Date of Award

Summer 1998

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

History

Committee Director

Willard C. Frank, Jr.

Committee Member

Lorraine M. Lees

Committee Member

Austin Jersild

Call Number for Print

Special Collections LD4331.H47 S523 1998

Abstract

The convoy system, no matter how limited, has proven to be the most effective way of defending merchant shipping against attacks by submarines. Yet after the United States entered the Second World War, the United States Navy (USN) did not implement a comprehensive system of convoys for moving shipping along the East Coast of the United States until August 1942. Due to this lack of convoys during the first eight months of 1942, the losses of allied merchant ships to German submarines were among the highest experienced during the Second World War.

This thesis examines why the USN believed that it lacked the resources to implement a comprehensive system of coastal convoys along the East Coast of the United States until late in the summer of 1942.. This study shows that the USN believed that coastal convoys required the same tactical doctrine and resources as North Atlantic convoys. This thesis demonstrates that the USN believed that a convoy's escort force needed the ability to take offensive action against enemy submarines and thus the USN preferred convoys with heavy escorts. Primarily due to its own experiences fighting wolfpacks in the North Atlantic, the USN concluded that weakly escorted convoys were a liability. As a result, the USN did not implement a coastal convoy system in early 1942 because it lacked the resources for offensive convoys. This thesis also shows that the tactical doctrine of the USN on the escort of convoys during the Second World War developed out of its experiences escorting convoys in the North Atlantic in 1941 and during the First World War. The majority of the materials used in this study consist of the Chart Room Dispatches of the Commander-in-Chief of the United States Fleet, the action reports of Task Force 4 and Task Force 24, the records of Tenth Fleet, the records of the Anti-Submarine Measures Division, the Records of Commander Destroyers, Atlantic Fleet, the Admiral King Ernest J. Papers, the Admiral Harold R. Stark Papers, the Admiral Royal E. Ingersoll Papers, the Papers of Morton L. Deyo, the Command Files of the USN during the Second World War, the United States Naval Administrative Histories of World War II, and the Records of the Tenth Fleet. Anti-Submarine Measures Division.

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DOI

10.25777/y0n9-7737

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