Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order in World War II. Paul Kennedy and Ian Marshall. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022.
Can a single night be identified as the realization of a year’s long powershift the way the slow grinding of tectonic plates is revealed in the suddenness of an earthquake and tsunami? As the light faded on May 5th, 1943, Return Convoy ONS-5, a slow convoy headed from Liverpool to Halifax, slipped into a heavy fog off the Grand Banks. On the blinking radar scopes of the convoy’s escorts, seven surfaced U-Boats appeared, blocking the path ahead. Since leaving England on April 21st, the convoy had battled poor weather as well as U-boats. On May 5th, the U-boats seemed to have the upper hand. Previously, the convoy had only lost three of its 42 merchant ships, but on that day it would lose ten more. Visibility fell to 100 yards. But in the fog and darkness, the tables turned. The escort’s centimetric radars allowed them to fix the U-boats’ positions while the U-boats were blind. In fierce close-quarters fighting—including two collisions between U-boats and escorts—the escorts would send five U-boats to the bottom.
Can a single night be identified as the realization of a year’s long powershift the way the slow grinding of tectonic plates is revealed in the suddenness of an earthquake and tsunami?
While this tally alone does not make the case for the night as a tipping point, the greater context does. In total, ONS-5 sank or heavily damaged 14 U-boats during its crossing, the most on that fateful night of May 5th.[1] Allied surface ships did the most damage. Previously, allied aircraft had been required to exact such a toll. Backing away further, we can see the difference improved Allied surface radar and tactics had made. Just two months before, in March 1943, the Battle of the Atlantic was at its worst for the Allies. In early March, two eastbound convoys—HX-220 and SC-122—had crossed together with a total of 110 merchant ships. They suffered 22 ships lost and many diverted. Only 69 of the 110 ships reached their destinations. Just one U-boat was sunk.[2]
At the end of May, just a few weeks after ONS-5’s crossing, eastbound convoy SC-130 sailed. U-boats sank none of its 28 ships despite heavy attacks. The convoy’s escorts and supporting forces sank four U-boats. The German U-boat commander, Admiral Karl Donitz, recognized the shift almost immediately.[3] From this point onward the Allies would sink more U-boats per convoy and per month than the U-boats would sink merchant vessels.[4]
None of this history is new. Paul Kennedy admits as much in Victory at Sea, his new history of the Second World War’s naval struggles. Almost eighty years after that war’s end, it sometimes seems little remains to be written about the war at sea. Is another history needed? Kennedy’s genius has always been his ability to highlight how the shifting tectonic plates of power underlie and help explain the surface history, sometimes represented in a single event. Rather than uncovering new history, Victory at Sea arranges existing history in ways that better reveal the whole. Kennedy draws one connecting thread through the resources, strategies, and ends of each naval power, and explains the goals of battles and how they affected the war’s outcome. Such succinct and overarching analysis is rare, making the work a valuable addition. For those learning to connect military means to grand strategic outcomes, the book is required reading. The story of ONS-5 is the preeminent exception to an approach that generally eschews recounting the details of battle—though Kennedy wants to discuss its details so badly he describes them in the text and includes a further appendix on them. One reason perhaps, beyond its human tale, is that the battle captures so many of the larger book’s themes. It was one night that crystalized the full arrival of the Allies’ industrial and technological power.
As Kennedy outlines, the 1930s featured six major naval powers: the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Germany, and Italy. The Washington Conference’s Five Power Treaty had ensured the end of unilateral British naval dominance and established a relative hierarchy. Navies usually take time to build, and despite the treaty’s lapse, in many ways its pattern remained. The first three powers were clearly in a class above the last three, but all were of sufficient size that they could potentially shape the outcome of a conflict. In five short years, from 1939 to 1944, that multi-polar naval world would collapse to the unipolar naval world that with limited exception has remained unchallenged until the present.
Americans tend to focus on the Pacific war, acknowledge the Atlantic war, and mostly forget the Mediterranean war, except for its amphibious assaults. Kennedy places them in better balance.
The change occurred across the war in three separate theaters. First, the battle for control of the North Sea and the Atlantic that began with an Anglo-French alliance fighting Germany, transformed into a contest between Britain and Germany after the French surrender, and ended with the Anglo-American alliance’s eventual defeat of the Kriegsmarine. Second, there was the battle in the Mediterranean, where the fighting would occur principally between the British and the Italian Navy and German Air Force. And finally, there was the Pacific war with Japan, which would prove a mostly American affair.[5] Americans tend to focus on the Pacific war, acknowledge the Atlantic war, and mostly forget the Mediterranean war, except for its amphibious assaults. Kennedy places them in better balance.
Similar themes emerge from his analysis across the three theaters. Victory at sea meant moving cargos across the sea to their destinations—not necessarily the destruction of enemy navies. This view has come to be called a Corbettian approach to sea control, but Mahan may have ultimately agreed—he would have most differed in believing the destruction of the enemy fleet was a prerequisite for moving cargo safely. Even if that had once been true, the maturing of both submarines and airplanes changed that dynamic.
The importance of airpower to sea control is not a new finding, but the regularity with which land-based air power—vice carrier-based—tipped or nearly tipped the balance becomes a consistent theme. The surprise with which this reality confronted many naval commanders early in the war is a potent reminder to refrain from discounting the influence long-range shore-based anti-ship missiles could have on naval conflicts today.
In two years, the Navy’s tonnage had more than quadrupled despite combat losses. Imagine today if the U.S. Navy built and trained crews for 800 ships in less than three years. At war’s end the United States Navy possessed almost twice as much naval tonnage as the remainder of the world’s navies combined.
