Sarah Paine: evaluation

Transcript context

…are trying to run the Dardanelles with their navy, this is when the Ottomans are terrified of their Christian subjects, the Armenians. They're starting to round them up, pulling them out of the army. Then days before the landing, the Turkish massacre of the Armenians begins. Between 1915 and 1923, 1.5 million Armenians are killed. That's a lot of collateral damage. The Normandy landings are a completely different event in World War II. This is another contested landing of trying to get armies in. First of all, the buildup of war materiel goes on for years to get all the landing vessels, the equipment, the forces all ready to go in Britain. Then the disinformation campaign kept the Germans completely misinformed. They were expecting the landing to be at the Pas-de-Calais, which is the shortest place. It's way off in Normandy. That worked. Everybody lands on a day and they're up and over and into places inland. Another lesson learned. The Royal Navy did not think that convoy duty was the manly thing to do. They would convoy troop transports, but they wouldn't deal with the Merchant Marine until 1918. Well, the Germans almost sank a terminal quantity of that stuff. The Navy is not thinking about the economic dimensions of warfare. They're just focused on all the military things in World War I. In World War II, the British would be convoying even before they got in the war. Another difference between World War II and World War I. At the end of World War I, if you look at the disposition of German troops, they're abroad. They're occupying Belgium, Luxembourg, and parts of France. Nobody's in Germany. Yes, the Germans had really lousy meals during the war, but German civilians did not feel the full brunt of what their government had done. Therefore Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt felt that it was really critical to have boots on the ground in Berlin to let the Germans know exactly what had happened to them and let them feel the war that they had inflicted on others in order to end it. Even so, the Allies win this thing and they wreck the continental powers. But they almost wreck themselves in the process. It's a Pyrrhic victory for France and Britain. It really weakens them. World War II is going to be a different event. That's the lesson from being in this continental situation, the lessons learned from the last time around for France and Britain. It really weakens them. World War II is going to be a different event. That's the lesson from being in this continental situation, the lessons learned from the last time around Now for what the British did in World War II to deal with the continental problem. The opening move of a maritime power in a really high-stakes war like this is typically blockade. What you want to do is cut your enemy off from the oceans and force it to cannibalize its own resources and those of occupied areas. Because of the geographic position of a maritime power, you can quite often do this to a continental power on narrow seas. The British were well aware that Germany's a trading country. Most of its trade goes by sea and it's also on these narrow seas. Geographically and economically it's really vulnerable to blockade. Germany gets alternate resources, but they come at a much higher cost. They're much more difficult. You're really putting stress on the German economy and causing inflation and other things. But if you blockade, a continental power can't blockade you back. Why? They're on the narrow seas, so they can't deploy a surface fleet. You'll sink it. Also they can't easily blockade a coastline that faces the open seas, the high seas. You can do other things on narrow seas, but it's pretty tough. What do you do if you cannot blockade ships in port? Well, then what you're going to try to do is commerce raiding to try and sink things when they're out and about. That was what Germany did in World War II and why its occupation of France was so important. Once it took the French coastline, it then set up U-boat pens in Brest, Lorient, Saint-Nazaire, La Rochelle, and Bordeaux. They're going to be using these to fight the Battle of the Atlantic. That's the game. Maritime powers blockade. The response of continental powers is commerce raiding. Then the maritime response to that is going to be convoying your merchant ships. As the war begins in Europe, the United States is not in, but Roosevelt is coordinating with Latin America to set up a big neutrality zone all around the Americas, 300 nautical miles. Then the Lend-Lease Act, also before US belligerency, has pieces of it which say the United States is going to take over British bases in Iceland and set up bases in Greenland. Why do we care about those locations? They're really important if you're going to send convoys back and forth across the Atlantic both to attack and to defend. That's what we're up to. Even so, the Axis visits a real nightmare in the Battle of the Atlantic. A lot of things are going down. How does that all work? Before the United States gets in, at the very beginning these U-boats turn the North Sea into a kill zone. Britain is losing an awful lot of stuff off of its shores and also off the shores of Africa. The Germans get really good at commerce raiding really fast. There's also the Fall of France which is a mess because prior to the Fall of France, Britain is only convoying just beyond Ireland. Once you get the Fall of France and all of those submarines on French territory, then the British have to convoy 400 miles further west. Fall of France, Britain is only convoying just beyond Ireland. Once you get the Fall of France and all of those submarines on French territory, then the British have to convoy 400 miles further west. They've lost an awful lot of destroyers between the fall of Norway and then the Dunkirk evacuation. They haven't got enough ships to convoy properly. Then the Germans are really creative. Admiral Dönitz, who runs the submarine service at this point, uses wolfpack tactics where you concentrate a whole bunch of submarines on a convoy, attack it at night, and bad things happen to the convoy. Also, the Germans have captured some of the British codes, so they have a sense of where the convoys are. They're sinking almost a terminal tonnage of this traffic. 850,000 tons of allied shipping is going down. This is Hitler's Happy Time when he's sinking an awful lot of stuff. Then there's a big Greenland gap. This is where there's a lack of air cover, and you'll see a lot of things are going down in this Greenland gap. Meanwhile, the British have gotten pretty good at espionage and they've captured a lot of Enigma machines. Those are what the Germans are using to encrypt their messages. Well, the British capture some machines, some rotors, some code books in 1940 and 1941. By the summer of 1941 through February 1942, they can actually read the codes and decrypt them so that within 36 hours they can get the information out. This allows convoys to go, "Oh, wolfpack there. We're going to do evasive routing of the convoys somewhere else." That may have saved up to 2 million tons of Allied shipping. Meanwhile, for the Germans, General Rommel is in North Africa. He's having troubles because he's supplied across the Mediterranean and the British and friends are sinking too many of his supplies. Admiral Dönitz is told to reroute some of the U-boats in the Atlantic to go help General Rommel up in North Africa. The United States isn't in the war, so all quiet on the eastern seaboard. It's looking like it might be okay for the British for a while, except Dönitz thinks something's up. They add a fourth rotor to the Enigma machine. The British are then blind again for most of 1942 until they can capture a four-rotor Enigma machine, all the rotors plus the code books. It takes a while. They're in a world of hurt. The United States enters the war, which you think would be good for Britain, except it produces Hitler's Second Happy Time. Why? Because Admiral King, like his Royal Navy predecessors in the previous war, doesn't think convoying is the manly thing for naval officers to be up to. He's not for convoying. Also, Americans don't turn off the lights. Therefore as merchant ships are going up the east coast of the United States, the lighting is just highlighting their silhouettes, making them much easier to sink. By the way, in those days, Louisiana and Texas oil, which is supplying the east coast where a lot of American industry is, is coming up by ships on the eastern seaboard, particularly by the Cape Hatteras shoals which are like 30 miles wide. They become a total kill zone.…

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