The victory gained by the British in the Battle of Britain in August and September, 1940, has been universally acclaimed. But six months later, Great Britain, with American assistance, gained just as decisively important a victory which has gone practically unrecognized. This was the defeat of the Axis all-out offensive in the spring of 1941 against British shipping, which was designed to gain a victorious peace by blockading England.
The Axis attack on shipping was much more than the guerrilla submarine campaign which is now being carried on with the present limited purpose of hampering and crippling Allied sea communications. The German offensive against shipping in the spring of 1941 was an all-out offensive, an attempt to gain a decisive victory and so win the war. The information which is now available makes it fairly clear that the British success, with American help, in turning back these attacks, forced Hitler to undertake his Russian adventure.
The progress of this campaign, except for spectacular episodic events, like the raid of the two battleships, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and the sinking of the Bismarck, went practically unnoticed, at the time, by the public. Even the attention of most of the military experts on this side of the Atlantic was absorbed by the German mop-up campaigns in the Balkans, which occurred at the same time. Yet these were merely designed, as the Germans indicated clearly, to remove a threat to their Balkan flank, and to organize their Balkan supply sources. The Balkan campaigns were important, but subsidiary to the main objective of winning the war.
The events leading up to the Axis offensive against shipping in the spring of 1941 in retrospect can be seen to fit into a sharp pattern, although they were obscure at the time. After the fall of France in June, 1940, Hitler offered peace terms to the British. The small British Army had been practically stripped of weapons. According to The Aeroplane, there were, for example, fewer than 100 tanks left in England after Dunkirk. Yet the British refused to make peace with Hitler. The Nazis then began to prepare in their thorough, methodical way, for an invasion of England.
At this point, a distraction arose. What happened can be best described in the words of Hitler when he reviewed Soviet- German relations on June 22, 1941, as his troops crossed the Russian frontier. Hitler declared:
While our soldiers from May 10, 1940, on, had been breaking Franco-British power in the west, Russian military development on our eastern frontier was being continued to a more and more menacing extent.
From August, 1940, on, I, therefore, considered it to be in the interest of the Reich no longer to permit our eastern provinces, which moreover had already been laid waste so often, to remain unprotected in the face of this tremendous concentration of Bolshevik divisions.
Thus, there resulted British-Soviet Russian cooperation, intended mainly at the tying up of such powerful forces in the East that radical conclusion of the war in the West, particularly as regards aircraft, could no longer be vouched for by the German high command (Author’s italic’s).
Churchill’s analysis of the situation is similar. He said in his speech on June 22, 1941, when Hitler was beginning his invasion of Russia:
[There is] . . . one deeper motive behind his [Hitler’s] outrage. He wishes to destroy the Russian power because he hopes that if he succeeds in this he will be able to bring back the main strength of his army and air force from the cast and hurl it upon this island, which he knows he must conquer or suffer the penalty of his crimes.
His invasion of Russia is no more than a prelude to an attempted invasion of the British Isles.
A few men in the United States, like Captain W. D. Puleston, U. S. Navy (Retired), even at that time, saw clearly that Germany had a two-front war on her hands in the summer of 1940, and that the German-inspired propaganda on a Russo-German alliance covered up an actual state of inactive warfare on the Eastern Front. It is now evident to all of us that what happened in the summer of 1940 was that the concentration of Russian troops and airplanes on the German eastern frontier pinned down a large portion of the German Army and a decisively large portion of the German Air Force. Hitler, nevertheless, attempted to smash the Royal Air Force as a preliminary to invasion, with the remaining available fraction of his Luftwaffe. During the Battle of Britain in August and September, 1940, the Royal Air Force completely defeated this attempt.
The Germans in the fall and winter of 1940-41 were, therefore, confronted with two alternative plans which might win the war. With American airplanes flowing into England, even if in small numbers, and with the experience of the Battle of Britain behind them, the possibility of destroying the British Air Force with a part of the German Air Force could not be counted on. Hitler’s choice then was between:
(A) An attempt to defeat England by a policy of blockade, using the German naval forces which were completely available for this purpose.
(B) An attempt to destroy the Russian threat and then, as Churchill said, “bring back the main strength of his army and air force from the east and hurl it” upon England.
Probably the decision was made to give Plan A a good try and if it failed to adopt Plan B. The defeat of Plan A by the British with American help in the spring of 1941 left the Germans no alternative, if they wished to bring the war to an early end, but to crush the Russian military forces with a sudden surprise attack and a lightning campaign.
