Sarah Paine – How Hitler almost starved Britain

The Germans almost sank a terminal quantity of British trade. It's close because Britain is dependent not only on oil imports, but about half of its food supply. Malta, Crete, and the Suez Canal lie in the center of Italian ambitions. The Britains are in a world of hurt. Fall of Norway, fall of France, blockade of Malta, fall of Crete. It is really bad news. Germany should have bought a completely different navy, skipped the surface fleet, buy a lot more U-boats. Maybe they would have zapped the British before the United States gets its act together in either world war. If Hitler had just done the Anschluss and maybe done the Sudeten number in Czechoslovakia and quit, he'd be called Bismarck II, a genius. But that's not who he is. It turns out that the possibilities for maritime and continental powers are a little different. Uh, basically, a small subset of countries can defend themselves, but primarily at sea. And that opens certain possibilities and others can't, and that opens and closes certain possibilities. And I'm gonna talk at this, uh, story from Britain's point of view, the country with the 360, you-can't-get-me moat. And it's an, an instructive case for the United States of the possibilities and the perils of having this sort of, uh, position. So that is my game plan today. And you can look at the great peninsula of Europe where Britain is located, and you can see this northern coastline for Britain, where it's uncomfortably close to the continent and its enemies are sitting there. It's an, an, an interesting neighborhood. So here's my plan. I'm gonna took about, talk about these continental problems that Britain has dem- been dealing with. If you think about it, Britain was always fighting France, and then in 1871, Germany reunif- uh, unifies, and then the problem's Germany. And I'm gonna pick up the story in 1939 when things are really bad for Britain. So I'm gonna talk about first these continental problems, and then I'm gonna talk about how Britain tried to deal with it. And first, it has to do with getting sea control, and then once you can do that, finding some peripheral theaters where you might be able to fight and deal with a continental problem, and you probably need allies. And so that, those are the force, uh, the first four topics. Then... So that was then, and now is now. The continental problems now are China and Russia, and to see of what this case study might reveal about the ongoing things. All right, so here's Britain, uncomfortably close to the continent. If it wants to get to Russia, which is its big ally in World War I and World War II, it's either gotta go way up north around the Norwegian coastline, and you get up into places like Murmansk and Archangel, or it's gotta go way around through this very narrow sea, the Mediterranean, through the choke point of choke points, which is at Dardanelles and the Bosporus into the Black Sea, and the main port back in the day was Odessa. And then if you compare French and British access to the high seas, France has got a pretty good coastline that just gets it right into the oceans. But Germany, if it wants to send merchant traffic or naval traffic, it's gotta go through these narrow seas, and then it's gotta get by Britain, which is its b- big enemy in the two world wars, which is the dominant naval power. So that's complicated. For Britain, if it wants to get to its empire back in the day, it wants to go through the Suez Canal. That requires the cooperation of Spain, France, Italy, and if it wants to get to Russia, Turkey as well. Well, Turkey didn't cooperate very well in either war, and if you think in World War II, well, fall of France, fascist sympathies of Spain and then Italy is part of the access. Britain is in real trouble. And what do you do about this? Britain has this big empire that it wants to protect. It's got a massive basing system, more bases than anybody else does in order to protect this empire from this, which is a very resentful Germany, doesn't much like the Versailles settlement of World War I. It's a divided country in that a Polish corridor separates East Prussia, and the Germans start trying to solve this problem. Initially, they're taking Austria, the Sudeten German parts of Czechoslovakia in '38, then they take all of Czechoslovakia in '39, and they've already dealt with the Rhineland, which is supposed to be demilitarized per the terms of the Versailles Treaty. Well, they ignored that, re-militarized in '36. And this is important 'cause there are a lot of industrial, uh, resources and factories and things there. It turns out that Hitler's plans require, it's not optional, it requires the resources not only of the Rhineland, but also Czechoslovakia and Poland and Romania, which is gonna have the oil for them. So when you get to '39, when Russia and Germany are dividing up Poland between them, this is the part of the history that Russians don't like to talk about, but it's exactly what they were doing, this triggers World War II because the French and the British honor their alliance with Poles to help deal with this. All right, so in 1940, Britain's in a world of hurt. It faces this massive blue problem, and then there's this green, growing green disaster. It's facing two continental powers, Germany and Russia, that are both have these expansive empires they wanna create. They wanna divide Europe and then the rest of the world. Bad news for Britain. So, but 1941, when Hitler decides he needs Russia too, (laughs) and then Russia decides, ah, the one that's attacking me is probably the major problem, not the other