The Role of Luck

By Gordon B. Greer

In attempting to analyze the role of luck in war, a rather narrow definition of luck is necessary. The conventional dictionary definitions of luck are "a force that brings good fortune or adversity" and "the events or circumstances that operate for or against an individual." Those definitions are so broad that they would appear to cover many, perhaps most, events in war. There is in literature an old expression, deus ex machina, a translation into Latin of the original Greek thos ek mechans. While it literally translates as "a god from a machine", its meaning is a person or thing that appears or is introduced suddenly and unexpectedly and provides a contrived solution to an apparently insoluble difficulty. In the book a similar but probably unique concept, felix ex machina, will be used to denote certain extreme instances of luck which was relatively sudden, completely unexpected with dramatic consequences, good or bad, in war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 27, 2007
• ISBN: 9780595891153

Gordon B. Greer

Gordon B. Greer was born in Butler, Pennsylvania, and educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He practiced law for 43 years and served in the United States Air Force from which he retired as a Major. Mr. Greer lives in Belmont, Massachusetts.

Book preview

Copyright © 2007 by Gordon B. Greer

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in

critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse

2021 Pine Lake Road, Suite 100

Lincoln, NE 68512

www.iuniverse.com

1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims

any responsibility for them.

ISBN: 978-0-595-44796-1 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-595-69006-0 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-0-595-89115-3 (ebk)

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

THE ATTACK ON PEARL HARBOR

THE TOKYO RAID

THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY

CODES

THE P-51 MUSTANG

THE BATTLE OF THE PHILIPPINE SEA

THE BATTLE FOR LEYTE GULF

D-DAY JUNE 6, 1944

THE B-17 FLYING FORTRESS

THE BRIDGE AT REMAGEN

MONITOR VERSUS VIRGINIA

BISMARCK VERSUS THE ROYAL NAVY

SARAJEVO

WHAT IF?

DIFFERENT PEOPLE

CONCLUSION

ENDNOTES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The staff of the Information Technologies Department of Bingham McCutchen, and particularly Dennis Scheffler, has done its usual fine job of keeping my word processing equipment processing words. My son, Bruce Greer, an excellent military historian, has made a number of very helpful suggestions for this book. My wife, Nancy, has been very patient and helpful throughout the writing process. The staff of the publisher has done its usual good job of converting my efforts into an attractive format.

Any errors in the following material are mine alone.

Belmont, Massachusetts

June 2007

Introduction

In attempting to analyze the role of luck in war a rather narrow definition of luck is necessary. The conventional dictionary definitions of luck are a force that brings good fortune or adversity and the events or circumstances that operate for or against an individual. Those definitions are so broad that they would appear to cover many, perhaps most, events in war. For the purposes of this book luck in war will be deemed to be present only in totally unexpected events which may be fortuitous or disastrous, usually both in that what is good for one side is usually bad for the other.¹ Thus, for example, when two forces are facing off against each other and one finds a weak point in the other force enabling the first force to win the battle, that discovery would not be considered luck for purposes of this book. While the winning side had discovered a weak spot that it did not suspect, the fact is that the winning side would have been looking for a weak spot somewhere, as probably so had the losers. The winners, having discovered a weak spot by accident, naturally exploited it to their advantage. There is no extraordinary luck in the approach; it is the usual give and take of military operations. The following few examples illustrate major lucky or unlucky events in World War II which were of considerable importance in that war but are the sort of events that one might reasonably expect, if not anticipate, in war:

1. If the schedules for the aircraft carriers USS Lexington and the USS Enterprise had been slightly different they might easily have been tied up in Pearl Harbor at the time of the Japanese attack

2. If both of the governments of Great Britain and France had not been in political crises at the time of the German attack on France in May of 1940.

3. If Admiral Halsey had not been hospitalized and thus the most experienced American commander of aircraft carrier operations would have been able to command the United States fleet at the Battle of Midway.

4. If the Royal Navy had failed to take the German ship Altmark in early 1940 possibly enabling the Germans to invade England early in the summer of 1940.²

5. If Hitler had not so recklessly declared war on the United States after Pearl Harbor although not required to do so by the terms of his agreement with the Japanese, thereby assuring the defeat of Germany.

