All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [229]
Shortage of assault shipping was a chronic constraint on Allied strategy, and Churchill frequently lamented British dependence on US bottoms. No amphibious operation could be mounted unless Washington willed it. Britain’s forces also called upon Lend-Lease for a growing proportion of their weapons requirements. Britain’s production of tanks fell from 8,600 in 1942 to 4,600 in 1944, of artillery pieces from 43,000 to 16,000. The US eventually provided 47 per cent of the British Empire’s armour, 21 per cent of small arms, 38 per cent of landing ships and landing craft, 18 per cent of combat planes and 60 per cent of transport aircraft. So great became American capacity that deliveries to Britain amounted to only 11.5 per cent of US 1943–44 production: 13.5 per cent of aircraft, 5 per cent of food, 8.8 per cent of guns and ammunition. British industry meanwhile focused on heavy bombers – the strategic air offensive engaged around one-third of national output, which does much to explain why Britain attached such importance to its achievements and shortcomings.
After Pearl Harbor, there was an interval of thirty months – a long time in the context of a seventy-one-month war – before America’s military and industrial mobilisation translated into large armies deployed on European battlefields, though US air and maritime power impacted sooner. Most of the soldiers who later fought in north-west Europe enjoyed the luxury – and endured the boredom – of more than two years’ training before being committed to action: the majority of US formations did not see their first battlefield until 1944. In 1942 the United States sent most of its Marine Corps and a few army divisions to the Pacific, and tens of thousands more soldiers to Iceland and Northern Ireland.
Americans began to descend on Britain in large numbers. Some warmed to the quaintness of Churchill’s battered islands, but many questioned their inhabitants’ commitment both to the mid-twentieth century and to waging war effectively. ‘The English were kind to us, especially when they got to know us,’ wrote an armoured officer, Haynes Dugan. ‘There were some wonderful parties, although supplies were low.’ Dugan never forgot one such gathering, at which a young Welsh paratroop officer sang in his own language. The American was bemused to discover that, amid the national clothing shortage, a woman guest was wearing a dress made from her own curtains. He recorded, ‘The shopkeepers had a favorite saying: “It isn’t rationed, old boy, we simply can’t get it!”’
Airman Bob Raymond, from Kansas City, came to Britain to serve first with the RAF, later the USAAF. He wrote home in May 1942: ‘The force of tradition and precedent is so strong that thinking in politics, business, religion, etc. seems to have congealed. They are the most economically backward people I’ve ever encountered. Labor-saving devices and shortcut, direct business methods are heartily resisted … Too much tea-drinking, Friday-to-Monday weekends, holidays etc.’ A US government survey of domestic opinion on 25 March 1942 reported: ‘Americans have a greater confidence in the intensity of the Russian war effort than in the intensity of the British war effort; they feel that Russians are putting our Lend-Lease supplies to better use … Lack of confidence in British war effort has become more strongly marked since the fall of Singapore.’ The British were under no illusions about their low standing: ‘The Americans … know us chiefly as a nation suffering from a slow decay,’ asserted a January 1943 War Office report, ‘a nation of superior, unfriendly, discourteous people, set in the old ways of inefficiency,