Why the Allies Won
Page 10
Rather than avoid the submarines, Horton drove his convoys into their midst. There was no repeat in April of the fate of HX229 and SC122. Each convoy was now surrounded by a carefully trained escort, able to cooperate with aircraft and with the lurking support groups. The ships had the latest centimetric radar, and, more significantly, so did the supporting long-range aircraft. The submarine’s Metox receiver was now useless against air attack. New radio equipment was installed in ships for the purpose of High Frequency Direction Finding (HF/DF), which provided an accurate bearing on any submarine that used its radio.74 Convoy HX231 from Newfoundland fought its way through four days of gale-force winds against a pack of seventeen submarines. Four U-boats were sunk for almost no loss. At the end of April convoy 0NS5, outward bound from Britain, was sent into the gap with a powerful escort. Some 39 submarines attacked and sunk twelve ships in all. But with the aid of two support groups and the Liberators seven submarines were sunk, and five severely damaged. By the end of the month only half the merchant losses of March were recorded, for the loss of nineteen more U-boats.
Offensive tactics were resumed in May. On the 11th Horton sent 37 merchantmen, formed in ten columns and escorted by eight naval vessels under Commander Peter Gretton, from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to England. Convoy SC130 had continuous air cover. For the first six days nothing happened. By the seventh submarine contact was made in what was left of the gap. Gretton marshalled his merchantmen like well-drilled guardsmen, turning in formation first this way, then that, to avoid the waiting submarines. Overhead, Liberators prowled the skies. The first to appear sank a U-boat in its initial attack. The others drew the escorts to the submerging boats by radio. The nearest support group steamed to attack and arrived behind the hastily reorganising U-boats, who were now caught between the two forces. A second boat was sunk. In the afternoon the relief Liberators arrived and in close co-operation with the surface vessels sank four more submarines. The small cargo ships, slow and old-fashioned, watched the explosions of bombs and depth charges in a distant noisy ring around them. But not one torpedo reached them. After two days of battle the wolf-packs broke up to lick their wounds. For Dönitz the convoy battle was especially poignant for on board U-954, sunk by a Liberator on 19 May, was his son, Peter.75
Horton’s offensive did all that he had hoped and more. During May sinkings in the North Atlantic fell to 160,000 tons, the lowest figure since the end of 1941. The new tactics and technology blunted the U-boat threat in a matter of weeks. During May the U-boat arm lost 41 vessels. This was a catastrophic rate of loss. By the end of the month U-boats were being sunk faster than cargo ships. With great reluctance Dönitz bowed to reality and on 24 May he ordered all submarines to retreat from the Atlantic until his forces could be reformed and rearmed. On 31 May he reported to Hitler that the Atlantic Battle was lost for the moment.76 His retreating forces were harried home to their bases across the Bay of Biscay where they were forced to fight it out with enemy aircraft armed with rockets, depth charges and pin-point radar. In June and July his force lost 54 more boats. For submarine crews each mission was more and more likely to be their last.
