by Lynne Olson
AS THE DEBATE ABOUT U.S. involvement in the war raged on, the Navy’s Atlantic force joined an estimated ten thousand Americans who were already engaged in the fighting. At least two dozen U.S. citizens, volunteers in the Royal Navy, were serving as officers aboard British ships escorting convoys from Iceland to Britain. They came from a variety of backgrounds and occupations—doctor, yacht broker, theater advertising, and real estate among them—but most had grown up as avid sailors. One of the Royal Navy’s Americans—Edwin Russell, a Princeton graduate whose father owned New Jersey’s largest paper, the Newark Star-Ledger—ended up marrying Lady Sarah Spencer Churchill, daughter of the Duke of Marlborough and a cousin of Winston Churchill.
Several hundred more Americans had gone to Britain to enlist in the Royal Air Force, seven of them flying in the Battle of Britain. So many U.S. citizens, in fact, had become RAF pilots that they were given their own units, called the Eagle Squadrons. More than five thousand Americans, meanwhile, were serving with the Canadian army and air force in Britain, while several dozen had joined the British army.
Among the British army volunteers were five young Ivy Leaguers who had left their Dartmouth and Harvard classrooms to enlist in Britain’s cause. They included Charles Bolté, a Dartmouth student leader, who in the course of a year had moved from ardent pacifism to an equally fierce belief in interventionism. In April 1941, Bolté had published an open letter to President Roosevelt on the front page of the Dartmouth daily newspaper. “[W]e have waited long enough,” he wrote. “We hear that Greece has fallen, and on the same radio broadcast we hear that the United States is sending Britain some ships—‘small ships, 20 torpedo boats.’ It is travesty in the midst of tragedy.… We have not produced enough guns, tanks, airplanes, bombs. We have not supplied the ships.… We have not supplied the men.… Now we ask you to send American pilots, mechanics, sailors and soldiers to fight wherever they are needed.… We ask you to make us our best selves by waging war.”*
The British government quickly realized the propaganda value of young Americans fighting and dying for Britain while their own country remained aloof. As one official wrote, “Every American enlisting in the armed forces of the crown is worth his weight in gold to us.” Newspapers in Britain and the United States ran glowing stories about the American volunteers, and the BBC featured them in a number of their broadcasts, as did Ed Murrow at CBS.
There were few stories, however, about the thousands of other Americans on the front line—the sailors of the Merchant Marine and U.S. Navy who were now engaged in the Battle of the Atlantic, waged across twenty-five hundred miles of frigid, treacherous seas. On any given day, four or five convoys were heading for Britain or returning to America, guarded by long lines of gray U.S. destroyers. It was the greatest cargo lift operation in history.
Setting off from ports in Nova Scotia and Halifax, the makeshift, motley armadas were usually composed of thirty to forty tankers and freighters—some gleaming and new, others aging, rusting wrecks. For their escorts, it was a nail-biting task to ride herd on these widely disparate ships, so unequal in size, speed, and maneuverability, and to keep them in as tight a formation as possible.
In the ocean’s vast, rolling, gray wastes, finding enemy surface ships was difficult enough, but locating submerged submarines with primitive sonar was far trickier—more art than science. Much of the time, the sudden, blinding glare of an exploding merchant ship was the first and only sign that German U-boats were on the prowl.
The weather proved to be an equally formidable enemy. The convoys followed a route in the North Atlantic noted for its treacherous weather, particularly in winter. And as it turned out, the fall and winter that year were among the worst in memory. The ships and their crews were pummeled almost daily by bitter cold, howling, razor-sharp winds, and towering waves that broke over the decks and poured down any open hatches, making life perpetually miserable for those aboard. Not infrequently, ships were cloaked in ice and blinded by snow. Thick fogs were always a hazard, greatly increasing the risk of collisions.
In the fall of 1941, most Americans still had no personal stake in the war. That, however, was not the case for the wives and families of the American naval personnel on convoy duty. Hundreds of women and children moved to Portland, Maine, a key base for the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, to be with their men when they returned from their hazardous journeys. In Portland, one journalist noted, “the people speak of America’s war in the present tense.” Filled with “waiting women,” it was “the U.S. city nearest the war.”
Not surprisingly, Portland was rife with rumors and worry. In this perilous cat-and-mouse game in the North Atlantic, who would be the first American casualties?
THE ANSWER CAME ON the night of October 16, in freezing waters southeast of Iceland. A convoy guarded by the Royal Navy and steaming toward Britain was attacked by a U-boat wolf pack. After receiving an urgent SOS from the convoy, five U.S. destroyers based in Iceland raced to its aid. In the confused fighting that ensued, one of the destroyers, the Kearney, was struck by a German torpedo. Eleven sailors were killed in the blast, and twenty-two were wounded.
News of the first American deaths in official action reached Washington just as Congress was debating a proposal by Roosevelt to allow the arming of American merchant ships and to permit them to carry their cargoes through German war zones and into British and other belligerent ports. The legislation was, in effect, a repeal of several key provisions of the neutrality law.