As is customary with German offensives, Hitler opened his Plan A, the offensive against British shipping, with a speech. He announced on February 24, 1941:
Our fight on the sea can begin only just now.
[The Allies] . . . will know what has been going on. They will know shortly when our new types of submarines arc going to be brought into the expanded warfare. They will find out in March and April what German-Italian submarine cooperation will mean to them.
One thing is certain. Wherever the British touch the Continent we will encounter them immediately, and where British ships cruise they will be attacked by our U-boats until a decision comes.
The Germans did give Plan A a thorough try. The offensive against shipping went all-out. Increased numbers of submarines preyed on convoys. Long-range bombers were sent out in attacks on shipping. The bulk of the German Navy was thrown into the battle. The two battleships, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, were sent out in March. The pride of the German Navy, the battleship Bismarck, and a heavy cruiser, Prinz Eugen, were sent out in May. The only major unit of the German Navy not in action was the Tirpitz, which may not have been ready for operations yet.
The German offensive did meet with some successes, but, as we know, it failed. Sinkings increased from under 300,000 gross tons in January to over 500,000 tons in March and April. According to Churchill, in the four months, March- June, shipping losses totaled more than 2,000,000 tons. Note that if these losses running at a rate of 6,000,000 tons a year could be sustained, and if England were thrown on her own shipbuilding resources, publicly acknowledged to be little more than 1,000,000 tons a year; then, England must surrender. April, with over 550,000 tons in losses, according to the latest published figures at that time, represented the peak of the offensive. It is likely that later revised figures, as the reports came in, might have raised April losses still higher, but in any case, losses in April must have been considerably under the 870,000 tons of the peak month of the last war, April, 1917. Not all of the April losses were due to the German shipping offensive; a large part of them resulted from the evacuation of Greece. In May, in spite of the losses resulting from the evacuation of Crete, ship sinkings began to decrease sharply. Losses continued to decrease, and by July they had fallen to a negligible amount, well within the British shipbuilding capacity.
The German offensive was turned back, but the resources of the British were strained to the utmost to meet the threat. The Navy, of course, fought hard and well and the Royal Air Force was also called into the battle. The Air Ministry stated in a review of 1941 that for the protection of shipping, the Coastal Command was built up at the cost of the Bomber Command. Most of the heavy bombers we sent to England had to be diverted to the Coastal Command instead of being used for the bombing of German industry. The Fighter Command furnished Hurricane fighters to be catapulted off ships to drive off the long-range German Focke-Wulf Kurier bombers. The British have since announced that 40 per cent of the activities of the Bomber Command were devoted to the winning of the Battle of the Atlantic.
Perhaps the greatest service the bombers performed was keeping the battleships, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, holed up in Brest. These two 26,000-ton ships made one foray into the Atlantic in March, 1941, were hunted into Brest, and then kept out of action for the rest of the year by the Bomber Command. The Germans claimed that the two raiders sank over 100,000 tons of shipping in their first and only sally into the Atlantic. Discounting the German statement by the usual 50 per cent, the toll they took must have been fairly large and if they had been allowed out again, they would have unquestionably caused serious losses.
The United States showed acute awareness of the British danger. Secretary Stim- son said on May 6, 1941, in a radio broadcast:
The life line of Great Britain is threatened. The high-water mark of the Nazi effort is at hand in the shape of an attack on the shipping which furnishes Britain with the means and the nourishment to maintain her battle.
The government of the United States did more than extend sympathy: it helped, perhaps decisively. On March 11, Lease- Lend became law, making completely available American shipbuilding resources to the British without fear of exhausting the British supply of dollars. On March 30, several hundred thousand tons of Axis and Danish shipping immobilized in American ports were seized.
At the height of the Axis offensive, on April 9, 1941, Churchill analyzed the British position. He pointed out that to win the Battle of the Atlantic, there were two main factors: (1) The provision of adequate shipping replacements; and (2) the provision of adequate convoy escorts. The United States had taken action already to provide shipping replacements, through her shipbuilding campaign and Lease-Lend to pay for the new ships. He called upon America to help in the provision of escorts. He .stated:
But, after all, everything turns upon the Battle of the Atlantic which is proceeding with growing intensity on both sides. Our losses in ships and tonnage are very heavy and, vast as are the shipping resources we control, these losses could not continue indefinitely without seriously affecting our war effort and our means of subsistence.
