Blackett's War (33 page)

THE COMMAND STRUCTURE
of the U.S. Navy was a holy mess. Responsibility for antisubmarine warfare was split up among a dozen different commands; no one was in charge. Actual operational control of antisubmarine patrols along the Atlantic coast rested with the admirals who commanded the separate naval districts based at each of the major ports (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Norfolk, Charleston, and Miami), but the ships themselves belonged to the Atlantic Fleet. The commander of the fleet was supposed to be in charge of all antisubmarine training but had no authority to issue orders to the district commandants. Overlapping the naval districts, another layer of authority had been hastily added in 1941: the “sea frontiers,” which were a halfhearted attempt to establish higher-level coordination for the defense of shipping lanes on the approaches to the American coast. The Eastern Sea Frontier was based in New York, with responsibility for the coast from Maine to Florida; there was also a Gulf Sea Frontier and a Caribbean Sea Frontier. The launch of the U-boat offensive along the American
coast had thrust the Eastern Sea Frontier front and center, but in 1942 it was still little more than a paper command, with an office on the fifteenth floor of the Federal Building at 90 Church Street in lower Manhattan. Though administratively equal to the Atlantic Fleet, the sea frontier commanders, like the naval district commanders, had no destroyers or other ships permanently assigned to them; they could only “request” the Atlantic Fleet to detach ships to them. Overall responsibility for developing antisubmarine doctrine and procedures rested in yet another place, the staff of the U.S. Fleet commander in Washington.

The position of commander-in-chief, U.S. Fleet—CominCh—was also something new in the navy command structure. FDR had ordered the creation of the post in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor; for the first time, it gave direct operational authority over the entire navy to a single top admiral, based in Washington. While a much needed step in theory, in practice the immediate effect was to sow even more chaos and confusion in the lines of authority throughout the navy, the antisubmarine campaign in particular.

Some but not all of that chaos stemmed from the personality of the man chosen for the job. Admiral Ernest J. King was brilliant, capable, and confident. He was also bullheaded, ruthless, and vindictive. In 1939 everyone in the navy, King included, had been certain his career was over. Passed over for the position of chief of naval operations, the service chief of the navy, he had been shunted off to the General Board, the place where over-the-hill admirals were put out to pasture, whiling away their few years before retirement writing studies that sat unread on the shelves of the secretary of the navy’s office.

At age sixty, King had made almost nothing but enemies in his four-decade career in the service. He bad-mouthed rivals, contemptuously dismissed subordinates, bristled at even mild advice from superiors; off hours he drank like a fish and remorselessly chased fellow officers’ wives. “His appeal to women was most unusual,” remarked one wondering officer.
¹⁸
The appeal was apparently that he could be charming on social occasions, was a good dancer and an intelligent and interesting conversationalist, and did not hesitate to proposition any attractive woman who came along. His wife remained installed in a home in Annapolis he had purchased shortly after they were married in 1905 and raised the couple’s six daughters and a son while King followed his naval career, and other pursuits.

There was no doubt, though, that King got things done. He was always more determined, more energetic, more demanding than anyone around
him. His sheer stamina was legendary. He was no intellectual but nonetheless possessed a formidable natural intellect, and the drive to put it to use when required. At age forty-seven he had earned his wings so that he could command an aircraft carrier. After a moment of despair upon being assigned to the General Board, he astonished everyone by taking the job seriously, throwing himself into a series of complex studies, putting in improbable hours at his desk in Washington. “They’re not done with me yet,” he told an acquaintance he ran into in a Navy Department corridor.
¹⁹

In December 1940 Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox was looking for a commander to take charge of Atlantic escort operations and decided to bring King off of the sidelines—for one last tour. King immediately put his ships on a war footing and made it clear they were going to take the offensive in the Atlantic in the as yet undeclared war with the Nazi U-boats. In the aftermath of the destroyer
Greer
’s depth charge battle with a U-boat in September 1941, he called in the ship’s commander to reassure him. “As long as I command the Atlantic Fleet,” King told him, “no one is going to nail your tail to the mast because you defended yourself.”
²⁰

