by Richard Snow
The belief took more concrete forms than literary ones. Starting in 1935, Congress began passing acts aimed at making it impossible for the United States to get involved in any foreign war. The first of these Neutrality Laws forbade American ships to sell or carry armaments to any country embroiled in conflict, but allowed the president to decide when the act should be applied. The next one took that power away from him. Roosevelt didn’t like this, but support was running so strongly in favor (the Third Neutrality Law passed 376 to 16 in the House, and 63 to 6 in the Senate) that he let the issue drop and signed the bills.
On September 5, 1939, two days after Britain declared war on Germany, the president proclaimed the Neutrality Act in effect. Then he set about doing his best to dismantle it. Summoned to a special session, Congress unhappily reconvened in a Washington still clammy with summer heat, and FDR asked that the act be repealed in favor of a cash-and-carry arrangement that would allow a belligerent power to buy munitions so long as it paid up front and took them away in its own ships. This would, of course, greatly favor the British, who controlled the sea-lanes of the Atlantic. It would also, as Congress well understood, permit the release of previously ordered arms and thus irrigate with millions of dollars a workforce still in the shadow of the Great Depression. In a month, Roosevelt had his way.
That same September 5 FDR announced the Neutrality Patrol. This was a project he had warmed to long before. Back in April, with Warsaw still intact, Europe still in what passed as a state of peace, and the Atlantic Squadron preparing itself for the World’s Fair, the president had told his cabinet he was planning to order “a patrol from Newfoundland down to South America and if some submarines are laying there and try to interrupt an American flag and our navy sinks them, it’s just too bad …” He was a man of circumspection, misdirection, and improvisation, but in the confusing months to come he would never abandon this basic idea.
He said nothing about sinking U-boats being just too bad on September 5. His directives, as filtered through the Navy Department, established a zone two hundred miles out from shore (by any standard, a generous interpretation of territorial waters), but suggested only that the U.S. vessels keep track of the comings and goings of ships that entered it.
This nonetheless seemed more than enough of a job to Rear Admiral Alfred W. Johnson, in command of the Atlantic Squadron. He didn’t have enough ships, and he didn’t have the means to effectively support the ones he did (his fliers based at Key West fueled their planes from trucks that trundled back and forth to Fort Lauderdale, where civilian contractors sold them the gas). Nor were there enough men. Hastily reconditioned four-stack destroyers were putting to sea with crews of 56 rather than their full complement of 103. And among those 56 were only the sparsest salting of old hands that knew their way around a warship.
It came as a considerable shock to Roosevelt’s chief of naval operations, Admiral Harold R. “Betty” (a surprising number of high-ranking American navy men had infantile nicknames) Stark, when, later in September, FDR indicated a swath of Atlantic that at one point ran a thousand miles off the Carolinas and airily asked, “How would the navy like to patrol such a security zone?” Stark, a highly capable man, was also a restrained, careful one. He merely told the president that this would take a great many ships.
In fact, the assignment would require—as the navy concluded when word of it got out—three hundred ships and perhaps four thousand planes. In other words, the whole fleet, plus three times as many airplanes as the service possessed. Some wishfully thought that the mission was presidential hyperbole, but on October 9 FDR issued a memo that began, “I have been disturbed by …” and contained the words “slowness,” “lag,” “weakness,” and the like, all in regard to getting the patrol up and running.
So the ships, more and more of them, shouldered their way through steepening seas while summer blew away and autumn came in and a bad year moved toward a worse one. The Atlantic Squadron was stretched to the limit, its undermanned ships couldn’t find enough time for proper gunnery and tactical training, and there was little torpedo practice because there were hardly any torpedoes to practice with. Yet, more and more men were learning the ropes in a task and on an ocean that would demand all their efforts for the next five years and more.
MOST OF THE ACTION in this peculiar new war seemed to be taking place at sea. England and France had mobilized to protect Poland, but there was scant chance of that, and in any event they didn’t try. Americans watched skeptically as the “Phony War”—it was an American phrase—settled in. During the coldest winter anyone could remember, English soldiers and equipment crossed the Channel to France, and French troops reinforced the miles and miles of passageways and bunkers that made up the Maginot Line. There were none of the great wheeling maneuvers and ferocious clashes that had marked 1914; there was not much of anything at all.
Spring came. Over here, the New York World’s Fair reopened for its second and final season. Its theme had changed from “The World of Tomorrow” to the somehow rather plaintive “For Peace and Freedom.” The Czechoslovakian and Polish pavilions still stood, cenotaphs for their vanished nations. The Soviet Pavilion of the first season was gone, replaced by something called American Common, a two-and-a-half-acre square dedicated, according to the official guidebook, “to the perpetuation of a democratic idea…. From a liberty pole in the center of the site flies the highest flag on the Fair grounds.” Russel Wright’s flying lobsters apparently hadn’t had legs; his exhibit was gone, too, and my father’s wheatstalks now served as the puzzling herald for a Coca-Cola bottling operation. No nicely shined-up fleet was in the Hudson on opening day.
