Pearl Harbor Betrayed (14 page)

The difficulty is that the entire country is in a dozen minds about the war—to stay out altogether, to go in against Germany in the Atlantic, to concentrate against Japan in the Pacific and the Far East—I simply cannot predict the outcome. Gallup polls, editorials, talk on the Hill (and I might add, all of which is irresponsible) constitute a rising tide for action in the Far East if the Japanese go into Singapore or the Netherlands East Indies. This can not be ignored and we must have in the back of our heads the possibility of having to swing to that tide.… This would mean that any reinforcement to the Atlantic might become impossible, and, in any case, would be reduced by just so much as we would send to the Asiatic [Fleet]. And that might be a very serious matter for Britain.
30

In April, Roosevelt finally got his way with a warship foray into the western Pacific, but, at Stark's urging, the form of the voyage was a nonthreatening southern route “practice cruise” to Australia and New Zealand. The ships taking part were the heavy cruisers
Chicago
and
Portland,
the light cruisers
Brooklyn
and
Savannah,
and Destroyer Squadron (Desron) 3. Their crews received a hearty welcome in the Commonwealth nations, and some solid training was obtained along the way. No harm was done and possibly some good was achieved. But Stark was truly alarmed by Roosevelt's newest “harebrained scheme.” He quoted the President in a personal letter to Kimmel, dated 19 April:

The President said (and incidentally when I open up to you this way I don't expect you to quote the President and I know that there is nobody who can keep things secret better than you can): “Betty just as soon as those ships come back from Australia and New Zealand, or perhaps a little before, I want to send some more out. I just want to keep them popping up here and there, and keep the Japs guessing.” This, of course, is right down the State Department's alley. To my mind a lot of State Department's suggestions and recommendations are nothing less than childish (don't quote me) and I have practically said so in so many words in the presence of all concerned.
31

Popping up all over the Pacific to say “Boo!” to the Japanese was to play a dangerous game, in Stark's view. Following an alternative tactic, he decided this time to see Roosevelt's chips and raise him. He proposed a plan to send a carrier force out northwest of Hawaii to a point within striking distance of Japan, which would really give the Japanese a thrill, given “their unholy fear of bombing.” (In his letter of 25 February, Stark had advised Kimmel that, in planning offensive raids after the opening of hostilities, he should consider carrier bombing attacks on the “inflammable Japanese cities—ostensibly on military objectives.”) The tactic worked. “I thought for once, if I could, I would give the State Department a shock,” Stark wrote to Kimmel. “I had a broad inward smile when the State Department in effect said: ‘Please Mr. President, don't let him do it'; or words to that effect. It was a little too much for them.”
32

Whenever he turned his gaze to the Pacific Roosevelt was edgy and erratic. Or so Stark thought. To his confidant and former director of war plans “Savvy” Cooke, skipper now of the flagship
Pennsylvania,
Stark complained, “To some of my very pointed questions, which all of us would like to have answered, I get a smile or a ‘Betty, please don't ask me that.'” He confided to Cooke that he had more than once offered to resign. “Policy seems to be something never fixed, always fluid and changing.” He said of his letter, “I think you should burn it after showing it to Kimmel.”
33
(Fortunately for history Yamamoto's and Stark's addressees did not always observe that admonition.) If it is true, as is often alleged, that Roosevelt all along wanted to go to war, it is far from certain that war with Japan was the war he wanted—at least not now.

*   *   *

By contrast, where Germany was concerned, Roosevelt was totally focused, resolute, confident, and daring, to the extent of giving Admiral Ernest J. King, commander in chief of the Atlantic Fleet, license to make war at the time of his choosing in the North Atlantic Ocean. There the enemy was the one arm of the German Navy (Kreigsmarine) that by summer 1941 was still playing a significant offensive role in the war against England. Hitler's heavy units were then frozen in port, the Führer not willing to see happen to them what happened to the battleship
Bismarck,
which was famously sunk by a combined air-sea force of the Royal Navy on 27 May 1941. The still active arm was the submarine fleet (
Unterseebootwaffe
), commanded by Admiral Karl Dönitz. From the first week of September 1939, Dönitz's U-boats had waged a tonnage war (
Tonnagekrieg
) against Britain's merchant fleet of freighters and tankers in a campaign to sink more British tonnage than could be replaced with new construction. Britain depended on her ocean trade for all her fuel oil and refined gasoline, most of her raw materials, and half of her food. Dönitz's staff had calculated in 1940 that the U-boats would have to inflict a monthly loss rate of 700,000 gross register tons (GRT) in order to strangle Britain's armed forces and industries and to starve into submission Britain's people. (The British had estimated that 600,000 would do them in.) By July 1941, however, they had never reached that goal, nor would they in the entire course of the war, excepting November 1942, when they sank 118 ships for a record 743,321 GRT. Because of the unexpectedly productive American shipyards, in that same November merchant ship construction passed and continued to pass thereafter, with ever increasing plurality, the figures for merchant ship losses to U-boats. It was clear by that date that Dönitz's tonnage battle was not winnable.