On October 27, the president delivered one of his strongest speeches yet, condemning the attack on the Kearney and declaring that “in the face of this newest and greatest challenge, we Americans have cleared our decks and taken our battle stations.” But no new action followed his belligerent words.
During the Atlantic Conference, Roosevelt had told Churchill he planned to “look for an incident which would justify him in opening hostilities.” He had made similar statements to several of those in his inner circle. To Churchill and the others, it seemed that the attack on the Kearney was just what FDR had been waiting for. The president, however, obviously did not agree.
There was no question that a majority of Americans supported FDR in his avowed toughness. In one poll, nearly two-thirds of the public said they favored his “shoot on sight” policy. According to other surveys, more than 70 percent of the public approved of U.S. escorts for convoying. Clearly prepared to fight if necessary, Roosevelt’s countrymen had, as he noted, taken their battle stations. Now, as one historian put it, they “waited for battle orders [that] their commander-in-chief refrained from issuing.… They had been told by him again and again in fervent words that American survival required Hitler’s defeat. But the Executive action logically implied by Executive words had not been taken.”
The people wanted FDR to lead them, while he seemed to expect them to lead him. The result, once again, was stasis.
DURING THESE TENSION-FILLED DAYS and weeks, the president focused his efforts on winning congressional approval of the Neutrality Act revisions, another interim step toward war. He had in fact been under considerable pressure to take even more aggressive measures. A number of interventionist newspapers had called for outright appeal of the Neutrality Act, as did the American Legion at its September convention.
For months, Wendell Willkie had also urged him to seek repeal of the act, which Willkie termed “a piece of hypocrisy and deliberate self-deception.” Complaining about the administration’s lassitude, Willkie accused it of “pursuing its usual course at critical moments—consulting polls, putting up trial balloons, having some of its members make statements that others can deny—the same course that has led to so much of people’s confusion and misunderstanding.” After the attack on the Kearney, the former Republican presidential candidate bluntly told reporters that “the United States already is in the war and has been for some time,” adding that the American people should “abandon the hope of peace.”
After Roosevelt sent his message to Congress
seeking the Neutrality Act changes, Willkie persuaded three Republican senators to offer an amendment that would scrap the entire law. At his urging, more than a hundred prominent Republicans from forty states signed a letter calling on GOP lawmakers to support the amendment. Millions of Republicans, the letter declared, are determined “to wipe the ugly smudge of obstructive isolationism from the face of their party.” Two Democratic senators, Carter Glass and Claude Pepper, joined their three Republican colleagues in urging outright abolition of the law. But Democratic congressional leaders, following the lead of the White House, opted only for repeal of the provisions banning the arming of merchant ships and the delivery of cargo to belligerent ports.
Once again, most of the country was clearly behind the president’s proposal. According to a Gallup poll, 81 percent of Americans favored arming the ships and 61 percent backed the idea of allowing them to transport supplies all the way to Britain. But Roosevelt again paid more attention to the opposition of the dwindling but determinedly vocal isolationist minority in Congress. He insisted that the legislation be seen not as a direct challenge to Germany but as a simple defense of American rights.
His opponents, by now stripped down to isolationism’s hard core, rejected that argument. In what turned out to be its final lobbying campaign, America First, although badly weakened by Lindbergh’s Des Moines speech, ferociously fought the White House proposals. On the day the bill was sent to Congress, Robert Wood condemned the measure as the equivalent of “an engraved drowning license for American seamen.” He and his organization contended that revising the Neutrality Act would immediately plunge the country into war.
In a letter headed “The Crisis Is Here,” the America First leadership urged its local chapters to flood Capitol Hill with letters and telegrams against the bill. “We will fight it,” the letter declared, “as we would fight a declaration of war.” Every member of Congress should be told, the message said, that a vote for the measure would be considered a vote “to send American seamen to their deaths. They must be reminded that the American people will hold them responsible for doing, by subterfuge, what they dare not do directly.”
Fighting back, the president in his October 27 speech made an announcement that jolted the country. He had in his possession, he said, a secret German map showing how the Reich planned to carve South America and much of Central America into five vassal states. He also spoke of a detailed Nazi plan to abolish all existing religions in the world, replacing them with an International Nazi Church.
The map mentioned by Roosevelt was in fact an outline of air traffic routes in South and Central America that featured a realignment of the area into four states and one colony, all under German rule. On the map, the proposed German airline network had lines leading to Natal, a port on the east coast of Brazil, and to Panama.
General George Marshall and others in the U.S. military were still greatly worried that a German force might one day be transported from the west coast of Africa to Brazil’s east coast and then northward to the Panama Canal. Indeed, as recently as the week of the president’s speech, the Army’s War Plans Division had warned that the German threat to Brazil remained extremely serious.
Not surprisingly, then, Roosevelt’s revelation set off alarms in his administration and the nation. Reporters clamored for further information from the White House and asked to see the map. The president refused, saying that making it public would jeopardize its source, which he described as “undoubtedly reliable.”
German officials, however, begged to differ. Four days after Roosevelt’s speech, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop flatly denied the existence of such a map, declaring that both it and the document referring to the extermination of the world’s religions were “forgeries of the crudest and most brazen kind.” Ribbentrop’s statement had been preceded by a frantic search by the German government to find out if any such documents had actually been produced. None was discovered.
