Von Rom
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Rather than reply to all of you individually: pry, Nikodemus, and Mogami, I will present the evidence here.
Much has been made about tonnage, about the number of ships that have gotten through to Britain, etc, etc.
This is Blair's central thesis:
". . . the U-boat peril in World war II was and has been vastly overblown: threat inflation on a classically grand scale." (Blair, pXIII).
Yet, between 1939-1941, Germany sank 2,500 Allied ships (mainly British) which represented 83% of all of Britain's pre-war Merchant shipping.
This was not a crisis??
The fact that 200, or 300, or even 900 convoys got through to Britain, means NOTHING. That's right - nothing.
What matters is a) how many ships are in those convoys; b) what those ships are carrying; and c) are the amounts they are carrying sufficient for Britain's needs.
I have found sufficient information so that we have a clearer picture of British imports and the effectiveness of Germany's attempts to isolate Britain and deprive her of the supplies she required.
Winston Churchill
In a report to Parliament in 1940, Churchill stated that in order for Britain to hold on, she required at least 20 ships, loaded with with 120,000 tons of food and fuel, to unload in British ports EVERY DAY.
Let's do the math:
This means Britain required 120,000 x 30 days = 3,600,000 tons of food and fuel EACH MONTH in order to hold on in the war against Germany.
Next I'm going to use Blair's own figures. For those of you who have the first volume of his book, the page I am referring to is page 699, Plate 14: "Comparison of Imports to the UK".
Let's look at the Totals column for the years 1941 and 1942. I find it odd that he does not include any data for the years 1939 and 1940. But don't worry I will supply that info for you.
Under the year 1941, we see that the total imports coming into Britain by ship and convoy for 8 months. It seems that 4 months are missing from his data. But no matter.
British Imports (in thousands of tons):
1941:
Jan - 2,954
Feb - 2,994
Mar - 3,340
April - 3,237
May - 3,954
June - 3,984
July - 3,875
August - 4,128
1942:
Jan - 3,043
Feb - 3,006
Mar - 2,666
April - 2,996
May - 2,837
June - 2,865
July - 3,154
August - 2,835
We know that Britain required 3,600,000 tons of food and fuel each month.
It is very clear from Blair's own data that in 1941, this requirement was not met in Jan, Feb, Mar, and April. It was only met in May, June, July and August.
It is very interesting that British imports were exceeded only in these 4 months in 1941, because this was when Hitler intervened in the U-boat campaign and orderd Doenitz to send 12 U-boats from the Atlantic shipping lanes to be sent to the Mediterranean. This effectivley gave Britain a badly needed break, and so convoys were getting through unmolested. (Source: Chronicles of WWII, pp. 222-3).
In 1942, Britain's import requirements for the 8 months listed WERE NEVER MET, effectively representing a short-fall of food and fuel.
Blair himself states:
"This was a decline in basic imports of about 5 million tons, and it led to very real hardships in the British Isles - food, heating, fuel, and gasoline shortages, among others - and to serious second thoughts about diverting so much shipping to provide aid to the Soviet Union and about embarkig on further military campaigns such as Torch; it led as well to renewed demands on Washington for a larger share of the shipping allocations" (Blair, Vol 1, p. 699).
The U-boat threat was overblown?
1940:
Total imports for 1940 were 42,000,000 tons (see below for source). Since we know that 43,200,000 tons is the min (3,600,000/month x 12), then Britain DID NOT MEET ITS IMPORT REQUIREMENTS for all of 1940.
1939:
Total imports for 1939 were 50,000,000 tons. This number exceeded Britain's minimum requirements. This was mainly due to the war having just started and the U-boats had not entered into their full war footing.
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The following abbreviated information regarding Britain's import crisis is by:
RICHARD M. LEIGHTON, Faculty, Industrial College of the Armed Forces. Harvard University, University of Cincinnati, Cornell University, Ph.D. Taught: Brooklyn College, University of Cincinnati, The George Washington University. Historical Officer, Headquarters, Army Service Forces, 1943-46. Historian, OCMH, 1948-59. Co-author: Global Logistics and Strategy, 1940-1943 (Washington, 1955) and Global Logistics and Strategy, 1943-1945 (in preparation), UNITED STATES ARMY IN WORLD WAR II.
