Working with Allies and Mobilizing Fully
On February 6, 1945, a rather unusual event occurred. On that day a German submarine, U-862, torpedoed and sank an American troopship that had been in transit between Australia and Ceylon. Sinkings due to submarines in wartime are not in and of themselves unusual. The novel aspects of this particular attack were, first, that the Indian Ocean was not the normal stalking ground for German submarines, and second, that such activity there represented a type of combined operation between Germany and Japan, something that was exceedingly rare in World War II. The German fleet commander, Admiral Karl Doenitz, had dispatched a number of German U-boats to the Indian Ocean beginning in June 1943. The disastrous defeat his submarines had suffered at the hands of the Allies in the Battle of the Atlantic had forced him to find a new locale for operations. Doenitz chose the Indian Ocean as a less dangerous hunting ground; he knew that Allied antisubmarine defenses there would be nowhere near as formidable as the gauntlet of Allied submarine-hunting ships and aircraft that, by the summer of 1943, had become highly specialized in the art of tracking down and destroying any U-boat that dared to threaten the Atlantic sea-lanes.1
Admiral Doenitz got some assistance from his Japanese ally during his Indian Ocean venture. The Japanese built a naval base for German use on the island of Penang in the Strait of Malacca. In addition, Japanese submarines sometimes operated in tandem with German U-boats in the hunt for Allied merchant ships in Indian Ocean waters. While German U-boats operating there succeeded in sinking fifty-seven Allied ships, for a combined total of 365,807 tons, the German loss rate quickly became as catastrophic as it had been in the Atlantic. Twenty-two of the U-boats sent to the Indian Ocean were sunk by Allied air and surface attack.2
It may never have occurred to the crews of these German submarines that they were engaging in just about the only form of cooperation the German-Japanese alliance would ever know. Such a situation contrasts sharply with the large-scale combined operations that the Allies were able to carry out during the war. On large, strategic issues of crucial importance, Germany, Japan, and Italy each operated in an almost entirely unilateral manner. Such independent behavior was, of course, motivated by self-interest. However, the nearly complete lack of thought the Axis nations gave to trying to determine what were the best interests of their alliance as a whole (and how to act on those interests as a coalition) worked greatly against the best interests of each of the three nations individually. Admittedly, it might have been difficult for the Axis nations to find any common ground, even if they had tried. For example, Japan’s goals in Southeast Asia were geared largely toward acquiring natural resources. Germany, on the other hand, was fighting an ideological war of annihilation against Russia, a war in which German strategic objectives were at best of secondary importance. The military campaigns of the Axis nations did have some common aspects, but not of the types that were conducive to the forging of an effective coalition. For example, in contrast to its forays into Southeast Asia, Japan’s war against China was just as lacking in strategic objectives as was Hitler’s war against the Soviet Union. Also, all three of the Axis nations felt they could win their respective military objectives quickly.
Their failure to work effectively as a coalition was especially damaging to the Axis nations in World War II because they and their satellites (such as Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Thailand) were opposed by an alliance that, though comprising twenty-six nations, was able to operate with more efficiency and greater cohesion than had any previous alliance. To be sure, the Big Three nations—the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union—had far more influence in setting the Allied agenda than did less powerful members of the alliance, such as Brazil and New Zealand. Nevertheless, the Allies fought as a true coalition right from the beginning, although, like all coalitions, they had their problems. The difference was that inter-Allied friction never reached ruinous proportions. On January 1, 1942, a mere three weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack, the Allies signed the “Declaration of the United Nations,” in which the importance of full cooperation between nations was spelled out explicitly. This agreement stated that full-scale war against the Axis was necessary and identified “complete victory” as the goal.3 (This, incidentally, proves that the unconditional surrender of the Axis nations was an Allied war aim long before the Casablanca Conference convened.) In striving toward that objective, the declaration stated, “Each government pledges itself to co-operate with the governments signatory hereto and not to make a separate armistice or peace with the enemies.”4
The collective memory among Combined Chiefs of Staff members, all of whom had been in uniform during World War I, of how badly the alliance that finally muddled through to victory in World War I had been mismanaged created a desire to cooperate more effectively in order to achieve better results the second time around.5 Indeed, the lack of cooperation and planning that had been characteristic of the alliances on both sides during World War I provided an important lesson for the future. It was to be demonstrated during World War II that the British and the Americans, and to some extent the Russians, learned these lessons far better than did the Germans and the Japanese. Franklin Roosevelt and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were fully aware that maintaining an aloofness from one’s allies could be very costly. By joining the allied side in World War I as an “associated” instead of an “allied” power, the United States had greatly handicapped the peace process at Versailles in 1919.6 At that time, President Woodrow Wilson had an entirely different agenda for peace from his British and French cobelligerents. In World War II, the Americans made more of an effort to find common and consistent war aims in all the decisive theaters. However, they were not always successful in this attempt.