one. So Stalin is gonna swap sides, and he's gonna be, uh, be coordinating with Britain. So that's better from Britain's point of view than having two continental powers trying to deal with it. So now it's down to one. So once the United States has gotten into the war, this is what the world looks like. You have a big cancer in Europe from the British point of view, but it's all surrounded by oceans that Brit can get to and a lot of allies and neutral states. So Britain has access to those places. And then there's a separate...... cancer in Asia, where Japan's trying to work its magic. And I say separate because the Axis never coordinated these two theaters. So, this is looking at the world from a maritime perspective. What you're looking at is all the oceanic routes that connect everything. So Britain's problem is how to leverage the miracle of sea transport that basically can access you the whole world, versus the logistical nightmare of land transport, where you have to, you can only drive through countries that'll let you drive through. The seas give you mobility, they give you access to theaters, markets, resources, allies, and they also give you sanctuary at home if you're surrounded by them. It makes it harder for people to invade. So Britain's trying to leverage all of that against the armies, uh, of the continental armies by, um, it's gonna try to strangle them economically, diplomatically, and militarily. Now, the generation that led World War II in Britain, and not just Britain but elsewhere, they were the conscripts of World War I, which was supposed to end all wars, and they knew full well as they're in the midst of World War II that it did not remotely achieve that promise. And so, they learned a whole series of lessons, and I'm gonna do a comparison of what was done in World War I versus World War II, and they are the greatest generation, not their children who claimed the title. Lesson number one is don't go beyond the culminating point of attack. What's that? The terminology comes from Clausewitz, uh, Carl von Clausewitz, who is the Western guru on conventional land warfare, which means is if you're attacking in a battle, if you go too far, you'll weaken yourself, 'cause the enemy will counterattack, send you further backwards than you would've otherwise. In the case of World War I, you're sending young men over trenches into ongoing machine gun fire. What do you suppose is gonna happen to them? And this profligate waste of life in these, uh, assaults out of trenches, maybe you took a little territory in the first two weeks, but after that, nothing. These offensives will go on for months and months, racking up hundreds of thousands of deaths. Uh, no more doing that in World War II. And you can look, the death figures for World War I and II. So World War I, the British army gets the multi-million man army that they had coveted. They deployed on the main front from start to finish, and they chalk up twice as many deaths as they did in World War II when they have a peripheral strategy. Uh, in World War II, they do make the mistake, is they land the big army on the continent, opening move, but it doesn't do well, and then they reassess and they get that army off the continent immediately. This is what the Dunkirk evacuation is, where the French are covering the British as they're decamping from the continent, saving the British army, and this is why France has such large casualties. It is, it is doing this, even though France isn't, in the war that long. So it's gonna be a long wait before the British get back on the continent again. Long wait also for the United States to get in the war. There's no more going beyond the culminating upon, uh, point of attack. All right, the, the way diplomacy is run is also completely different. In World War I, there are exactly two conferences trying to coordinate things among the Entente powers, and they're the December 1915 and November 1916 Chantilly Conferences, and all they are, are the military heads. Well, the Russian Romanov dynasty is overthrown in early 1917. It is too late. What happened in World War I is the Germans focused on the western front in 1914, eastern front in 1915, back to the western front in 1916. Well, in World War, World War II, the idea is you wanna squeeze them simultaneously from all fronts so they can't, can't divert people back and forth. And if you look at the coordination, it begins even before the United States is in the war with the ABC staff talks, and then the Atlantic, uh, Conference, which yields the Atlantic Charter, which is talking about what war objectives are, unconditional surrender of, uh, Germany, and also what the post-war situation is gonna look like. And there's coordination not only among military leaders, but, uh, uh, civil and military leaders as well. There's a combined command of US and British forces. We have offices in each other's capitals, but we're also coordinating with the Russians so that you're setting up not only, uh... Also, war termination and what, what post-war institutions are gonna be like to hold the peace. It's a completely different event from World War I when Russia falls out of the Entente because there are bread riots in St. Petersburg and Russia could not supply its troops with adequate armaments. Well, that's not gonna happen in World War II. Russia comes with a really large army. Germany has another large army. You've gotta have a big army to deal with Germany's army. So in World War I, there is no Lend-Lease aid. No one would've thought of giving that much stuff to each other. It's like, "Everybody first," and it's like, "Okay, everybody