Threshold of War

by Heinrichs, Waldo;

  It was very hard to say no. Conceivably the Japanese were having a change of heart, though Roosevelt doubted it. They were more influenced by the sway of battle in Russia than by regard for the United States, he told Lord Halifax.37 Even so, finding out seemed wise, and resuming the talks offered the further opportunity of weakening Japan’s ties with the Axis at the delicate moment when the United States was intervening in the Battle of the Atlantic. Above all, a return to the Hull-Nomura format of the spring, in all its complexity with the added inducement of a culminating leaders’ meeting, was likely to win more time for containment than discussions pivoting on the neutralization of Indochina. The previous talks had, after all, consumed three months. But a blunt war warning was not likely to create a mood conducive to extended discussions, so Roosevelt accepted the weaker version.

  The president saw Nomura on Sunday afternoon, August 17, only a few hours after his return. The meeting really consisted of two conversations divided by a pause: one admonitory, the other conciliatory. First Roosevelt read the State Department’s version of the warning, which no longer insisted upon an unconditional Japanese commitment to remove its forces from Indochina, nor referred to the Indochina neutralization proposal and British support for it, nor warned against advance in specific places or directions. Most important, the warning itself did not use the word “war” or “conflict.” It simply said that, if Japan made any further advances, the United States would have to take whatever steps were necessary to safeguard the rights and interests of its citizens and its safety and security.38 And by commenting on the text, thereby distancing himself from it, Roosevelt gave Nomura the clear impression that he was reluctantly but dutifully conveying a message the bureaucrats had devised. He even left some doubt as to whether he was delivering a written communication at all, for he denied it the status of a diplomatic note, describing the warning as “merely what we want to say,” and “reference material,” yet insisting that “it should be expressed in writing.”39 The president went to extraordinary lengths to sugar-coat the pill.

  Moving to the second part of the conversation, Roosevelt showed how the Japanese move into southern Indochina had led to a breakdown in diplomacy, then painted a fair picture of the possibilities for peace on American principles and an open door for trade and resources in the Pacific region. If Japan was prepared to abandon its expansion and embark on such a program, Roosevelt went on, his government would, as requested, consider resumption of the Hull-Nomura conversations and seek to arrange a time and place for a meeting of high officials. The president said he preferred San Francisco or Seattle because a journey to Hawaii would take too long and he was not permitted to fly. Juneau or Sitka in the Alaska panhandle might be an alternative, he said. But while dangling the hope of a leaders’ meeting before Nomura, Roosevelt let it be known that distance was a problem, and he could not promise attendance. Furthermore, a critical condition, first the United States required a “clearer statement” of the Japanese government’s “attitude and plans.”40

  To the British, Roosevelt tried to minimize his weakening of the warning. Informing Lord Halifax of the proposal for a meeting with Konoe, he claimed that the warning he delivered was similar to the Argentia draft. But Halifax checked the wording with Welles, and Churchill soon knew better.41

  Publicly the prime minister gloried in the common aspirations and promised cooperation of Argentia: as he had journeyed home, he said, “overhead the far-ranging Catalina airboats soared, vigilant, protecting eagles in the sky.” “We shall not be denied the strength to do our duty to the end,” he assured his war-weary countrymen. Turning to Asia he scathingly denounced Japanese military “factions” which were “seeking to emulate the style of Hitler and Mussolini as if it were a new wave of European revelation.” Japanese armies had been “wandering” about China for years bringing “carnage, ruin, corruption.” Now they threatened the southwest Pacific and he was “certain that this has got to stop.” Cleverly placing America out front as Japan’s principal antagonist, he praised the “infinite patience” with which it was trying to work out a settlement, but if trouble came, he warned, Britain would “of course” range itself “unhesitatingly at the side of the United States.” The Japanese press reacted to the speech with “almost unprecedented violence in tone,” Grew reported.42

