The British Admiralty's greatest problems in World War II were rooted in decisions taken during and after World War I, aggravated by the unwillingness of British statesmen, including Prime Ministers Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, and Winston Churchill, to adopt foreign policies and grand strategies that the Royal Navy might reasonably uphold. The establishment of an independent Royal Air Force in 1918 with control over the Fleet Air Arm led directly to the loss of the navy's early lead in carrier-and land-based naval aviation with the result that the fleet entered World War II with too few carriers, a small inventory of obsolete naval aircraft, an indifferent naval air doctrine, not one high-level flag officer with a background in naval aviation, and few naval aviators senior enough to assume higher commands.
The pre-World War II Admiralty itself badly misread the meaning of the 1914-18 war against the U-boat. It reposed excessive confidence in its newly-invented echo-ranging sonar, or asdic, system, and paid little attention to developing new escort and anti-submarine doctrines, weapons, and tactics that took into account the improved endurance, ruggedness, and tactical flexibility of Germany's recently constructed U-boats. Little thought was given to devising ways to counter U-boats by deploying long-range, land-based maritime patrol planes or air-or seaborne radars. This was greatly complicated by Churchill's commitment in June 1940 to the defense of Malta, Suez, and the eastern Mediterranean, a strategy that sought out the enemy wherever he happened to be, spread out the British fleet entirely too thin, and repeatedly and unnecessarily exposed Royal Navy warships undefended by combat air cover to Axis land-based air forces in restricted waters.
What if the Royal Navy had maintained its early supremacy in carrier-based naval aviation throughout the interwar years and had entered the war with a powerful land and sea-based naval air arm? More and heavier British carriers, better armed, faster, and more rugged naval aircraft, and a reasonable naval air tactical doctrine surely would have made more difficult the German occupation of Norway, and considerably reduced the danger of cross-Channel invasion shortly thereafter. All British estimates of German invasion plans concluded that some invasion flotillas would have to venture at least ninety miles out to sea, at which point their land-based air cover could easily have been disputed by mobile carrier-based fighter and bomber squadrons.
But no amount of British naval air could have compensated for Churchill's disastrous insistence on holding Malta and Suez rather than falling back to Gibraltar and Aden, a strategy the Americans urged on him in 1941 and early 1942. A powerful multi-carrier-battleship task force based on Singapore and supported by squadrons of land-based fighters and maritime patrol bombers surely would have forced the Japanese to concentrate their carriers in the South China Sea in 1941, and made the occupation of Malaya and Singapore a quite contestable proposition. Instead, the small British Far Eastern Fleet had to rely on a mere handful of overtaxed land-based bombers on 10 December 1941.
The loss of that fleet made it possible for the Japanese to quickly isolate Singapore and the Philippines, and advance headlong into the Dutch East Indies, the Marshall Islands and Gilberts with no thought of danger to their southeastern flank. A substantial British carrier force, even one forced to withdraw from Singapore to Ceylon, would have confronted the Japanese Navy with the intractable problem of a two-ocean war in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.
Had the Japanese Navy been faced with a real prospect of conducting a large-scale naval war on two fronts in 1941, its support for Prime Minister Hideki Tojo's war policy surely would have been less vocal. A two-ocean front was what Admiral King intended to create when he urged the Admiralty on the eve of the action off Midway to use their old battleships and carriers in the Indian Ocean to conduct a quick raid on Timor. The mere presence of a British modern “fleet-in-being” in the Indian Ocean would have caused even more one-sided outcomes in the Coral Sea, off Midway, and in the South Pacific in 1942 and 1943, and so led to a considerable acceleration of the U.S. Pacific Fleet's great Central Pacific offensive along the Gilberts-Marshalls-Marianas-Formosa line.
Had the Admiralty recognized earlier than late 1939 the German U-boat threat and prepared for it accordingly, the course of the war would have been materially altered. A large-scale destroyer and light destroyer escort program and a supporting program to develop powerful land-based maritime patrol plane forces were easily within Britain's means in the mid- and late-1930s, although it would have come about at the expense of the Royal Navy's battleship and cruiser programs and the Royal Air Force's bomber program – but not at the cost of the naval aviation program.
