America At War - Concise Histories Of U.S. Military Conflicts From Lexington To Afghanistan (25 page)

Even before the United States entered the war, President Roosevelt had become acquainted with the U-boats. Early in September 1941 the American destroyer USS
Greer
was in the Atlantic south of Iceland. A German submarine fired two torpedoes at her. Both missed. A month later a German torpedo struck the USS
Kearny
, another destroyer. The ship survived, but eleven sailors died. The USS
Reuben James
was not so fortunate. On October 31, 1941, U-568 sank the vessel, killing 115 American sailors. Harold Stark, then one of the navy’s most senior admirals, said, “The Navy is already at war in the Atlantic but the country doesn’t seem to realize it.” Franklin Roosevelt did. After the attack on the
Greer
, he ordered the U.S. Navy to fire on any ship threatening American vessels or those under American escort.

At first, the battle against the U-boats did not go well, for neither Great Britain nor the United States. Once Germany and America were at war, Dönitz sent the U-boats to American waters. There they enjoyed great success, sinking ships from Cape Cod to the Caribbean. Foolishly, the U.S. Navy initially chose not to mandate that merchant ships sail in convoy. This made the job of the U-boats much easier. So did the bright lights of American cities. Only belatedly were they blacked out. The initial result was a maritime massacre. The Germans called the submarine campaign Operation
Paukenschlag
, best translated as the introductory roll of kettle drums. The U-boat commanders referred to it as “the Happy Times.”

Early in the war, the British too had felt the full force of the U-boats. From May through November of 1940, in the waters off England, there had been an earlier Happy Time. In June alone the U-boats sank 173 ships. By then the German submarines had gained an important advantage. With the defeat of France, Dönitz had been able to base his boats at French ports. This shortened their voyages to and from operational areas.

During 1942, despite increasing losses, the U-boats continued to enjoy success. And their numbers grew. At times, Dönitz had one hundred U-boats on patrol in the Atlantic. Sometimes these were replenished at sea. The Type XIV submarine, nicknamed the Milk Cow (
Milchkuh
) carried fuel and food, fresh water and torpedoes. These submarines would rendezvous in mid-ocean with the attack boats, which then would continue the hunt. Often the U-boats would strike in “wolf packs,” a number of submarines acting in concert. Pity the convoy they encountered. In 1942, a banner year for Dönitz, his U-boats sank 1,662 Allied ships.

On February 18, 1942, as the Battle of the Atlantic raged, U-578, sank the American destroyer escort the USS
Jacob Jones.
Twenty–five years earlier, as Germany’s kaiser sought to control the seas, U-53 had torpedoed an American warship. It too was named
Jacob Jones
.

Yet in May 1943 the Allies gained the upper hand. More escorts, better weapons, plus advances in technology made the Atlantic Ocean safer for convoys and more dangerous for the U-boats. One key factor was the increasing use of aircraft. These would first detect the submarine and then attack. Employing American-built long-range B-24s, Britain’s Coastal Command made life difficult for the U-boats. So did escort carriers. These were small warships that operated naval aircraft. Along with destroyers they formed hunter-killer groups. In mid-June 1944, one of them, an American, captured a U-boat. The war prize, U-505, is today on display in Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry.

By the beginning of 1944 the Allies had won the Battle of the Atlantic. U-boat losses were heavy. That year alone, 242 boats did not return. Dönitz attributed the defeat to technological advances in radar and radio detection. He would have been surprised to learn that a principal reason for the Allied victory was that the British Intelligence Services had penetrated U-boat communications and were able to read the encrypted messages that Dönitz and his U-boat captains sent to one another. At first, the British used this knowledge to reroute convoys away from the wolf packs. Later, this highly secret intelligence was employed to direct air and surface forces to where the U-boats were.

Key to this intelligence coup was early work by Polish and French agents. This was built on by the British. At Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, some extremely smart men and women analyzed captured German code books as well as Germany’s famous Enigma machine (one of which had been plucked from a sinking U-boat). The Enigma machine was a sophisticated electromechanical encoding device, about the size of an old-fashioned typewriter. It was the means by which senior German generals and admirals communicated. That the British were able to intercept and decode these communications was extraordinary. Indeed, it was one of the most remarkable accomplishments of World War II. So critical was this intelligence that only a few individuals were privy to it. The intercepts were labeled ULTRA. Closely guarded—their existence was publicly revealed only in 1977—ULTRA intelligence was of great value to the Allies. In the Battle of the Atlantic, it was decisive.

