by Richard Snow
Captain Lemp continued his cruise, and he was punctilious when, a couple of hours before dawn on September 11, he saw the British freighter Blairlogie. Scrupulously following the rules, he signaled the ship to stop, put warning shots across the bow, and gave the crew all the time they needed to take to the lifeboats before firing a torpedo. As the ship went down, he took the U-30 slowly among the boats, distributing schnapps and cigarettes to their occupants, and even fired flares until a neutral ship, the American Shipper, came up to help.
Three days later it was the Fanad Head’s turn. Once again, Lemp made sure everyone aboard was safe in the lifeboats, then towed the boats beyond any possible danger while his men placed explosive charges in the freighter. Before he was done, he had even captured two British airmen. While bombing his ship, both planes had, incredibly, blown themselves out of the sky.
Still, Lemp was full of misgivings as he dropped anchor in Wilhelmshaven on September 26. A band was playing brightly on the pier, but Admiral Doenitz was waiting there, too.
Doenitz greeted his captain. “He asked me to speak in private,” wrote the admiral. “I noticed immediately that he was very unhappy, and he told me immediately that he was responsible for sinking the Athenia. … I dispatched Lemp at once by air to report to the SKL [naval high command] at Berlin. At the same time I ordered complete secrecy as a security measure.”
It can have been only the smallest comfort to Captain Lemp that he was going to justify his actions to his commander in chief, Raeder, rather than to Hitler. But justify them he did—armed merchantman, no running lights—and this turned out to be enough. Lemp was surely helped by his government’s having so unequivocally denied being responsible for the sinking. Raeder spoke with Hitler after questioning the U-30’s commander, and the two men reached the same conclusion as Doenitz: secrecy. This went as far as swearing the crew of the U-30 to silence, and replacing the relevant passages in the boat’s logbook with faked ones that omitted any mention of the Athenia. *
Having disobeyed no orders, Lemp was of course subject to no court-martial. Soon he was back at sea.
Hitler himself disavowed the sinking. Still amazed that Britain had actually kept its word to Poland and gone to war, he had little desire to inflame neutral nations, and none at all to bring so powerful a one as America into the fight. The same day the Athenia went down the German navy was told, “By order of the Fuehrer, passenger ships until further notice will not be attacked even in convoy.”
The order didn’t hold for long. Like Captain Gainard, Captain Lemp had briefly pushed open the heavy lid the present keeps on the future. What he had done to the Athenia was how the Atlantic war would be fought.
AS SOON AS HE could, Doenitz began to chip away at his confining orders. Before September was over, he told his boats, “Armed force should be used against all merchant ships using their wireless when ordered to stop. They are subject to seizure or sinking without exception.” By year’s end he had got far sterner: no schnapps and cigarettes for lifeboats, no flares to summon help. “Rescue no one and take no one aboard. Do not concern yourselves with the ship’s boats. Weather conditions and the proximity of the land are of no account. Care only for your own boat and strive to achieve the next success as soon as possible! We must be hard in this war.”
Doenitz had every reason to expect his requests would get a respectful hearing. His submarines had achieved far more than the “pinpricks” he had fretted about. During the war’s first month fifty-three Allied ships went down.
Warsaw surrendered on September 27. The victory came swiftly enough to surprise even Hitler. The next day he traveled to Wilhelmshaven at the urging of Admiral Raeder, who wanted his branch of the service to get some attention after a campaign in which the navy had played little part. From Doenitz’s point of view, the visit couldn’t have gone better. The weather-stained ships came in, their crews bearded (U-boats had neither enough room nor fresh water to allow regular shaving), high-hearted, sanguine. Doenitz got the chance to tell Hitler face-to-face of his long-fomented plans to gather his boats in group attacks against convoys. Hitler’s naval aide, Karl-Jesko von Puttkamer, who accompanied him to Wilhelmshaven, said that the Führer “carried back to Berlin an excellent impression of the leadership of the U-boat arm as well as the liveliness and spirit of the crews.”