Building austere escorts consumed fewer resources than constructing U-boats, and the British possessed throughout the war a far larger shipbuilding capacity than the Germans. If Churchill and the Admiralty had dedicated themselves first and foremost to the defense of the British Isles and its sea lines of communications to the Empire in North America, Africa, the Persian Gulf, and South and Southeast Asia, then the construction and organization of powerful ocean escort groups, land-based maritime patrol squadrons, and light carrier anti-submarine hunter-killer formations would have been their top priority. Early success in defending convoys and counterattacking U-boats, especially after the Germans began to operate from bases on the Bay of Biscay in late 1940, might have persuaded Hitler that Admiral Karl Dönitz's U-boat arm was as useless and costly as Admiral Raeder's battleships and heavy cruisers. Had the U-boat been defeated in 1941, as it well might have been had Churchill adopted a different policy, most American shipyards could have been used to produce shore-to-shore landing craft with the result that the date of the re-entry of the Allied forces onto the Continent would have been advanced by at least a year or two.
The Royal Navy's capture of the U-110 and its codebooks and grid charts in May 1941 enabled British cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park to read German message traffic in Hydra, one of thirteen ciphers used by the German Navy during the war. Hydra carried many of the command directives from Dönitz to his deployed U-boats. Ultra also enabled the British to read German traffic concerning German heavy unit operations, deployments to the Mediterranean and U-boat training in the Baltic. Ultra clearly provided the Admiralty with the means to conduct several evasive routing operations in mid-and late 1941, but the U-boats' success in turning back SC.52 – the only convoy turned back during the entire war – suggests that radio intelligence was by no means the most important key to defense of the transatlantic convoys. It must also be remembered that at the same time German Navy codebreakers had successfully attacked British Naval Cipher No.3, an older U.S. Navy code which the Admiralty had adopted at American insistence in 1941 to carry Anglo-American-Canadian convoy and routing messages.
In the absence of an extensive and more thoroughly-researched scholarship on the importance of these two intelligence coups – research made virtually impossible by the British Minister of Defense's refusal to declassify the most critical Allied message traffic based on Ultra for the better part of 1943 – two good working propositions are that the Admiralty want to conceal some dreadful mistake or misappreciations; and, that the British, the Americans, or both made poor use of Ultra that year. In short, it is likely that some of the work of the rival special intelligence services cancelled one another out. Moreover, at best – when Hydra and later, after February 1943, when Triton, a replacement cipher, were being translated concurrently – the level of confidence in Ultra naval traffic was surprisingly low. Lag time constrained evasive routing and anti submarine operations throughout the war, the Germans were skilled in the use of deceptive tech niques that often spoofed the Admiralty, and many successful U-boat concentrations were simply the product of chance encounters and Dönitz's quick-thinking responses.
The one obvious tactical lesson of the Battle of the Atlantic was that convoys strongly defended by large numbers of powerful, well-equipped, well-trained, and well-led ocean escort groups, and supported by nearby land-based maritime patrol aircraft and hunter-killer carrier task groups, could not be seriously menaced even by very large, skilfully handled diesel submarine concentrations. The large number of heavily defended, uniformly successful American-escorted transatlantic troop convoy crossings demon strated this as well. It now appears, therefore, that the value of radio intelligence in defeating the U-boat offensive has been greatly exaggerated by some scholars. Its importance was probably negligible by contrast to that of more the traditional elements of convoy warfare, such as the available escort pool inventory, the commitment of land-based and carrier-borne aircraft to covering and anti-submarine operations the overall level of materiel availability and quality, and the tactical efficiency of the ocean escort groups and their supporting air and sea elements.
The German navy's major problem in World War II stemmed more from its failure to appreciate the naval lessons of World War I than from Hitler's alleged ‘land-power’ outlook. German victory in 1914-18 hinged on defeating France and Russia, not on challenging Britain. Hitler's World War II policy of favoring his ground and air arms was therefore quite reasonable. What was unsound was to deny the German Navy any control over the design, production, or operation of most land-based maritime patrol bombers. Equally mistaken was German failure to provide for a truly unified anti shipping command with naval officers exercising control of anti-shipping aircraft and coastal defense operations. Even more self-defeating was the German navy's prewar Z-plan, a shipbuilding program that aimed at rebuilding the Wilhelmine navy, a balanced fleet policy that distributed scarce shipbuilding resources too widely and failed utterly to take into account the velocity of Hitler's diplomacy and grand strategy. The result was to leave Germany in 1939 with a handful of superb capital ships, but few screening escorts, obsolete naval weapons systems, too few long-range submarines, no truly effective anti-warship bombing capability, and an inadequate inventory of small coastal defense vessels such as swift torpedo boats and minelayers.
