by Richard Snow
By the end of the next month, American destroyers had taken nearly seven hundred ships safely across.
The Rattlesnakes of the Atlantic
America’s first losses, 1941
A third of the way into The Cruel Sea, his justly celebrated novel about the Battle of the Atlantic, Nicholas Monsarrat’s hero, Keith Lockhart—as his creator was, an officer aboard one of the too lively corvettes—takes stock of the new presence. “There were, as yet, no Americans officially upon the scene; their two years’ profitable neutrality had not yet been ended by the galvanic shot-in-the-arm of Pearl Harbour. But here and there they were to be met: flyers relaxing at Liverpool between trans-ocean trips, and sailors in the anonymous middle reaches of the Atlantic. For they were now escorting some of the convoys, from American ports to a point where they could be taken over by the British escort: strange-looking escorts, with long names often beginning with ‘Jacob’ or ‘Ephraim,’ would appear from the mist, and spell out morse messages very slowly and gently, for the dull British to assimilate as best they could. [It evidently did not occur to these veterans that they were being treated to inexperience rather than condescension.] ‘They must think we’re a lot of kids,’ said Leading-Signalman Wells disgustedly one day, when an exceptionally prudent American operator had tried his patience to the limit. ‘It’s like Lesson Number One back in barracks. And what a bloody ignorant way to spell “harbour.”’ … But the main reaction was a pleasant sense of comradeship; it was good to have some more ships lending a hand, at this time of strain, and the fact that the trans-Atlantic link was being completed in this natural way, American handing over to British, gave the latter a grateful and brotherly satisfaction. The Americans were still out of the war; but between Lend-Lease, and this unobtrusive naval effort, they were certainly doing their best round the edges.”
Those edges were drawing closer. Five days before HX-150 set out, President Roosevelt had come on the radio with a fierce speech. A U-boat had attacked an American destroyer, the Greer. “We have sought no shooting war with Hitler. We do not seek it now. But neither do we want peace so much that we are willing to pay for it by permitting him to attack our naval and merchant ships. … When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him. These Nazi raiders are the rattlesnakes of the Atlantic.”
What had actually happened was a wan provocation for such vehement rhetoric.
On September 4 the USS Greer, one of the old four-stackers that hadn’t been handed over to Britain, was making for Iceland. A hundred miles or so south of Reykjavik, a British patrol bomber sloped overhead to report, “Enemy U-boat submerging about ten miles northeast.”
The captain of the Greer, Lawrence H. Frost, who had had her for just a little over a month, swung to follow the submarine. He called his crew to battle stations and tracked the boat while broadcasting its position. He signaled the bomber, which asked if Frost intended to attack. The American said he did not, and the Briton, low on fuel, tossed four depth charges into the sea and headed landward.
Meanwhile Captain Frost kept dogging the German. After several hours the U-boat’s skipper, George-Werner Fraatz, came to the surface and fired a torpedo. Once shot at, the Greer attacked with depth charges, but Captain Fraatz had been in this game longer than Captain Frost and had little trouble getting away. The most significant thing to emerge from this bloodless first battle between the Kriegsmarine and the U.S. navy was FDR’s speech. Toward its end, the president, after making his rattlesnake metaphor, declared, “In the waters we deem necessary for our defense, American naval vessels and American planes will no longer wait until Axis submarines lurking under the waters … strike their deadly blow—first … our patrolling vessels and planes will protect all merchant ships—not only American ships but ships of any flag—engaged in commerce in our defensive waters.”
Winston Churchill knew what this meant: “Hitler will have to choose between losing the Battle of the Atlantic or coming into frequent conflict with United States ships.”
Admiral Raeder put it more bluntly. He told Hitler that the president of the United States had declared war on Germany: “There is no longer any difference between British and American ships!”
But still Hitler stayed his hand against the Americans.
Nevertheless, as Churchill had said, convoy meant “frequent conflict.”
