Chapter 5 of Samuel Eliot Morison's The Two-Ocean War, a history of the USN in WWII, pivots from the Pacific to the Atlantic, covering the "second happy time" and the early stages of the war against the U-boats.
I got a surprise on the first page of this chapter. I had not previously heard about the Chicago Tirbune publishing the leaked warplans on December 5th, and it makes Hitler's decision to declare war on the US, previously extremely high on my "what were they thinking" list for WWII, make at least a bit more sense.
Beyond that, this is the first chapter that was really what I was hoping this book would be, a condensation of the best bits of The Battle of the Atlantic, with Morison's superb prose and ability to sample the entire picture really coming to the fore. Everything from a beautifully evocative picture of a convoy under attack to the German campaign against American coastal shipping to a discussion of the operations research teams that I love so much to a paragraph on the Civil Air Patrol, which has long been one of my markers for how much Morison covers in the main books. Yes, there's a bit of halo-polishing on King, and I think he's unfair to criticize the lack of units in the Eastern Sea Frontier, which was stripped because there simply weren't enough destroyers to go around. But on the whole, it's an excellent, lovely description of the early battle with the U-boats.
One thing that isn't mentioned in this chapter, and that I should talk about, is ULTRA. For those who don't know, ULTRA was the codename for British efforts to decrypt the German Enigma machine, and it played a significant part in the Battle of the Atlantic. However, it remained classified until 1974, a decade after this book was written. Morison was aware of it, having been cleared for it in 1956, but obviously couldn't include it here. This oversight has since been rectified, and if anything, ULTRA is probably overdiscussed relative to its contribution to the war. All that said, this chapter would have been largely unaffected. The German Navy introduced a new, more sophisticated Enigma in February 1942, and it wasn't broken by the British until December. They were able to struggle on with direction-finding data and the work of the OIC, which comes up late in the chapter. Here, I'm pretty sure that when Morison talks about HF/DF, he actually means it, but in later chapters, it's often a code for ULTRA.
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FDR wanted war with Germany but wanted Germany to declare war first because of domestic politics, so arguably Germany declaring war first was more of a formality than a real decision point. The US had been providing escort duty for British ships with permission to engage, which made them de facto participants in the war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrality_Patrol
https://ww2db.com/battlespec.php?battleid=336
"Roosevelt's own Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, believed the patrols were belligerent acts and he advocated Roosevelt to openly say so. Between one another, Stimson and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox agreed that the President's reasoning in justifying the Neutrality Patrol was 'tortured.'"
Incidentally, did you write about the Neutrality Patrol yet?
"Londonderry, a dour Presbyterian city, seemed like Coney Island after Reykjavik..."
Ha. I'm sad to say that I don't know enough about Irish Protestant social history to say if this stereotype was accurate in 1942 or if Morison was falsely invoking it to make more colorful prose.
The paragraph on the next page (105) about Treasury-class Coast Guard Cutters being big enough to equal destroyers in everything but speed and torpedoes "and seldom does an opportunity arise to use torpedoes in escort-of-convoy" is interesting.
Page 106 both addresses the geopolitics of the Atlantic theatre by bringing up the Azores and when Salazar's Portugal decided it was safe to offend Hitler and Mussolini by allowing the Allies to build airfields there and begins Morison's great prose description of what a convoy is. So good.
Neutrality patrol was covered in Chapter 2. Morison was definitely on team "we're hiding the ball about how much like an act of war that looks" because of his general defensiveness around FDR. I didn't go into it in detail because there was other stuff I wanted to talk about more.
(To be clear, I'm not arguing that Hitler's declaring war wasn't in many ways justified. But it being justified doesn't mean it was a good idea, and not declaring war on the US would make things much harder for Roosevelt and probably much easier for Hitler. Hence my confusion.)
Right: Hitler's declaration of war having a justified casus belli under the accepted laws of war doesn't mean he had no choice, and the opposite choice seems like it would have made his life much easier. I think you'd have to argue that Lend-Lease to the USSR was going to defeat his regime if the U-Boats weren't free to sink the convoys in declared war.
@Le Maistre Chat
That stuck out to me, too. Between that phrase and wonderfully evocative description of a convoy under attack, I wondered if those comments were born of personal experience.
Turns out, he was on Atlantic convoy duty, including aboard the USS Buck:
https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2020/february/sam-morisons-war
I don't know if his particular convoys were routed through Londonderry, but hah.
I also wondered if with a name like "Morison", he might know about Londonderry personally. A little searching turned up that he was indeed Scots Irish and had ancestors from Londonderry:
https://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2009/12/samuel-eliot-morisons-nutfield.html
What a fascinating man he was.
If war with the USA was inevitable, it was better to declare war than be declared upon, if only for domestic politics. Also, it was 4 days after Pearl Harbor, so the military situation wouldn't get better than that either.
I looked into submarine chasers after reading this and saw that they were sent across both oceans for support work later in the war. Since Morison went into how difficult it was to get the four-stack destroyers across that distance, how did they manage it with ships that were even smaller and shorter ranged?
@Steve-O
Yes, I should probably have specified at some point that Morison spent most of the war running around getting first-hand experience, and it definitely shows in the book.
@AsTheDominoesFall
A couple of possibilities spring to mind:
Escorting a convoy takes considerably more fuel than just going from point A to point B because you're having to station-keep and patrol around the convoy.
You can take more inefficient routes when you're not constrained by the need to run your merchant shipping efficiently. Maybe you refuel in Newfoundland and Iceland and Scotland, which is fine if you have a dozen subchasers, but doesn't work as well for convoy escorts because they'd have to run around offshore where the U-boats could get at them.
You might send them with a tanker and UNREP, which was a significant thing later in the war.
No idea offhand what combination of these ended up getting used.