CHAPTER 21
When The World at War series was shown the Official Secrets Act was still a powerful tool of censorship and nobody then dared speak about the breaking of Axis cyphers, arguably the most significant operational-technological achievement of the war. The first crack in the dam was Frederick Winterbotham's 1974 book The Ultra Secret, but some information uncovered by Allied cryptographers was so embarrassing that it remained classified for decades. It was not until 1995, for example, that a Senate commission forced the release of material that showed how comprehensive Soviet wartime penetration of the US government had been. Another vital scientific achievement was the invention of the cavity magnetron at Birmingham University in 1940, which permitted the development of the airborne centimetric radar that was crucial to the outcome of the Battle of the Atlantic, as well as to accurate night navigation and bombing. In combination with the proximity fuse, another British invention given to the United States in 1940, it spared London the worst of the V-l attacks in 1944. The fact that Britain could not herself develop these inventions (or the research into the atom bomb, handed over in 1941) and put them into large-scale production points to the single most important factor in the crushing of Nazism and Japanese militarism – the enormous surge unleashed by the war in the US economy. Despite considerable duplication of effort and profiteering on an epic scale, not only did it build and supply an American Army of millions and the largest Navy and Air Force in the world, it was also the indispensable financier and supplier of both Commonwealth and Soviet war efforts. Surplus capacity explains why production peaked in Germany as late as mid-1944 despite devastating bombing – but Germany did not begin to mobilise until it was far too late, and when it did the Byzantine nature of the Nazi regime, mistaken labour allocations and cultural constraints prevented it achieving its full potential.
PROFESSOR VANNEVAR BUSH
Chairman of the US National Defense Research Committee
Scientific discoveries revolutionised the ideal of warfare completely and by the end of the war all we thought we knew about the ideal war at the beginning was obsolete. It's the only time in history that ever happened and it can't happen again, because before the war there was a great stock of technical knowledge built up ready for use, but which had never been applied to military things and, of course, therefore there was a great blossoming of new ideas and new devices.
CAPTAIN PETER GRETTON
Naval Escort Group Commander
Scientists used to analyse attacks by aircraft, attacks by certain ships on submarines and statistics on convoy work and that sort of thing. And they would produce new ideas on the use of ships, on the use of aircraft and the whole tactics of convoy defence, which I think revolutionised the whole affair. I think the most dramatic example was that the scientists early on studied the size of the convoys and they soon discovered that if you doubled the number of ships in a convoy, in order to provide the same protection – the same degree of protection – you only had to increase the number of escorts quite marginally. So by increasing the size of the convoys considerably, this released escorts for other duties, in particular to forming the support groups which were later so extremely important in the Atlantic.
ALBERT SPEER
Hitler's Armaments Minister
[Hitler's Reichsminister] Bormann was not an obstruction to my work in the first time when I was Minister, he was the reverse; he supported me because as it's well known Bormann was trying to diminish the influence of the strongest one and I diminished in this time the influence of Goring. Goring was, more or less by my activity, no more the head of the four-year plan and of course Bormann liked it. But then when Bormann found out that now 1 am the strong man, he of course tried to do the same thing to me. There was no unanimous handling of the things, everybody of the big stars of Hitler's government were doing things of their own. It would have been better if the leading men would have been brought together now and then to discuss problems. It didn't happen. Hitler was preferring to have these discussion with every single man in leading positions and then to make his decisions, and often it was the man who was there first who got the decision and the other men who were late had to see how to get along with this decision. As long as I was on very good terms with Hitler, as was the case to the end of 1943, I was always mostly the first one to come to Hitler and get my orders and so the others had to see how to get along with them. But afterwards it was getting more and more difficult because I was no longer his favourite.
CAPTAIN GRETTON
The Germans had some very high-class scientists indeed, and excellent engineers, but they didn't achieve the results they ought to have done. Firstly, I think, because they were mucked around and the Nazis kept changing the priorities, and secondly and most important I don't believe they were ever allowed to take any interest in the operational side, as opposed to what happened to us, where the scientists were made to feel full members of the operational team. I believe this, more than the question of weapons and devices, was the reason why the Germans fell so far astern in technological matters.
