by Richard Snow
Soon boats were crossing between the ships. From the Augusta to the Prince of Wales came fifteen hundred packages, each containing an orange, half a pound of American cheese, a carton of cigarettes, and a card: “The President of the US of A sends his compliments and best wishes.” From the Prince of Wales to the Augusta came Winston Churchill.
The prime minister climbed aboard and walked beneath the eight-inch guns to where Franklin Roosevelt was standing, braced on the arm of an air force officer, his son Elliott. Churchill bowed and handed FDR a letter from King George VI: “My dear President Roosevelt, This is just a note to bring you my best wishes, and to say how glad I am that you have an opportunity at last of getting to know my Prime Minister. I am sure that you will agree that he is a very remarkable man, and I have no doubt that your meeting will prove of great benefit to our two countries in the pursuit of our common goal.” The bow and the letter were more than pleasantries. Robert Sherwood wrote that Churchill never lost sight “of the fact that Roosevelt was his superior in rank—the President being the Head of State, on the level with the King, whereas the Prime Minister is Head of Government. To the average American this may seem a rather academic distinction, but it was of great importance in the relationship of the two men.”
The genesis of the meeting went back months, perhaps to a conversation the president had with Harry Hopkins at Christmastime. “You know,” said FDR, “a lot of this could be settled if Churchill and I could just sit down together for a while.”
“What’s stopping you?” Hopkins asked.
The idea had a most urgent appeal to Churchill, who was not only curious to see Roosevelt, but who thought that the invitation to do so surely indicated that the United States was ready to join Britain in the war.
The prime minister was mistaken, and that was not the only misunderstanding during what came to be called the Atlantic Conference. It is pleasing to think that an instant affinity sparked there beneath the cruiser’s guns, one that would grow into a deep friendship—“the partnership,” as the historian Joseph P. Lash subtitled his study of the two men, “that saved the West.” And to a degree this is true; certainly they would preside over what became perhaps the closest and most successful national alliance in history.
But president and prime minister were, as Harry Hopkins put it, “two prima donnas.” Roosevelt was jealous of Churchill’s oratorical brilliance; Churchill occasionally grew bitter and petulant about his role of suitor. On a deeper level, the prime minister must have felt something close to grief as it became increasingly clear that the ally Britain needed to save her would inevitably surpass her power. Tremendous as the partnership might be, Churchill was the junior partner.
As for the frets of petulance, FDR felt them early in the encounter, when Churchill made it evident (strangely, since the prime minister prepared for this meeting with the most obsessive first-date meticulousness, saying at one point, “I wonder if he will like me”) that he did not remember having met Roosevelt at a dinner in England in 1918. “It would be an exaggeration,” wrote Sherwood, “to say that Roosevelt and Churchill became chums at the Conference or at any other time. They established an easy intimacy, a joking informality and a moratorium on pomposity and cant—and also a degree of frankness of intercourse which, if not quite complete, was remarkably close to it.”
The next day, Sunday, the president went over to the Prince of Wales. As the American destroyer that ferried him across from the Augusta came alongside, a chief noticed a guy in a peacoat standing around on the battleship’s deck doing nothing. The American threw over a line, barking at the loafer to make it fast.
Winston Churchill complied with amiable alacrity, and FDR came aboard for Sunday services. These were held on the wide quarterdeck, with hundreds of sailors, American and British mixed together, looking on. They sang hymns that could have been heard that same Sunday in the churches of both countries—“O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” “For Those in Peril on the Sea”—while off in the distance Argentia (a city given, not leased, to the United States by Britain) could be seen coming to life. It was still in the ramshackle shape that reminded a British viewer of a Klondike mining town, but it would become one of the great staging areas for the reconquest of a continent.
The next day was meetings, and these didn’t go the way the British had hoped. No declaration of war from America; rather, the promulgation of the Atlantic Charter, a statement of irreproachable ideals—nations’ right to self-determination, freedom of the seas, and so forth—to go into effect once victory had been gained in a war that America had not yet entered and that was at the moment being lost.
