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Part Eighteen
"If you see a white plane it's an American, if you see a black plane it's the RAF. If you see no planes at all it's the Luftwaffe" German Infantry joke , 1944
This lengthy series on Jasper Maskleyne is almost at an end. We have critically dissected and, in many areas, demolished Maskelyne's colourful wartime career as presented in "The War Magician'"and "Magic Top-Secret". This month's article allows further reflections on a persistent theme: did the camouflage and deception schemes used by the British and their allies really have an impact on the war ? In an earlier article (Part Three), I mentioned two competing models for analysing warfare: 'brute force theory' (the side with the greater military and industrial might will eventually triumph) versus 'Thermopylae theory' (the valiant few can defeat or forestall the larger force). Idealistically and emotionally, I am tempted by the Thermopylae theory. As a child, I was raised on the powerful Battle of Britain myth, that the few could defeat the many. As a teenager, influenced by the unexpected complications of the Vietnam quagmire, I believed that the David and Goliath legend resonated with truth, and that 'superior' forces would not necessarily triumph. The Israeli victory in the 1967 war against the numerous Arab forces seemed to confirm this model. While studying Thucydides at school, I read about how the decline of the Athenian Empire (5th Century BC) was triggered by the disastrous expedition to Sicily. The Athenian rulers arrogantly dispatched a fearsome naval force against the city of Syracuse. Instead of quelling the enemy, the expeditionary force was badly defeated. Hubris, indeed. More recently, Eritrea's astonishing victory in its long struggle against Ethiopia seemed to confirm the validity of the Thermopylae theory. A nation of only 3.5 million, lacking sophisticated military hardware, eventually defeated a nation of 50 million. Obviously, there was more to warfare than mere armchair audits of military strengths. Popular culture strongly rejects the 'brute force' model and prefers to re-enact a romantic view of combat, akin to the Thermopylae model. For example, Dr Who and his assistants will always defeat the Daleks, those evil creatures who behind their science fiction guises are surely Nazi exterminators. And, against all odds, Luke Skywalker and his companions can defeat the Evil Empire by being cleverer, braver, and being able to find its Achilles heel. Brute force does not necessarily triumph. However, having researched the outcomes of major battles in the Second World War, I recognise on intellectual grounds that the materialistic 'brute force' theory is a more convincing model for analysing protracted global warfare. In the long, drawn-out struggle of the Second World War, the bigger battalions eventually did win. As John Ellis , author of "Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War", wrote:"Nazi Germany was bludgeoned to death." Ellis is critical of the way previous accounts have focused on and over-glamorised the contribution of individual Allied generals. In a grotesque but beautifully apt phrase, Ellis rates their battlefield tactics as "simply mortician's flourishes". Ellis believes that the Allies' "...enormous advantage in guns, tanks, aircraft and ships was an inevitable consequence of their far superior economic potential. In other words, given both Germany's and Japan's shortage of raw materials, inadequate level of conversion to munitions production and utterly haphazard planning procedures, it was absolutely essential for them that they win decisive early victories that would bring about a speedy negotiated peace." A longer struggle meant long-term defeat because the mathematics of military production was stacked against them. Once Britain had rallied from the initial setbacks of 1940, once Russia had recovered from the terrible incursions of 1941, and once America had made good the initial losses of Pearl Harbour, "...the ultimate issue of the war was as good as decided. Years of hard fighting lay ahead but the prosaic arithmetic of natural resources, generating capacity, industrial plant and productivity was to be incontrovertible. So much so that in the last 18 months of the war the Allies put onto the battlefield 80,000 tanks to the German's 20,000, 1,100,000 trucks and lorries to 70,000, and 235,000 combat aircraft to 45,000; in these same months the U-boats sank 630,000 tons of merchant shipping whilst the Allied shipyards turned out another 20,000,000 tons; between 1942 and 1945 the Japanese built 13 aircraft carriers, the crucial component of modern naval warfare, but the Americans built 137. The Battle of Production was virtually a walk-over." Historian, A.J. Levine in his eloquent article, "Was World War 2 a Near-run thing?", would share this assessment. Despite the prevalent myth that the war was a tight contest, fought within narrow margins, and that the result could have gone either way, Levine argues that it was highly unlikely, even close to impossible, that Nazi Germany could have won the war. Overall, I find the 'brute force' model compelling, particularly when analysing the long-term outcome of 'Total War'. Nevertheless, awkward exceptions to this model did occur in World War Two and should therefore be of great interest to military historians. Under what circumstances, if any, can the lesser force triumph ? A classic example is the disastrous Italian invasion of Egypt which backfired in late 1940. A few months before Maskelyne's arrival in the Middle East, a small British force defeated and took prisoner a massive Italian army. Ellis sees this expedition as "a useful cautionary footnote, reminding us that on occasion even a seemingly overwhelming paper strength can be vitiated, in this case by completely inadequate command structure, hopeless administration and obsolete equipment." How do you quantify less tangible factors? How do you measure quality over quantity ? Michael Handel, a historian specialising in military deception, is wary of the overly dogmatic 'brute force' analysis and makes the following suggestions: "While manpower, the number and quality of weapons, ammunition and other supplies are essential to wage wars — qualitative or non-material elements such as the quality of planning, organisation, suitable military doctrines, morale and intelligence are no less important. Otherwise, the victory of larger armies over smaller ones would be a foregone conclusion.." Battles cannot be simply reduced to 'materialschlacht', a German word meaning 'material battle'. "Strength unaccompanied by stratagem will become sterile and lead to eventual defeat." Handel's cautionary comments are valid. Brute force theory, after all, could hardly have predicted Hitler's success in May 1940. Even Ellis admits that this amazing campaign was "one of military history's major