A World at Arms (73 page)

^a
it should be added that if used in an unescorted attack on Formosa, as Brereton intended, the B-17s would surely have suffered disaster anyway. But they might instead all have been used from bases on Mindanao to interfere with the invasion, as a handful eventually were. Clayton James,
The Years of MacArthur
,
chap. 1
, comes to very similar conclusions.

^b
Ibid., pp. 240-44. Like the Germans in 1939, the Americans went into the war in 1941 with submarine torpedoes that often either failed to explode at all or did so when nowhere near a ship. A comparative study of this phenomenon has yet to be written.

^c
This was a complete reversal of all earlier British planning which had dismissed the idea of a Japanese landing in the north and then an advance on Singapore by land as preposterous and depended upon defending Singapore against a landing from the sea. Note Rohwer and Jäckel,
Funkaujklürung
, pp. 266-68.

^d
The final order of January 29, 1942, for these operations had included reference to the possible seizure of Port Moresby (Morton,
Strategy,
pp. 214–15), but that was
not
originally thought necessary.

^e
it is too often forgotten that on the issue of greater self – government for India Churchill had been on the opposite side not only from his fellow Conservatives but also from the Labour Party, one of whose representatives on the Indian Statutory Commission had been Clement Attlee. This was part of the background of Labour’s original preference for Lord Halifax over Churchill as Prime Minister in May 1940; Halifax had been the Viceroy in 1926–1931 and had been denounced by Churchill for meeting with Gandhi.

^f
This was one time that Churchill overruled Brooke who thought the operation unnecessary. Note David Fraser,
Alanbrooke,
(New York: Atheneum, 1982), p. 253. The British official history sides with Brooke,
Grand Strategy,
3, Part 2, pp. 489–92.

^g
This is the procedure Yamamoto had used to obtain approval for the Pearl Harbor attack. The similarity to General Erich Ludendorffs procedure in World War I is startling. Repeatedly he too had forced the German government to adopt his projects (which turned out equally disastrously) by threatening his own and Field Marshal von Hindenburg’s resignation.

^h
The 6th and 7th Australian Divisions were returned from the Middle East to Australia and would play key roles in the Southwest Pacific; the 8th was sent to Malaya, and the 9th remained in the Middle East until the end of 1942. Important relevant documents have been published in D.M. Horner,
Crisis of Command: Australian Generalship and the Japanese Threat
1941–43 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1978), pp. 41-50.

ⁱ
The very negative comments on the Australians in the diary of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff hardly seem warranted. At this time it was the Australians, not the British, who faced the real possibility of invasion. Brooke Diary, 12 May, 1942, Liddell Hart Centre, Alanbrooke Papers.

^j
Over 2000 men were lost on the carriers. While some of the aircrews were saved, the majority were either shot down or lost with the carriers.

^k
The Australian cruiser sunk was the
Canberra.
The United States thereupon named one of its new cruisers for the Australian capital. Roosevelt to Knox, 6 Sept. 1942, Hyde Park, OF 18, Box 9, Dept. of Navy 1942 Sept.-Dec.

^l
The sending of the Marine Division to Australia in turn made it possible for the 9th Australian Division to remain in North Africa and participate in the battle of El Alamein rather than return to Australia. Morton,
Strategy,
pp. 340–45.

^m
This produced another instance of U.S. British friction over an American request for a British carrier to be transferred to the Pacific. Eventually the
Victorious
was sent, but by then (March 1943) the crisis had long passed. See Roskill,
War at Sea,
2: 229–31, 415.

ⁿ
The Mufti and al-Gaylani naturally saw this time as their great opportunity. it was also at this time that Nasser, Sadat, and other Egyptian army officers in touch with the Germans were either arrested or sent to remote posts.

^o
The British commando raid on the French Atlantic port of St. Nazaire in March, 1942, was related to concern about the German battleship
Tirpitz
and is therefore discussed in
Chapter 7
.

^p
In October 1942 Pétain was only prevented by the Germans from going to North Africa to whip up enthusiasm for fighting any British-American landing
ADAP,
E, IV, No. 127); two days before the Allied landing of November 8, there was still discussion in Vichy of the project to reconquer the Free French territories in Africa (ibid., No. 143).

7

THE WAR AT SEA, 1942–1944, AND THE BLOCKADE

The earliest stages of the fighting on, over, and under the oceans have been integrated into the account of the first years of the war, and the last efforts of the Germans to recover the initiative in the winter of 1944–45 will similarly be included in the account of that portion of the war in
Chapter 14
. For the war in the Pacific in 1942, the surface naval aspect has been dealt with in the preceding chapter, and the naval battles which accompanied the American advance in the Pacific in 1943–45 form an integral portion of that advance. Special features of the struggle for control of the world’s oceans, however, require a separate treatment because they dominated the strategy of both alliances in a manner not all recognized at the time and which is too often ignored in retrospect.

In Europe, the difference between the situation in World War II from that of World War I made control of the seas even more critical for the Allies. In World War I, the Soviets pulled out of the war in the latter portion of the conflict, but by that time Germany had been so weakened by her earlier exertions and losses while the Allies had been so strengthened by the entrance of the United States into the war that it was possible to stop the German onslaught in the West in 1918. This enabled the Western Allies to bring their power to bear directly on Germany and to crush her in the summer and fall of that year. In World War II, on the other hand, the Soviet Union had assisted Germany in driving the Western Allies off the continent in the north, west, and southeast in the first years of war, so that thereafter the Allies faced the fundamental problem of how to bring their power to bear on Germany.