A consistent set of war aims was something the Axis nations clearly lacked. Japan’s war with China was already in a holding pattern by the time Hitler attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, having ground to a virtual halt largely for lack of any specific objectives. In the Pacific, Japanese war aims consisted of little more than digging in to fortify Japan’s newly captured island empire and hoping that its navy could serve as enough of a deterrent to keep the Americans away while Japan used its newly acquired resources to strengthen its domestic economy and its military machine.7 German General Staff officers such as General Franz Halder were greatly dismayed to find in the spring of 1941, while planning Barbarossa, that in the forthcoming invasion of the Soviet Union Germany had no strategic objectives. It was difficult for the German generals to develop a coherent plan or timetable for a campaign in Russia that was to be an ideological war of annihilation against what Hitler and Nazi propaganda described as “Asiatic-Jewish Bolshevism.”8
The disastrous Nivelle offensive of April 1917 showed how dangerous had been the World War I practice of allowing a major military campaign to be dictated by the vanity of a supreme commander in the field. General Robert Nivelle sent the French army into a futile frontal assault against a heavily defended and prepared German position, despite the fact that high-ranking civilian and military French officials, such as Paul Painlevé and Philippe Petain, had urged him not to undertake a campaign that was destined to fail even before it began. The terrible slaughter that resulted was a direct cause of the mutinies in the French ranks that occurred in May 1917.9 Similar mismanagement was apparent on the Allied southern front in World War I. In one of the most dramatic allied setbacks of World War I, Austrian and German troops broke through the Italian lines at Caporetto on the Austro-Italian border on October 24, 1917. The Italians were forced into an eighty-mile retreat in which they suffered 80,000 casualties. Eleven infantry divisions from the western front had to be rushed to Italy to help restore the situation.10 The defeat at Caporetto was very significant for allied strategy in World War I; according to Leon Wolff, “if nothing else, Caporetto had proved that the Allies could not go on much longer without coordinating their war efforts.”11 This change in outlook quickly became apparent. While noting that British and French troops had begun to arrive in Italy, the November 5, 1917, edition of the New York Times quoted the U.S. secretary of war as stating that “the western front today stretches from the North Sea to the Adriatic. The Venetian Plain has become part of the western battle front.”12
It was precisely to avoid such disjointed and belated strategic planning that the Combined Chiefs of Staff was created in January 1942. It was clear to the Allies in World War II that it was much better to allow grand strategy to be planned by a command staff that was removed from any one particular front and thus able to take into account the war situation as a whole. In that way, offensive operations could be planned and resources allocated in the most efficient manner possible.13
The war against the German U-boats makes a good starting point for discussing British-American cooperation during World War II. The German defeat in the Battle of the Atlantic became apparent in April and May 1943. It was characterized both by the ability of Allied shipyards to produce new merchant ships faster than German U-boats could sink them and by the fact that new antisubmarine equipment and tactics, such as escort carriers organized into “hunter-killer” groups and short-wave, ten-centimeter radar carried by patrol aircraft, were enabling the Allies to track down and destroy U-boats at sea in greatly increasing numbers. The Battle of the Atlantic is an example of a combined operation in which the British and the Americans achieved success because they worked together. The two nations shared the duty of providing warships to escort convoys of merchant vessels in the North Atlantic shipping lanes, and Allied aircraft from the decks of aircraft carriers hunted submarines with great success. British and American crews also operated long-range patrol aircraft from both sides of the Atlantic to provide constant air cover for convoys. The two allies also exchanged technical information about innovative antisubmarine weaponry, such as the Hedgehog-type depth charge.14
From July 1942 onward, with the exception of the month of December 1942, Allied shipping construction outpaced sinkings due to U-boats. However, it was the sharply rising curve of German submarine losses in the spring of 1943 that was the most important aspect of the Allied victory in the Atlantic. The losses inflicted upon Admiral Doenitz’s submarine fleet were accompanied by greatly reduced Allied merchant tonnage sunk. In March 1943, German submarines sank 514,744 tons of Allied merchant shipping in the Atlantic, while only eleven U-boats were destroyed by the Allies. Two months later, in May, Allied shipping losses were well under half the March rate, while the number of U-boats destroyed shot upward. U-boat losses during May 1943 are a matter of some debate, but everyone agrees that they were catastrophically heavy—more than a German submarine per day was sunk. At least thirty-seven, and as many as forty-seven, German submarines were lost due to Allied air and sea action that month. The latter figure represented fully half of Doenitz’s total force. Admiral Pound’s biographer puts the figure at forty-one U-boats destroyed during May.15 These figures tell the tale. As Churchill wrote, “By June 1943 the shipping losses fell to the lowest figure since the United States had entered the war. The convoys came through intact, and the Atlantic supply line was safe.”16
After the Pearl Harbor attack, the Axis powers made some half-hearted attempts at outlining a joint plan for the conduct of the war. Germany, Japan, and Italy supplemented the Tripartite Pact of September 27, 1940, by signing further diplomatic and military agreements in January 1942. This was little more than window dressing, however. The Allied camp, by way of contrast, constituted a real alliance. From the Pearl Harbor attack through the surrender of Japan, the Allies fought together as a true coalition, while the Germans and the Japanese hurt each other greatly through their inability, or unwillingness, to coordinate their war efforts in any meaningful way.17
There are many examples of the consistent failure to cooperate among the Axis. As the war turned against Germany, Hitler and his General Staff desperately wanted to see Japan open an offensive against the Russians in maritime Siberia.18 This would have greatly eased the German situation in the war against Russia. Instead, Japan and Russia maintained a shaky, suspicion-laden truce until Soviet forces moved into Manchuria on August 7, 1945, three months after the defeat of Germany and only one week before Japan itself surrendered to the Allies. From the time it began on June 22, 1941, the German-Russian war was a diplomatic disaster for Japan, because it made it almost inevitable that Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union would become full military allies. Japan’s prime minister, Konoe Fumimaro, was fully aware in the summer of 1941 that engaging in hostilities against the Russians and the Americans simultaneously was out of the question for Japan. It was the fervent desire of the Konoe government to drive those two powers apart. What the Germans did by invading the Soviet Union was to bring them together. It is true that FDR and Winston Churchill had hoped that Russia would enter the war against Japan at an earlier date. However, the Russians clearly did much more to help the Allied effort as a whole by concentrating all of their military and industrial energies upon defeating Nazi Germany.19