More than anything else, the United States’ massive financial, technological, and industrial capacity—the tectonic plates of power distribution—shaped the outcome. The United States had begun a naval rearmament program in 1934 and supersized it as the war approached. Many of these ships and airplanes began to join the fleet in 1943. By whatever metric, ship count, ship tonnage, personnel, or aircraft; the U.S. Navy’s size exploded. In 1941, the U.S. Navy was roughly the size of the Royal Navy with warships that displaced just under two and half million tons. In 1943, the U.S. Navy displaced almost five and half million tons, and by 1944, 10 million tons, and growing. In two years, the Navy’s tonnage had more than quadrupled despite combat losses.[6] Imagine today if the U.S. Navy built and trained crews for 800 ships in less than three years. At war’s end the United States Navy possessed almost twice as much naval tonnage as the remainder of the world’s navies combined.[7] Britain had once maintained the two-power standard, the United States had achieved an all-power standard, and then some. All in less than 5 years. All without counting the similarly incredible construction of merchant ships. Even more incredible, had the U.S. Navy not existed in 1945, the Royal Navy alone would have been the “most powerful naval force the world had ever seen.”[8] Like a tsunami, this wave of Sailors, aircraft, and ships became almost unstoppable.
Numbers of ships alone did not make for victory. Kennedy repeats and contextualizes his compelling argument from Engineers of Victory that the Battle of the Atlantic was more than the simple attrition game it is sometimes portrayed as.[9] The Allies did not just build more ships than the Germans could sink—a metric that does not account for the war material or sailors lost when ships went down. They developed and applied new technologies and trained the crews that made it riskier to be a U-boat than a merchant ship in the Atlantic.[10]
Most impressively, the United States financed its massive war production alone. The Spanish empire collapsed in part because it could not finance its wars, just as Britain emerged triumphant in the Nineteenth Century in part because of its creditworthiness, especially with international lenders.[11] Almost uniquely, the United States found little need to borrow abroad. It financed the construction of its Navy and Air Force through taxes and domestic war bonds.[12] The United States could do this precisely because it had so much wealth, the result of American industrialization in the 19th and early 20th century.[13] This wealth enabled the construction of a Navy that secured the sealines, which in turn allowed the safe transport of the Army it built and supplies for Britain and the Soviet Union.
Kennedy’s case fails in one essential way. He summarizes his argument’s “reciprocal” formulation: “Naval events led to Allied victory and changes in the distribution of power. Yet it was the inherent, unfolding distribution of power that determined the outcomes of naval events.”[14] Kennedy convincingly shows how naval events helped lead to victory, and how latent American industrial, technological, and financial power determined that outcome, but not how naval events significantly changed the underlying distribution of power. He never shows the United States needed to control the sea lanes to support its production miracle. Perhaps it did not. The closest he comes is in an appendix tracing the “success chain” through which South American bauxite became fighter aircraft at the Battle of Philippine Sea.[15] The reader is left with the sense that American power sprung outwards from a North American engine that needed no outside inputs. This image may be true, but it seems to run counter to Kennedy’s initial claim and fundamentally differs from his own assessment of British naval mastery.[16]
Kennedy’s newest work originated with late naval artist and Kennedy friend Ian Marshall, whose paintings punctuate the book. The first image shows Royal Navy dreadnoughts in Malta’s Grand Harbor in 1938, a picture of British imperial stability unaware of the great stress it would soon face.[17] The last image shows the post-war nuclear-powered USS Enterprise passing through a foggy Golden Gate. “Nuclear-powered US aircraft carrier of the new age…No other nation can afford such behemoths,” reads the caption.[18] Though Enterprise inactivated ten years ago, the reader cannot help but see the connection with our time. As before, new technologies—then airplanes, now guided missiles—may be changing naval warfare more than we understand. Today, the great naval builder is China, and the United States no longer has the capacity to finance ships and aircraft so easily or to build them so quickly. The naval effects of shifts in the tectonic plates of economic and technological power are becoming clear. Nothing is preordained, but changes to seemingly stable equilibria could occur much faster than we expect.
Erik Sand is an assistant professor at the U.S. Naval War College and an officer in the Navy Reserve. The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of the U.S. Navy, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
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Header Image: U 426 a Type VIIC submarine, down by the stern and sinking, after attacks by a Short Sunderland flying boat, 1939-1945 (Royal Air Force)
Notes:
[1] Paul M. Kennedy and Ian Marshall, Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order in World War II (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2022), 439-42.
[2] Kennedy and Marshall, Victory at Sea, 258-9.
[3] Kennedy and Marshall, Victory at Sea, 263.
[4] Kennedy and Marshall, Victory at Sea, 262.
[5] Kennedy and Marshall, Victory at Sea, 417-420.
[6] Kennedy and Marshall, Victory at Sea, 299.
[7] Kennedy and Marshall, Victory at Sea, 425.
[8] Kennedy and Marshall, Victory at Sea, 422.
[9] Paul M. Kennedy, Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (London: Penguin Books, 2014).
[10] Kennedy and Marshall, Victory at Sea, 263.
[11] Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500-2000 (London: William Collins, 2017).
[12] Kennedy and Marshall, Victory at Sea, 318.
[13] Kennedy and Marshall, Victory at Sea, 326.
[14] Kennedy and Marshall, Victory at Sea,, xvii.
[15] Kennedy and Marshall, Victory at Sea, 445.
[16] Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London: Penguin Books, 2017).
[17] Kennedy and Marshall, Victory at Sea, 2.
[18] Kennedy and Marshall, Victory at Sea, 426.