That impression never left him. This most savagely capricious of men supported his U-boat admiral to the very end. Doenitz spoke that day in Wilhelmshaven of his ideal goal of three hundred submarines. Hitler would eventually give him nearly twelve hundred.
ONE OF THEM WOULD kill the weary old City of Flint, but not for a long time yet. She was a neutral vessel, with big American flags painted on her sides now, and lights rigged to play on them at night.
Rather missing his Killer Dillers, Captain Gainard took on his new cargo and signed on his new crew. The protean Jubb left, but Steward Freer stayed aboard.
Gainard sailed for Britain on October 3. The City of Flint had cleared the Newfoundland Banks and was well along the great-circle route that would eventually raise the southern tip of Ireland when, on the afternoon of the ninth, one of Gainard’s officers pointed out a cloud that seemed to be moving faster than its fellows. It turned out to be smoke from a ship, and the men on the bridge speculated whether it was French or British.
In a couple of years German surface vessels would be encountered out in the middle of the North Atlantic about as often as flying saucers were. But these were early days, and the City of Flint had run into the Deutschland.
The naval agreements had put a ten-thousand-ton cap on warship construction, but within this stricture Raeder had worked with the greatest ingenuity. One result of his planning was the pocket battleship, which carried far heavier weaponry than any vessel of its weight ever had before. The Deutschland mounted six eleven-inch guns, and as she came steaming along at twenty-five knots, all of them were pointed at Captain Gainard.
When the German captain saw the emphatic American blazon on the freighter’s side, he swung his guns inboard. “You must not use your radio,” he signaled. Then: “I am going to send a boat.”
Gainard came to a stop, then went to his cabin and changed from dungarees into his dress uniform. He thought his visitors would be dressed that way, and so they were. Although he had been stopped at gunpoint—the most intimidating gunpoint the world had to offer—the men who came over the side were far more civil than the Hamburg pilot had been.
“Glad to have you aboard,” Gainard said, and the senior of the three officers matched this politeness: “Captain, I am sorry to cause you inconvenience, but this is war. I must ask to see your papers.” Gainard showed him the manifest: wax, apples, asphalt, tobacco, lard, flour, grease, oil, tractors, lumber …
The German lieutenant looked grim. “This is bad. You have twenty-thousand drums of oil on board. What kind of oil is it?”
“Lubricating oil.”
“This is bad. And this flour, what is it?”
“White-bread flour.”
“Under the laws of my country, you are guilty of carrying contraband.”
Gainard protested that it was an American ship, and that the cargo was perfectly legal under American law.
This didn’t impress the officer, who signaled the battleship and received in return a message asking if the City of Flint could make room for “thirty-eight male passengers.” The lieutenant explained they were from the Stonegate, a British merchantman the Deutschland had sunk a few days earlier.
Gainard said he could.
The officer was concerned. “This is a big passenger list, and you are a freight ship.”
“I’ve carried more,” Gainard told him.
The Deutschland signaled again: “The ship will go to Germany.”
The captured English sailors came across, along with a prize crew about twenty strong under Lieutenant Hans Pushbach, who spoke good English and used it to explain that no one must interfere with his men: “If you do, I will ki
ll you.”
The Deutschland departed. Lieutenant Pushbach sketched a line on a chart of the North Atlantic. “We go to Germany, and we go like this.”
Gainard may have been a prisoner of sorts, but he was still captain. He shook his head. “Not with this ship under these conditions.” He drew a course far to the north of the lieutenant’s, through less traveled sea-lanes. “If we get into trouble and the ship is sunk, no government will know who was responsible, for most of my people would be dead and so would yours. There’s no telling what might happen. We want peace between our countries, so we’re not going to meet any belligerent ship if it can be helped and you will have to use force to make me do it.”
Lieutenant Pushbach agreed and the strange voyage began. It proceeded in silence because, as Gainard half-explained a few months later, “something had happened to the Flint’s radio between the time the Deutschland was sighted and the time the prize crew came aboard. The German radio operators evidently didn’t know enough about radios to fix it; consequently, they were unable at any time to receive messages from Germany.”