At this time theory, not long enough tested, held that the escorts should stand in close to the ships they were protecting—one thousand to fifteen hundred yards. This was comforting to the merchantmen, but was an inflexible and hampering arrangement against U-boat attacks. And so it proved on the night of October 15.
Convoy SC 48, some fifty merchantmen heading east from Canada, was heavily escorted—seven destroyers and seven corvettes at one point—but it was having a bad night. Doenitz’s group tactics were working as well as even that exacting commander could wish. Half a dozen merchantmen had been destroyed since sundown. Each foundered beneath the light of flares, red distress rockets and livid star shells, cold, fuming, and transient. The flares were sent up in hopes of illuminating the attackers, but they only dazzled the lookouts while offering them nothing but glimpses of the tormented convoy. At midnight a Norwegian tanker exploded and, burning, lit the scene more brightly and steadily than any flare could. A Canadian corvette hurried down the convoy to find survivors, while the destroyer USS Kearny came forward at fifteen knots. The American ship saw the corvette in time to avoid a collision, but backing her engines left the destroyer all but motionless and silhouetted by the blazing tanker. The U-568 fired a spread of three torpedoes. Two missed; the one that didn’t instantly killed seven men in the No. 1 fireroom. In his history of this long, peculiar quasi-war, Patrick Abbazia thought it worth setting down their names—Luther Curtis, George Calvert, Russell Wade, Sidney Larraviere, Herman Gateway, Louis Dobnikar, Iral Stoltz—because “they were the first to die under their own flag in World War II.”
Their ship didn’t die. The Kearny was new—built at a cost of $5 million and launched just the year before—and she had a strong double hull. She also had a No. 2 fireroom; that is, each of her two engines was served from separate compartments that could be sealed off and made watertight. The Kearny was under way just minutes after being struck, and dawn found her making for Iceland at ten knots. The old Greer came up to give her a hand, and so they came safely home together, the first U.S. navy ship of the war to be fired on and the first to be hit.
The president’s response was his strongest statement yet on the Atlantic struggle: “We have wished to avoid shooting. But the shooting has started. And history has recorded who fired the first shot. In the long run, however, all that will matter is who fires the last shot.
“America has been attacked. The USS Kearny is not just a navy ship. She belongs to every man, woman, and child in this nation.”
Not every citizen felt the warmth of that common ownership. After the newspapers reported that George Calvert’s mother had collapsed upon learning of her son’s death, the Calvert family received a mocking letter telling them, “Your dear son was sent to his death by the murdering imbecile head of our Government.” But despite this bit of malevolence, the public seemed largely undisturbed by what was going on in the Atlantic. Robert Sherwood thought that a fatalistic torpor had settled on his country. “The American people,” he wrote later, “always have considered the men in their regular armed forces—Navy, Army and, most of all, Marine Corps—as rugged mercenaries who signed up voluntarily, as do policemen or firemen, for hazardous service. There was little or no self-identification of the normal American civilian with the professional American soldier or sailor. In the case of drafted men, however, the attitude was entirely different. They were ‘our boys’ who must be kept out of harm’s way at all costs. Since there were no drafted men in the Navy at the time, there was no great popular indignation against Hitler for the attacks on the destroyers; but what is most important is that
neither was there any serious popular indignation against Roosevelt for his responsibility in thus exposing our ships.”
FDR made his tough speech on Navy Day (October 27, the birthday of that vigorous supporter of the service Theodore Roosevelt). Four days later, an American destroyer whose name may have amused Nicholas Monsarrat, the USS Reuben James, was helping see HX 156 into a cold Halloween morning when a lookout on Captain Erich Topp’s U-552 made out the convoy. Dawn was still distant enough for the merchantmen to seem little more than patches of deeper blackness in the general black, but as Topp followed the convoy, a stratum of dim gray silhouetted one of the destroyers that was guarding it.
