Blackett's War

by Stephen Budiansky

  The coming of the war rescued King’s career. “When they run into trouble, they send for the sons of bitches,” he reportedly commented on his change of fortune after being appointed CominCh. The most famous observation about King was one attributed to his daughter: “My father is the most even-tempered man in the navy. He is always in a rage.” Roosevelt had heard the other joke that had been making the rounds about King for years, that he “shaved with a blow torch,” and the president sent him a letter quoting the line and saying how glad he was to have “the toughest man in the navy” in charge. FDR added: “P.S. I am trying to verify another rumor—that you cut your toenails with a torpedo net cutter.”21 There was no doubt that the navy, and the country, needed someone with King’s aggressive spirit to put some confidence back into the navy in the wake of Pearl Harbor.

  But in the rapidly deteriorating war with the U-boats along the coast of the United States, nearly everything King did for the first few months only muddied the waters further. The formation of Baker’s ASW unit within the Atlantic Fleet had been a small step toward bringing some central coordination to the effort. It was undermined by King’s own repeated insistence on the very traditional navy view of decentralized authority: the captain of the ship was the ultimate word. Upon taking command of the Atlantic Fleet the year before he had promulgated a famous order on the “initiative of the subordinate,” lambasting flag officers for issuing instructions to the individual ship’s captains under their authority telling them “how” as well as “what” to do. As CominCh, King insisted at first on keeping the staff to an unrealistically small size, no more than 300 officers. When the Atlantic Fleet tried to issue its first manual for antisubmarine warfare, the fleet’s staff first had to receive approval from CominCh—which refused to print enough copies to distribute to every ship. When Vice Admiral Adolphus Andrews, the commander of the Eastern Sea Frontier, issued an order to one district commandant spelling out antisubmarine patrol procedures, King “practically hit the ceiling,” recalled one aide. The commander-in-chief sent a curt signal canceling Andrews’s order and telling him off: “Do not presume you are on the bridge of every ship under your command.”22

  By the same token, King refused to override Andrews’s misbegotten decision not to organize convoys of coastal traffic even in the face of the mounting losses to the U-boats. Andrews argued that until he had enough escorts it would be best to let the freighters and tankers continue to sail individually. Weakly escorted convoys, he insisted, would be worse than no convoys at all. In fact, even unescorted convoys were an effective counter to U-boats, particularly those operating singly as Dönitz’s Paukenschlag forces were. A convoy substantially reduced the opportunity for a U-boat to find a target in the first place, and did not significantly increase the chances that more than one ship would be sunk even when a convoy was spotted.

  Much has been made of King’s anglophobia as an explanation for the American failure to institute convoys or otherwise benefit from British knowledge and experience during those disastrous opening months of the war for America. King did make it abundantly clear that he would be damned if the United States was going to play second fiddle to the Royal Navy and dismissed out of hand a British proposal to place the joint Anglo-American naval forces in the Atlantic under a single—British—admiral. But the far more important factor was that the U.S. Navy lacked the command structure to put any British knowledge to use even if it cared to. The shortage of surface ships and aircraft did not help, but that was not the main problem either. The main problem was that all of the various pieces of the antisubmarine campaign, from training to doctrine to operations, were parceled out among various commands, all of which had other duties as well. No one commander was actually responsible for understanding the whole picture, or doing something about it.

