The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (376 page)

W
e have not yet declared or taken a direct part in a shooting war,” declared a September 2
New York Times
editorial. “But we have taken a position which must force us ultimately to take such a direct part if our present policy does not prove sufficient to defeat Hitler. It is a position from which we cannot now retreat… a position from which the overwhelming majority of Americans have no wish to retreat.” No one seriously thought that the “present policy” of avoiding conflict with Germany while supplying Britain food and weapons would bring down Hitler. In essence, the
New York Times
had proclaimed: We have taken a position that at some point will lead to war, and we will stick by that position.
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That line of thought held that America was a ship drifting toward war, and that wasn’t good enough for Churchill. To persuade Roosevelt to steer America into the war remained Churchill’s priority for the remainder of the year. When persuasion failed, the utility of chicanery presented itself. When his pleas to Roosevelt for more American naval action in the eastern Atlantic went unheeded, he cooked up schemes. One night earlier in the year, Churchill, Winant, and Harriman chatted over drinks about the benefit to Britain of an “incident” on the high seas involving a German attack on an American ship. The U.S. government—at least Congress—would have been shocked, and anything but thankful, had it learned that Winston Churchill was engaged in a ploy to precipitate a widening of the war, at America’s expense. His request that American ships locate and track
Bismarck
had been an attempt to drag the Yanks in. As were his pleas for American naval patrols in the Azores. Throughout the spring and summer, Roosevelt refused Churchill’s bait, and for good reason. The president had no solution to the problems that would arise from a U.S. warship running into the wrong German ship in the wrong place and with disastrous results. Roosevelt could only hope that nothing unfortunate took place on the high seas until such time as the U.S. Navy and the American people were prepared, militarily and emotionally, for war.
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Then, at Argentia Roosevelt himself brought up the value of “an incident” on the high seas, and told Churchill that the United States planned to put at least one U.S. merchantman, flying the U.S. flag, in every convoy under escort by U.S. warships. The challenge to Hitler was obvious; were he to shoot at an American merchant ship guarded by American warships,
he would face the consequences. Again, it seemed as if Roosevelt had given Churchill what he sought.

The incident duly occurred on September 4, when the destroyer USS
Greer,
while making a mail run to Iceland, made sonar contact with a U-boat.
Greer
notified the British of the position and waited for British destroyers to show up. None appeared.
Greer,
meanwhile, dodged two torpedoes fired from the lurking U-boat, while the German sub dodged nineteen depth charges loosed by
Greer.
This potentially incendiary business on the seas ended with
Greer
and its crew steaming unscathed into port. Roosevelt seized the occasion on September 11 to deliver another of his fireside chats, one in which he brought America nearer to outright involvement in the European war. Declaring that Germany was guilty of an “act of piracy” in attacking
Greer,
he unleashed American ships and planes for offensive action. In waters “which we deem necessary for our defense,” he declared, “American naval vessels and American planes will no longer wait until Axis submarines lurking under the water, or Axis raiders on the surface of the sea, strike their deadly blow first.” They would shoot on sight. By moving the American defense zone even farther east, Roosevelt had, in effect, declared “undeclared war” in the mid-Atlantic. He then proclaimed—as he had to Churchill at Argentia—the right of U.S. ships to escort any nation’s ships, anywhere. Still, as he had in late April, he kept his warships out of the hottest battle zones—the Northwest Approaches, the Azores, and along the West African coast—where the dangers to British convoys bound from Britain around the Cape to the Middle East were greatest.
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“There has now come a time,” Roosevelt told his countrymen, “when you and I must see the cold inexorable necessity of saying to these inhuman, unrestrained seekers of world conquest and permanent world domination by the sword: ‘You seek to throw our children and our children’s children into your form of terrorism and slavery. You have now attacked our own safety. You shall go no further.’ ” The United States sought “no shooting war with Hitler,” he declared, “but neither do we want peace so much that we are willing to pay for it by permitting him to attack… our ships while they are on legitimate business.” To that end, he asked Congress to amend the Neutrality Acts such that merchantmen could be armed (cargo ships were at the time allowed to carry only a handgun and harpoons). He wanted those ships, once armed, to sail under the escort of U.S. warships. Congress acceded to Roosevelt’s wishes, in essence claiming sovereignty of the seas in America’s name, another virtual declaration of war. Such measures as Roosevelt proposed were costly, but America now spent willingly. The production decline of the first two quarters was reversed. By September, the U.S. government, not even at war, was plowing
$1.8 billion per week into war production, more than was spent at the height of the Great War. With each new motion to Congress, with each new address to Americans, with each new contract let out for planes and tanks, Roosevelt edged closer to war, too close for the America Firsters, yet still not close enough for Churchill.
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On October 17 a second and far more serious incident than the
Greer
episode took place. That day, the destroyer USS
Kearny,
escorting a North Atlantic convoy, took a German torpedo in the side; eleven sailors belowdecks were killed. American blood had been spilled, but still Congress remained silent, and America remained at peace.