ALBERT SPEER
Hitler was more and more convinced that he doesn't need any more advice of anybody and he made the decisions by himself without listening to experts. He didn't even come any more to headquarters: he didn't like to see them any more, and the decisions were made which were preventing the highest output possible and we had so many types of tanks that the supply of spare parts was almost an impossible question. We had so many parts, so many different ammunitions for so many different guns, that the logistic problem was no more possible to solve.
PROFESSOR BUSH
There were a number of reports from the Academy of Science about an atom bomb but it was the British report that really made everybody feel that after all it probably could be done. Of course we way underestimated the time and the money that would be required. But the first real conviction that the job could be done came from the British report.*50
ALBERT SPEER
I was enthused by the V-1 rocket because it was such a wonderful technical device, and I also thought it will be a strong weapon but was disappointed when I heard that the warhead of the missiles only carried a very small load of explosives, and that the cost of such a missile compared with what it's bringing as an explosion to the enemy is not worth the effort. We could do, with the same material and the same workmen, we could do better. Hitler was dreaming of attack of a few thousand missiles at once and he said there should be stocked and then with one big blow he will start his offensive. And it turned out that in the end it started very slow, they were just firstly a few and the next day there was another few and then there were five or six or ten every day and not more, because by then the war was already in a stage that Hitler ordered everything into immediate action.
PROFESSOR BUSH
The project that involved the greatest technical difficulties? You would have to put the atomic bomb as one of the greatest. But the next I'd put the proximity fuse and after that radar, and particularly centimetric radar. Of course you people are ahead of us on radar but when we got going we produced the short-wave radar, which was an enormous advance, and the Germans never got it. Proximity fuses, when they first presented that to me, it came up on appeal because some of my people had turned it down as impossible. I talked to four fellas and finally said to them, 'I think it's impossible on the face of it but I will not stop if you four guys think it can be done, go ahead, waste your time, beat your brains out trying to do it.' But think of what they proposed to do – to take a radio set as big as a baking powder can, put it in a shell, fire it off so that they press down its support with the force of a ton, it would contain thermionic tubes, little glass tubes with filaments in them and they'd expect them to be in operating condition after it had gone out of the gun. It was out of this world, yet they did it, and I think it was the greatest technical accomplishment.
MAX AITKEN
Son of Minister of Production Lord Beaverbrook
My father was a master of propaganda. There was the pots and pans drive where everyone was asked to give up pots and pans and railings, and ex-Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin didn't give up his gates but most other people gave up everything they could in the way of metal. We pilots knew that you couldn't make aircraft out of pots and pans but it was good stuff, it brought the people to realise that the situation was desperate. And I believe the response to the pots and pans drive was tremendous. They had piles and piles of pots and pans, not knowing what to do with them, but he, as I say, he was a great propagandist and enthused them. They didn't like him much, the air marshals didn't like him and I don't think the manufacturers liked him for a start. But he did enthuse them, he worked hard and when I say hard I mean hard. He wouldn't have any weekends; any chairman of an aircraft company who was going to play tennis he'd get him off the tennis court at once and bring him in. He had an uncanny knack of knowing when people in the aircraft industry were taking time off. He said the pilots have no time off, the pilots flew all weekends, and they were tired, and they flew at Christmas and they flew at Easter and New Year, and therefore he couldn't see why anyone else should do it.
OLIVER LYTTELTON
Minister of Production 1942–45
There had only been one Minister of Production before, who was Max Beaverbrook. Otherwise the Ministry of Supply dealt almost entirely with Army matters, the Ministry of Aircraft Production with the Air Force and the Admiralty with its own thing. The two new ministries, of Supply and Aircraft Production, in neither department that I can remember had there been a minister who had been on the battlefield. And this is one of the central difficulties of war production: you've got to have equipment which industry can produce and which is as near the tactical requirement of the Air Force or the Army as you can get.