  Churchill was depicting in rhetoric the common front he had failed to secure in secret diplomacy, and with some success. The New York Times, under the four-column headline CHURCHILL WARNS JAPANESE TO “STOP” OR FACE BRITISH-AMERICAN COALITION, commented that the British leader had confirmed what many suspected: that the two governments had decided at Argentia to take the “strongest sort of line” with Japan.43

  Behind these rhetorical flourishes, the British government grew increasingly critical as it examined the American backslidings and the paltry tangible results of Argentia. Particularly disillusioning were Roosevelt’s frequent public assurances that he had not made any commitments at the conference and that the nation stood no closer to war. On August 28, Churchill, aiming at Roosevelt, wrote Hopkins a most despondent letter. He spoke of a “wave of depression” in the cabinet and informed circles over apparent American disinclination to become involved. “If 1942 opens with Russia knocked out and Britain left again alone all kinds of dangers may arise,” he warned. That night, he said, thirty U-boats lay in a line from eastern Iceland to northern Ireland but east of the 26th meridian, beyond current American responsibility. In the past two days submarines had sunk 25,000 tons of shipping. The implication was clear that the Battle of the Atlantic could still be lost while Americans guarded its western reaches. He ended by saying that he would be grateful for “any sort of hope.” If the British ever reached the conclusion that the United States would not somehow, sometime join the fray, Hopkins warned Roosevelt, “there would be a very critical moment in the war and the British appeasers might have some influence on Churchill.”44

  Churchill was keeping one step ahead of the American navy, which was moving as fast as possible to enter the Battle of the Atlantic within the limitations agreed to at Argentia. The president, having taken his decision, left implementation to the navy; admirals were not summoned to the White House in August as they had been in July. Nevertheless, over a month passed before escort began. The navy planned to start September 1, but administrative and logistical problems forced postponement.

  The “Washington machinery” was not ready, Admiral King explained to a subordinate.45 He undoubtedly meant the special staff and communications network to control convoys and escorts in the western Atlantic. American escort operations entirely depended on British experience and sophisticated facilities, on the ULTRA decryption work at Bletchley Park, on the Operational Intelligence Center, Trade Plot, and Submarine Tracking Room at the Admiralty, and on the Western Approaches Command at Liverpool. Multinational escort required the most intimate cooperation with the Royal Canadian Navy at Ottawa and St. John’s, Newfoundland, and coordination with the system for forming up, routing, and dispatching convoys from American ports and Sydney and Halifax, Nova Scotia. The Office of the Chief of Naval Operations in Washington, hub of American escort communications, had to tie into London’s routing and tracking systems and expedite information to Atlantic Fleet headquarters and the various destroyer escort bases and forces. Information about U-boat and convoy locations requiring the tightest secrecy had to be disseminated in cyphers accessible to headquarters of three navies. American command in the western Atlantic had to be instituted and escort units inserted without disrupting the schedules of convoys, six to eight of which at regular intervals were passing back and forth across the ocean on any given day.46

  Great difficulty occurred in getting ships to the right place at the right time. Icelandic and American-flag merchantmen, one of which Roosevelt still insisted had to provide a figleaf of neutrality for each convoy, were a particular problem. Adequate numbers of American vessels only began departing from New York on August 27. Some Icelan
dic vessels were so slow they endangered their escorts; others ignored escorts and steamed off alone.

  A division of responsibility was arranged with the Americans taking fast (HX) convoys and the Royal Canadian Navy the slow (SC) from a point south of Newfoundland to a rendezvous with British escorts south of Iceland and then back again with convoys of empty ships. But the Canadians, with too few vessels and too few with adequate range, had to retain some of the British escorts to carry out their side of the bargain.

  The measured activity of the Atlantic Fleet before the Argentia conference gave way to a rush for position afterward. Within a week Admiral King ordered the fleet train from Newport to Casco Bay, Maine, the nearest American anchorage to the convoy routes. The Support Force commander established himself at Argentia. Destroyer tenders, repair ships, oilers, and other auxiliaries followed or moved on to Iceland. At Casco Bay, King set up a destroyer pool, dissolving the neat division and squadron organization, so that escort units could be filled out on the basis of readiness and a mixture of old and new destroyers. From there units moved up to Argentia near the convoy meeting point or were pre-positioned in Iceland for the westbound convoys.