The amount of important information the Axis nations kept from each other boggles the mind. In spite of the Tripartite Pact, Germany, Japan, and Italy repeatedly kept each other in the dark in regard to issues of vital strategic significance. A prime example is that no official advance notice was given to Germany by Mussolini before Italian forces moved into Greece from Albania on October 28, 1940.20 Mussolini deeply resented not being privy to the details of previous German moves. Now was his chance to cash in. In his own words, Mussolini complained that “Hitler always faces me with faits accomplis. This time I am going to pay him back in his own coin. He will find out from the papers that I have occupied Greece.”21
The Germans hid their intentions from the Japanese, as well as from the Italians. On the eve of Barbarossa, Hitler did not even bother to inform his Japanese allies that he had decided to invade the Soviet Union. Other actions toward Japan seem to display very little in the way of careful consideration on the part of Hitler. Historians such as Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham have noted that Hitler’s impulsive decision to declare war upon the United States after Pearl Harbor remains something of an enigma. It was not mandated by the Tripartite Pact, since Japan itself had not been attacked. Even if it had been mandated by the pact, violating treaties had never caused Hitler to lose sleep. It is also odd that Hitler made his declaration of war against the United States on December 11, 1941, in a speech to the Reichstag in Berlin. That was out of character for him—sudden, surprise attack was much more Hitler’s style. Also, the prospect of keeping the United States neutral, or at least out of Europe, was one reason that Germany had signed the Tripartite Pact in the first place. The Germans had hoped that as Japan targeted Britain’s Asian possessions, the Americans could be frightened by the prospect of a two-front war into remaining on the sidelines. There had been no discussion between Tokyo and Berlin as to what the appropriate German response should be if Japan were to make a surprise attack against the United States.22
None of the Allied nations were prepared, in terms of military strength and munitions production, for a major war when it came. Yet one of the greatest assets of Great Britain, the United States, and the USSR was that each realized from the outset how desperate was the struggle in which they were all engaged. An interesting fact in regard to the Allied nations in World War II is that each did everything it could to avoid going to war but once involved did not hesitate to impose very strict emergency measures that, designed to win the war, resulted in harsh restrictions upon the everyday lives of their citizens.23
The British had waited until they were two years into World War I before instituting conscription. There was no such hesitation in World War II. Similarly, the Americans instituted their first-ever peacetime draft in 1940. This was part of an American mobilization of resources that had really began in 1939, although American entry into the war was delayed for two years. Important spurs for early mobilization of the U.S. economy were the munitions orders placed by the British and the French after war broke out in Europe, but before Pearl Harbor. In March 1940, the British and French governments sought and obtained permission from President Roosevelt and General Arnold to purchase the latest combat types of American aircraft.24
The Americans therefore put the 1939–41 period to good use in terms of industrial mobilization. By the end of 1940, for example, federal government money flowing from a new U.S. government agency known as the Defense Plant Corporation was beginning to be used to finance the construction of new aircraft factories in the United States. Indeed, the impressive photographs taken in 1942 or 1943 of the bustling interiors of cavernous American aircraft factories during World War II are usually not of plants that had been idle during the Great Depression; they instead show factories that had not even existed in 1935. One of the most amazing aspects of the American wartime economy was that before all those weapons and supplies could be produced, a great many brand new factories had to be built. Direct government financing of the construction of new munitions plants, or favorable government loans to private companies that wished to build or expand their own factories, would become standard practice during the war.25 Aircraft manufacturers took advantage of loans that were available. However, according to the official historians of the Army Air Forces, when it came down to loans versus direct government financing to build new aircraft factories, “More commonly, the government simply built the plant at its own cost, usually acting through the Defense Plant Corporation, and then leased it to a private concern for operation. . . . By February 1941 federal financing of new plant facilities had reached a figure almost ten times the sum invested by private agencies.”26
A good example of this procedure in operation is that during 1941, as American entry into the war began to look more and more like a certainty, it became apparent that the Boeing factory in Seattle would not be able to produce by itself all the B-17 bombers that would be needed. Consequently, by order of the Army Air Forces (that is, General Arnold) and the Office of Production Management (OPM), two other manufacturers, Douglas and Vega (the latter an affiliate of Lockheed), were recruited to build B-17s under license. Boeing and Douglas were bitter rivals, and it must have been with considerable distaste that the directors at Boeing, forced by Arnold and OPM, handed over the blueprints for their best-selling aircraft, the B-17, to Douglas engineers. This meant that by order of two federal government agencies, B-17s (some 12,000 in all) would be built by Boeing in Seattle, by Vega in Burbank, California, and by Douglas in a brand-new factory in Long Beach, California. The construction of the Douglas–Long Beach facility was apparently initially to have been financed by a government loan under highly favorable repayment terms, with Douglas being the building’s owner of record. However, unfavorable tax laws in California that would have greatly increased the cost for Douglas resulted in a decision to make Douglas–Long Beach a factory owned lock, stock, and barrel by the federal government.27 That is, the federal government purchased the land, paid the construction costs, and owned the finished factory as well as every single machine tool inside the plant. All Donald Douglas had to do was operate the plant—at a booming profit. There is a name for this kind of government planning and ownership of the means of production—socialism. For the three years and nine months that the United States was involved in World War II, the American economy, self-proclaimed bastion of free enterprise and laissez-faire economics, achieved miracles of production never seen before or since under this most un-American form of government.
