That Time When Business Greed Nearly Lost the Allies WWII and How It Relates to the Covid Crisis

We are plunging toward a dark and dangerous winter. A third wave of Covid-19 infections is surging around the world. At this writing, U.S. Covid cases are increasing at a rate of more than 100,000 new infections per day. One thousand Americans are dying from the virus each day. The health care facilities of nearly every state are being overwhelmed by Covid caseloads.

It is a sad fact that all this could have been avoided.

If more state governments had been responsible and closed the bars, restaurants, gyms, and political rallies that act like petri dishes for the virus’s growth, Covid’s impact could have been mitigated. But too many politicians bent to the pressure placed on them by both small businesses and corporations to avoid such lockdowns. Even in states like California, where a lockdown did start to contain the virus, politicians eventually caved and lifted restrictions too early and too quickly.

We’ve seen this same profit-at-any-price mentality in this country before when another scourge threatened American lives, and businesses refused to adapt to the situation to save lives. The last time we saw this kind of thinking, we nearly lost WWII.

Operation Drumbeat

Within weeks of declaring war on the United States, Adolf Hitler launched a U-boat offensive against the American East Coast called Operation Paukenschlag (Operation Drumbeat). On January 14, 1942, the first German sub arrived off the coast of Rhode Island, soon followed by four more. The German sailors were delighted to find tankers and freighters sailing alone without escort. Even more surprising, they found the coast brightly lit by shore lights that provided U-boats with perfectly silhouetted targets.

Blackouts are a necessity of war. Across the Atlantic, blackouts were imposed on every English, French, and German shoreline. Even before entering the war, American military officials realized the potential need for blacking out the Eastern seaboard at night. But local chambers of commerce, fearing a loss of profits, fought every attempt to impose a coastal blackout.

The result was devastating.

In just weeks, those first five U-boats sank 16 ships totaling 104,761 tons. Allied logistics experts estimated the loss in ships, cannon, vehicles, and fuel was equivalent to the damage caused by 30,000 German aerial bombing sorties. And it was just the beginning.

Like the coronavirus, the U-boat onslaught came in waves. The first wave may have come as a surprise—though it shouldn’t have—but there was no excuse to not be prepared for the following waves. But, just as with the Covid crisis today, America remained unresponsive to the threat

The blame can’t be laid entirely at the feet of East Coast business interests—though they fought tooth-and-against blacking out shoreline enterprises. Just as with the Covid crisis, there was ineptitude at high levels of government where bureaucrats would not accept the reality of a U-boat threat in American waters.

The Anglophobe Admiral

Admiral Ernest King, chief of naval operations, was an Anglophobe. A British official described King as “intolerant and suspicious of all things British, especially the Royal Navy.” Before America entered the war, King rejected all calls for preparing for a U-boat attack on the United States, refusing to believe Germany had such a capability despite the fact U-boats had operated in American waters in WWI.

Merchant ship Dixie Arrow torpedoed off Cape Hatteras by U-71, 26 March 1942.

Like Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the reality of the Covid crisis, King refused to acknowledge the threat facing merchant ships sailing in American waters or his own failure to protect them. Even after the first German submarine onslaught, King’s Anglophobia made him resist implementing any of the hard-won lessons the English learned about fighting U-boats in three years of war. He adamantly refused to adopt a convoy system to protect Allied shipping as the British had despite the fact that convoys—groups of merchant ships protected by sub-hunting ships and patrol boats—was used by the American Navy in WWI. King’s attitude, and that of many of his subordinates, was summed up by U.S. Rear Adm. R. S. Edwards. “Americans must learn by their own mistakes,” he told a British colleague, “and we have plenty of ships.”

In fact, we did not have plenty of ships.

By mid-March, the loss of oil tankers was so great that the Petroleum Industry War Council warned the U.S. would run out of oil in six months. By June 1942, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall worried “that another month or two of this . . . [and] . . . we will be unable to bring sufficient men and planes to bear against the enemy . . .”

The danger to the war effort posed by King's ethnocentrism prompted General Dwight D. Eisenhower to write, “One thing that might help win this war is to shoot King.”

To the British, the Battle of the Western Atlantic was a “holocaust.”

A convoy system wouldn’t be organized until mid-1942, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered King to implement one.

And still the lights shone

In February 1942, FDR issued an executive order giving the military authority to order coastal blackouts. Once again, seashore businesses pushed back, and the military hesitated to implement the order. Admiral King sent the coastal defense commander a “request” to implement a “dimout” of shore lights, but he still refused to call for a full blackout.

U-boats victories mounted as did merchant ship losses. For the tourists and party clubbers enjoying the well-lit coastal nightlife, the war came home the hard way. At night, they could see torpedoed ships burning offshore. In the mornings, those same fun lovers found the scorched bodies of merchant sailors that had washed ashore. Eventually, coastline businesses began to lose money simply because people did not want to be that close to the reality of war. And still, they refused to execute blackouts until much later in the year.

By then the damage was done. In the first six months of 1942, nearly 400 Allied merchantmen were sunk in American waters at a cost to Germany of only six U-boats. Unlike Pearl Harbor, none of the ships were salvageable. No one was ever held responsible for these terrible losses. It would still take until the first half of 1943 before American anti-submarine warfare capabilities caught up with those of Britain and Canada.

(New York Times)

Today Americans face a similar deadly threat, one that threatens the well-being of us all, not just a relative few merchant sailors. Yet we’re are seeing the same inaction and ineptitude that nearly lost us the war against the Axis Powers. While European countries are seeing positive results by reimposing restrictions on restaurants, bars, and other gathering places, too many Americans still resist taking basic precautions that can slow the spread of the virus and save hundreds of lives (see graph). At this writing, just shy of a quarter million Americans have died from the disease, and the number keeps climbing every day.

In his book Operation Drumbeat, author Michael Gannon concludes, “Civilian avarice and carelessness must take their places on the list of agents accountable for the U-boat triumphs.”  When the history of America’s war against Covid-19 is written, what will the historians say of us?