September 30, 2006
Antisubmarine Warfare Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:10 PM EST The lead article on this website today, Blimps At War, by Nicholas Nirgiotis, describes the intriguing and almost-unknown role of blimps in the Battle of the Atlantic, the fight against German submarines during the Second World War. The Battle of the Atlantic was absolutely vital. Churchill later wrote that “the only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril”. Using only 30 words out of 3,300, Mr. Nirgiotis passes very tactfully over the degree to which remarkably bad American strategy vastly magnified that peril: “Poor planning by the Allies helped them. Merchant ships were permitted to sail singly and unescorted and to transmit their positions in uncoded radio messages.” In fact the US Navy actively resisted using convoys, as the Royal Navy had earlier in the war, as both navies had initially done in the First World War, and as the Japanese did in the Second World War. The history of antisubmarine warfare makes for depressing reading. Navies strenuously resisted convoying, an immensely effective tactic against a deadly threat. At critical moments air forces strenuously resisted deploying long-range aircraft to cover areas where land-based aircraft couldn’t reach: at the height of the Battle of the Atlantic, Air Marshal Harris, the head of the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command, refused allow to four-engine bombers to patrol the midocean gap. A handful of B-24D Liberators eventually did that, to immediate and great effect. Why did this happen? Both Robert O’Connell’s Of Arms and Men, the most fascinating single book on war I have ever read, and Richard Overy’s Why the Allies Won, a superb book on the Second World War, persuasively argue that very strong and very old instincts worked against effective antisubmarine tactics. The most effective way to protect merchant shipping was widely deprecated as a passive tactic: Convoy escorts can only engage the enemy when he chooses to attack, and naval officers vastly preferred offensive tactics, searching out the enemy, and initiating combat themselves. Unfortunately, this preference played to the submarine’s strength, since for most of the war hunter-killer groups could not effectively locate submarines and bring them to battle. But the submarines had to engage the escorts, if they chose to attack the convoys, which was the submarine’s reason for being. Convoys had other advantages: escorts forced submarines to stay submerged by day, and this made it harder for submarines to attack at all, since the submerged speed of a submarine was less than that of many merchantmen, whereas a submarine on the surface was faster than a merchantman. But a real fighting sailor is not supposed to wait and let the enemy come to him, and he is not supposed to employ tactics designed to minimize combat with the enemy. That rigid notion of what a real fighting sailor is supposed to do almost cost us two world wars. That rigidity has an unpleasant ring. When truly judicious and dispassionate post-mortems on Iraq are done—we may wait a long time for them to appear—the lessons of our current war may look nothing like the lessons we are drawing now, while that war still rages. But one lesson drawn now looks plausible: A lot of observers are insisting that some large portion of our difficulties in Iraq sprang from the fact that some sections of the American Army, and its political masters, had a strong and durable disinclination to understand themselves as necessarily engaging in counterinsurgency warfare and state-building. Those activities, apparently, are not what American soldiers are supposed to do.
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