The German side consistently exaggerated the damage being done to the RAF. By September, Fighter Command, with over 700 aircraft, had more fighters operationally available than it had had when the battle started, and there were never fewer than 1,400 pilots on hand. The Luftwaffe suffered from poor supply from German factories of aircraft and bombs and a slow, if thorough, training system. In the last weeks of combat the German fighter force was down to 700–800 operational pilots and 600 aircraft. The combination of radar, an effective communication system and a regular resupply of RAF planes and pilots ensured that the German side could not win air superiority over southeast England, even though the RAF had its own weaknesses in the quality of fighter armament and the rigid flying pattern initially adopted by fighter units.
On 7 September, the Luftwaffe switched the weight of attack to London in preparation for Operation Sea Lion, but lost so many aircraft over the week that followed that daylight bombing had to be abandoned. On 15 September, now celebrated as Battle of Britain Day, one-quarter of the Luftwaffe’s forces were shot down or damaged. This was a level of loss no force could sustain and 15 September, the day Hitler had originally planned to invade, marked the end of the major daylight air battles, and the end of the invasion threat to Britain. On 17 September, Hitler postponed Sea Lion indefinitely. During October, the German fighter force undertook regular hit-and-run raids to lure the RAF into combat, but they petered out by the end of the month. Over the course of the battle from July until the end of October, the Luftwaffe lost 1,733 planes, RAF Fighter Command 915. Radar became one of the most important technical developments of the Second World War, a classic example of how a technical lead, even a temporary one, can transform the face of battle. Radar was also used in the anti-submarine campaign and in all the air battles of the war, and laid the foundation for today’s electronic battlefield.
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No. 49 PEARL HARBOR
7 December 1941
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In 1921, Brigadier General Billy Mitchell of the United States Air Service conducted tests to demonstrate his contention that modern warships were highly vulnerable to air attack. The captured German battleship Ostfriesland suffered severe damage during the exercise and Mitchell claimed that his point was proved. The navy took offence and Mitchell was court-martialled in 1925 for going too far in his criticism of service short-sightedness. A little over twenty years later, the pride of the United States Pacific Fleet was struck in harbour by Japanese torpedo and fighter bombers attacking in waves. The raid on Pearl Harbor was not the first to knock out warships from the air, but it was by far the most damaging and it confirmed Mitchell’s argument that sea power was no longer viable if unsupported by air.
The Japanese navy was among the first to develop aircraft carriers and high-performance naval dive-bombers and torpedo-bombers. Geography dictated the necessity of protecting the ocean surrounding Japan’s empire, while power could only be projected further south and east by using ships and aircraft together. The prospect of a Pacific theatre of war came closer in the early 1940s as America tightened embargoes on scrap metal and oil in an attempt to pressure Japan into ending its drive into China and threatening French Indo-China. The Japanese navy needed oil and the rich pickings of Southeast Asia beckoned. The government in Tokyo hoped to negotiate an end to the embargo; the United States was determined to make no concessions unless Japan agreed to end its aggression. In October 1941, the new prime minister, General Hideki Tojo, finally set a deadline for talks. If America would not negotiate, then war would follow.
Under its supreme commander Admiral Yamamoto Isoruku, the Japanese navy planned a daring operation to cripple the US Pacific Fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor, the main base on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. A pre-emptive strike, it was hoped, would make the Americans accept negotiation more readily. By 22 November, a carrier fleet comprising six carriers, two battleships and a number of smaller vessels had gathered in readiness for possible war in the Japanese Kurile Islands, under the command of Vice Admiral Nagumo Chuichi. The naval pilots were the elite of the service, subject to long hours of training in cross-ocean flight, dive-bombing and torpedo attacks. The force carried around 600 pilots and 460 aircraft, enough to do serious damage. On 1 December, the government accepted that further talks were fruitless. Nagumo was instructed to strike on the morning of 8 December (7 December Honolulu time).
The Japanese attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor on the morning of 7 December 1941 had devastating results for the ships unfortunate enough to be moored in harbour. Here the USS Arizona is ablaze and listing badly. The attack signalled the end of the battleship era in warfare.
