Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (57 page)

The conclusions below are not assembled in a rigid hierarchy, although the order of the themes and reflections does advance toward a small number of key factors that explain how this particular war was won. That moves other explanations into a position that helps the reader see where they were important but also where they were not. I did not anticipate some of this ordering of the causes of the Allied victories when I began this book four years ago. The key determinant throughout, however, was a simple one: did this new device, organization, or new form of weaponry really
work
in winning battles, and can that be shown in practice? If scholars assumed afterward that a new invention was decisive simply because it was up and running, that was not enough.

A good example of this concerns the part played by intelligence in the winning of the war, especially in view of the massive attention given to that theme over the past four decades. So voluminous nowadays is the literature on intelligence in the Second World War that I originally assumed it was proper for the draft table of contents of this book to list a chapter titled “Chapter 6: How to Win the Intelligence War.” Then two things happened. The first was that it gradually became apparent that it made no more sense to isolate intelligence into a single chapter than it did to isolate logistics or science and technology. All claim an important role in the eventual Allied victory in World War II, but the only way of measuring their true significance—as opposed to swallowing the assertions of their backers—is to integrate them into the story and analysis of each of the five parallel campaigns that make up this book. Claiming an astounding “intelligence breakthrough” that changed the course of the struggle without showing where it actually worked in the fighting fields is as sloppy as claiming that a new weapon transformed a campaign without proving that it did.
^a

Once one attempts to integrate the hidden dimension of intelligence into the story of how the tide turned, a very mixed picture—more bluntly, a confusing one—emerges. For the fact is that the usefulness of intelligence varied from theater to theater, from service to service, and from year to year. Intelligence had a value in one encounter but no particular value in another. There is no way of amalgamating the many case studies into some complete rendering of account, and it remains a continual puzzle to this author that such a professional scholar as Sir Harry Hinsley could venture the opinion that Ultra probably shortened the war by as much as three years.
⁷
It is not provable.

One thing that emerges from the study of intelligence in the 1939–45 war, frankly, is the preponderance of intelligence
failures
. The litany probably begins in 1939–40, with the Red Army’s crass underestimation of Finnish resistance capacities, the British intelligence failures regarding the Norwegian campaign, and the complete French ignorance of what was about to burst out of the Ardennes in May 1940. Add Stalin’s utter refusal to listen to
all
the intelligence warnings about Operation Barbarossa and, in a different category, the American blindness to understand an attack was coming upon Pearl Harbor, and it may be that the year 1941 claims the accolade for having the most intelligence failures of the war. Then came the horribly expensive mistakes by Wehrmacht intelligence in not foreseeing the Red Army’s encirclement at Stalingrad in 1942, the reverse pincer movement at Kursk in 1943, and the central punch at Bagration in 1944—a three-loss record without any equivalent.

The list goes on. MacArthur’s prejudice against intelligence from naval sources was bound to affect the potential of the enemy messages that had been cracked by the brilliant Magic and Purple code breakers.
⁸
There was no realistic Allied assessment of how forcefully the German army would counterattack at Salerno and Anzio or at the Battle of the Bulge—it was as if no one in Anglo-American military intelligence had figured out that having to fight a Waffen-SS division was a very tough proposition. Brian Urquhart’s warning that the Arnhem paratroop units would drop where seasoned German regiments were stationed was ignored. This incompetence was widely shared. Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo was repeatedly blindsided by the multiple routes of American advances across the Pacific, yet surely anyone who
has played a complex board game could perceive that the counteroffensive might drive along various, changing routes. The final point may be the most important of all: there were of course fabulous technological advances made during the war in this dimension, especially in decryption and signals intelligence, yet that did not automatically give an advantage leading to victory in a battle or a campaign. Even the Ultra system was imperfect; far, far better to have it than not, but by the very nature of the intelligence war with Germany it could only produce mixed results, not miracles.

By contrast, the successes—that is, the breakthroughs that had provable battlefield victories that shortened the course of the war, which is
the
litmus test—are on a short-order menu.
⁹
The Battle of Midway—knowing where the enemy carriers are located, hiding one’s own location from the enemy, and then being able to arrange one’s forces accordingly—certainly passes the test. But what else does? Several of the Royal Navy’s victories over the Italian fleet in Mediterranean encounters occurred because the British knew the location of their enemy, and the sinking of the
Scharnhorst
far to the north in December 1943 was a clear triumph for British detection systems. The ability by 1943 to pick up and then sink distant U-boats was potentially a smart use of intelligence, provided the high early success record didn’t compromise the detection system itself, as was threatened by the U.S. Navy’s overzealous attacks upon U-boat meeting places in the Atlantic. Soviet military intelligence got better and better by 1944, but so did the entire Red Army and Air Force. So, once again, one is driven back to the blunt question: where can prior knowledge of the enemy’s forces and intentions be shown to have had military impacts? On the whole, and even if one can readily concede that the Allied record on intelligence was far better than that of the Axis, it is easier to demonstrate where smooth logistics helped win the war than to show where intelligence led to victory.
¹⁰

A more positive surprise was the repeated evidence of the sheer interconnectedness of the five narratives. Although the introduction suggested that an Allied success or failure in one campaign would have consequences elsewhere, one of my early assumptions was that this book would consist of five essentially self-contained, parallel narratives, picking up from time to time the connections between, say, the campaign
against the U-boats and the Sicily landings, or between Operation Bagration and Normandy. Moreover, histories of the war in any single theater, even brilliant ones such as Atkinson’s books on the U.S. Army in the Mediterranean, draw the reader’s attention closer in, giving us even less perspective by which to understand what is happening elsewhere in the same season of the war.

