Quote of the Day - Hindsight and Foresight

Hindsight is notably cleverer than foresight. – Chester Nimitz

One of the biggest challenges I face as a historian is separating myself from hindsight. All history is obvious in retrospect. That is because after the fact you know what did not work. My job as a historian is to explain why things were not obvious at the time the decision was made. To look through the eyes of those making history using their limitations on knowledge. Sometime I make surprising discoveries.

One example came from the Battle of the Atlantic. In the 1930s, prior to the war no navy expected the submarine to play a major role as a commerce raider, primarily targeting merchant vessels. That was one reason no navy, including Germany's Kriegsmarine, built massive numbers of submarines. To conduct the type of tonnage war envisioned by Karl Donitz a navy needed hundreds of submarines. Donitz believe 300 submarines would be required to bring down Great Britain.

But "obviously" everyone was wrong about submarines being not useful against merchant ships, because Germany almost succeeded in bringing down Britain. It would have had Germany had 300 submarines when World War II started. Right?

I concede if the Kriegsmarine had 300 submarines in commission in September 1939 it would likely have starved Britain into surrender by 1941. But Germany only started building U-boats in 1935, and only started building U-boats capable of operating in the Atlantic in 1936. It defies credulity that a peacetime Germany could have built and commissioned an average of 100 U-boats a year between 1936 and 1939.

There is another reason not to ridicule the pre-war wisdom that submarines should have been ineffective operating primarily against merchant shipping. It was correct. Naval experts considered that a combination of convoys, sonar (or ASDIC for the Royal Navy) and antisubmarine aircraft would make any submarine tonnage war against merchant ships a disaster for the submarine force. The results of the Battle of the Atlantic from 1943 through the end of the war demonstrated the effectiveness of that combination.

The success of the anti-shipping war by Germany in the War's opening years was due to a major blunder by Great Britain. It had sonar, and it used convoys, but it lacked effective antisubmarine warfare aircraft and more importantly effective weapons for its aircraft. The RAF was so focused on strategic bombing, it neglected ASW aircraft and weapons.

The main ASW weapon possessed by the RAF, the 100-pound antisubmarine bomb, could not damage a U-boat. It bounced off. It might shatter a lightbulb or two opposite the hit, but that was it. Seventy percent of the aircraft on ASW duties in 1939 could only carry the 100-pound bomb and was incapable of carrying anything larger. It took the RAF 12 months to develop an air-droppable depth charge once they discovered they had a problem with the 100-lb bomb. That was in January 1940.

That meant for nearly two years Britain fought U-boats without the weapon most effective in attacking them: ASW aircraft. Had the British possessed an effective air-dropped weapon against submarines in 1939 the Kriegsmarine would have run out of U-boats by January 1940 (This assumes RAF ASW aircraft sank one U-boat every twenty times it attacked one. It attacked a lot of them in the war's first four months.)

I unpieced this because I went into the problem by asking why, given the knowledge possessed by everyone in 1938-39, the outcome went so much differently than expected.

Incidentally, had Japan, prior to World War II, paid as much attention to ASW doctrine as they did to torpedo doctrine, the US Navy submarine offensive against Japanese shipping would have fare as badly as the Kriegsmarine's U-boat offensive against Allied shipping did, especially in the years 1943-45. As it was, even with slipshod Japanese ASW efforts the Submarine Service suffered heavier casualties than any other branch of the US Navy.

For history to be a predictive art, filtering out the effects of hindsight is critical. Hindsight leads to becoming too clever to understand why things happened instead of what things happened.