Having lost World War I in part owing to a U-boat fleet that was too small to isolate Britain or prevent the U.S. Navy from transporting the American Expeditionary Force to western France in 1918, the German Navy, nonetheless, planned in the 1930s to build a balanced fleet without much regard for what those ships might do to advance Hitler's foreign policy objectives other than enhancing Germany peacetime prestige. If the German Navy, instead of diversifying its naval construction, had devoted these resources to building more and better U-boats, and after 1940, a huge fleet of swift, radar-controlled coastal defense torpedo boats and mine craft, it would have more rationally applied its limited industrial resources. The steel, skilled manpower, tools, gear-cutting resources, electro-mechanical output, and shipyard capacity used to build the battleships Bismarck and Tirpitz, and the cruisers Gneisenau, Prince Eugen, and Scharnhorst would have paid for at least another two or three hundred U-boats, a lethal frontline force which would have forced the allies to devote even more of their resources to ocean escort groups and antisubmarine operations and thus delayed even longer the cross-channel movement. The active presence of very large numbers of fast torpedo boats on the French coast in 1944, supported by night-fighters and maritime patrol bombers and backed up by a large fleet of minelayers, would not only have menaced the establishment of an allied lodgment on the Cotentin Peninsula but also would have diverted Allied resources that were devoted to transatlantic and cross-channel shipping into costly escort and minesweeping forces.
If the German Navy had adopted a prewar and wartime building policy that eschewed battleships and heavy cruisers and instead stressed U-boats, submarine tankers, E-boats, coastal minelayers, shore-to-shore landing ships, and maritime patrol bombers armed with modern air-launched anti-ship bombs and torpedoes, Britain might truly have been endangered. Once France capitulated and Britain rejected Hitler's peace terms, the war at sea was clearly to be won or lost within the war zone in the English Channel, around the British Isles, and along the coast of occupied Europe.
Inasmuch as British industry, agriculture, and military operations depended greatly on imports, Admiral Dönitz's “tonnage warfare” strategy was a reasonable way of wounding Germany's most persistent enemy. But Dönitz had fewer than sixty U-boats in September 1939, and only a fraction of that number to deploy into the war zone. Aircraft and submarine anti-shipping operations were wholly uncoordinated. Even at the supposed height of the Battle of the Atlantic, the pseudo-crisis of March 1943, the German Navy had fewer than 100 frontline line U-boats dedicated to the transatlantic anti-shipping campaign, and fewer than half of these vessels were actually in or near the main area of operations. The epic cruise of the Bismarck, the gallant 1942 Channel Dash, and the raids of the Scheer and the Hipper boosted German morale, but building manning, and operating these extremely expensive ships cost the U-boat arm and the German coastal defense commands hundreds of vessels and uncounted hours of steaming time. Like the Danes and the Confederates in the nineteenth century, Germans in World War II learned that building a small capital ship fleet and engaging a superior naval power without arranging for offsetting assets is a recipe for strategic disaster.
The Imperial Japanese Navy which struck the first blow against Pearl Harbor was a polished weapon forged specifically to wage war against either the United States or Britain in the western Pacific or the South China Sea. It could not, however, fight both in the Pacific and the Indian Ocean at the same time, nor could it defend itself against a major campaign of attrition and still guard its interior sea lines of communications against anti-shipping raids by powerful, long-range submarine forces. The Japanese rearmed more quickly than their rivals in the 1930s, and the opposing alliance systems which evolved in 1941 forced Japan's foremost enemy, the U.S. Navy, to divide its ships between two distant theaters. The Japanese had some materiel advantages. Their Fubuki-class destroyers were superior to prewar American types, and their two Yamato-class superbattleships had the largest guns, heaviest armor, and greatest displacement of any contemporary warship. Japanese cruisers, slightly faster and more heavily armed than comparable American classes, had tubes to fire the Long Lance torpedo, an accurate, long-range, lethal weapon designed with night surface actions in mind.
