by Richard Snow
In fact, the election was shaping up well from Churchill’s point of view. The Republican National Convention met in Philadelphia that June and drafted, amid much fractious uncertainty, the party’s foreign-policy plank. The result, said H. L. Mencken, that unfailing fount of promiscuous scorn, “is so written that it will fit both the triumph of democracy and the collapse of democracy and approve both sending of arms and sending of flowers.”
What was significant, though, was that the Republicans did not oppose outright all aid to Britain. And when they nominated Wendell Willkie, they chose an internationalist who was as much in favor as FDR of helping England. So in the coming campaign, whatever assaults Republicans might mount on New Deal policies, they would not be attacking the Democratic nominee (Roosevelt had not yet revealed whether he would be running for a third term) as an interventionist.
In the meantime, while the mockingly gorgeous summer strengthened English fields of hops and rye, contrails began to appear in the skies above them as the German air force fought to open the way for invasion. English onlookers tried to read their future in the momentous white scribbles six miles up, and Americans watched almost as closely. England’s fighter planes went down; England’s cities burned; but England held.
The current of American sympathy flowed more and more strongly toward Britain. Nevertheless, a rider to the June 1940 naval appropriations bill had made it illegal to sell the destroyers—or any such “surplus military material”—unless the chief of naval operations said the ships were not necessary to defend American shores. This put Admiral Stark in a most uncomfortable position. How could a man in the midst of a struggle to build up a navy threatened in two oceans say he didn’t need fifty destroyers?
Eventually Roosevelt raised the possibility of a trade: the destroyers for British bases in the western hemisphere. This would allow him to say that the ships had been exchanged for something of greater military value to the United States. He explained the idea in a letter to a recalcitrant senator in which he describes a not wholly credible encounter between himself and the sort of canny rustic who had been a fixture on the American stage for at least a century. “Here is the real meat in the coconut as expressed to me by a Dutchess County farmer yesterday morning. I told him the gist of the proposal, which is, in effect, to buy ninety-nine year leases from Great Britain for at least seven naval and air bases in British Colonial possessions. … The farmer replied somewhat as follows:
“‘Say, ain’t you the Commander-in-Chief? If you are and you own fifty muzzle-loadin’ rifles of the Civil War period, you would be a chump if you declined to exchange them for seven modern machine guns—wouldn’t you?’”
Through July and August negotiations went on with Britain. At one point Churchill’s amour propre got ruffled. At such a time, he said, a quid pro quo deal seemed sordid and ungenerous of the United States. Speaking on the phone to FDR’s attorney general, Robert Jackson, Churchill snapped, “Empires just don’t bargain.”
“Republics do,” said Jackson.
In the end a bargain was struck. Britain would get the destroyers, and America the right to operate out of eight British colonies stretching from Newfoundland down to Guiana. As far as the obstacle of Congress—well, several distinguished lawyers felt that although the neutrality laws made it illegal for the United States to build and deliver warships to belligerent powers, in this case the ships had been built years ago by the government for its own purposes and could thus be turned over to a private contractor for sale to the British. No need for Congress to get involved.
The president announced the deal on September 3, and despite some fussing, nothing like the crisis FDR half expected developed. A public opinion poll taken two weeks earlier had apparently been quite right in its conclusion: over 60 percent of the American people were for the deal.
The navy was not caught by surprise, but the four-stackers were proving hard to resuscitate. Decades of caked grease had to be chipped away from machinery whose purpose was often incomprehensible, the plans of its ship having been lost. Many of the vessels had been cannibalized for basic parts; others had mysterious capillaries of piping that needed to be deciphered like the hieroglyphics on a tomb. Everything had to be coaxed back to life, from boilers with corroded tubing to treacherous galley stoves that might light up compliantly or might blow off their burner grates.
When, on September 3, the order came, “Proceed with project to turn over fifty destroyers to appropriate British authorities at Halifax,” the Atlantic Squadron was ready. The destroyers would arrive in groups of eight, with two weeks between each transfer.