anomalies...the Germans managed to rout the armies of four European powers in less than six weeks. They achieved this despite the fact that they had no material or numerical superiority over their opponents — who were allowed nine months in which to prepare their defences..." The 'brute force' model has other practical weaknesses. Detailed knowledge of the enemy's real strength is hard to acquire and is usually discovered only in hindsight. Even if the paper strength is known through accurate intelligence (e.g. ULTRA), the manner in which these forces react cannot be precisely calculated in advance. The enemy's resolve and fighting strength can only be tested in battle. Mistakes will be made. Progress will be slower than expected. Weapon systems will fail. Machines will break down under battlefield conditions. Soldiers will falter, turn tail or surrender. The battlefield itself is a stubborn , unpredictable mess. Clausewitz referred to factors like these as the inevitable 'friction in war', and this 'friction' disrupted the logical execution of any military offensive. In practice, in the fog and uncertainty of war, the master plan is often jettisoned or rendered invalid on first contact. The best plan, joked Rommel, was the one made after the battle! On a strategic level, is it possible to assess relative strengths accurately before the campaign has begun? For example, in June 1941, the British Ambassador to Moscow, Sir Stafford Cripp, secretly informed the British War cabinet that if Hitler attacked Russia he would defeat it within three to four weeks! This was a widely-shared view. The British Chiefs of Staff were told by their intelligence sub-committee that Germany would take only four to six weeks to capture Moscow. The Ministry of Economic Warfare predicted that "the Germans would not incur heavy casualties or any high degree of military exhaustion in defeating the Red Army." This proved to be a pessimistic assessment. Ellis offers solid evidence why such predictions were unfounded. Despite the misleading initial success, the Germans were poorly prepared for a sustained invasion. He is also critical of standard accounts of the German invasion, particularly the pointless debates by military historians as to whether Hitler should have pushed harder to the north, the south, or to the centre: "much of this debate seems essentially sterile in that it implies real strategic options, 'right' or 'wrong' decisions, when in fact neither the choices made nor their alternatives could have had much bearing on the fundamental cause of German failure — that the Wermacht was simply not powerful enough to conquer Russia." ___________________________________________________________________________ Faced with these two competing models of warfare (Brute Force theory versus Thermopylae theory), readers may recall that I suggested an intermediate position based on the notion of 'contingency', a concept favoured by writers such as Stephen Gould who doubt that outcomes can be confidently determined in advance. A succession of negative or positive outcomes during the course of a campaign can produce cascade effects which, in hindsight , give the appearance of inevitability to the final outcome. The 'contingency' theory is a more flexible, less determined, less fated model of history. 'Contingency' straddles the gap between 'inevitability' and 'chance'. It emphasises the unpredictability and uncertainty of historical outcome. This model is more tolerant of alternative or parallel histories. (Academic historians use the awkward term 'counterfactual' history.) It allows an alternative history where Rommel captures Egypt, where the Allies are repelled from the Normandy beaches, or, for that matter, where France and Britain defeat the German offensive of 1940. Breaking ranks from Ellis, I believe that a plausible alternative history can be constructed where Barbarossa succeeds. For example, imagine Hitler transferring more divisions from the West to the East in 1941, making preparations for a longer campaign, including the provision of adequate winter equipment and the creation of special teams to concentrate on logistical problems (such as adapting German railway equipment to the unusual Russian train gauge and redesigning the German engines to prevent frozen, burst boilers). Most significantly, imagine that Hitler launches a combined attack against Russia with his ally Japan invading simultaneously from the east. Under 'contingency' theory, these important alterations could lead to a cascade of 'inevitable' consequences. Historians would then look back at 1941-42 and confidently write about the inevitability of the conquest and dismemberment of the Soviet Union. And in a recent speculative scenario by two Russian historians ("What if Hitler had defeated Russia?", History Today, May 1995), Stalin and the Communist leaders flee Moscow in their armoured train, which is attacked and destroyed by a chance Luftwaffe raid. Moscow falls. With the Politburo wiped out, there are no authoritative leaders left to organise resistance... It is not my intention then to support an inflexible model of 'brute force' warfare. The purpose of this drawn-out discussion is to emphasise the following points: • an accurate assessment of the impact of deception measures cannot be easily delivered without first critically analysing competing models of combat outcome. • in its presentation of military history, Fisher's 'The War Magican' reflects the somewhat outdated, traditional , and , perhaps, mythical version of the Second World War , where Hitler comes close to victory on several occasions but is repeatedly thwarted by the ingenuity of his beleaguered opponents. Brute force factors which favoured the Allies are underestimated or misunderstood. • modern scholarship tends to emphasise the greater likelihood or 'inevitability' of the Allied victory. This revised approach appears to be at variance with earlier accounts of the war which saw the outcome as uncertain and precariously balanced. • the work of the deceptionists and decoy experts should be judged in the context of these three competing models of warfare. • I tend to favour a revised brute force model which allows for some level of 'contingency'. • I would argue that even if Fisher's version of events could be accepted, even if Jasper Maskelyne's role in these decoy operations could be verified, it is doubtful that these schemes were any more than peripheral experiments. To borrow and adapt Ellis' phrase, the work of the deception and camouflage experts, even when their plans were implemented properly, were mere mortician's flourishes. • In my opinion, the camouflage and decoy plans on the eve of El Alamein in 1942 and the deception plans for the Normandy invasion in 1944 had no significant impact on the outcome of either battle. Brute force factors were of much greater relevance.
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