Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (3 page)

Remarkably, all five separate though interconnected challenges
were overcome between early 1943 and the summer of 1944—roughly, between Casablanca and the quadruple successes of Normandy, the fall of Rome, the Marianas landings in the Central Pacific, and Operation Bagration on the Eastern Front. Some strategic problems (aerial control over Germany, island-hopping across the Pacific) took longer than others (controlling the Atlantic sea-lanes, blunting the blitzkrieg), but in the space of something like seventeen months, the tide turned in the greatest conflict known to history.

Why was that so, and how did it happen? One reply lies close to hand, in the sense that the Fascist aggressor nations were rash enough to attack the rest of the world. Because of their earlier arms buildups in the 1930s, the Axis powers gained wide and stunning successes, but they could not succeed in defeating any one of their three major enemies. When the rest of the world recovered from those batterings, it steadily applied its far greater resources, fought its way back, and achieved final victory.
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Yet there is another equally important point to be pursued, namely, exactly
how
did the Allies recover and fight their way back? The relative productive capacities held by each side by 1943–44 do indeed point to the likely winners. But what if the U-boats had not been defeated in summer 1943, or if the Luftwaffe had not been destroyed early in 1944, or if the Red Army had not found ways to blunt German panzers? What if the legendary “turnaround” weapons such as the long-range fighter and miniaturized radar—whose arrival on the battlefields in 1943–44 most historians seem to take as a given—had not come into play at the time they did, or had not been developed at all?

At the very least, all this suggests that the “inevitable” Allied victories could have occurred much later than in May and August 1945, and that they would have been accompanied by far higher losses in the field. The story of the second half of the Second World War presumably would have looked very different than it does to us today. What we explore here, then, is a common conundrum: how does one achieve one’s strategic aims when one possesses considerable resources but does not, or at least not yet, have the instruments and organizations at hand?

This is the story, then, of that strategic, operational, and tactical turnaround from early 1943 to mid-1944. From the beginning, it was obvious that the investigation proposed here had to move downward from the Combined Chiefs of Staff’s declarations to a detailed analysis of the process of carrying out the proclaimed missions. It was one thing to assert that defeating the German U-boat threat was paramount. How, actually, did one go about defeating it? Again, it was no doubt fine (and politic) for Washington and London to assure an irritated Stalin throughout 1942 and 1943 that a second front would soon be launched in France. But how? Certain individuals and certain organizations had to answer those questions; it was they who must solve these problems and thus make feasible the efforts of the millions of Allied soldiers, sailors, and airmen.

This is where the present work may set itself apart, because it seeks to tell the story of such individuals and organizations, not just in some anecdotal or romantic or military-history-buff sort of way, but as a key part of understanding the larger epic of how the tide was turned. Many readers will have some knowledge of the story of the Ultra decryption team at Bletchley Park and their equivalents in the Pacific. Some will know the story—as portrayed in the film
The Dam Busters
—of how Barnes Wallis invented the bouncing bombs that blew up the Ruhr Valley dams. Only a few are familiar with the eccentric Percy Hobart’s creation of the weird tanks that could push right through D-Day coastal minefields and barbed wire, or with the individuals who devised the Mulberry harbors. Very few Western readers will have an inkling of the renowned T-34 tank’s truly pathetic capacities, or know instead of the extremely important role of the Red Army’s antitank weaponry. And only some will understand the significance of the cavity magnetron, or why putting a Rolls-Royce Merlin 61 engine into a rather limp P-51 Mustang fighter was such a critical step, or the significance of the extraordinary career of the founder of the American Navy’s Seabees. Much of that World War II folklore is fascinating in itself to those who do know those stories. But the point being made here is that we have rarely if ever stepped back and understood how their work surfaced, was cultivated, and then was connected to the problems at hand,
or appreciated how these various, eccentric pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fitted into the whole.
⁶

This book seeks, through the chapters that follow, to make a contribution to such understanding. In many ways, it is a return to the research and writing done some forty years ago for Sir Basil Liddell Hart’s own
History of the Second World War,
although this time I hope I am seeing through the glass more clearly than in that earlier time.
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Yet the present study is intended not as a form of personal pilgrimage but rather as an effort to widen the debate about decision making and problem solving in history. It seems a story worth telling. And if that is true, it is a mode of inquiry that may be worth applying elsewhere.