The coming of the war rescued King’s career. “When they run into trouble, they send for the sons of bitches,” he reportedly commented on his change of fortune after being appointed CominCh. The most famous observation about King was one attributed to his daughter: “My father is the most even-tempered man in the navy. He is always in a rage.” Roosevelt had heard the other joke that had been making the rounds about King for years, that he “shaved with a blow torch,” and the president sent him a letter quoting the line and saying how glad he was to have “the toughest man in the navy” in charge. FDR added: “P.S. I am trying to verify another rumor—that you cut your toenails with a torpedo net cutter.”
²¹
There was no doubt that the navy, and the country, needed someone with King’s aggressive spirit to put some confidence back into the navy in the wake of Pearl Harbor.

But in the rapidly deteriorating war with the U-boats along the coast of the United States, nearly everything King did for the first few months only muddied the waters further. The formation of Baker’s ASW unit within the Atlantic Fleet had been a small step toward bringing some central coordination to the effort. It was undermined by King’s own repeated insistence on the very traditional navy view of decentralized authority: the captain of the ship was the ultimate word. Upon taking command of the Atlantic Fleet the year before he had promulgated a famous order on the “initiative of the subordinate,” lambasting flag officers for issuing instructions to the individual
ship’s captains under their authority telling them “how” as well as “what” to do. As CominCh, King insisted at first on keeping the staff to an unrealistically small size, no more than 300 officers. When the Atlantic Fleet tried to issue its first manual for antisubmarine warfare, the fleet’s staff first had to receive approval from CominCh—which refused to print enough copies to distribute to every ship. When Vice Admiral Adolphus Andrews, the commander of the Eastern Sea Frontier, issued an order to one district commandant spelling out antisubmarine patrol procedures, King “practically hit the ceiling,” recalled one aide. The commander-in-chief sent a curt signal canceling Andrews’s order and telling him off: “Do not presume you are on the bridge of every ship under your command.”
²²

By the same token, King refused to override Andrews’s misbegotten decision not to organize convoys of coastal traffic even in the face of the mounting losses to the U-boats. Andrews argued that until he had enough escorts it would be best to let the freighters and tankers continue to sail individually. Weakly escorted convoys, he insisted, would be worse than no convoys at all. In fact, even
unescorted
convoys were an effective counter to U-boats, particularly those operating singly as Dönitz’s
Paukenschlag
forces were. A convoy substantially reduced the opportunity for a U-boat to find a target in the first place, and did not significantly increase the chances that more than one ship would be sunk even when a convoy was spotted.

Much has been made of King’s anglophobia as an explanation for the American failure to institute convoys or otherwise benefit from British knowledge and experience during those disastrous opening months of the war for America. King did make it abundantly clear that he would be damned if the United States was going to play second fiddle to the Royal Navy and dismissed out of hand a British proposal to place the joint Anglo-American naval forces in the Atlantic under a single—British—admiral. But the far more important factor was that the U.S. Navy lacked the command structure to put any British knowledge to use even if it cared to. The shortage of surface ships and aircraft did not help, but that was not the main problem either. The main problem was that all of the various pieces of the antisubmarine campaign, from training to doctrine to operations, were parceled out among various commands, all of which had other duties as well. No one commander was actually responsible for understanding the whole picture, or doing something about it.