It was some time before the British realised what had happened. After years of painful attrition the U-boat threat was liquidated in two months. Radio interception soon showed that the submarines had gone. A strange silence fell across the battlefield, almost too good to be true. In June the weather calmed. Thirty-two convoys ploughed through the ocean. Not one ship was lost, not one attack was recorded. In July 1,367 ships crossed both ways without incident. In the autumn Dönitz sent back a part of his force to test the water, but losses were once again beyond endurance. Between June and December 1943 only 57 ships were sunk in the whole Atlantic theatre, for the loss of 141 submarines. In October Portugal allowed Allied aircraft to operate from the Azores, and the last hole in the Atlantic where submarines could hide was finally plugged. In the whole of 1944 Allied shipping losses were no more than 170,000 tons, a mere 3 per cent of the losses endured in 1942. The battles of May and June 1943 represented, Horton told his staff, ‘a clear-cut victory over the U-boat’.77
So sudden was the end of the campaign that had hung dangerously in the balance only weeks before that it is tempting to assume that some special factor, lately introduced into the battle, explained its abrupt conclusion. The explanation is more routine than this: victory was the product of all those elements of organisation and invention mobilised in months of patient, painstaking labour. Under Horton’s inspirational command these elements reached a critical mass by the late spring of 1943. German directives could again be read by British cryptanalysts at almost exactly the time that new Allied codes blinded their opposite number for the rest of the war. Radar and anti-submarine weaponry had evolved at last the necessary level of reliability and sophistication. Better training and tactics turned the escort vessel into a genuine help-mate for the convoys and a true deterrent to its hunters. Finally, air power worked its transforming art in the Atlantic as it had done in the Pacific and the Mediterranean. This was the most important change of all. Not until April did Horton get the escort carriers long promised, but from then on the number of carriers increased more rapidly, and air cover could be provided throughout the seaborne theatres. The number and quality of aircraft plying backwards and forwards over the Bay of Biscay or far out into the Atlantic, in lengthy, often unrewarding, cold reconnaissance, increased sharply by the spring of 1943. In January 1942 there had been only 127 of which just ten were converted long-range bombers; a year later there were 371 aircraft, including almost one hundred long-range aircraft. But the VLR aircraft, the Liberators with their extra fuel tanks, which could fly for eighteen hours or more, came in numbers only in April and May 1943, although only a fraction of what had been requested was supplied. Why the RAF remained resistant for so long to the idea of releasing bombers for work over the ocean defies explanation. A mere 37 aircraft succeeded in closing the Atlantic Gap, whose existence had almost brought the Allies’ war plans to stalemate.78
5 Merchant ships sunk from 1 August 1942 to 21 May 1943
6 Merchant ships sunk from 22 May 1943 to 31 December 1943
The Battle of the Atlantic was not won like other naval conflicts, fleet face to face with fleet in decisive engagement. Its start and its finale were ragged and ill-defined, though real enough. The outcome of the struggle owed a great deal to organisations and staff far distant from the seamen and ships whose job it was to fight for the convoys’ passage: the submarine Tracking Rooms in London and Washington, the Trade Plot Room that masterminded the global movement of merchant shipping, and the offices for radio interception and decipherment. It was a victory neither easy nor inevitable. Allied navies were stretched to the limit to achieve it. But victory in the Atlantic sea-lanes, like the victory at Midway, represented a decisive shift in the fortunes of war.
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The war at sea was won not by the traditional instruments of maritime strategy, but by modern weapons – aircraft, radar and radio intelligence. Where ships sailed unprotected by aircraft, without benefit of modern means to detect other vessels and blind to the intentions of the enemy, they were all but defenceless. If either the British or American navies had been unwilling to recognise that maritime strategy had to undergo a fundamental revolution in the early years of the war, the sea-lanes might well have remained blocked. The Japanese navy was compromised for too long by the search for the big battleship confrontation, while the German navy was handicapped throughout the war by the reluctance of the German air force to develop a serious maritime strategy.
