Air University Review, July-August 1978

Air War at Sea in World War II

In tracing the experiences of two convoys, SC 122 and HX 229, sailing eastward early in March 1943, Martin Middlebrook, in his book Convoy,† covers every conceivable aspect of U-boat and antisubmarine warfare (ASW): the status of Allied merchant shipping between 1939 and 1943; the tasks of naval and civilian men in convoys and of U-boat crews; both American and British convoys and routing procedures; the organization of a convoy and its escort; the operations conducted at "Onkel" Karl Doenitz's U-boat headquarters, including Allied code breaking; and enough battles between U-boats and surface escorts to satisfy the most bloodthirsty naval war buff. At the time, Allied air cover on both sides of the ocean was minimal. Middlebrook then portrays the eventual closing of the air gap, or black pit, between Greenland and Iceland, which widened greatly from north to south, by the use of long-range aircraft and of hunter-killer groups. Included are excellent descriptions of air versus U-boat warfare.

†Martin Middlebrook, Convoy (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1976, $12.50), 330 pages, appendixes, acknowledgments, illustrations, charts, index.

Middlebrook used a great variety of sources. In addition to researching official documents and secondary data, he interviewed many surviving Allied men and women who sailed in the convoys and the Germans who worked at U-boat head-quarters and operated the U-boats, and American and British aviators as well. He notes the contest between Admiral Ernest King and the Army Air Forces for responsibility for air ASW and the fragmentation of the long-range American and British air forces in North Africa and in ensuing American operations in the Pacific and in the Mediterranean. From the dispersion of this air power he concludes that the Army Air Forces knew that they must end their chasing of the rainbow of winning the war by the strategic bombing of Germany. Until late March 1943, such fragmentation precluded extensive air operations against U-boats. On 18 March 1943, a suggestion by President Franklin D. Roosevelt caused King to find B-24 Liberator bombers to operate out of Newfoundland and to institute support (Huk) groups. Germany's acoustic torpedoes, schnorkel boats, and advanced-design U-boats simply came too late to overcome Allied countermeasures.

While neither the British in 1989 nor the Americans in 1942 were prepared for ASW, Hitler's blindness to naval power predicated that few U-boats were ready for operations in 1939 and that only 37 new ones were built in 1940. Hitler thus gave the Allies time to build up naval escorts and air power. In the last six months of 1942, the sinking of U-boats by aircraft exceeded that by surface escorts. By late 1942, B-24 very-long-range Liberators, B-17E Flying Fortresses, and Sunderland flying boats flying out of Newfoundland, Iceland, Northern Ireland, and the Outer Hebrides, began covering convoys and killing U-boats. Radar, high-frequency direction finders, star shells, and Leigh lights helped find U-boats so that they could be depth charged and strafed, and in 1944 Tallboy bombs finally destroyed U-boat shelters along the French coast. With the Allied "Happy Time" in the Bay of Biscay, Doenitz shifted from attacking North Atlantic convoys to tonnage warfare. Shortage of modern escorts and of air cover nevertheless had nearly enabled Germany to cut communications between the old world and the new during the first three weeks of March 1943. Thereafter, to the end of the war, 590 U-boats were destroyed--290 by aircraft, 174 by ships, and the rest by combined ships and air or other causes. Middlebrook's annoying use of the passive voice notwithstanding, this is the best account of ASW warfare in the Atlantic known to this reviewer.

James Merrill’s popularly written biography, A Sailor's Admiral: A Biography of William F. Halsey,† deals largely with Halsey's career in World War II. He devotes only sixteen pages to pre-Pearl Harbor days and only eleven to Halsey's life following the surrender of Japan. The work supersedes the Halsey and J. Bryan III Admiral Halsey's Story (1947) and compares favorably with Frank Benis's Halsey (1974).

†James M. Merrill, A Sailor's Admiral: A Biography of William F. Halsey (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1976, $9.95), 256 pages, bibliographical note, bibliography, illustrations, index.

Halsey is a fabulous subject to write about because he was so colorful and also because he commanded carrier forces for four years in the Pacific war. In early 1942 he raided Wake and Marcus islands, and in April he took Doolittle's planes to within reach of Tokyo. Too late to fight in the Battle of the Coral Sea, he missed the Battle of Midway because of illness. From October 1942 on, as commander of naval forces in the South Pacific, he used his carriers to support the advance up the Solomons chain while MacArthur moved west along New Guinea. Not an intellectual admiral nor gifted with communications skills, he believed firmly in integral command; hence he stepped gingerly between serving under MacArthur's strategic direction while using forces provided by Nimitz. He chose good staff member and relied on their decisions except when his intuition told him to do otherwise. His expletives aside, he was a fighting sailor-aviator who became a sort of god to his men (this reviewer included). His apparent rashness at times grew out of the conviction of keeping pressure on the enemy at all times. He proved that carrier-based planes could knock out both Japan's carrier- and land-based air power. In part by leapfrogging, he helped the Allies break through the Bismarck Archipelago and knock out and neutralize Rabaul by early 1944.

By the summer of 1943, Nimitz had enough carriers to start his Central Pacific drive. While Raymond Spruance used the Fifth Fleet to take the Gilberts, Marshalls, and Marianas, Halsey, as Commander Third Fleet (the ships used in the Third and Fifth Fleet were the same), planned the next operations against the Western Carolines as a step toward the Philippines. Specific plans for the latter were made in conference with Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, Commander Seventh Fleet, early in September 1944. Strikes by "Pete" Mitscher's fast carriers, in Task Force 38, severely weakened Japanese air power from Iwo Jima and Okinawa to Formosa and Mindanao (September 1944) and caused the invasion to be launched at Leyte, in the central Philippines, instead of at Mindanao, to the south (October 1944).