Topp’s job was to sink tankers, not destroyers. He knew, though, that the same faint glow that showed him the warship would soon strengthen enough to reveal his boat to its lookouts; if he took the time to go around it and get at the convoy, he would surely be seen. Well, better a destroyer than nothing. Topp fired two torpedoes. One hit the ship in nearly the same spot on her port side where the Kearny had been struck on her starboard. But the Reuben James was not a new ship; she was a four-stacker, older than many of the men who crewed her. She had no double hull, and fewer watertight compartments. The torpedo ignited her forward magazine. The Reuben James split in two just in front of her fourth stack, and the forward part was gone in seconds, taking with it every officer and the captain, Tex Edwards. The stern stayed afloat for perhaps five minutes, giving some of the men there the chance to escape into the winter sea.
Griffith Baily Coale, the painter, was with the convoy aboard the destroyer Hilary P. Jones.“A sudden loud explosion brings me upright. Know instantly that is a torpedo and not a depth charge. Spring from my bunk, jump for the bulkhead door, spin the wheel releasing the dogs, and land on the deck in a split second, with General Quarters still rasping. It is not us. A mile ahead a rising cloud of dark smoke hangs over the black loom of a ship. With a terrific roar, a column of orange flame towers high into the night air as her magazines go up, subsides, leaving a great black pall of smoke licked by moving tongues of orange.” The destroyer Niblack came up to keep watch over the Hilary P. Jones while she picked up survivors. “Before we know it, we hear the cursing, praying, and hoarse shouts for help, and we are all among her men, like black shiny seals in the oily water … blown up and choking with oil and water, they are like small animals caught in molasses.”
The crewmen of the Jones hung cargo nets over the side, threw lines, went into the sea themselves to help. “It is a lengthy and desperately hard job to get these men aboard. Our men are working feverishly, but less than half have come over the rail and thirty-eight minutes have passed.”
Still, many would live. More would have if the soundman on the Niblack hadn’t got a contact. The Hilary P. Jones confirmed it. Now came the wrenching decision that would have to be made so many times in the years ahead, that would be forced on my father’s destroyer division in the very last days of the war. Was the contact firm? Was it really a U-boat? If the chances were good it was, the decision was made.
The two destroyers put on speed and dropped depth charges. It was day now, bright enough for Coale to see that the heart of each white explosion was “tinged with blood color in the dawning.”
The destroyers killed some of their own with those depth charges; they never got Topp; but they did, in the end, rescue forty-five men from the Reuben James, something of a triumph considering the circumstances. One hundred and fifteen died with the first American fighting ship sunk in the war.
The folksinger Woody Guthrie read of the sinking in the New York City newspapers and wrote a song about it. He began with the honorable intention of mentioning every dead sailor by name—
There’s Harold Hammer Beasley, a first rate man at sea
From Hinton, West Virginia, he had his first degree.
There’s Jim Franklin Benson, a good machinist’s mate
Come up from North Carolina, to sail the Reuben James.
—but was eventually persuaded that this was too unwieldy. The chorus, as it finally worked itself out, distills all the names into a question we remember today:
Tell me what were their names, tell me what were their names,
Did you have a friend on the good Reuben James?
Most Americans did not. “Among the general public,” Sherwood wrote, “there seemed to be more interest in the Army–Notre Dame football game.”
Roosevelt did nothing. There was nothing he could do. Earlier in the month he had harried through Congress an amendment to the Neutrality Law that allowed the arming of merchant ships and permitted them to sail in war zones. He had not done it easily, and now, Sherwood said, “He had no more tricks left. The hat from which he had pulled so many rabbits was empty.”
The status quo may have been exasperating for the president; it was worse for the men out in the Atlantic. They were there on duty they were forbidden to even talk about during their infrequent shore leave, and the duty was severe. No North Atlantic winter is mild, and this one was proving harder than most. The ceaseless wind occasionally sent up waves powerful enough to punch in a gun shield, or blast the glass in the wheelhouse windows into a helmsman’s face.
In a way, the people protecting the convoys lived the life of the very, very old. The simplest tasks were daunting in prospect, dangerous in performance. Everything was exhausting: going from the wardroom to the bridge was to navigate a hellish fun house where the floor might drop forty feet, and steel doorframes swivel sixty degrees in a deft, prankish attempt to break your spine. The seasick made themselves choke down food only because it was so much more painful to vomit on an empty stomach.
