All Hell Let Loose (46 page)

The New Guinea campaign remains a focus of controversy. It inflicted misery on all its participants, many of whom doubted its usefulness, especially in the later stages. For a few brief weeks before the Coral Sea and Midway, it seemed a possible Japanese stepping stone to Australia, but by June 1942 this prospect was already dead. In some respects, the campaign became thereafter an Asian counterpart of Britain’s North African and 1942–44 Burma operations. Once the US Navy and USAAF had gained strategic dominance, the Japanese faced insuperable difficulties in sustaining and supporting their New Guinea operations at the end of a long line of maritime communications. From an Allied viewpoint, the campaign’s principal strategic merit was that it provided a theatre in which the enemy could be engaged, when Allied land forces were too small to strike a decisive blow.

But the critical operations against Japan remained those of the US Navy, committed to its own thrust across the central Pacific. Month by month across a battlefield of several hundred thousand square miles, American planes, surface ships and submarines inflicted crippling attrition on Japanese naval power – vital to the maintenance of their long, long supply chains. In 1942–43 the Allies needed airfields on Papua New Guinea, which had to be fought for and won. In 1943–44, however, it was probably unnecessary to launch the costly operations to clear the Japanese from the north coast, once their offensive and air capabilities had been destroyed. The Papua New Guinea campaign, like so many others in the course of the war, gained a momentum and logic of its own. Once thousands of troops were committed, lives lost and generals’ reputations staked, it became progressively more difficult to accept anything less than victory. The only senior officer to emerge with an enhanced reputation from the New Guinea operations was the US air chief, Kenney, one of his service’s outstanding commanders.

Within a year of Pearl Harbor, the arrest of Japan’s Asian and Pacific advances, and the beginnings of their reversal, made its doom inevitable. It is remarkable that, once Tokyo’s hopes of quick victory were confounded and American resolve had been amply demonstrated, Hirohito’s nation fought blindly on. Japanese strategy hinged upon a belief in German victory in the west, yet by the end of 1942 this had become unrealistic. Thereafter, peace on any terms or even none should have seemed to Tokyo preferable to looming American retribution. But no more in Japan than in Germany did any faction display will and power to deflect the country from its march towards immolation.
Shikata ga nai
: it could not be helped. If this was a monumentally inadequate excuse for condemning millions to death without hope of securing any redemptive compensation, it is a constant of history that nations which start wars find it very hard to stop them.

1
THE ATLANTIC

The British Army’s part in the struggle against Nazism was vastly smaller than that of the Russians, as would also be the US Army’s contribution. Beyond Britain’s symbolic role in holding aloft the standard of resistance to Hitler, from 1940 onwards its principal strategic importance became that of a giant aircraft carrier and naval base, from which the bomber offensive and the return to the Continent were launched. It fell to the Royal Navy to conduct the critical struggles of 1940–43 to keep the British people fed, to hold open the sea lanes to the Empire and overseas battlefields, and convoy munitions to Russia. Naval might could not bring about the defeat of Germany, nor even protect Britain’s eastern empire from the Japanese. It was a fundamental problem for the two Western Allies that they were sea powers seeking to defeat a great land power, which required a predominantly Russian solution. But if German efforts to interdict shipments to Britain were successful, Churchill’s people would starve. A minimum of twenty-three million tons of supplies a year – half the pre-war import total – had to be transported across the Atlantic in the face of surface raiders and U-boats.

Protecting this commerce was a huge endeavour. The navy had suffered as severely as Britain’s other services from inter-war retrenchment. The construction of big ships required years, and even a small convoy escort took months to build. Britain’s shipyards were indifferently managed and manned by an intransigent labour force, which began to work only a little harder when the Soviet Union was obliged to change sides, and communists of all nationalities endorsed the war effort. Britain built and repaired ships more slowly, if much more cheaply, than the United States, and could never match American capacity. For the Royal Navy, shortage of escorts was a pervasive reality of the early war years.

It was also hard to concentrate superior strength against enemy capital ships which might be few in number, but posed a formidable threat and were deployed many hundreds of miles apart. In the first war years, Germany’s surface raiders imposed as many difficulties as U-boats: the need to divert convoys from their danger zones increased the strain on British merchant shipping resources. German sorties between 1939 and 1943 precipitated dramas which seized the attention of the world: the pocket battleship
Graf Spee
sank nine merchantmen before being scuttled after its encounter with three British cruisers off the River Plate in December 1939. The 56,000-ton
Bismarck
destroyed the battlecruiser
Hood
before being somewhat clumsily dispatched by converging British squadrons on 27 May 1941. The British public was outraged when the
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
made a dash to Wilhelmshaven from Brest through the Channel Narrows on 21–22 February 1942, suffering only mine damage amid fumbling efforts by the navy and RAF to intercept them. The presence of
Tirpitz
in the fjords of north Norway menaced British Arctic convoys and strongly influenced Home Fleet deployments until 1944. Further afield, the Italian navy had formidable numerical strength, and when the Japanese entered the war the Royal Navy suffered severely at their hands.