Overseas, the war had dropped any aspect of phoniness. On April 8, Hitler attacked Denmark and Norway. Denmark fell in hours, Norway in a few weeks. Raeder lost a good many of his surface ships in the fighting along the Norwegian coast, but it made no difference to the outcome.
The Germans had launched their campaign in the last freezing days of the bitter winter. Now the season gave way to a glorious spring, bright and mild and radiant all across Europe. This was Hitlerwetter, Germans told one another, the kind of fine dry days and clear nights that had smoothed his battalions’ path into Poland.
On May 10 the Nazi armies struck west into three neutral countries—Luxembourg, which fell without a struggle, Holland, overwhelmed in five days, and Belgium, taken in eighteen—and France, where they broke the front in forty-eight hours. In the last war, the Germans had striven exorbitantly toward the Channel for more than four years, and never got there. This time, it took them ten days.
On May 15, Winston Churchill sent Franklin Roosevelt a telegram asking for “the loan of forty or fifty of your older destroyers.”
“A New Chapter of World History”
The destroyer deal goes forward, 1940
Churchill had been prime minister for just five days, and a power in the British government for less than a year. He had been one before, of course, most significantly as first lord of the Admiralty in the last war, until the costly misfortunes of the Gallipoli campaign put him out of office. In recent years, while the word appeasement still carried the kindly connotations of a well-intentioned attempt to right old wrongs, he had widely been regarded as a bloody-minded troublemaker. “We must arm,” he’d called. “Britain must arm. America must arm.” After the Munich settlement of 1938 had appeased Hitler by giving him Czechoslovakia, Churchill said, “Britain had a choice between shame and war. She chose shame. She’ll get the war, too.”
As soon as she did, a few hours before the Athenia was torpedoed on September 3, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, the failure of his policies stark before him, reluctantly invited Churchill to return to the Admiralty. A week later, the new first lord received an unusual letter, from the president of the United States, that began, “My Dear Churchill, It is because you and I occupied similar positions in the World War that I want you to know how glad I am that you are back again in the Admiralty. Your prob
lems are, I realize, complicated by new factors but the essential is not very different. What I want you and the Prime Minister to know is that I shall at all times welcome it if you will keep me in touch personally with anything you want me to know about. You can always send sealed letters through your pouch or my pouch.”
Churchill answered quickly and with warmth (perhaps not wanting to deploy the resonances of his title in an informal correspondence, he signed his response, a little coyly, “Naval Person”), but at first relatively few communications passed between the two men.
The Norwegian campaign ran its sorry course, the British attempts to take back the country slipshod to the point of fecklessness. Much of the blame for this lay with Churchill, but the failure meant the end of Chamberlain’s government.
Churchill became prime minister on May 10. Early on the morning of the fifteenth he was awakened to take a telephone call from Paul Reynaud. The French premier told his English counterpart, “We have been defeated. We are beaten. We have lost the battle.”
Churchill did not yet believe the French would surrender. But they might. He saw clearly what would follow: his country, on its own, shoring up its defenses behind the narrow ribbon of water that separated it from a hostile continent, facing—and this was the brightest possible prospect—a siege that would last for years.
After lunch that day, he wrote his telegram to Roosevelt. This extraordinary message for one head of state to send another pretty much said, Your nation has to save mine. “Although I have changed my office, I am sure you would not wish me to discontinue our intimate private correspondence. As you are no doubt aware, the scene has darkened swiftly…. The small countries are simply smashed up, one by one, like matchwood. We must expect, though it is not yet certain, that Mussolini will hurry in to share the loot of civilisation. We expect to be attacked here ourselves, both from the air and by parachute and air-borne troops in the near future, and are getting ready for them. If necessary, we shall continue the war alone, and we are not afraid of that.
“But I trust you realise, Mr President, that the voice and force of the United States may count for nothing if they are withheld too long. You may have a completely subjugated, Nazified Europe established with astonishing swiftness, and the weight may be more than we can bear. All I ask is that you should proclaim non-belligerency, which would mean that you would help us with everything short of actually engaging armed forces. Immediate needs are, first of all, the loan of forty or fifty of your older destroyers to bridge the gap between what we have now and the large new construction we put in hand at the beginning of the war.”
Churchill knew America had the destroyers; 170 of them were laid up at the time the war started, and 68 sent back to sea once the Neutrality Patrol began.
Where were Britain’s destroyers? The nation had ended the last war with 433 but a straitened peace had cut the number to fewer than 200 by 1939, and even when rearmament began, destroyers were low on the list of new vessels, partly because the Admiralty preferred to put what funds it had into larger ships, and partly because of the complacent fallacy that the U-boats had been taken care of the last time and wouldn’t pose much of a threat in any future war.
The destroyers Britain did have had been battered by the awful winter, and in the Scandinavian campaign four were put out of action by damage, and seven sunk outright.
