In the time since I last updated you, Cold Waters has become my most played game of the year. As I recently suggested, repeated trial and error has taught me how to avoid Russian torpedoes which in turns allows me to take it as well as I dish it out. Provided I have a sufficiently stocked ammunition tender, I can be fairly confident of prevailing in most1 of the scenarios assigned to me by the 1968 campaign.
This constant immersion in submarine warfare was probably a big factor in my checking out the book Blackett’s War: The Men Who Defeated the Nazi U-Boats and Brought Science to the Art of Warfare from my local library. That and I’m a sucker for these math-and-science-save-the-day -type narratives.
Before I started reading, I glanced through some of Amazon’s reviews. Insomuch as one can rely on that review system (i.e. not very), I gathered the impression that this might not be the best book on this subject available. It is, however, the best book on this subject available to me – a factor that’s worth quite a bit. Furthermore, once I started reading, I was able to put some of the critiques into perspective. I have to say I like the direction that the author went with this work, even if some Amazon readers didn’t appreciate it.
There is an outsized emphasis on politics and that focus seems to have turned some readers off. Furthermore, said politics actually comes in two different flavors. There are the political aspects of running the war – politicians, bureaucrats, and career military officers butted heads over who was in charge of what and who was to determine policy. The book also features substantial discussion of the communist leanings (or outright allegiances in some cases) of many of the book’s leading figures. Having read it all, I think this approach is on to something. In many ways those politics are more interesting than the math itself – the computations that won the war are almost trivial in an age of ubiquitous computers and spreadsheets. These same politics, on the other hand, continue to dominate today’s world.
In the introduction, author Stephen Budiansky explains that the scientist referred to in the title, Patrick Blackett, remains underappreciated given what he contributed to both the advancement of scientific knowledge and to the British war effort. Part of the reason for that under-appreciation, the author supposes, is that Blackett was a committed socialist and a strong supporter of Stalin and the Soviet Union’s system. This allegiance persisted even when it should have been seen to be obviously problematic – for example, when Stalin made his pact with Hitler, who was at war with Britian. Given this context, put forth in the introduction, one shouldn’t, perhaps, be surprised when Budiansky devotes a good chunk of the narrative to the politics of the time.
A shockingly large portion of the scientific community in interwar Britain were socialists, if not outright pro-Soviet communists. The philosophical thought leaders of academia were convinced that socialism was the only way to bring the benefits of scientific discovery to the people and this seems to have become the default politics of that class.
Reading between the lines of Budiansky’s text, I blame the remnants of England’s feudal past. The “eggheads” who mastered the new technologies of the 20th century were still looked down upon by their “betters;” those who came from the right families. In a variation of the jocks versus nerds conflict that surely plays out everywhere and in all times, those with the intellectual ability to change society, government, and technology found themselves at the mercy of lesser thinkers. It would have indeed been tempting to dream that Russia’s proletariat revolution would flip this power balance on its head.
In the end2, the socialist and central planning instincts that turned out to be invaluable when fighting a war for national survival were quickly swept away upon the coming of peace. This led to disappointment among those, especially the socialists, who hoped their vision would continue to expand once the war was won. This all is yet another factor as to why most of us wouldn’t recognize a name like “Patrick Blackett” or many of the other scientific minds that helped win the war. Their philosophy fell out of favor once they were no longer necessary to the nation.
Politics aside, the storyline of the book was one that fits my tastes. It begins, as might seem familiar, in the First World War and development of submarine warfare. In fact, the narrative takes us back even further to the first submarines and some key bits of technology that made them feasible as weapons of war. Additionally, there is much consideration of the ethics, morality, and legality of submarine warfare Conclusion -and see below for more – it is none of these things.
Like I said, the actual math and technology was not as interesting as I was figuring it might be. The book emphasized the importance of cracking Enigma in Britain’s eventual victory but, as that story has been told elsewhere and better, Blackett’s War didn’t dwell on the details. Once place it did go is the use of statistics, which should have allowed the Germans to figure out that the British (and Americas) were reading their coded messages. The Germans never did figure it out and Budiansky explains that one of the reasons is that they never allowed their eggheads to serve this same critical role in the war. At the same time, and despite the influence of their own scientists and codebreakers, the British never seemed to realize that their own naval cypher had been broken. In fact, this was one of the reasons the Germans felt Enigma was secure long after it had been compromised; if the British had the ability to crack Enigma, they figured, surely they’d be using better encryption for their own communications.
