FDR - Jean Edward Smith [359]
On the home front the alphabet soup of wartime agencies created by FDR had soured and urgently needed attention. The War Manpower Commission (WMC), charged with allotting workers between military and civilian needs, competed with the Selective Service System (SSS) and the National War Labor Board (NWLB), both of which enjoyed independent statutory authority. The Office of Price Administration (OPA), responsible for controlling inflation, shared overlapping authority with the Office of Economic Stabilization (OES). And the War Production Board (WPB), denied power over both labor and prices, floundered under the erratic leadership of Donald Nelson, a former Sears, Roebuck sales executive congenitally incapable of making tough decisions. “It took Lincoln three years to discover Grant,” Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote FDR when Nelson was appointed, “and you may not have hit on your production Grant first crack out of the box.”3
But it was the military situation that was most pressing. The Battle of the Atlantic hung in the balance. In October 1942 German submarines sank 101 Allied merchant ships. In November the total rose to 134. Heavy losses continued through the winter. In January, as Churchill and Roosevelt met at Casablanca, submarines off West Africa demolished a tanker convoy carrying much-needed fuel to Eisenhower’s forces. Seven of the nine vessels were sunk in one of the most devastating attacks of the war.
In February and March 1943 merchant sinkings approached an all-time high. The Germans had 212 operational U-boats in the Atlantic (compared to 91 a year earlier) and were adding 17 each month. By contrast, Allied shipping tonnage—despite impressive American production figures—had declined by almost a million tons since the outbreak of war. “The Germans never came so near to disrupting communication between the New World and the Old as in the first twenty days of March, 1943,” said the Admiralty in retrospect.4
A modest breakthrough occurred in December 1942, when British intelligence officers at Bletchley Park outside London cracked the German naval code, allowing them to read U-boat message traffic. But the German decryption service had previously broken the British convoy cipher, so in effect both sides were reading each other’s mail.
The key to control of the Atlantic was airpower. Submarines of World War II vintage were unable to remain submerged for long periods of time, and when surfaced they were extremely vulnerable to air attack. In early 1943 small escort carriers began to arrive from American shipyards. These “baby flattops” carried up to twenty planes and provided some convoys their own air cover. But a vast midocean gap remained in which German U-boats operated with impunity. “Sinkings in the North Atlantic of 17 ships in two days are a final proof that our escorts are stretched too thin,” Churchill cabled FDR on March 18. The prime minister recommended the immediate cessation of all convoys to Russia so that aircraft and escort vessels could be shifted to the Atlantic.5
“We share your distress over recent sinkings,” Roosevelt replied. But he was reluctant to curtail convoys to Russia. Instead, the president suggested that additional long-range aircraft be assigned to the Atlantic theater. “I will provide as many as can be made available and I hope you can augment the number,” he told Churchill.6
As he had done when he ordered the invasion of North Africa contrary to the recommendation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Roosevelt assumed personal responsibility.