Читать книгу Mr. Roosevelt's Navy - Patrick Abazzia - Страница 20

7. Ceremonies Appropriate to a Neutral Nation

THE SUMMER OF 1940 was a hectic time for the Atlantic Squadron. The long absence of fleet units from the Atlantic had reduced shore facilities to the point that they could not adequately support the growing Squadron, especially south of Hampton Roads. Much essential overhaul work on the force’s aged destroyers had to be accomplished by their own crews and by the overworked tender Denebola. The upkeep of ships and the training of men continued to be impaired by Neutrality Patrol steaming. Transfer of personnel to new construction resulted in acute shortages of radiomen and sonar operators, and Admiral Ellis lamented that many of his skippers were in their first commands and a large percentage of his gunner’s mates seemed callow, “inexperienced recruits.” Antiaircraft ammunition and torpedo overhaul facilities were lacking, limiting AA battle practices and torpedo exercises. Yet the Squadron desperately needed intense gunnery and tactical training if it were to be ready to “perform efficiently” in a war emergency.

Admiral Ellis set up a destroyer type-command under Rear Admiral Ferdinand L. Reichmuth, an experienced, somewhat pedestrian officer, to conduct intensive training operations on a rotational basis. Reichmuth gave his best, but the Navy was robbing Peter to pay Paul, and the need for ships to carry out ever-increasing operational duties critically hampered the training program.¹

In early August, rumors and newspaper speculation concerning the possible transfer of destroyers to the Royal Navy impelled Atlantic Squadron staff officers to survey the readiness of all the force’s destroyers and make up a list of ships in order of their fitness for transfer. The precaution proved wise, for on the morning of 20 August, Admirals Ellis and Reichmuth received telephone instructions to fly to Washington immediately; their roster of ships to be transferred was quickly approved by the Department. Two destroyer divisions were recalled from patrol, armed, and made ready for hard service. On 3 September, the order went out: “Proceed with project to turn over fifty destroyers to appropriate British authorities at Halifax . . . .”

The old Aaron Ward, Abel P. Upshur, and Hale were the first to go. On 4 September the slim four-stackers, freshly painted, and flying the American flag but shorn of their commissioning pennants, steamed out of Boston harbor, churning white creases in the blue water, as pleased motorists on a nearby bridge honked horns and flashed headlights to cheer on the destroyermen bound on a novel venture.²

Admiral Reichmuth was worried about “this most unneutral mission” and gave much thought to the preservation of appearances. He was “most insistent” that under no circumstances were the American destroyermen to permit themselves to be photographed in the company of British personnel. Admiral Stark, doubtless in accord with the wishes of the President, decreed a simple decommissioning ceremony “as being appropriate under the circumstances for a neutral nation.”³

When the first eight American destroyers reached Halifax, they encountered the British transport Duchess of Richmond, her decks tiered with young British destroyermen; the meeting was one of the Prime Minister’s whimsical touches. The destroyers docked at the north side of Pier “B,” promptly took aboard British crews, and put to sea for an indoctrination cruise.

At 1000 on the morning of 9 September, the American crews lined up on the dock in front of their eight ships; the small indoctrination crews, usually consisting of one officer, normally the Exec, and eighteen of the most experienced ratings, remained out of sight below decks. There were no British personnel on the dock. Officers took station in front of their men; skippers remained on board until the colors were lowered. A bugle sounded “Attention,” then “To the Colors,” as the eight flags slowly dropped at the same time. The sailors felt the significance of the moment; a few of the older men shed some tears. Captains then came ashore and each took custody of his ship’s ensign, jack, and pennant. Abruptly, the blue-clad American crews marched quickly across the dock to waiting trains and embarked. Then British sailors marched out on to the dock and, while the American indoctrination crews waited below, recommissioned the destroyers with suitable pomp into the Royal Navy.⁴ Through one of Churchill’s felicitous instincts, the destroyers were christened after towns in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada which shared common names.