Then, on October 31, the old four-stack destroyer USS
Reuben James,
escorting a convoy south of Iceland, steamed into the crosshairs of a U-boat, which with two torpedoes sent
Reuben James
and 115 of its crew of 159 to the bottom. Here was the sort of incident that started wars. Churchill telegraphed Roosevelt his regrets: “I am grieved with loss of life you have suffered with
Reuben James.
I salute the land of unending challenge.” But the
Reuben James
was not to prove the
Lusitania
of World War Two. Churchill understood now that only an incident far greater than the sinking of a small warship—which had been sailing, after all, in harm’s way—would bring America into the war. He admitted as much when he told the War Cabinet the next day that Roosevelt faced “difficulties… as a result of the slow development of American opinion and the peculiarities of the American Constitution. Nobody but Congress could
declare
war. It was however in the president’s power to make war without declaring it.”
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Churchill knew after the
Reuben James
went down that this was a war America would declare on its own terms in its own time for its own reasons, or not declare at all. He thus advised his War Cabinet that “in the last twelve months American opinion had moved under his [Roosevelt’s] leadership to an extent nobody could have anticipated.” As well, he told the cabinet, the American “Navy was escorting the Atlantic convoys; and finally they were taking a firm line with the Japanese”—though a far less firm line than Roosevelt had promised at Argentia. Churchill said that it would “be a grave error on his part to press President Roosevelt to act in advance of American opinion.” Not only would it be a grave error to press Roosevelt, it would be futile. Americans and their president were not to be pressed. On several occasions Churchill voiced his preference to trade six months’ worth of supplies for an immediate declaration of war. He’d have to satisfy himself with the supplies, for he’d get no war from America, declared or undeclared, until America was willing.
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Roosevelt had injected for effect into his September 11 address a phrase that resonated with beer-and-a-shot Americans: “When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck before you crush
him.” It was just the sort of turn of phrase, brash and dashing, that Churchill relished. Yet by November 1 the rattlesnake had struck repeatedly: USS
Greer, Kearny, Reuben James.
American sailors had drowned. Roosevelt’s threat had been cold and clear, but while his actions, in relation to his words, appeared to be ambiguous, they were not: America had been attacked and America had done nothing.
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B
ack in May, a few days after
Bismarck
went down, Churchill cabled his thanks to Roosevelt for declaring a state of emergency in the Atlantic and for his promise of shipping more matériel, on American ships, to the Middle East. Churchill concluded the cable with the arithmetic of battleships in the Atlantic: Britain and Germany had traded great ships, but Germany could not afford the trade. Elated over
Bismarck’
s demise, Churchill ended the telegram with a prediction: “The effect upon the Japanese will be highly beneficial. I expect they’re doing all their sums again.” In fact, the Japanese had been doing just that for quite some time.
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The previous year, Churchill (after the Americans declined his request to rattle their saber on his behalf in the Pacific) planned to send
Hood
and a squadron of cruisers and destroyers to Singapore in order to show the flag and give the Japanese something to think about. That option was now off the table;
Hood
was gone. In late October, to discourage any Japanese incursions westward toward Singapore or India, Churchill dispatched
Prince of Wales
to join the battle cruiser
Repulse,
already on station near Singapore. He informed Roosevelt of
Prince of Wales’
s mission, and outlined his Pacific strategy, such as it was: “This [
Prince of Wales
] ought to serve as a deterrent on Japan. There is nothing like having something that can catch and kill anything.”
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Churchill’s love of the Royal Navy betrayed his judgment. A 35,000-ton fast battleship couldn’t catch an airplane, and only with great shooting skill and good luck could it kill an airplane. Even after the British victory at Taranto, even after the disastrous attacks on
Southampton
and
Illustrious,
after the carnage inflicted by the Luftwaffe upon Cunningham’s fleet at Crete, Churchill could not concede that an airplane armed with just one torpedo or a single five-hundred-pound bomb might be able to kill his fast battleships. That an Asian race might accomplish such a feat did not square with his belief in the stature of Englishmen and their warships, and the importance of both in the orderly conduct of world affairs. Churchill “attributed to battleships,” recalled Ian Jacob, “a power… that they no longer retained.”
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Churchill was one in his thinking with the old admirals in the navies of the Western world—including the British Admiralty—for whom it was accepted fact that successfully dropping a bomb from several thousand feet onto the deck of a moving battleship was a matter of chance. As for torpedoes, an aerial torpedo attack might prove dangerous on the open ocean, but in the navies of the world and among naval aviators it was accepted fact that in the shallow waters of anchorages, torpedo attacks were not possible. Torpedoes dropped from airplanes hit the water and descended more than one hundred feet before rising to running depth; when dropped into shallow harbors they simply buried themselves in the mud and posed no threat. Yet the British at Taranto the previous November had carried off just such an operation. In Japan, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto and his naval aviation planners were duly impressed by the raid, and took note especially of the depth of the waters the British torpedoes had run in, just forty feet in places, shallower even than the waters of Pearl Harbor, home of the U.S. Pacific fleet. Some within the U.S. government grasped the turn taken by naval aviation at Taranto. Admiral Harold Stark, chief of naval operations, suggested to Admiral James Richardson, commander in chief of the U.S. fleet in Hawaii, that torpedo nets be strung at Pearl Harbor. Richardson, believing the nets would only get in the way of his ships, did not deploy them.
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