There is in literature an old expression, deus ex machina, a translation into Latin of the original Greek theos ek mechanes. The expression’s existence may say something about the continuity of a few of the early Greek plays. While it literally translates as a god from a machine its meaning is a person or thing that appears or is introduced suddenly and unexpectedly and provides a contrived solution to an apparently insoluble difficulty. In this book a similar, and so far as the author is aware, a unique concept, felix ex machina, will be used to denote luck in the sense of a fortunate or unfortunate event that appears suddenly and unexpectedly and provides a solution to an important and apparently insoluble difficulty or creates an important and completely unexpected disaster. The term felix³ will be used instead of luck, whether good or bad, to distinguish those events when the luck is of the nature of being relatively sudden, completely unexpected and with dramatic consequences.

Consider a battle in ancient history that seems to fit the concept of totally unexpected events with great consequences as felix is being used for the purposes of this book. In the early fifth century B.C.E.⁴ the Greeks were in the middle of one of their wars with the Persians. At the battle of Thermopylae the Greeks were, as usual, outnumbered with their force consisting of only 300 Spartans led by King Leonidas, backed up by 400 Thebians or 4,000 miscellaneous Greeks or 7,000 miscellaneous Greeks depending upon whose version of history one chooses to believe. Since there were supposed to have been 1,000,000 or more Persian soldiers in the battle, the actual number of Greeks was not important; they were terribly outnumbered in any case. In spite of being badly outnumbered the Greeks had one huge advantage in that they were defending a narrow pass in which only a few men from either side could be engaged at any one time. Thus the huge Persian army could only engage the Greeks piecemeal and the pieces were very small. The Greeks held off the hordes quite comfortably for a time as the Persian king became more and more frustrated. His best troops were being killed by the Greeks at a high rate while apparently inflicting little damage to the Greek forces. Finally a Greek traitor appeared at the Persian camp and disclosed a hidden path around the Greek forces which allowed the Persians to outflank the Greeks and win the battle. In this case the Persians were indeed lucky; they had no reason to believe that there was any other way to defeat the Greeks except by frontal attacks which were not succeeding. Then from nowhere came the surprising information about the secret path and the Greeks were surrounded and destroyed, a good example of a felix event.

On the other hand, at the beginning of World War II the British were involved in an event which might seem to have been governed by such luck. The German commerce raider Graf Spee was at sea attacking British merchant shipping. The Royal Navy had seven groups of ships hunting for her in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Graf Spee and her two sister ships, Deutschland (later Lützow) and Scheer, were unusual naval ships. Their dimensions were a bit larger than heavy cruisers of the 1930s, their top speed was somewhat slower and their main armament was much more powerful.⁵ One of the hunting groups, consisting of a heavy cruiser and two light cruisers, was commanded by Commodore Harwood. The commanding officer of Graf Spee, Kapitan zur See Langsdorff, determined that the waters in which he had been searching around Capetown in South Africa were becoming too dangerous for his ship and decided to move across the South Atlantic to patrol the waters off Montevideo, Uruguay. At about the same time Commodore Harwood came to the same conclusion. He briefed his three cruiser captains on the tactics he would use if they encountered Graf Spee, took his squadron to South America, met Graf Spee and, in spite of being outgunned, defeated her using his planned tactics. She was scuttled off Montevideo; Kapitan Langsdorff later committed suicide. While one could attribute the outcome of the battle to felix, a far fairer appraisal would be to attribute it to Commodore Harwood’s planning and combat tactics with only a minimal component of luck. As such this event would fall into the category of the normal fortunes of warfare, not a felix event, in its results.

