Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [62]
IN 1917, GERMANY HAD very nearly brought Great Britain to defeat and starvation by the use of submarines. She never came quite that close in World War II. There were periods when the Germans were actually winning, but in the longest and most crucial battle of the war, to keep the sea lanes to the United Kingdom open, the Royal Navy mastered the challenge. The Battle of the Atlantic was a super-scale Battle of Britain, spread out over five years.
There were several different aspects to it. The longest and most dangerous was between the escort vessels and the German submarines, and it started with the declaration of war and did not end definitively until the last German U-boat surrendered in May of 1945. This campaign passed through several phases, dictated both by geographical shifts of emphasis, and by the introduction of new tactics and techniques. When people speak of “the Battle of the Atlantic,” it is the submarine campaign they are usually thinking of.
Besides that, the Germans also had a respectable surface fleet. They did not hope to challenge the Royal Navy for overall control of the sea; their own fleet was not that strong. Instead, they used their battleships and pocket-battleships as raiders, sending them out on sorties designed to catch and destroy the occasional convoy. This was expensive for the British, for it meant that many of their large fleet units had to be employed as convoy escorts, in case a German battleship should suddenly loom over the horizon. But it was also expensive for the Germans, because the British eventually caught or ran to earth almost all of their major units. Some naval authorities argue that the whole surface effort on the part of the Germans was a vast and costly diversion, and that if the money, men, and material that were put into battleships had gone into submarines instead, Germany would have won the Battle of the Atlantic—and possibly the war.
This argument, which is central enough to the course of the war to explore for a moment, goes essentially back to the American naval theorist Alfred T. Mahan. Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, Mahan analyzed how Britain had gained her supremacy at sea and held it. His conclusion was that the dominant element in sea power was a large battle fleet able to destroy an enemy fleet, or blockade it in its harbors, so that one kept the seas open for one’s own use. Mere commerce raiding, he said, had never been decisive, and had always been a second-class alternative for a second-class power.
Just before he wrote, there was a French school of naval thought known as the Jeune école; its writers maintained that commerce raiding could indeed be decisive, especially against a state such as Great Britain that depended increasingly upon imports for its livelihood. Most writers and naval leaders, however, agreed with Mahan, and at the opening of the twentieth century all the navies of the world were busily building battleships. It was this race that produced the German High Seas Fleet which challenged the Royal Navy, and lost, in World War I.
The irony of Mahan’s writings was that at the very time when they were uncritically accepted, technology was producing weapons that challenged their validity. Steam and oil made close blockade increasingly difficult and the development of the submarine provided a commerce raider that was so effective that perhaps commerce raiding could win wars after all. The submarine in its early days, however, was not seen as a raider—Europe was too civilized for that—but rather as a weapon against enemy warships. Only as World War I progressed in nastiness did the submarine achieve its true role as a killer of merchant ships. When it did, the Germans very nearly won the war with it. Had they had more subs and fewer battleships, they probably would have won.
In 1939, both sides went to war with the experience of World War I fresh in their minds. The junior officers of the first war were the senior officers of the second. The Germans therefore immediately began submarine warfare, and