For once the Reich was telling the truth; the map, as it turned out, was the creation of William Stephenson’s British Security Coordination. In its official history, BSC claimed that agents from its extensive South American network had intercepted a German courier and discovered the map in his dispatch case. In fact, it was a forgery, the product of a clandestine BSC unit in downtown Toronto called Station M, which had been assigned the task of fabricating letters and other documents.
Sent to New York, the map had been given to William Donovan, who in turn passed it on to Roosevelt. According to Donovan’s executive assistant, who actually delivered the document to the White House, neither his boss nor the president knew it was counterfeit. While that may well have been true, it was also the case that other senior officials in the administration had been warning for some time of the possibility that the British would try to transmit fake documents to the government for their own purposes. In early September, Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle informed Undersecretary Sumner Welles that “British intelligence has been very active in making things appear dangerous” in South America, adding that “we have to be a little on our guard against false scares.” As an example, he mentioned “the manufacturing of documents detailing Nazi conspiracies in South America.”
It’s not clear how much influence FDR’s announcement of the map had on the vote in Congress. Quite possibly, news of the Kearney had more of an impact on those inclined to vote for the Neutrality Act revisions. Lawmakers leaning against the measure, meanwhile, were influenced not only by the thousands of anti-revision letters and telegrams pouring into their offices but also by their own sense of outrage at Roosevelt for not doing enough to stem continuing labor unrest at aircraft and other defense manufacturing plants.
On Capitol Hill and throughout the country, there were growing demands for legislation banning strikes during a time of national emergency—demands that the pro-labor Roosevelt administration was loath to meet. In early November 1941, Henry Stimson noted in his diary: “The feeling that the President has been too soft with Labor has made many in Congress very angry and reluctant to do anything he wants until he takes a sterner hand with Labor.”
As they had done in fighting every previous interventionist measure, isolationists in the Senate held out for as long as possible, delivering seemingly endless speeches against the Neutrality Act changes. In an eight-hour address delivered over two days, Burton Wheeler issued a blistering warning to his pro-administration colleagues: “You men who follow blindly the administration’s policy, you men who, under the whip and lash, are going to take this country to war—you are going to take it to hell!” One of those whom Wheeler was addressing, Senator Claude Pepper, wearily noted in his diary: “Tragic indifference still apparent in Congress. Democracy will just be saved, if at all.”
Early in November, the Senate finally passed the measure by a relatively narrow 50–37 margin. Despite Wendell Willkie’s best efforts, only six Republicans voted for it. A few days later, the House followed the Senate’s lead, approving the revisions in another close vote, 212–194.
The fact that Congress’s antilabor mood was a significant factor in the narrowness of the vote did not seem to make much of a difference to Roosevelt. His sole focus was on the fact that once again an interventionist proposal by the administration had barely squeaked through Congress. The vote certainly did nothing to lessen his profound sense of caution.
In the midst of the continuing Sturm und Drang in Washington came word of another attack on an American destroyer in the Atlantic—this one far more calamitous than the assault on the Kearney. On October 31, off the west coast of Iceland, the Reuben James was sunk and 115 of its crew killed. The World War I–era destroyer thus earned the melancholy distinction of being the first U.S. naval ship lost in combat in World War II.
A FEW WEEKS BEFORE the sinking, Wallace Lee Sowers, a seaman aboard the Reuben James, had written to his parents about his harrowing experiences thus far in protecting convoys. He described how a submarine had attacked his shi
p late one freezing night, how the Reuben James, which Sowers fondly called “this old tin can,” had evaded the torpedoes and gone on to search for survivors from British merchant ships that had not been so lucky. “We did not find any,” the young sailor wrote. He told his parents he hoped to be home for Christmas.
The Reuben James was indeed a “tin can,” an aging wreck with ancient, misfiring guns. Before being sent to a boatyard for a thorough refit, however, it had been ordered to make one final convoy run to Iceland. On October 23, it and four other destroyers left Halifax with their armada of merchant ships in tow. En route, the naval escorts received several reports of U-boat sightings. On the night of October 31, the submarines finally struck. One of them fired a single torpedo into the Reuben James, smashing it amidships and breaking it in two. As orange flames lit up the sky, the destroyer sank in a matter of minutes.
Wallace Lee Sowers and the other young men who died represented a cross-section of America, hailing from tiny towns in Louisiana and Alabama as well as from big cities like New York and Chicago. The father of one of them—Lloyd LaFleur, a pharmacist’s mate from Texas—told reporters after being notified of his son’s death: “I think the U.S. should go into the war and wipe the German submarines forever from the sea. If I were young enough I would like to help do this job.”
German officials awaited the U.S. response to the sinking with great trepidation, convinced that Roosevelt would use it as a pretext for breaking off relations with Germany and declaring war. But FDR did nothing. To the consternation of his aides, he did not even issue a condemnatory statement. The torpedoing of the Reuben James, they were sure, was the incident he had been waiting for. Why didn’t he act?
