In addition to large fleet carriers, the United States, Great Britain, and Japan built a limited number of light carriers, most on narrow hulls originally intended for cruisers. Of more utility and built in far greater numbers, especially by the United States, were escort carriers. Known as jeep carriers and baby flattops, these were crucial for ferrying replacement aircraft to distant theaters of operation, and they were deployed in support of amphibious landings in the Pacific. In the Atlantic, escort carriers also provided air cover for convoys and sailed as part of detached hunter-killer groups, usually one escort carrier and four or five destroyer escorts fitted with radar and sonar and armed with ever more effective depth charges, hedgehogs, and other antisubmarine weapons.
The Submarine War
The battle of the Atlantic, the titanic struggle to defeat Germany’s unrestricted submarine war against Allied shipping, overshadows all other submarine efforts of the war in terms both of ships sunk and losses to submarines and their crews. Collectively U-boats sank well over two thousand Allied and neutral ships, most of them in the North Atlantic and, after the United States entered the war, the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Grim as this figure is, it represents only a fraction of the successful merchant ship passages made carrying food, war matériel, and other supplies to Great Britain and, after 1941, the Soviet Union. More impressive, fewer than ten thousand Allied soldiers were lost in troop transports. On the German side, the casualties were appalling. Of the 863 U-boats that put to sea, 754 were lost—a staggering 87 percent—together with 27,491 officers and crew, about three-quarters of the personnel of the U-boat arm. Yet despite the experience of World War I, submarine warfare was an insignificant component of Germany’s prewar planning. In September 1939, Germany had only twenty-two seagoing U-boats in operation, and a handful of submarines designed for coastal operations. In the first year of the war only three U-boats were launched, and for the first eighteen months there were seldom more than six to eight boats on patrol at any one time. This paucity of numbers was compounded by the unreliability of German torpedoes—a problem that bedeviled the Americans, too—probably a quarter of which detonated prematurely or not at all, or were unable to maintain the proper depth.
When France surrendered on June 22, 1940, Admiral Karl Dönitz moved his submarine operations to Brest, Lorient (which he chose as his headquarters), Saint-Nazaire, La Pallice (La Rochelle), and Bordeaux. All had excellent dockyard facilities, to which Dönitz added bombproof submarine pens that still exist. More important, they were hundreds of miles closer to the Atlantic shipping lanes than Germany’s North Sea bases. In May 1940, U-boats had sunk nine ships in the North Atlantic, and in June fifty-three; the numbers thereafter rose steadily. U-boats collectively sank more than eleven hundred ships (over five million tons of shipping) before the United States entered the war. In 1942, more than a thousand ships were sunk in the North Atlantic, many of them by submarines ganged in “wolf packs” whose activities were coordinated via radio transmissions between the U-boats and headquarters in Germany or France.
One reason for the sharp increase in sinkings that year was the failure of the Americans to institute coastal convoys or impose a blackout along the east coast of the United States, so that individual ships were clearly silhouetted against the illuminated backdrops at night. In what the Germans called the “Happy Time,” from January to July U-boats sank nearly four hundred ships between the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Caribbean. The Americans’ refusal to attempt the most rudimentary precautions against the U-boat threat is baffling, especially because the United States had been involved in the battle of the Atlantic since early in the war. Circumventing domestic isolationists, Roosevelt had engineered a number of pro-Britain policies. The neutrality patrol of September 1939 kept warships of any nation at least two hundred miles from the coasts of North and South America. Under the destroyers-for-bases deal, the United States transferred fifty old destroyers to Britain in exchange for naval bases in Newfoundland, Bermuda, and the Caribbean. The Lend-Lease Act of 1941 allowed the United States to sell weapons, munitions, aircraft, and ships to “any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States,” and that summer the United States assumed the defense of Iceland, an important staging ground for Atlantic convoys. By the fall, the neutrality patrol had expanded to allow U.S. Navy ships to sail in harm’s way; two U.S. destroyers exchanged fire with U-boats, and on October 31 the USS Reuben James was torpedoed and sunk with the loss of 115 men. Yet Allied countermeasures only became truly effective in 1943, when the Americans were running coastal convoys, Allied intelligence could routinely break encoded radio transmissions (thanks to the seizure of an Enigma encryption machine from the captured U-110), and improvements to sonar and radar were making it easier to find and attack submarines.
