A World at Arms (78 page)

One of the most engaging of the Allied projects has left its mark on the California tourist industry. The obvious counter to a submarine that could make sustained high speed under water was a cargo plane that touched the surface of the ocean only in port, carrying its cargo through the air and beyond the reach of torpedoes, conventional or acoustic. This was the concept of the huge flying boat, constructed of light wood, powered by multiple engines and capable of either carrying very substantial cargo or ferrying large numbers of soldiers safely across the ocean. The contract for such a plane was issued to the Hughes Aircraft Company and, when the project was first reduced and then dropped, Howard Hughes completed one and flew it. The “Spruce Goose,” the largest airplane ever built, was moved in 1992–3 from California to Oregon, a monument to a campaign never fought between submarines designed always to remain below the surface and cargo ships designed always to remain above it.
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Two other aspects affecting the war at sea generally must be noted. The participation of Canada has been remarked on repeatedly. The active Canadian role was a product of several factors. The deep involvement of Canada in the war by 1942 and the obvious danger of the submarine campaign–evidenced by numerous sinkings in the St. Lawrence and off the Canadian coast–were the central elements. But there were important contributing factors. President Roosevelt, who always followed the war at sea with special attention, had a greater personal interest in Canada than any American President before (or since).
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While Churchill was on the contrary extraordinarily insensitive to Canadian susceptibilities, his government recognized the large portion of the Battle of the Atlantic necessarily carried by the Canadians. In this field, Canada really came into its own.

In another area, however, there was no effective participation. While, under the influence of the National Maritime Union, the American merchant marine operated without a color barrier and came to include a very large number of Blacks among the ship crews essential to the war effort, the United States navy was hopelessly unmoving.
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Even President Roosevelt, the Commander-in-Chief, found that he could hardly budge the navy’s insistence that Blacks were to be used only for mess duty.
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In this regard the ancient prejudices continued to assert themselves unchecked.

THE MEDITERRANEAN

The war on the oceans was, of course, in many ways a unified whole, but some theaters and aspects of it, in addition to the central conflict to control the oceanic supply routes, must be examined at least briefly. Reference has repeatedly been made to the significance of the war in the Mediterranean for both sides. The Axis powers had to supply their forces in North Africa while the Allies hoped to control the Mediterranean to protect their position in the Middle East. The fulcrum, as both sides recognized, was the island of Malta; and the long German-Italian siege of the island, as well as their project of seizing it, grew out of this. The other side of this equation was the need for the British to reinforce the island, and during all of 1942 the battle over such reinforcement raged across the Mediterranean and over the island. Convoys battled their way there from Gibraltar and Alexandria, frequently engaged by the Italian navy, German airplanes and submarines, and often losing many of the ships. Airplanes to defend the island had to be flown in off aircraft carriers approaching close enough for fighter planes to reach it, a task for which the old British carrier
Eagle
was repeatedly used. This was so important a task that the American carrier
Wasp
was, at Churchill’s request, twice also used for such missions.
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The daring of the British navy, the determination of the garrison and inhabitants of Malta, and the miscalculation of the Germans in relying on their air force to contain the island made it possible for the British to hold it through its most difficult days.
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Thereafter, Malta became an offensive base for the Allies and helped them control the Mediterranean.

An aspect of that control was, of course, the struggle against the Italian navy. While in the end the Allies were victorious in this when much of the Italian fleet surrendered to them in September 1943, it is too often over looked that the Italians had fought under grave handicaps. The British had broken into some of their codes; and the Germans had foolishly insisted on their ally replacing some of its old–fashioned code systems–which the British could not read–with their own modern and more elegant machine codes–which the British were reading with some regularity!
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The major handicap of the Italian navy, however, was its desperate shortage of fuel oil. With the country itself almost completely dependent on oil imports, inadequate supplies from Romania, followed by the failure of the German 1942 offensive to seize the Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus, meant that only the most limited missions could be run. The fuel shortage dominated Italian naval strategy in 1942–43 and in the end made it impossible for the big ships even to try to interfere with the invasion of Sicily in July 1943.
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The one time that massive quantities of fuel were allocated to the Mediterranean theater by the Germans was in the winter of 1942–43, when by ship and plane German and Italian troops and supplies were rushed to Tunisia. This initially successful project certainly had major effects on the course of the war which will be examined in the next chapter. On the one hand it prolonged the North African campaign by four months and hence made an invasion of Western Europe in 1943 impossible; on the other hand it meant that the Axis lost several hundred thousand additional soldiers when the surrender there–the biggest one up to that time in the war-finally came in May of 1943. Practically none of the troops sent out were evacuated, and considerable numbers of Axis ships had been sunk as they attempted to keep the German and Italian units fighting in Tunisia supplied.

The German attempt to defeat Britain and paralyze the United States by sinking as much Allied tonnage as possible had its counterpart in the efforts of Britain and the United States to blockade the Axis powers and to throttle Japan by the destruction of
her
merchant shipping.

