Making sense of the clutter
We live amidst a clutter of events so dense that it’s hard to tell what’s important and what’s not. A few examples:
The decision by the United States to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem has been posited as a Middle East game changer. It may be, or not.
This week representatives of Germany, France, Britain, China and Russia will meet as members of the joint committee overseeing the Iran nuclear agreement. The U.S., having renounced the accord, will be absent. Important?
Will it matter to future generations that in the year 2018 the president of the United States tweeted the following? (Here you may insert any one of Donald Trump’s numerous tweets.)
How important is it that Kanye likes Donald, that Donald despises Barack, that Joe may take another run at the White House, that Stormy’s attorney lives to get in front of the camera, and that Michael Cohen is more bagman than attorney?
For the most part, it’s enough that we know and care about these things. This is the stuff of everyday life. The fabric of our time. It’s what’s meant by being contemporary. As for their place in the history books, that will take care of itself.
All of which brings me to World War II — what, you say, yet again! Pearl Harbor we know about and was important. The same for the invasions of North Africa and Italy. D-Day. The Battle of the Bulge. Iwo Jima. The fall of Berlin and Hitler’s suicide. Hiroshima.
All are familiar signposts on the road to victory and the emergence of the American world order.
Either because I was poorly educated, or I just wasn’t paying attention, but it seems I missed until very recently one of the most important episodes of the war.
Or maybe it’s just been buried beneath the sheer weight of World War II history. The Holocaust, the unraveling of the atom, and the others are difficult to knock from the front pages, after all.
Regardless, it’s the most important World War II event that most of us never reckoned with.
Here, in brief, is what I’m talking to: The Allies — principally the United States, Britain, and Russia — were having a heck of a time getting war supplies and foodstuffs across the Atlantic in the winter and spring of 1943.
Both the Brits and the Soviets needed plenty of U.S. supplies if the war against the Nazis was to go forward to a successful conclusion.
The problem was German submarines, or U-boats, which were sinking scores of merchant ships bound for the United Kingdom and Russia. England, being an island nation, was especially vulnerable. With tons of war supplies assigned to the ocean’s depths, the future was bleak. The British leader Winston Churchill later wrote, “The only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.”
By choking off delivery of supplies, German U-boats nearly defeated Britain in World War I. Would they succeed in doing so in World War II?
By March 1943, the Germans had sunk 108 freight-carrying ships. The tide of war in the North Atlantic pointed Germany’s way.
In May of 1943, however, the German navy gave up its U-boat patrols. The Battle of the North Atlantic became an Allied victory.
This astonishing turn-around was due to President Franklin Roosevelt, who against the advice of his military brass ordered the transfer of dozens of B-24 Liberator bombers from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
Roosevelt “assumed full responsibility” for the transfers from Hawaii, writes biographer Jean Edward Smith. B-24s, notes historian John Keegan, “were like flying death to a surfaced U-boat.”
The Allies sank eight German submarines in March 1943; 31 in April; and 43 in May. Sixty-two convoys crossed the Atlantic in the next four months without one casualty.
A grateful Churchill told Parliament: “This is absolutely unprecedented in this war or in the last.”
“With the sea to Britain secure, American production tipped the balance in favor of the Allies,” Smith concludes. Henceforth, the “arsenal of democracy” bore down hard on the Germans. U.S.-produced armaments were a dagger pointed at the heart of Hitler and the Nazis.
So the next time someone asks whether so-and-so is important shrug your shoulders and remember the North Atlantic in the Second World War. Then answer, “Ask me in 50 years. No, better make that a hundred.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.