The success of Allied economic mobilization is indicated by the production figures. In 1942, its first full year as a combatant, the United States was able to produce 47,836 aircraft. This was three times as many aircraft as Germany was able to manufacture in the same period and almost double what Germany and Japan together were able to turn out that year. In 1943, the number of American aircraft produced for the year shot up to over 85,000, comfortably maintaining a three-to-one margin over German aircraft production. The Russians had to move entire munitions factories, piece by piece, from European Russia over the Ural Mountains so that full wartime weapons production could take place, unhindered, outside the path of the German advance. Despite these difficulties, Russian aircraft production was up to almost 35,000 for the year 1943, while German production lagged behind at 24,807 aircraft for 1943. In the United States, a ruling of the War Production Board that became effective on February 1, 1942, halted the production and sale of civilian passenger automobiles in the United States. Henceforth, the resources of the American automobile industry would be used solely to manufacture military vehicles, aircraft, and other assorted munitions for the duration of the war.28
For a variety of reasons, Germany did not even begin to institute a true wartime economy until the beginning of 1942 at the earliest. Hitler felt the war would be short. Indeed, his Blitzkreig strategy depended upon it. The Nazis were consistently opposed to allowing German women to work in munitions factories. This in itself served to severely limit the production of war materiel in Germany, because labor was always in short supply.29 Also, as Richard Overy has noted, German industrial workers and factory managers were strangely resistant to the idea of true mass production and its corollary, the standardization of designs, preferring to build relatively modest numbers of a wide variety of weapons exhibiting the highest degree of craftsmanship rather than huge numbers of just a few types of weapons that were “good enough.”30 However, the most important reason behind the failure of Germany to adopt an effective war economy at an early date had to do with morale. According to Gordon Craig, “Hitler was convinced that it was the home front’s collapse that had defeated the German army in 1918, and he was resolved to prevent a repetition of that.”31
This, by the way, is interesting evidence that deep down, Hitler knew the “stab in the back theory” to be what it truly was—pure propaganda. Germany had been militarily defeated in 1918, and Hitler knew it. Accordingly, trying to prevent the German people at home from becoming depressed because of the new war was an important wartime goal of the Nazis. This task was difficult for Joseph Goebbels and his propaganda apparatus right from the start, because German public opinion was never enthusiastic about World War II, even during the victories of the early days. With this in mind, Hitler’s government remained unwilling to ask the German people to reduce their use of consumer goods in any appreciable way during the war. This meant that until early 1942 the German economy was mobilized only to the extent that it had been in 1936—when the Four Year Plan had been set in motion.32 During this entire period, according to Gordon Craig, “the production of armaments did not increase significantly, nor did that of consumer goods decline.”33 Overy has pointed out that unlike Russian and American military and civilian leaders, who believed that the winner in the war would be the side that outproduced the other in terms of munitions and supplies, Hitler “did not consider economics as central to the war effort. Rather, he stuck to the view that racial character—willpower, resolve, endurance—was the prime mover; weapons mattered only to the extent that they could be married to the moral qualities of the fighting man.”34
Consequently, and also as a result of the fact that Britain lost no time in mobilizing fully during World War II, as early as 1940 British aircraft production pulled ahead of that of Germany. In fact, weapons production programs in general in Germany exhibited no special urgency until 1942. For the initial phase of Barbarossa the Germans were able to field 3,648 tanks. However, the vast majority of these were antiquated machines. Fewer than five hundred were Panzer IVs, which were in 1941 the only German tanks that had any chance at all against the Russian T-34s and KV-1s. In June 1941 the Russians had 15,000 tanks available, of which 1,861 were of the T-34 or KV-1 type.