Under the impact of modern weaponry and tactics the sea war became a war of costly attrition conducted in the main by aircraft, submarines and small escort vessels. These spent the bulk of their time in monotonous routine, sweeping the skies and oceans for sight of the enemy, adding a tiny piece to the intelligence puzzle or supplying another statistic in the trade war. This kind of sea war, Churchill later observed, had none of the
flavour of the past, no ‘flaming battles and glittering achievements’. Instead its end product was ‘statistics, diagrams, and curves unknown to the nation, incomprehensible to the public’.79 Attrition warfare had none of the spectacular bloodletting of great land battles; there was no Somme, no Stalingrad. Yet the war at sea was exceptionally costly in men, who had to fight one small engagement after another, with all the skills of old-fashioned seamanship, against both the enemy and the harsh marine environment. Out of 39,000 German submariners, 28,000 were killed, or almost three-quarters of the force. From the 55,800 crewmen who went down with Britain’s merchant ships, over 25,000 were drowned.80 Chances of rescue on the high sea were slight. Life and death at sea were peculiarly harsh. ‘There is no margin for mistakes in submarines,’ Horton once told British submariners stationed at Malta, ‘You are either alive or dead.’81
The victory of the Allied navies was the foundation for final victory in the west and in the Pacific. It permitted Britain and the United States to prepare seriously for the largest amphibious assault yet attempted, the re-entry to Hitler’s Europe. It allowed the Allies to impose crippling sea blockades on Italy and Japan that destroyed 64 per cent of all Italy’s shipping tonnage, and reduced the Japanese merchant fleet from over 5 million tons in 1942 to 670,000 tons in 1945.82 The stranglehold on Italian and Japanese supply lines sapped fatally the industrial strength of these nations and made their reinforcement of distant fronts sporadic and costly. Finally, victory gave a growing immunity to Allied shipping so that the disparity in naval strengths and merchant tonnage between the two sides became unbridgeable. From the beginning of 1943 onwards the Royal Navy lost no more battleships or aircraft carriers; only six more cruisers were lost compared with 26 between 1939 and 1942; and only 36 destroyers against 112.83 In the Atlantic the Allied merchant marine lost only 31 ships in 1944 against a figure of 1,006 in 1942, despite the fact that the U-boat arm actually had almost four hundred submarines in 1944, bottled up in their home ports or kept at arm’s length by an almost impenetrable curtain of anti-submarine defences.84
The source of this enhanced naval presence was the vast production of American shipyards. The United States navy ended the war with 1,672 major naval vessels, the Royal Navy with 1,065 major warships, and 2,907 minor ones. The American merchant shipbuilding programme was a production miracle: 794,000 tons of shipping were built in 1941, 21 million tons in the next three years.85 It is tempting to argue that sheer material strength won the sea war. Yet this is to ignore the question of timing. Midway was won against overwhelming Japanese superiority in warships. The convoy battles were won by a tiny number of maritime aircraft and limited numbers of escort vessels. The great imbalance in resources only began to tell later in the war, when it helped to prevent any re-entry by the Japanese navy or the U-boats as a serious peril in the sea war. In the critical year between Midway and the defeat of the submarine Allied resources were stretched to the limit. Tactical and technical innovation won the war at sea before sheer numbers came to matter.
The war at sea ended as untidily as it had been fought. When Germany finally accepted defeat on 8 May 1945, Grossadmiral Dönitz had become the most unlikely head of state – Hitler had designated him his successor as chancellor and war minister shortly before committing suicide in the Führer-bunker in Berlin. Dönitz ordered the remaining U-boats to surrender. Forty-nine of them were at sea and most complied with the order over the next two weeks. But two boats, U-530 and U-977, refused to do so. The first arrived off Long Island and attempted to torpedo shipping moving in and out of New York. Out of ammunition, the submarine made its way to Argentina where it arrived on 9 July, hoping for an enthusiastic welcome from Argentinian fascists. The crew was instead interned and their boat turned over to the American authorities. The second boat, U-977 made a slow, submerged crossing of the Atlantic and arrived in August on the Argentine coast. This was the submarine that was later alleged to have carried Hitler, his new wife Eva Braun, and his secretary Martin Bormann to safety in Latin America or Antarctica. The reality was internment for its fiercely pro-Hitler crew three months after the formal end of hostilities in Europe, and a matter of days before Japan’s surrender.86 But by the end of May Allied ships were reasonably clear of danger. On 28 May the United States navy and the British Admiralty issued a joint statement: ‘No further trade convoys will be sailed. Merchant ships by night will burn navigation lights at full brilliancy and need not darken ships.’87
3
DEEP WAR
Stalingrad and Kursk
‘We speak of deep night, deep autumn;
when I think back to the year 1943
I feel like saying: “deep war”.’
