The Battle of the Atlantic: How the Allies Won the War
Jonathan Dimbleby. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Photos. Maps. Illus. Notes. Index. Select Biblio. 560 pp. $34.95.
Reviewed by James M. Scott
British author and television journalist Jonathan Dimbleby has crafted an immensely readable history of the German submarine war in World War II in his new book, The Battle of the Atlantic: How the Allies Won the War.
In recent years, many World War II submarine narratives have focused largely on the fight in the Pacific. No doubt that is because the story is much more American oriented. U.S. boats had so crippled the Japanese economy that the fuel-starved military resorted to kamikaze attacks, while hungry Home-Island residents were left to eat acorns and sawdust.
As far as tonnage lost, however, the Battle of the Atlantic was far more destructive. While American merchant mariners paid a high price, the economic effects were borne mostly by Britain, which as an island nation dependent on imports was particularly vulnerable. Submarine warfare, after all, was inherently a commerce war. Each convoy of food, airplane parts, and fuel delivered to the bottom crippled the British war machine and threatened life for the public.
At first glance, Dimbleby is an unlikely author to tackle such a topic. His previous books range from a biography of the Prince of Wales to an examination of Russia to the plight of the Palestinians. That said, he is an excellent storyteller with a deft understanding of pace, tone, and character. The end result is a book that clocks in at more than 500 pages but reads like a thriller.
The challenge any writer tackling a topic this large faces is what to include and how best to craft a story. To Dimbleby’s credit, he deftly navigates between the 30,000-foot view of the war as well as the 30-foot.
On the larger level, he centers the German side of the story on Admiral Karl Dönitz, the architect of submarine war. He balances the aggressive German admiral’s story by focusing on British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. “The U-boat menace is our worst danger,” Dimbleby quotes Churchill’s desperate cable to Roosevelt. “The spectacle of all these splendid ships being built, sent to sea crammed with priceless food and munitions, and being sunk—three or four every day—torments me day and night.”
Dimbleby then masterfully weaves in plenty of action to give readers a terrifying taste of what life was like for the sailors on the front lines of the undersea war. One of his great strengths is his eye for the telling detail, which makes the story so visual. In one case, after a U-boat torpedoed the passenger liner Laconia, carrying 1,800 Italian prisoners of war, Dimbleby quotes one man’s instructions to another in the lifeboat: “If any of them hang onto the side, call out and I’ll give you a hatchet so you can chop their fingers off.”
The seafaring slugfest dragged on for years, making it less of a battle, as Dimbleby notes, and more of a campaign. He writes that as the months piled up, it was impossible not to notice the rise in bitterness on both sides. “Mercy—the quality of which had been demonstrated by both sides in the early days of the conflict—had yielded to harsher rules of warfare in which chivalry on the high seas was replaced by a ruthless disdain for human life,” he writes.
The massive losses made it impossible for the Allies to keep up—simply put, ships were going down faster than new ones could be built, threatening the Atlantic lifeline. Germany’s success, however, was undone by the rise in the Allied use of radar, which allowed convoy escorts to target U-boats with incredible success.
The fulcrum in the Atlantic undersea war came in May 1943, when Germany lost 41 U-boats in a single month. Dimbleby recounts Dönitz’s meeting with Adolf Hitler, in which he leveled with the German leader. “The enemy’s new location devices,” the admiral said, “are, for the first time, making U-boat warfare impossible and causing heavy losses.”
The successful Allied retaking of the Atlantic shipping lanes helped guarantee a steady flow of vital goods to the British—keeping them in the fight—and made it possible for enough troops to cross the ocean to make the Allied landings in France in June 1944 a reality.
Dimbleby’s book is an engrossing and worthwhile read that serves as an important reminder more than seven decades later of the incredible struggles and sacrifices the Allies made in the quest to win World War II.