They went north into the ice fields off Greenland, through the mists of the season, and the equally shifting and puzzling mists of neutrality. The Germans assured the Americans that they’d have their ship back as soon as the cargo was confiscated, but the Americans were restive, and the captain had to defuse several plots to take the ship over from its well-armed guards. Along with pistols and machine guns, Pushbach said he and his men were carrying grenades so powerful that just one would kill everybody aboard (although you’d think that this might make the Germans reluctant to use them).
Nevertheless, a kind of homey routine settled in. Dark, drizzling mornings would find the American captain, the German lieutenant, and Captain Randall, the British master of the vanished Stonegate, shivering together on the bridge drinking coffee and agreeing they had been fools to take up their calling. “Why did I ever leave my father’s farm?” Randall wondered once. “The politicals,” said Pushbach. “Ah! They have the jobs. Comes my next incarnation, I will be a political. Let the other fellow go to sea.” Gainard agreed: “Just think. Steam-heated trains, soft seats, warm subways, no wind or snow, no cold rain …”
Then, on a fine high blue morning, with the icebergs glowing green about them, the three sailors would speak pityingly of “the poor earthbound landsmen.”
Despite such camaraderie, Gainard wanted his ship back. He persuaded his captors the City of Flint was running low on water, and after eleven days they dropped anchor at Tromsoe, Norway. There was plenty of water, but Gainard knew that if they put into a neutral port for it with no real need, neutrality statutes mandated that the prize crew should be seized and taken off the ship. But the Norwegians did no such thing, merely topping off the tanks and telling the City of Flint a few hours later to get moving. They did, however, take off the British sailors for repatriation before escorting the freighter back out of their territorial waters.
Pushbach knew Norway would broadcast the news of what had happened to the City of Flint. Nervous about British patrols, he ordered Gainard on through a mean southeast gale, finally coming to rest in a place American seamen would soon know all too well: Murmansk, Russia. Gainard was delighted when the Russians took the Germans ashore to be interned, as the Norwegians should have done. For five days the City of Flint stayed there, being assured by the local authorities that it was a “free ship,” but forbidden to leave. Then the German crew reappeared: Russia and Germany had recently consummated the nervous embrace of the Hitler-Stalin pact. The Russians put the Germans and their colossal grenades back aboard and told the Americans to get out.
Back to Norwegian coastal waters—Pushbach was quite right in his belief that the British and Americans alike were now following the war-blown ramblings of the City of Flint, and he didn’t want to meet the Royal Navy. At last, he ordered the ship to anchor at Haugesund. The Norwegians warned them off, but Pushbach thought he had no choice. At midnight on November 3, a boarding party from a Norwegian minelayer stormed the City of Flint. “It was slick, the way they did it,” wrote Gainard. “Simply woke the Germans up, took away their artillery—and told them they had lost their rights by anchoring without legal cause and contrary to Norwegian neutrality laws.” Gainard, his crew, and his ship were free to go about their business.
The world had moved along while the City of Flint was picking its way through the ice floes, and neutrality laws with it. The captain could no longer take his cargo to Britain in a ship under American registry. He sailed north along the coast of Norway instead, to try to sell it in Bergen. That didn’t happen quickly, and the City of Flint’s men celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas in the port—Steward Freer put up two magnificent meals—before they could at last head for home. On January 27, 116 days after setting sail, Gainard entered the port of Baltimore. He arrived angry. During his ordeal he had possibly been most deeply annoyed when his German captors insisted that a big tractor in the hold of his freighter was meant to be converted into a tank, but this was worse. The night before she dropped anchor, he had heard over the radio the ubiquitous newscaster Lowell Thomas saying, “The City of Flint is coming through the Virginia Capes again back from her Odyssey, just a rusty piece of junk, bound for the boneyard.”