EMANUEL SHINWELL
Trade-union official and Labour MP
I don't hold any particular brief for the late Lord Beaverbrook. I knew him well, knew him very well indeed, often had conversations with him, often was associated with him over the Second Front before he became a member of the government. But I would say this in Beaverbrook's favour – if he had not been made Minister of Aircraft Production it would have been disastrous. Of course he upset things, he went in and turned the whole thing upside down, disturbed people, incensed people, did all the things he shouldn't have done according to the critics – but without Beaverbrook it's doubtful if we could have got through.
DR JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH
Deputy Head of the US Office of Price Administration
In the late Thirties part of the CIO was under left-wing leadership and in the days of the Nazi pact with Russia there was foot-dragging on the part of some of the union leaders.*51 I think this could easily be exaggerated but there were strikes and there was a certain lack of enthusiasm on the far left. But from 22nd June 1941 the left-wing unions became very enthusiastic and started talking about no-strike pledges and, generally speaking, the big production unions got their back into the war pretty strong. Walter Reuther of the United Automobile Workers was, though very young, a very strong militant figure in seeking to develop production against the Nazis. So I wouldn't put the unions on a par with the businessmen. The businessmen were a drag but so were the unions, certainly after the attack on the Soviet Union – and I'm not saying this was true of all the unions, just a few under left-wing leadership – but from that time on they were a pretty affirmative force.
ALBERT SPEER
Of course a man who is producing the arms is very powerful man in every country who is leading the war. I was not as powerful as I would have liked to be because in my hands were only the armaments production for the armies, but not those for the Navy and for the Air Force and not the general war production. This was leading to some failures in production because of course the whole production must be put together. I tried first in vain to be the boss of the whole thing, and succeeded very slowly in the length of time, the latest thing was in May 1944 when I got the production of the Air Force. It's astounding for everybody who didn't live in this system to hear that it was divided in many districts, in thirty-two districts, and if the head of every district was a gauleiter he was a strong political man and had the power, the absolute power, in his district. He was only subordinate to Hitler himself, so when my orders didn't please one of the gauleiters possibly they weren't carried out.
DR PAUL SAMUELSON
Member of the US War Production Board
One thing we learned, and this was a surprise to most of us, we all thought the Nazis were very good organisers of the economy. After the war, when we went on our bombing surveys and got all the records, it turned out that they didn't even know what the gross national product was. They were never even on a two-shift basis in the factories. The democracies of the world, once they set their mind to it – and I am thinking primarily of the UK and the United States – we did a better job of mobilisation than ever the totalitarian states did. I think they were done in by it.
ALBERT SPEER
Industrialists who were advising me told me at the very beginning of my office in 1942 that the great difference between Great Britain and Germany was that in Great Britain the women are mobilised to a very high degree. They gave me the percentage of women working in Germany in this war and they gave me comparison to the women working in Germany in the First World War, and it was quite obvious that women were almost not used for war production. So I tried to get the women in war-production machinery but it was opposed by Sauckel, who was in charge of all the labour – he was in some way at the same position as Bevin [Labour Minister Ernest Bevin] in England.*52 Sauckel denied it and the thing came to Goring and Goring flatly denied it too, then it came to the decision of Hitler and Hitler also said no, the women must be preserved, they had other tasks, they are for family, they have to rear their children and it would spoil their health and their morale if they are working in the factories. I think it was a general line of the whole system, it started with the thatched roof, which was propagated everywhere, it started with fostering the old customs and so on and so on. There was a long list of things which didn't match the technical age, which were on the contrary going more to the past, and those things were, really made it impossible to push through armaments production as I wanted to do it.
DR GALBRAITH
The one great thing we had, the one great thing that Britain had, and very little point has ever been made of this, was that the tables of the social accounts, which were new in those days, for business and others, allowed us to see exactly what we were investing in civilian goods, capital goods, what we were putting into war production – and the Germans had no such figures. And those of us who were concerned, who saw something of the German economy towards the end of the war, were awestruck by our greater knowledge of what we were doing.
