Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II. Len Deighton

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       Comparative ship sizes

      The Allied sea lanes were kept open because in the long run there were enough ships built, and enough brave men to man them. Britain’s merchant service had gone through bad interwar years but during the war seamen were formed into a ‘pool’ by means of the ‘Essential Work Order’ of May 1941. This brought permanent engagement and regular pay. Crew accommodation in many ships was squalid, dirty, unhealthy and cramped, and would have horrified any factory-inspector. Yet during the war Britain’s Shipping Federation was receiving a hundred letters a day from boys (16 was the minimum recruiting age) asking for a job afloat.

      When war began Britain’s merchant service included 45,000 men from the Indian sub-continent (including Pakistan) and over 6,000 Chinese, as well as many Arabs. When it ended, the Official History says, 37,651 men had died as a direct result of enemy action, and the true total, including deaths indirectly due to war, was 50,525.

      The U-boat war was no doubt difficult and dangerous, and the German navy lost 27,491 men out of approximately 55,000.¹⁸ Perhaps the most important figure – and the most surprising – is that less than 50 per cent of all U-boats built got within torpedo range of a convoy. Of the 870 U-boats that left port on operational trips, 550 of them sank nothing.

      The sea has always attracted men from far and wide. On the escorts there were Dutchmen, Free French, Poles, Norwegians, Americans and many Canadians. The Atlantic convoys were not the worst perils the sailors faced: those convoys to Murmansk saw ships labouring under tons of ice and attacked constantly from German bases in Norway. Convoys through the Mediterranean to Malta were equally hazardous.

      Ultimately it was the vast resources of the United States of America which decided the outcome. Using the techniques of mass-production, American shipyards proved able to build a freighter in five days! Despite the war in the Pacific, the US spared carriers, escorts and aircraft to supplement British and ever-growing Canadian naval forces in the Atlantic. Soon there would be US armies to be supplied in Europe and North Africa. During a war of unprecedented supply lines and unprecedented amphibious operations, a war in which every front demanded more and more seagoing vessels, the ships kept coming.

PART TWO

       6

       GERMANY: UNRECOGNIZED POWER

       I have to report that M. Blériot, with his monoplane, crossed the Channel from Calais this morning. I issued to him a Quarantine Certificate, thereby treating it as a yacht and the aviator as Master and owner.

      The Collector of Customs at Dover, 25 July 1909¹

      To understand why an improvised and inadequate mixture of British military formations were sent to war in 1939 it is necessary to remember that her army had always been quite different in tradition, formation and function to any of the continental armies.

      In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, standing armies were established on the Continent, not so much in response to foreign wars as to civil strife and rebellions. From that time onwards continental rulers made sure that every town had its barracks and parade ground. The constant sound of bugles and drums reminded the discontented that ‘who draws a sword against a prince must throw away the scabbard’. A centralized and severely regulated life is still the normal one for most Europeans, who remain subject to compulsory military service and are required to carry identity papers that they have to produce for any authorized inquirer.

      Apart from a riot here and there Britain did not need such control of its population. England’s civil war had ended in a consensus as the English discovered that they hated foreigners more than they hated their own countrymen. Once England was united with Scotland no army was needed to guard the frontiers; keeping invaders at bay was the Royal Navy’s job. Britain had no need for a mighty army: its power and wealth came from peace and stability, its wars took place overseas, and agile politicians ensured that England was always allied with the winning side.² When the continental powers were evenly balanced, England tipped the scales.³ The army was simply a refuge for the disinherited rich and the unemployable poor.

      The role of Britain’s navy was to raid and harass shipping, ports and coastlines to bring the enemy to the negotiating table. Within such a policy, overseas possessions were primarily needed as bases to revictual the fleets. From these, in the course of time, merchants, soldiers and adventurers conquered vast tracts of land. They found that a small armed presence was usually enough to maintain control of even the largest overseas dominions, although much of these was hostile uninhabitable land like the northern part of Canada and the Australian interior. Weapons improved, and in a short time Britain acquired and maintained a vast empire extending far beyond any real power that it could deploy.

       Citizen armies

      Compulsory military service is not a new device. Press-gangs that kidnapped able-bodied men in seaports and forced them into the slavery of naval service had been keeping the navies manned for many years before Prussia set up a system of compulsory military service in 1733. Prussian regiments, each based in a Kanton or county, kept records of local men and summoned them to military service as needed. But when Napoleon attacked, the Prussian army was mauled and humiliated by the French and the defeat was blamed upon its inefficiency. Two out of three men had been given exemption from military service, so that the Prussian army in the field consisted of mercenaries and peasants in about equal numbers.⁴ Now Prussia created a system of service which exempted very few healthy men whatever their social class. They were not simply called in time of war. Each citizen spent a year in uniform and returned to the colours throughout his life.

      But compulsory military service as we know it was born, like so many other intolerable devices of the centralized totalitarian state, out of the French Revolution. In 1793 the war minister proposed to the National Assembly that every healthy single Frenchman aged between 18 and 25 should be summoned to the army. Married men of the same age would go into the armoury workshops, and males aged from 26 to 40 would be entered on a reserve list for service in wartime.

      Thus Germans and Frenchmen spent their adult lives at the beck and call of the generals. In 1870 the two systems of mobilization could be compared. The Germans attacked France with an army of 1,200,000 men. In that same two weeks of crisis France had mustered only half that number.

      By 16 February 1874 Helmuth von Moltke was able to stand up in the Reichstag and claim that the army’s prodigious use of civilian manpower had been ‘raising the nation for almost sixty years to physical fitness, mental alertness, order and punctuality, loyalty and obedience, love of our country, and manliness.’⁵ It had also enabled Prussia to thoroughly thrash her neighbours, including France, into abject submission.

      It is difficult to be sure whether the prospect of military service was as unpopular in France and Germany as it was in Britain. But in France and Germany public opinion was disregarded by the government; Britain was different. Dating from Anglo-Saxon times, its army consisted of small companies raised by noblemen under royal commission. Only in dire emergencies were citizens called to serve. Although nineteenth-century Britain was not a democracy – no European state enjoyed democracy – public СКАЧАТЬ