In Nelson’s Wake: The Navy and the Napoleonic Wars
James Davey. London and New Haven: National Maritime Museum and Yale University Press, 2015. 440 pp. Maps. Append. Gloss. Biblio. Index. $40.
Reviewed by Rear Admiral Joseph Callo, U.S. Navy (Retired)
In the final paragraph of his 1897 biography The Life of Nelson, U.S. sea-power visionary Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan helps readers focus on the long-term issues of the Napoleonic Wars. While paying high tribute to Nelson’s achievements, he focused on the post-Trafalgar years rather than the irresistible drama of Nelson’s legendary victory there: “There were, indeed, consequences momentous and stupendous yet to flow from the decisive supremacy of Great Britain’s sea-power, the establishment of which, beyond all question or competition, was Nelson’s great achievement.”
James Davey’s new book, In the Wake of Nelson, focuses on the “momentous and stupendous” consequences of Nelson’s “great achievement”—in particular, the Royal Navy he left behind after Trafalgar. Davey proposes that the conflict between Great Britain and Napoleon’s France was, for the most part, a Royal Navy matter. He supports his premise with a series of sub-stories. The first of these is the ongoing and frequently contentious political interaction between the Royal Navy’s civilian leaders and its senior admirals. Players include the Earl St. Vincent, Admiral Collingwood, Viscount Melville, Lord Spencer, William Addington, Lord Barham, and William Pitt. Davey also describes the Royal Navy’s complex leadership structure during the Napoleonic Wars.
A relatively short but fascinating topic discussed is Britain’s Sea Fencibles, a volunteer maritime-defense force established in 1801, which was essentially a Royal Navy reserve force. Not surprisingly, the Sea Fencibles had strong attachments to their local communities, and generally they were recruited in areas most likely to be invaded by the French.
Just there would in later eras, debates arose among the naval and political leaderships about the cost of training and maintaining a Royal Navy reserve force. There also were questions about whether the Sea Fencibles’ civilian jobs as local watermen would take precedence over their navy support duties in times of greatest peril. Some were convinced that the Sea Fencibles were motivated primarily by the fact that they were exempt from being taken up by press gangs. The Sea Fencibles were, however, maintained until 1810, when fears of an invasion by Napoleon had been dispelled.
Davey discusses the role of Britain’s improved shipyards and industrial base and the parallel improvement in the Royal Navy’s logistical system in supporting the Navy’s role in the Napoleonic Wars. In the latter instance the British government is given credit:
The much improved logistical system allowed ships to remain on blockade for years at a time, and operations that could not have been undertaken even twenty years earlier suddenly became possible. Decisions made in the closeted environment of Whitehall could transform the broader naval war.
The book also focuses on Napoleon’s blind spot concerning the full scope and significance of naval power. He thought primarily in terms of land power, and failing to recognize the full implications of sea power was a fatal flaw. It wasn’t that Napoleon didn’t pay attention to sea power; it simply was that he did not sufficiently recognize its importance. Sea power is a complex blend that includes blockades, amphibious operations, trade, industrial power, ship and weapons technology, skilled sailors, national attitude, and winning battles. Napoleon failed to understand the complexities and full range of sea power’s implications.
Davey ends his thought-provoking work on a dramatic note:
It was therefore only fitting that Napoleon’s final journey was on board a naval vessel as he was carried to St. Helena. He would live for another six years, imprisoned on an island in the South Atlantic, surrounded by a yawning expanse of sea.
Seventeen Fathoms Deep: The Saga of the Submarine S-4 Disaster
Joseph A. Williams. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2015. ix + 279 pages. Hardcover, $26.95.
Reviewed by Master Chief Petty Officer David A. Mattingly, U.S. Navy (Retired)
When the U.S. Navy introduced the submarine to the fleet, there were many unknowns: How deep, how long, and what happens if you collide underwater? Today, the U.S. Navy Submarine Service’s safety record is the best in the world. However, the early days of the submarines (the small diesel boats known as “pig boats”) were intrinsically dangerous, and the Navy lacked the capability to rescue the crews that were unable to escape their steel tombs.