Moreover, U.S. submarines were conducting precisely the same campaign against Japanese commerce. Within hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Chief of Naval Operations Harold N. Stark had issued the order: “Execute unrestricted air and submarine warfare against Japan.” This was an abrupt about-face. The United States was a signatory to the London Naval Treaty, which specified that “a warship, whether surface vessel or submarine, may not sink or render incapable of navigation a merchant vessel without having first placed passengers, crew and ship’s papers in a place of safety,” and less than three months before, Roosevelt had described an attack by a German submarine on an American merchantman as “violating long-established international law and violating every principle of humanity.” Although the United States began the war with more than a hundred submarines, twenty-nine of them in the Asiatic Fleet, prewar doctrine had called for them to be used primarily as forward scouts for the battle fleet, and to sink warships. In consequence, submarine commanders tended to be timid, and during the Japanese invasion of the Philippines they sank only three Japanese transports. The reluctance to pursue aggressively enemy shipping was compounded by the failure of American torpedoes, which routinely ran too deep or failed to detonate, problems not solved until September 1943. The Americans also lacked a commerce warfare doctrine and failed to adequately use aerial reconnaissance to direct submarine operations or to concentrate on oil tankers, the Achilles’ heel of Japan’s overseas trade and the primary reason for its invasion of the Dutch East Indies.
Japan depended vitally on merchant shipping for imports it could not produce at home—especially food and fuel—but it, too, was slow to respond to the submarine threat by forming convoys and it continued to lavish resources on aircraft carriers rather than destroyers and other escort vessels for antisubmarine and convoy work. The Japanese had an estimated six million tons of merchant shipping in 1941, and during the course of the war they built or otherwise acquired more than four million tons, but by August 1945, they had lost nearly nine million tons. Of the thirteen hundred Japanese merchant ships lost or damaged beyond repair, about 55 percent were credited to submarines. Fifty-two of the 288 U.S. submarines that saw service during the war were lost, together with thirty-five hundred officers and crew.
According to a postwar study, American submarines had sunk so many Japanese merchant ships that the country would have been forced into submission for lack of fuel, war matériel, and food. Yet the Pacific campaign of the “Silent Service” is overlooked for several reasons. Instruments of stealth and deceit, submarines are viewed more comfortably from the perspective of the aggrieved victim than from that of the proud victor. For Americans, chalking up success in the Pacific to submariners risked legitimating the U-boat war in the Atlantic or otherwise drawing uncomfortable parallels between German and American strategy, an issue raised at the Nuremberg war crimes trial of Admiral Dönitz.
In September 1942, the U-156 had sunk a requisitioned British passenger ship carrying among other people 1,800 Italian prisoners of war. Although the Germans radioed their intention to escort the survivors’ lifeboats to safety and displayed Red Cross flags, an American plane attacked the flotill
a, which by then included three other German and Italian submarines. To ensure that his U-boats were never put needlessly at risk again, Dönitz issued the “Laconia order” stating that “All attempts at rescuing members of ships that have sunk … are to cease.” In his defense, however, Dönitz secured an affidavit from Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, who swore that “On general principles, the U.S. submarines did not rescue enemy survivors if undue additional hazard to the submarine resulted or the submarine would thereby be prevented from accomplishing its further mission.” The submarine had once again proved as insidious as its critics always claimed.