last," doing that one. The railways had not been completed in World War I. The Trans-Siberian doesn't get completed until 1916, and the Murmansk Railway, you can see Murmansk up there, isn't completed until early 1917. The Romanov dynasty is gone. It's too late. In World War II, three quarters of Lend-Lease aid would go over those completed railway systems. Now, to the British credit, they did try to break the blockade on Russia. The way to get into Russia in those days and hook in with the railway system would be to get into the Black Sea in Odessa, 'cause Russia had all the men, but they didn't have all the war material to fight, so this is where the Gallipoli campaign comes in. You could argue about whether you think it is good strategy or not, but it was miserably executed. So first of all, it wasn't a joint operation. What's joint? Joint means you're coordinating your different military services, in this case army and navy. So what goes on? The British Navy tries to run the Dardanelles for two months. That does not work well. Do you suppose the Ottomans might think something was up? Yeah. And when you get up there on the Dardanelles, all the high point, it's a very steep...... place. So the, the Ottomans are all busy sorting that all out, getting troops in place. So two months later, when the c- the British, New Zealand, Australian, and French troops all land on a given day, the Ottomans, uh, are there with a welcome party essentially, a- and that invasion stalemates in three days. But they keep at it for eight months, uh, taking 190,000 casualties, 55,000 of, uh, of whom are dead men, uh, totally, uh, miserably executed. And it comes as collateral damage. As the British are trying to run the Dardanelles with their navy, this is when the Ottomans are terrified of their Christian subjects, Armenians, and they're starting to round them up. They're pulling them out of the army, and then days before the landing, the, the Turkish massacre of the Armenians begin, and between 1915 and 1923, 1.5 million Armenians are killed. That's a lot of collateral damage. All right, the Normandy landings are a completely different event in World War II. This is another, uh, uh, contested landing of trying to get armies in. First of all, the buildup of war material goes on for years to get all the landing vessels in, the equipment, the forces, all ready to go in Britain, and then the disinformation campaign kept the Germans completely disinformed. They're expecting the landing to be at the Pas-de-Calais, which is the shortest place and it's way off in Normandy. That worked, so everybody lands on a day and they're up and over and into places inland. Another lesson learned, the Royal Navy did not think that convoy duty was the manly thing to do. Uh, they would convoy troop transports but they wouldn't deal with the merchant marine until 1918. Well, they, uh, the Germans almost sank a terminal quantity of that stuff, so the Navy is not thinking about the economic dimensions of warfare. They're just focused on all the military things in World War I. In World War II, the British would be convoying even before they got in the war. Another difference of the, between the World War II and World War I, at the end of World War I, if you look at the disposition of German troops, they're abroad. They're occupying Belgium, Luxembourg, parts of France. Nobody's in Germany. Yes, the Germans had really lousy meals during the war, but German civilians did not feel the full brunt of what their goddam government had done. And therefore, uh, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt felt that it was really critical to have boots on the ground in Berlin to let the Germans know exactly what had happened to them and let them feel the war that they'd inflicted on others in order to end it. Even so, the a- the Allies win this thing and they wreck the continental powers, but they almost wreck themselves in the process. It's a Pyrrhic victory for France and Britain. It really weakens them. So World War II is gonna be a different event. So that's the being in this continental situation and the lessons learned from the last time around, and now for what the, uh, British did in World War II to deal with the continental problem. The opening move of a maritime power in a really high-stakes war like this, uh, is typically blockade. What you wanna do is cut your enemy off from the oceans and force it to cannibalize its own resources and those of occupied areas. And because of the geographic position of a maritime power, you can quite often do this to a continental power on narrow seas. And Britains were well aware that Germany's a trading country. Most of its trade goes by sea, and it's also on these narrow seas, so geographically and economically, it's really vulnerable to blockade. And I get it. Germany gets alternate resources. But they come at a much higher cost, they're much more difficult, and so that you're really putting a stress on the German economy and, and causing inflation and other things. But if you blockade, um, a continental power can't blockade you back. Why? They're on the narrow seas, so they can't deploy a surface fleet. You'll sink it. And also, um, they can't easily blockade a coastline that faces the open seas, the high seas. Yeah, they, it, that you can do other things on narrow seas, but it's pretty tough. So what do you do if you cannot blockade ships in port? Well, then what you're gonna try to do is commerce raiding, to try and, uh, sink things when they're out and about, and that was what Germany did in World War II and why its occupation of France was so important. Because once