ALBERT SPEER
Looking back of course I see that is, was, one of the big mistakes of our warfare to use foreign labourers. But not only now, also in the time when the things were decided, my leading industrialists and me we had the opinion that the rule that production can be done is with German forces, mainly with the women. But Hitler denying it, we were, I was too, compelled to ask Sauckel for deported labour. In the first time there were not so many arguments because I was of the opinion too that I need the workmen and that even if they are coming against their own will, it's a necessity to me, so I supported Sauckel and in the Nuremberg trial when I was in the dock I made a statement saying again what I did.*53 At first Sauckel was quite successful and brought to Germany hundred thousands of foreign labourers. But then he got in trouble because the people who were drafted in France, for instance, they didn't want to go any more to Germany, or more they didn't want to go in the beginning, but now they resisted really with some risks, went away and were joining the Maquis, the French Resistance. Generals who were in charge in France at this time were saying that Sauckel is more or less supporting the French Resistance with his systems. So we found out, together with the Production Minister of the French government, that it would be much better to occupy those French workmen in the French production and to charge them with consumer-goods production, while I am in Germany changing consumer-goods production into armaments production. We just started with this, with difficulties because Sauckel was opposing me and had the help of Bormann, but we got along.
DR GALBRAITH
The business community regarded Roosevelt, at minimum, as a major deputy of the devil and Roosevelt was deeply suspicious of the businessmen, so the people who were associated with mobilising for war were divided. Some of them felt that their main purpose in being in Washington was to put a curb on the Socialist excess of the New Deal. Some of them were uneasy about being there. They had something of the feeling that the people who worked there were playing in an orchestra in a brothel. There was also a great unwillingness to convert from civilian industries. There was a feeling that war production would be a very unprofitable business, would lose markets for automobiles, for tyres, for chemicals and so forth and there was a very great reluctance to take the plunge into the production of war goods.
OLIVER LYTTELTON
It's very easy to win battles with tanks that can't be produced and if you ask the ordinary run of General what he wants, he wants eight inches of front armour, he wants a high-velocity gun, capable of forty-five miles an hour over rough country and absolutely reliable. Such an animal can't be made. In the Air Force they used to introduce modifications – say a new bombsight that weighed twenty-eight pound more than the last one – and this starts altering the whole design and hundreds of modifications have to be put in, the wing, the ribs have to be strengthened and so on. So you want a synthesis between tactical requirements and what is possible from the point of view of production.
ALBERT SPEER
We succeeded quite well with tank productions, in fact we produced five times more tanks in July 1944 than in February 1942, but one must compare to see the whole picture that the output in 1942 was a very low one, and the output in 1944 was, compared with the production in United States or in Russia, the normal one. I wouldn't say it was a minor one but it was a good output and also if I think of the air attacks, everything was against the highest production in Germany. But we could have done more without the changes Hitler always ordered – but Hitler was representing the Army wishes and a Production Minister has to fulfil what the Army is asking for. Of course we were all sticking together, and we had many talks about it and we tried, almost with intrigues, to attack Hitler's opinion from different sides and were winning other officers who were coming with experience from the fights to tell Hitler. Well, he changed his opinion maybe for a few days, but afterwards he jumped back again, and it was mainly the question that he wanted the heaviest tanks possible, which now were so slow that the tanks of the other side were far superior to them.
DR GALBRAITH
Washington in the 1930s had been a place of great excitement. I was not there much during the 1930s but many young people had come to be part of the Roosevelt revolution, part of the New Deal and then, after Pearl Harbor or even before Pearl Harbor, it became the Mecca for every kind of talent and non-talent. It was the scene, and everybody who was there had an enormous sense of his own importance when we all felt we were carrying the fate of the world on our shoulders and didn't hesitate to proclaim that fact at any given moment. One saw everyone you'd ever heard of in the streets, in the restaurants. It wasn't a place of great gaiety but on the other hand Washington never is. It was a very interesting time, and I think there's a tendency if one is winning, that is common to both Britain and the United States, to behave in a crisis with a certain panache, a certain style and everybody wanted to prove that he can take on very serious tasks of the period without being too gloomy about it.
