A World at Arms (106 page)

The armored fighting vehicles, generally referred to as tanks, had been introduced during World War I. Slow, with unreliable engines, and vulnerable to artillery, the tank had been the subject of further experimental development by all major powers in the inter-war years, with the Germans enabled to do so in the 1920s by the Soviet Union. In the 1930s, the Germans had proceeded to continue with this process, eventually concentrating to their later disadvantage on two medium tanks, the Mark III and the Mark IV, both very effective in the early years of the war and used in different models until its end. This was supplemented by a very fine medium tank which had been developed in Czechoslovakia, referred to as the T-38, and built under the German occupation until 1945.
⁴
It was the experience of the greatly superior Soviet T-34 and KV tanks which shocked the Germans into developing the Mark V, or “Panther,” which was to equal it, and the Mark VI, or “Tiger,” which was supposed to better the Soviet models.
⁵

These new German tanks in their various models were among the most effective built in the war, but they suffered from development problems, were rushed to the front when not yet ready, and could not be built in the numbers Germany needed and wanted because of the diversions caused by bombing and by competing needs. These competing needs included not only submarine construction but a tendency to gigantomania, which was not limited to artillery. There were endless experiments with monster tanks, including a 188 ton “Mouse,” which absorbed resources to no conceivable practical purpose.
⁶

The French had begun to develop and then to build very good medium and heavy tanks, but the quick collapse of France in 1940-brought about in part by the foolish dispersal of the country’s numerous tanks–ended the French role in this field. For reasons which remain unclear, the Germans did not insist on the continued production of the excellent French tanks as they did with the Czechoslovak model.

Mussolini had dreamt of a massive and advanced Italian armored force, but, like many of his military aspirations, this one remained largely in the sphere of dreams.
⁷
The British had been the great innovators in armored warfare in World War I, British writers on military affairs had emphasized the possible role of armor in the inter-war years, and under the prodding of Secretary of State for War Leslie Hore-Belisha the British army had become the first European army to turn completely to motor from horse transport; but in the field of tank development Britain lagged behind. The steady series of defeats at the hands of the Germans in North Africa was to a considerable extent due to the inferiority of British armor.
⁸
The models introduced in 1943 and 1944 were a substantial improvement, but in those years British armored units were increasingly equipped with American vehicles, especially the “Sherman” tank.
⁹

The “Sherman” came to symbolize the arguments over American armor in World War II.
¹⁰
With its reliable engine and substantial armor, it proved distinctly superior to the Mark III and IV but had trouble dealing with the Mark V and VI, generally relying on larger numbers to cope with the more heavily gunned German tanks.
¹¹
Whatever their defects in detail, the American tanks, especially when supported by the excellent American artillery and by the Allied air forces, proved adequate for their task.

There cannot be any doubt that the Soviet Union both developed the most effective tanks and produced and fielded them in huge numbers. The T-34, KV, and Stalin tanks, all improved during the war, proved admirably suited to conditions on the Eastern Front, distinctly superior to the German tanks of 1941 and 1942, and more than able to cope with the new German models of 1943 and 1944.
¹²
Of probably equal
importance on the battlefield was the Soviet development of “tank armies” and their use in the war, first conspicuous in the offensive which encircled the Axis armies in Stalingrad. Although the Germans had introduced large armored formations, eventually named “Panzer Armies,” as a practical matter these contained fewer and fewer tanks as the war went on. The Red Army, on the other hand, steadily increased the tanks allocated to their “tank armies” and these came to be the main instruments of the deep penetrations which it was able to make in 1943 and 1944.

Armor played a decidedly smaller role in the Pacific War, in part because the terrain in Burma and the Southwest Pacific was generally not suitable for the employment of armor on any large scale. The Japanese used small and lightly armored tanks;
¹³
the Americans and British small numbers of their standard models. The modification which the Americans found most useful in the Pacific War was the tank mounted flame–thrower for dealing with Japanese soldiers and gunners who had dug themselves into caves and other natural obstacles on such islands as Okinawa. The biggest use of armor in East Asia came at the end when Soviet armor, recently transported by train across the U.S.S.R., swept into Manchuria in August 1945.

Far more dramatic changes took place in airplanes. Most air forces still had bi–planes at the beginning of the war, but with the exception of the Russian U-2 (used for liaison and support of partisans throughout the war), these were all phased out. The single-engine single-wing fighter came to characterize all air forces with the initial German and Japanese lead in speed overcome by newer British as well as newer American and Soviet models. The German experiment with two-engine fighters proved a bad mistake; the American ones, on the other hand, turned out to be especially useful in the Pacific with its greater distances. The most important change, discussed in
Chapter 11
, was the extension of the range, especially of the P-51 “Mustang,” to where it could escort bombers great distances. The completely new world of jet–propelled airplanes is discussed later in this chapter.

If fighters became faster, carried heavier armor, came to have self-sealing tanks, and flew further, bombers changed in a different way. The two-engined standard bomber of all air forces continued to be used in varying modifications by all air forces. The major new development was the four–engined bomber, produced in ever larger numbers primarily by the United States and Great Britain. Designed before and in the early
stages of World War II, these planes could go further and carry a vastly heavier load of bombs than the two-engine models.
^b
They bore the major burden of the strategic bombing offensive, carrying huge loads of high explosive and incendiary bombs to German and Japanese cities, factories, and other installations. The most advanced bombers of the war, the American B-29 and the British “Mosquito” represented opposite lines of development. The B-29 with its huge size, enormous range, and pressurized cabin pointed toward the inter-continental planes of the post-1945 era.
¹⁴
The “Mosquito,” with its light wood construction, great speed, and very high altitude capability foreshadowed the spy–planes of the Cold War era.