Other amusing anecdotes concern simply the avoidance of some really bad decisions – as opposed to the brilliant application of the good. Budiansky talks about Germany’s torpedoes, which simply didn’t work at the war’s start. For the British, they were setting their depth charges too deep – an error that simple statistical analysis could correct. Another basic error that persisted, despite the math showing the solution, is that Allied convoys were too small. Naval professionals were wary of trying to coordinate too many ships at once. Logically, the ships lost during cross-Atlantic transit were proportional to the number of convoys, not the number of ships. As obvious (and demonstrable) as this was, the naval brass ultimately would only “compromise” with the scientists, allowing that convoys could be a little bigger but not too big.
Overall, an interesting book on The Battle of Britain, The Battle of Atlantic, and the early stages of analytics taking hold of how we run our society. On any of these topics, I suspect that Amazon naysayers were correct – there are better books on the history of the war. As an interesting story built around a technological and political thesis, though, it was well worth my time.
Near the end of the book, the author speaks sourly of those who romanticize the U-boat warriors. He makes some interesting points, and raises some interesting facts, some of which I hadn’t thought much about before.
He spends some time discussing the laws of the sea and how non-combatants – both merchant ships and civilians serving aboard such ships – are to be treated. The rules of such had been established for centuries. Those rules had developed separately from those for land warfare and, occasionally, produced some odd contradictions. Nonetheless, naval combat in World War I was expected to adhere to the ways that these things had always been done.
Initially, the use of the submarine – particularly against merchant shipping – relied simply on its stealth. A submarine could hide beneath the waves and approach its target unseen. Engaging a ship suspected of aiding the enemy, however, was a more traditional exercise. The submarine would surface, threaten with its gun, and board, search, and (perhaps) seize the vessel in service to the enemy. The problem was that submarines were among the smallest and slowest vessels afloat (so to speak). Seizing ships as prizes or, in the case of a sinking, taken aboard refugees, simply wasn’t practical for such a small vessel – especially one already strained in terms of crew, space, and function.
Through World War I and most definitely into World War II, Germany bent and, ultimately, broke those rules of engagement for purely practical concerns. In all other ways, they were outmatched by Britain on the ocean. By maximizing the effectiveness of the submarine and its unique weaponry, they could come up even in naval warfare. Unfortunately for all involved, that meant throwing overboard the traditional laws of the sea.
The result, in Germany, was a glorification of the submarine and its crewmen for the purposes of propaganda. Echos of that propaganda continue to this day, and in stark contrast to the reality of the time. Serving aboard a U-Boat was dirty, nasty business that typically ended in an untimely death. Serving aboard the U-Boat hunters, surface ships hastily welded together in a desperate attempt to turn the tide of battle, wasn’t a much better experience. This is all before we consider the wholesale murder that was a torpedo attack against passenger liners, POW transports, or the like.
I finished the book feeling somewhat chastised – even if it won’t keep me from playing the next WWII submarine game I find appealing. It also made me think about those Cold War submarine sims and the missions assigned to them. Would a present-day Battle of the Atlantic involve terrorizing merchant shipping? When playing Cold Waters, I’ve certainly sunk a few Soviet merchant ships when they presented themselves as targets of opportunity. Why not3? This is war, right? Or is it? Perhaps the next time the world goes to war we will have internalize the error of the German Navy’s ways and return to a more restricted Rules of Engagement for submarines.
Blackett’s War offers one more reason why Nazi Germany was not utterly condemned for their persecution of unrestricted submarine warfare. The inconvenient truth was that America, against Japan in the Pacific, conducted very much the same submarine war against our enemies as Germany did against theirs. Accusing Germany’s naval command with war crimes might have caused a little too much reflection on the conduct of the U.S. Navy and its Silent Service.
Game Pairing: Atlantic Chase. Certainly not UBOAT.
- I’ll say this. The one mission I cannot master is stopping an amphibious invasion. Every time I ended up in a fight with the escorts, which I can now win, but the landing craft themselves get away. You’d think that unescorted assault ships would scrub their mission… but not in this game. ↩︎
- This isn’t a mystery story, where giving away an ending ruins it. Nonetheless, this is something of the “ending” of the book. Hopefully I didn’t, in fact, ruin it for anyone. ↩︎
- That question isn’t answered by the game. After sinking Soviet-flagged, but non-military, merchant ships, I receive neither victory points nor a penalty for doing so. ↩︎