On the whole, however, the Japanese were unprepared to wage modern naval war. Above all, quarrelsome, backward-looking military leaders wasted limited resources. Tokyo's faction-ridden national government lacked a single strong leader, being run instead by superstitious fanatics. An almost complete lack of economic intelligence blinded the Japanese high command to what its military and naval forces faced in the combat theaters. Political, strategic, and tactical coordination at a national level, and strategic and tactical collaboration at theater levels between the Army and Navy was virtually non-existent. Naval leadership was inspired but foolish. The commander of the Combined Fleet, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, had spent years in Britain and the United States before the war, but his wartime strategy suggests that he had really learned very little from these experiences. He totally misread the U.S. Navy's strategy on so many occasions in 1942 that the American decision to ambush his plane over the Solomons in early 1943 seems questionable in retrospect. Yamamoto's insistence on attacking Pearl Harbor must rank as a strategic blunder without modern parallel. It is mystery why he failed to understand that the Pacific Fleet's slow World War I-era battleships and trio of “treaty-class” carriers posed no serious threat to the Japanese offensive in the Western Pacific. Yamamoto's handling of his carriers before the battle off Midway almost assured their destruction, and his acceptance of an air war of attrition with the Americans in the Lower Solomons in September 1942 simply invited defeat.
Surprising as it might seem, the Japanese Navy had devised no realistic industrial policy to support its far-flung overseas military and naval operations. The result was that materiel shortages, deficiencies, and defects led to repeated setbacks. The Japanese designed some fine aircraft in the 1930s – although the vaunted Zero fighter has been vastly overrated – but the Imperial Navy's war planning was so deficient that it had arranged no workable system to compensate for the inevitable attrition to frontline planes or experienced naval aviators. Japan's I-class submarines were unequal to the demands of the Pacific War and the Imperial Navy's use of them was wasteful. Although Japan imported most of her raw materials, she never developed an effective convoy system, an appropriate escort doctrine, and adequate escort force, or a small, mobilization-class escort and anti-submarine ship comparable to the mass-produced Canadian corvette or the American destroyer escort.
Had the Japanese more carefully evaluated their opponents and acted accordingly, the outcome of the war might have been very different. As it was, Japan's understanding of her predicament was exceptionally primitive. The contents of the 1940 Two Ocean Navy Act were well known. Any reasonable appreciation of that shipbuilding program should have convinced the Imperial Navy's high command that war with the U.S. Navy would be suicidal. But Japan had other enemies: the Soviet Union, Britain, the Netherlands, and above all, China. Japan's best hope of destroying the British Empire in Asia and acquiring the Dutch East Indies lay with the success of the German campaign against Russia. Once the Soviets had collapsed, the Germans were certain to turn their attention back to Britain and further concentrate American resources on that conflict. Had the Japanese Navy been less insular, less parochial, its leaders would have pressed after June 1941 for the “northern strategy” against Russia and admitted that the Combined Fleet could not hold the South and Central Pacific against the Americans in a protracted war. It seems doubtful that the Soviets would have survived the resulting pressure on both flanks.
An alternative, but riskier strategy would have been to recognize and exploit the divisions within American politics by avoiding war with the United States while engaging the Thais, the British, and the Dutch. The time to have done this was after soon after June 1940. The Dutch East Indies fleet was negligible, and the British fleet was tied down by the neutral French Navy, the Italians in the Mediterranean, the defense of the English Channel, and the U-boat offensive in the Atlantic. The United States had no treaty commitment to defend Europe's colonial empires, and the Japanese should have reasoned that Washington's failure to come to the defense of the Netherlands or the British Isles against Germany meant that the chance of American entry into a war by Japan against the European colonial powers was highly unlikely. The 1942 campaign in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific suggests that such a war would have been short and decisive. This was, of course, what the Americans feared, and the reason that the U.S. Navy devised a 1939 plan to shift the U.S. Fleet from its bases on the West Coast to Pearl Harbor and implemented it in the spring of 1940. By failing to properly evaluate the obsolescence of those World War I-era American battleships and the hollowness of the political threat they were supposed to represent, the Japanese failed to take advantage of one of the two maritime strategies that might have seen their country among the victors in World War
II.
Having decided to go to war with the United States in late summer 1941 anyway, the Japanese should have adopted a different strategy than opening their southern campaign with a pre-emptive strike on Pearl Harbor. As it was, the Pearl Harbor attack proved to be a military fiasco. The Japanese failed to understand that, for industrial reasons, the best reason for attacking a naval base in World War II was to cripple the facility, not to sink ships. Had Admiral Nagumo remained off Hawaii for another day or two, or even for an afternoon, his air groups could have easily worked over the ammunition dumps, fuel farms, submarine pens and other fixed installations on Oahu. Simply by bombing the ammunition dump at the entrance to the lochs would have shut down the naval base for months. As it was, Nagumo limited his bombing operations to only ninety minutes, and concentrated on sinking ships and destroying aircraft.
