by Richard Snow
The president’s fishing wasn’t very productive. Despite his following Ernest Hemingway’s advice that big stuff was to be had in the Mona Passage between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic if it was offered a feathered hook baited with pork rind, the prize of the voyage was a twenty-pound grouper, caught not by FDR but by his aide Harry Hopkins.
Only when the party was homeward bound, said Hopkins, did he realize the president had more on his mind than fish. “I didn’t know for quite awhile what he was thinking about, if anything. But then—I began to get the idea that he was refueling, the way he so often does when he seems to be resting and carefree. So I didn’t ask him any questions. Then, one evening, he came out with it—the whole program. He didn’t seem to have any clear idea how it could be done legally. But there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that he’d find a way to do it.”
The “whole program” was Lend-Lease. The playwright Robert Sherwood, who composed speeches for FDR, said, “Roosevelt, a creative artist in politics, had put in his time on this cruise evolving the pattern of a masterpiece, and once he could see it clearly in his own mind’s eye, he made it quickly and very simply clear to all.”
He did that at a press conference on December 17, the day after he returned to Washington. He liked to start these events with the transparently disingenuous phrase “I don’t think there is any particular news …” That out of the way, he turned to foreign affairs, saying that he wanted to “get rid of” what he called with fond, avuncular impatience “the silly, foolish old dollar sign.”
He gave an example. “Suppose my neighbor’s home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him put out his fire. Now, what do I do? I don’t say to him before that operation, ‘Neighbor, my garden hose cost me fifteen dollars; you have to pay me fifteen dollars for it.’ What is the transaction that goes on? I don’t want fifteen dollars, I want my garden hose back after the fire is over. All right. If it goes through the fire all right, intact, without any damage to it, he gives it back to me and thanks me very much for the use of it. But suppose it gets smashed up—holes in it—during the fire; we don’t have to have too much formality about it, but I say to him, ‘I was glad to lend you that hose; I see I can’t use it anymore, it’s all smashed up.’ He says, ‘How many feet of it were there?’ I tell him, ‘There were one hundred and fifty feet of it.’ He says, ‘All right, I will replace it.’ Now, if I get a nice garden hose back, I am in pretty good shape.”
Looking back across the fierce debates that followed, Sherwood wrote, “I believe it may accurately be said that with that neighborly analogy, Roosevelt won the fight for Lend-Lease.” It was in some ways a preposterous analogy. If your neighbor’s house is on fire, you not only lend him your garden hose, you help him use it. Nevertheless, it stuck in people’s minds.
Two weeks later, Roosevelt deployed a phrase that had just as much sticking power and considerably more grandeur. Three-fourths of the American people heard it on December 29 when they tuned in Roosevelt’s fireside chat. In it, the president called for greater military production—“We must have more ships, more guns, more planes—more of everything”—stating that the surest path to American security was to help keep Britain in the war. He concluded by saying, “We must be the great arsenal of democracy.”
Polls showed 60 percent of the president’s listeners agreed with him. When the time came, two-thirds of the public supported Lend-Lease, but the debate was more heated than the one over the destroyer deal. The conservative senator Robert Taft was not buying the hose metaphor: “Lending arms is like lending chewing gum—you don’t want it back.” Senator Burton Wheeler of Montana took the discussion far beyond garden hoses and gum with his declaration that Lend-Lease “will plow under every fourth American boy.” Many Americans less furiously engaged with the issue than Wheeler worried that giving the president a free hand to supply arms to another country was crossing a perilous boundary.
Nevertheless, the bill passed on March 11, 1941. Hours afterward it was undergirded by an appropriation of $7 billion. America was going to be arsenal and factory, too.
New ships, new strategy, new matériel—everything was in place. Yet Stark was moving into some of the most frustrating weeks of his life.
The reason is suggested in a press conference the president held on April 15. FDR had long since set a standard for these gatherings that his successors could only hope to emulate. Relaxed, cheerful, confident, amused, and amusing, he was always in control of a pack of those most unherdable creatures, newspaper reporters.
He began with his “I don’t think I have anything” rubric, then amended it to admit to one “little human-interest thing.” He had just looked at the first Lend-Lease lists of nonmilitary equipment that the British Purchasing Committee wanted, and “there are a number of different items like tar, kettles, and road rollers, and pumps, and graders. The last three items are for nine hundred thousand feet of garden hose!”
The reporters laughed, and FDR went on, “Not garden hose but fire hose—actually fire hose—at a final cost of three hundred thousand dollars. I thought it was a rather nice coincidence.”
One of the reporters asked a shrewd question: “Mr. President, do you have any oceangoing fire hose?”
That is, how is the hose going to get there? On the most mercenary level, the question was noting that under cash and carry, the British had already bought the goods they were bringing home, and best of luck getting them there. With Lend-Lease, these were our goods, and the garden hose wouldn’t come back if it was at the bottom of the sea. The president didn’t answer, and there was some genial back-and-forth about other matters.
“Mr. President, the press reports from Europe indicate that the situation looks rather gloomy for the British at the moment.”
“Do they?” Roosevelt asked innocently.
“Would you care to comment?”
