Читать книгу Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II - Len Deighton - Страница 16
Equipping for war
ОглавлениеOn Sunday 3 September 1939 Britain declared war on Germany. Although there were no treaty obligations between Britain and the Dominions, Australia and New Zealand also declared war at once. The Canadians declared war on Germany after Britain (but were later to declare war on Japan before Britain). South Africa followed after some fierce parliamentary debate, and the Viceroy took a similar decision for India seemingly without reference to anyone. Virtually the whole of the Empire and Commonwealth, from Ascension Island to the Falklands, joined the mother country. A newly independent Ireland remained neutral and was represented in Berlin throughout the war by an ambassador accredited in the name of King George.
In the course of time, 5 million fighting troops were raised from these overseas countries, with India contributing the largest volunteer army that history had ever recorded.4 But warships were in scarce supply. The navy was still regarded as the factor which both bound the countries of the Empire and protected their sea routes. So, for Britain’s Royal Navy, the war was a global one right from the first hour of hostilities.
Britain went to war with a Royal Navy that was highly skilled and totally professional, although its officers and men were poorly educated when compared with men of the other industrialized nations. Most of its 109,000 sailors had joined as boys aged sixteen, and most of its 10,000 officers as thirteen-year-old cadets. Steeped in tradition, its ratings wearing curious old uniforms which could not be put on without help, the navy provided a tot of rum each day for every man, and the fleet retained corporal punishment long after the other services had abolished it.
When wartime’s compulsory military service first sent civilians to sea, they regarded this narrow-minded, time-warped community with awe. They took it over, and changed it for ever. Soon the regular sailors with their distinctive rank badges were outnumbered by HO (Hostilities Only) ratings and RNVR (Volunteer Reserve) officers with ‘wavy-navy’ rings on their cuffs. By the middle of 1944 the wartime navy totalled 863,500 personnel of whom 73,500 were WRNS (Women’s Royal Naval Service). The sailors who fought and won the Atlantic battle were in the main civilians.
When war started the Admiralty was calm and confident. With fifteen battleships, of which thirteen had been built before 1918 (and ten of these were designed before 1914), and six aircraft-carriers of which only HMS Ark Royal was not converted from other ships’ hulls, it knew exactly what sort of war it was going to fight. Unfortunately Germany’s naval staff, the Seekriegsleitung (SKL), had a different rule book.
A less parsimonious British government or a more realistic Royal Navy might have expected the Germans to break their agreements, but the interwar years had been noted for self-delusion, and the admirals did not readily learn lessons. The Royal Navy seemed indifferent to the threat of air attack. Its multiple pom-pom anti-aircraft guns had proved completely ineffective, but only when war was imminent were Swedish Bofors and Swiss Oerlikon guns put into production.
A closed eye had been turned to the potential of the submarine. With lofty disdain, most Royal Navy officers regarded the submarine service as a refuge for officers of low ability. Submarines participating in fleet exercises were always ordered to withdraw during the hours of darkness. Anyone who suggested that in a future war the enemy might not be willing to withdraw during the hours of darkness was told that the miracle apparatus asdic could counter submarines.
Asdic (later named sonar) was a crude device first introduced at the end of the First World War, although never used operationally in that war. Mounted under a ship’s hull, it emitted sound waves and picked up their reflections to detect submarines. Always demonstrated in perfect weather by well-rehearsed crews, it enabled a confident Admiralty to declare the U-boat to be a weapon of the past. By 1937 the Naval Staff said that ‘the submarine would never again be able to present us with the problem we were faced with in 1917’. Even if the Admiralty’s assessment of asdic had been right, there were only 220 warships equipped with it, while the British merchant service had 3,000 oceangoing ships and 1,000 large coasters to be protected.
The range of the asdic was a mile at best. It could not pierce the layers of differing temperature and salinity that are commonly found in large bodies of water. Nor could it be used by a ship steaming at more than 20 knots, or in rough weather. It was useless in locating a surfaced submarine and did not reveal the depth of a submerged one. All of these shortcomings could benefit a skilful U-boat commander, and it might have been remembered that by the end of the First World War attacks by surfaced U-boats had become the favoured tactic.
Admirals everywhere prefer big ships. The United States navy lined them up in Pearl Harbor and, even in the middle of the war, German admirals were still telling each other that the battleship was the most important naval weapon and pressing for a programme to build more and more of them. So the British navy, like the United States navy, began the war with plenty of expensive battleships for which there was little or no need and a grave shortage of small escort vessels.
Canada wanted to make a contribution to the war without having its soldiers decimated at the commands of British generals on some new ‘western front’. It elected to concentrate on ships, which could be kept under its own control. The Canadian navy started a construction programme exclusively devoted to escort vessels – corvettes and frigates – to protect the Atlantic traffic. The corvettes were slow and seaworthy, although the way in which they rolled and wallowed from wave top to wave top made crewing them one of the war’s most queasy assignments. Nevertheless by May 1942 Canada had 300 ships – a magnificent achievement.