Ever since the Neutrality Act had been ramified to allow sales on the cash-and-carry basis, England had maintained a purchasing mission with its offices at 15 Broad Street in Manhattan. At its head was that rare creature, a man disliked by nobody. Arthur Purvis had been born in London, but his Scottish wellsprings disarmed Americans of a generation more leery than ours of what they saw as English hauteur and high-handedness. The mission’s first days had been hectic, as Garment District salesmen came downtown to pitch bras, and one elderly man stopped by repeatedly to offer an exemplary mule that was “a very great bargain.” Purvis had done reasonably well in recent months, but destroyers were a different matter from machine tools and wire. It required an act of Congress to sell them.
Roosevelt hardly stood in terror of Congress, but he was a human seismograph where public opinion was concerned. He might want to get Churchill the ships, but he couldn’t afford to be branded as a warmonger in the presidential election that was coming up in November.
Yet he had reason to be hopeful. At the time of Munich the Roper poll—which FDR trusted more than the Gallup—had shown that two-thirds of all Americans opposed selling any arms to any belligerents. In late September 1939, after the war had begun, Roper reported that this had changed: two-thirds now wanted the United States to help the Allies, but less than 3 percent thought we should do it by going to war. Most Americans then held the tacit belief that however malign the German government might be, they were insulated from any mischief it could work by the French army, so indefatigable in the Great War, and the Royal Navy, which was, after all, the Royal Navy.
Now, with the Western democracies being blown out like a stand of birthday candles, Germany suddenly seemed both closer and scarier.
Still, the president replied cautiously: “I have just received your message and I am sure it is unnecessary for me to say that I am most happy to continue our private correspondence as we have in the past.
“I am, of course, giving every possible consideration to the suggestions made in your message. …
“With regard to the possible loan of forty or fifty of our older destroyers. As you know, a step of that kind could not be taken except with the specific authorization of the Congress, and I am not certain it would be wise for that suggestion to be made to the Congress at this moment.”
Beyond the considerable legal difficulties in turning over the ships was another, unspoken one: the possibility that we might be giving them to the Germans. The Allied chances seemed slim, and a great many Americans thought them poorer than that. When in late May German forces trapped hundreds of thousands of French and British troops in the Channel around Dunkirk, Ambassador Joseph Kennedy sent FDR a cable saying, “Only a miracle can save the BEF [British Expeditionary Force] from being wiped out or, as I said yesterday, surrender.” But something like a miracle was taking shape. Hitler held back his armor to let Hermann Goering and his Luftwaffe finish the job, and they weren’t up to it. A scratch flotilla of small boats and excursion steamers began an increasingly effective rescue operation. By June 4, 225,000 British and 113,000 French soldiers had been taken off the beaches—albeit with no piece of equipment larger than a rifle.
We remember those fishing smacks and excursion boats, but destroyers did the heaviest work in the evacuation. At Boulogne, the ships came in so close to shore to take off the Welsh Guards that they fought gun duels with German tanks. A third of the troops carried to safety reached it on destroyers.
This tremendous result came at a tremendous cost. On May 10 the British Home Fleet had ninety-four seaworthy destroyers; after Dunkirk, forty-three were still fit for service.
In the House of Commons Churchill gave one of the most famous of the speeches that would bolster British resolve and strengthen American sympathy for his cause: “Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous states have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight in the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air; we shall defend our island whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”
As Churchill knew, this magnificent defiance perversely contained within it an impediment to the ceaseless struggle it promised. So long as England carried on, its fleet stood between America and Germany. And given his pledge to keep up the fight no matter what, America would always have the protection of that fleet one way or the other. A
s Churchill wrote the prime minister of Canada, where the Royal Navy would go if a German invasion succeeded, “We must be careful not to let Americans view too complacently the prospect of a British collapse, out of which they could get the British Fleet and the guardianship of the British Empire, minus Great Britain. … Although the President is our best friend, no practical help has [come] from the United States yet.”
Churchill was in the highly tricky position of having to maintain two contradictory stances before America: we’re indomitable, whatever may befall us (in which case no reason for the United States to hurry up with the destroyers); we might be driven down (in which case the destroyers should certainly not leave home). If the former was as well articulated as human speech could make it in his “fight on the beaches” peroration, the latter was succinctly expressed in one of his private messages to Roosevelt (which the prime minister was now signing “Former Naval Person”): “If members of this administration were finished and others came to parley amid the ruins, you must not be blind to the fact that the sole remaining bargaining counter with Germany would be the fleet, and if this country was left by the United States to its fate no one would have the right to blame those then responsible if they made the best terms they could for the surviving inhabitants.”
The “deliverance” of Dunkirk, as Churchill called it, could not save France. Italy made the jackal’s pounce the prime minister had predicted and declared war on June 10. France gave up a week later.
“The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned upon us,” Churchill told the House. “Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.” A couple of days later Churchill gave a speech in a secret session of the House. It was not recorded, but his notes for it include “If we get through next three months, we get through the next three years,” and, looking to America, “It depends upon our resolute bearing and holding out until Election issues are settled there.”