A
s Churchill and Roosevelt journeyed to and from Casablanca in January 1943, the weather in the North Atlantic had become as violent as any experienced sailor could remember. For much of December and January, huge storms at sea cramped naval and air activity. Merchant ships, pounded by giant waves, had heavy cargoes breaking loose and sliding around inside their hulls. Smaller warship escorts such as corvettes were tossed around like corks. Warships with heavier upperworks and gun turrets rolled from side to side. German U-boats, when they surfaced, could see nothing across the hundred-foot-high waves and were happy to submerge into quieter waters or to head south. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of sailors were hurt, and not a few killed by accidents or washed overboard. In some extreme cases, the commander of a convoy was forced to order a return to base, or at least to send damaged ships back. General Sir Alan Brooke (later Viscount Alanbrooke) records in his diary that he, the other British Chiefs of Staff, and Churchill himself had their flight (or surface sailing) plans from London to Casablanca changed time and again.
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The result, quite naturally, was that convoy activity upon the storm-whipped North Atlantic routes was much less than normal in these midwinter months. Quite separate from this physical interruption, there was a second and cheerier reason the regular convoy traffic fell away at this time. Operation Torch itself demanded a vast number of escorts to assist the occupation of the Vichy states of Morocco and Algeria—the Royal Navy contributed 160 warships of various types to it—and in consequence the Gibraltar, Sierra Leone, and Arctic convoys had to be temporarily suspended.
¹
Since ships carrying Allied troops, landing equipment, and immediate supplies were bound to get the
highest level of naval protection, and the Axis was ill-prepared for the Operation Torch invasion because of its obsessions with the Eastern Front and Egypt, it is scarcely surprising that the invading forces met with little or no U-boat opposition on North African shores.

The other, understandable consequence was that Allied losses to enemy submarine attacks fell dramatically during midwinter. If there were fewer Atlantic convoys at sea in the first place, those that did sail, while battered by storms, were often protected by the same lousy weather conditions. Some were routed far to the north in a sort of great circle, trading physical damage by ice floes for distance from the wolf packs. The Admiralty’s monthly toll of shipping losses captured this dramatic decline well. For example, in November 1942 the Allies lost 119 merchant ships totaling 729,000 tons, and while many of these vessels were sunk in more distant waters, off South America, those supply lines were also part of an integrated effort aimed at sustaining and enhancing Anglo-American power in the British Isles. The sinking of British oil tankers coming from Trinidad would, as a consequence, hurt the buildup of the U.S. bomber groups in East Anglia; everything hung on command of the seas.

Because of the rough weather, U-boat sinkings in December and January fell to a mere 200,000 tons of Allied shipping, most of which also occurred on more southern routes (e.g., Trinidad to Gibraltar, to supply the Operation Torch armies). But the tallies for those months were exceptional, for the reasons explained above, and thus when the prime minister and president met at Casablanca they were under no illusion as to how serious the crisis over shipping losses had become. The Allied merchant fleets had lost a staggering 7.8 million tons in the course of 1942, almost 6.3 million of which had been sunk by that most formidable weapon, the U-boat. The amazing American mass production shipyards were still gearing up to full strength, but even their output in 1942 (around 7 million tons) meant that total available Allied shipping capacity had declined in absolute terms, and now had to compete with the even greater demands of the Pacific War. By early 1943, therefore, British imports were one-third less than those in 1939, and U.S. Army trucks and box-bound aircraft now competed with colonial foodstuffs, ores, and petroleum for space on the endangered merchant vessels. This grim fact imperiled
everything
in the European war
strategy. It threatened the British war effort; if things got worse, it threatened mass malnutrition for the islanders. The heavy losses suffered by oil tankers meant that only two to three months of fuel remained in Britain’s storage tanks, but how could the country fight, or live, without fuel? This crisis also threatened the Arctic convoys to aid Russia, and the Mediterranean convoys to aid Malta and Egypt. It threatened, by extension, the entire Egyptian campaign, for Britain could scarcely send military reinforcements via Sierra Leone and the
Cape of Good Hope to Suez if its own lifelines were being crushed. It even threatened unrest in parts of East Africa and India that had come to rely upon seaborne food imports. And it absolutely threatened the assumptions behind Operation Bolero (later renamed Overlord), which called for a rapid and massive buildup of the U.S. Army and the Army Air Forces in the British Isles in preparation for a second front in Europe; it would have been ironic to have sent 2,000 American heavy bombers and millions of GIs to England only to find that they had no fuel. Churchill later stated in his memoirs that, of all struggles of the war, it was the Battle of the Atlantic that he most worried about; if it was lost, so too might be Britain’s gamble to fight on in 1940.