Free The Burning Shore by Ed Offley Page B

duties as the warship continued on to Newport.
    As if that sorry performance level weren’t bad enough, Krogstad’s command was being disassembled in front of his eyes as the U-boat campaign heated up in late January 1942. At the beginning of the year, he commanded four bombardment groups, three heavy (B-17s and B-18s) and one medium (B-25s and B-26s). Within three months after Pearl Harbor, all but one of these units had been detached from I Bomber Command. Arnold rushed two of them to Australia to form part of an emergency bomber force to defend that country from Japanese invasion. He shifted the third bomber group to the West Coast as part of aerial reinforcements against a feared Japanese attack there. As the USAAF official history later described it, “Army forces were themselves seriously inadequate. In addition to the insufficient number of AAF forces available, Army units began anti-submarine operations under serious handicaps of organization, training, and equipment. . . . Army planes [were] manned by crews who were ill-trained in naval identification or in the techniques of attacking submarine targets.” The U-boats at this juncture clearly had the upper hand in the Atlantic. 2
    Even the British were still struggling to master air power against the U-boats. The Royal Air Force Coastal Command, which had managed to obtain a small number of effective LB-30 Liberator bombers (a model of the USAAF B-24), was making progress in devising new tactics and deploying new sensors and weapons to bring the fight to the U-boats at sea. Military commanders and civilian scientists at the center of this effort were optimistic that in time the land-based patrol squadrons would prove vital in thwarting Admiral Karl Dönitz’s campaign against Allied merchant shipping. But the overall effort was taking time, and the learning curve was steep: from September 1939 untilthe beginning of 1942, German and Italian U-boats destroyed 1,124 Allied ships totaling 5.27 million gross registered tons; until August 1941 Coastal Command patrol planes had yet to sink a single U-boat and, in the subsequent four months, had only managed to destroy five U-boats and force a sixth to surrender to Royal Navy warships.
    The British effort to turn around the abysmal performance of antisubmarine patrol aircraft had begun in mid-1941, when a team of civilian scientists attached to Coastal Command employed an investigative technique, which came to be known as operations research, to pinpoint flaws in the U-boat hunters’ tactics, equipment, and weapons. Led by renowned physicist Paul M. S. Blackett, the scientists pored over operational records and closely interviewed aircrews to obtain a detailed picture of what was happening at sea. They quickly came up with some easy-to-implement changes that dramatically improved the lethality of Coastal Command aircraft. When the scientists’ research showed that U-boat lookouts were spotting approaching aircraft far away enough to safely crash-dive before an attack, the team recommended that the paint on the undersides of the bombers be changed from black (Coastal Command had inherited Royal Air Force night bombers) to white. The result: U-boat sightings—and sinkings—jumped 30 percent. Blackett and his team also learned that aerial depth charges were set to detonate at one hundred feet, too far down, they concluded, given the weapon’s lethality radius of just twenty feet. They recommended the detonation take place at twenty feet, which again significantly increased the U-boat kill rate. And a review of squadron maintenance records led the researchers to devise astraightforward schedule of repairs and flying hours that doubled the number of Coastal Command aircraft available for patrols.
    Unfortunately for General Arnold and his bomber crews, Coastal Command and the USAAF had no information-sharing program. This meant that the Americans would have to spend the same prolonged period learning the same painful