When the first flotilla reached Halifax, the old ships looked every bit as smart as their fellows had at the World’s Fair opening. They were freshly painted, fully armed, and their larders were stocked with food. This last made the greatest impression on the British who were waiting to take them over. In Britain a year of war had brought shortages in even the most common foodstuffs, and here were such splendors as fruit cocktail and cocoa.
Captain Taprell Dorling wrote of this bounty, “The ships had been refitted throughout. They were scrupulously clean and fully supplied … paint and cordage; messtraps, silver and china, all marked with the anchor and U.S.N.; towels, sheets, blankets, mattresses and pillows. Sextant, chronometer watch, high-powered binoculars for the use of officers and look-outs, parallel rulers and instruments for navigation were not forgotten. A typewriter, paper, envelopes, patent pencil sharpeners, pencils, ink—everything and anything one could imagine, even to books and magazines, an electric coffee machine in the wardroom, were all provided. Storerooms were fully stocked with provisions, including spiced tinned ham and tinned sausages, and canned fruit and corn which do not normally find a place in the dietary of British bluejackets.”
The Halifax authorities immediately did their best to get their own hands on the food, ordering that it be replaced at once with standard provisions. Many ships complied, and one commander complained that afterward “during our crossing of the Atlantic our Wardroom lived exclusively on a diet of Stilton cheese and sheeps’ hearts (the only dish the steward could make).” The reason so many of the officers stood still for this extortion is that they were green. It was no easy thing to come up with the crews for fifty ships in the middle of a war.
Green or not, they began learning about the four-stackers right away. On the morning of September 9 the American crews mustered on the dock in front of their ships for the last time. The captains remained aboard the eight destroyers while a bugle called “Attention” and “To the Colors.” The American flags came down, the skippers came ashore and marched with their men to where trains waited to carry them south to other commands. The navy wanted no photographs of English and American crews fraternizing, so only then did the British sailors appear and board the ships and recommission them under new names (in a graceful conceit typical of the man, Churchill had directed that they be christened after cities in America, Canada, and England that bore the same names). Waiting for the newcomers belowdecks were American indoctrination crews of about twenty men.
Not much except the larders pleased the new tenants. They’d been leery to begin with—an American naval officer had widely been quoted after explaining that the hulls of the four-stackers “were just thick enough to keep out the water and small fish”—and now they discovered a host of unwinning eccentricities. The destroyers were not nimble; they had the turning radius of a battleship. The steering engine that swung the big rudder was connected to the wheel on the bridge by cables that ran unsheathed aft through the engine and boiler rooms, begging to snag something. The vessels proved full of surprises; for instance, when the four-inch guns were raised to their full elevation, they liked to fire themselves.
The British got a couple of weeks to learn these crotchets. Captain Guy Sayer wasn’t one of the neophyte officers—he knew enough not to surrender so much as a single can of spiced ham—but he still found “this fortnight was indeed a hectic period and
must constitute a record for taking over an entirely unknown, foreign, elderly, and somewhat decrepit warship after twenty-two years laid up in reserve.”
Captain Sayer’s new command—born the USS Stockton, now HMS Ludlow—had made it across the Atlantic in the last war, but had gotten in so severe a collision there with a troopship that she had to be partially rebuilt in a Portsmouth dockyard. Sayer was told about this “within a few minutes of my arrival on board by the commanding officer—Lieut. Cdr. Lewis R. Miller, U.S.N.,—who greeted me with, ‘Say, Cap’n, d’you know your ship has got a British bow!’”
Sayer immediately took to his American counterpart, and all his colleagues. “No one could have been more friendly, frank and helpful than the American naval authorities. They were completely honest about the ships, pointing out all the defects and weak spots.”
These were numerous. The Ludlow’s steering engines twice went crazy (although not because of the problematic cables) “and jammed the helm hard over, causing the ship to steer out of control through an East Coast convoy, to be pulled up only just in time to avoid a sandbank, by an anchor hastily dropped!”