Yamamoto knew that this was a risky operation and the Japanese navy prepared for opposition or accident. Yet everything went according to plan. The weather in the northern Pacific concealed their approach. The American military did not anticipate an attack and aircraft were sent south to other American islands, or to reinforce the Philippines where an attack was expected. Hawaii was on high alert for possible sabotage, but as a result, the anti-aircraft batteries were not fully manned and the level of alert for air attack was low. The American intelligence agencies could read Japanese diplomatic traffic but failed to alert Hawaii to what was happening, even when intercepts revealed instructions to the Japanese consul to provide a grid map covering the port and its shipping. The message indicating that a state of war would exist from 7 December (Washington time) was not decrypted in time to give any reasonable warning. When one of the few radar stations detected the incoming Japanese carrier planes, no action was taken because a group of B-17 bombers was expected that morning.
When the first wave of Japanese aircraft arrived over the island at 7.49 a.m., the forces of Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter Short were taken completely by surprise. Pilots saw the clouds part obligingly and the whole island was laid out clearly before them. The 173 attacking aircraft destroyed or damaged all but 47 of the 394 American planes on the island and inflicted heavy damage on the port area. The second wave at 8.50 was made up entirely of bombers and dive-bombers aiming for the main warships. By 9.45, the battle was over for the loss of only twenty-nine Japanese aircraft. Nagumo abandoned the third wave of attack against repair and oil installations for reasons which have never been clear. Six American battleships were sunk and two damaged, including Arizona, Oklahoma and West Virginia; a further ten smaller vessels were disabled. A total of 2,403 civilians and servicemen were killed and 1,178 injured. Mitchell’s ghost had returned with a vengeance.
In Japan the news was greeted with delight. The radio played ‘The Battleship March’ in between special announcements. ‘The whole nation bubbled over,’ one Japanese sailor remembered, ‘excited and inspired.’ The parting of the clouds over Oahu was taken as a divine omen. In Washington, the Japanese attack united American opinion. President Roosevelt announced the declaration of war on 8 December with the famous words, ‘a date which will live in infamy’. The US navy had learned its lesson. The Japanese battle fleet was reduced slowly over four years to a mere shell, hammered into the sea by attacking waves of naval dive-bombers and torpedoes. Combined air-sea co-operation became standard practice in all the world’s navies, a commitment whose roots reach back to the two destructive hours at Pearl Harbor in December 1941 rather than the wreck of the Ostfriesland.
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No. 50 BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC
March – May 1943
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What Winston Churchill called the ‘Battle of the Atlantic’ was a major struggle waged by the Royal Navy, abetted by the Canadian and US navies, against the submarine arm of the German Reichsmarine for control of the trans-oceanic shipping lanes. The German plan was to sink enough merchant shipping to blockade Britain and undermine any attempt to invade mainland Europe; the Allied strategy was to break the stranglehold of the U-boats and so maintain the flow of supplies, resources and troops to Britain. The course of the battle was determined n
ot only by the naval vessels assigned to the convoy operations, but by the introduction of very long-range aircraft, advanced radar equipment and a scientific system for cracking German naval codes. The breakthrough for the Allies came at the last moment in spring 1943, in time to avoid a growing crisis.
In the course of 1942 German submarines sank 7.8 million tons of shipping – 1,662 ships in all. They hunted the convoys and single vessels in ‘wolfpacks’ of anything up to thirty or forty vessels. A lucky convoy might avoid contact altogether, and many did so, but the real danger to the Allies was an attrition rate so high that shipping lost could not be replaced in time. This meant finding an active way to inflict losses on the submarines. By 1942, many innovations had been introduced: large, armed escorts protected the merchantmen and hunted for submarines; improved air-to-surface radar helped Allied aircraft to locate submarines more accurately; a large spotlight (the Leigh Light) was introduced so that submarines that surfaced at night could be illuminated for attack. Better anti-submarine projectiles were developed, including the Hedgehog, which fired twenty-five small bombs fitted with contact fuses, so that an explosion would indicate clearly a submarine hit. The German submarine arm, commanded by Admiral Karl Dönitz, reacted to these changes, but the main effect was to push the wolfpacks to the so-called Atlantic Gap in the central part of the ocean, between Greenland and the Azores, where long-range aircraft could not yet reach. By late 1941, the German B-Dienst serving naval intelligence had cracked Anglo-American codes and could track convoys, while in February 1942, after a long period in which the German encrypted Enigma messages could be decoded and read (known in Britain as Ultra intelligence), the German navy changed its Triton cypher and kept the Allies in the dark until December 1942, when German naval traffic could be read again, with a brief pause in March 1943, and the submarine packs tracked.