There will follow in this book a series of discussions of some instances mainly involving the United States during World War II in which a felix event had a major impact on the war or might have been felt to have such an impact. In the course of the book on occasion reference will be made to codes. Those references will actually be to ciphers but the conventional view seems to be not to distinguish in this type of history between those two quite different methods of communicating in secret. As a technical matter, a code is a method of transmitting a secret message by means of words, phrases, numbers or symbols that do not have the conventional meanings of those terms. One of the most famous examples of a code transmission in World War II was the message sent by Japanese naval headquarters to the very powerful force sailing toward Pearl Harbor at the beginning of December 1941. The message read Yama Ni Nabore Niitaka (Climb Mount Niitaka).⁶ Prior discussions between the parties had established that this message had nothing to do with mountain climbing in Japan but rather would mean that the Japanese fleet then at sea should continue to the east and execute the planned attack on Pearl Harbor. A second example occurred just before the battle when the raiding force sent back to the rest of the fleet a three-word signal that seemed to be gibberish but meant that the attack had come as a complete surprise to the Americans. This type of code can be made unbreakable because it is entirely arbitrary. There is no system to it. About the only way it can be broken is if one such encoded message produces a particular result several times. An enemy, given enough time and enough messages, could work out the cause and effect results, thus decoding the message. For this reason coding is usually done on a one-time basis or the codes are changed very frequently. A rare example of such a code used by the American military in the mid-twentieth century was the authentication code. That was a code used when one was communicating by radio or telephone and wanted to be sure that the other party was not an enemy. The codes often consisted of an arbitrary two-letter interrogation and an arbitrary two-letter authentication reply. That type of code can be easily broken but the codes were changed daily to try to prevent an enemy from hearing the code and using it. That system was not very flexible since it required both parties to have received the code in advance by a much more secure system of communication. Efforts had been made early on to expand coding of all types of communications to make them much more flexible. One fairly usual method had been to use for coding a commonly available book, the use of which was known only to the parties, and to send the message as a series of cites to pages, lines and word positions without, of course, any mention of the book to be used. The recipient would decode the message by picking out the words in the preagreed text to make up the message. Of course the sender would have to be sure that the recipient had the book in the correct edition and knew that it was the book being used. Often a particular version of the King James Bible was the common book. This produced considerable flexibility if one did not mind communicating in early seventeenth century English but it also made the code quite easy to break.

The result of the problems with true codes was the creation and use of ciphers. A cipher is a form of message in which the letters in the message are substituted for by other letters or numbers⁷ through a matrix known only to the sender and those for whom the message is intended. This allowed for complete flexibility of the message contents, ease of sending (machines could be used on both ends so messages were written in the clear, encoded by machine, decoded by machine and delivered to the recipient in the clear) and ease of changing at least part of the coding system. Ciphers rapidly became the only method of sending messages of any great length and were often thought to be impossible to break. Nevertheless they were usually broken. Even the enormously complicated German Enigma system used in World War II was finally broken. The United States was reading the Japanese diplomatic code and a portion of its naval code even before the United States entry into World War II. Of course every time a code was changed to try to prevent the enemy from reading the messages sent in it, as was usually the case every few months, the code breakers had to go back to work. Once the system by which a code was constructed had become known, it was generally easier to break a new version of the code.

There follow descriptions of some major events generally in World War II and the elements of felix that might have affected them.

The Attack on Pearl Harbor

If one were to evaluate events of the United States’ participation in World War II from the point of view of the effect of felix on those events, one really should start with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in December of 1941. That attack was made by very powerful units of the Imperial Japanese Navy. While battleships and cruisers were part of the fleet, the actual attacks on Pearl Harbor were made almost entirely⁸ by carrier-based aircraft; bombers, torpedo planes and fighters. The first wave of the first attack took off from their carriers at dawn, arriving at the American naval base at Pearl Harbor at about 8:00 A.M. local time on Sunday, December 7, 1941.⁹ It was a complete surprise to the Army and Navy notwithstanding several events that should have alerted them. First, a few hours before the attack began an American destroyer, USS Ward, sighted and depth charged a small Japanese submarine close to harbor entrance. Second, a newly established radar site picked up a large group of aircraft headed for the island of Oahu but, since there seemed to have been no procedures for dealing with this news and some American bombers were expected, nothing was done. Third, United States military intelligence, having broken the Japanese diplomatic code, knew that something was about to happen but could not get the serious attention of senior military