Stardate 20030516.1619

(Captain's log): When you find yourself in a major war because you were attacked, there are steps you go through to win it. (Assuming you do.) They aren't particularly surprising; it's all common sense.

In the first stage, you try to halt the enemy's campaign, or at least seriously derail it. Initially, the enemy has what in the game of Go is referred to as senté, and in war is generally referred to as initiative. The idea is to take that away from him, though you may not be able to hold it yourself.

The second stage is a holding action where you buy time, during which you work on building your own strength. Often there is a great deal of bloody combat involved in this, because it may require you to seek out battle on less than totally favorable terms, using less force than you'd really like.

But during this period what you are primarily doing is to prepare yourself to go on the offensive against the enemy. At this point you attempt to seize the initiative and to largely control events to your advantage until the war is over, and you've won it. (Assuming you do.)

This is hardly the kind of thing which can be planned scientifically and carried out exactly as you planned it. Your enemies will be actively resisting you, and there will be failure and setbacks during the whole process. But you can still win if you do a good enough job of it, even if you were not perfect.

Taking WWII as an example, the early stage of enemy success and expansion includes the German invasion of Poland, and then the Netherlands and Belgium and France and Norway and ultimately with the Barbarossa attack against the USSR; and the Japanese attacks into China and against Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines and Indonesia.

The British resisted the Germans in France, and did not succeed. Britain itself was then in peril, but did manage to survive. The Red Army tried to stop the initial invasion but did extremely badly. In the Pacific, there was an attempt by a mixed naval force under Dutch command to oppose the Japanese Navy which ended in disaster, and the US Navy fought against the Japanese at Coral Sea, with mixed results.

Eventually there were definitive battles which stopped the generally rapid advances. The Germans were stopped in front of Moscow by the appearance of a hundred infantry divisions which had been brought west from Siberia. Italy and Germany reached their high water mark in the north-African desert campaigns. The initial Japanese offensive was stopped at Midway.

In the second stage, when the goal was stabilization, what you see is relatively inconclusive combat in all theaters involving allied forces which were rather less strong than you'd really like. There will be local successes, and there may still be enemy advances though they will be far less dramatic than in the early period. The British fought a long back-and-forth campaign in North Africa. The Red Army did continue to lose ground against later German offensives but no longer had the kinds of outright disasters which took place in the first few months. The US sent a Marine division to Guadalcanal to capture an airfield the Japanese were trying to complete, which would have given them control over strategic shipping lanes in the region. Australian and American forces fought a campaign in Papua New Guinea, which is just about the last place on earth you'd ever want to fight a war. And the most critical military campaign during this period was the Battle of the Atlantic, which in fact was the single most important battle of the entire war.

On all fronts, progress during this interval can seem achingly slow if there's even any perception of progress at all, and there can be terrifying losses. The US Navy fought many actions against the Japanese in the Solomons and especially in the waters near Guadalcanal, which came to be known as "Iron Bottom Sound" because of the number of warships which had been sunk there. Especially in the early going, a lot of those battles went very badly for us.

Losses during the Battle of the Atlantic were particularly terrifying, with the U-boats sinking hundreds of cargo ships. And Red Army losses against the Germans are horrifying to contemplate, because Stalin necessarily ran a man-rich but equipment-poor campaign.

But the allies were using this period to build and prepare. While Admiral Halsey was using much of the pre-war US Navy in the Pacific, and losing large parts of it, American shipyards were busy cranking out a new one which would be larger and better. The first significant parts of that became available in the second half of 1943.

American industry converted to a war footing, a process which is not rapid. Newer and better aircraft were designed. The US began to recruit and train a huge ground force and air force and crews for all those ships.

The USSR had moved its factories east of the Urals, and began to crank out arms and ammunition at unprecedented rates. A lot of intelligence was collected (the British were particularly good this) and there was a great deal of joint planning between the US and UK. A study of the overt events of the war in this period doesn't reveal the real progress which was made.

Eventually you get turn-arounds in all theaters, where the allies began sustained offensives. In the USSR the turning point was the battle of Kursk; in Africa it's the second battle of Alamein and the American Torch landings; in the Pacific the Japanese were finally kicked out of the Solomons and PNG. (These were not a