1,200
Landing craft and ships
82,000
Bombers
96,000
Fighters
88,000
Transports
23,000
“Liberty” ships
2,600
Tankers
700
* * *
The actual instruments for producing materiel for the war effort were as varied as the agencies created to direct the mobilization. When economic incentives and some degree of self-regulation stimulated producers, they found ways to increase production of such critical items as food and petroleum products, assisted by rationing and pricing policies that restricted domestic consumption. The same approach applied to rubber, with the additional provision that the chemical industry found it attractive to produce synthetic rubber. The voracious need for metals could be only partially served by increased production, so durable consumer goods disappeared from the marketplace and manufacturers moved to paper and plastics as substitute materials in both military and civilian consumables. The scarcity of raw metals and steel also furnished the government with the most effective tool for settling priority disputes among war industries. Designed by Ferdinand Eberstadt, a Baruch protégé and leader of the Army-Navy Munitions Board, the Controlled Materials Plan went into effect in late 1942 and allowed the WPB to adjust production schedules to FDR-JCS strategic decisions by allocating steel, aluminum, and copper to the twelve principal government contractees rather than the thousands of contractors. Each claimant, therefore, had to persuade a Requirements Committee chaired by Eberstadt on the virtues of its raw-materials needs. The WPB further influenced the process by also controlling the delivery of scarce raw materials and components, thus shaping production schedules.
The federal government used its war powers over the nation’s financial system to pay for the war, reduce domestic consumption, and control inflation. Increased income and corporate and excise taxes financed the war and checked civilian spending; the government paid 40 percent of the war’s costs from current revenues, a percentage never before approached in American war financing. It also borrowed $187 billion from its own citizens in the form of war bonds and from itself by regulating credit and the money supply through the Federal Reserve System and the Treasury Department. The national debt increased from $49 billion in 1941 to $260 billion in 1945. Money and credit controls supplemented price controls as a check on consumption and inflation, which the administration correctly identified as a threat to public morale and productivity.
The “Arsenal of Democracy” policy also assumed that the American scientific-engineering community would ensure that the armed forces enjoyed technological superiority over the Axis. After some pulling and hauling between the various military and civilian components of the research and development (R&D) community, the administration established the Office of Scientific Research and Development under Dr. Vannevar Bush, president of the Carnegie Institution. An active lobbyist for war-related research, Bush won an important early battle by winning draft exemptions for 10,000 critical scientists and engineers. He also designed the basic R&D system by using liberal government contracts to turn university and industrial research laboratories to critical war projects. Bush successfully argued that government-controlled laboratories would not utilize scientific talent effectively and would stifle technical creativity. Bush and his associates decided which labs would tackle which projects by evaluating the labs’ specialties and arranging close civilian-military collaboration in equipment design. Using their own and British inventions, the American developers produced an impressive list of military innovations: radar, antitank rockets for aircraft and infantry launchers, amphibious vehicles, bombing guidance systems, sonar for detecting submarines and a variety of rocket-propelled weapons for destroying them, improved shells, a radar-controlled proximity fuse for all kinds of ground and naval antiaircraft artillery, drugs to combat infection and tropical diseases, and, ultimately, the atomic bomb. Although German achievements in artillery and tank design—as well as jet aircraft and long-range rockets—proved that the Americans had no monopoly on developmental expertise, the United States created a research and development effort that balanced technical sophistication with mass production and time-urgent deployment.
The Allied accomplishments in the electronic “wizard war” complemented the performance in the mass production war. The use and abuse of the radio wave shaped many military operations. During the course of the war the Allies developed radio signals as guides to long-range air and naval navigation; the use of radar dramatically improved the ability of airplanes and warships to find targets when eyesight failed because of distance, darkness, and weather. Long-range radio communications allowed senior commanders to coordinate the movement of forces far from their headquarters. The widespread use of radio signals, however, opened a whole arena of military operations, and the Allies eventually emerged as victors in the signals intelligence war that resulted. With equipment capable of receiving enemy radio messages, both sides could exploit radio intercepts in several ways. With high-frequency direction-finding receivers, the Allies could locate enemy forces (especially warships) whenever those forces sent radio messages within range of Allied monitoring stations. A careful analysis of radio messages, even when encoded, often allowed Allied intelligence officers to identify the message sender and to track enemy deployments. Finding the location and identity of enemy forces permitted intelligence analysts to make astute guesses about enemy intentions.
