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

course the other Allied trade routes mattered, and all faced the same operational and logistical difficulties, or sometimes (as with the Arctic convoys) even greater ones. But maritime security across the Atlantic was the foundation stone of all Anglo-American grand strategy in the European theater. With a look forward to the remaining chapters of this book, it is worth restating the many interconnections. Winning this Atlantic battle preserved Britain’s own very large military-industrial base. Britain was also the unsinkable aircraftcarrier for the Allied strategic bombing campaigns, and the springboard for the eventual invasion of western Europe. Britain was the port of departure for most of the convoys to northern Russia and to the Mediterranean; it was the source for the many troopship convoys that Churchill dispatched, via the Cape, to Montgomery in Egypt and the Middle East. Controlling the Atlantic was the sheet anchor of the West’s plans to defeat Italy and Germany.
    The top-to-bottom logic chain of Allied grand strategy here is also unusually clear, a fine example of Millett and Murray’s concept of the multilevel nature of “military effectiveness.” 5 The
political
aim was the unconditional defeat of the enemy, and the return to a world of peace and order. The
strategy
to achieve that purpose was to take the war to the enemy by all the means that were available: aerial, land-based, naval, economic, and diplomatic. This required decisive successes at the
operational
level, and in all the areas covered in the chapters of the present book. It would be foolish to argue about which of those operational regions was more important than others (even if the Combined Chiefs of Staff had to do so as they wrangled over allocating resources); they all were part of Allied grand strategy. What is incontestable, however, is that if the British, the Americans, and their smaller allies were to reconquer Europe from fascism, they first of all had to have command of the Atlantic waters.
    Yet control of that vital route was itself determined, in the last resort, by a number of key technical and tactical factors. In other words, there is also in this story a clear example of a bottom-to-top logic chain. Every individual merchant ship that was preserved and every individual U-boat that was sunk by Allied escorts directly contributed to the relative success rate of each convoy. The tactical success rates of each single convoy contributed to the all-important monthly tonnage totals, and those monthly tonnage totals were the barometer to the winning or losing of the Battle of the Atlantic. That operational battle, as we have argued, was key to victory in western Europe and the Mediterranean. And winning in the West was a part of the strategic tripos—victory in the West, victory in the East (Eastern Front), and victory in the Pacific/Far East.
    The Battle of the Atlantic was an operational and tactical contest that hung upon many factors. The first of these, from which all the othersflowed, was the possession of efficient and authoritative organization. This was so basic a point that it is often taken for granted, yet on brief reflection it is clear how important were the structures of command, the lines of information, and the integration of war-fighting systems. Both sides benefited greatly, of course, from the experiences of the epic campaign in the Atlantic during the First World War, and by the post-1919 lessons drawn from them. In terms of simplicity of command, Doenitz had it easier, for the U-boat service was separate from the German surface navy, and it became easier still for him when the failure of a squadron of heavy ships to destroy an Arctic convoy in the last days of 1942 led to an explosion of rage on Hitler’s part and to Grand Admiral Erich Raeder being replaced as commander in chief of the entire navy by Doenitz himself at the end of January 1943. Doenitz decided to remain commander of U-boats, so as to keep