When Admiral Dönitz recalled the U-boats in May 1945, it marked the end of a titanic struggle. Germany had contested the Atlantic with Britain and America and had lost. During the Second World War, Dönitz sent a total of 859 U-boats on war patrols. A staggering 648 of them failed to return. Toward the end of the conflict, a German submarine leaving port was embarking on a suicide mission. In total, some 30,000 U-boat crewmen lost their lives.

Dönitz survived. Upon Hitler’s death, he became head of state. But, not for long, as Germany soon surrendered and the admiral was placed under arrest. At Nuremberg, where the top Nazis were tried postwar, Dönitz received the comparatively light sentence of ten years in prison. He died in 1980. His impact on the war and that of the German submarines were substantial. Winston Churchill expressed it in simple prose: “The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.”

***

As the Royal Navy and its American counterpart fought the U-boats, their comrades in the Allied air forces were engaging the Luftwaffe, the German air force. In 1939 the Luftwaffe was the foremost aerial combat organization in the world. By 1943 it was waging war on three fronts—Italy, Western Europe, and Russia—and the strain was beginning to tell. Yet it remained a formidable foe, as both England’s Royal Air Force and the American Eighth Air Force were finding out.

Proponents of airpower in both the United States and Great Britain believed aircraft alone could destroy Nazi Germany, thus making the inevitably costly cross-channel invasion unnecessary. Their plan was to strike Germany from the air with well-armed long-range bombers. They expected to destroy the Nazis’ capacity to make war and to break the morale of the German people. In the event, they accomplished neither. But the damage their bombers inflicted was immense and their contribution to victory significant.

The British bombed at night. Their principal targets were German cities. By April 1945, most major cities in Germany were in ruins, thanks to the RAF’s Bomber Command. Because thousands and thousands of German civilians were killed, postwar moralists would declare the raids to be inhumane, condemning Bomber Command and its leader, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris. Harris, however, simply wanted to win the war. He and his pilots thought what they were doing was eminently reasonable given what the German air force had done to Warsaw, Rotterdam, Coventry, London, and numerous Russian cities.

The Americans bombed in daylight. Their goal in the strategic bombing campaign was to destroy Germany’s industrial base. Over a period of 966 days the four-engine B-17s and B-24s of the Eighth Air Force would depart England and fly to the Continent. There, they would bomb shipyards, railroad yards, munitions factories, naval bases, aircraft plants, and the like. By mid-1944, the Luftwaffe no longer could stop them.

The Eighth Air Force was one of fifteen numbered air forces the United States established during the Second World War. Eleven of them were deployed overseas. The Tenth Air Force, for example, operated in Burma and India. The Fifth flew in the southwestern Pacific. The Eighth was based in East Anglia. It operated from sixty-two airfields that crowded this most eastern bulge of the United Kingdom.

The Eighth began its endeavors on February 29, 1942, when seven U.S. Army Air Force officers arrived in Britain. Their job was simple: create an aerial armada that would pulverize the enemy. That is exactly what they did. But the cost was high. Some twenty-six thousand Americans of the Eighth Air Force did not return home alive.

***

At first, progress in building the Eighth was halting. Airplanes and crew were slow in arriving, and some were transferred to Africa to assist Eisenhower in the battle for Tunisia. Then, General Ira Eaker, the commander of the Eighth, discovered that B-17s and B-24s could not safely fly over Germany without protective escort fighters. Yet the fighter available, the P-47 Thunderbolt, did not have sufficient range. So, consistent with U.S. war fighting doctrine, the bombers went on alone into Germany. The results were disastrous. Luftwaffe fighters destroyed many, many U.S. aircraft. Perhaps the most notorious missions targeted Schweinfurt. On August 17, 1943, and October 14 of that same year, Eaker dispatched first 337 planes and then 420 to Schweinfurt and, on the first mission, to nearby Regensburg as well. The latter was the location of an important aircraft manufacturing plant. Schweinfurt was where most ball bearings in Germany were made. On both days the Luftwaffe hammered the attacking force. Each time their guns destroyed more than sixty B-17s. As one B-17 Flying Fortress carried a crew of ten, the Schweinfurt raids cost the Eighth Air Force no fewer than twelve hundred men.

