The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (108 page)

The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 fixed the
ratio of capital ship
tonnage for Britain, the United States, Japan, France, and Italy in the proportion of 5:5:3:1:1, with Britain and the United States each allowed 525,000 tons in capital ships. The United States and Japan each were entitled to convert two
battle
cruisers already under construction to
aircraft carriers, and the treaty limited the size of new carriers. Inequities in the distribution of power excited nationalist indignation, especially in Japan, which had declared war on Germany in August 1914, nearly three years before the United States. The Americans also made repudiation of the
Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1902 a condition for their acceptance of the treaty, for as the author of the memorandum that guided American negotiators wrote, they wanted to place the “
wise administration of sea power in the hands of an undivided
Anglo-Saxon race.” Neither Germany nor Russia (then embroiled in a civil war) was represented at the conference.

The
London Naval Conference of 1930 confirmed the 5:5:3 ratio in battleship construction (Italy and France refused to sign) and came up with fixed definitions and tonnage limits for cruisers, destroyers, and submarines, which the Washington Treaty had ignored. Japan was limited to about two-thirds the cruiser and destroyer tonnage of either the United States or Britain. Only in submarines was there parity. Four years later, Japan repudiated the terms of the Washington and London treaties. As ominous, the
London Naval Treaty (1935) between Britain and Germany allowed the latter to build a fleet, although the aggregate tonnage could not exceed 35 percent that of the naval forces of the British Commonwealth.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of these negotiations and the formulation of naval strategy in the interwar period was the refusal to acknowledge the realities of World War I. In his memo to Wilson, Benson had recommended that German and
Austrian submarines be scrapped:

This was wishful thinking of the worst kind, but it reflected not only revulsion from Germany’s unrestricted submarine campaign but also the abiding
influence of Mahan, who had died in 1914. In
The Influence of Sea Power,
Mahan conceded that “
steam navies have as yet made no history which can be quoted as decisive in its teaching,” but the obvious lessons of the submarine campaigns were lost on his acolytes. However unsettling the consequences, the
Jeune Ecole’s assumption of an abrogation of international law in the case of total war had been correct. Yet as before the war, most navy officers worldwide considered capital ships the gold standard against which naval power should be measured and they tailored their strategies accordingly. American war gamers relegated submarines to the role of scouts for the U.S. fleet, and if submariners assigned to the “enemy” fleet actually dared to attack, they were chastised. Reflecting on the thinking of interwar strategists, submarine commander
and naval historian
Edward L. Beach later wrote, “
The minds of the men in control were not attuned to the changes being wrought by advancing technology. Mahan’s nearly mystical pronouncements had taken the place of reality for men who truly did not understand but were comfortable in not understanding.”

In addition to their counterparts in other navies and submariners in their own, the “gun club” had to contend with an even newer and less understood phenomenon,
naval aviation. In 1910, only seven years after the
Wright brothers’ demonstration of manned flight, a pilot flew a plane off the deck of the anchored cruiser
USS
Birmingham
. In August 1917 a pilot landed a plane on the deck of the
battlecruiser–cum–aircraft carrier
HMS
Furious
while that ship was under way, and the next year
Furious
launched seven planes in a successful raid on a German Zeppelin base. The Japanese commissioned the world’s first purpose-built aircraft carrier, the
Hosho,
in 1921, and by 1930 there were eleven aircraft carriers in commission worldwide. As with submarines, strategists initially thought of aircraft carriers as support vessels. Their potential came to be realized with improvements to radio communications and as the operational radius and payload capacity of carrier aircraft increased.