“A freight ship is no thing, Mr. Thomas,” Gainard replied. “She’s my home. And if the City of Flint was good enough to carry … stranded Americans out of the war zone, if it’s good enough to be the home of a crew of officers and sailors, and good enough to carry the cargo of American manufactures to all the world—she’s no pile of junk!”
Nor was she bound for the boneyard. She and a thousand very much like her were entering a sea battle of unprecedented length and ferocity. So, too, was Gainard. It may have taken some of the sting out of Thomas’s words when, for his service aboard his Hog Islander, Captain Joseph A. Gainard was awarded the Navy Cross, the first to be given in the war.
The Neutrality Patrol
Guarding the western hemisphere, 1939–40
Franklin Roosevelt had heard about the City of Flint. When the Bibb and the Campbell had come out to see it home, one of Captain Gainard’s guests, Alta Magoon, needed to have an ankle x-rayed. One of the cutters had the equipment, but to use it she had to get permission to be the first woman ever allowed aboard a coast guard vessel. Apparently this could be granted only by the president.
Roosevelt would have been tickled by this duty. He liked everything connected with the American seafaring tradition. Springwood, his home in Hyde Park, New York, contained some two thousand prints and paintings of warships from sailing days. He had been assistant secretary of the navy under Woodrow Wilson and greatly enjoyed the post. During the early years of his presidency he had not shown himself much interested in military matters—he had more than enough to contend with—but he always found time to go over the navy promotion lists. A couple of years down the road General George Marshall, nettled by FDR’s clear preference among the services, would ask him, “At least, Mr. President, stop speaking of the army as ‘they’ and the navy as ‘us.’”
The war found his navy early.
The tremors shaking the world had been going on as long as Roosevelt had been in office. His inauguration in 1933 took place a day before Hitler came to power, and Japan had invaded Manchuria two years earlier. In December 1937, with their armies besieging Nanking, Japanese bombers sank the USS Panay while the Yangtze River gunboat was trying to get American citizens out of the tormented city.
There have been times in our history when the deliberate sinking of an American warship—and it had been deliberate—meant war, period.
This wasn’t one of them. A frustrated FDR asked his cabinet, “If Italy and Japan have evolved a technique of fighting without declaring war, why can’t we develop a similar one?” But it was largely a rhetorical question. Roosevelt could gauge the mood of the nation he led as shrewdly as any politician who ever lived, and although it might be unsettled a
nd even violent, it was not warlike.
A general feeling held that back in 1917 America had been duped into going to war by the House of Morgan, the munitions industry, and cynical political hacks in their thrall.
This conviction was not confined to the extremes: the Communist left that saw in any powerful capitalist nation a threat to the Soviet Union and the far right as incarnated in Father Charles Coughlin, the immensely popular “radio priest” (he drew a bigger audience than Amos ’n’ Andy) with his winning trace of a brogue and a heart full of malice encapsulated in his references to Franklin Roosevelt’s “Jew Deal.”
The sense of betrayal bubbled up quite early. In 1924 Laurence Stallings and Maxwell Anderson enjoyed one of the greatest theatrical successes of the decade with their play What Price Glory, which, as Stallings’s New York Times obituary put it, “painted World War I as an inelegant brawl between two hard-bitten veterans—Captain Flagg and Sergeant Quirt—over a slut who might have been called Europe.”
Then there was the tremendous success of both the novel and the movie All Quiet on the Western Front (Germans didn’t want to do this any more than we did), and a bestseller by Thomas Boyd called Through the Wheat that showed the grim absurdity of the war from the other side, and Company K by William March, which portrays the American effort with a brutal nihilism that still has the power to shock. Even Stephen Vincent Benét, a patriotic writer in perhaps the least patriotic decade since the republic began, published a poem in which the speaker dreams he sees corpses stringing “their wire on disputed ground—I knew them then.” Why have they come to trouble him, he asks. “We know your names. We know that you are dead. / Must you march forever from France and the last, blind war? / ‘Fool! From the next!’ they said.”
All these works carried the same message: the war had been an obscene waste of time; we must never do it again. Keep away from Europe’s squabbles.