One especially significant Allied advantage in signals intelligence was in high-level codebreaking, which often reduced the guesswork involved in assessing the enemy’s intentions, numbers, deployments, equipment, and morale. By midwar, the British and Americans had broken their adversaries’ most important codes, occasionally through pure cryptanalysis utilizing sophisticated mathematical theories, but often only with the help of captured cryptography equipment and codebooks and careless errors by enemy radio operators. Even before Pearl Harbor the United States had penetrated Japan’s foremost diplomatic code, which the Americans read fluently until Japan surrendered. The resulting intelligence, codenamed MAGIC, was vital in the battle against both Japan and Germany; messages from the Japanese ambassador in Berlin to Tokyo reporting his interviews with Hitler and other leading Nazis were an invaluable source of information regarding the Germans. In the Pacific theater, the Americans generated ULTRA, which was intelligence gleaned from breaking Japan’s military codes, including its primary navy code, Army Water Transport Code, military attaché code, main army code, and several army air force codes. In the European and Mediterranean theaters, the British Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park also produced ULTRA, but in this case it denoted intelligence obtained from messages transmitted by the Germans over their supposedly secure Enigma machines. Fortunately for the Allies, the Germans were wrong; from late 1943 until war’s end Bletchley Park produced nearly 84,000 Enigma decrypts per month. Military intelligence resulting from even the best codebreaking effort was rarely perfect or complete, and it would have been useless if it had not been utilized in battle by determined commanders and brave soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines. Still, codebreakers made an indispensable contribution to Allied operational planning. In the arcane world of coding and codebreaking, and of deceiving the enemy with bogus radio signals, the Allies enjoyed far more success than their enemies.
Maritime Victory
“The Arsenal of Democracy” could do nothing to defeat the Axis unless the Allies could ship American manpower, supplies, and weapons to the theaters of war across the world’s oceans. In 1940–1943 Allied shipping had to run a gauntlet of German U-boats to reach England, and Admiral Karl Donitz and his determined, skillful submariners believed that they stood on the edge of victory even as the United States entered the war. Without a triumph over the U-boats there would be no victory over Germany. As Winston Churchill wrote FDR, “the spectacle of all
these splendid ships being built, sent to sea crammed with priceless food and munitions, and being sunk—three or four a day—torments me day and night. Not only does this attack cripple our war energies and threaten our life, but it arbitrarily limits the might of the United States coming into the struggle. The oceans, which were your shield, threaten to become your cage.”
In 1942 the balance in the Battle of the Atlantic swung toward the Germans, who profited immediately from American belligerency. Since the Royal Navy included surface commerce raiders and the Luftwaffe’s antishipping campaign menaced only the convoy routes to northern Russia, the U-boats alone held the initiative in the Atlantic. The Allied antisubmarine warfare (ASW) campaign suffered from shortages of everything: escorts, land-based and carrier-based ASW aircraft, and information, for British codebreakers had lost their ability to read Atlantic U-boat radio messages, which used a new code. Donitz deployed his U-boats in 1942 in two kinds of operations: “wolfpack” attacks against Allied convoys in the North Atlantic and individual patrols against the unconvoyed American ships along the Atlantic seaboard and in the Caribbean. The results were devastating. With only about forty U-boats in combat at any one time, the Germans sank an average of 100 ships (around 500,000 tons) a month for most of 1942. They did so at a cost of only 21 U-boats, easily replaced by the 123 submarines the Germans built in the same period. The Allies lost another 700,000 tons of shipping to German and Italian raiders and mines, while the Japanese onslaught deprived the Allies of an additional million tons. With many defeats from which to choose in 1942, Churchill and Roosevelt regarded the losses in the Battle of the Atlantic as the worst of the year.