  That was the real lesson the United States needed to learn from its more experienced ally. Coordination with air forces, or rather the lack thereof, was especially telling. The British services had been through a tug-of-war between the navy and the air force over control of naval aviation very much as the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy had, but far more important than the decision to place RAF Coastal Command under Admiralty control in April 1941 was the fact that the headquarters for the two most important air and sea commands fighting the U-boats—Western Approaches Command and Coastal Command’s No. 15 Group—were located side by side in the Liverpool command center. They closely coordinated air patrols with surface escorts and convoys. The day after Pearl Harbor the U.S. Army Air Forces I Bomber Command began sea patrols along the Atlantic coast of the United States, but it took until the end of March to work out even a preliminary agreement clarifying the command relationships and giving authority over antisubmarine air patrols to the Eastern Sea Frontier headquarters in New York. It was May before a Gulf Task Force from I Bomber Command was detached to Charleston, South Carolina, under a similar arrangement with the Gulf Sea Frontier.23

  Worst of all was the intelligence situation. The U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Intelligence had long since become a retirement home for incompetent officers who washed out in sea commands. Its key functions were thoroughly cannibalized by other departments of the navy. The aggressive commander of the War Plans Division, Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, had wrested control of operational intelligence away from ONI even though he had no experience or knowledge of intelligence matters. (He was, though, a master intellectual bully: he had once taken a crash course in music just so he could convincingly chew out the band on a ship he commanded.)24 The Office of Naval Communications meanwhile seized effective control of all signals intelligence and code breaking in another bureaucratic skirmish. ONI was left with compiling static assessments of the order of battle of foreign navies, collecting attaché reports that were little better than what could be had from clipping local newspapers, and carrying out often clumsy and incompetent security investigations to ferret out real or imagined spies and domestic subversives.

  A small Convoy and Routing Section had been established at navy headquarters in Washington in November 1941 to organize and keep track of the transatlantic convoys, but it did not deal with intelligence about U-boat locations. It was again left largely up to the individual district and sea frontier commanders to pick up the ball and try to maintain their own map plots with their own small intelligence units.

  The British Operational Intelligence Centre was almost everything the U.S. Navy’s intelligence system was not. It brought together intelligence from all sources—radio direction finding from U-boat transmissions, Enigma decrypts, sightings by aircraft and surface ships, prisoner interrogation reports, and a growing file of accumulated clues about individual U-boat captains and their tactics and habits—to maintain a constantly updated picture of U-boat movements and dispositions in relation to current convoy locations. The OIC also had the authority to forward their findings directly to commanders in charge of convoy routing and antisubmarine operations.

  The resident genius of the OIC’s Submarine Tracking Room was a remarkable man, Rodger Winn. The ravages of polio contracted in childhood had left him twisted and gnomelike, with a terrible limp and a severely crooked back. Thirty-eight years old, he was a barrister in civilian life. His deformity would have normally made him ineligible for naval service at all but the navy arranged a direct commission for him as a commander in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserves. Winn had exactly the kind of mind and instincts for the job, the sharp lawyer’s ability to piece together often contradictory and incomplete data to form a picture of the whole, and was legendary for his almost sixth sense—or so it seemed to those not as steeped in operational intelligence as he was—to know where the U-boats were going to be next.

  On April 19, 1942, Winn arrived in Washington hoping to convince his American counterparts that they needed a thorough reorganization of their intelligence system to stem the tide of disasters besetting Allied shipping in American waters. It took him several days to get in to see Rear Admiral Richard
S. Edwards, King’s deputy chief of staff. Winn made his case that the U.S. Navy needed to centralize its submarine intelligence just as the British had. Edwards, displaying a full measure of U.S. Navy anglophobia, retorted that the United States did not need the British to teach them anything, and moreover that if America wanted to lose ships that was her business: America had plenty of ships and could afford to lose them. Edwards also blithely insisted that it was impossible to forecast U-boat movements, thus futile to try to reroute convoys around them.

  Winn, who had spent time in the United States as a student at Harvard and Yale, was well aware of what he described as the American bent for straight talking and decided to let Edwards have it. “The trouble is, Admiral,” he began, “it’s not only your bloody ships you’re losing, a lot of them are ours. And we’re not prepared to sacrifice men and ships to your bloody incompetence and obstinacy!”

