Blackett's War (34 page)

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.
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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.
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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:

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.
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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 anti-submarine 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.”
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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”).
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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 they 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.
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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:

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.

Baker forcefully urged combining all of these separate ASW units and appointing a single commander of anti-submarine warfare in Washington, where he would have direct access to the Convoy and Routing Section and other central functions of the navy, including intelligence and communications.
The new commander should be given the unequivocal authority to develop and enforce proper antisubmarine training and procedures throughout the Atlantic theater. Subordinate commanders expected to do the actual fighting should “have no other duties than
fighting
.”
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Baker then presumably held his breath and waited for the explosion.

BAKER’S OTHER PROBLEM WAS
his rapidly growing team of scientists, who refused to behave as expected. No one in the navy seemed to know how to handle them or what to do with them. As Morse observed, the regular navy men at first could not even figure out whether the scientists were the equivalent of officers or ordinary seamen: “They didn’t know whether to ask us or order us to do things.” The scientists, in any case, rebelled almost immediately, Morse recalled:

Morse’s team then “went into a one-week huddle” while they worked out, from first principles, a mathematical theory of submarine search. They were aiming to come up with a set of equations that would clarify what the key factors were that determined how often a submarine would be found by an aircraft conducting a visual or radar search over the ocean, or by a surface vessel scanning the water below with sonar. With that mathematical model, they could then start making recommendations for how much air coverage was needed to attain a given probability of finding a U-boat, what the optimal search patterns were, and other basic tactical and operational questions. ASWORG Report No. 1, “Preliminary Report on the Submarine Search Problem,” was completed on May 1, 1942.
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Only when they were done did they compare their model to the data in the attack reports. One problem was immediately clear: the reports, which were filed after every possible submarine contact by a ship or plane, did not contain much of the quantitative data that was really needed to address the basic questions of search effectiveness. But even the data that was available agreed only poorly with the theoretical predictions from their model of how often a U-boat should have been sighted. “Our reaction to this disheartening discovery was just as unanimous, and just as visceral, as our first reaction,” Morse wrote. Audaciously, “We believed our theory. We didn’t believe the reports.”
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The scientists went to Baker and explained that they wanted to go to the antisubmarine bases themselves, talk to the pilots, go out on some patrols if possible, and see if they could find out what was going on while also starting to collect more accurate data of the kind they already knew they needed. Baker countered by suggesting that officers could be brought in from time to time to the office to be interviewed. Morse held firm. Finally Baker agreed to see if he could get permission for the scientists to make some field visits. It was part inspection trip and part missionary work, Morse realized, and he knew if they blew it the scientists would not be permitted in the field again. As he would write later in a procedure manual on organizing an operations research section, a scientist on a field visit had to be free to ask questions and poke his nose into every aspect of the actual operations, but at the same time had to behave with “considerable delicacy” to avoid creating the suspicion on the part of the base commander that he had been sent as “a sort of spy” to check up on things. The best way to avoid trouble, Morse recognized, was to get the base commander on their side from the start by promising him that any recommendations or reports ASWORG produced would go directly to him for approval and distribution.
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