Every normal fixture became a peril. On the destroyer Lea, which had just lost two men washed overboard in a single day, the violent seas so agitated the deck-mounted torpedo tubes that one launched itself. The torpedo did not explode, but before it rolled overboard it clattered around the deck for five minutes and took off Electrician’s Mate Alfred Buck’s foot. When the Lea’s pharmacist’s mate knelt down to help Buck, the same seas that had knocked loose the torpedo broke one of his arms and one of his legs.
A sailor weary beyond enduring of the gyrating fireroom of the four-stacker Decatur cut his wrists with a razor blade. But not skillfully enough: his pragmatic shipmates bound the wounds and sent him back to his post.
Others sought less drastic ways to get out of it. There were desertions—so many that some ships had to put to sea badly shorthanded. In November, President Roosevelt, with the greatest reluctance, allowed draftees to be sent into the navy.
For the most part, though, the seamen stuck it out, gale after gale. In perpendicular seas, the escort captains endlessly badgered the merchant skippers to bring their ships nearer together, and the merchantmen endlessly protested that they couldn’t steer well enough in fifty-foot waves to keep close company. Do it anyway, the escorts said, and they tried, a freighter sometimes pitching so heavily forward that its propeller would rise clear of the water, a hazy, clamorous circle churning thin air while the ship shuddered though a series of train-wreck jolts. Seawater got into the fuel lines; pieces of ship continually disappeared into the wailing murk; on one destroyer the watch couldn’t be relieved for twelve hours because nobody would have been able to reach them alive, which condemned the lookouts to sixteen straight hours of excruciating vigilance.
Nobody sank a U-boat. Nobody saw a U-boat. Nevertheless, the American ships got fourteen convoys through safely during the five weeks between the sinking of the Reuben James on October 31 and the first Sunday in December 1941, which was the seventh.
A Present in the Führer’s Lap
Hitler declares war, 1941
The news from Pearl Harbor was big, and the men keeping watch over the convoys understood that. However, it struck them quite differently from how it did their civilian counterparts back in the States. Many shared the bleak gleam of pleasure a sailor in HX 156 expressed: “We’ll now give three silent cheers for the
bastards who jumped ship to join the Pacific Fleet.”
Sailors who had made sure that even during empty, exhausted gray days at anchor in Hvalfjordhur between patrols they could get their guns manned and firing within five minutes wondered what the hell the battleship sailors lazing on their sunny atoll had been thinking. A lot of Atlantic seamen believed they would finally have the chance to get warm, and they were right. Ships would begin steaming west to take the ghostly place of vessels the Japanese navy had stricken from our roster. Seaman Jernigan would happily leave Iceland and its unwelcoming inhabitants and, eventually, his battleship for destroyer duty on the other side of the world. Before too long the Canadian navy would be doing 49 percent of the Atlantic convoying, and the British 50 percent.
That American 1 percent who kept working the frigid convoy lanes had learned a great deal. Not quickly enough—nobody learns quickly enough in war—and not well enough yet. But they had survived a trying, lonely ordeal, and what they knew would be both strength and reassurance to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who were about to come join them.
WORD OF PEARL HARBOR reached the cruiser Vincennes during an Atlantic storm that had, earlier in the day, torn the ship’s Curtiss float plane from its moorings and flung it over the side. “It will be good,” said one of the officers, “to be fighting a declared war for a change.”
But it wasn’t a declared war, not for the Atlantic forces, not yet.
Germany had damaged one new American destroyer and sunk one old one and killed some 130 sailors. Japan had destroyed our main battle line in the Pacific and killed 2,500 men. The United States declared war the next day on the Empire of Japan, but not on Germany. Despite Admiral Stark’s careful formulation of the Germany First plan and our military’s acceptance of its principles, FDR didn’t see how he could go before Congress and ask for two declarations of war.