“Mediocre minds discuss strategy; Good minds discuss tactics; Great minds discuss logistics”
– Unknown, possibly aprocryphal
Every “war” in the living memory of any American under the age of probably 60 has been the sort of thing a peasant in the 1700s might recognize; a country’s professional military duking it out with another country’s military, or with insurgents in some unruly province, while back things went on more or less as normal.
The idea of “total war” – the complete mobilization of every factor of a nation’s economy toward a war effort – sounds completely foreign to people today. The idea that entire nations would devote their entire economies – down to the food on one’s table – to defeating an enemy who similiarly engaged? That may as well be words from another language.
But seventy years ago today, there were not one but two separate stories that illustrated how deeply America’s raw industrial output affected the outcome of history’s greatest war.
Shorefront: For centuries, the greatest problem with launching an amphibious invasion – landing troops from the sea to not merely harass the enemy and leave, but to stay and conquer their target – wasn’t landing the troops on the shore. Any boat can land a group of soldiers on a beach; with enough courage and skill, they can overwhelm the defenses (if any) and prevail.
The hard part is keeping those troops supplied. You can’t just land soldiers and expect them to keep moving; you need to supply them with ammunition, food and clothing. Their artillery support needs to land. And they all need ammunition. Vehicles – jeeps, tanks, personnel carriers, to fight the battles, and trucks to carry supplies to the troops at the front – all have to be landed, as well as fuel, oil and spare parts for all the vehicles. And the men; field hospitals, replacment soldiers, medicine, body bags. And ever more of all the above.
The irreducible fact of fighting a war across any sizeable body of water is that the bridgehead, sooner or later, would need to capture an intact port, with dock facilities capable of unloading ships full of cargo to be tranported to the front. Cranes, wharves, warehouses, roads and railroads, all the infrastructure needed to accept, unload, sort, transfer and dispatch cargo to the front to support millions of fighting and support soldiers – there was only one way to get those.
In the case of D-Day, it was complicated by the fact that the same geography that made the invasion beaches usable for the initial assault – a long, gently sloping shelf out from the beaches, with shallow water extending out hundreds of yards – made it exceptionally difficult to bring in cargo ship, which have deep “drafts” – they run aground in water less than 20-30 feet deep.
Or that was the conventional wisdom. British and American engineers, in the runup to D-Day, hatched the idea of the “Mulberry” – an artificial harbor, capable of providing a shelter from the weather of the English Channel, and instant wharves and jetties and docks built straight out from the invasion beaches, capable of unloading bulk lots of cargo from ships designed to carry lots of it, in water deep enough for the ships to approach and navigate. They consisted of…:
- A “breakwater” constructed of long chains of sunken ships and large concrete boxes, to create an area of calm water
- Instant docks made out of large, prefabricated cement and steel sections that would be towed to the beach and moored in place.
- Long stretches of floating roadway to join the beach to the docks, so trucks could take unloaded cargo from the jetties directly to the beach, and thence to the road system.
The Arromanches Mulberry, in service.
There were two Mullberries – an American one off Omaha Beach, and a British one off Sword Beach. And in the two weeks since D-Day, the two harbors had been erected, and had started their job of moving cargo…
Floating roadways in from a Mulberry dock to the beach.
…when, seventy years ago tonight, a huge gale struck Normandy. The American Mulberry, anchored in softer sand, was broken apart; floating roadways were washed away; docks were pulled out of place and damaged beyond repair.
The British Mulberry was badly damaged, and out of service for a few days – but it served on at reduced capacity until, later than fall, the Allies finally captured the port of Antwerp (after the Germans destroyed the ports facilities at Cherbourg, Le Havre and Dunkirk).
The remains of the British Mulberry can be seen from Google Maps today, off “Sword” beach, at the French city of Arromanches.
What that meant was the Allies – especially the Americans – had to do what had been considered impossible; bring in all the supplies needed for a huge army, “over the beach”.
And there was the other huge American success story; they pulled it off, using hundreds of “Landing Ship, Tank” vessels.
A row of LSTs, disgorging cargo at Utah Beach.
About 300 feet long, fairly flimsy by naval standards, but designed to run up in waters less than five feet deep to drop off tanks almost directly onto the beach, an “LST” could also carry trucks loaded with supplies that could drive onto the beach with needed cargoes.
And the US built well over 1,000 of them.
LST-1, the first of well over a thousand nearly identical ships. Some are still afloat today.
So when the pre-invasion calculus of moving supplies to the troops got blown away seventy years ago tonight, there was a “Plan B” – raw, brute carrying force.
Raw Numbers: Meanwhile, halfway around the world, the Battle of the Philippine Sea – the run-up to the invasion of the Philippines – was underway.
Let’s go back in time a bit, first.
Two years ago, the US Pacific Fleet was far from recovered from Pearl Harbor. For that matter, it was reeling from losses at Coral Sea, Midway, and the Solomon Islands.
At one point, the US was down to two carriers – the Saratoga and theEnterprise – afloat in the Pacific. We had had to resort to the subterfuge of “borrowing” the British carrierVictoriousfor a few months, and masquerading it as an American ship, to deceive the Japanese.
But in the intervening two years, the US had commissioned nearly a dozen new “fleet” carriers (each carrying 90 aircraft), and nine “light” carriers (converted cruisers, designed mostly to carry fighter escorts for the main fleet, and carrying about 40 planes). More importantly, its pilots had gone from a mass of untrained college graduates to a highly-trained force adept at handing down hard-won experience from combat veterans to newbie pilots.
Five “Essex” Class Carriers – all commissioned since 1942; more carriers than the US actually owned in 1941. There were eventually nearly twenty Essexes.
In the meantime, the Japanese Naval Air Service – in 1942 perhaps the most elite body of pilots in the world – had been ground down by massive casualties at Midway, whittled away in other battles across the Pacific…
…and finally, launched into an epic attack on the American fleet.
Which led, seventy years ago tonight, to “the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot”.
Nearly 600 Japanese planes were shot down; the US Navy lost about 120, two-thirds of them due to running out of fuel while attempting to attack the Japanese fleet (which escaped, although not without terrible cost) at extreme range.
Japanese fighter going down at the Battle of the Philippine Sea – one of nearly 600 lost in two days.
The battle left the Japanese navy’s air service with enough trained aircrew to fit out one light carrier; without air cover, there was no question of the Japanese Navy undertaking any non-suicidal offensive action for the rest of the war.
And the bulk of the backstory for this pivotal battle came down to industrial production; the United States had replaced its casualties from Pearl Harbor, Coral Sea, Midway and the Solomons at least twice over (and even more so in terms of smaller warships, supply vessels and especially aircraft and aircrew).
The battle spelled the end of any rational Japanese threat in the Pacific.
And between both episodes, on both sides of the world, it showed what a crushingly immense thing US productivity was.