But when all is said and done, the only way in which we can get through the year 1942 without a very sensible contraction of our war efforts is by another gigantic building of merchant ships in the United States similar to that prodigy of output accomplished by the Americans in 1918.
All this has been in train in the United States for many months past. There has now been a very large extension of the program and we have assurance that several million tons of American newly-built shipping will be available for the common struggle during the course of the next year.
Here, then, is the assurance upon which we may count for the staying power without which it will not be possible to save the world from the criminals who assail its future.
But the Rattle of the Atlantic must be won not only in the factories and shipyards but upon the blue water.
The defeat of the U-boats and of surface raiders has been proved to be entirely a question of adequate escorts for our convoys.
It will indeed be disastrous if the great masses of weapons, munitions and instruments of war of all kinds made with the toil and skill of American hands at the cost of the United States and loans to us under the Aid to Britain Rill were to sink into the depths of the ocean and never reach the hard-pressed fighting line.
That would be lamentable to us and I cannot believe it would be found acceptable to the proud and resolute people of the United States.
The next day, April 10, the United States took a preliminary step towards providing the needed assistance in announcing that it was taking over the protection of Greenland. Then, on April 30, the United States took the step which the Nazis at once must have realized doomed their offensive to ultimate failure. The second necessary measure requested by Churchill to win the Battle of the Atlantic was provided: help in protecting shipping. President Roosevelt announced that the American Navy would patrol the sea in the American defense zones. An immense burden was lifted off the British Navy. It could concentrate on giving increased protection to shipping in the Eastern Atlantic. At the same time, the sphere of action of submarines was cut down; Axis submarines had to abandon the western Atlantic as scene of operations, or run the risk of bringing the United States into the war. This risk Hitler was not willing, as yet, to take because of his hopes of an early victorious end to the war.
In spite of the Nazi propaganda attempts to belittle the United States as an opponent, the German High Command showed at this time an absence of desire to add us to their opponents. In 1917, Germany was willing to take the chance of bringing us into the war in pursuance of her attempt to defeat England by an unlimited submarine blockade. In the spring of 1941, confronted with a parallel choice, the Germans refused to run the risk of adding us to their enemies. Hitler, indeed, has done us the honor of stating that fear of bringing us into the war paralyzed his submarine fleet. In his speech of April 26, 1942, Hitler said:
I have already previously stated that the paralyzing of German submarine activities in the past year was solely due to our efforts to avoid any conflict one could think of with the United States.
The German High Command claimed to have destroyed over 1,000,000 tons of shipping in April, 1941, or more than at the height of the 1917 campaign, when England was rapidly going under. If the German figures were actually true, England would soon have been forced to her knees. That the Germans did not believe their own claims and had realized that their best was not good enough, is evidenced by the fact that preparations to put in effect Plan B, the invasion of Russia, began to be made.
On May 10, Hess parachuted to earth in Scotland, undoubtedly bearing peace proposals designed to take England out of the war while Russia was being finished off. The last big bombing raid on England occurred on May 11, and after that the German Air Force began to move towards the East. Throughout May, we received reports of the movement of German troops to the Russian frontier. Even while the German parachutists were dropping on Crete to secure the Balkan flank, German troops were being moved out of Greece towards the Russian front.
In the third week of May, one last desperate attempt was made against British shipping: the strongest ship of the German Navy, the Bismarck, was sent out to attack commerce. The sinking of the Bismarck on May 27 by the British Navy must have finally convinced the Germans that Plan A had failed and that Plan B, the invasion of Russia, must be tried. Six days later, on June 2, Hitler met Mussolini at the Brenner Pass and undoubtedly informed him of the decision taken. On June 22, German troops crossed the Russian frontier, and Plan B was given its trial.
Most people remember the spring of 1941 as a time of successive allied defeats in Libya, in Yugoslavia, and in Greece. Actually, these battles must pale before the unspectacular ceaseless struggle waged at sea at that time for the mastery of the lanes to the British Isles. The failure of Hitler in these months to blockade the British Isles forced him to invade Russia in his striving for the elusive final victory. The German defeat at sea forced Germany to bring into active warfare against the Nazis the most formidable military machine outside of Germany. It appears certain that history will regard the British and American victory at sea in the spring of 1941 as one of the decisive victories of the world.