The damage inflicted on the Pacific Fleet on 7 December was inconsequential in that the slow World War I-era battleships could not cooperate with newer fast carrier task forces anyway. The loss of a few of their number had no significant effect on American strategy or operations in the early months of the war. Prewar U.S. Navy fleet doctrine was to operate the new fast North Carolina and South Dakota-class battleships in company with the speedy attack carriers, and the old battleships had no role to play in these powerful, highly mobile formations. They served bravely during the war, not as mobile capital ships but as nearly stationary offshore naval gunfire bombardment platforms. On the other hand, damaging Hawaii's fixed installations surely would have impeded the conduct of Admiral Ernest J. King's blocking, barring, and raiding strategy in the South and Central Pacific in early 1942. Constructing large, overseas military bases was, however, one of America's great wartime fortes, and it seems unlikely that the delay imposed on the Pacific Fleet's counteroffensive would have been meaningful.
Attacking Pearl Harbor clearly solidified American opinion behind Roosevelt's war policy and had the effect of so enraging Americans that they went to war with Japan with unprecedented unity and determination. Japanese strategists might have reasonably regarded a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor as one of the few steps they might take that would make immeasurably more difficult the task of negotiating a later settlement of the war that left the enlarged Empire intact, which was, after all, Japan's basic war aim.
Having engaged and enraged the United States, the Japanese should have chosen to follow a conservative strategy, ignoring pinpricks like Admiral Halsey's early raids on the Marshalls and the April bombing of Tokyo. Unless they were absolutely certain of crushing local superiority, they should have refused fleet actions as in the Coral Sea and off Midway, and instead devoted their limited resources to improving and perfecting the Empire's defensive outposts. As it was, the Japanese reacted to the Tokyo Raid by exposing almost their entire carrier force to potentially superior land-and-sea-based enemy air forces merely to overrun Midway Island, a fairly worthless outpost useful neither as an advance fleet base nor as a staging point for long-range strategic bombing operations against Hawaii.
Yamamoto's decision to enter the eastern Pacific in June 1942, like his move soon after to defend the Solomons, offered Admiral King the opportunity to engage the Japanese fleet in battles of attrition that destroyed the enemy's sea-and-land-based naval air forces. After Japan's frontline air power was wasted in the South Pacific and its destroyer force decimated in over sixty battles of attrition, the Imperial Navy lacked the means to implement any strategic decisions that would influence the course or outcome of the war.
The more conservative strategy of preserving the Combined Fleet as a “fleet-in-being” to protect Southeast Asia and the Dutch East Indies, operating the carriers and battleships only within supporting range of powerful submarine and land-based air forces, and securing the interior sea lines of communications between every major strongpoint within the empire's defensive perimeters through the use of convoys strongly defended by land-based maritime patrol aircraft and powerful ocean escorts, surely would have delayed the Pacific Fleet's progress, would have greatly increased the cost of the war to Japan's opponents, and might have made more possible a negotiated peace had Tokyo realized the value of the Philippines as a bargaining chip. King, alone among allied strategists, understood from beginning to end how much delay worked disproportionately to Japan's advantage.
Instead of pursuing a conservative strategy, the Japanese risked their formidable air striking capacity with the aim of sinking the Pacific Fleet's three carriers off Midway. This fleet action was obviously one of the turning points in the Pacific war, but it was not truly decisive in the classic sense. The U.S. Navy's long-term advantages were so great that the Japanese, regardless of the result of any single battle or campaign, lacked the resources to alter the overall balance through wartime shipbuilding, or even to inflict enough damage on the Americans to influence significantly the eventual outcome of the conflict.
When King committed his three Pacific Fleet carriers to the Midway ambush he was fully aware that they all might be sunk. His concerns were heightened after Admiral Halsey, whom he trusted, fell ill and was replaced by Admiral Fletcher, whom King already wanted to relieve. But King was risking the U.S. Navy's prewar ships, not its wartime construction. He understood that the twenty-four Essex-class fast attack carriers, which did not begin to arrive in the Pacific until early 1943, would deliver the main blows against Japan. In short, had all three Pacific Fleet carriers been lost off Midway, Yamamoto would have found himself in possession of a worthless outpost and in need of a huge fleet to defend a new, long, highly vulnerable sea line of communications between Midway and the Marshalls. Japan could do little to replace wartime ship losses. King could simply shift resources to the Essex and Independence-class heavy and light attack carrier programs – probably at the expense of the Iowa-class battleships and the Lend-Lease merchant shipping programs – with little long-term effect on the course of the war.