Amphibious Operations
In addition to aircraft carriers and submarines, and the various vessels designed to protect or hunt them, World War II saw the development of a third class of vessels barely imagined before the war: landing craft for amphibious operations. Boarding ramps and gangways have long been used for discharging troops, horses, and equipment, but through the 1930s amphibious landings tended to be cumbersome affairs in which soldiers clambered over the side of the hulls of small craft to wade ashore, and ramps had to be fitted to the top of the bulwarks to land motorized transports. In the 1930s, the Japanese developed a landing craft with an integral bow ramp for personnel and light vehicles, and New Orleans boatbuilder Andrew Higgins adapted this to a boat designed for work in the Louisiana bayous. Formally known as a “landing craft, vehicle, personnel” (LCVP), the eleven-meter-long Higgins boat could carry a platoon of thirty-six soldiers, or a dozen troops and a jeep, and had a draft of only three feet aft and two feet forward. The propeller was protected so that it could easily back off the beach, and it was designed to turn around without broaching in the surf. More than twenty-three thousand were built and they were widely viewed as integral to the Allied success. Marine general Holland M. Smith, who commanded amphibious operations in the Pacific, wrote that the Higgins boat “did more to win the war in the Pacific than any other single piece of equipment,” and General Dwight Eisenhower, who oversaw Allied landings in North Africa, Sicily, and Normandy, described Higgins as “the man who won the war for us. If Higgins had not designed and built those LCVPs, we never could have landed over an open beach. The whole strategy of the war would have been different.”
The Higgins boat was one of more than thirty types of American and British landing and amphibious craft, from amphibious jeeps to 117-meter-long LSTs (landing ship, tank). With massive double doors in the bow, an LST could carry three smaller LCTs (landing craft, tank), each with five medium tanks or 330 infantry and their equipment. Landings on hostile shores were executed with a choreographic precision. Troop transports halted several miles off the coast and the smaller landing craft were lowered and circled near the transport before the troops boarded them via rope net ladders or vehicles were lowered into them by crane. Waves of landing craft would then approach the beach, disgorge their troops, and return to the transports for more men. Once the beachhead was secured, the landing craft were loaded with supplies. Mechanized vehicles drove onto the beach under their own power, while palletized goods were dragged onto the beach by tractors or other vehicles and nonpalletized goods were passed hand-to-hand by gangs of soldiers and sailors. Landing craft also carried the wounded back to transports or hospital ships.
Two Coast Guard–manned Landing Ships, Tank (LSTs) with their bow doors open to the beach on Leyte Island, the Philippines, in 1944. Sailors are laying down a sandbag causeway from the LSTs to the beach to speed up the offloading operations. Well suited though they were to carrying huge quantities of cargo, their unwieldy form explains why LST was popularly said to stand for “large, slow target.” Courtesy of the National Archives, Washington, D.C.
Shipbuilding
As the prodigious output of the Higgins yards suggests, the difference between victory and defeat depended on which side could produce more ships and matériel and get armies and their supplies where they needed to go. Meditating on the battle of the Atlantic, Churchill wrote,
The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.… How much would the U-boat warfare reduce our imports and shipping? Would it ever reach the point where our life would be destroyed? Here was no field for gestures or sensations; only the slow, cold drawing of lines on charts, which showed potential strangulation.… Either the food, supplies, and arms from the New World and from the British Empire arrived across the oceans, or they failed.
In this numbers game, the industrial capacity of the United States gave the Allies an insuperable advantage. Well into the 1930s, the combination of the Great Depression, isolationism, and pacifism had militated against building a fleet up to the limits allowed by the naval treaties. Roosevelt took the first steps toward naval rearmament by directing funds appropriated for the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 to build 2 aircraft carriers, 4 cruisers, 20 destroyers, and other ships. The following year Representative Carl Vinson secured passage of the first of four acts to increase the size of the navy. Japan’s repudiation of the London Treaty and invasion of China and Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany facilitated further increases, culminating in the Two-Ocean Navy (or Vinson-Walsh) Act of July 1940, which called for 13 battleships, 6 aircraft carriers, 32 cruisers, 101 destroyers, and 39 submarines.
