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

control of submarine operations, and it is evident that he found it much easier to obtain the Fuehrer’s backing than his predecessor had. This did not mean that he had no organizational fights. There was a constant struggle to gain the necessary share of war materials (steel, ball bearings, electrical parts, antiaircraft weaponry) against the enormous demands of the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe. And, as we shall see, Doenitz had the greatest difficulty in getting aerial support for his boats. Nonetheless, it was an enormous advantage to have a single and very experienced authority directing the entire U-boat campaign.
    The organizational story on the Allied side was a lot less clear-cut. During the years of American neutrality, it actually had been simpler. Ensuring command of the seas was the traditional responsibility of the Admiralty in Whitehall, which then devolved defense of the Atlantic convoys to a particular authority, the Western Approaches Command, based in Liverpool. By the time our analysis begins, its chief was the formidable Admiral Sir Max Horton, like Doenitz a highly experienced submarine commander twenty-five years previously. The much smaller Royal Canadian Navy, operating out of ports such as St. John’s and Halifax, could, as before, fit under what was essentially a British imperial command structure. This was certainly not true of the U.S. Navy when it entered the conflict in December 1941. Admiral King was known for his keen sensitivities toward the British, and while it might be thought that the United States had so much to do in the giganticPacific War that it might find it agreeable simply to leave some of its warships to operate under an Anglo-Canadian command structure in the Atlantic, this did not happen easily. In any case, for much of 1942 the greatest U-boat challenge had occurred in America’s own waters, off its eastern seaboard, and further south, in the Caribbean routes; the U.S. Navy clearly had to be centrally involved here. So, for all those Naval War College lectures about the benefits of having an integrated “command of the sea,” the Allied navies had decided to settle for three zones with identified handover points.
    This position improved significantly in early March 1943 following the Atlantic Convoy Conference in Washington. What could have been a serious crisis among the Allies—King for a while wanted to withdraw
all
U.S. warships from the North Atlantic in order to protect the military supply routes to American forces fighting in Tunisia—ended in a sensible compromise. The U.S. Navy would have primary responsibility for the convoys to Gibraltar and North Africa and would also protect all Caribbean convoys, while the British and Canadian navies assumed responsibility for the major routes to the United Kingdom. More important still was that King agreed to lend some naval forces (including a new escort carrier) to the North Atlantic theater, and did not oppose increasing the numbers of squadrons of very long-range B-24 aircraft to RAF Coastal Command and to the fast-growing but overstretched Royal Canadian Air Force. The last additions, as we shall see, came just in time.
    The necessarily important factor of intelligence and counterintelligence fitted well into these larger command structures. Older forms of gaining information about the enemy’s forces and possible intentions still operated in this war, and the British in particular used aerial reconnaissance, reports from their agents and anti-German resistance movements, and technical analysis of captured weapons systems to add to their miscellany of acquired knowledge. Both sides also developed some very sophisticated bureaus of operational research, whose analysts studied runs of data to figure out how best to utilize one’s own resources and dilute the foe’s. But it was in the 1939–45 struggles that signals intelligence, or “sigint,” took a major lead over human intelligence, or “humint,” in the great