World War II, 1939-45
4.4. Esoteric War
During most of history, war had been a relatively simple activity as men discarded the re nements of civilization, took up the sword, and marched to slaughter one another. Even as late as the American Civil War, 90 percent of the troops on either side walked on foot and carried re to the enemy. Even as late as World War I, outside certain services such as the railway section, the artillery, and the navy, very few o cers thought that a specialized technical training was necessary. As to the idea that a university education might be useful, it was so preposterous as to never surface at all.
World War II changed all this. Already during the twenty years’
truce, the winds of change could be felt as the US Industrial College of the Armed Forces opened its doors. Its purpose was to facilitate the interaction between o cers and the economy—on which, in case another con ict broke out, those forces would have to rely for everything they needed.37 Other countries followed, more or less. By 1939, Berlin even boasted something known as the Wehrtechnische Universitaet, a technical-military university.
In particular, four elds had developed to the point that even prime ministers, the ministers responsible for waging war on land and at sea, and commanders in chief often could no longer understand them on their own but had to call on experts, many of them civilians, for advice. They were, rst, the process of research and development proper; second, the ever-changing, ever-evolving weapons and weapons systems to which it led; third, operations research, designed to nd the best way to use those weapons and weapons systems; and fourth, intelligence.
As Trotsky once said, war has always acted as the locomotive of history, forcing men to come up with better and better weapons if they wanted to survive. Traditionally, inventions had come from individuals, which even as late as the last years of the nineteenth century led to devices with names such as the Chassepot ri e and the Gatling and Maxim machine guns. During World War I, the process of research and development began to be institutionalized.
Teams of scientists and engineers were assembled, subordinated to a central directing hand, and put to work. Their task was to experiment, draw up proposals, submit them to the appropriate committees—themselves consisting of scientists, engineers, military men, and o cials—and seek approval as well as money in order to put them into e ect.
During World War II, many senior policy makers and commanders surrounded themselves with scienti c advisers. Their job was to judge, as best they could, which of the numerous proposals being made were feasible; which would be useful and which could be ready in time for service.
Under such a stimulus, technology advanced in leaps and bounds, and one of the most critical elds was radar. The British, who throughout the 1930s had been obsessed with air defense, pioneered the use of radar for such a purpose, as well as the complex communications infra-strucure needed to coordinate it with its ghter command. The Germans were the rst to put radar to sea.
Later, both sides developed sets su ciently small to be put aboard aircraft, the British to enable bomber pilots to nd their targets by night and the Germans so they could locate the bombers and shoot them down. The Germans were also the rst to use electronic navigation aids, sending out electronic beams that aircraft could receive and use to orient themselves. The British countered by generating their own beams intended to mislead the Germans, and so on in an endless series of moves and countermoves that Churchill, in his memoirs, was to dub “the wizzards’ war.”38
Radar and navigation aids, though, were only a very small part of the technological battle. Other devices that owed their existence, or
at least their forced development, to the war included jet engines, rocket engines, ballistic missiles, and computers, all of which had great careers ahead of them. Jet engines were pioneered in Germany and Britain during the last years before 1939. The rst ghter aircraft powered by jets came in time to participate in the war; there is, however, no record of the German Me 262 and the British Meteor meeting in combat.
Rocket engines and ballistic missiles, as well as crude cruise missiles, were pioneered by the Germans. The Vi was cheap and easy to produce but, owing to its relatively low speed, not too hard to counter. Against the V2 ballistic missile no defense was possible, but in terms of labor, raw materials, and engineering talent its cost was enormous. The Vi could deliver half a ton of explosives, the V2 twice as much. Given that both were too inaccurate to be used against any target smaller than a city, it is doubtful whether either was worth the resources invested in it.39
Computers were developed in Britain, where they played a key role in secret intelligence, as well as in Germany and the United States where the earliest mechanical examples were used to calculate the trajectories of anti-aircraft artillery rounds and assist in aiming the guns. The Americans also built the rst electronic computer, but it came too late to play a role in the war.
If only because the opponents watched and imitated one another very closely, a swing e ect set in. Few technological advantages lasted for long; some inventions, such as proximity fuses, were even held back out of fear that the enemy would copy them. Early in the war, the German and Japanese forces were able to hold their own, technologically speaking, but Japanese research and development e orts in particular had always been rather narrowly based, and from 1942 on they were no longer able to keep up with their enemies. The Germans were better placed, countering most Allied developments in the eld of electronics until the end of the war and pioneering in some of the above-mentioned elds. It is true that, from 1942 on, German aircraft became less competitive with Allied examples—a fact that drove the head of the Luftwa e’s Technical
Branch, General Ernst Udet, to commit suicide—but this was due less to lack of capability than to the fact that the Germans focused on developing jet engines, neglecting the rest. In the event, their jet- powered aircraft came too late in the war, and in insu cient numbers, to change the outcome.
On land and at sea, the situation was very di erent. German ground weapons, tanks and artillery in particular, were as good as anything the Allies or Soviets could produce. Some of them were clearly superior; a few, indeed, remained in the service of the Bundeswehr for decades after 1945. Though no further surface vessels were built after 1942, had the war not ended when it did, Doenitz would have been able to confront the Allies with an entirely new generation of submarines capable of underwater speeds beyond anything previously available. Perhaps the best comment on this entire question is o ered by the fact that, in 1945–47, the Americans, the Soviets, the British, and even the French all hunted for German scientists to interrogate and employ.40
How best to use the new weapons and technologies, was a problem in itself. In the past, such matters had normally been dealt with with the aid of experience and rules of the thumb; now they became proper subjects for scientists to study. Some of the earliest experiments in operations research had been made during World War I by mathematicians such as Frederick W Lanchester, who tried to apply it to air combat.41 From 1939 on, other scientists—some of them, like the Englishman Solly Zuckerman, coming from unexpected directions such as zoology—were asked to answer questions such as: How should a command and control system for ghters, intended to intercept incoming bombers, be organized?