With its own shipyards taxed by the need to build and repair warships, and under regular threat from German bombers during the battle of Britain, the British ordered 60 Ocean-class freighters from the United States under the Lend-Lease program. When Britain placed its order, Roosevelt called for more than 300 additional tankers and dry-cargo Liberty ships, a modification of the Ocean class. As of 1941, the U.S. Maritime Commission was on track to build five million deadweight tons of shipping in 1942, and seven million in 1943.a In January 1942, these figures were increased to eight million and ten million tons, respectively. When it was pointed out that this rate would not produce enough ships to transport and provision the soldiers destined for service overseas—1.8 million in 1942 and 3.5 million in 1943—the targets were increased to twenty-four million tons for 1942–43. In the end, American shipyards turned out twenty-seven million tons of shipping over the two years, 125 percent of the original goal. (Munitions manufacturing and war construction attained only 60 percent of their goals.) This output was achieved thanks to unprecedented levels of prefabrication and subassembly, and the introduction of new methods and people—including women and minorities—into the shipbuilding trades. All told more than fifty-five hundred merchant and naval vessels were constructed under Maritime Commission contracts during World War II, including 2,710 Liberty ships and nearly five hundred Victory ships, which were roughly the same size as Libertys but more than a third again as fast.
The Korean War
As the Allies and Axis powers battled each other around the world, Soviet-Japanese relations were eerily calm. In 1938, Japan and the Soviet Union had clashed over the border between the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (Manchuria) and the Soviet Union. The Russian victory at the battle of Khalkhin Gol (or Nomonhan) forced the Japanese to set their sights on Southeast Asia; but the mutual need for a stable border in Northeast Asia led to the Japanese-Soviet Neutrality Pact of 1941. Under Lend-Lease agreements negotiated after the German invasion of the Soviet Union that June, the United States committed to supply the Soviets via the Arctic, the shortest but most dangerous route; the Persian Gulf, the longest run; and across the Pacific from the United States to Vladivostok. Because of the neutrality pact, the Japanese allowed ships sailing under the Soviet flag safe passage. Technically only goods with civilian applications could be sent via Vladivostok, but these included dual-use cargoes like food, fuel, trucks, locomotives, and engineering equipment. Thus while the Arctic convoys are the best known, more Allied ships sailed to Vladivostok than to all other Soviet and Persian Gulf ports combined, and in far greater security.
Two days after the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. Its
armies proceeded to occupy the Liaodong Peninsula where, as Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin had agreed at the Yalta Conference, “The former rights of Russia violated by the treacherous attack of Japan in 1904 shall be restored, viz.… The commercial port of Dairen [Dalian] shall be internationalized, the preeminent interests of the Soviet Union in this port being safeguarded, and the lease of Port Arthur as a naval base of the U.S.S.R. restored.” Chinese communists welcomed the Soviets’ presence at Port Arthur as a deterrent to American intervention, and they remained until 1955.
After declaring war on Japan, the Russians moved into Korea and on August 10 the United States proposed to divide the peninsula along the 38th parallel, a plan to which the Soviets agreed. The Russians backed the totalitarian communist rule of Kim Il Sung, while the Americans supported the authoritarian right-wing government of Sygnman Rhee. Both the Soviets and the United States withdrew their forces in 1948, but whereas the Russians had left their protégé with planes, tanks, and a cohesive army, the Americans withheld arming Sygnman Rhee’s regime. In the summer of 1950, the armies of Kim Il Sung crossed the 38th parallel, and quickly reduced the territory under South Korean control to an area around the port of Busan. The United Nations condemned the invasion and, led by the United States, landed troops at Busan. General Douglas MacArthur, supreme allied commander in Japan, proposed an amphibious landing at Incheon, about twentyfive kilometers from Seoul. With a tidal range of ten meters, treacherous currents, and a granite wall rather than a beach to seaward, this was a risky move. Compounding these problems were a schedule shorter than that for any comparable operation in the Pacific War and the fact that the American forces who would lead the operation were out of training. Nonetheless, on September 15 a flotilla of 260 ships, including old LSTs commandeered from the Japanese fishing fleet, landed thirteen thousand troops at Incheon, followed the next month by landings on the east coast. In the aftermath of the massive Chinese counterattack at the Chosin Reservoir, in December the navy evacuated more than 100,000 troops, 17,500 vehicles, and 350,000 tons of cargo from Hungnam in “an amphibious invasion in reverse” that lasted two weeks. Apart from these operations and providing carrier-based air support for ground troops, naval operations in the Korean War were otherwise limited.
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 80
