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.
11
The British at Sea
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:
The bombers came and attacked us wave after wave. They seemed to single a ship out and deliver a mass attack on it, diving vertically and from all angles. A huge bomb exploded in the water near our gun. Tons of water crashed down on us, tearing us away from the gun and tossing us around like straw – I was certain we would be swept over the side. One thought flashed through my mind: ‘My God, this is the end.’ After what seemed an eternity, we picked ourselves up, blew up our lifebelts and kicked away our shoes, as I for one expected to abandon ship. But in a short time we were firing again, as we were still being attacked. Huge pieces of shrapnel lay around. There was a huge column of black smoke amidships and a direct hit on number two gun. There isn’t a gun now, just a piece of charred metal…Nearly all the gun’s crew were wiped out, most of the lads trapped underneath the gun or blown against the splinter shield. It was a ghastly sight. We’ve lived and slept all as a family for a year and a half: laughed, quarrelled, joked, all gone ashore together, discussed our private lives…Poor old Bob Silvey is still under the gun – I’ve seen him, but it’s impossible to get him out.
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