When World War II began in 1939, flag officers worldwide shared a common anxiety: the number of battleships available to them was inadequate. The lack of ships was real, but the war would require fleets of a completely different composition than strategists envisioned even as late as 1941. Going into the war, battleships dominated doctrine, but the outcome of World War II depended on aircraft carriers, submarines, destroyers, convoy escorts, cargo
ships, and landing craft, all in far greater numbers than were available or than anyone imagined could be built. The fate of the world’s biggest battleships, the
Yamato
and
Musashi,
offers one example of the vast gulf between expectation and experience. Advocates of carrier aviation greeted these ships with skepticism in the late 1930s, and Admiral
Isoroku Yamamoto told one of the ships’ designers, “
I’m afraid you’ll be out of work before long. From now on, aircraft are going to be the most important thing in the navy; big ships and big guns will become obsolete.” As they prepared for her last mission in April 1945, the
Yamato
’s junior officers are said to have gibed that “the world’s three great follies, prize examples of uselessness are the
Great Wall of China, the
pyramids and the
Yamato
.” The battleship saw little action before the
battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944, but changes in her armament reflected the shifting balance of power in naval warfare. Commissioned with 24 antiaircraft guns, by 1945 she carried 152 of them, and her 46-centimeter (18.1-inch) main guns, the largest ever mounted in a ship, fired antiaircraft “
incendiary shotgun” projectiles. Even these were not enough to save her. While en route to
Okinawa on April 7, she was attacked by
nearly three hundred carrier planes and sunk with the loss of 2,500 lives.

The promise of carrier aviation in offensive operations against capital ships was first revealed in the November 1940 British attack on
Taranto, when British carrier planes from HMS
Furious
permanently disabled one Italian battleship and put two others out of service for nearly six months.
Close study of the Taranto action may have convinced Yamamoto to attempt a preemptive Japanese strike on the American base in Hawaii. Even before Taranto demonstrated the feasibility of such an attack in wartime, a U.S. fleet exercise had yielded the same conclusion in 1938, and a report of the following year warned that the Japanese would likely “
damage Major Fleet Units without warning, or possibly … block the Fleet in
Pearl Harbor.” President
Franklin D. Roosevelt made this the home port of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet in 1940, in a modest effort to counter Japanese aggression in the Pacific. Relations reached the breaking point when the United States banned oil exports to Japan the following summer. Yet despite official warnings, the experience of war games, worsening diplomatic relations, and the knowledge that Japan had begun the Sino-Japanese and the
Russo-Japanese Wars with surprise attacks, preparations at Hawaii for a preemptive strike were inexcusably lax.

On December 7, 1941, a Japanese fleet of thirty ships under Admiral
Chuichi Nagumo launched two strikes of high-level bombers, dive-bombers,
torpedo planes, and fighter planes from a point about 220 miles north of Oahu. The primary target was
Pearl Harbor’s “Battleship Row,” where two of seven battleships were permanently destroyed. As luck would have it, none of the U.S. Navy’s carriers was in Pearl Harbor at the time. The
USS
Enterprise
and
Lexington
were delivering planes to
Wake Island, twenty-three hundred miles southwest of Pearl Harbor, and Midway Island at the end of the Hawaiian chain thirteen hundred miles to the northwest. The attack on Pearl Harbor was carried out in conjunction with surprise attacks on American bases in the
Philippines, as well as British
Hong Kong and
Singapore, and on December 10 bombers and torpedo planes based in
Indo-China sank the Royal Navy’s capital ships
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
off the Malay Peninsula.

Although Japanese and American admirals alike often used battleships as their flagships, carrier task groups were at the heart of the most important naval operations of the Pacific War. At the
battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944, for instance, Task Force 58 was made up of four carrier groups about fifteen miles apart. Each comprised three or four carriers surrounded by between three and five
cruisers and between twelve and fourteen destroyers that provided early warning of and protection against enemy submarines and aircraft. Carrier aircraft were designed for distinct missions. Fighter aircraft were intended to fight other aircraft and were the core of the combat air patrols launched against incoming planes. Dive-bombers attacked ships from a high altitude by diving at a ship and releasing their bombs at as low an altitude as possible before leveling out. Before the development of effective bombsights, this was the most accurate means of delivering a bomb to a relatively small target like a ship. Ships’ decks tended to be unarmored and bombs could easily penetrate them, although sinking a ship in this way was difficult. Most lethal to ships was the torpedo bomber, which flew directly toward its target before releasing the torpedo at an altitude of less than thirty meters. But this angle of attack left planes vulnerable to antiaircraft fire and combat air patrols.