Most British battleships were old, slow and could not be adapted for bulky modern fire-control equipment. The Dutch navy’s triaxially stabilised Hazemeyer system represented the most advanced AA gunnery technology in the world, to which the Royal Navy gained access in 1940. It was fragile and unreliable, however, and a British version entered general service only in 1945; anti-aircraft fire-control remained sadly ineffective meanwhile. Britain had more carriers than the US Navy until 1943, but there were never enough to go round, or rather to meet global demand, and they were too small to carry powerful air groups. Fleet Air Arm pilots displayed notable courage, but their performance was indifferent in both air combat and anti-shipping operations. The RAF, doctrinally committed to a strategic bomber offensive, resisted the diversion of resources to support operations at sea. Throughout the conflict, the Royal Navy displayed the highest standards of courage, commitment and seamanship. But until 1943, it struggled against odds to fulfil too many responsibilities with too few ships, all vulnerable to air attack.

Churchill’s decision to make a major British military effort in North Africa obliged the navy to conduct operations in the Mediterranean with negligible air cover, and in the face of strong Axis air forces operating from fields in Italy, Sicily, Libya, Rhodes, Greece and Crete. Able Seaman Charles Hutchinson described an attack on the cruiser
Carlisle
in May 1941:

Malta, the only offshore outpost in the central Mediterranean from which Axis supply routes to North Africa could be interdicted, faced three years of siege. Under almost continuous bombardment from nearby Sicily, at times the island became unserviceable as an offensive base for submarines and surface ships, but it remained a vital earnest of Britain’s will to fight. Hitler blundered by failing to seize Malta in 1941, and huge efforts and sacrifices were made to sustain it thereafter. Between June 1940 and early 1943, the Mediterranean was largely unusable as an Allied supply route, but Churchillian war-making emphasised assertion of the navy’s presence and engagements of opportunity, especially against the Italian fleet. Some of the fiercest naval fighting of the war, and heavy British losses, took place in those limpid waters. The Axis faced increasing pressure on its own sea link to North Africa, but the passage between southern Italy and Tripoli was short; only in mid-1942 did shipping losses and fuel shortages begin to exert an important influence on Rommel’s fortunes.

The Atlantic was the dominant naval battlefield, forever the cruel sea. Signalman Richard Butler described a typical Atlantic storm: ‘I couldn’t see anything for the swirling spray. The wind shrieked through the rigging and superstructure. It looked as though we were sailing through boiling water as the wind whipped the wave tops into horizontal spume, white and fuming, which stung my eyes and face. Now and again I caught a glimpse of one of the big merchant-ships being rolled on its beam ends by the huge swells sweeping up under rain-laden skies.’ Butler’s destroyer,
Matchless
, hove to near a struggling merchantman with a twelve-foot split in its upper deck. Soon afterwards, one of their own men was washed overboard. The captain took the brave, futile decision to turn in search of him. Butler thought: ‘The captain’s gone crazy, he’s going to risk the lives of two hundred men to look for some silly bastard that hadn’t the sense to keep off the upper deck.’ After a few anxious moments, the hopeless quest was abandoned. Then Butler learned that the lost man was one of his own messmates. ‘I was saddened and shocked, filled with remorse about my selfish attitude … “Snowy” was well liked and had the reputation of being a “gannet” who never stopped eating. Never again would we hear him ask cheerfully at mealtimes, “Any gash left?”’

Aboard corvettes, workhorses of convoy escort groups, conditions were much worse, ‘sheer unmitigated hell’, in the words of a seaman. ‘Even getting hot food from the galley to fo’c’sle was a tremendous job. The mess decks were usually a shambles and the wear and tear on bodies and tempers something I shall never forget. But we were young and tough and, in a sense, we gloried in our misery and made light of it all. What possible connection it had with defeating Hitler none of us bothered to ask. It was enough to find ourselves more or less afloat the next day with the hope of duff for pudding and a boiler-clean when we reached port.’

