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.
Chapter V section 2...
Loving Morison's combination of scope and detail with turns of phrase like "happiest hunting ground".
He sure is mad about US cities being allowed to have lights until between April 18 and May 18. As he cites Doenitz about the morale value of "bathers and sometimes entire coastal cities are witness to that drama of war" in addition to calculating tonnage lost NOT crossing the Atlantic, it's hard not to agree. He even makes drama out of the logistics of choosing not to construct small coastal vessels because of frantically devoting shipbuilding capacity to destroyers and up.
The part about poor Latin American republics having declared war on the Axis but having no ships to defend themselves was interesting. Not enough space to explain any of the politics behind that, except for more significant Mexico joining later.
'Kapitanleutnant "Ajax" Achilles in U-161' ... Germany's greediest Iliad fanboy.
I find it interesting that while Morison accurately describes mistakes like not instituting any sort of convoy system in early 1942, not demanding ships run with lights out, or demanding coastal blackouts, he does not describe Admiral King's part in all those decisions.
Had King's "frenemy" the Brits not been the ones recommending those courses of action, perhaps the steps would have been taken sooner? Morison protects King at every turn, at least in these early chapters.
Morison protects everyone at every turn, unless their name is Fletcher. I think he was a little more critical of King in The Battle of the Atlantic, but it's been a decade since I read that, so I could be wrong.
I haven't caught up part like chapter 2 yet (life is happening), but a while back I started in on Victory at Sea (which is freely available on YouTube)
There are several interesting and/or confusing editorial decisions made in that series. One of which (relevant to the discussion, I think) was the choice to spend an entire episode on the contributions from defense of ... Brazil.
The USN was prepared to fight and win a war without coffee. It didn't want to, though.
Re Brazil, I just read a Wikipedia article about US plans to occupy the northern portion of Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Rubber#CITEREFMoura2012
It seems the main concern was that Brazil would either be sympathetic to the Axis or simply unable to prevent the Germans from occupying part of the country. With hindsight the possibility of a German invasion of Brazil seems ridiculous but Germany had just pulled off its invasion of Norway which also seems ridiculous in hindsight. And Dakar was Vichy so they (sort of) had a jumping-off point.
The value of Brazil was two-fold. First, any enemy bases on its northern coast could threaten the approaches to the Panama Canal and oil shipments from Venezuela/Guiana/Curacao. The second was raw materials, most notably rubber. After the Japanese occupation of Malaya and Indonesia, Brazil was the main source of rubber available to the Allies.
It does appear that having an allied or sympathetically neutral Brazil was a major goal of American policy in 1941-42, and the Brazilian government had been intentionally playing up its sympathies with Germany in order to extract British and American concessions.
Victory at Sea came out in 1952. This was just before the high water point of McCarthyism, but concerns were high about "communist influence" in South America. I suspect the Brazil episode was the result of someone browbeating NBC based on 1950s politics, not 1940s history. See how good Tio Sam has been to you, Brazil?
@Steve-O: Yes, I have been analyzing it as a glimpse, not into the America of the Forties, but into the America of the Fifties.
As a history of WWII, it's not great. Adequate, but not great. As glimpse at the culture of the time of production, though...
One last thought, on Dönitz and the effectiveness of U-Boats:
Hitler admitted knowing nothing about naval matters, while being Head of Government for a war economy. What if, for whatever reason, he chose not to spend zero resources on blue-water ships? How many more U-Boats could Germany have had in September 1939, and could that have changed the outcome of the war, e.g. by starving Britain into a peace treaty?
Meant "chose to spend zero resources on...", stupid typo.
Well, in that case, he probably can't take Norway, and the U-boats only got really effective after they were able to start operating from bases in France. But it's also worth pointing out that Hitler was probably the main driver behind the later fleet program including the battleships, if I remember stuff I haven't looked into in a while correctly.
Yeah, putting as much into the blue-water Kriegsmarine as he did was probably the only way to conquer Norway, so the building decisions did have that upside for Hitler.
Was Norway worth invading? Worth enough to justify a fleet?
It was pretty valuable for the Nazi war effort in some ways (ability to attack the North Russia convoys, for example) but might have been a bad deal on net.
(This kind of question is always difficult to answer given if you try to remember the ways the war could have gone but didn't. If France doesn't fall apart, then U-boats are probably relatively less valuable because they're having to go all the way around the British Isles to get to the shipping lanes, and that takes a huge chunk of their endurance.)
I was very taken by the prose in this chapter. I think this is the best written one so far, even with the hagiography of King and FDR, which is limited.
I was also struck by how personally offended he seemed to be by the failure to black out the east coast. Additionally, I had forgotten that the blackout didn't happen until that late in the year.
As far as Norway goes, the reasons already listed here are fairly important, but I think a fairly important reason is that there's now a second port for Swedish iron ore that is actually controlled by the Germans. Ownership of the port effectively cuts off the possibility that the Allies would try to purchase the entire Swedish production, like the US did with Spanish tungsten in the 1944-45 timeframe. If there's no port, there's no real way to export it. Additionally, even though I don't know how much of it was shipped this way, it allows a higher rate of export to Germany, particularly in the winter, when the Baltic would freeze, but the Norwegian coast would stay open.
Yes, if Norway was neutral, the ships could sail south inside Norway's 12 mile limit, but we all know how useful that 12 mile limit was when Great Britain was existentially threatened.
Also, it was 3 miles at the time.