The Axis powers lagged behind in the development of the 4-engine bomber. Misled by their faith in the dive-bomber’s ability to hit targets by getting low enough to aim accurately, the Germans moved from the single-engine dive-bomber (JU-87) to a two-engine dive-bomber (JU-88), whose pilots, however, often found diving far too dangerous and tended to fly their planes like any two-engine bomber. To make a four–engined bomber capable of diving, the Germans put two engines onto each of two propellors, a solution which proved more genial in theory than in practice (Heinkel 177). This plane always had problems with its tandem engines, caught fire in the air or on the ground, and was never practical for diving anyway. Unlike the B-29 and the Mosquito, the Heinkel concept turned out to be a dead end.
^c

All air forces continued to use their two-engine bombers, especially to support the ground forces. In this, the Western Allies, after initial difficulties, became especially proficient, using their planes in Europe to attack German military targets with cannons as well as machine guns and with rockets mounted under the wings.
¹⁵
In the Pacific the Americans used their two-engine bombers not only in the same way but to skip–bomb Japanese shipping.

The Red Air Force started the war with a large stock of often obsolete or obsolescent planes. Losing huge numbers of planes in the first days of fighting, the Soviet Union soon concentrated production on more modern models and developed planes which were equal to the Germans’ in capacity even if the crews often lacked experience. There were,
however, no great technological breakthroughs. The Soviet Union, like all the belligerents, faced enormous problems in training vast numbers of pilots, navigators, and other aircrew members. It could, however, do this at bases out of reach of enemy planes, something the United States could do in the Western Hemisphere and Great Britain did to a considerable extent through the British Commonwealth air training plan in Canada.
¹⁶

The old standby of the pre-war air enthusiasts, the balloon, played a part in the war in two ways. Primarily, but not only, the Western Allies used balloons very extensively to protect cities, military installations, and convoys from low-level air attack.
¹⁷
Here was one area in which women increasingly came to occupy a near–combat role in the West at a time when they were already fighting with arms and in planes in the Soviet military. The other use of balloons, discussed in
Chapter 7
, was the employment of helium filled–and hence non-inflammable-blimps with crews in anti-submarine patrols, as opposed to the hydrogen–filled captive barrage balloons whose crews were on the ground. The Germans did not repeat their World War I bombing of England with Zeppelins, that is, with dirigibles; but the Japanese unsuccessfully tried to set fire to the forests of western Canada and the United States with incendiary carrying balloons. The 1944 idea of burning down huge portions of the enemy’s country-forests, cities, factories and people–in enormous firestorms was Japan’s contribution to the conduct of war; it would prove unsuccessful in practice and be repaid the following year by the Americans on a more limited scale but to far greater effect.

At sea, there were fewer innovations than on land or in the air. The types of warships developed in the pre-war years, and in fact the ships themselves, dominated in the navies of all belligerents.
¹⁸
Aircraft carriers became increasingly important, but except for American adoption of the British concept of the angled flight deck and the introduction of the small escort carrier, these ships became more numerous rather than different. The really new type of ship was the landing ship and landing craft, a variety of ships designed in part by the American marines in the inter-war years, in part by the British Combined Operations Command, and most often built by the Americans, to bring ashore troops, tanks, and other equipment in amphibious operations. By 1945 there were literally thousands of these, essential to all the landings in the Mediterranean and Normandy as well as the many assault landings in the Pacific.

The submarines of World War II were also basically those developed
earlier. These ships spent most of their time on the surface, were too slow to overtake ships or convoys when underwater, and had to surface to recharge the batteries which drove them when submerged. The Japanese began the war with the most effective torpedo; those of other powers, especially of Germany and the United States, were defective and only slowly improved. As explained in
Chapter 7
, the massive effort made by the Germans to by–pass the handicaps of the standard submarines and to employ new types which could stay submerged and move at high speeds failed to produce results in time for their effective employment in the war. The real impact of these new types was their absorption of vast resources and the influence their anticipated effectiveness had on the conduct of German military operations in the Baltic area in 1944 and 1945.

The most significant changes in naval warfare came from the introduction of radar and other electronic devices which are reviewed later in this chapter. The advances of the Allies in these fields gave their navies an enormous advantage over the Italians from 1941 on and over the Germans and the Japanese from 1943 on. The use of these new technologies helped them turn the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic and destroy Axis warships on all oceans from the waters off Norway to the Southwest Pacific.

Acting independently of each other as far as is known, both the Japanese and the Germans had tried to leap–frog the British and Americans for control of the seas by beginning construction in the 1930S on battleships vastly larger than anything being built or even contemplated elsewhere and arming such new ships with 18 inch guns, again larger than any gun in any other navy. The Germans had halted work on their super-battleships in September 1939, had renewed work in the summer of 1940, halted it again later that year, resumed once more in the summer of 1941 only to stop once more and finally in the fall. The deliberate or accidental oversight in the cancelling of the contracts which led to some engines being completed–only to be scrapped–in the summer of 1944 is of interest in showing how seriously the project had been taken in Berlin. The Japanese, on the other hand, completed two 70,000-ton monsters, the
Yamato
and the
Musashi,
while converting a third into a huge aircraft carrier, the
Shinano.
All three were sunk without having had any substantial effect on the war (a fourth one was scrapped quite early during construction). Whatever the theoretical merits of the concept in the context of Japan’s
original
war plan, the substitution of the Pearl Harbor concept made the super-battleships of doubtful value. Both Germany and Japan would have derived greater naval power from investing the resources devoted to the monster ships to smaller models.