Although Anglo-American shipbuilders came close to replacing the 1942 losses, Allied planners had to face the fact that they could not mount any major operations in the European theater unless they defeated the U-boats. The very ability of Great Britain to fight the war rested in the balance, since its merchant fleet had suffered an important net loss by 1943. British imports had dropped by half, producing grave shortages of raw materials, food, and consumer goods. American visitors to England in 1942 were shocked by the widespread poverty of their ally and worried about British war-weariness. The depressing mathematics of 1942 showed that shipping shortages would limit the American buildup in England and further stretch the British economy.
The greatest concentration of wartime shipbuilding was in the San Francisco bay area, the home of fourteen major shipyards that produced merchant ships. All but two of the yards did not exist in 1939, and they were underutilized. The pioneer in efficiency and productivity in building Liberty and Victory ships was a six-company consortium led by Henry J. Kaiser, an industrial visionary of quick, massive production. Using a newly trained work force, including women and minorities, and modular construction, Kaiser’s shipyards could assemble a 10,000-ton Liberty ship in ten days (1942), then seven and a half days. Four shipyards in Richmond, California, built 747 ships, 519 of them Liberties. Kaiser’s workers received pioneering attention in healthcare, wages, plant safety, housing and skilled training. Two thousand miles away, Andrew J. Higgins used many of the same assembly-line innovations to produce 9,000 landing craft in an instant, sprawling empire around New Orleans, Louisiana. In the Mississippi Valley, corporations that specialized in building bridges, factories, and railroad engines as well as tugs and barges built over 1,000 Landing Ships, Tank (LSTs), an essential beaching vehicle carrier for amphibious assaults. Much of this production sacrificed financial cautiousness for speed of delivery, a recognized strategic trade-off.
Oil and gasoline powered the American armed forces, and POL (the military designation for fossil fuels) moved overseas by ship. These ships came in two broad categories, tankers and, for the U.S. Navy, fleet oilers capable of underway refueling. Tankers were the POL workhorses, and the German U-boats made them prime targets in 1942, sinking 97 U.S. tankers in Western Hemisphere waters. Such losses did indeed cripple Great Britain and Japan, but not the United States. Of the 5,777 ocean-going vessels built by American shipyards, more than 700 were tankers. One prime tanker supplier, the Marineship Corporation of the Bechtel-McCone construction empire of California, could build a 22,800-ton tanker (6 million gallon capacity) in thirty-three days and make it operable in two more months. The construction required 17,000 welds and 10,000 cuts and bends to sixteen miles of piping in the ship. The Navy oiler fleet expanded from twenty-nine to nearly one hundred, easily replacing the nine lost to the enemy. In the meantime, tanker losses dropped to twenty-five in 1943, ten in 1944, and six in 1945.
The shipping crisis required an unprecedented American effort to increase production of merchantmen and tankers, and in 1943 the United States tripled its deadweight tonnage (the carrying capacity of ships) in new vessels from 3 million to 9 million tons. To do so, however, meant that the government had to assign lower building priorities to all warships except escort vessels, thus slowing the construction of the vessels the Navy needed to win control of the Pacific and to carry amphibious invasion forces to both the war’s theaters. The U-boats also put enormous strains upon Anglo-American cooperation and upon interservice and civil-military relations among America’s war managers, since “Japan First” strategists like Admiral King argued that the Battle of the Atlantic would prevent SLEDGEHAMMER and ROUNDUP and justified a shift in theater priorities. Navy and Army planners clashed over the allocation of long-range aircraft and the organization of ASW land-based air operations. Military planners complained bitterly whenever Roosevelt committed new vessels to carrying imports to Britain rather than military supplies for American operations abroad. The torpedo explosions in the Atlantic sent concussions throughout the Allied war effort.
