Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II. Len Deighton

Navy had shown a lack of offensive spirit. He persuaded the first sea lord and chief of naval staff that the admiral in HMS Norfolk, as well as the captain of Prince of Wales, should be court-martialled for failing to engage Bismarck during the run south. The C-in-C Home Fleet blocked this⁸ and Churchill must have soon realized how damaging such proceedings would be for the British cause.

      Hitler became ‘melancholy beyond words’ at the loss of Bismarck. He was furious that the naval staff had exposed the mightiest warship in the world to such dangers. He had expressed doubts from the beginning and now he was proved right. The Führer complained of ‘red tape and wooden-headedness’ in the navy and said that the commanders wouldn’t tolerate any man with a mind of his own. From that day onwards, Admiral Raeder’s ideas were treated with suspicion: eventually command of the navy would be given to Dönitz, whose ideas were more in line with Hitler’s.

      The ‘hunting of the Bismarck’ certainly provided lessons for those who would learn them. The battleship admirals saw it as proof of the value of the big ship, and the way in which more big ships had to hunt for them. Such people stubbornly persisted with the story that Bismarck had been sunk solely by gunfire and denied that the Germans might have opened the sea-cocks. They were wrong: in 1981 the wreck was inspected and the German version of her sinking confirmed.⁹

      Hindsight shows that the real lesson was the importance of aircraft. A land-based Catalina had discovered the Bismarck; a torpedo-carrying Swordfish had crippled it and thus decided its fate. History provides no evidence that those in authority at the time were converted to this line of thought. The US navy continued to line up the big ships of its Pacific fleet in ‘battleship row’ Pearl Harbor until the bombers smashed them. Before the year was over the Prince of Wales, which had exchanged salvoes with Bismarck, would be sent to the bottom by Japanese aircraft. Those tempted by the ‘what if ?’ game asked what might have happened to the two German ships had Prinz Eugen been an aircraft-carrier.

      On 22 June 1941 Germany invaded Russia, and Churchill immediately declared Britain to be Stalin’s ally. Sorely needed Hurricane fighters and other war supplies were loaded and the first North Cape convoy departed for Murmansk in northern Russia in August. These tanks and guns and aircraft were all desperately needed elsewhere, and they would certainly make little difference to the outcome of Barbarossa, the most colossal clash of armed might in the world’s history. Perhaps it was a worthwhile gesture in propaganda terms, although Stalin made sure that his people heard little about it. As for the drain upon shipping that would come from sailing heavily escorted convoys so close to German bases in Norway, and mostly in cruel weather, this prospect must have filled the Royal Navy with gloom. It was a time when every ship was badly needed in the Atlantic.

       America loses her neutrality

      America’s neutrality had been defined by Congress and decreed in the Neutrality Act of 1937, but soon after Britain’s war began, the Act was modified to permit belligerent powers to buy war materials if they shipped them themselves: so-called ‘cash and carry’. This of course benefited Britain and France – whose navies dominated the North Atlantic – while providing no benefit to Germany.

      In July 1940 – as France collapsed – Roosevelt signed an act to provide $4 billion to build for America a two-ocean navy. It was an amazing sum of money by any standards. Yet there were many Americans wondering how soon the French fleet, and the British fleet too, would be taken over by the Germans. Meanwhile, in response to an urgent request from Churchill, Roosevelt exchanged 50 old United States destroyers for 99-year leases on naval bases in Newfoundland, British Guiana, Bermuda and islands in the West Indies. British sailors were hurried to Halifax and picked up the first of these ‘four-stackers’ on 6 September 1940. This was essentially a political action; a signal to friends and enemies that Roosevelt, if re-elected in November, would move closer to an endangered Britain. In the latter part of the year, the US navy began to escort its own shipping on ‘threatened transatlantic routes’.

      Then in December 1940 something happened that would influence the outcome of the Battle of the Atlantic far more than the 99-year leases on naval bases. The American steel magnate Henry Kaiser launched the first ‘Liberty Ship’. Its welded hull showed the way to unprecedented production speeds. Welded ships were subject to all sorts of troubles but welded steel – for ships and tanks – was none the less a leap forward in technology. Such welding was strenuously resisted in British yards. It was not until 1943 that the Admiralty supported it. Even then the strikes of angry riveters, confronting timid management, ensured that the speed of change was slower than need be.

      By January 1941, with the presidential election won, Roosevelt authorized his military leaders to have secret talks with their British counterparts. Soon it was decided that, should America ever go to war against both Germany and Japan, the conquest of Germany would take precedence. It was not a decision easily arrived at, and for some American military commanders it remained a contentious issue for years to come.

      The ever-present threat of a successful German occupation of England, which would have deprived America of a base for operations in Europe, made the ‘Germany First’ policy logical. Looking back now, it seems that arguments to reverse this policy were bluffs used by American military commanders to get more resources for the Pacific war, and also by American politicians as a threat that kept Churchill under control. The policy, all the same, was never seriously challenged.

      In April the United States signed an agreement that gave them the right to build and maintain military installations in Greenland, and in this same month the Americans extended their ‘ocean security zone’ to longitude 26 degrees west, which is about halfway to England. An agreement with the Icelandic government to install and use military bases there followed in July. It was a vitally important development, for Iceland provided a vital base from which ships and aircraft could protect the Atlantic convoys. Without it there would have always been a mid-Atlantic gap in which the U-boats could operate at will.

      Roosevelt and Churchill met in a warship off Newfoundland in August 1941 and pledged themselves to the common goal of destroying Nazi tyranny. It was no empty boast. In a decision no less than breathtaking, America extended $1 billion of credit to a USSR that most observers believed to be near total defeat.

      Aboard Prince of Wales, returning home from his meeting with the president, Churchill was provided with a chance to see the merchant service at work. On the prime minister’s instructions, the battleship went right through a convoy, the escorts taking the outer lanes. The convoy was making a steady 8 knots; the warships doing 22. From the signal halliards Prince of Wales flew ‘Good luck – Churchill’ in international code.

      Those seventy-two ships went mad. Quickly every ship was flying the ‘V’ flag; some tried a dot-dot-dot-dash salute on their sirens. In the nearest ships men could be seen waving, laughing and – we guessed though we could not hear – cheering. On the bridge the Prime Minister was waving back to them, as was every man on our own decks, cheering with them, two fingers on his right hand making the famous V-sign.

      Soon we were through them and well ahead, when to everyone’s surprise we did an eight-point turn, and shortly after another. Mr Churchill wanted an encore.¹⁰

      The US navy entered a shooting war in September 1941 when U-652 was attacked by depth charges and fired two torpedoes at a nearby destroyer. Both missed. The U-boat captain had made two errors: the destroyer was the US navy’s Greer (a First World War four-funnel profile making it look like those sent to the Royal Navy); and the depth charges had come from an RAF plane. Greer retaliated with a pattern of depth charges but did only minor damage to the German boat which crept away. Roosevelt was angry about the ‘unprovoked attack’ and said that U-boats were the rattlesnakes of the Atlantic. The press echoed his verdict, and reported that the US navy had been ordered to ‘shoot on sight’ in future. It was a phrase which Roosevelt himself was happy to repeat.¹¹

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