A new front in Europe had to be created from across the sea; it did not already exist. This issue loomed over the diplomacy of the Allies when could they establish a front on the continent?-even as it created a redoubled vulnerability for Great Britain: how to keep in the war at
all unless the seas over which her supplies had to come could be kept open. Control of the sea lanes was, accordingly, crucial for the survival of Britain, for the maintenance of the alliance between Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, and for an effective land offensive against Germany from the west. A massive bombing campaign could and did provide a partial substitute for such a land campaign and is discussed in
Chapter 10
; but if the Allies were to crush Germany, they would have to open a new front or fronts on the continent, land and supply vast forces there, and advance into Germany itself. All this depended on control of the seas.

Some Germans saw this clearly. Although Hitler had initiated a massive naval construction program early in his chancellorship, knowing that big warships could be built only if there were an early start on them, the big blue-water navy was in its infancy when he went to war in 1939. What there was of it could be and was used as effectively as possible, but great reliance was placed on submarines. If the surface ships had been essential for the conquest of Norway and would have been vital for any invasion of Britain, they could only play a subordinate role in the fight to strangle British trade. The submarines played a central role in this effort, and they were simultaneously to make it impossible for the Western Allies to build up and support the huge forces the latter would need to have in England for a major assault on the continent.

The longer the war lasted, the more obvious this point became for the Germans; and as it became increasingly clear to them in late 1941 that the war in the East was not about to end in German victory as quickly as they had anticipated, the issue of keeping Western Europe under German control and preventing the British and Americans from assaulting the continent assumed increasing significance as a major role for the German navy.
¹
Furthermore, the success of the navy in sinking Allied ships would not only keep them from supplying Britain and landing on the continent but would also reduce their ability to provide assistance in the form of supplies to the Soviet Union. The focus of German military planning for 1942 and until that time when they finally did attain victory in the East, therefore, had to be on the campaign against Allied shipping. Because of Hitler’s assumption of direct command of the army in December 1941 and his pre-occupation with the fighting on the Eastern Front, he did not give the naval struggle the constant attention he paid to operations in the East, but he understood quite early that the way to paralyze his enemies in the West was to destroy the shipping on which the life of Great Britain and any offensive plans of Britain and the United States were necessarily dependent.

Control of sea routes was obviously a key aspect of the fighting in the
Pacific, but here, as we will see, there was a significant difference from the European theater. The Japanese, unlike the Germans, did not really comprehend how important merchant shipping was and how their conquest of Southeast Asia, far from freeing them from dependence on others, in fact made them as vulnerable to blockade by the sinking of merchant ships as Great Britain. The Americans, on the other hand, recognized this early. They soon acted on their comprehension of the obvious fact that Japan’s seizing oil wells, tin mines, and rubber plantations did not move the wells, mines, and plantations by one inch; it merely meant that their products had to be moved by ships in war rather than in peacetime.

Of the other major belligerents, the Italians certainly recognized the enormous significance of sea communications. Not only their long coast line and sense of being bottled up in the Mediterranean by the British at its eastern and western entrances kept this issue before their eyes, but the fact that all their fighting in the first year of war was dependent on sea communications reinforced their concern. They had depended on sea transport to Albania to launch their ill–fated attack on Greece; they had been unable to support their garrison in Northeast Africa as it was being crushed by the British in the winter of 1940–41 because they could not send ships there; and, above all, they were entirely aware of the almost complete dependence of their own and Germany’s forces in North Africa on sea communications for reinforcements and supplies. Their navy carried the main burden of Axis naval fighting in the Mediterranean; and while they did receive some welcome help in this from the Germans in the form of submarines and planes, they in turn had sent many of their own submarines to assist the German campaign against Allied shipping in the Atlantic.

The Chinese had seen their own sea communications cut off by Japan early in the Sino-Japanese War and were therefore no longer directly involved in the war on the oceans. Once the Burma Road was cut by the Japanese advance in the spring of 1942, supplies had to come in by plane until a campaign in north Burma reopened the possibility of a new road, but all that was far into the future. In the meantime, Chiang Kai-shek had other worries.

The Soviet Union’s navy was involved in important operations primarily in the Black Sea and these are taken up subsequently in this chapter, but there is very little evidence on Stalin’s recognition then, or Soviet historians’ recognition later, of the extent to which Allied strategy was dominated by the problem of shipping. Whether because of the primarily land–locked character of Russia, a concentration on the immediate and terrible danger on the land front, or an unwillingness to accept the
fact that her allies were doing the best they could under very difficult circumstances, Stalin appears never to have developed any real understanding of the long and bitter fight for control of the oceanic supply routes. In the pre-war years he had begun to push for the building of a Soviet blue-water navy, and he had utilized the period of alignment with Germany to obtain items useful in such a buildup in exchange for Soviet support of the German war against Allied shipping; but these measures represented a small beginning of naval planning, not a real comprehension of the role of sea power in global war.

The fundamental problem facing the Allies in the war with Germany then was to protect what shipping they had, and to replace, hopefully more than replace, what shipping they lost. Conversely, the challenge for the Germans was to defeat England, paralyze the United States, and divide both from the Soviet Union by destroying Allied shipping at a greater rate than replacement was possible. Important but still subsidiary elements in this struggle were the most efficient use of what shipping there was by careful loading, quick turn–around of ships, and use of the shortest possible routes for the Allies; and interference with short routes and destroying the morale of the crews of merchant ships by heavy sinkings for the Germans. Although the longest part of the struggle involved attacks by and defense against submarines, the Germans also used other weapons, and these can be taken up first.