Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War Read Online Free PDF Page A

much, because they didn’t win wars. It was true that during the Napoleonic Wars French predators had seized many independently sailing British merchantmen, but once the latter were organized in convoys and given an escort of warships, the sea routes were secure behind Nelson’s assembled fleets. The same truth revealed itself, albeit at great cost, during the First World War. For three years, and even though the Grand Fleet had command of the sea, Allied merchant ships steaming on their own were picked off in increasing numbers by German U-boats. After the Admiralty was compelled by the British cabinet to return to the convoy system in 1917, losses to enemy submarines dropped dramatically. Within a short while, moreover, the Allied warships would possess asdic (sonar), so for the first time ever they could detect a solid object under water. Provided one had command of the sea on the surface, it was argued, one would also control the waters below. A submarine would thus be as recognizable as the sails of a French frigate 150 years earlier. Such was the prevailing assumption of naval staffs in the years following the Treaty of Versailles, 1919. Convoys, plus sonar, worked. 4
    Before we examine how and why that assumption was challenged by the renewed German U-boat threat during the first half of the Second World War, a couple of very important, though clashing, strategic-operational assumptions also need to be considered. The first of these, rarely articulated, is that one really didn’t need to sink surface commerce raiders or submarines to win the maritime war. So long as the Royal Navy shepherded without loss a group of fifty merchantmen from, say, Halifax to Liverpool, it had won. The larger Allied strategy was to keep Britain in the fight and then to make it the springboard for an enormous invasion of western Europe. Thus, if every transatlantic (and South American, Sierra Leonean, and South African) convoy got to port safely without ever encountering U-boats, the war was beingwon, ship by ship, cargo by cargo. Even if the convoy escorts had to face a serious submarine attack but could beat off the predators, all would still be well. The task of the shepherd was to safeguard the sheep, not to kill the wolves.
    The opposite argument was that killing the wolves had to be the essence of Allied maritime strategy. It too had its own logic: if the threat to the sea-lanes was forcibly removed, all would be fine and one of the Casablanca war aims could at last be implemented. In today’s language, the prevailing authorities cannot wait for terrorists to attack the international system but have to go and root out the terrorists. In maritime terms, therefore, a navy charged with protecting its merchant ships would either go on a submarine hunt or, an even bolder tactic, simply drive its convoys through U-boat-infested waters and force the submarines to fight—and be killed.
    The first of these two convoy strategies was clearly defensive; the second (whether submarine hunting or forcing the convoys through) was equally clearly offensive. Both visions, it is worth noting, involved a tricky, interdependent three-way relationship between the merchant ships, the U-boats, and the naval and aerial escorts, not unlike the children’s rock-paper-scissors game. If the convoys could avoid an encounter or have the U-boats beaten off, fine for them; if the U-boats could get at the convoys without destruction from the escorts, fine for them; and if the escorts could destroy enough submarines, fine for them.
    In the harsh world of the North Atlantic between 1939 and 1943, however, neither an Allied defensive operational strategy nor an offensive one was possible on its own. The way forward had to be achieved by a combination of both options, depending on the ups and downs of what turned out to be the longest campaign of the entire Second World War. And this route was, geopolitically, the most important maritime journey in the world. Of