Churchill left disappointed—although with the “Marines’ Hymn” firmly lodged in his head—as were the British people, though he put the best face he could on the proceedings in a broadcast to them: “And so we came back across the waves, uplifted in spirit and fortified in resolve.”
The prime minister was to meet one more famous American during the voyage. On his way home, he was shown his first Donald Duck cartoon. He described it as “a gay but inconsequent entertainment.” In the lively and all-but-omniscient book that he tartly titled Mr. Roosevelt’s Navy: The Private War of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, 1939–1942, the historian Patrick Abbazia adds that Churchill “might have said the same of the meeting at Argentia.”
This seems a little too dismissive. Perhaps Abbazia’s close study of FDR’s cautious increments of engagement gave him a twinge of the same frustration that Stimson felt. Felix Frankfurter thought the meeting far from inconsequent. “We live by symbols,” he wrote the president, “and you two in the open ocean … in the setting of that Sunday service, gave meaning to the conflict between civilization and arrogant, brute challenge; and gave promise more powerful and binding than any formal treaty could, that civilization has brains and resources that tyranny will not be able to overcome.”
And Admiral Stark came away much more satisfied than Churchill. He had discussed convoying with his British counterpart, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound. It was really going to happen.
The Moving Square Mile
Learning and relearning the lessons of convoy, 1917–41
Stark’s anxiety about convoying might have come not only from FDR’s reluctance, but from that of almost everyone involved in the decision. The convoy system looks so rational from our undisturbed perspective of the world wars of the last century that it seems the inevitable product of those conflicts. In fact, it very nearly never happened at all.
In 1915, a year into the First World War, a U-boat sank the British liner Lusitania, killing 128 American passengers and so infuriating their countrymen that Germany eventually drew in her claws and left neutral shipping unmolested. Many months and many, many lives later, with victory no closer than it had been, Germany declared an unrestricted submarine campaign. This brought America into the war in April 1917, and William S. Sims was put in charge of the naval part of it.
Sims was loyal, energetic, a born raconteur (without the repellent qualities that phrase so often signals), and, something that rarely harms a career, uncommonly handsome. He was also a controversialist, inescapably because in the early years of the last century he was a visionary in the truest sense of the word. He knew what needed to be done to change the designs of the ships that had recently evolved during the tremendous, painful transition from wood to steel and sail to steam. In the historian Elting Morison’s phrase, “he remembered Pearl Harbor before it happened.” That is, in a service nourished by its past and necessarily bound by tradition, Sims could see the future, and he worked all his life to bring his navy into it. By the time we entered World War I he was known throughout the service as “the man who taught the U.S. navy how to shoot.”
But shrewd and effective though Sims was, he had no idea what was going on with the British merchant fleet when America entered the war, and finding out was one of the greatest shocks of his life. Sent across the Atlantic to coordinate the American naval effort with the British, h
e called on John Jellicoe, the first sea lord.
Jellicoe, quiet, cheerful, the least dramatizing of men, took a piece of paper from his desk and gave it to his new ally. Sims read it with growing astonishment. “It was a record of tonnage losses for the last few months,” he wrote. “This showed that the total sinkings, British and neutral, had reached 536,000 tons in February, and 603,000 in March; it further disclosed that sinkings were taking place in April which indicated the destruction of nearly 900,000 tons.”
Sims said, “I had never imagined anything so terrible.”
“Yes.” Speaking “as quietly,” Sims remembered, “as though he were discussing the weather and not the future of the British Empire,” Jellicoe said, “It is impossible for us to go on with the war if losses like this continue.”
England would go down—perhaps as early as August, certainly by the end of October. The country had six weeks’ worth of grain on hand.
“Is there no solution to the problem?” Sims asked.
“Absolutely none that we can see.”