As the British had difficulty providing crews for the ships, the transfer proceedings extended into the winter. Usually the American indoctrination crews remained on board the British ships, training the new crews, for about ten days. It soon became a tradition for the British, on the day of departure, to stand the Americans to rum and cocktails. The British warships in port seemed unkempt to the innocent Americans, not yet at war, and a few of the British officers showed small signs of nervous irritability born of combat fatigue. For the most part, the gregarious Americans got on well with both the British and Canadians, partly because the British preferred them to the wild and unprofessional Canadians, who in turn preferred them to the stuffy and pedantic British.

The destroyers were transferred with full wartime allowances of arms, ammunition, stores, spare parts, and equipment. The ships were shined and clean to a degree astonishing to the British. Prior to the transfer, each ship had been allocated $2,500 for provisions and was stocked with items rare in the Royal Navy that fall: cereals, fruit juice, clams, chipped beef, canned vegetables and fruits, macaroni, gelatin, and cocoa. As this was not standard fare, Royal Navy bureaucrats insisted that it be taken ashore, and most of the inexperienced commanders of the destroyers foolishly complied. The wardroom crockery on the vessels was unneutral; it bore the blue anchor and USN logo of the American Navy. The British were most impressed with the graciousness and thoroughness with which the Americans had outfitted the old ships.

However, the British crews had difficulty in adjusting to the cantankerous four-stackers, partly on account of their inexperience. While some of the new skippers were proven officers who had lost their former ships in battle, others were younger men given their first command, or older men who might have been passed over in times of lesser urgency. Many of the enlisted men were but recently removed from recruit training depots.

Also, some of the American equipment was different, and required getting used to. The American sound gear was not as good as that of the Royal Navy and lacked any range recorder; the difficult water conditions off Halifax rendered sonar operations unsuccessful, further impairing British confidence in the equipment. The British found communications on the ships slower and more awkward than their own because fuses and switches were in different locations. They were unfamiliar with the .50-caliber AA machine guns mounted on the American destroyers and needed much work with the weapon. They did not like the vulnerable glass-enclosed bridges of the old destroyers. The officers deemed the American wardrooms, with their functional steel-framed furniture, overly austere, and found their cabins smaller than in British destroyers. The enlisted men, used to hammocks, complained that the American bunks were too soft. “It’s like lying on a bloody sack of jelly,” one man lamented. There was a general dislike of such modern refinements as speed keys and typewriters, which were deemed suited to business offices, but not to the hardy calling of Nelson, and out of place aboard a warship. It seemed that the traditional British virtuosity at sea had imbued the Royal Navy with a perhaps unhealthy spirit of conservatism.

Then there were the eccentricities of the ships. The four-stackers were originally fast and relatively durable, but as ancient “war babies,” mass produced quickly, they were not without the defects of premature birth. Their plating was thin and the watertight subdivision of their hulls was not up to modern standards, a structural problem to which advanced age contributed. They were not maneuverable; their turning circle was comparable to that of an old Texas-class battleship. They had been built in the days when escorts were not expected to protect convoys across the entire ocean, and so they lacked range. Long and slender ships, they rolled heavily in any kind of a sea, especially when their fuel was low. In the American Navy, it was common practice to take seawater into the empty fuel tanks as ballast, but the British feared fuel contamination and did not adopt the technique until grim experience demonstrated its necessity. Occasionally, there were condenser and generator breakdowns. The British crews found the destroyers difficult to steer in confined spaces; some thought that this was because the propellers were set too close together, while others thought it was because they were set too far apart. The Americans thought it was because of the inexperience of the British.⁵

Of the first group of eight ships, the Churchill (ex Herndon), Clare (ex Abel P. Upshur), Chesterfield (ex Welborn C. Wood), Cameron (ex Welles), Castleton (ex Aaron Ward), Chelsea (ex Crowninshield), Caldwell (ex Hale), Campbeltown (ex Buchanan), five left Halifax on schedule. Two were detained when the Chesterfield rammed the Churchill’s stern twice while maneuvering at close quarters, and the Cameron was briefly delayed by generator trouble. During Campbeltown’s voyage across the Atlantic, her officer of the deck fainted from seasickness.