17 Fathoms Deep: The Saga of the Submarine S-4 Disaster tells the story of one of the worst accidents in the early U.S. Submarine Service. On 17 December 1927, S-4 was conducting standardization trials on a measured course in what Joseph Williams describes as “the quiet serenity of Cape Cod.” Her collision shortly thereafter with the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Paulding returning to port occurred at the worst of times: winter in New England just days before the Christmas holidays. Time was of the essence, as 40 men were on board the submarine when she sank.
Between 1900 and 1927, eight submarines were lost at sea. Williams, a naval historian, builds on the 1925 sinking of S-51, in which all but three crew members died, following her collision with the SS City of Rome. It is particularly interesting that some placed the blame for the S-4’s collision on the 18th Amendment, because the Paulding was enforcing Prohibition laws by interdicting rumrunners.
Admiral Frank Brumby, commander of Navy Submarine Base New London, led the S-4 rescue attempt from on board the USS Falcon (AM-28), the Navy’s only submarine rescue ship. Captain Ernest J. King, who had commanded the S-51 salvage operation, left his command in Norfolk to serve as Admiral Brumby’s aide and direct the day-to-day operations. It is important to note that the Falcon’s crew of 91 nearly doubled with the addition of the admiral’s staff and additional divers. Ice buildup from the frigid weather and the treacherous seas endangered the overloaded ships and hampered diving operations.
Over the first few hours after the collision of S-4, a number of divers and officers, many from the S-51 operation, left their homes or current assignments and sped, often with police escort, to Provincetown, Massachusetts, to join the small armada of ships and boats that assembled in Cape Cod Bay.
One of the most interesting volunteers was Edward Ellsberg, a former line officer and the first commissioned officer to qualify as a deep-sea diver. The most experienced diver and salvage expert in or out of the Navy, he had collaborated with the service’s best divers and salvage experts in raising S-51. But later he found himself in hot water with the Navy after speaking publicly about what the service needed to do to prevent another accident and build a rescue capability. His suggestions were “largely ignored” by the Bureau of Construction and Repair, and he later authored On the Bottom, his memoir of the S-51 salvage operation.
Ellsberg, who left the Navy in 1926, was working as chief engineer for Tidewater Oil when he read the headlines “Submarine S-4 Sunk! Forty Men Trapped!” He first contacted the Navy Department to be a civilian volunteer. He resisted accepting a Navy commission until he was convinced that “his widow” would receive the service’s death gratuity in the event something went wrong. He was rushed in a Navy ambulance from the Brooklyn Navy Yard to New York City’s Grand Central Station, while police officers held traffic so the ambulance could race through the red lights!
Throughout the ultimately futile S-4 rescue operation, constant tension existed between the Navy, the families of the trapped sailors, and the press. Often the family and press misunderstood the movement of ships; for example, the Falcon left the scene to transport an injured diver to the Boston Naval Hospital. The little information the press was able to garner was passed from sailors who answered a few questions by semaphore code. The dribble of information the press published was all the families received.
A positive result of the S-4 tragedy was the invention of the rescue diving bell and the “Momsen lung” by Lieutenant Charles “Swede” Momsen. Both were critical in later rescue operations, including the USS Squalus (SS-192) in 1939.
There are official records and inquiries, news reports, and books written about the S-4 rescue and the early Submarine Force. However, Seventeen Fathoms Deep provides notes and sources used by the author and frames the sinking and various aspects of the attempted rescue and salvage in a way that brings the reader into the dangers of going to sea in pig boats.
Jutland: World War I’s Greatest Naval Battle
Michael Epkenhans, Jörg Hillmann, and Frank Nägler (eds.). Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015. 412 pp. Illus. Maps. Tables. $50.
