Sarah Paine: evaluation

Transcript context

…e able to construct adequate quantities of naval hulls and merchant hulls. You need to coordinate with allies. You got to get food and other things to Britain. There are a lot of things going on here. You need air cover and the planes that are capable of doing it. There are a lot of things going on. Remove any one of them and the outcome may have been different. e are a lot of things going on here. You need air cover and the planes that are capable of doing it. There are a lot of things going on. Remove any one of them and the outcome may have been different. So that's it on the commerce raiding. Once you command the Atlantic—which means that a sustainable amount of traffic is going to get through from the Allied powers—then you can start thinking about peripheral theaters. What's a peripheral theater? The main theater is Russia in this war, not what you think. Why? Because between two-thirds and three-quarters of German ground forces were always fighting Russia. That means these other theaters, which are peripheral to the main theater, take up between one-quarter to one-third of German forces. That makes them peripheral. It doesn't make them unimportant, but they're not the main theater. By the way, who would want to fight in the main theater if there are alternatives? People die in droves in the main theater. This man, Sir Julian Corbett, a very fine naval theorist of Britain, was heartbroken in World War I that Britain ignored his naval strategy, which was to not do the continental commitment and run the war through these peripheral operations. It wrecked his health. But according to Corbett, here are the prerequisites for a theater that makes a really good one for a peripheral operation. One, it has to be overseas so the enemy can't invade you or wreck your productive base. Secondly, you need local sea control to get in there. But that local sea access has got to be better than the land access, because you want to have it easier for Britain to get in and out than it is for the enemy. Because then attrition rates will favor Britain. Britain also should deploy a disposal force. What's that? It means those forces you have who are in excess of what's necessary for homeland defense. It's not a disposable force. It's rather a force sized so if everything goes south, you won't ruin the homeland. You can afford to risk it on potentially very risky, but potentially war-changing operations. In addition, they have joint operations. Joint means cooperation of land and sea in this era. You're going to come in by sea, you're going to supply by sea, but you'll be fighting on land. You better coordinate all that. It's got to be combined operations. What does that mean? Coordinating with allies. You need friendly locals who are going to help you do all of this. Then you need to command your own forces. Why? Because you want to determine how they come in, how they go out. If it all goes badly, you want to be able to leave, which is what they did at Dunkirk. As much as the continental power might want to play this game, they cannot because they don't have the requisite sea access to pull it off. The war winds up with Britain and the United States going through four phases—well, for Britain it’s all four and with us it’s some of the later ones—of four peripheral theaters. First, the North Sea. That's essential for British homeland defense. There are three keys to the North Sea: Scapa Flow, Strait of Dover, coast of Norway. Britain always controlled the Strait of Dover and Scapa Flow. h Sea. That's essential for British homeland defense. There are three keys to the North Sea: Scapa Flow, Strait of Dover, coast of Norway. Britain always controlled the Strait of Dover and Scapa Flow. Germany went after Norway to try and open things up that way. Norway is not an ideal peripheral theater for Britain because the Germans had better land and sea access to that theater. They take Norway and then they set up sub bases at Bergen and Trondheim in addition to the ones they had at Kiel, Hamburg and the Heligoland Archipelago. These are the things that are ruining those Arctic convoys. That one does not go well for Britain. It winds up facing a totally hostile continental Europe shoreline. The Axis has it all. In the Mediterranean, there are certain keys that Britain controlled. Gibraltar that’s access to the Atlantic. The Suez Canal that’s access to the Red Sea. Crete that’s access to the Black Sea. The British had a fallback position, a midway point at Malta if things went really badly. The Germans attack the fallback position because they're trying to bail out the Italians fighting in North Africa. They're trying to take Malta because whoever's got planes there can cause convoys all kinds of problems, or they can protect their own things. Malta is blockaded by the Germans. It's not relieved until the end of 1942. That is not great for Britain. It's threatening its access to the empire. The problem for Britain is Italian belligerency. Italians had been part of the Entente in World War I. Well, they're part of the Axis in World War II. Three of these keys—Malta, Crete and the Suez Canal—lie in the center of Italian ambitions because they want an empire where they're going to go down the Balkan coast, and then they're going to go deep into Libya and Ethiopia to unify their empire around the Red Sea. Mussolini kicks this thing off, except then he gets stuck in Greece. The Germans have to come and bail him out. They chase the British out of Greece. The Britons are then on Crete, and then that falls to the Germans. The Britons are in a world of hurt. The Suez Canal is under threat. Think about it. You have the fall of Norway, fall of France, the blockade of Malta, the fall of Crete. It is really bad news. However, when the United States gets into the war, the United States can help Britain retake some of these keys to the Mediterranean. This is what is going on in North Africa. Admiral Dönitz had saved it initially. But after the United States is in with more assets, 60% of the tankers supplying Dönitz's oil are getting sunk because Malta holds and Malta is supplied. These tankers are getting bombed out of existence. Rommel loses in North Africa, not because he's the inferior general—he's a better general—he's just not supplied. This is the key. Once you take North Africa, that peripheral operation, it opens the opportunity to go into Sicily and then the rest of Italy. Once you get that going, there's a possibility to do the Normandy landing. So there are four different peripheral operations. Some would argue that the air campaign over Germany was another peripheral campaign.…

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