U.S. Merchant Shipping and the British Import Crisis
by Richard M. Leighton
The drain on British Merchant Shipping during 1942, which Britain's new ally was not yet able to make good, posed a serious and growing threat to the British War Economy. The heart of that economy lay in the industries and people of the United Kingdom, which depended for their very existence on an uninterrupted flow of imports. These had already declined from a prewar average of more than 50 million deadweight tons [in 1939] to 42 million in 1940 and 31 million in 1941. In 1942, despite desperate efforts to arrest the decline and increased assistance from the United States, they fell to 23 million. Even with drastic curtailment of domestic consumption and services and increased local production of food and munitions, this was far less than was needed to meet current requirements. Britain had to eat into its stocks, which by the end of the year had fallen an estimated 2.5 million tons to a level dangerously near what the War Cabinet had decided must be regarded as irreducible. [4]
By late summer U.S. as well as British officials were growing uneasy over the trend. Lewis Douglas, deputy administrator for the War Shipping Administration (WSA), visited London in July and he and Averell Harriman, the President's lend-lease representative there, submitted a special report to the President on 2 August, supplementing a more comprehensive one by the two Combined Shipping Adjustment Boards (CSAB) (Washington and London) and warning that substantially greater aid in American shipping would be needed if Britain were to continue its war effort on the current scale. On 6 October the United States, through the CSAB, formally accepted the principle that, as merchant shipbuilder for the United Nations, it would undertake to assign an "appropriate portion" of the residue of tonnage built over tonnage lost in order "to relieve the burden on the war services of each of the other United Nations." Before the end of that month the President decided to expand the merchant shipbuilding program, hitherto held back because of a shortage of steel, to the full capacity of the shipyards. However, the British Government, while reasonably confident that Britain would be the chief foreign beneficiary of this expansion, felt that the clear drift of the national economy toward disaster called for more specific assurance and concrete action. It decided to seek from its ally "a solemn compact, almost a treaty" setting forth the amount of shipping Britain could expect. [5]
In November Sir Oliver Lyttelton, British Minister of Production, came to Washington to negotiate such a settlement, not merely for shipping but for the whole field of munitions as well. Depletion of domestic stocks, he pointed out, had gone so far that imports had little or no margin left for fluctuation; henceforth, the flow must keep pace with consumption. Lyttelton requested the United States to guarantee enough shipping in 1943 to enable Britain to bring her dry cargo imports up to 27 million tons, a figure that would retard, though it would not halt, the depletion of stocks while providing raw materials for an expanded output of munitions. To produce these results would, the British estimated, require the transfer to British service of ship-ping equivalent to 2.5 million deadweight tons in continuous employment throughout the year-an amount considered sufficient to bring in about 7 million tons of imports via the North Atlantic route. [6]
The President's response was prompt and sympathetic. He wrote to Rear Adm. Emory S. Land of the U.S. Maritime Commission:
In all probability the British are going to lose again in 1943 more ships than they can build. If we are going to keep England in the war at anything like this maximum capacity, we must consider the supplementing of their merchant fleet as one of the top military necessities of the war. [7]
Roosevelt's principal civilian advisers concurred; the military, evidently, were not consulted. Replying formally to the Prime Minister on 30 November, Roosevelt noted that the U.S. shipbuilding program was being augmented to at least 18.8 million deadweight tons in 1943, possibly 20 million. [8] He promised that the United States would make available in 1943 (as a loan rather than by transfer of flag, as requested), sufficient shipping to meet Britain's marginal needs for carriage of 27 million tons of imports, along with requirements for military supply and essential war services. Over and above U.S. shipping already in British service, the amount needed had been estimated, the President noted, as "an average of nearly 300,000 tons each month of carrying capacity." [9]
The President's warning of a probable lag in early deliveries was immediately borne out. Shipments in American bottoms during December were hardly more than token in character, and the schedules drawn up by WSA provided for delivery of only 1.8 million tons of imports, soon revised downward to 1.15 million tons, in the first half of 1943. Britain's own shipping position, meanwhile, was deteriorating rapidly. Military demands upon shipping for the forces in North Africa proved far larger than expected, and British shipping suffered heavily-far more so than American-from German submarines during the period of the North African operation. Apart from losses, evasive routing in areas where escorting had to be curtailed or dispensed with lengthened already long voyages and thus in effect reduced the net movement of cargo. During the same period, moreover, Britain was lending her ally ships to move U.S. cargo from the United Kingdom to North Africa-some 682,000 deadweight tons of shipping between October 1942 and mid-April 1943, or more than twice as much as the United States lent to Britain for use on this route. (See Map III, inside back cover.) The impact upon the U.K. import program was devastating. During the last quarter of 1942 imports came in at an annual rate of only about 20 million tons, which was at least 6 million tons less than the total consumption for that year. In January 1943 imports fell to the lowest point, as it proved, of the whole war-less than half the level of January 1941, nearly 42 percent less than in January 1942-and by February the British had to revise downward their estimate of the amount of imports they could expect to carry in their own shipping. Fearing new military demands and uneasy over the lag in American aid, the British Government began to doubt the wisdom of allowing domestic stocks to drop as far below their end-1941 level as it had earlier been willing, in expectation of American aid, to permit. Food stocks had fallen by the end of 1942 to a level that would support wartime consumption for only three or four months, and for certain important items the level was even lower. [11]