The struggle for Guadalcanal in the fall and winter of 1942 provided yet another opportunity for the Japanese to adopt a conservative strategy. King sent the Pacific Fleet and the 1st Marine Division into the South Pacific in August of that year not to retake real estate but to keep the enemy off-balance, predicting wrongly that the Japanese would fall back on more defensible lines around Rabaul. Instead, Yamamoto reacted by throwing his fleet-and-land-based air forces into the maw of American air power, one of the worst mistakes of the entire Pacific war. This created a crisis for the Americans on the eve of the November 1942 Congressional elections, and forced Roosevelt to order the Army to support the Navy Guadalcanal campaign. Roosevelt was worried that if the Japanese evicted the Marines from the Solomons, then the Republicans would win those elections and return to Congress in January 1943 with a majority in at least one House. Their stated intent was to curtail the president's powers as commander-in-chief, put a brake on Roosevelt's unstinting support for the Soviets, balance the war effort more evenly between the Atlantic and Pacific, and so dilute even more the already-corrupted grand strategy of Germany-first. Domestic politics moved Roosevelt to order the Joint Chiefs to spare no resources to hold Guadalcanal. Thus, the paradoxical outcome of a Japanese victory on Guadalcanal would have been to focus even more resources on the Pacific Theater and lesson the Atlantic, all to the disadvantage of Japan.
American fleet strength fell somewhat below the benchmark of “treaty” limits in the 1920s, but what really retarded the prosecution of the war in 1942 and 1943 was Roosevelt's failure in 1935 to realize that the naval disarmament system had collapsed and his insistence that, with a few exceptions, American naval shipbuilding conform to the 1936 Second London Treaty until as late as December 1939. The White House, not Congress, retarded naval rearmament under the New Deal. The 1934 Vinson Act aimed only at building up to a “treaty fleet” by 1942, the 1938 Second Vinson Act stretched this out to 1946, and even the enormous 1940 Two Ocean Navy Act was not to be completed until 1948. As late as the spring of 1940, on the eve of the fall of France, Roosevelt slashed a Navy Department request for an increase of twenty-five percent in authorized fleet tonnage to eleven percent, although it was clear at the time that Congress would vote for the larger figure.
American naval rearmament in the decade of the Great Depression was not retarded by a shortage of skilled manpower, raw materials, or unused industrial or shipyard capacity, nor indeed by opposition in Congress. Every major naval shipbuilding program between 1933 and 1941 was initiated by the Navy Department, supported by overwhelming majorities on the Hill, and slashed by the White House. Roosevelt vacillated between negotiating further naval disarmament treaties and building up to treaty limits in the 1930s, with the result that the Navy in 1941 had no frontline battleships or post “treaty-class” carriers afloat, a bare handful of modern, long-range maritime patrol planes, few fighter, bomber, or torpedo squadrons operating heavy, all-metal, single-engine monoplanes, and almost no modem austere escorts or ship-to-shore or shore-to-shore landing craft. A powerful, balanced fleet capable of conducting major offensive air, sea, and amphibious operations in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters concurrently in 1941 probably would not have deterred Hitler, but the effect on Japan might have been significant. Admiral Yamamoto supported the decision to go to war on the basis that the Combined Fleet could hold off an American offensive for about two years, but even his stance might have changed had he believed that he could not defend Japan's far-flung empire for more than a few months.
The U.S. Navy's prewar “balanced fleet” policy was widely criticized by many early historians of World War II. More recently, however, the “balanced fleet” policy has been seen in a less harsh light. With few exceptions, the Navy developed the tools to fight before the war. By 1941, plans were in place to build the ships, weapons, and aircraft, and to train the sailors, airmen, and Marines who would fight the war. Early setbacks, while spectacular, were truly marginal; indifferent presidential leadership, the lack of a coherent national industrial policy, and Allied disputes over strategy delayed offensive campaigns and operations more than enemy action. And, at the end of the war, every foe had been beaten. No other military organization produced such an extraordinary cast of grand strategists and fighting admirals of the first rank. Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, the wartime Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations, supervised the largest warship and naval aircraft building program in history, devised strategies that defeated his enemies and held his own losses to a minimum, and picked combat commanders for the numbered fleets who uniformly possessed exceptional skills. It is instructive, for instance, to remember that the historical controversies that swirled around Admirals Halsey and Spruance concerned tactical decisions during battles – Midway, the Philippine Sea, and Leyte Gulf – generally counted as among the most pivotal sea victories of all time. The charge that the “battleship admirals” dominated the prewar Navy Department ignores the fact that the interwar Navy laid down more carriers than battleships, a policy that culminated in 1940 with the decision to construct the mobilization-type Essex-class carriers so that each vessel might embark a powerful, flexible five-squadron air group.