it took the French coastline, it then set up U-boat pens in Brest, Lorient, Saint-Nazaire, La Rochelle, and Bordeaux, and they're gonna be using these to fight the Battle of the Atlantic. That's the game. So maritime powers do blockade, the response of, um, continental power is commerce raiding, and then the maritime, uh, response to that is gonna be you're gonna convoy your merchant ships. Okay, as the war begins in Europe, the United States is not in, but Roosevelt is coordinating with Latin America to set up a big neutrality zone all around the Americas, 300 nautical miles, and then the Lend Lease Act, also before US belligerency, there's, uh, pieces of it which say the United States is gonna take over British bases in Iceland and set up bases in Greenland. Why do we care about those locations? They're really important if you're gonna send convoys back and forth across the Atlantic, both to attack and to defend, so that's what we're up to. Uh, but even so, uh, the Axis visits a real nightmare in the Battle of the Atlantic. A lot of things are going down. So how does that all work? So before the United States gets in at the very beginning, these U-boats turn the North Sea into a kill zone and then Britain is losing an awful lot of stuff off its shores and also off the shores of Africa, and the Germans get really good at commerce raiding really fast, and there's also the Fall of France, which is a mess, because prior to the Fall of France, Britain is only convoying just beyond Ireland. Once you get the Fall of France and all of those submarines on French territory, then the British have to convoy 400 miles further west and they've lost an awful lot of destroyers between the fall of Norway and then the Dunkirk evacuation, so they haven't got enough ships to convoy properly. And then the Germans are really creative. Admiral Doenitz, who runs the submarine service at this point, he uses wolf pack tactics where you concentrate a whole bunch of submarines on a convoy, attack it at night, and bad things happen to the convoy. Also, the Germans have captured some of the British code so they have a sense of where the convoys are and they're sinking almost a terminal tonnage of this traffic. 850,000 tons of Allied shipping is going down. So this is Hitler's...... happy time, (laughs) when he's sinking an awful lot of stuff. Um, then there's a big Greenland gap. This is where there's a lack of air cover, and so you'll see a lot of things are going down in this Greenland gap. But meanwhile, the British have gotten pretty good at espionage, and they've captured a lot of Enigma machines. Those are what the Germans are using to encrypt their messages. Well, the British capture some machines, some rotors, some codebooks in 1940 and '41. So by the summer of 1941 through February '42, they can actually read the codes, or some of them, s- decrypt them, so that within 36 hours they can get the information out, and this allows convoys to go, "Oh, wolf pack there. We're gonna do evasive routing of the convoys somewhere else." And that may have saved up to a mil- two million tons of Allied shipping. Uh, but meanwhile, for the Germans, General Rommel is in North Africa, and he's having troubles because he's sublied across the Mediterranean, and the British and friends are sinking too many of the, uh, his supplies. So Admiral Doenitz is told to reroute some of the U-boats in the Atlantic to go help General Rommel up in North Africa. The United States isn't in the war, so all quiet on the, uh, on the eastern seaboard. So it- it- it's looking like it might be okay for the British for a while, except Doenitz thinks something's up. And so they add a fourth rotor to the Enigma machine, and so the British are then blind again for most of 1942 until they can, uh, capture a four-rotor Nig machine, all the rotors plus the codebooks. It takes a while. So they're in a world of hurt. The United States enters the war, which you think would be good for Britain, except it produces Hitler's second happy time. Why? Because Admiral King, like his Royal Navy predecessors in the previous war, doesn't think convoying is the manly thing for naval, uh, officers to be up to, so he's not for convoying. Also, Americans don't turn off the lights, and therefore, uh, as merchant ships are going up the east coast of the United States, the lighting is just highlighting their silhouettes, making it much, uh, easier to sink. And, oh, by the way, in those days, Louisiana-Texas oil, which is supplying the East Coast where a lot of American industry is, is coming up by ships on the eastern seaboard, and particularly by Cape Hatteras shoals, which are, like, 30 miles wide and become a total kill zone. So, uh, Admiral King rethinks it after losing more than a million tons of tonnage in the first three months of '42 and goes, "Oh, gee whiz, maybe we should do convoys." Yes. And, uh, the United States does interlocking convoy system by May of 1942, but then Doenitz just starts hunting things a little further south in the Caribbean. So, um, the Brits, uh, get their four-rotor Enigma machine, and they're able to decode things again, but, uh, there's another problem. The British think that there's something up with their Admiralty codes in, in August of, uh, '42, but they don't change them out till June of '43. There was something wrong. The Germans were reading them. So, um, uh, it's this, you can see this back and forth in the Battle of the Atlantic. But eventually, the air cover gap is closed. This makes a tremendous difference. There are new technologies that are introduced that ruin Admiral Doenitz. Here was what happens. The