It was not until the spring of 1942 that German munitions factories began to be kept open at night to operate second, and perhaps third, shifts. This is quite surprising, since by that time Germany had been at war for two and a half years. American, British, and Russian munitions makers showed no such hesitation in instituting night work in weapons factories. German aircraft production lagged badly early in the war, comprising less than 12,000 units in 1941—a year in which the United States produced more than 26,000 aircraft, even though until the very end of that year it was not yet a formal combatant.35 The Russians would go on to produce T-34s, the war’s finest tank, on a grand scale in terms of numbers. Even when the German Tiger and Panther tanks entered service in late 1942 and early 1943, the Russians still held the tank advantage. The new German tanks were responsible for the Russian decision to up-gun the T-34 from a 76.2-mm gun at the outset of the war to an 85-mm cannon later. However, although the Tiger in particular has attained almost mythical status among tank enthusiasts, it was always “not” many things that the T-34 “was.” The Tiger was not fast, it was not mechanically reliable, it was not easy to repair, it did not turn quickly, and it was not easy to produce.36
Behind this German lack of preparation for war lies the origins of the Blitzkrieg strategy. Violent attacks of short duration utilizing sophisticated technological weapons (such as tanks and aircraft) were designed to lead to quick victories. Blitzkrieg was supposed to keep German casualties to a minimum and the German people from getting war weary. The industries of each conquered nation could be added to the German war economy, thus dispensing with the need to expand German production at home. The ability of the Russians to regroup and defeat the Germans outside Moscow in December 1941 meant that the war in Russia would be long and would require a belated and extensive mobilization of German resources. The German defeat in the battle of Moscow proved that Blitzkrieg had failed utterly.37
Like Germany, Japan was completely unprepared for a long war. At the time of America’s entry into the war, Japan had a vast and powerful navy. Among the most important parts of that navy were the elite highly trained carrier-based air squadrons, such as those that had carried out the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941. There was, however, no real plan to replace Japanese ships that might be sunk or combat pilots who might be killed. Japan expected the war with the United States to be short, victorious, and virtually free of Japanese casualties. Defeat in the battle of Midway (June 3–6, 1942) was disastrous for Japan in many ways. Four irreplaceable Japanese aircraft carriers were sunk, and Japan’s navy would never again hold the strategic initiative in the war. It is interesting to note that equally as irreplaceable as the four aircraft carriers were the hundred experienced Japanese pilots who were killed at Midway. As with the ships, there was no way for Japan to make good these losses. In the period from December 7, 1941, until August 14, 1945, Japan added only three full-sized aircraft carriers to its battle fleet from new construction (and lost in action by the end of 1944 all six of those that it had possessed at the outset of the war). Largely as a result of the Two-Ocean Navy Act of July 1940, enacted while the United States was still at peace, the Americans placed eighteen large, fleet-type, aircraft carriers into commission during the same time period. (In addition, the Americans already had six large carriers in service at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack.) The British completed six large aircraft carriers of their own between 1940 and 1945. The disparity in output is even more dramatic if small aircraft carriers are included. The Americans built 119 of these during the war, while Japan started the war with six small carriers and created a dozen others during the war, mostly by converting ships initially built for different purposes. The Japanese also had no large-scale training program for new pilots during the war, while the Americans went all out for pilot training. As the war continued, the flying skills of Japanese aviators deteriorated markedly due to losses and lack of adequate training for replacements, while American pilots got better and better and became available in ever growing numbers.38
Clearly, in terms of both cooperation and mobilization, the Allies were way ahead of the Axis nations throughout the war. Indeed, cooperation was simply one form of their all-out mobilization for war. The Allied nations understood fully that they were in for a long war. This is why Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union mobilized fully right from the outset (or even before the outset) of hostilities. Allied cooperation reached truly unprecedented levels in many areas, such as the aforementioned mobilization. For example, the Americans and the British regarded the munitions they each produced as collectively constituting a (more or less) common pool from which both nations could draw as needed.39 Clearly, the Allies, particularly the Americans and the British, understood that a long war would require close international cooperation to ensure victory. As the common “munitions pool” indicates, this inter-Allied cooperation was so extensive that it sometimes approached a type of joint sovereignty between the United States and Great Britain.
There were degrees of cooperation among the Allies. As noted earlier, the most powerful members of the alliance, The United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, exercised much greater control over the war effort than did the other members of the Grand Alliance. Even within the Big Three nations there was the important variation that the Americans and the British cooperated very closely while both endured strained and difficult relations with the Soviet Union. For instance, the headline for the May 8, 1945, edition of the New York World Telegram announced much more than the end of the war in Europe when it proclaimed, “Nazis Give Up: Surrender to Allies and Russia Announced.”40 On the surface, such a headline may not seem surprising, in view of the fact that the German surrender to Eisenhower, which was signed at Reims on May 7, 1945, was followed two days later by a second ceremony in Berlin, where the remnants of the German army had recently suffered their final defeat at the hands of the Russians. However, referring to the “Allies and Russia”—that is, as two different things—has a deeper significance. There were often serious disagreements between the Americans and the British in regard to strategy. This however, did not prevent the military efforts of both nations from functioning as one, highly cohesive whole. The Russians, on the other hand, with no permanent representative on the Combined Chiefs of Staff, were left to conduct their military efforts in isolation, at least until the Cairo/Teheran Sextant Conference.41 There were some in the Combined Chiefs of Staff organization who felt that the Russians wanted it this way. Major General John R. Deane, in his capacity as head of the U.S. Military Mission in Moscow, fit into this category. Deane felt that, even after the Overlord campaign had opened a second front in Western Europe, “the Soviets have a natural desire to remain operationally unhampered by Allies.”42 Indeed, it seemed that the Grand Alliance had two distinct components, the Russian and the British-American. Despite this mistrust between Moscow and its Western Allies, the level of Russian interallied cooperation was much higher than that for the German-Japanese alliance.