Each time the Ludlow revealed one of her flaws, Captain Miller, referring to the peccant part, would sympathetically tell Sayer, “That installation stinks to high heaven!”
The crew’s quarters “were very cramped by our standards,” said Sayer, “… and the wardroom austere and unhomely, mainly due to the fixed tables, chairs and settees all in steel frames.” Surprisingly, given that the lavishness of American bathrooms was the object of amused envy throughout the British Isles, “The sanitary and bathing arrangements for the crew were rugged and archaic in the extreme, the former consisting of a spar over the top of an open trough into which a branch of the fire main was fed, and over which men were expected to perch like hens roosting!”*
Moreover, the ship was “short legged”—had no great cruising range—and, by Admiralty standards, carried weaponry far too heavy for her slim hull. Sayer was actually worried about the Ludlow’s ability to get to England. He expressed this to Miller time after time, always to be told, “She’s done it once, and she’ll do it again.”
And sure enough, “when we did finally arrive, and after experiencing a certain amount of trouble with the engines and auxiliary machinery, I sent Lewis Miller a telegram: ‘She stinks to high heaven, but she’s done it again!’”
Once across the Atlantic, Sayer discovered that the infamous mock-reassurance about the small-fish-proof hull was a slander. “Ludlow was … made of remarkably tough steel. … We were rammed on the port quarter by another ship at night in heavy weather off Kinnairds Head. The damage, which in a modern ship would have been far more serious, was restricted to bad denting, and when the plates had to be removed in Rosyth Dockyard, much difficulty was experienced due to tools being continually blunted.”
A number of the four-stackers had more trouble than the Ludlow did in getting across the ocean. In the first group of destroyers, HMS Chesterfield twice in quick succession rammed HMS Churchill (the only one of the ships not to be named after a town), hurting both badly enough to keep them from sailing for England. HMS Cameron got to sea without hitting anything, but then had to limp back with generator trouble. The Newark broke her nose against a seawall and, that damage repaired, had to abort her crossing when a blizzard carried away two depth charges that then exploded near her hull. In all, twelve of the fifty destroyers were involved in collisions, and during the last three months of 1940 the original eight spent a total of 218 days taking up precious space in British dockyards.
In time, though, they all went to work. Some sank U-boats (not a great many, but any single U-boat kill seemed like a lot when it happened), and some were sunk by them. One was a spectacular suicide. Early in 1942 the Campbeltown, shorn of two stacks to disguise herself as a German destroyer, ran through a murderous crevasse of fire—“her sides seemed to be alive with shells,” said one of the commandos on the raid—to pile herself up against the lock gate at the port of St.-Nazaire, which held the only drydock on the French coast large enough to accommodate the German battleship Tirpitz. The next morning the German intelligence officer interrogating the Campbeltown’s captain told his captive how foolish it had been to try to attack that formidable gate “with a flimsy destroyer.” But the hull of the flimsy destroyer was packed with depth charges so cunningly hidden by concrete and steel baffles that they escaped the notice of the men examining the ship. When the timers tripped, the explosion killed some 150 Germans aboard the Campbeltown and put the lock gates and the drydock they shielded beyond repair until 1947.
Of all FDR’s four-stackers, the Campbeltown did the most obvious and dramatic damage to the enemy. But their real effect was one of increment, which would count for so much in the long battle. All through 1941, the four-stackers made up nearly a quarter of Britain’s antisubmarine force.
They worked hard. In 1943, HMS Burnham went into drydock after a year of uninterrupted Atlantic steaming. One of her engineers walked beneath her bottom with a hammer to make a routine test on the rivets. As he tapped each one, it dropped from the hull to his feet amid a little puff of rust.