  Edwards was taken aback for a moment but then laughed and said, “Well, maybe you have a point there.” Winn also hinted that if the U.S. Navy did set up such a centralized, and secure, intelligence operation, “we might have better information to impart if we could be sure how it would be handled.” That was an allusion to the Enigma traffic—the one secret the British remained loath to completely share with their ally, given their fears about lax American security and the terrible risk of losing this source altogether if the Germans caught even a hint of its having been successfully broken. But after an “alcoholic luncheon,” Winn subsequently reported, he and Edwards “parted the best of friends” and the American admiral agreed that Winn ought to be brought in to see Admiral King. Things began to happen. By the time he left Washington in May, Winn was able to report that the American U-boat tracking room was “a going concern.” The operation was made part of the CominCh staff at navy headquarters and the small tracking operation at Eastern Sea Frontier headquarters in New York was disbanded, a significant reversal in King’s philosophy of decentralization and a recognition that drastic changes in business as usual were going to be needed if the ravages of the U-boats were to be stemmed.25

  THE BAD NEWS CONTINUED unabated through the spring of 1942. Even with a belated blackout of coastal cities in April and the beginnings of a more unified coordination of antisubmarine operations, the situation remained, to quote King’s own assessment, “desperate.” A second wave of U-boats arrived in the Caribbean around April 12 and again began picking off tankers with abandon. As a stopgap the navy established protective anchorages off Cape Lookout in North Carolina so ships could wait out the dangerous night and pass Cape Hatteras by daylight.

  In mid-May convoys were finally organized from Key West to Hatteras; at once sinkings were cut from 25 percent of unescorted vessels leaving U.S. ports in May to 2 percent of those traveling in convoys. Still, the worst month was June, when 127 ships in the Atlantic theater went down, 637,000 tons in all, the grimmest toll of the war to date. The United States had lost 5 percent of its available shipping in just the first six months since it entered the war.26 General George Marshall, the army chief of staff, normally the most reticent of men in criticizing his military colleagues, sent King a memorandum on June 19 expressing his anxiety:

  The losses by submarine off our Atlantic seaboard and in the Caribbean threaten our entire war effort.… We are well aware of the limited number of escort craft available, but has every conceivable improvised means been brought to bear on the situation? I am fearful that another month or two of this will so cripple our means of transport that we will be unable to bring sufficient men and planes to bear against the enemy in critical theaters.

  King responded testily that he had “long been aware” of the implications of having ships sunk by U-boats and was doing everything he could.27 He responded with an even more imperious statement to the press—his disdain for publicity and reporters was legendary—suggesting that “the volume of criticism of the conduct of the antisubmarine campaign” was hurting the war effort: “It must be obvious that we of the Navy are even more concerned than are any of the critics or any of the other citizens of the U.S. because we have the responsibility and the critics have not.”28

  All kinds of helpful suggestions poured in from members of the public. A memorandum forwarded to Captain Baker from navy headquarters dryly summarized them: “Many letters suggest we do more patrolling, convoying without giving any specific recommendation.” Others offered the idea of using railroads and inland waterways to move goods, or establishing “safe lanes” for merchantmen to follow which would be constantly patrolled. Many proposed deploying small fishing boats and pleasure vessels to the hunt for U-boats (“here is always mentioned the advantage of sailing vessels as a listening post due to the lack of machinery noise”).29 The president, an enthusiastic yachtsman, unfortunately added his voice to this last idea; he ordered King to establish an armada of civilian volunteers to patrol the shores. The coast guard obediently christened it the “Corsair Fleet,” and among its enthusiastic members was Ernest Hemingway, who took to the seas off Cuba in his yacht, armed with a machine gun, hunting rifle, and hand grenades and visions of taking a U-boat singlehandedly. The press more accurately dubbed it the “Hooligan Navy.” It did nothing but generate hundreds of false sighting reports.30