Sims tackled the crisis with all his hectoring tenacity.
What had Britain been doing to avert it? “Everything,” Jellicoe said. Tens of thousands of mines laid, forty thousand antisubmarine inventions submitted to the patent office, and most important, Sims wrote, “all the destroyers, yachts, trawlers, sea-going tugs, and other light vessels which could possibly be assembled. Almost any craft which could carry a wireless [radio], a gun, and depth charge was boldly sent out to sea.”
The British battle fleet had immobilized the German battle fleet. In any naval war waged from the time guns first went to sea, this would have meant victory. The submarine had changed the scheme of things. Now the big warship could be done in by a small one. But that small vessel could be harried and destroyed by other small vessels, ones designed for the purpose that were agile enough to keep on top of the submarine, drop explosives on it, fire guns at it when it had to come up.
Destroyers were best suited for this job, and Britain had hundreds of them. But while the British were scratching up tugs and trawlers to send against U-boats, they had to keep many of their destroyers tied close to the Grand Fleet, guarding its big warships from submarine attack.
Sims took this in and saw something that only a few recognized. Those dreadnoughts were being convoyed.
The merchant ships were not.
Unlike the challenges involved in getting guns big as factory chimneys seaborne, there was nothing new about convoying, which is gathering defenseless ships together in a herd to escort them with armed ones. Julius Caesar had sent his invading legionnaries to Britain under convoy. During the Napoleonic wars convoys had proved so effective that England made it illegal for merchantmen to leave port without an escort.
Why hadn’t this been tried in the present war? Sims wanted to know.
It had been considered, he learned, but the Admiralty was opposed to it. The vast scale of the shipping required to keep Britain fed and armed made it all but impossible. Moreover, a convoy presented a far larger target than a single ship. Finally, convoy was merely a defensive measure; centuries of naval tradition mandated offense always.
Sims certainly believed in the offensive, too. But what sort of offense did those vessels going out on patrol hunting submarines really amount to? The ships would cover an assigned square of ocean thirty miles on a side, which meant that lookouts were hoping to discover an object a couple of hundred feet long, lying close to the surface, somewhere in nine hundred square miles of sea.
On the other hand, when the U-boat sights a convoy—and this was Sims’s crucial insight—it must attack if the captain wants to do his job. In attacking, the submarine will bring down upon itself the convoy’s warships. Because the convoy is far more likely than any patrol to foment a battle, it was actually an offensive weapon after all.
So Sims once again found himself embroiled in a controversy. He was not alone; some in the Admiralty had long favored convoying. Sims, though, represented a powerful new ally and, having spent his professional life persuading people against their wills, may well have had the decisive word. In any event, nobody could have given a clearer explanation of why he believed what he did.
He pointed out that since the opening of the war in 1914, troops and supplies had been shuttled across the narrow strait between Britain and France in an “immune zone, which was constantly patrolled by destroyers and other anti-submarine craft,” without the loss of so much as a stirrup or a can of rations, let alone a life. “If we could arrange our ships in compact convoys and protect them with destroyers we would really create another immune zone of this kind and this would be different from the one established across the Channel only in that it would be a movable one. In this way we should establish about a square mile of the surface of the ocean in which submarines could not operate without great danger, and then we could move that square mile along until port was reached.”
In mid-May a convoy assembled in the Mediterranean and sent to England arrived intact on the twentieth, a date that, Sims said, “marked one of the great turning points of the war. That critical voyage meant nothing less than that the Allies had found the way of defeating the German submarine.”
They had. But like so many great messages, this one took a long time to sink in: years—decades—would be spent learning, applying, forgetting, perverting, relearning, and applying it once again.
The Allies applied it now, and it took hold. When Sims had arrived in London, the U-boats were sinking an average of more than one merchant ship every two days. A little over a year later, it was one every fourteen days. In the awful spring of 1917, nearly 900,000 tons of Allied shipping went down in April. The Germans sank 302,000 tons in January 1918, and just 112,427 the following October. Halfway through the next month, the war was over.
