Slow and Steady Wins The Race....?

I have been a history buff since I was about nine years old. It was a novel called Knight Crusader by Roland Welch that fired my interest and imagination, followed closely by a non-fiction book called Knights of the Air by Canadian John Norman Harris. Once bitten by the history bug I was hooked and have devoured history, both fiction and non-fiction, for the last 55 years. While writing The Job To Be Done there was a four year period when I read nothing but books related to my research, so it was a bit of relief when my book was published to once again expand my horizons, although military history continues to fascinate me.
I am about half way through a thoroughly enjoyable book called Wolfpack by British historian Roger Moorhouse about the German submarine (aka U boat) fleet during the Second World War. I had read Moorhouse’s book about life in the city of Berlin during the war years (Berlin At War) as part of my research into my Dad’s time as a Bomber Command pilot, and had been impressed with it – I think he is one of those rare people who is both a skilled historian and a talented writer.
One of the chapters in Wolfpack had me pondering logistics and how it was one of the ways the Allies were able to defeat Hitler. I knew that the Luftwaffe (the German Air Force) had gotten increasingly desperate as the war went on. Part of the problem was Hitler’s constant meddling – he had a fixation with dive bombers and even the groundbreaking jet aircraft that Germany was developing were fatally delayed by Hitler’s insistence that they be capable of dive bombing. The other body blow to the Luftwaffe was lack of training for its aircrews. By the last year of the war, mere boys were being sent into combat with only a few hours of training, and all their mentors (the experienced old hands) were dead, as the Luftwaffe had no system of resting men after a set period of combat operations, they flew until they died.
What I have learned through Wolfpack is that the same shortcomings plagued the U-Boat force. The horrible losses they incurred could not be made good without rushing under trained recruits in to fill the empty spots. By 1943 U-Boats were putting out to sea with as little as four men on the crew having had any combat experience. Shockingly, this included the captains, whose quality deteriorated steadily as the war years went on. The German U-Boat force was probably the best trained, best led (with the highest morale) military force in the world in 1941, but it steadily deteriorated due to losses, poor planning (and logistics) from the higher ups and constant interference from that Austrian corporal, who thought he was a military genius.
Now, let’s contrast this with Bomber Command. Throughout the Second World War the training the new volunteers got from the Allied Air Force they joined (RAF, RCAF, RAAF etc) didn’t change substantially, as far as length went. A pilot-recruit, whether in 1941 or 1944, would have gone through the same Manning Depot, Initial Training School, Elementary Flying Training School, Secondary Flight Training School, Pilot – Advanced Training Unit route, before forming a crew with equally well-trained airmen at Operational Training Unit. Even during the horrible losses incurred in 1943, Bomber Command’s policy was to never take shortcuts in training in order to rush men into combat.
This careful approach is reflected throughout the British armed forces at the time – they had experienced the bloodbath of the Somme and Ypres in WW 1 and were determined to not send their men into that sort of carnage again. This kind of care and attention to battle planning, personified by Field Marshall Montgomery, drives many American historians to froth at the mouth – I am at the point where I check the author’s nationality before buying a history book to avoid the churlish Monty/Brit-bashing.
The polar opposite of the careful approach is the Russians, or should I say Stalin, as he was 100% in charge. Stalin cared not one iota about his people or saving his soldiers lives. One Russian veteran recalled that they would attack German positions by throwing “waves of meat” at it. Russia had unlimited pools of young men and women to throw into the fight, and all they needed to do was hand each new recruit a rifle and send them into the fray. Sometimes they didn’t even manage that – at Stalingrad only the front line of Russian attackers had rifles and those in line behind them were told to pick up a rifle when the man ahead of him died. Commissars with machine guns were waiting at the rear to deal with anyone who turned back. One often hears the story that the Russian people paid such a huge price, millions dead, to defeat Hitler, but one is seldom reminded that Stalin was on on Hitler’s side for the first two years, aiding and abetting him and his war machine. The Russian people suffered horrifically during those 1941-45 years, there is no question, but I think a case can be made that a large part of the responsibility for that should be laid not at Hitler’s, but at Stalin’s feet. He “sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind” to paraphrase Sir Arthur Harris, the head of Bomber Command.
At any rate, my Dad made it home in 1944 after surviving 69 combat operations. No doubt luck played a huge role in his survival. But I am also aware that the careful planning, careful training, the policy of posting crews as instructors between tours and the cautious weighing of risks versus goals that the leadership of Bomber Command took also played a part in his making it home.
The motto of the Special Air Service commandos is “Who Dares Wins” - all very well for one-off special forces operations, but I am grateful that my Dad’s branch of service took a (comparatively) more careful approach.