  By mid-September thirty-three destroyers, every one the Atlantic Fleet commander could get his hands on, and the Coast Guard cutter Campbell were ready for merchant vessel escort at the northern bases. Another sixteen were due by the end of October and six more by the end of the year, leaving a bare minimum to escort warships, one division (four ships) to patrol the Caribbean, and a sonar training division at Key West which Admiral King coveted. He had barely enough vessels to begin the task: six escort groups of five destroyers each. Canadian units had even fewer. King planned to increase the number to seven groups of at least six each, and allow a layover in Boston, but storm damage and machinery breakdowns were constantly whittling down the number available to meet the inexorable convoy schedules.47

  So urgent was the need for destroyers that peacetime criteria for efficiency were dispensed with. Gunnery proficiency was below that of the Pacific Fleet and, for recently completed destroyers, unsatisfactory. In machine gun practice in August even veteran Support Force squadrons were scoring virtually no hits because of lack of practice ammunition. U.S.S. Ericsson, Nicholson, and Mayo reported for escort duty with no gunnery practice at all. Injuries among crews unfamiliar with weapons and equipment were “far too many in number.” Few destroyers were equipped with radar and fewer still experienced in its use. U.S.S. Babbitt, hurrying to duty, received its underwater sound detection gear not in a dockyard but at Casco Bay from a tender.48

  As the fleet readied, the war moved back toward it. The number of operational U-boats increased from sixty-five in July to eighty in October and the number on station rose past thirty, permitting the U-boat command to form a wolfpack of fourteen boats, Group Markgraf, for Greenland-Iceland waters. These began entering the western Atlantic on August 18 and by early September were neatly positioned in rank and file to sight any plume of smoke in the hundreds of miles of convoy routes lying southeast of Greenland and southwest of Iceland. At the same time the German naval command began super-encyphering U-boat locations within encyphered messages, delaying ULTRA by as much as four days and temporarily masking U-boat deployment. Atlantic Fleet destroyers were entering far more dangerous waters than could have been imagined a month earlier.49

  The nearly inevitable encounter occurred September 4 some 125 miles southwest of Iceland between U.S.S. Greer, a World War I destroyer, and U-652, cruising on the northern flank of Group Markgraf. Greer was sailing alone carrying mail and officer passengers to Reykjavik from Boston and Argentia. Informed by a British patrol bomber of a submarine in its path it proceeded to hunt and find the boat and pursue it tenaciously for the next several hours, in full compliance with orders to trail and report U-boats in the American defense zone. U-boats were forbidden to initiate attacks on American warships, but the submerged U-652, unable to identify the nationality of its pursuer and believing depth charges dropped by the plane had come from the destroyer, finally fired two torpedoes in self-defense, which Greer dodged. The American destroyer responded with depth-charge attacks and further pursuit until called off at twilight. The quarry, shaken but not damaged, continued westward to join in a pack attack on September 9–11 on SC-42, which was desperately trying an end-run to the north, close to Greenland. U-652 claimed as probably sunk two of the sixteen vessels lost from that devastated convoy.50

  The Greer incident greatly facilitated arrangements for escort of convoy. The incident allowed removal of the restrictions under which it would be conducted. President Roosevelt on learning of the encounter immediately ordered the navy to “eliminate” the submarine, and destroyers were ordered down from Iceland before the search was called off.51

  The following day, September 5, the president met with Admiral King and Admiral Stark among others and authorized the beginning of outward-bound escort September 16 and escort back from Iceland of the first convoy available whether fast or slow. Destroyers were ordered out again from Iceland on September 12 to assist battered convoy SC 42. Then Roosevelt permitted destroyers to escort convoys without American or Icelandic-flag ships and the Royal Canadian and Royal navies to escort American ships as far as Iceland. A few days later he authorized attack on German and Italian warships anywhere in the western Atlantic, including Iceland and a broad belt of ocean to its east. Mere presence of a submarine or raider was now grounds for attack. By September 16, when the first American escort group, Task Unit 4.1.1, met the first American-escorted convoy, HX 150 out of Halifax, the United States Navy was in a state of full belligerency in the western Atlantic.52