Sims wrote that “the American navy had been privileged to play a part” in “one of the greatest victories against the organized forces of evil in all history,” but he was exhausted, and uncharacteristically melancholy. Speaking of the navy, he said, “I have never liked it. I would rather have been in a productive occupation. There has never been a time when I have not been uncomfortable in a uniform.”
Later, brightening a little, Sims wrote, “However, the festive Hun is now down and out for all time, so that nothing else really matters.”
NOW THE FESTIVITIES HAD resumed, and so had the convoys.
As in Sims’s day, the Royal Navy, which again wanted to pursue rather than to lure, and the skippers of the merchantmen, who feared it would be both too tricky and too slow to sail in close company, had been recalcitrant. But as before, the numbers won the argument, and by the time Roosevelt and Churchill met in Placentia Bay, the system had been up and running smoothly for months.
A transatlantic convoy of the time would be made up of forty-five to sixty merchantmen, steaming nine hundred yards apart, deployed in nine to twelve columns with a thousand yards separating each file. Here was Sims’s moving square mile—actually a box perhaps two miles long and four wide, guarded by escort vessels. In the beginning these often included a battleship, there to counter heavy surface raiders such as the one that had captured Captain Gainard. But by 1941 these were scarce, and the battleships went about other business. Smaller ships kept watch over the convoys: destroyers, of which there were never enough, and corvettes, tough little British craft buoyant as champagne corks, wonderfully seaworthy and damnably uncomfortable for their crews. The warships were in the charge of the escort commander; a convoy commodore was responsible for keeping order among the merchant ships and sailed aboard one of them.
As the U.S. navy prepared to take its part in these caravans, support vessels and destroyers began to congregate in the wide, chill waters of Casco Bay, Maine.
On September 16, HX 150, the war’s first transatlantic convoy to be partly shepherded by an American escort, set sail from Nova Scotia (HX meant “Halifax to Great Britain”). Its merchantmen left port in the ch
arge of the Canadian navy, a prodigy that in two years had managed to grow itself from almost nothing into an armada of four hundred ships. The next day the Canadians were relieved by five American destroyers: Upshur, Ericsson, Eberle, Ellis, and Dallas, Captain Morton L. Deyo commanding. Captain Deyo had a great many inexperienced sailors in his division. The newly minted communications men who had to take down the messages from the convoy’s commander flashed out in Morse code by signal lamp were swamped by the commodore’s goodwill. No cool British taciturnity from Rear Admiral Manners: he greeted the newcomers with “I am very delighted to have all of you to guard this convoy for the next few days,” and followed this with “Very many thanks for your complete list of ships. Yes, we are taking the Iceland ships. When relief escort arrives, I will pass the papers to him. Will you please direct ships for Iceland to form on the port side well clear and we will take them on? I presume they have no one experienced in signals so would it not be better to put them in one column and follow the leader? Will appreciate your advice.”
The Americans turned up no U-boats, which was probably just as well, but the convoy was not dull. Some of the freighters, worn to near ruin by two years of war steaming, flagged astern and had to be harried back into line. The SS Nigaristan opted out of the war by bursting into flames without German assistance, and the Eberle stood by her through a midnight gale and managed to bring off the entire crew.
The genial Manners did not fail to notice this. When, south of Iceland, the convoy reached the momp (a dismal word confected from “midocean meeting place,” where the Americans turned over their charges to the Royal Navy), he sent a final garrulous message that nobody resented having to take down: “Comconvoy to Comescort: Please accept my best congratulations on the brand of work and efficiencies of all your ships in looking after us so very well, and my very grateful thanks for all your kindly advice and help. Wish you all success with best of luck and good hunting. If you come across Admiral Nimitz, give him my love. We were great friends some years ago out in China.”