Of the second octet, the Hamilton (ex Kalk), Georgetown (ex Maddox), Brighton (ex Cowell), Roxborough (ex Foote), Bath (ex Hopewell), Charleston (ex Abbot), St. Albans (ex Thomas), St. Marys (ex Doran), commissioned by the British on 23 September, only four were able to leave for England on schedule. The Hamilton and Georgetown sustained propeller damage in a collision while maneuvering to take on fuel; then, after being repaired, the unfortunate Hamilton ran aground on a rocky ledge, breaking her back, and she did not enter service for nine months. The Roxborough began the crossing with her sister ships, but excessive fuel consumption forced her to return; later she burned out a main bearing and required extensive work on her engineering plant.

The next group of six destroyers—the Annapolis (ex Mackenzie), Columbia (ex Haraden), St. Clair (ex Williams), Niagara (ex Thatcher), St. Croix (ex McCook), St. Francis (ex Bancroft)—was commissioned on the 24th of September and, since the ships were transferred to the Royal Canadian Navy, they were already at home.

The next group of eight—Beverley (ex Branch), Broadway (ex Hunt), Broadwater (ex Mason), Belmont (ex Satterlee), Burwell (ex Laub), Burnham (ex Aulick), Buxton (ex Edwards), Bradford (ex McLanahan—was commissioned on 8 October. There occurred a near tragedy during the training of this group. The Broadwater was pulling away from the dock one day when a British rating accidentally released a depth charge. The live drum did not explode, but lay on the bottom alongside the dock, causing what an American called “considerable consternation” until it was recovered by Canadian divers. Seven of the destroyers made it across to Britain on schedule; the Buxton had to return due to an outbreak of diphtheria on board.

The penultimate group was large, ten ships—Leamington (ex Twiggs), Lancaster (ex Philip), Mansfield (ex Evans), Montgomery (ex Wickes), Stanley (ex McCalla), Sherwood (ex Rodgers), Leeds (ex Conner), Lewes (ex Conway), Ludlow (ex Stockton), Lincoln (ex Yarnall)—and its training was complicated because many of the ships were manned by Polish and French sailors, and instructions had to be translated. Anglo-American relations were especially good in the Ludlow, where Commander G.B. Sayer, RN, and Lieutenant Commander Lewis R. Miller, USN, presided. The ship had operated out of Queenstown in World War I, and after an accident, her bow had been replaced in a British yard. Hence, when Sayer first came aboard, Miller drawled, “Say, Cap’n, d’you know your ship has got a British bow!” Whenever the ship’s machinery balked, Miller’s favorite words of commiseration were, “That installation stinks to high heaven!” Sayer was worried that the Ludlow, in the event of bad weather in the Atlantic, might run out of fuel before completing the crossing; but Miller always insisted, “She’s done it once and she’ll do it again.” The ships sailed on schedule after a late-October commissioning, and all ten made it to England on time and without incident. Shortly thereafter, Lieutenant Commander Miller received the following cable: “She stinks to high heaven, but she’s done it again!”

The last group, commissioned into the Royal Navy on 26 November, was also a large one: Reading (ex Bailey), Ramsey (ex Meade), Ripley (ex Shubrick), Rockingham (ex Swasey), Salisbury (ex Claxton), Richmond (ex Fairfax), Newmarket (ex Robinson), Newark (ex Ringgold), Newport (ex Sigourney), Wells (ex Tillman). But only six of the ships sailed on time; four were detained by mechanical trouble. Then the Newmarket, Newark, and Wells crashed into the corner of a dock while moored together when a maneuvering valve in one of them jammed in the ahead position. The British by now were hard pressed for men, and the crews of these last vessels were very green. One skipper conceded that the training of his crew was “a chimpanzee’s tea party.” The Newark suffered damage on her crossing when two inadequately lashed depth charges were washed overboard and exploded.⁶

