In Passage Perilous: Malta and the Convoy Battles of June 1942

4. Global Snapshot—June 1942

4 Global SnapShoT—June 1942 But even a nation which loves to hail its disasters as triumphs could hardly look back on the campaign of the first half of 1942 with satisfaction J. R. M. Butler On 10 March 1942 Supermarina issued a strategic assessment. It correctly noted that “above all other considerations the enemy coalition has enormous economic opportunities for sustaining a war of long duration. . . . Their vulnerability lies in the length and complexity of the maritime communications necessary for exploiting their strategic and economic opportunities and the relative inferiority of their ground forces.” It concluded that while the Russian front was the most important, a vigorous continuation and even intensification of the war against maritime traffic would be the best way to defeat the enemy and indeed was the only way the three Axis powers could effectively cooperate in their separate theaters of operation.1 This assessment demonstrated the Regia Marina’s appreciation of the war’s economic foundations and worldwide nature. It did not address political issues . Great Britain’s mid-June operation to restore Malta’s offensive capacity had global ramifications, but a review of the world situation at the beginning of June 1942 suggests that London’s objectives were as much political as military in light of more serious threats faced elsewhere. Africa In June 1942 the German army fielded 235 divisions. Three were deployed in Africa. Italy had seventy-eight divisions with eight in Africa. The British Empire had seven divisions and five independent brigades in Africa 62 Global Snapshot–June 1942 63 from a total of twenty-five British and twenty-five Commonwealth and Imperial Divisions and fifteen independent brigades. In other words, Germany had 1.3 percent of its field formations in Africa, Italy had 10.3 percent, and the British Empire had 15.7 percent. The British numbers in Africa had even greater significance because many of the formations in the United Kingdom or India were not fully equipped or were territorial units. In nearly two years of campaigning in Africa, Great Britain had not been able to parlay a hard-won material dominance into success. General John Kennedy of the War Office put the problem into a nutshell. “We manage by terrific efforts to pile up resources at the necessary places and then the business seems to go wrong, for lack of generalship and junior leadership and bad tactics and lack of concentration of forces at decisive points.”2 The Eastern Front On 5 June 1942 the Eastern Front was relatively quiet, caught in a moment between the failure of the Soviet Union’s spring offensives and the onset of Germany’s summer push toward Stalingrad and the Caucasus oil fields. In Russia the German army deployed 139 infantry and 36 armored and motorized divisions. There were, in addition, sixteen Finnish, thirteen Romanian, nine Hungarian, three Italian, one Slovakian, and one Spanish division there. Axis forces totaled about 2.7 million men. Against them the Soviets fielded 5.5 million troops organized into forty-nine field and four tank armies.3 The Arctic Front Germany maintained more ground, air, and naval forces in Norway than in the Mediterranean. By June 1942 these included eight divisions to protect against a feared Allied invasion and, to menace Russian-bound convoys , a strong surface fleet and a specialized antishipping Luftflotte with 264 aircraft. The Arctic convoys strained Great Britain’s shipping resources, and London needed the tanks and aircraft it sent more than the Soviets did, but the convoys were a political necessity. The Soviet Union was tremendously popular in Great Britain at the time, and the government was under heavy pressure to support the heroic Russian soldier defending his land against the mighty Nazi army. The convoys also reduced the threat of Stalin signing a separate peace 64 In Passage Perilous with Hitler—an event which the two foes periodically discussed through the summer of 1943 when Stalin concluded Germany could not defeat him. Like the Malta convoys, the Arctic operations traversed restricted waters dominated by enemy aircraft and subjected to submarine and surface attack to reach an isolated destination. The British ran six major convoys from March to July 1942. These averaged twenty-eight transports and forty-three escorts each. The first five convoys lost twelve vessels and the last, PQ17, twenty. The Atlantic The Royal Navy fought, with Canadian and American assistance, its most important naval campaign in...