And then there was the enemy. While Germany’s capital ships commanded headlines and their sorties inflicted some injuries, Axis submarine and air forces represented a much graver long-term threat, and the men of both arms displayed courage and skill. U-boats achieved striking early successes, such as sinking the old battleship
Royal Oak
in Scapa Flow, and wreaking havoc upon vulnerable merchantmen. Churchill as First Sea Lord estimated that the introduction of convoying in 1939 was responsible for a 30 per cent fall in Britain’s imports. Merchant ships were obliged to waste weeks waiting for convoys to assemble. Once ocean-bound, they travelled painfully slowly, and were offloaded on arrival by a lethargic and sometimes obstructive British dock labour force. Many ships that carried commodities in peacetime had to be diverted to move troops and munitions across huge distances by circuitous routes, to avoid Axis air and submarine concentrations – for instance, almost all Egypt-bound cargoes travelled via the Cape of Good Hope. The voyage to Suez lengthened from 3,000 miles to 13,000, while a Bombay-bound ship made a passage of 11,000 miles against the pre-war 6,000.

Until 1943, the Royal Navy was desperately short of escorts and effective technology to hunt U-boats. The British sank twelve German submarines in 1940, and just three in the six months between September that year and March 1941; intelligence and skilful convoy routeing did more to frustrate Admiral Karl Dönitz than did anti-submarine escorts. The Royal Navy was slow to realise the vulnerability of merchantmen off the African coast, where in 1941–42 just two long-range Type IX U-boats achieved some spectacular destruction, partly because they maintained wireless silence and partly because few defensive resources were available. The British were grievously hampered by lack of air support. The RAF’s Coastal Command was short of planes; its long-range Sunderland flying boats suffered from crews’ poor navigational and depth-charging skills, together with technical problems that reduced their effort in 1941 to an average two sorties per aircraft a month. Meanwhile, until 1942 many of the Royal Navy’s destroyers remained committed to coastal defence of Britain.

In the course of the entire war, while 6.1 per cent of Allied shipping losses were inflicted by surface raiders and 6.5 per cent by mines, 13.4 per cent were caused by air attack and 70 per cent by U-boats. The British suffered their first severe blow in the autumn of 1940, when the slow eastbound Atlantic convoy SC7 lost twenty-one out of thirty ships, and twelve out of forty-nine in the fast HX79. Thereafter, the tempo of the undersea war rose steadily: during 1941, 3.6 million tons of British shipping were lost, 2.1 million of these to submarines. Churchill became deeply alarmed. His post-war assertion that the U-boats caused him greater anxiety than any other threat to Britain’s survival has powerfully influenced the historiography of the war. It is scarcely surprising that the prime minister was so troubled, when almost every week until May 1943 he received loss statistics that represented a shockingly steady, debilitating depletion of British transport capabilities.

But the submarine force commanded by Dönitz was weak. Germany’s pre-war industrial planning envisaged a fleet which achieved full war-fighting capability only in 1944. Naval construction was skewed by a focus on big ships: a hundred U-boats could have been built with the steel lavished on the
Bismarck
. On the eve of war, Admiral Erich Raeder, German naval C-in-C, wrote: ‘We are not in a position to play anything like an important part in the war against Britain’s commerce.’ Until June 1940, Dönitz did not anticipate waging a major campaign in the Atlantic, because he was denied means to do so; the small, short-range Type VII boats that dominated his armoury were designed to operate from German bases. Even when the strategic picture radically changed with Hitler’s seizure of Norway and of France’s Atlantic ports, the Kriegsmarine continued to build Type VIIs. Productivity in German shipyards, hampered by shortages of steel and skilled labour, and later by bombing, fell below British levels. U-boats remained technically primitive. Innovation – for instance, the 1944–45
Schnorkel
underwater air-replenishment system – was not matched by reliability: the revolutionary Type XXI sailed on its first war patrol only on 30 April 1945.

Thus, Dönitz’s force lacked mass, range and quality. Just as the Luftwaffe in 1940–41 attempted to deal a knockout blow to Britain with wholly inadequate resources, so the U-boat arm lacked strength to accomplish the severance of the Atlantic link. Germany never built anything like enough submarines to make them a war-winning weapon. Dönitz calculated that he needed to sink 600,000 tons of British shipping a month to achieve a decisive victory, for which he required three hundred U-boats in commission to sustain a third of that number in operational areas. Yet only thirteen U-boats were on station in August 1940, falling to eight in January 1941, rising to twenty-one the following month. This small force inflicted impressive destruction: two million tons of British shipping were sunk between June 1940 and March 1941. But in the same period just seventy-two new U-boats were delivered, far short of the number Dönitz needed. They achieved their highest rate of productivity – measured by tonnage sunk per submarine at sea – in October 1940; thereafter, while many more boats were deployed, their pro-rata achievements diminished.