General Deane had arrived in Moscow in October 1943 as part of a shake-up of American political and military representatives that, it was hoped, would lead to improved relations between Washington and Moscow. Deane seemed particularly well suited to his new assignment. He knew about plans, and he had high-level contacts from his days on the Secretariat of the Joint and Combined Chiefs of Staff.43 Deane brought with him a small but talented staff that included a Lend-Lease expert, Brigadier General Sidney Spalding, who had participated in the negotiations over the Third Russian Protocol. As part of this shake-up, Averell Harriman replaced Admiral William Standley as U.S. ambassador to Moscow. Standley thought the Russians did not appreciate the Lend-Lease aid they were receiving from the British and the Americans and had been quite vocal in expressing this view while he was in Moscow. Clearly this kind of attitude wouldn’t do, and Standley had to go.44
Whether or not Deane’s view was accurate that the Russians did not want to work within a coalition format, it is interesting to speculate as to what would have happened had the Combined Chiefs of Staff organization included a Russian delegation. Would Russian membership have created among the Combined Chiefs irresistible pressure for a cross-channel invasion in 1943? If Overlord had been moved up by a year, would that have decreased tension within the alliance to a degree that would have allowed, as FDR wished, Moscow, Washington, and London to work together as a team after the war? The most obvious reason for the lack of a Russian representative on the Combined Chiefs of Staff is that Russian forces were fighting an independent campaign. Russian CCS representation would have been essential if large numbers of British and American troops had been fighting side by side with the Russians on the Eastern Front. The many combined operations in which the British and the Americans collaborated directly necessitated a CCS-type organization for them. As Maurice Matloff has indicated, “down to the fall of 1943 close collaboration with the USSR was, perhaps, not immediately necessary.”45
That was a situation that clearly needed to change as the date for Overlord approached. As far as the Russians were concerned, that date was not soon enough. It was at the Trident Conference in Washington, D.C., in May 1943 that the American Joint Chiefs of Staff were finally able to get their British counterparts to allow a date (May 1, 1944) to be set for the Overlord landings in northwestern France. While the Americans were relieved to be able to pin the British down to an actual date, the Russians were appalled that Overlord, after so much delay already, was still an entire year in the future. The prospect of being forced to carry nearly the entire burden of the war against Germany for so long before they could expect their allies to open a real second front in Europe was a crushing disappointment for the Russians. It is therefore not surprising that in the wake of the Trident Conference the Russians briefly withdrew their ambassadors from Washington and London. Their anger that Trident did not provide for a 1943 Overlord may have led the Russians even to toy with the idea of a separate peace with Germany.46 The postponement of Overlord, specifically that Trident did not provide for a 1943 Overlord, probably represented the greatest rift between the Soviet Union and its Western Allies during World War II.47
It is well known that this delay in crossing the channel sparked intense debate between the British and American members of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. Like the Russians, General Marshall was acutely disappointed that Overlord was not going to take place in 1943. General Brooke, on the other hand, was greatly relieved that the invasion would not take precedence over Allied operations in the Mediterranean for some time yet. The reason that such serious disagreements did not ruin the British-American alliance is that the Combined Chiefs of Staff organization provided a framework within which arguments resulting from differences of opinion could be part of a healthy working relationship and not become irretrievably divisive forces.
General Deane’s position in Moscow gave him a unique opportunity to view firsthand, and over a sustained period of time, the deep level of mistrust existing between the Western Allies and the Russians. In both the United States and England, Joint Staff planners were constantly discussing and refining the strategic ideas of the CCS principals; Deane found that planning was done very differently in the Russian command hierarchy. In a report to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, under the heading “Subordinate Officials Cannot Discuss,” Deane related how he had been forced to give up trying to discuss anything relating to strategy with his Russian counterparts. Every idea mentioned to the Russians by the U.S. Military Mission in Moscow received immediate negative criticism, after which the Americans would be informed by the Russian officials that higher authority would have to be consulted. Consequently, Deane adopted the approach of simply submitting his ideas and asking that they be forwarded for approval, “without endeavoring to enter into discussion.”48
Even normal day-to-day discussion was difficult for the American mission in Moscow. Deane complained to his superiors in Washington that
We do not have a telephone directory nor are we allowed to learn individuals’ telephone numbers. We are not permitted to visit the offices of Soviet officials without a previous appointment. All such appointments must be made through one officer who has been designated as a foreign liaison officer. When officials are not ready to discuss questions the usual replies to requests for appointments are that the person we desire to see is ill, at the front, or otherwise engaged. There are absolutely no telephone conversations.49
This is a stark contrast to the informal discussions in Washington between members of the British Joint Staff Mission and the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff that went on every day.
The lack of cooperation between the Western Allies and the Russians had serious consequences, not only in broad strategic issues but also in immediate tactical events. One of these occurred on November 7, 1944, when, due to mistaken identity, a column of Russian vehicles and their protecting fighter planes in Yugoslavia were attacked by a large group of American Lockheed P-38 Lightnings. When it was over, it was apparent that Russian losses had been heavy. Six Russians lay dead on the ground amid the wreckage of twenty vehicles. In addition, three Soviet aircraft had been shot down and two Russian pilots killed. Among the Russian dead in the column was a lieutenant general.50
Casualties due to “friendly fire” are certainly not unheard of in any battle situation. However, this particular incident had been easily preventable and was a source of very bitter feeling (understandably) on the part of the Russians. They correctly perceived that this unfortunate incident bore testimony to the lack of detailed planning between the Western Allies and the Russians. There had been an agreement as far back as July 1944 between General Deane and the Russian General Staff upon a line of demarcation between areas in which Allied aircraft operating from bases in southern Italy would attack Balkan targets and those that would be bombed exclusively by Russian aircraft. However, this bomb line was out of date by the time of this tragic encounter between Russian and American forces; it only covered Hungary and Romania.51
In an attempt to rectify the situation, the Combined Chiefs of Staff directed the American and British military missions in Moscow to work with the Russians to draw a new bomb line in Yugoslavia that, it was hoped, would avert any more such incidents “pending the establishment of effective liaison.”52 (November 1944 seems rather late in the war for the CCS finally to be establishing operational liaison with the Russians.) At that time, General Aleksei Antonov of the General Staff of the Red Army represented to Deane in Moscow that he agreed that operational liaison machinery should be set up at once (first in Moscow and later among commanders in the field) to coordinate the air activities of all Allied air forces operating in Yugoslavia.53
There were other areas, besides tactical operations, where relations between Russia and its allies were far more cumbersome and suspicion-laden than they needed to be. For example, the crews of British and American merchant ships felt like prisoners during their turnaround times in port at Murmansk and Archangel.54 Such ill treatment was also accorded to the so-called No. 30 Mission, which seems to have been a subset of the British Military Mission in Russia. No. 30 Mission consisted of British technicians and radio communications people posted in the Soviet Union to assist the Russians in assembling and using their Lend-Lease tanks and aircraft and to handle matters related to the routing and scheduling of the Anglo-American northern convoys of merchant ships to Russia. In July 1943 there were approximately four hundred British personnel in the Soviet Union, serving either in north Russia or with the British Military Mission in Moscow. The vast majority of these Britons (more than three hundred) were stationed near the north Russian ports. No. 30 Mission personnel did not exactly receive a warm welcome upon their arrival in January 1942. In fact, they were initially left stranded at Archangel, despite being eager to get to their bases and start work.55 In a rambling and somewhat contradictory account, the leader of No. 30 Mission (and of the entire British Military Mission in Russia), Lieutenant General Giffard Le Q. Martel, listed some of the difficulties under which the British personnel under his command were forced to operate.
