
the Argentine and grain from the United States.

  Ships sailing individually were desperately vulnerable to interception. As the Royal Navy’s experience in the First World War had proved, independent sailing presented U-boats with a succession of targets: a captain who missed one lone ship on a well-used trade route could still count upon the appearance of another and thus achieve a respectable success rate by the operation of the probability factor alone. Convoy upset probability. Because the submerged speed of a submarine was at best equal to and often lower than that of a merchant ship, a U-boat captain who was wrongly positioned for an attack when a convoy hove into view would miss all the ships in it and might have to wait days before another appeared, with no greater certainty than before of finding himself correctly positioned to attack it.