But the entry of the Essexs into the fleet in 1943 did not by itself upset the balance of power in the Pacific. What made the U.S. Navy's carriers so potent in World War II was not only their large air groups but also the accompanying anti-ship, anti-air battleship-cruiser screens. Wartime carriers could not conduct 24-hour, all-weather flight operations and there were no reliable nightfighting squadrons embarked until late 1944. In short, the air group, all-powerful in good weather during the day, was itself wholly exposed, as was its flight deck, to enemy gunfire or torpedoes once the sun went down or a storm came up. Positioning his carriers so that they might escape at night from opposing battleships and heavy cruisers or lurking submarines was one of the major skills an admiral brought to his command in the war. Yet, as a result of the 1935 decision to build the 35,000-ton North Carolina-class fast battleships – an illustration of the balanced fleet policy – and to arm them with 16-inch main batteries, the Navy entered the war on the verge of deploying battleship-carrier-screen formations superior to anything afloat. Roosevelt's addiction to naval disarmament – the United States did not renounce the 1936 London Naval Treaty until December 1939 – but the policy that produced this ultimate outcome, and the decisions that led to the construction of the follow-on four heavy Iowa-class battleships and the three heavy Midway-class carriers, were rooted in a belief in the strategic correctness of a balanced fleet and a conviction that mass production methods might somehow be applied to wartime capital ship construction.
Had the prewar U.S. Navy been dominated either by “battleship admirals” or “brown-shoe” naval aviators who totally disregarded the needs of the other community, the results would have been costly. Most Navy men agreed on a “balanced fleet” policy, however, regardless of their warfare specialty. The plan to build eighteen Essex-class carriers, embodied in the 1940 Two Ocean Navy Act, was devised by a submariner, Captain Charles M. “Savvy” Cooke, who hated to fly, and the penultimate “battleship admiral,” Harold R. “Betty” Stark, whose entire career was a testimony to primacy of the prewar “Gun Club” or [Bureau of] “Ordinance gang.” With the collapse of the 1922 Five Power Naval Disarmament Treaty in 1936, the pressure within the Navy to replace the World War I-era battleships – the vessels attacked at Pearl Harbor – was intense. Indeed, battleship replacement headed the Navy's priority shipbuilding lists for four years thereafter and no carriers were laid down between the last of the “treaty class” carriers, the 19,200-ton Hornet, and the first of the mass production Essexs in 1940. Had the Two Ocean Navy Act not shifted the focus back to a balanced fleet policy by emphasizing large-scale heavy carrier construction thereafter, the war against Japan surely would have been prolonged considerably. Fletcher and Spruance defeated Yamamoto's Combined Fleet at Midway with “treaty-class” carriers. Land-based naval aircraft provided the margin at Guadalcanal. By the end of 1942 attrition left only one undamaged, operational carrier in the South Pacific – at the very time when the Essex was putting to sea for her shakedown cruise. In the absence of a balanced fleet policy, the delays in prosecuting the war in the Pacific beyond the Lower Solomons would have been disproportionate to the time necessary to undertake heavy carrier construction.
American shipbuilding assets in World War II were remarkably flexible. Skilled labor, machines, tools, raw materials, especially steel, and shipyard capacity, were constantly shifted from building one type to another on a “crash” basis. The adoption of the First Landing Craft Program in 1942, its suspension in favor of the Destroyer Escort Program late that year, and its resumption in the fall of 1943 at the expense of escort shipbuilding demonstrates the proposition. The competition for those industrial assets applicable to shipbuilding from the Army, the War Shipping Board, and the British was intense following the passage of the 1941 Lease Act. As it was, by that time contracts for the Essex-class carriers had been let, shipyard time allocated, and labor, machines, and materials identified. Until it was well underway, the program never fell below the top of the Navy's priority list for manpower and materials. Inasmuch as Nimitz's Pacific Fleet could not force an entry into the Central Pacific without carriers and Admiral Thomas Kinkaid's 7th Fleet could not break the Bismarck's barrier and lift MacArthur's Southwest Pacific armies from New Guinea to the Philippines without covering carrier-based air power, delaying the Essex-class program would have prolonged the dual offensive, allowed Japan to stiffen her defensive perimeter, and made far more costly the inevitable American progression into the Western Pacific.