According to Martel, things ran fairly smoothly until July 1942. At that time the Russians began to demand that British military personnel bound for duty in north Russia obtain Russian visas before they arrived. The most pressing problem with this demand, aside from the insult, was the delay (often considerable) before the Russians would grant visas.56 A few months later, in September 1942, the Russians began to censor the mail of No. 30 Mission personnel. As with the visas, the insult to the British was twofold. First, there was the implication that the British commanders on the spot could not be trusted to ensure that military secrets did not circulate in the mail of the personnel under their command. Second, Russian censorship involved lengthy delays that were infuriating to British soldiers, who were eagerly awaiting mail from home.57
In addition to imposing seemingly arbitrary restrictions upon British personnel, the Russians seemed very unwilling to make use of the technical expertise those personnel were prepared to offer. General Mason McFarlane of the British Military Mission in Moscow provided to the War Office a lively account of the difficulties of keeping the Russians in spare parts for their Lend-Lease equipment. McFarlane reported, “Russian methods are not our methods. Their principle is the continental one of running a machine until it blows up and then replacing it with a new one. . . . I cannot convince the Russians that our assistance on the stores and spare parts side would be invaluable.”58
One on occasion, a group of British technicians from No. 30 Mission was given the task of assembling American Bell P-39 Airacobra fighter aircraft that had been shipped to the USSR in crates. This did not work out so well. Shunning the assistance of this group, which had set up its workshop in the inland city of Kineshma, some two hundred miles northeast of Moscow, the Russians preferred to assemble the P-39s on their own at Ivanovo, fifty miles from Kineshma. The British technicians at Kineshma were left with virtually nothing to do.59
No. 30 Mission also experienced great difficulty in caring for its own sick and wounded in the Soviet Union. Upon arrival in north Russia, the British intended to set up hospital accommodation for their personnel at Vaenga and Archangel. The Vaenga hospital was set up.60 However, when the equipment and materials for the Archangel medical unit arrived, on a British ship, the Russians would not allow any of it to be unloaded. In fact, the doctors, nurses, and technicians for this hospital all returned to England without ever setting foot on Russian soil. This was particularly galling for the British serving with No. 30 Mission, as Martel indicated to the COS Committee:
At that time, there were a considerable number of British casualties needing urgent medical attention in Archangel [where] there was a Russian hospital, and the Russians were most anxious to help in every way, but they were unable to compete with the influx of survivors from the convoy P.Q. 17. Many of these men died or had limbs amputated unnecessarily. . . . There can surely never have been a previous case in history in which one nation has treated the casualties of an allied nation in such a callous manner.61
In other areas, however, the Russians were quite helpful to Martel and No. 30 Mission. The British found that they were eventually able to reduce the number of their people stationed in north Russia because of the willingness of the Russians to make the facilities of the ports available to the British. This included the use of heavy equipment to repair ships that had been damaged by enemy action or the elements in transit.62
The Russians were also quite open with certain types of information. They provided Martel everything he wanted to know about how Russian equipment and tactics stood up under the test of battle and about German strengths and weaknesses. In regard to plans for their own forthcoming offensives, however, the Russians tried not to tell Martel anything at all. They were similarly secretive about intelligence reports, Russian troop strengths in various sectors of the front, and the overall supply situation in regard to such things as weapons and food.63
It seems Martel was trying to say that in some ways the Russians were helpful, in some ways not. Maybe “unpredictable” is a better word to describe Russia’s behavior toward the Western Allies, rather than “bad” or “good.”
At approximately the same time, a British embassy report from Kuibyshev gets to the crux of the matter as to why Britain had not been welcomed with open arms as an ally by Russia. Among the conclusions listed is this very prescient and succinct observation:
The root of the trouble is no doubt political. . . . Soviet Government are only interested in us as allies to the extent to which they think our activities will assist:
(a) their own victory in the war.
(b) their own security after the war. . . .