“No, no. No. I don’t look that way, do I?”
Further laughter, but the question returned, more sharply.
“Mr. President, could you tell whether you feel there is an increasing demand toward the use of American naval power?”
“No, I couldn’t tell you that.” No longer so amiable, he rode over another question and went on, “I would also—let me put it this way—there has been more nonsense written, more printer’s ink spilled, more oratory orated over that subject by people who don’t know a hill of beans about it than any other subject in modern times.”
This was diversionary bluster. Roosevelt knew what his audience was asking—will American warships escort and protect vessels carrying Lend-Lease goods?—and he squirmed and dodged to avoid giving an answer.
Committing his ships to guard belligerents was an act of war. He may have wanted the war, but he didn’t want to start it. He certainly didn’t want to be perceived by the American people as calling for military action so close on the heels of Lend-Lease. The loss, of, say, a cruiser would perhaps have been sufficient provocation to bring the country in, but Hitler wasn’t cooperating. He had given strict orders to his U-boat commanders to keep out of the way of American ships, and none had been harmed.
Two days before his press conference the president had extended the “security zone” to Greenland, but the ships patrolling it were merely to report the presence of submarines, not engage them.
Stark believed this a meaningless order, and when he pressed his boss, he got only the same vagrant beam of sunlight that bedeviled Stimson. The secretary of war was also badgering FDR to ask Congress for the power “to use naval, air, and military forces of the United States” in the Atlantic. Feeding Britain supplies wasn’t enough: “The men who suffered at Valley Forge and won at Yorktown gave more than money to the cause of freedom.”
Roosevelt complained, “I simply have not got enough navy to go around.” All his lieutenants were prickly and sour that season. As the humid spring ripe
ned into one of the hottest Washington summers on record, Stimson made what he called his “only wholly pessimistic diary entry in five years.” It began, “Altogether, tonight I feel more up against it than ever before. It is a problem whether the country has it in itself to meet such an emergency, whether we are really powerful enough and sincere enough and devoted enough to meet the Germans.” Secretary of State Cordell Hull went about muttering, “Everything is going hellward.” Eventually Roosevelt took to his bed with what he said was a severe cold. Robert Sherwood didn’t see much sign of the ailment, and when he said so to the president’s private secretary, Marguerite LeHand, she smiled and explained that the patient was down with “a case of pure exasperation.”
MY PARENTS HAD A much better spring than the president. Nearly a decade had passed since my maternal grandparents had forbidden Emma Folger to marry an architect in the precarious Depression economy. It was late in the day to have taken this step: the invitations had already gone out. I remember my mother telling me that after she’d bent to her parents’ wishes, she’d gone weeping to her room with a pair of pinking shears and cut her wedding dress into long white rags.
The prohibition had evidently gone the way of the London naval accords when, one evening in 1940, my mother, riding out from Grand Central Terminal to Bronxville, where she still lived with her parents, saw my father waiting for a train on the platform of the 125th Street Station. She got up from her seat, hurried down the aisle and out of the car, and confronted him.
In later years the two of them remembered only one thing about the conversation that followed. “Then she pinched me in the stomach,” my father would say, still surprised and amused half a century afterward. “Then I pinched his stomach,” my mother would tell me, still surprised at herself, “and I said, Dick, are you going to marry me or not?”
He was. He did, in the April of FDR’s discontent, at the Riverside Church in Manhattan, where Emma worked as an assistant to the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick. There was no parental interference this time; the country was awash in Lend-Lease money, and any competent architect had as much work as he could handle.
Fishing Trip
Churchill and Roosevelt meet, 1941
Admiral Stark kept pushing the president to take more forceful action in the Atlantic. Things were going badly for the British, he insisted—and they certainly were, with U-boats sinking merchant ships at three times the rate English yards could replace them. But Roosevelt still held back on escorting convoys. Instead, the president took a new tack that was bolder than the patrols, yet less provocative than convoy escorts. On June 7, 1941, he announced that America would relieve the British troops garrisoning Iceland.
The three-hundred-mile-long island between Greenland and Norway had been a dependency of Denmark when the war began. Hitler planned to occupy it, but Britain got the jump on him. It was not to prove a popular posting. Though touching the arctic circle, the country is not quite as inhospitable as its name suggests because it is warmed by the Gulf Stream—or at least made habitable. But only a quarter of it is habitable, the rest treeless volcanic mountains along whose stony flanks fogs and storms are perpetually brewed by the collision of Gulf and polar waters.
The Germans had thought that any American movement would be to the south, and the occupation took them completely by surprise. The marines arrived, in early July, without difficulty but with little joy. After only a few hours in Reykjavik most of them were calling the port “Rinky-dink.” Hvalfjordhur, twenty-five miles up the coast, they just as quickly christened Valley Forge. There followed a great deal of muddy unloading, and the Sixth Marines began sourly to refer to themselves as the Sixth Labor Regiment. The carrier Wasp risked a voyage through U-boat waters to ferry in thirty P-40 fighter planes, and the newcomers settled down to their monotonous business.