But it was not so clear earlier, in 1940 and 1941, when Roosevelt worried that what German chancellor Adolf Hitler had failed to do with his Luftwaffe he might well accomplish with his Unterseebootwaffe: take Britain out of the war. That would be a disaster for the British people, but it would be an equal disaster for American arms should they be called upon to rescue the European continent from Naziism, since the British Isles were the indispensable jumping-off point, and an unsinkable aircraft carrier, for mounting that endeavor. Too, a technologically advanced German armed force, with perhaps the entire British Home Fleet under its swastika, would pose a grave threat to America's own security. Therefore, in September 1940, with solid Gallup poll backing (62 percent), Roosevelt transferred fifty obsolete World War I–era four-stack destroyers to Britain in exchange for bases under ninety-nine-year leases in the Bahamas, Jamaica, Antigua, St. Lucia, Trinidad, and British Guiana. Ten of the destroyers barely made it across the Atlantic, but even in lame condition the old tin cans could be put to work in the Royal Navy's antisubmarine effort. By strict interpretation the warship transfers violated the neutrality provisions set down in the Hague Conference of 1907, and a grateful Winston Churchill wrote nine years later that the exchange “was a decidedly unneutral act by the United States” that would have “justified” Hitler in declaring war.
34
Berlin was appropriately indignant, but the declaration would not come until fourteen months later, after Pearl Harbor.

Acting boldly during February and March, Roosevelt froze German and Italian assets in the United States; seized German and Italian ships in U.S. harbors “to prevent their sabotage”; and created a Support Force of twenty-seven destroyers to escort merchant ship convoys from North American ports as far as Iceland. In March he devised the Lend-Lease program so that the U.S. industrial base could become the “arsenal of democracy.” On 9 April he authorized the establishment of U.S. military bases and meteorological stations in Greenland. And, nine days later, he extended the “Western Hemisphere,” which, he said, the United States had a duty to defend, to about 26 degrees west longitude, or 2,300 nautical miles east of New York. The new jurisdiction, covering some four-fifths of the Atlantic, including Greenland and the European Azores, Roosevelt brazenly called the Pan-American Security Zone. In July, he extended his conception of the Western Hemisphere even farther, to 22 degrees west to include Iceland; and at the (forced) invitation of the Icelandic government, he dispatched an occupation force of 4,095 Marines to Reykjavík. The United States was edging into the Battle of the Atlantic. And with the occupation of Iceland, it was compromising its condemnation of the Japanese occupation of northern Indo-China, as Tokyo was quick to point out.

*   *   *

During spring, summer, and fall of 1941 there were incidents at sea. On 10 April, while rescuing survivors from a torpedoed Dutch freighter off the coast of Iceland, the destroyer USS
Niblack
made sonar contact with what she thought was a submerged U-boat, range closing.
Niblack
dropped three depth charges—the first American shots fired in World War II. No visible damage resulted, and German naval archives make no mention of the event, leading to the conclusion that the sonar contact was a false one. On 21 May, a 5,000-ton American freighter, SS
Robin Moor,
sailing under the stars and bars in the South Atlantic, was torpedoed and sunk by
U-69
(Kapitänleutnant [hereafter Kptlt.] Jost Metzler). The crew and passengers were found and rescued. Calling the sinking “ruthless,” Roosevelt declared an “unlimited national emergency” on 27 May. Berlin turned a deaf ear to Washington's demand for restitution. On 20 June,
U-203
(Kptlt. Rolf Mützelburg) attempted to attack the U.S. battleship
Texas
in the western approaches to Britain, but during a sixteen-hour pursuit was not able to overtake the faster battlewagon. Her commander, Mützelburg, explained to Dönitz that he thought the warship was British because it was east of the Pan-American Security Zone and inside the declared German blockade area surrounding the British Isles. On the U.S. side, the event would not become known until after the war.