PROFESSOR BUSH
We started on this side a year and a half before Pearl Harbor and gradually, through Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt himself who saw the picture, we had an organisation here for the development of new weapons by civilians going for eighteen months before we got in. We also had a complete interchange with Britain way back there, the form of organisation was a simple one. The first national office was later made the Office of Scientific Research and Development. The change came when the military machine was joined to it and through that all the work funnelled, it was a single paramilitary organisation getting its money from Congress. On the other hand the British – I never did understand the British organisation and I'm not dead sure they did either. But it was not in paramilitary form, it was in the separate military branches and joined together largely by committee. We had the unitary organisation, which is far better.
DR GALBRAITH
There was a certain enthusiasm in Washington for making people suffer. I think most of us who were associated with it felt a certain amount of suffering on the part of the American business community was good for its soul and I think that was probably disliked. And then, as everywhere else, there was great dislike for disrupting the accepted patterns of life and when you shifted the corporation from producing automobiles to tanks, or when the Ford Motor Company had to become the producer of the B-24 bomber – which it did very inefficiently for a long time – this interrupted comfortable patterns of life, which many people didn't like. Then there were the shortages. Though on the whole the people took the shortages rather well. I think there is the same tendency to accept shortages that existed here in Britain, with one exception: people were very resistant to gasoline rationing. Clothing shortages, food shortages, coffee, sugar, people would accept – but there was no form of rascality, chicanery, thievery and larceny which people wouldn't engage in to get extra gasoline. That was the one form, that was the kind of rationing which was really terrible to administer in the United States.
DR SAMUELSON
The first problem was that we had a head of stagnation, what we call the Great Depression, and so most of our business community said we couldn't expand our production very much. It was a perfect controlled experiment of modern science – you wouldn't think that was possible in economics but it was: the followers in America of John Maynard Keynes versus the business community.*54 The Keynesians said the American economy had lots of slack, it will get the orders and there will be a secondary multiple in response, there will be a vast expansion in output, and so build big plants. The business community generally said, 'Oh, no, we're practically at capacity now.' Well, Franklin Roosevelt decided in favour of the Keynesians and when he announced fifty thousand planes everybody thought the man had lost his senses. Well, of course, we didn't get fifty thousand aeroplanes in a month, but a couple of years after Pearl Harbor the American economy reached levels just about what had been predicted by John Maynard Keynes himself in visits here and by his followers in this country.
OLIVER LYTTELTON
Maynard Keynes had an effect in the government circle as he would have in any circle. He had a brilliant brain but he didn't get his way enough. In a curious way this applied more to the Americans than us. People got frightened of this colossal intellect and the Americans were terrified of him. They thought that any minute some unarguable point was going to be raised by him, and US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau was frightened of him, he realty was.
GEORGE BALL
Associate General Counsel for the Lend-Lease programme
Lend-Lease was a novel conception and the more immediate problem was to get people to understand what it was. In this, I think Mr Roosevelt's very simple analogy of lending your neighbour a hose when there's a fire was the most persuasive kind of simple illustration so that people could understand it. The biggest problem the programme had, of course, was the allocation of materials. Should we give it to the United States armed forces, or should we send it to the Pacific theatre, or should we turn it over to our European allies or to the Soviet Union after the Soviet Protocol? There was a long period of delay when we simply weren't keeping up deliveries and President Roosevelt got quite exercised about it and really began to put great pressure on the bureaucracy to meet the commitments.