  As he had done in his radio address of May 27 before the Iceland venture, so now before taking this next big step Roosevelt made a powerful presentation of his views and intentions to the American people and sought their support. His plans for a broadcast were interrupted by the failing health and then death of his mother the weekend of September 6–7. He was with her when she died at Hyde Park on Sunday, and he remained for her funeral. Meanwhile the speech went through draft after draft at the State Department and White House. Hopkins brought the latest draft to the presidential train in New York as it was returning to Washington, and that evening and the next morning Roosevelt refined it and tested it on congressional leaders.53 On Thursday evening, September 11, he broadcast a major state paper setting out the basis for intervention in the Battle of the Atlantic and, if that followed, war with Germany. The speech went out in his familiar, reassuring voice and vivid, colloquial idiom to a nation of family homes gathered around their radios. He aimed his message abroad as well, to the nations and peoples fighting Hitler and particularly to the British, described by Churchill as so very discouraged with the lack of tangible results from the Atlantic meeting.

  Claiming correctly that the submarine fired first on the Greer and with deliberate intent to sink it, the president was silent about what the U-boat captain must have regarded as hostile pursuit, Roosevelt did not rest his case on the ambiguities of the chase, however, but placed the incident in the larger context of German U-boat warfare and American devotion to the freedom of the seas. The Greer, he insisted, was on a “legitimate mission” to Iceland, an American outpost protecting waters through which passed ships of many flags carrying food and war matérial provided by the American people as an essential part of their own defense. If the U-boat had been unable to identify the destroyer, as the Nazis claimed, and still fired, this reflected a policy of indiscriminate violence, as proven by such other attacks as the sinking of the Robin Moor and stalking of the U.S.S. Texas in June, and the recent sinkings of the Panamanian freighter Sessa and the American freighter Steel Seafarer.

  These acts of “piracy” were all part of a Nazi plan for domination of the seas wherein no American ship could travel without the “condescending grace of this … tyrannical power.” A counterpart was Nazi subversion of governments in Latin America aiming at ultimate control of
the Western Hemisphere and a “permanent world system based on force, terror, and murder.” The Monroe Doctrine was too self-limiting for Roosevelt, however; the immediate issue, he insisted, was freedom of shipping on the high seas, the settled policv of the United States since Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson cleared the Caribbean of privateers and the Mediterranean of corsairs. The line of supply to the enemies of Hitler would be maintained at all costs and by active defense: “When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait … you crush him.” The American navy would protect “not only American ships but ships of any flag” in American defensive waters. “Let this warning be clear,” he concluded: “From now on, if German and Italian vessels enter the waters, the protection of which is necessary for American defense, they do so at their own peril.” ROOSEVELT ORDERS NAVY TO SHOOT FIRST, the banner headline of the New York Times reported the next day.

  The president was evasive about the precise manner in which the navy would provide protection. In fact Stimson himself did not learn of the escort system until September 25. Nonetheless the determination to use force and the justification for it had been forthrightly declared to the American people, and their reaction was powerfully supportive. Approving “in general” the “shoot on sight” directive were 62 percent of those interviewed by Gallup, disapproving 28 percent.54

  Once restrictions on escort eased, the British, Canadian, and American navies were soon getting much “mixed up together,” to use Churchill’s apt phrase.55 Even before the Greer incident, the battleship H.M.S. Rodney teamed up with the American carriers Wasp, Yorktown, and Long Island in search of a German raider, possibly the cruiser Prinz Eugen, which British intelligence feared had broken out again and which had been supposedly sighted east of Bermuda. The search was in vain.56 The president’s orders to shoot on sight in the western Atlantic included German surface raiders as well as aircraft overflying Iceland.57