When Captain Daniel V. Gallery was ordered to command the Fleet Air Base at Reykjavik he found “the situation was grim. Our boys were eking out a miserable existence knee-deep in mud. … The wind howled through our broken down Nissen huts with arctic glee. The well-dressed man-about-camp wore two sets of long flannel drawers and without our eider-down sleeping bags we would have frozen. Our galley was equipped with salvaged junk, and the food was terrible.”
Griffith Baily Coale arrived in Iceland late in the year. Coale was a successful muralist who believed that the navy should recruit artists to record its doings, and he made his point so persuasively that he was commissioned a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve and sent to sea aboard a destroyer. As his ship approached the island, Coale heard the lookout shout, “Land ho!” and came out on deck. “Soon with the naked eye we see a great mountain rising straight out of the sea, shaped like a sperm whale’s tooth. Presently the coast opens up, a great bleak jagged contour of mountains topped by a volcanic cone two thousand feet high and covered with snow. … We salt-caked destroyers swing hard left and in a straight column proceed at fifteen knots up the amazing corridor of Hvalfjorhdur, carpeted with dark-green water and walled by sheer chocolate-colored precipices capped with a strangely white icing of snow. … The scale is so vast that one is convinced that the scattered houses and church yonder are tiny scale buildings built by the Icelanders for their children.”
Coale found a place to bunk with the marines tending an antiaircraft battery. “This is rugged, simple life. My furniture consists of two packing boxes; my wash basin is the bottom of a gasoline can, cunningly lipped over; my drinking water is in a peanut jar, the top of which is my ashtray.” Thus berthed, Coale sat and sketched and watched the sentries “driving Icelandic ponies from the camp garbage cans. They trot away and hide behind a hut, peeping like bad boys around the corner at a cop.”
There was little fraternization with the natives. Seaman Emory Jernigan, now at home aboard his battleship, got shore leave when the Washington anchored at Reykjavik. “The people were pretty nice looking,” he said. “Most of them were blonde. However, they were the most unfriendly people I ever ran across anywhere in the world. As a general rule, they had bad teeth and very rude manners.” The best Jernigan could find to say about Reykjavik was that the bakeries there sold good pastries.
To be fair, the Icelanders were under the occupation of a foreign power, and they’d had little say in the matter. Stimson and Stark might chafe about how slowly things were moving, but America had garrisoned a European nation and was flying regular patrols from its airfields. The garrison had to be supplied, of course, and that meant merchant ships. They would need protecting.
ON JUNE 22, WHILE the marines were on their way to Iceland, Hitler attacked Russia along a fifteen-hundred-mile front. President Roosevelt had known that this was coming (and had sent warnings to the Soviet Union, which Stalin chose to disbelieve) and was thus confident that the heavily engaged Germans wouldn’t contest the Iceland occupation.
Not surprisingly, the drastically changed European situation spurred Stark and Stimson and Knox to press once again for convoy escorts. On July 2, Roosevelt agreed. A few days later, with the Japanese making trouble in Indochina, he again changed his mind, saying that “every little episode in the Pacific means fewer ships in the Atlantic.” Stark kept his peace, and his stoicism was rewarded late in the month when FDR finally gave the permission Stark had been seeking for months.
Then, having sent his navy to war, the president said it was time for another fishing trip. On August 3, a Sunday, Roosevelt went by train to New London, Connecticut, and there got aboard the presidential yacht Potomac. He spent Monday close enough inshore for newspaper reporters to see him fishing. Once darkness had fallen, the Potomac made for Martha’s Vineyard, where the president’s previous fishing boat, the Tuscaloosa, was waiting in company with its fellow heavy cruiser Augusta and several destroyers. The president and his party boarded the Augusta. Admiral Stark was there, fully enjoying himself for the first time in quite a while.
The warships headed north, while the Potomac took up her earlier station. On Tuesday, shor
ebound correspondents could again watch the president—or someone dressed like him—fishing off the yacht’s stern.
The actual president was bound for Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. Saturday, August 9, dawned cool there, with mist lying white on the water. The American sailors watching—from the Tuscaloosa, the Augusta, the old (launched in 1911) Arkansas, the destroyers—saw a shape form in the fog and resolve itself into the Prince of Wales. The British battleship steamed out into clear daylight. Her band was playing “The Star-Spangled Banner”; the band aboard the Augusta answered with “God Save the King.”
All the difference between war and peace was visible in the two ships. The Augusta was immaculate, her paint clean and as bright as gray can reasonably get. The Prince of Wales was new, but she had already seen hard service. A couple of months earlier she’d had to hurry to sea with some civilian technicians still aboard when the Bismarck, the most powerful battleship in the world, broke out into the convoy lanes of the open Atlantic. In company with the battle cruiser Hood she had found the Bismarck and got so badly hurt that she had to retire from the action that followed. The Hood fared worse. When a single salvo hit her, she simply disappeared; of the fourteen hundred men aboard, three survived. But the brief action had doomed the Bismarck, too. Bleeding oil, she was tracked down by sea and by air.* So that morning in Placentia Bay the Prince of Wales bore scars from the Bismarck’s guns on her upperworks, and on her sides the disorienting scythes and daggers of camouflage paint.