British naval opinion, while unhappy at the defects of the four-stackers, generally favored the transaction as a glum necessity, while those in Britain less familiar with the critical need for destroyers felt that an exorbitant price in national prestige and honor had been paid. Nevertheless, the fifty ships were equivalent to 2½ times the annual British production of destroyers; they augmented the British destroyer fleet by 29 percent after a period of very heavy losses and before an anticipated period of even higher losses.⁷

The President urged speed on the Navy in the development and use of the bases. In November, he inspected the Caribbean sites in the Tuscaloosa and observed the pestiferous French at Martinique. By mid-November, tender-based PBYs were operating from off St. Lucia, Trinidad, and Bermuda. Facilities were planned at Antigua, the Bahamas, British Guiana, and St. Lucia to support seaplanes and a carrier air group; Jamaica, Bermuda, Trinidad, and Newfoundland were destined for more extensive development, with facilities for destroyers and submarines, as well as patrol planes and carrier aircraft. The larger bases could also provide anchorages for task forces, and consideration was given to the possibility of building a Pearl Harbor of the Atlantic in Puerto Rico. But soon the eager Americans were confounded in their attempts to speed utilization of the bases by an unexpected obstacle—their new-found allies, the British.

President Roosevelt was most disinclined to have the United States drawn into the complex social, racial, and economic problems of the West Indian islands,⁸ and insisted that American responsibilities be strictly limited to the base sites. He joked about Bermuda: “. . . we don’t want it. We think too much of Bermuda! Bermuda is an American resort. Americans go there because they like to be under another flag when they travel. They wouldn’t enjoy Bermuda half so much if it was under our flag. It would lose its quaintness.”⁹

But the Colonial Office did not believe the President, and leaders in Bermuda and Trinidad were hostile to the Americans. The war had ruined tourism, the major business of the islands, and adversity made the locals cantankerous. Agriculture was barely viable. The islands imported food, rain was the only source of potable water, and horses were slaughtered for lack of forage.

Many of the islanders felt that the American bases would mean overcrowding, declining real-estate values, destruction of the last vestiges of the tourist trade, unemployment, and disease: unstated fears were of native blacks “spoiled” by high wages, civil strife, and eventual loss of British sovereignty over the islands.¹⁰ The Bermudans warned:

The attractions of Bermuda as a resort are its beauty, peacefulness, other-worldliness, facilities for outdoor recreation on land and water in pleasant surroundings, absence of mechanical transport, freedom of movement. . . . In all these respects it is clear that the character of the Colony would be violently changed by the unsightly buildings, noise, bustle, restriction of movement. . . .¹¹

The Bermudans did not want seaplanes landing in Great Sound. The Trinidadans wanted the base there placed in the middle of a swamp. At Newfoundland, squatters on the Avalon Peninsula demanded exorbitant recompense for their holdings. And everywhere local authorities insisted on the right to levy harbor dues on warships using the bases and to place duties on military and naval supplies brought in to the base sites.¹²

The Foreign Office worried lest the obstinacy of the provincials compromise passage of the Lend-Lease Act. The diplomats persuaded Churchill, himself sulking over the decline of Empire, to treat a delegation of Bermudans to syrupy prose and strong cigars. At a meeting in London with American service representatives, the Governor of Trinidad, Sir Hubert Jones, demanded that the base site be removed from a beach area to a swamp in order not to disturb bathers; one of the Americans then asked him if he knew that there was a war on. The next day, the Americans formally responded to Jones’ proposal by handing him a small slip of paper with but two words on it: “No dice.”