The battle was poised by the end of 1942. Submarine losses were at last starting to mount. Only three had been sunk in the Atlantic between January and June, but between July and December the total was thirty-two. Allied shipping losses were high in 1942 and the morale of merchant seamen, thousands of whom lost their lives in the cold and remote seas of the mid-ocean, was low. The cost of building new ships challenged even the wealthy economy of the United States. But over the first months of 1943, the balance began to tilt towards the Allies, thanks not only to the painstaking work of directing convoys onto safer routes, and the growing expertise of the aircraft and escort vessels hunting the enemy, but also to a number of vital technical changes in the Allied force that came together all at once, and at the moment of greatest crisis.
A Vought SB2U Vindicator naval dive-bomber from the carrier USS Ranger flies alongside Convoy WS-12 on its way through the Atlantic to Cape Town in South Africa. The use of aircraft in reconnaissance and anti-submarine roles was essential to the Allied success against the U-boats.
The first innovation was a new radar set, ASV-III, using the newly discovered cavity magnetron that permitted much more accurate sets based on narrow centimetric wavelengths. The Germans had been able to block the ASV-I and ASV-II sets that used long radar waves, but they had nothing to stop the new sets. The new radar could even detect a periscope in calm seas, transforming the capacity of aircraft to detect submarines.
The second change was the advent of very long-range aircraft, principally the B-24 Liberator bomber, designed to close the Atlantic Gap and give air cover for the whole convoy voyage. This was something the Royal Navy had wanted for a long time but they had been frustrated not by the enemy but by the resistance of the US navy chief-of-staff, Admiral Ernest King, and the commander-in-chief of RAF Bomber Command, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris, neither of whom had been willing to divert long-range aircraft from other operations. But this change came only after a fierce battle between submarines, ships and aircraft in the middle of March 1943 that signalled the peak of the Battle of the Atlantic.
The battle was fought against thirty-eight submarines, organized in three wolfpacks, Raubgraf, Stürmer and Dränger, in the heart of the Atlantic Gap. Intercepted signals warned the Germans that two large convoys, SC122 and HX229, were on their way, a total of ninety-one vessels. The weather was appalling, with squalls of snow and hail, fog, and heavy grey seas. Contact was made with the convoys when U-653 sighted the ships of HX-229 and alerted the rest of the packs. Radar was less useful with the high swell of the waves and the submarines pressed home their attacks, sinking a total of twenty-one ships of 141,000 tons. Only one submarine was lost, sunk by a B-17 ‘Flying Fortress’ on duty from the Hebrides Islands. But during the battle, two B-24s were used for the first time over the Gap; neither scored a kill, but their presence caused the submarines to be more cautious. The British commander of the Western Approaches in the eastern Atlantic, Admiral Sir Max Horton, sensed that, despite the high losses, the balance of technology was swinging the Allies’ way. Rather than urging greater caution, Horton insisted that the next convoys sail into the waiting jaws of the wolfpacks, where long-range aircraft and escorts armed with centimetric radar would seek out and fight the submarines.