By then newer ships were doing the job begun by the old-timers. But the four-stackers had stood in the gap when there was nothing else to plug it. When they began struggling their way to England, Churchill told the House, “The fifty American destroyers are rapidly coming into service just when they are most needed.” Admiral of the Fleet Sir James Somerville went much further: “Had there been no American ‘four stacker’ destroyers available and had they not gone into service escorting trade convoys when they did, the outcome of the struggle against the U-boat and the subsequent outcome of the European War itself might have been vastly different.”
There was more to it than that. When the deal was concluded, Hanson W. Baldwin, already embarked on his thirty-year career as a military correspondent for the New York Times, wrote, “A new chapter of world history was written last week…. The destroyers steaming towards Halifax were not only symbols of an ever-closer Anglo-American rapprochement, but in the opinions of some observers, sealed what in effect was an unofficial alliance between the English-speaking nations and brought the United States far closer than ever before to entry into the war.”
Baldwin was right. The old destroyers had carried America and Britain to the beginning of a road the two nations would walk together for all the hard years ahead.
Long after the transfer, when the war had come to us and burning freighters were brightening the night skies off Boston and Charleston and Key West, one of Stark’s admirals told him how much he missed those fifty four-stackers, what a difference it would have made if they’d never been handed over to the Royal Navy. Stark wouldn’t have any of that. “Those ships,” he said, “have already been fighting for us for more than a year.”
Doenitz Goes to France
Germany builds her Biscay U-boat bases, 1940
The German Foreign Office dismissed the destroyer deal: “Germany takes note of the fact that Great Britain has sold out valuable areas of its empire to the United States for fifty old destroyers.” The German press took the same tone. “Like the Jew Esau,” the English were selling their birthright for “some poor naval leftovers with scarcely any naval value.”
But of course Hitler understood what the transaction meant. Less than a month after the first of the four-stackers sailed for Halifax, his foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, signed a document that began, “The governments of Germany, Italy, and Japan, considering it as a condition precedent of any lasting peace that all nations of the world be given each its own proper place, have decided to stand by and cooperate with one another in regard to their efforts in greater East Asia and regions of Europe respectively wherein it is their prime purpose to establish and maintain a new order of things calculated to promote the mutual prosperity and welfare of the peoples concerned.” Article Three had each of the nations going to war when “one
of the three contracting powers is attacked by a power at present not involved in the European war or in the Chinese-Japanese conflict.”
Admiral Raeder would never get his aircraft carriers, but Hitler had seen a way to bring a great many carriers against a potential opponent in an ocean ten thousand miles away.
“Done in triplicate at Berlin,” the pact concluded, “the 27th day of September, 1940, in the 19th year of the fascist era, corresponding to the 27th day of the ninth month of the 15th year of Showa (the reign of Emperor Hirohito).”
Germany had last signed a treaty of high significance just four months earlier. It allowed the French to quit fighting in return for two-thirds of their country, including the coast that ran south by east from Brest down to the Spanish border and embraced the Bay of Biscay. The bay’s size and relatively shallow floor gave it some of the fiercest of the fierce Atlantic weather. Yet Doenitz looked toward it with longing. “From the moment that it had started in May 1940,” he wrote, “the advance of the German army in the campaign against France had been watched with close attention by U-boat command. If the army succeeded in defeating France, we would be given the advantage of having bases on the Channel and Biscay coasts for our naval operations …; it would mean that we should now have an exit from our ‘backyard’ in the southeastern corner of the North Sea and be on the shores of the Atlantic, the ocean in which the war at sea … must be finally decided.”
Throughout the fighting, “U-boat command had a train standing by, which, laden with torpedoes and carrying all the personnel and matériel necessary for the maintenance of U-boats, was dispatched to the Biscay ports on the day after the signing of the armistice.” Doenitz found his tour of the Biscay bases more than satisfactory. Any one of them would cut some 450 miles off the journey his boats had to make to reach the Western Approaches. The effect was the same as if the size of his fleet had just been increased by something like a fifth: a shorter turnaround between patrols, and repair facilities infinitely more accessible than the overtaxed German ones.