Ilya Ehrenburg, The War 1941–1945
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FOUR CENTURIES AGO on the broad river Volga, at the sharp elbow where it turns south-east to flow the last 300 marsh-fringed miles to Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea, the Cossacks built a small trading town, Tsaritsyn. Through this typically provincial ‘three hotel town’, dotted with wooden houses and jetties, flowed the rich produce of the Caspian and the Caucasus. It might have languished in this state but for the Russian Revolution in 1917, when Tsaritsyn found itself in the midst of a fierce civil war between the new Bolshevik forces and the ‘White armies’, a motley array of counter-revolutionaries and independent-minded Cossacks. The Whites laid siege to Tsaritsyn in the autumn of 1918, pushing back the Red Army until it held just a small horseshoe of territory on the west bank of the Volga, surrounding the town. The population began to evacuate. Local Bolshevik leaders cabled desperately to Moscow for reinforcements and arms of any kind. Nothing was forthcoming save a telegram urging the revolutionary forces to stand firm: ‘Under no circumstances is Tsaritsyn to be given up.’1
The town was saved, according to Soviet legend, by the initiative of one man, the local chairman of the military committee, Josef Djugashvili, who in 1913 had adopted the name Stalin or ‘steel’. Urging his comrades to fight to the death rather than abandon the town, he disobeyed orders from Moscow by recalling a Red Army division from the Caucasus; Zhloba’s ‘Steel Division’, after a forced march of 300 miles, crashed into the rear of the Cossack host and saved the day. A month later Stalin was promoted to the national Council of Defence in Moscow. A year later he was back on the southern front in charge of a campaign that stretched from the steppe city of Kursk, through Tsaritsyn down to the Caucasus. Once more, so it was said, Stalin was instrumental in saving the region for the revolution. For his success on the Volga, Tsaritsyn was renamed in 1925 his city, Stalingrad.
Twenty-four years later, by a strange quirk of history, Stalin found himself defending the city once again, in circumstances far grimmer. In the autumn of 1942 German forces reached to their farthest extent, to the snow-covered passes of the Caucasus mountains and the banks of the Volga on either side of Stalingrad. In the decades between these two assaults, the city had changed beyond recognition. It had become a major industrial centre, sprawling untidily along the river for a length of 40 miles. Its half a million inhabitants worked mainly in the new factories, turning out vast numbers of tractors to fuel the regime’s agricultural revolution, and latterly large numbers of tanks. The city was a vital junction in Soviet trade. Industrial goods and machinery came down from the north; a steady flow of grain and oil was headed up the other way. Stalin had changed also. He was now the chief source of authority in the Soviet state, and the Supreme Commander of the armed forces. He wielded far more power than he had enjoyed in 1918, and vastly greater armies. On him alone rested responsibility once again for saving the city and the embattled Soviet system. On 28 July 1942 he issued a demanding order to the troops desperately trying to halt the German drive: ‘Not a step back!’ For four months they clung to the same horseshoe of land, while Stalin relived the nightmares of the civil war.
Then, slowly, the tide turned. Once again, Soviet armies crashed into the rear of the enemy host. The first major defeat of the war was inflicted
. Over the next twelve months the Red Army drove German forces from much of western Russia, on a broad arc from Kursk to the Caucasus. These Soviet victories marked the turning-point of the whole war, as victory in 1919 had turned the tide of the civil war. In December 1942 Stalin promoted 360 officers to the rank of General for saving the city that bore his name. In March 1943 he awarded himself his first formal military title, Marshal of the Soviet Union.2
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7 The Eastern Front 1941–1942
When German forces had renewed their onslaught in the early summer of 1942, Stalingrad had not been high on Hitler’s list of priorities. His one thought had been to secure a decisive, annihilating victory over the Red Army and crush his Bolshevik enemy once and for all. With the east eliminated, German resources could then be turned to defeat the western Allies. The issue was where the blow should fall. German army leaders favoured an attack at the centre of the front, to seize the Soviet capital, Moscow. This was where the bulk of Soviet forces was concentrated; the loss of the city would be devastating for Soviet morale. Hitler thought otherwise. The conquest of the Soviet Union was ideologically inspired, but motivated by material greed. Hitler wanted the industries, the oil and the grain of southern Russia; here was real Lebensraum, or living-space. He reasoned that if Germany captured these resources from the enemy the Soviet war effort would be brought to a halt, while the Third Reich would become all but invincible. On 5 April he issued his Führer Directive for the new summer campaign: a general blow to the south against the Crimea, the Don steppe and the Caucasus.3