Reviewed by Howard J. Fuller
This well-produced edited volume, a second-edition reprint from the 2009 Skagerrakschlacht: Vorgeschichte—Ereignis—Verabeitung, comes from an international conference held at Reinbek Castle near Hamburg in 2006 (the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Jutland). And while the venue, hosts, and editors are German, 5 of the 11 chapters are written by distinguished British and Commonwealth scholars, including N. A. M. Rodger and James Goldrick. Andrew Lambert’s contribution is derived from his earlier chapter on Admiral Sir John Fisher’s Baltic plans in The Danish Straits and German Naval Power 1905–1908 (Potsdam: Militärgechichtliches Forchungsamt, 2010), for example.
As the original foreword by German Vice Admiral Hans-Joachim Stricker notes, as late as 1966 Jutland was considered by German histories as “an embarrassing defeat” for the British side, but “This is no longer found in today’s teaching materials.” Indeed, it is difficult today to find any historian willing to argue that Jutland was anything but a British victory “strategically if not tactically.” Therefore, two of the more interesting sections in this work are by Eric Grove and Jörg Hillmann, who discuss the respective historiographies (and “battle for memory”) of this climactic naval engagement. Grove takes some issue with Andrew Gordon’s popular The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command (London: John Murray Publishers, 1996), whose “protestations of clear British victory have always seemed to me somewhat overoptimistic.” Hillmann exhaustively charts Jutland in German consciousness since 1916 as a more acutely politicized event and writes that only by slowly applying a more “historical approach to understanding, which took into consideration the collective events of the prewar, wartime, and postwar eras” was the German verdict modified from the 1980s.
Narrowly focusing on just the battle—the numbers of ships lost by both sides, the comparative casualty figures, the personal accounts of (German) heroism—served an equally narrow agenda. Jan S. Breemer in his Naval War College essay “The Burden of Trafalgar: Decisive Battle and Naval Strategic Expectations on the Eve of the First World War” (October 1993) observed that the mighty steel battle fleets that clashed 31 May–1 June 1916 did so ultimately for prestige; the Germans to win it, the British not to lose it.
The question remaining then is whether the wider context of Jutland, as represented by the other chapters in this collection, can shake the somewhat determinist line that a German victory, in the truest sense of the word, was anything but impossible or even pointless. As many historians have pointed out, neither navy was especially ready to pounce on the other nation’s coasts once the rival battle fleet had been sunk. It was also unlikely that the U-boat campaign would have been affected either way; with the technological and strategic possibilities at the time, surely imperial Germany would have opted to continue fighting in 1916.
Lambert reasons, as best he can, that Fisher’s Baltic “plan” for assaulting the enemy’s northern flank by sea was, on the one hand “the key to any war against Germany,” yet on the other hand “the blockade was the key to British security.” At any rate, “Fisher took his plans to the grave,” so we’ll never really know.
In the chapter “Anglo-German Rivalry, 1860–1914,” Rodgers stresses that it was the emotional quality of German fears and ambitions that underpinned “the sheer irrationality of German naval plans, which were founded on a mass of internal contradictions and ungrounded assumptions and which seriously proposed that a reduction in some number of battleships must be ‘the renunciation of Germany as a great cultural nation.’” Perhaps from the British Empire’s vantage point it could afford to remain more relaxed, more coolly logical, while the Germans just needed to be more patient about their own rise to world-power status, Rodgers theorizes.
Thus, celebrated British historian Paul M. Kennedy, in his 1980 study, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism 1860–1914 (London: George Allen & Unwin), answered the question “Was it ‘wrong’ for Germany to want to be a world power like Britain?” in the affirmative—but only inasmuch as the attempt was relatively clumsy. The British had learned—by and large—to “manage their problems better.” The Battle of Jutland in this sense was not only unnecessary from the British perspective but rather rude.
This is a valuable body of work providing much food for thought and ammunition for debate. It is a good buy.