DR GALBRAITH
This was the first war where radio was important – there was no question that quick access to mass opinion was a matter of great utility. In something like the freezing of rubber-tyre stocks, the announcement of sugar rationing and the announcement of coffee rationing, you could very quickly get the explanation through to the whole population. It was very important in propaganda terms for the keeping up of the war spirit. Roosevelt used it for that purpose and used it with great skill, as did Winston Churchill – Roosevelt I think with less skill than Winston Churchill, but I think he was an apt student. In World War Two, censorship was surprisingly unimportant. We had no powers of censorship in the Office of Price Administration so we had to keep our rationing intentions secret, but we had no protection from leaks and after 1943 we no longer kept our production figures secret. Ships, aircraft and so forth were so large it seemed simpler just to let them be known and we learned after the war that they were on the whole discomfiting to the Germans. Hitler prohibited the citing of American production figures within the German bureaucracy and said they were faked. So the only really important restrictions on the media were the news of impending battles, military actions, the invasion of North Africa and so forth. I think that in retrospect one is surprised how liberal the reporting was. I would say that governments, when they're winning a war, tend to be much more conscious of the importance of the freedom of the press than when, as in the case of Vietnam, they are losing the war.
GEORGE BALL
One of the possible defects of the American system is that the executive branch, the President, does not have control over fiscal policy as in the case of Britain. We have a Budget Message to the US Congress and that's more or less the end of it. It simply makes proposals with regard to taxation, for example, and the Congress wasn't prepared to vote the kind of taxes which the President felt were absolutely necessary. This greatly contributed to the inflationary forces as we began to gear up for production and we got into some serious problems until that could be brought under control through an enormous bureaucratic operation.
DR SAMUELSON
You might have thought that inflation would have been a major problem because in most countries in most wars it's always been a major problem. But very early when we mobilised we put in rationing and although there was a small amount of grumbling it's amazing how well the rationing system worked, although if the war had lasted another five years I won't answer for the consequences. Probably when you hear the name John Kenneth Galbraith you think of his books The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State. Well, among connoisseurs like myself it's the book you don't read that's the most intriguing: it's the book he wrote after the war about our wartime-rationing system. He was the Deputy Administrator of our price controls and he called it 'the disequilibrium-equilibrium system' and let me tell you how it worked. It really was a charm, too bad that it had to be in terms of war. You could get as much employment as you wanted and families which had never had any money at all were suddenly having lots of money. Now you'd say that with all this money and limited supplies of civilian goods the balloon would really go up in terms of inflation. But what happened was that all the things that you spend money on and enjoy – automobiles, durable consumer goods – were completely unavailable. There was only one thing available and that was savings, so people put their money in bank deposits, half their money in War Bonds. As a result we not only financed the war without too much disruption of the price levels but also came away with a nice nest egg that prevented the post-war depression which lots of economists – I'm one of them – predicted.
DR GALBRAITH
The cliché has it that Pearl Harbor brought a great change and there was a change, no doubt, but it wasn't dramatic and there was a stepped-up sense of urgency, but some of the same old businessmen were there, some of the public-relations types and what really happened, I suppose, was the organisations got better. But I didn't notice anybody any less interested in making money, anybody more interested in conducting a war in any spirit of business sacrifice. I was in charge of price control and probably I had a somewhat jaundiced view of the whole situation because most of my time was spent by people proclaiming to me how greatly their patriotism would be enhanced and how much more energetic they would be if they could just have a little more money.
DR SAMUELSON
There was a famous wartime picture of Sewell Avery, a great tycoon of the last age who was the head of retailer Montgomery Ward and who had brought it out of the Depression, being carried out of his office by two American soldiers in uniform because he wouldn't comply with the War Labor Board. Well, he learned where sovereignty lay.
DR GALBRAITH
Those years were ones of considerable social progress. The notion of equality of sacrifice – well, it was never realised in fact – but it became in some degree established and so that there was at least a bad conscience after the war about extreme inequality. It certainly committed the United States much more strongly to the idea of full employment. It was seen that it became a cliché that if you can give a man a job to produce war material, then surely you can give him a job to produce civilian goods, and I suppose the most important single result was that since the war was being conducted by a government very sympathetic to trade unionism, there was a very widespread acceptance of the trade unions among businesses which previously had been very anti-union. If they were going to participate they had to take the unions along with it; this one of the reasons why the businessmen, in the early months of war, dragged their feet.