Building upon the hard-learned lessons of World War I and the ocean battles of 1940–1941, the Royal Navy, Canadian navy, and U.S. Navy bore the brunt of the war against the U-boats. They received some assistance from the RAF and USAAF, which mounted some long-range reconnaissance operations (useful) and bombed submarine bases and construction yards (largely futile). For victory there was no substitute for convoying. Only troop-carrying transoceanic liners could maintain sufficient speed to outrun U-boats, and even these normally had destroyer screens. Merchantmen formed into convoys off North America, divided into “fast” and “slow” groups. A convoy averaged around fifty vessels, spread in parallel columns over twenty-four square miles of ocean. Bulk cargo merchantmen formed the outer ranks, with oil tankers, munitions ships, aircraft and tank carriers, and troopships clustered in the center of the formation around the convoy commander’s ship. Around the convoy prowled the escorts, usually no more than six. Destroyers and smaller warships (destroyer escorts, frigates, corvettes, and even converted yachts) made up the escort, progressively reinforced with escort carriers, which provided critical air cover. At a 1942 rate of about six convoys a month the Allies plunged through the awaiting wolfpacks.
The Battle of the Atlantic produced some of the war’s hardest service and grimmest experiences. Weather—arctic storms, fog, and heavy seas—plagued friend and foe alike. The U-boats attacked submerged by day and on the surface by night. Usually the first sign of an attack was the roar of a torpedo ripping open a merchantman; tankers and munitions ships often exploded and sank in a cloud of flames. Merchant seamen who escaped their vessels often perished from hypothermia in the frigid seas. Survivors who managed to find lifeboats and rafts might go days before a rescue vessel dared to pick them up. On the escorts the strain of long watches, wretched living conditions, and recurring contacts and searches for U-boats often brought crews to the point of collapse during every voyage. Moreover, the escorts seldom had the release of an obvious victory over the U-boats, unless a victim surfaced before sinking. In any event, the Navy bagged few U-boats in the battle’s opening phases.
For eighteen months the Battle of the Atlantic hung in the balance, and it was not clear until the summer of 1943 that the Allies had won one of the war’s critical campaigns. No single development,
either in mass-producing escorts and ASW aircraft or inventing miracle weapons or electronics, spelled victory for the Allied navies. Rather, the ultimate victory rested upon a wide range of organizational, technical, and operational programs. To conduct his share of the campaign, Admiral King created a separate command—the 10th Fleet—from which he directed operations through a series of geographic commands that deployed the escorts, air patrols, and convoys. Intensive ASW training paid dividends as the Navy received more escorts (especially destroyer escorts) and aircraft. Shore-based long-range patrol planes like the PBY Catalina and the Navy’s version of the B-24 and carrier-based search-and-attack aircraft eventually gave the Navy full aerial coverage of its areas of responsibility, including the “black hole” in the Atlantic between Iceland and the Azores that land-based planes could not reach. Since the U-boats had to surface to move rapidly, to recharge their batteries, and to take on fuel and supplies from their own U-boat-tankers, they were especially vulnerable to air attack. They also preferred to move at night on the surface from their European bases, a tactic exploited by RAF Coastal Command, which mounted intense night patrolling over the Bay of Biscay. The ASW campaign also profited from the use of mathematically based operations analysis by American and British teams, who developed optimal ways to use escorts, aircraft, and ASW ordnance.
The technological war at sea also swung against the Germans. Improved radar and sonar aboard escorts and aircraft made it more difficult for the U-boats to surprise a convoy; Allied high-frequency direction-finding equipment intercepted German radio traffic and allowed more accurate position locating. The Allies also invented an airborne radar system that the Germans could not foil with their radar-detecting “black boxes.” The Allies developed and deployed more accurate, destructive ASW ordnance, including rocket-assisted depth charges and magnetic and acoustic antisubmarine torpedoes. In the codebreaking war the Allies used message analysis to discover that the Germans had broken the convoy routing codes, and the subsequent Allied code changes hampered U-boat operations. The Allies also again cracked the Germans’ own U-boat code, which allowed hunter-killer naval support groups to locate and attack submarines before they closed upon a convoy, or to divert convoys around the U-boats. In April 1943, for instance, the Allies learned from ULTRA that the route Convoy SC 127 was sailing would take it into a wolfpack of 25 U-boats. Forewarned, authorities changed the convoy’s route, sending it north of the lurking subs. Several subsequent changes allowed the convoy to avoid smaller U-boat concentrations that ULTRA revealed, and the entire convoy arrived safely in England.
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