Inferno - Max Hastings [231]
Experience under fire in North Africa showed that wooden vessels were highly vulnerable. Steel variants were introduced, many of them assembled by a Florida farm-machinery contractor, which between 1943 and 1945 carried millions of Allied troops and tens of thousands of vehicles into battle. The Americans built a total of 42,000 such small craft and the British 3,000, nearly half of them in 1944; the United States also made 22,000 DUKW (“duck”) amphibious trucks and amtracs, the latter used almost exclusively in the Pacific. Yet even this vast inventory—what Americans christened the “gator navy”—never sufficed to satisfy demand: 2,470 small craft were required merely for the initial phase of D-Day in Normandy.
Shortage of assault shipping was a chronic constraint on Allied strategy, and Churchill frequently lamented British dependence on U.S. 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 United States eventually provided 47 percent of the British Empire’s armour, 21 percent of small arms, 38 percent of landing ships and landing craft, 18 percent of combat planes and 60 percent of transport aircraft. So great became American capacity that deliveries to Britain amounted to only 11.5 percent of U.S. 1943–44 production: 13.5 percent of aircraft, 5 percent of food, and 8.8 percent 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 U.S. air and maritime power impacted sooner. Most of the soldiers who later fought in northwest Europe enjoyed the luxury—and endured the boredom—of more than two years’ training before being committed to action: the majority of U.S. 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!’ ”
Bob Raymond, an airman from Kansas City, came to Britain to serve first with the RAF and later with 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 short-cut, direct business methods are heartily resisted … Too much tea-drinking, Friday-to-Monday weekends,