How to best con gure a convoy crossing the Atlantic so as to minimize the chances of the U-boats preparing to attack it? In what pattern should destroyers, chasing those U-boats, drop their depth charges? How to best combine squadrons of aircraft carrying high explosive and rebombs to demolish a city?
People who were not themselves scientists had trouble making sense of the endless, often very complex new devices and techniques. They would, however, be even more nonplussed by the esoteric world of intelligence and counterintelligence. Of course, there is a sense in which none of the methods used by the belligerents was entirely new; from spies (and spies who were turned around) through prisoner interrogation to encryption and decryption, all had been commonplace at least since the time of Julius Caesar.
Nevertheless, the conduct of far-reaching mobile operations, the hallmark of twentieth-century warfare, would have been impossible without radio. Radio transmissions, though, could be readily intercepted, which made the discovery of fast, easy-to-use, and reliable methods for encrypting messages and decrypting them imperative. Accordingly, the 1920s saw the rst attempts at devising electromechanical devices that would make transmissions secure. Originating in commercial rms, later the relevant patents were bought by the military, which continued to develop them.
The encryption device that acquired the greatest fame, albeit because of its failure to keep secrets secret, was the German Enigma, a typewriter-like machine that, using complicated mechanical and electronic gear, automatically translated clear text into gibberish that could then be decrypted by a recipient using a similar machine.
The organization that acquired the greatest fame, this time because it succeeded in its task of cracking the Enigma code, was the British Ultra. In some ways, both the bad reputation of the Enigma and the sky-high one of Ultra are exaggerated.42 This is not because the latter did not play a role in winning the war—by helping convoys avoid submarines deployed in their way and revealing the sailing details of Axis convoys in the Mediterranean, it certainly did—but because it was only one of many. By 1939, all the main belligerents had in place proper devices for encrypting their radio messages, though some were clearly better than others. At the same time, all the main belligerents had in place organizations, many of them going back all the way to the “black cabinets” of eighteenth-century
fame, that specialized in intercepting messages, decrypting them, and turning them into the kind of information decision makers could use. All read their enemies’ (and, often just as importantly, their allies’!) messages. For example, even as the British were breaking the code of the German navy, that navy’s so-called B Dienst was doing the same to its opponents.43
On the other hand, much of the most important tra c went by wire and could not be intercepted at all. So, for instance, the Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence, Stalin’s orders, and Hitler’s war directives; apparently none of these documents ever fell into enemy hands. At a lower level, the availability of a cable between Hawaii and Midway was a key factor that helped the United States win the Midway battle, and this is certainly not the only case that could be cited. Even where transmissions went by wireless and were intercepted, the results were not always of earthshaking importance, and a great many were of no importance at all. The problems were compounded by the fact that each belligerent used many di erent codes at any one time: one for the high command, say, along with one for each service, and often one for each arm and theater of war as well. All changed their codes quite frequently. The fact that, at any one time, there were many di erent codes meant that the emerging intelligence picture was seldom even nearly complete. The frequent changes often caused days, weeks, or even months to pass before the ow of information could be resumed, and sometimes caused it to cease owing at all. Even during periods when the tra c could be read there were often delays, causing at least some of the decrypted material to lose at least some of its value. On other occasions, when everything was working smoothly, those whose job it was to make sense of it simply did not succeed in their task.
All this formed an emormously complicated, kaleidoscopic world.
Surrounded by miles of barbed wire, mathematicians, high-level chess players, linguists, and cultural experts, all controlled by the inevitable security personnel, matched their wits against the enemy.
By devising better encryption methods, they sought to prevent their own secrets from leaking, while attempting to ferret out those of the
enemy and doing their best to present him with a false picture of their own side’s resources, deployment, and intentions. For example, preparing to land in Normandy in the spring of 1944, the British and the Americans used various means to succesfully fake an entire army preparing for a landing at the Pas de Calais. Even so, it was only one part of a secret planet where information rather than bullets counted; one that, on this occasion, succeeded in leading Hitler by the nose for weeks.
Wars are decided by a combination of quality and quantity, intelligence and brute force. It is doubtful that any mathematical model currently available, or likely to become available, will be able to embrace all the various factors, relate them to one another, and assign them their proper relative weight. As I have argued elsewhere, should such a model become available then it is quite likely that war itself will come to an end; after all, there is no point in a contest, least of all a deadly contest such as war, if the outcome is assured in advance.44 Hence it is impossible to say just how large are the roles played by the esoteric new technologies, new methods, and new intelligence sources. To the belligerents of World War II, these factors were absolutely critical to success, and their war e ort re ected this belief. Particularly in the early stages of the war, superior intelligence, superior doctrine, superior training, and superior leadership could and did make a di erence. Later, things changed. From 1943 on, American superiority over Japan, both quantitative and qualitative, was clearly overwhelming. During the battle for the Philippines, for instance, fteen times as many Japanese troops died as Americans.45 By contrast, the Germans were in a much better position to hold their own, qualitatively speaking.
The most important single factor that led to their defeat was the Soviet steamroller; out of every four Wehrmacht soldiers who lost their lives, three met their fate on the Eastern Front. Either way, counting from the high tide of Axis expansion three years of ghting on an unprecedented scale were needed to bring the war to an end.
Ultimately it was attrition that decided the Second World War, just as it had the rst.