In addition to large fleet carriers, the United States, Great Britain, and Japan built a limited number of light carriers, most on narrow hulls originally intended for cruisers. Of more utility and built in far greater numbers, especially by the United States, were escort carriers. Known as jeep carriers and baby flattops, these were crucial for ferrying replacement aircraft to distant theaters of operation, and they were deployed in support of amphibious landings in the Pacific. In the Atlantic, escort carriers also provided air cover for convoys and sailed as part of detached hunter-killer groups, usually one escort carrier and four or five destroyer escorts fitted with
radar and
sonar and armed with ever more effective depth charges, hedgehogs, and other antisubmarine weapons.

The
battle of the Atlantic, the titanic struggle to defeat Germany’s unrestricted submarine war against Allied shipping, overshadows all other submarine efforts of the war in terms both of ships sunk and losses to submarines and their crews. Collectively
U-boats sank well
over two thousand Allied and neutral ships, most of them in the North Atlantic and, after the United States entered the war, the
Caribbean and
Gulf of Mexico. Grim as this figure is, it represents only a fraction of the successful merchant ship passages made carrying food, war matériel, and other supplies to Great Britain and, after 1941, the
Soviet Union. More impressive, fewer than ten thousand Allied soldiers were lost in troop transports. On the German side, the casualties were appalling. Of the 863 U-boats that put to sea, 754 were lost—a staggering 87 percent—together with 27,491 officers and crew, about three-quarters of the personnel of the U-boat arm. Yet despite the experience of
World War I, submarine warfare was an insignificant component of Germany’s prewar planning. In September 1939, Germany had only
twenty-two seagoing U-boats in operation, and a handful of submarines designed for coastal operations. In the first year of the war only three U-boats were launched, and for the first eighteen months there were seldom more than six to eight boats on patrol at any one time. This paucity of numbers was compounded by the
unreliability of German
torpedoes—a problem that bedeviled the Americans, too—probably a quarter of which detonated prematurely or not at all, or were unable to maintain the proper depth.

When France surrendered on June 22, 1940, Admiral
Karl Dönitz moved his
submarine operations to Brest, Lorient (which he chose as his headquarters), Saint-Nazaire, La Pallice (
La Rochelle), and
Bordeaux. All had excellent dockyard facilities, to which Dönitz added bombproof submarine pens that still exist. More important, they were hundreds of miles closer to the Atlantic shipping lanes than Germany’s North Sea bases. In May 1940, U-boats had sunk nine ships in the North Atlantic, and in June fifty-three; the numbers thereafter rose steadily. U-boats collectively sank more than eleven hundred ships (over five million tons of shipping) before the United States entered the war. In 1942,
more than a thousand ships were sunk in the North Atlantic, many of them by submarines ganged in “wolf packs” whose activities were coordinated via radio transmissions between the U-boats and headquarters in Germany or France.

One reason for the sharp increase in sinkings that year was the failure of the Americans to institute coastal convoys or impose a blackout along the east coast of the United States, so that individual ships were clearly silhouetted
against the illuminated backdrops at night. In what the Germans called the
“
Happy Time,” from January to July U-boats sank nearly four hundred ships between the
Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Caribbean. The Americans’ refusal to attempt the most rudimentary precautions against the U-boat threat is baffling, especially because the United States had been involved in the battle of the Atlantic since early in the war. Circumventing domestic isolationists, Roosevelt had engineered a number of pro-Britain policies. The
neutrality patrol of September 1939 kept warships of any nation at least two hundred miles from the coasts of North and
South America. Under the destroyers-for-bases deal, the United States transferred fifty old destroyers to Britain in exchange for naval bases in Newfoundland,
Bermuda, and the Caribbean. The
Lend-Lease Act of 1941 allowed the United States to sell weapons, munitions, aircraft, and ships to “
any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States,” and that summer the United States assumed the defense of
Iceland, an important staging ground for Atlantic convoys. By the fall, the neutrality patrol had expanded to allow U.S. Navy ships to sail in harm’s way; two U.S. destroyers exchanged fire with U-boats, and on October 31 the
USS
Reuben James
was torpedoed and sunk with the loss of 115 men. Yet Allied countermeasures only became truly effective in 1943, when the Americans were running coastal convoys, Allied intelligence could routinely break encoded radio transmissions (thanks to the seizure of an
Enigma encryption machine from the captured
U-110
), and improvements to
sonar and
radar were making it easier to find and attack submarines.