The U.S. Navy first proposed an Allied landing in northwestern France before Pearl Harbor, and Admiral King loyally supported General Marshall's concept for the SLEDGEHAMMER and ROUNDUP plans in 1942. ROUNDUP called for a huge Allied fleet to land five divisions at the base of the Cotentin Peninsula in May 1943, and the British agreed to it when Marshall visited London in April 1942. One object of the plan was to concentrate all allied forces on one great, single object, to defeat Germany quickly, and then to turn on Japan. This was the essence of Admiral Stark's November 1940 Plan Dog strategy. But King and Marshall had another war aim, to prevent the Russians from overrunning Europe after Germany capitulated, and ROUNDUP served this end as well. King was fully prepared to support ROUNDUP without stint until 5 June, when he first learned from Admiral Mountbatten, then on a visit to Washington, that Churchill was backpeddling on the April accord. Aware on the 6th that the Japanese Fleet had just been mortally wounded off Midway two days earlier, King was eager to concentrate his efforts against Germany – until he learned soon after for certain that the British intended to renege on their agreements.
As early as 1941, U.S. Navy strategists sensed that the British would have to curtail their operations in the Mediterranean in order to invade France. Had the British been willing to abandon Malta, hold Gibraltar, and fall back to Suez or the Red Sea, the shipping to build up the army and tactical air forces for a late 1942 or an early 1943 invasion of France was available from the allied pool. The object of opening up the Mediterranean to British imperial shipping was surely not worth the cost to Britain of the North African war and the campaign against Italy. The major deficiency in the Roundup plan was in large landing ships and beaching craft, but the need for combat loaders and assault shipping was far less than it was for ROUNDUP than for Overlord – the 6 June 1944 landing – owing to the considerable differences in the state of Normandy's beach and coastal defenses as between early 1943 and June 1944. Greatly enhanced offshore gunfire support for the assault shipping and the total dedication of the Allied fighter and bomber forces to the beachhead would have more than offset the appearance of the German Air Forces over the invasion beaches and shipping anchorages. The Germans had little coastal artillery in place in the spring of 1943, and almost no fixed beach obstacles or deep sea mining. Neither in 1943 nor in 1944 could German heavy artillery or tanks operate within range of the allied battleships, and the German divisions defending France in 1942 and 1943 were poorly equipped by contrast to their 1944 counterparts.
In many ways, ROUNDUP was a less daunting operation than Overlord. More auxiliary and combat shipping would have been lost, but in 1943, by combining resources from the Pacific and Mediterranean, the Allied navies already possessed a formidable shore-to-shore lift and logistics capability. ROUNDUP would have changed the character of World War II and considerably improved the Western posture in the Cold War. ROUNDUP would have instantly shut down the German U-boat bases on the Bay of Biscay, brought nearly immediate victory in the Battle of the Atlantic, and permitted direct logistic support for the lodginent by using Norfolk to Normandy convoys. Germany's economy was not yet harnessed to its war effort, and Normandy's defenses were still in a sorry state.
OVERLORD quickly demonstrated that Germany was incapable of waging a two-front war. This was as true in 1943 as in 1944, no matter how Hitler had reacted. While the German Army had not been worn down on the Russian front in 1942, German industry had not geared up to supply a two-front war. These factors were probably offsetting. Had Churchill and General Alan Brooke not ingeniously sabotaged the ROUNDUP plan in July 1942, the major beneficiary would have been Japan. ROUNDUP's overriding priority was already draining ships, land-based aircraft, and troops from scheduled Pacific deployments in mid-summer 1942. An allied agreement to conduct the cross-Channel movement in 1943 surely would have brought to an end the entire Pacific counter-offensive until at least 1944. What slowed the Pacific Fleet's grand thrust into the Central Pacific and MacArthur's slow-paced ascent from New Guinea to the Philippines was the two-ocean war, however, and the defeat of Germany in 1944 would have merely delayed Japan's day of reckoning. While this might not have much changed Asia's postwar political landscape, surely the fault line of the Cold War in Europe would have been situated much farther to the east. Indeed, ROUNDUP might have brought it right up to Russia's western frontier, thus immeasurably easing the burden on the western democracies of the long postwar struggle.