For Leyte, Halsey was to support Kinkaid while the latter served as MacArthur’s navy. A problem to hinder the entire Philippine campaign was the lack of a unified command. Equals, MacArthur and Nimitz, took their orders from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but Nimitz had no direct communications link with Kinkaid and MacArthur. Kinkaid was responsible to MacArthur for landing and covering the Sixth Army; Halsey was under Nimitz's command and "operated by agreement" with MacArthur. Another problem was Halsey's operation order, which Merrill says Halsey wrote and had approved by Nimitz: i.e., if an opportunity offered or could be created to knock out a major portion of the Japanese fleet, this would become the "primary task" of his forces. Availing himself of his option, Halsey went north to destroy Ozawa's decoy carriers, leaving San Bernardino Strait uncovered and making it possible for Kurita almost to reach Leyte Gulf. While Merrill assigns demerits to Kinkaid as well as to Halsey, he also criticizes the use of two autonomous tactical fleet commands in the same operation. As for Halsey, Kinkaid was a "skunk" (per Hanson Baldwin), and any historian of Leyte Gulf who criticized him (Halsey) was a "son of a bitch."

Merrill is more sympathetic to Halsey than most historians have been and perhaps too lenient in his treatment of Halsey's handling of his fleet in not one but two typhoons, in one of which he lost three destroyers. He justifiably applauds his subsequent exploits in the South China Sea and notes that he probably did as well as a fleet commander with his "slapdash methods," which kept the enemy off balance, as did the logical and precise Spruance.

A Sailor's Admiral is good reading for those who like biography and for air buffs, too, for it shows how the Fifth Fleet--with a thousand or more planes embarked--greatly helped spell the doom of Japan.

John Winston, in his Air Power at Sea 1939-1945,† supplements Middlebrook and Merrill to a degree. His is a short book in which photographs take up as much space as the text.

†John Winton, Air Power at Sea 1939-1945 (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1977, $12.95), 187 pages, select bibliography, notes, illustrations, index.

The value of air power is proved on every page--to the Germans in the early days of World War II, to the Allies holding in the Mediterranean and finding and destroying the Bismarch, to the Japanese in their rapid conquest of the Southern Resources Area, to the Americans in the Battle of Midway. Winton jumps back to the Atlantic for the Channel Dash of the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, and Prinz Eugen, delivers a fine account of the creation and operations of the "jeep" carrier, then hops to the relief of Malta. He devotes one chapter to the U-boat menace and one to operations in the Arctic (largely the destruction of the Tirpitz) before ending his story with two chapters about the victory over Japan.

Winton's work, though solid, is obviously a condensation of secondary sources, and it is extremely episodic. Nevertheless, it includes critiques of British and American naval and air organization and administration as well as of air operations. Its stress on the importance of air power at war is excellently illustrated.

Operation "Menace," launched in the summer of 1940, is both subject and title of an impressive historical monograph by Arthur Marder.† This operation was based on faulty intelligence, particularly about Dakar's defenses and about the willingness of the French in Dakar to capitulate to a combined British-Free French force, the latter led by Charles de Gaulle, who greatly overestimated the extent of his backing by Frenchmen in Africa. Security for the operation was nonexistent, as was strategic intelligence for landing operations. The operation encountered delays, and communication-difficult at best between men of two nations-was extremely poor. Moreover, the British force commanders took passage in one ship and de Gaulle in another. Again it was proved that warships are useless against well-designed coastal fortifications manned by determined defenders (including the immobilized but powerful 15-inch guns of the Richelieu).

†Arthur Marder, Operation "Menace": The Dakar Expedition and the Dudley North Affair (London: Oxford University Press, 1976, $18.75), xxxv + 289 pages, illustrations, charts, index.

In response to events in equatorial Africa, Vichy France directed its Toulon squadron to transit the Strait of Gibraltar and sail south. Admiral Sir Dudley North, commanding at Gibraltar, already lacked the confidence of the Admiralty in consequence of the attack on the French Fleet at Oran (3 July 1940). As he read his ambiguously worded orders from the Admiralty, he felt justified in doing nothing about the passage of the French ships through the strait. He thus set himself up as the scapegoat for the operation desired by Churchill but opposed by almost all of his civil and military advisers. The Admiralty relieved North of his duties on 20 September 1940. Not until 1957 did Harold Macmillan issue a statement that might be characterized as a vindication for him.

Marder's account, based almost wholly on primary sources, is written in the only way that master naval historian can write--logically and lucidly: Air power played a part in the operation on 23 and 24 September, but fog hampered the work of planes carried by the Ark Royal, Britain's only modern carrier. But nature's fog was nothing compared with "the fog of war," or the lack of adequate intelligence on which to base an operation. Marder's book should be assigned reading for all statesmen and especially for staff officers, for everything that could go wrong went wrong in Operation "Menace." It is a masterful exposition of what not to do in combined operations.

Paolo E. Coletta, Captain, USN (Ret), (Ph.D., University of Missouri) is in the History Department, United States Naval Academy. He served with a Naval Reserves surface division from 1951 to 1955 and then taught strategy and tactics at Naval Reserve Officers School. His publications include a three-volume biography of William Jennings Bryan, The Presidency of William Howard Taft, and, forthcoming, The U.S. Navy and Defense Unification, 1947-1953. Dr. Coletta spent three wartime years in the Navy and retired after 30 years of Naval Reserve service.

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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