In January 1943 the Prime Minister took the drastic step of switching to the Atlantic area import routes 52 of the 92 monthly sailings usually assigned to service the Indian Ocean, in order, as he put it, not to make Britain "live from hand to mouth, absolutely dependent on the fulfillment of American promises in the last six months of the year." This was a bold, even a desperate move. [12] The ships that carried military cargo for British forces all along the route to India also carried food and other basic economic necessities for the civilian populations, while in their cross voyages they contributed to the complex inter-regional trade on which these countries also depended. The removal of so much tonnage endangered the delicate balance between subsistence and famine in the whole Indian Ocean area, particularly in India itself, and in fact contributed to the outbreak of famine in Bengal later in the year. On their return trips, moreover, the same ships performed other vital services-carrying coal, for example, from South Africa to the Argentine, and picking up bauxite cargoes in British Guiana. [13] (See Map I, inside back cover.) British officials emphasized that the switch of shipping was aimed at retarding depletion of domestic stocks, not building them up, and that it would not justify a reduction in American aid. While they expected the switch to produce a net gain of about 1.7 million tons of imports during 1943, there would still be a requirement for 7.6 million tons to be carried in American bottoms. The U.S. economic mission in London not only agreed with this position but also urged that the American shipping contribution during the first six months of 1943 should be raised to a level sufficient to bring in three million tons of imports, in order to keep within
Meanwhile, faced by an alarming lag in the flow of British imports, WSA officials were drawing up new schedules greatly increasing the amount of U.S. shipping to be diverted to British use during the critical first half of the year. [26]
Early in March Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden was sent to Washington to take up the problem directly with the President. He brought with him a strongly worded note from the Prime Minister:
Our tonnage constantly dwindles, the American increases.... We have undertaken arduous and essential operations encouraged by the belief that we could rely on American shipbuilding to see us through. But we must know where we stand. We cannot live from hand to mouth on promises limited by provisos. This not only prevents planning and makes the use of ships less economical; it may in the long run even imperil good relations. Unless we can get a satisfactory long-term settlement, British ships will have to be withdrawn from their present military service even though our agreed operations are crippled or prejudiced. [28]
The reaction of the Washington staffs to this demand was violent. If 7 million tons of imports must be carried, the Army's deployment would have to be cut by 225,000 men; a loan of shipping to support British forces in the Mediterranean and India would mean a further cut of 375,000 men. Taken together, the British proposals threatened to reduce a potential U.S. deployment of over 1.5 million troops to about 800,000. Moreover, the cut would be made primarily during the critical spring months, when shipping would be at its tightest and when, according to current plans, the battle of Tunisia was to reach its climax, preparations for HUSKY were to be completed, and the build-up of air forces in Britain was to hit full stride. During these months, if British demands were met in full, the movement of U.S. forces would virtually cease. [30] And what if the aid were refused?
With U-boats sinking ships at the rate of more than four a day and only a handful of subs sunk to show for this slaughter, the U.S. Chiefs of Staff fully shared Dill's sense of urgency. [34] The Joint Strategic Survey Committee was advising them to review and reorient the t whole strategic program outlined at Casablanca, since it was obvious that the planners at that time had "overestimated prospective resources, particularly shipping, and underestimated the demands on them." [35] A viable strategy, thought the committee, must first of all recognize the irreducible claims of such basic commitments as antisubmarine operations, support of forces overseas, and maintenance of the war economies, and tailor military operations to what could be carried out with residual resources, especially shipping, not absorbed by the basic commitments.
On 29 March Hopkins, Douglas, and Eden met with the President at the White House. No military representatives were present and Douglas, with occasional promptings from Hopkins, held the floor. He presented two main arguments-that the British import program must be sustained, and that this, despite the warnings of the military chiefs, could in fact be done without crippling the Casablanca strategic program. Douglas explained that the current rate of importation would bring only 16 million tons to the United Kingdom by the end of the year, and that even if U.S. commitments were met in full, the decline in British carrying capacity would result in a year's total almost 2 million tons less than the 27 million tons on which the two governments had agreed in November. The program, he argued, was an "essential part of the productive processes" of the United Nations, and any serious shortfall "would at last come back to us" in the form of a weakening of the total Allied war effort. Further, Douglas stressed the dangers, inherent in the Army's proposed allocations, of accumulating a deficit in the spring and summer that might be too heavy to handle in the autumn and winter. [43]
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