The Japanese never took anti-submarin warfare as seriously as the Allies, a fact which served to increase their vulnerability, which was in any case enormous because they could draw on the resources of the great empire they had conquered practically only by sea transport. Similarly, they could supply and reinforce their now far-flung garrisons only by using the sea routes, a point already mentioned in connection with their employment of submarines for this purpose. It is true that they attempted to reduce their vulnerability by drastic measures. The construction of the notorious railway from Thailand to Burma–the railway of “The Bridge on the River Kwai” -which cost the lives of tens of thousands of civilians and prisoners of war, was a part of the effort to create alternative methods of transportation. Similarly, the campaign in China in 1944 discussed in
Chapter 11
was designed in large part to open up overland communication by railway across Japanese-controlled China as well as with Southeast Asia.
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Another way of reducing dependence on shipping was to restore the oil refineries in the Dutch East Indies and then base much of the fleet at Singapore, close to the oil source.
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Measures like these, however, only minimally reduced Japan’s vulnerability to attacks on her shipping. As a post-war analysis phrased it: “No major power in the world was more dependent upon ocean shipping than Japan.”
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She not only needed ships to carry men and goods to
and from her newly won empire, but in the home islands the railway and road networks had not been well developed so that most domestic movement of bulk goods was also carried by ships from port to port. The railway system and its rolling stock were primarily designed for moving people, not cargo, and the road system was designed for local traffic with no major intercity highways at all. Furthermore, the radical nationalists who had shot their way into power in the country had not the slightest comprehension of the logistical problems of a modern industrial society. They knew how to use swords and guns; but beyond that they were not only ignorant, they tended by background and inclination to look down on anyone who knew anything about subjects which they considered beneath the dignity of the exalted warrior. Masters at fighting enemy soldiers and sacking cities, they were and remained the crudest amateurs in matters of supply.

As Japan moved to expand the war with China into a part of the world war initiated by Germany, she found fewer and fewer foreign ships that could be hired to carry goods for Japan, and this loss of shipping that could be hired as needed was not off-set by the 823,000 tons captured by the Japanese armed forces during the months of conquest in December 1941 to March 1942.
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This left the country dependent primarily on its six million tons of Japanese ships, and even this inadequate volume was never effectively utilized. It was divided into three separate shipping pools-army, navy, and civilian–which often had ships riding in ballast because the pool to which they were assigned had loads for only one leg of a trip. As if this organizational error were not enough, the Japanese committed a major doctrinal one in addition: they had never paid serious attention to the subject of anti-submarin warfare. There was no convoy system for years; merchant ships had not been armed and only a small portion ever were; and escort vessels were and remained few and far between. If the United States navy took half a year to wake up to reality in the North Atlantic in 1942, the Japanese navy remained somnolent through most of the war. While there was an effort to increase available shipping tonnage by construction, this was never on the scale of the Allied ship–building program, a point which could have been predicted very easily. In the event, Japan added about 3,300,000 tons during the war
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(as compared with United States construction of over fifty million).

From the beginning of general hostilities in December 1941, the Japanese lost shipping to Allied military activity, and by April, 1942, this had more than balanced out new construction and captures. Unlike the Allies, whose losses exceeded construction until the fall of 1943 but thereafter were consistently below the additions of new ships, the
Japanese were never able to reverse the tide. From April 1942 to the end of the war, the shipping situation for Japan, which was already tight, deteriorated steadily. In the first five months of war, she lost about 375,000 tons; soon thereafter the campaign around the Solomons and New Guinea led to further substantial losses in shipping, primarily to Allied air attacks. In subsequent years, carrier a.ir attacks on ships in port also inflicted heavy damage.

The major impact on Japanese shipping came as a result of Allied submarines, most of them American. In the first year of the Pacific War, the small number of United States submarines employed and the large proportion of defective torpedoes meant that few ships were sunk. In October 1942, submarines for the first time sank over 100,000 tons; in 1943, the monthly
average
was well above that figure, and in 1944 it rose to over 200,000.
^e
By the end of the war, submarines had sunk over 4.8 million out of the almost 9 million tons sunk altogether; the other major contributors being land and carrier based airplanes and, especially in the last year of the war, mines laid around the home islands, primarily by the new American very long range bombers, the B-29s.
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Two observations about this successful assault on Japanese shipping, primarily by submarines, must be made. First, the highly effective attacks on merchant shipping certainly did not involve neglecting warships. On the contrary, American submarines sank twice as much Japanese naval tonnage as the American surface fleet, and while the totals were far smaller, the same thing was true of British submarines.
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The largest warship ever sunk by a submarine was the super carrier
Shinano,
one of the three ships of over 60,000 tons built by the navy to outclass all American ships; of the two largest Japanese warships sunk by the British navy in World War II, both heavy cruisers, one was torpedoed by a submarine.
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And in all their missions, casualties among the submarines were very heavy.

The second point which must be noted is that, unlike the British and Americans, the Japanese were hopelessly slow in recognizing the danger to their supply routes, took forever to start convoys–and did it very poorly–and did not get their first escort carrier into service until July 1944.
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Of great importance to the Allies, especially to the Americans who carried the major share of the Pacific War on the oceans, was a significant difference in the intelligence war at sea. While at least until the summer of 1943 German ability to break the codes used by the
convoys gave them a major tool to use against the Allies and somewhat evened the odds in the war over shipping, the Japanese were generally unsuccessful in dealing with Allied naval codes. The Americans, on the other hand, after breaking back into Japanese naval codes in the late summer of 1942, steadily increased their ability to read their radio messages and employed the knowledge gained in this fashion to find their ships.
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As they advanced in the Pacific, the United States could also increasingly utilize air reconnaissance either to locate Japanese ships or to provide a plausible alternative explanation for attacks actually based on signal intelligence. Conversely, Japanese radar, direction finding, and air patrols never even remotely matched the skills and resources in these fields which the Allies employed in their war against the U-Boats.