Only after several chapters were drafted did it become clear to me that, for example, one would need to track the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe’s frantic juggling acts of moving divisions and air groups from France to Russia to the Mediterranean and back again, as explained in chapters 2, 3, and 4; to see better how the British fight for the Atlantic and Arctic sea-lanes, together with the strategic bombing campaign against Germany, dovetailed with the Red Army’s defensive and offensive battles in the east; and to detail how the Japanese high command’s excessive allocations of army divisions to central and southern China so undermined their capacity to hold ground in the Pacific. But campaign historians rarely connect the parts, and especially not across and between the five major theaters of war covered here. One comes away from this comparative exercise with a better understanding of the enormous tasks facing governments that have to conduct a multidimensional major conflict, and with a much higher appreciation of how the leaders in earlier wars had been involved in the same sort of juggling act.
^b

Some of the wartime Great Powers had less need to connect the parts than others; some had a need but failed to achieve balance and coherence. The Soviets did not have this problem of prioritizing; refusing to enter the Far Eastern war, they concentrated almost exclusively upon defeating the Nazi invader, and everything else was sensibly and terrifyingly subordinated to that end. The United States did face its classic Europe-versus-Pacific dilemma regarding priorities and resources, but by 1943–44 it had the capacity, remarkably, to surge forward
in both theaters. Japan trapped itself by striking in too many directions—China, Burma, Southeast Asia, New Guinea, the Central Pacific—without the capacity to do so, and paid the eventual price for such lack of concentration, as well as for its shrinking resources. Germany practiced a multidimensional strategy, but Hitler’s regime simply could not at the same time prevail in the great war in the Atlantic, the gigantic aerial battles over Europe, and the very large land campaigns in the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Balkans, and (especially) Russia, as well as preparing for the future Anglo-American invasion of France. Here, if anywhere, was the prime example of overstretch.

If the British did it rather better, it is perhaps because they had been juggling their global obligations for more than two hundred years and their decision-making systems had become reasonably good at it, but during the low point of 1941–42—Greece/Crete, Tobruk, Singapore, the Atlantic—it must have seemed to many that the old, battered empire was fading. Throughout the war British leaders
knew
they were overstretched—one reason the Alanbrooke diaries are so insightful—and that in turn explains why the Whitehall planners strove so intensively to make savings, to find new technologies that would reduce the future losses of ships, aircraft, and especially men, and welcomed volunteer fighting units and individuals from at least a dozen other nations into their own armed forces. It also explains why they attached such importance to getting their American allies to see things the British way, and were alarmed at the occasions when their more powerful and confident (and sometimes more ignorant) cousins brushed them away.
^c
As it was, Britain ended the war with the German-Italian Axis indeed completely defeated and Japan crushed, but it also overstrained itself and its empire as a result—as we can now see, fatally so.
¹¹

It is striking that while these five major players were so differently constituted, with each fighting its own war and along the different dimensions
of air, sea, and land, the end result here—that is, the 1944 result—was so uniform, with the Axis hard crust crumpling at the same time across four different theaters. Mark Clark may have justly complained that the arrival of his armies in Rome on June 4, 1944, was hardly noticed by the world’s press, but in practical terms and effect the Allied victory in central Italy was far less significant for the final resolution of the war than the other three, that is, the almost simultaneous invasion of Normandy, the seizure of the Marianas, and the powerful blow of Operation Bagration.

Was this, then, just a new form of imperial fatigue? Was it simply that the German and Japanese war machines, which had fought with astonishing ferocity and efficiency for so long, were geographically overextended by their leaderships and ultimately collapsed in the face of the accumulated material power of the British Empire, the United States, and the USSR? The raw statistics certainly suggest that: by 1942 the Grand Alliance was equal to the Axis in terms of productive power, by 1943 it was surging well ahead, and by 1944 it was dominant.
¹²
Take any measure—oil supplies, steel output, or aircraft production—and the Allies were well in front.

Clearly it would be silly to deny the massive importance of the Allies’ productive superiority by 1943–44. If instead it had been the Axis that possessed a productive power equaling $62.5 billion in 1943, with the Grand Alliance at only $18.3 billion, we would certainly not assume the defeat of Germany and Japan. But the argument that emerges from the chapters above is that these crude productive disparities could be, and very much were, affected by two other variables: namely, the role of geography (and its greater or lesser appreciation of that by the planners, designers, and decision makers on either side); and, perhaps the most important variable of all, the creation of war-making systems that contained impressive feedback loops, flexibility, a capacity to learn from mistakes, and a “culture of encouragement” (of which more in a moment) that permitted the middlemen in this grinding conflict the freedom to experiment, to offer ideas and opinions, and to cross traditional institutional boundaries.

If that is true, this work offers a different interpretation than the broad historiography of the Second World War, which tends to assume
that the war was essentially won by the time of the battles of Midway, El Alamein, and Stalingrad. It attempts to trim the crude economic determinist explanation of the war’s outcome and offers something more subtle. One is reminded here of Churchill’s point that the war would be, and had to be, won by the “proper application” of force. Sheer numbers were not enough. Giving the RAF another several thousand Lancasters made little sense (as the prime minister famously complained in September 1941) if Bomber Command couldn’t locate its targets. Building thousands of merchant ships couldn’t win the war if ways could not be found to defeat Doenitz’s great U-boat wolf packs in the mid-Atlantic. Quintupling the size of the U.S. Marine Corps didn’t matter if they couldn’t figure out a way of getting onto and past enemy-held beaches. Ten thousand T-34 tanks were simply a vast assemblage of steel and wire until someone figured out how to supply them with gas, oil, and munitions. One is tempted to modify Churchill’s phrase to suggest that the Second World War was won by the “intelligent application” of superior force.