That was the real lesson the United States needed to learn from its more
experienced ally. Coordination with air forces, or rather the lack thereof, was especially telling. The British services had been through a tug-of-war between the navy and the air force over control of naval aviation very much as the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy had, but far more important than the decision to place RAF Coastal Command under Admiralty control in April 1941 was the fact that the headquarters for the two most important air and sea commands fighting the U-boats—Western Approaches Command and Coastal Command’s No. 15 Group—were located side by side in the Liverpool command center. They closely coordinated air patrols with surface escorts and convoys. The day after Pearl Harbor the U.S. Army Air Forces I Bomber Command began sea patrols along the Atlantic coast of the United States, but it took until the end of March to work out even a preliminary agreement clarifying the command relationships and giving authority over antisubmarine air patrols to the Eastern Sea Frontier headquarters in New York. It was May before a Gulf Task Force from I Bomber Command was detached to Charleston, South Carolina, under a similar arrangement with the Gulf Sea Frontier.
²³

Worst of all was the intelligence situation. The U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Intelligence had long since become a retirement home for incompetent officers who washed out in sea commands. Its key functions were thoroughly cannibalized by other departments of the navy. The aggressive commander of the War Plans Division, Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, had wrested control of operational intelligence away from ONI even though he had no experience or knowledge of intelligence matters. (He was, though, a master intellectual bully: he had once taken a crash course in music just so he could convincingly chew out the band on a ship he commanded.)
²⁴
The Office of Naval Communications meanwhile seized effective control of all signals intelligence and code breaking in another bureaucratic skirmish. ONI was left with compiling static assessments of the order of battle of foreign navies, collecting attaché reports that were little better than what could be had from clipping local newspapers, and carrying out often clumsy and incompetent security investigations to ferret out real or imagined spies and domestic subversives.

A small Convoy and Routing Section had been established at navy headquarters in Washington in November 1941 to organize and keep track of the transatlantic convoys, but it did not deal with intelligence about U-boat locations. It was again left largely up to the individual district and sea frontier
commanders to pick up the ball and try to maintain their own map plots with their own small intelligence units.

The British Operational Intelligence Centre was almost everything the U.S. Navy’s intelligence system was not. It brought together intelligence from all sources—radio direction finding from U-boat transmissions, Enigma decrypts, sightings by aircraft and surface ships, prisoner interrogation reports, and a growing file of accumulated clues about individual U-boat captains and their tactics and habits—to maintain a constantly updated picture of U-boat movements and dispositions in relation to current convoy locations. The OIC also had the authority to forward their findings directly to commanders in charge of convoy routing and antisubmarine operations.

The resident genius of the OIC’s Submarine Tracking Room was a remarkable man, Rodger Winn. The ravages of polio contracted in childhood had left him twisted and gnomelike, with a terrible limp and a severely crooked back. Thirty-eight years old, he was a barrister in civilian life. His deformity would have normally made him ineligible for naval service at all but the navy arranged a direct commission for him as a commander in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserves. Winn had exactly the kind of mind and instincts for the job, the sharp lawyer’s ability to piece together often contradictory and incomplete data to form a picture of the whole, and was legendary for his almost sixth sense—or so it seemed to those not as steeped in operational intelligence as he was—to know where the U-boats were going to be next.

On April 19, 1942, Winn arrived in Washington hoping to convince his American counterparts that they needed a thorough reorganization of their intelligence system to stem the tide of disasters besetting Allied shipping in American waters. It took him several days to get in to see Rear Admiral Richard S. Edwards, King’s deputy chief of staff. Winn made his case that the U.S. Navy needed to centralize its submarine intelligence just as the British had. Edwards, displaying a full measure of U.S. Navy anglophobia, retorted that the United States did not need the British to teach them anything, and moreover that if America wanted to lose ships that was her business: America had plenty of ships and could afford to lose them. Edwards also blithely insisted that it was impossible to forecast U-boat movements, thus futile to try to reroute convoys around them.

Winn, who had spent time in the United States as a student at Harvard and Yale, was well aware of what he described as the American bent for straight talking and decided to let Edwards have it. “The trouble is, Admiral,”
he began, “it’s not only your bloody ships you’re losing, a lot of them are ours. And we’re not prepared to sacrifice men and ships to your bloody incompetence and obstinacy!”