However, as even the anxious Foreign Office was not prepared to complete the transaction without carefully-worked-out arrangements to safeguard British interests, it was not until nearly spring of 1941 that many of the details relating to the extent of the sites and rights of taxation were agreed upon.¹³ And even then, unfortunately, local authorities were prepared to violate the spirit of the agreements.

There was obstructionism in Trinidad, but the major contretemps occurred in Bermuda. Captain Jules James, a bright, articulate officer, was appointed CO of the Naval Operating Base, Bermuda, and because of the “delicate situation,” he was briefed before his departure by Admiral Stark, Secretary Knox, and even President Roosevelt.

The base was commissioned on 7 April 1941, even though its construction was far from complete. Ominously, no one from the local government attended the commissioning ceremonies, and Captain James felt that the attitude of the populace was “distinctly cold.” Soon he had graver troubles. The local wage boards struggled to keep the wages of native workers down, which tended to produce dissatisfied and apathetic toilers for the Navy; then they attempted to decrease the pay of the American construction men, too, in order to lessen the natives’ dissatisfaction at the disparity of pay scales. Local officials made persistent attempts to collect duties and taxes at the base docks, while the Americans insisted that they would pay only when using Bermudan ports and docks not leased to them. An American-financed service club soon became too expensive for sailors, but the government would not allow the Navy to close it because of the revenue it derived from a duty on the beer sold in the increasingly raffish joint. The Bermudans disliked automobiles, which they felt would impair the picturesqueness of their island and do harm to their light roads; even their governor was not permitted to drive a car. The Americans agreed to use automobiles only upon securing permission from local authorities. However, as with the customs duties, the Bermudans used the authority to harass the Navy. The Governor insisted that Captain James could drive his car only when in uniform. James retorted that the inside of his car was under the jurisdiction of the United States, and thus his driving apparel could not be a matter subject to local regulation!

Not that all of the wrongs were on one side. The constructors lived lavishly in beach-front hotels, and the officer in charge of the building program was later detached as a result of misapplied expenditures. The workers caroused, producing sporadic disorders as well as a significant prostitution problem. Such episodes were one important reason for the eventual formation of the Navy’s own construction battalions, the famed Seabees. The sailors on liberty in Bermuda, worse paid and better disciplined, caused somewhat less difficulty, although they too created disturbances when intoxicated. A strengthened shore patrol improved matters in the short run, and in the long run, the fine Navy Recreation Center at Riddell’s Bay solved the major problems.

Gradually, economic prosperity overcame the local resentment that accrued from too-rapid changes in ancient patterns of life, and the Navy’s relations with the Bermudans grew warmer; eventually, Bermudans were borrowing American cars.

There was no difficulty on the lesser islands, where the bases were smaller and there were fewer vested interests to offend; indeed, the local people seemed quite pleased to be in the limelight of grand events. At St. Lucia, public officials gladly turned out for commissioning ceremonies at the Naval Air Station, which included a fifteen-gun salute fired by the old destroyer Goff and the substantial pomp of Major Max Smith’s Marine detachment off aviation-tender Curtiss.¹⁴

As it turned out, the destroyer-bases transaction did not prove vital—merely helpful—to the safety of the United States and Great Britain. Victory in the Battle of Britain mitigated the need for destroyers for anti-invasion duty, and the continued security of Britain meant that the United Kingdom itself could serve as the first line of American defense until the United States entered the war and, thereafter, as an advanced base for offensive operations; the usefulness of the Western Hemisphere bases was thus reduced. There was no need to build a Pearl Harbor in the western Atlantic.

For each nation, the deal was insurance taken out against formidable but transient perils. The Prime Minister feared it would be reckoned sordid; the President feared it would lessen his popularity. But the best result of the transaction was that it became a symbol of their compact against tyranny and dramatized the tacit Anglo-American alliance.

For the Germans, the destroyers-for-bases deal was a stark, shocking warning that they could no longer ignore the growing impact of America upon the war. And so the Germans moved toward the fateful Tripartite Pact, bringing Japan into the Axis alliance.