This was risky and convoy sinkings continued, but at only half the losses experienced in March. More significant, the losses of submarines escalated. Between March and May 1943, fifty-six submarines were sunk, with thirty-three in May alone, one submarine for every merchantman sunk. In mid-May, convoy SC130 with thirty-seven merchant vessels set out across the gap. Supported by a large naval escort and very long-range Liberators, the waiting submarines were decimated, losing six of their number but sinking not a single ship. Dönitz, whose son died on one of the submarines in this battle, bowed to reality. On 24 May, he withdrew his submarines from the Atlantic so that they could be refitted and he could assess the new Allied tactics and technology, but their battle was all but over. It took time for the Allies to realize what had happened, but by June, when only four ships were sunk for the loss of twelve submarines in all waters, it was clear that the battle had been won. The submarines never posed a serious threat again.
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No. 51 HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI
6 and 9 August 1945
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The dropping of the atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not, strictly speaking, constitute a battle. Nevertheless, the two air operations have been seen ever since as the decisive blow in ending the total war that began with the Japanese attack on the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor four years earlier. The two bombs represent the culmination of thousands of years in which military forces have vied for the weapon that would give them a permanent advantage. Here was an innovation that both simplified and complicated the history of war: simplified because it reduced operations of huge destructive power to one bomb and one aeroplane; complicated because it put into the hands of modern soldiers and politicians a weapon that could quite literally destroy the globe.
The story of the atomic attacks comes together from two different directions. The first came from Britain in 1940, where scientists began researching the possibility of creating a weapon using what was then known about atomic physics. Much of the key research had been done by German emigré scientists who contributed to the development of the world’s first atomic weapons, initially in Britain, then from 1942 onwards in the United States. The programme – codenamed the Manhattan Project – cost more than $2 billion and took three years of work, which chiefly involved finding industrial ways of producing the fissile material. The Germans and Japanese worked on nuclear projects, too, but lacked the resources to make them a top priority. The Anglo-American allies worried all the time that they might be beaten to the nuclear draw, and so gave it high priority. On 16 July 1945, the new weapon was ready for testing at Alamogordo in the New Mexico Desert. In the early morning the test was carried out with complete success. It was, wrote one eyewitness, ‘as if somebody had turned the sun on with a switch’.
The second direction came from the war with Japan. The bomb came too late f
or it to be used on targets in Germany (whose leaders had surrendered on 7 May), but it seemed the ideal weapon to end Japanese resistance, save American lives and bring the conflict to a swift conclusion. The American Air Force had secured bases in the Marianas, to the southeast of the Japanese home islands, which now lay within range of the new American super-bomber, the Boeing B-29. The bomber had destroyed miles of Japan’s urban areas using incendiary bombing. Neither this nor the stranglehold on Japanese trade had provoked surrender, though Japanese politicians and soldiers were trying to find a way to persuade the hard-liners to give up. President Truman, who had succeeded Roosevelt in April 1945, gave equivocal approval for an atomic operation, and the US 21st Bomber Command was told to go ahead.
The operation hinged on where to bomb. A small handwritten note has survived in papers belonging to the American air force commander-in-chief, Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold, with ‘Atomic Bomb Cities’ underlined at the top. There were five cities on the list – Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Niigata, Kokura and Kyoto. These had not been bombed for a number of reasons, but one was to save a target in case atomic weapons became available. Kyoto was ruled out because it was the historic home of the imperial family. Arnold ticked Hiroshima, Kokura and Nagasaki, an almost casual selection that doomed whole cities to a form of destruction no-one could yet imagine. On the morning of 6 August 1945, the B-29 Enola Gay set out for Hiroshima carrying a 4,000-kilogram (9,000-pound) uranium bomb, nicknamed ‘Little Boy’. The bomb worked as planned, wrecking 13 square kilometres (5 square miles) of the city and killing 80,000 people in an instant. Another estimated 40,000 died from radiation effects, making this the worst bombing raid of the war. Three days later, a 4,600-kilogram (10,000-pound) plutonium bomb known as ‘Fat Man’ was flown to Kokura only to find it covered by cloud; Nagasaki was the secondary target. Around 74,000 of the population died. Eyewitnesses watched as a terrified stream of injured refugees fled from the bombings, their skin hanging in folds, lymph leaking from their flesh, their bodies caked in sores. The operations were one-sided: the triumph of military science against a defenceless civilian population rather than the armed forces of the enemy.
A History of War in 100 Battles Page 23