Another difficulty was the weather. Fog, rain, and high winds either kept the planes on the ground or made precision bombing impossible. The Americans thought their top-secret Norden bombsight would ensure accuracy. It did not. Bombardiers trained in the sunny, peaceful skies of the American Southwest found their jobs much more difficult once in German airspace, especially when antiaircraft guns and Luftwaffe fighter planes were trying to kill them. As Eighth Air Force intelligence officers discovered, the B-17s and B-24s more than occasionally missed their targets.

Yet the Eighth persevered. Its numbers grew, and by late 1944, it could put a thousand bombers into the air. Moreover, when early in that year a new fighter arrived, prospects for success dramatically increased. The new plane was the P-51 Mustang. It was fast, maneuverable, and most important, it could fly to Berlin and back. Hermann Göring, the head of the Luftwaffe, is reported to have said that once he saw Mustangs over the German capital he knew the war was lost.

With the P-51s—and the Thunderbolts—the Eighth Air Force was in a position to destroy the German air force. What the Eighth needed to do was to draw Luftwaffe fighters into battle. This was accomplished primarily in two ways. The first was to mount large-scale raids against factories producing German aircraft. Known as “Big Week,” these raids took place in February 1944. The second was to attack Berlin. Early in March, the Eighth struck the German capital. In both cases, the Luftwaffe responded. But the German air force incurred huge losses, and by late spring, the Luftwaffe, short of experienced pilots, was a spent force.

So when Allied soldiers landed on the beaches of Normandy, the German air force was nowhere to be seen.

***

To command the great invasion, code named Overlord, Churchill had hoped to designate General Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the imperial general staff, the British army’s most senior position. By 1944, however, it was clear than an American would have to hold the job, because Americans would constitute a large majority of the troops involved. So the choice was Franklin Roosevelt’s. Initially, he planned to appoint George Marshall. At the last minute, the president decided that he needed Marshall right where he was: in Washington directing the United States Army. With General Marshall’s full concurrence, Roosevelt gave the most important field command any American would hold in World War II to Eisenhower.

Eisenhower’s title was Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force. His deputy was a British airman, Sir Arthur Tedder. Tedder had worked with Ike (the nickname used by everyone save the more formal George Marshall) and shared the American commander’s commitment to a staff of British and American officers functioning as a single, integrated unit. The senior naval commander for Overlord also was British, as was the top air force officer.

Eisenhower had wanted Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander for command of the invading ground forces. An Englishman, he had seen success in Egypt, Tunisia, and Italy. “Alex” was well liked and very good at his job. But Churchill insisted that he remain in the Mediterranean. So the assignment was given to Montgomery. In fact, “Monty” was an obvious choice, though not one Eisenhower relished.

The newly installed Supreme Commander arrived in England on January 15, 1944. By then much planning for the invasion already had taken place. A British officer, Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Morgan, had put in place key parameters of the plan. It was Morgan, for example, who selected Normandy. He also initiated construction of the artificial harbors as well as the oil pipeline that ran under the channel from the coast of Cornwall to the Contentin Peninsula. One of Eisenhower’s biographers, Michael Korda, has called Morgan’s plan “inventive, audacious . . . and well-prepared.” Later, Montgomery would attempt to take credit for Overlord. But Korda reminds us that it was Frederick Morgan who did much of the planning.

When assigned his task, Morgan had been told Overlord would comprise three infantry divisions plus paratroopers. To his credit, Montgomery realized more troops would be needed and that the beachhead needed to be much wider (eventually it would span nearly fifty-five miles), an assessment with which Eisenhower agreed. However, more troops meant more landing craft, more equipment, and importantly, more time. So the date for the invasion was pushed forward. It was to take place on June 5.