As regards (a) they are disappointed we have not been able to send forces to the Eastern Front or achieve success elsewhere. Our material aid is important but not decisive. They accept the explanations politely, but they are not interested in the reasons or motives. We move up and down their chart by results alone and at present we are not very high.64
Lend-Lease aid was certainly vital to the Russian war effort.65 However, the food, medicine, communications equipment, and clothing that arrived via Lend-Lease was more important than the weaponry. It is true that the Western Allies sent forty convoys of ships to the northern Russian ports. Many of these convoys, such as the aforementioned PQ 17, suffered heavy losses en route due to attacks from German aircraft and submarines. Carried on these voyages were vast quantities of equipment of various types—for example, medicine, communications equipment, several thousand American light trucks and Sherman tanks, and five thousand British tanks.66 This certainly represents a significant form of cooperation between the allies. However, more important to Russian victory were the high-quality weapons produced in their own munitions factories. British and American aid certainly eased the Russian shortage of mechanized transport and provided extra aircraft and tanks. However, the Russians themselves produced 11,000 of the up-gunned version of their own vastly superior T-34/85 tanks and a total of 29,000 tanks in the year 1944 alone.67 In addition to the T-34 variant with the 85-mm gun, Russian 1944 tank production included the KV-1 and Stalin heavy models, as well as, presumably, the earlier-model T-34 with the original 76.2-mm gun. All of these Russian tanks were qualitatively superior to anything in the German arsenal—and to anything the Americans or the British could give the Russians.68 What the Russians really needed more than Lend-Lease aid was an early second front in northwestern Europe to force Germany to divide its forces between two widely separated enemies.
The primary reason for not including the Russians within the machinery of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, as noted, was that the Western Allies did not have to plan combined operations with the Russians on an everyday basis. The Americans and the Russians were, however, able to work together to plan Operation Frantic, a campaign that was dear to the heart of General Arnold. These were the shuttle-bombing missions conducted by American heavy bombers that took off from Fifteenth Air Force bases in southern Italy, bombed Germany and German-controlled areas in Eastern Europe, and then landed in the Ukraine. After refueling and replenishing on Russian soil, the aircraft would take off again to drop more bombs on German industrial targets during the return trip to their home bases. The eighteen shuttle-bombing missions of the Frantic campaign (which began on June 2, 1944) have been well documented elsewhere.69 These missions indicate that although the Western Allies and the Russians were deeply suspicious of each other, they were able to work together.
The Allies had a procedure that, although somewhat complicated, allowed the British and the Americans to exchange with the Russians closely guarded technical information describing new weapons and equipment. Under this system, the Combined Intelligence Committee (part of the CCS) was directed to prepare monthly reports containing technical information that was deemed appropriate for release to the Russians. These reports were then sent to the Combined Chiefs for approval. If approved, the monthly reports were sent to the American and British missions in Moscow for transmittal to the Russians.70 Examples of the types of information provided under this system to the Russians by Britain include details of ASDIC (sonar), Hedgehog depth charges, the Churchill and Cromwell tank designs, rockets and hollow-charge projectiles, muzzle brakes for artillery and tank guns, jet propulsion for aircraft, H2S ground-mapping radar, aluminized explosives, plastic armor, flashless cordites, and armor-piercing ammunition.71 While reasonably effective, this method of exchanging technical data was considerably more cumbersome than the manner in which the Americans and the British shared information. The Western Allies basically told each other everything in regard to weaponry. This included, from June 1942 onward, all information about the highly sensitive Manhattan Project. Such a level of trust is certainly a testimony to the intimacy of the alliance between Britain and the United States.72
General Deane elaborates on the tone of the relationships between the Allies when describing his first impressions upon arriving in the Soviet Union to attend the Moscow foreign ministers’ conference in October 1943. Deane attended the first meeting of the three foreign ministers—Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden, and Vyacheslav Molotov—with their assorted staffs and interpreters on October 18, the very day he arrived in Moscow.73 According to Deane, after all the parties had assembled in Molotov’s outer office,
We went through a handshaking procedure that was typical of all British-American-Soviet relations. The British and Americans paid no attention to each other beyond a casual nod or “Howdjdo,” but both Anglo-Saxon delegations shook hands with every Russian in the room. This process was repeated every time we met or departed from a group of Russians. It was indicative of the casual and informal relationship we had with our British ally as contrasted with the formality and reserve which attended our relations with the Russians.74
Clearly, the reserve that Deane mentions was evident in Allied discussions and debates to which the USSR was a party. However, while the British and the Americans did a much better job at working with each other than either did in working with the Soviet Union, the cooperation of the three nations together was not all that bad, considering the vast amount of territory over which their forces were arrayed. Indeed, the instances in which the Allied nations worked at cross-purposes were far fewer than those of the Axis nations, which consistently conducted their respective war efforts in isolation and to each other’s detriment.
In that regard, it should be mentioned that the aforementioned Moscow foreign minister’s conference had some very positive aspects, despite its awkward moments. Out of it came the “Four-Power Declaration,” a signed pledge by the USSR, Britain, the United States, and China to continue to cooperate after the peace had been secured. Lasting peace was the aim. This declaration was the basis for the foundation of the United Nations.75 Maurice Matloff has described the significance of the occasion: “Marking the first time since the outbreak of war that British and U.S. staff officers had met face to face with Soviet military representatives and discussed strategic plans, the conference was a landmark in the development of closer collaboration among the Allied Powers in World War II.”76