United States had radar. Germans never did. American radar improves so you can see through the fog. Uh, the United States adds hedgehogs. What are they? Not the cute little critters. It's rather if you have a ship and you have hedgehogs, they deliver an elliptical spray of depth charges, so anybody who's anywhere underneath you is in a world of hurt. In addition, the United States introduces two new classes of ships, one auxiliary aircraft carriers, little ones. That means you're gonna have air cover for the entire journey, right? When the, when you get beyond land-based air, then these folks will take over. In addition, uh, small destroyer escorts were introduced instead of the big ones, and these little ships, they've had all sorts of fun things on board, sonar, radar, depth charges, hedgehogs, and so they transform commerce raiding into a low life expectancy profession so that in May of '43, the Germans lose 41 U-boats. That's unsustainable. That's a massive percentage of what they have. And in one of those encounters, I think it's about 25 U-boats going after a convoy of 37 ships, sink nothing, lose three U-boats, plus another one damaged, and on one of these U-boats is Admiral Doenitz's 19-year-old son, Peter, who dies in all of this. So Doenitz, as a result, uh, redeploys the U-boats outta the North Atlantic because it's unsustainable for Germany south of the Azores. And, um, and yet, there are problems going on with the Arctic convoy that takes a quarter of the Lend-Lease aid to Stalin, and it gets called off from much of '42 and much of '43, and I'll get into it. But that problem gets solved, and then you can see where all the kills are, and the Germans are losing, uh, U-boats closer and closer to home shores. So the Battle of the Atlantic is won by the Allies in part by reducing merchantman losses through, um, convoys, evasive convoys, and also increasing, uh, U-boat losses through all these different technologies and also, um, reading their mail, which helps to find them. But one could argue even more important was the civilian side of it, the United States' ability to just overwhelm Germany with the construction of US naval and merchantmen. Here are the stats. Look what happens with naval strength. '43, US Navy hulls and personnel are, uh, tripling. That's quite a lot. And then naval hulls are gonna double in the next year. That's a lot of ships and a lot of people in the Navy. Here's some more fun statistics. So if you look in 1941 and go over, that's a bumper year for U-boat construction in 1941. Going to 1942, really ugly if you're a merchantman.... a crew member, 'cause it's double the number of tonnage of merchant ships that are being sunk. But then keep moving over. Look at merchant hull construction, up by four times. And the next year, that's gonna double. And oh, let's look over for, uh, 1943. Look how many U-boats are being sunk. It goes way up with all those new technologies that I've just told you about. So even though the Germans produce a lot more U-boats, the kill rate is so high that there's hardly any net gain. And then here's some more way, fun ways of looking at it. So you look at new ships. As soon as the United States gets in the war, new ship rates go up, up and away. But the losses are really high through mid-1943. And then it's, it's in, uh, mid-1943 that you can see the big divergence between construction and what's being destroyed. And the Germans just can't keep up with this. Uh, there is just way too much stuff out there for them to sink. All right, so Admiral Doenitz d- uh, did get one thing right. His boss there, Admiral Raeder, who's the head of the navy, had said that pocket battleships were the thing to use for commerce raiding, and Doenitz proves him wrong with, that U-boats are the way to go. And Hitler agrees, so he cashes Raeder, makes Doenitz the head of the, um, uh, the navy. And then S- Hitler goes one step further. He scraps his surface fleet, because it's useless to him in this war. You cannot deploy it in this kinda high-stakes war, something that countries like China with, uh, uh, surrounded by narrow seas oughta think about. All right, so if you look at why the Battle of the Atlantic turned out the way it did, is Germany and Britain have very different geographies. And arguably, Germany bought the wrong navy before the war. It should've bought a lot of U-boats and forget the surface, uh, minimize the surface boats that you're buying. And, uh, so Britain could do things that Germany just plain couldn't. That's just part of the geography. So on the, uh, uh, the effects of the blockade were really significant. You're really straining the German economy. And, but the German commerce raiding was also very effective. The Germans almost sank a terminal quantity of British trade. It's close, because Britain is dependent not only on oil imports, resources, but abou- about half of its food supply. So the Germans tried and came close. And then you go, well, the counter commerce, uh, raiding strategy did work, but it was very, there was touch and go, back and forth, and it required a lot of things that had to be coordinated. You needed the intelligence. It really helps reading other people's mail. You needed a whole set of new ship classes. You need to, um, be able to construct adequate quantities of, uh, naval hulls, merchant hulls. Uh, you need to coordinate with allies. You gotta get food and other things to Britain. There are a lot of things going on here. You need air cover, the planes that are capable of doing it. So there are a lot of things going on. Remove any one of them and the outcome may have been different.