Officially, Hitler did not want such incidents to occur, since he was not yet ready to make war against the United States. Dönitz dutifully issued warnings to his commanders to scrupulously avoid all U.S. naval and merchant vessels. And there were no further incidents until 4 September, when inadvertent action by a Royal Air Force Coastal Command bomber caused
U-652
(Kptlt. Georg-Werner Fraatz) to launch two torpedoes, ten minutes apart, at a World War I–era, 200-ton flush-deck “four-piper” destroyer, USS
Greer,
which was steaming toward Iceland with mail, freight, and military passengers. It was the first German attack on a U.S. Navy warship in the war. The bomber involved, an American-made Hudson, had warned
Greer
by blinker light that a U-boat lay submerged athwart her track about ten miles ahead; then, when seeing the destroyer come upon the position and begin a sonar tracking pattern, the bomber dropped four depth charges randomly and headed back to base. Coming to periscope depth,
U-652
's commander saw that the destroyer was of the same class that had been traded to Britain, and, thinking that the depth charges had come from
Greer,
considered himself justified in attacking her. Both torpedoes missed.
Greer
thereupon dropped nineteen depth charges, without effect, and broke off the engagement ten hours after first contact. In Washington, Roosevelt seized on this first “exchange-of-fire” event to demand that the U-boat responsible for the “unprovoked” attack (which he would later learn was not an exact description) be “eliminated” (which was not exactly possible). In a “fireside chat” to the nation on 11 September he denounced the U-boats as “rattlesnakes of the Atlantic” and declared that henceforth U.S. warships would “shoot on sight” (as the press put it) all German and Italian vessels discovered in Security Zone waters. Sixteen days later, addressing a Navy Day audience, Roosevelt himself used the “shoot on sight” phrase in presenting his newly assertive position, which drew a 62 percent approval rating in a Gallup poll published on 2 October.
35

Most histories about this period assign the origin of Roosevelt's “shoot on sight” order to the
Greer
event. But documents found in the Modern Military Branch collection of the National Archives and in the Operational Archives and Library of the Naval Historical Center at the Washington Navy Yard disclose that the “shoot on sight” order was originally given two months before, in July.
36
After
Greer
Roosevelt was merely articulating in public operational war orders that Admiral King had issued to his escort ship captains on 1 and 18 July: “Destroy hostile forces which threaten shipping of U.S. and Iceland flag”; “My interpretation of threat to U.S. or Iceland flag shipping, whether escorted or not, is that threat exists when potentially hostile vessels are actually within
sight or sound contact
of such shipping or its escorts [emphasis added].”
37
And on 19 July King added a spatial dimension to his order: Operation Order No. 6-41 directed U.S. naval forces to attack any U-boats or other German or Italian (and, one supposes, Japanese, if he thought that there were any around) warships found within one hundred miles of an American-escorted convoy to or from Iceland.
38
Thus, King went to war four and a half months before 7 December—notice of which action was never transmitted by Main Navy to Admiral Kimmel at Pearl Harbor.

No Axis ships were detected or attacked in the undeclared war that King waged beginning in July. Had there been, according to the third article of the Tripartite Pact, Japan (theoretically) would have been obligated to come to the aid of her German ally. Of course, the loss of just one U-boat or one surface vessel might not have been enough to trigger the pact's provisions. But if that surface vessel was a
capital
ship the outrage might have risen to a different order of magnitude. That King was plainly prepared to go that far may be gathered from an extraordinary step he took on 5 November, when he dispatched Task Force 1, consisting of battleships
Idaho
and
Mississippi
(transfers from Kimmel's Pacific Fleet), cruisers
Tuscaloosa
and
Wichita,
with three destroyers, to sink the German pocket battleship
Admiral Scheer
(or possibly the superbattleship
Tirpitz,
sister ship of
Bismarck
), which British naval intelligence predicted would sortie from her base in Norway and enter the transatlantic convoy lanes. Under King's direct command, Task Force 1 took up attack positions athwart the Denmark Strait (between Iceland and Greenland), through which
Scheer/Tirpitz
was expected to pass. As events unfolded, it was
Scheer
who was the intended intruder, and she was kept in port by machinery damage. Had the German raider attempted to force the strait, as planned, it is very likely that she would have been sunk by the combined firepower of King's task force, and Hitler would have had no option but to declare war on the United States. The noted German historian Dr. Jürgen Rohwer told this writer that, while the loss of fifty men in a U-boat could be kept quiet, the loss of a capital ship with one thousand hands could not. Pride, face, and anger would have caused the Führer to move his declaration of war forward from December to November. Japan, we may assume, would have followed suit. Pearl Harbor would have gone on maximum alert, and, both because the Japanese Combined Fleet was not ready to sail that early in November, and because the element of surprise would have been lost altogether, the events of 7 December
might not have happened at all, or as they did
.
39