  Roosevelt’s other idea was to outbuild the U-boats’ ability to sink ships. The mass-produced Liberty Ships that began pouring out of shipyards would become an American legend; by June construction had already accelerated to an astonishing pace, with sixty-seven launched that month, the fastest-assembled of them completed in sixty days start to finish. The German naval intelligence staff quickly revised its forecasts; it now estimated that 10 million tons of shipping would be added to the Allied merchant fleet by British and American shipyards in 1943, which meant that instead of 700,000 tons a month, Dönitz’s U-boats would need to sink 900,000 a month to keep pace.31

  Replacing men and ships faster than they could be destroyed was one way to win, and in some ways it was what would win the Battle of the Atlantic for the Allies, but it was a brutal calculus, a naval war of attrition at its most elemental. The military analysts Eliot Cohen and John Gooch would observe, “The undeniable resource shortages of early 1942 helped conceal the underlying problems of American ASW; the swelling tide of Allied ship production thereafter further obscured them.”32 The underlying problems were that American fliers and escort vessel commanders were not applying the lessons that the British, with the notable assistance of Blackett’s operational research sections and Winn’s Submarine Tracking Room, had already established for how to effectively protect convoys and destroy U-boats. In May 1942 Dönitz noted in his war diary, “The American airmen see nothing, and the destroyers and patrol vessels proceed at too great a speed to locate the U-boats or are not persistent enough with depth charge attacks.”33

  Baker had noted it, too. From January to June only 2 percent of attacks by U.S. naval forces resulted in the confirmed sinking of a U-boat; that was about a quarter the British success rate.34 It had taken until April 14 for the U.S. Navy to sink its first U-boat: U-85, sunk by gunfire from the destroyer Roper off Cape Hatteras. Baker was convinced the problems never would be solved until command of the antisubmarine battle was centralized.

  At the very end of April, Baker reached an agreement with King’s staff that CominCh would publish an ASW manual and issue regular antisubmarine warfare bulletins. But still King refused to drop his basic belief in decentralized control. “This in no way restricts Fleet and Sea Frontier Commanders in the issue of bulletins within their own forces,” the agreement emphasized. Moreover, the present arrangement in which CominCh, Atlantic Fleet, and the sea frontiers each retained their own ASW units would continue; even worse, Baker was to turn over to the sea frontiers the job of analyzing the operations of the Atlantic Fleet units temporarily attached to them, as soon as they were able to take on that duty themselves. The sea frontiers, for their part, were not to issue any doctrinal instructions to the air units attached to them; if t
hey had any suggestions that applied specifically to antisubmarine air operations, they could “recommend” them to the separate army air commanders who were in charge of each different type of patrol plane and who were responsible for the training doctrine of the pilots under them. The one glimmer of hope in all of it was that CominCh had agreed to transfer to Washington the entire ASWORG team along with Baker to CominCh headquarters as soon as space was available in the Navy Department building.35

  On June 24 Captain Baker sent a curt memorandum directly to Admiral King that minced no words about the woeful shortcomings of the arrangements. It began with an arresting statement:

  The Battle of the Atlantic is being lost.

  This is due to:

  (a) Lack of training by our A/S forces.

  (b) Lack of unified control of effort, i.e., rigid organization requiring conferences prior to taking action.

  (c) Insufficient vessels and aircraft.

  Baker in his suggested remedies zeroed in on the two cruxes of the matter: the lack of proper attack procedures and instruction and the still fragmented command structure. District commandants, he pointed out, were distracted by local administrative duties. The Eastern Sea Frontier, the Atlantic Fleet, and CominCh ASW units all duplicated and overlapped one another; no one authority was responsible for training, planning, intelligence, and doctrine. Intelligence on the whereabouts of the U-boats was not getting to the tactical units that needed it. It could take weeks or months of bureaucratic turf battles to transfer ships or aircraft to a new sector as the enemy activity shifted around the Atlantic. Local commanders each had their own ideas about antisubmarine tactics; no one was examining the accumulated experience across the entire theater to draw lessons about what really worked best, and then following through with consistent training for destroyer and aircraft crews.