Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

During the spring, summer, and autumn of 1941, Roosevelt was under constant pressure from many of his Cabinet to grab the bull by the horns and establish American naval escort of supply ships to Britain. At first he yielded to this pressure, but by July he became convinced that American public opinion would not accept convoy escort all the way to Britain, and substituted for this escort to the meridian of Iceland, with the argument that this was still within the Western Hemisphere. Orders to organize convoy escorts all the way to Britain had been issued on February 26th. To protect these, an Atlantic Fleet, under Admiral King, had been created on February 1st. This was reinforced by three battleships, an aircraft carrier, four cruisers, and numerous destroyers, transferred from the Pacific in May. In March, Roosevelt ordered two destroyer bases and two seaplane bases to be constructed with Lend-Lease funds in northern Ireland and Scotland. At the same time, he gave Britain ten Coast Guard cutters to be based in Iceland, and seized possession of sixty-five Axis and Danish ships anchored in American harbors. A month later, Greenland was declared to be in the Western Hemisphere, and the United States took over its protection and began to construct bases.

The Red Sea was declared not to be a combat area, thus reopening it to American merchant ships carrying supplies to Egypt (April 10, 1941). The financial assets of the Axis Powers and of all occupied and belligerent countries in Europe were frozen, and Axis consulates in the United States were closed (June 14-16, 1941). American flying schools were made available to train British aviators. Four thousand marines who had been ordered to occupy the Azores in anticipation of a Nazi move toward Gibraltar or the Atlantic islands were released from this assignment when Hitler moved eastward in June. Accordingly, they were reassigned to occupy Iceland, which they did, in agreement with the Icelandic government, in July.

In the meantime, by presidential proclamation, the American Neutrality Zone which had been defined in September 1939 as west of 60° W. longitude was extended to 260 W. longitude, the meridian of Iceland. The United States Navy was ordered to follow all Axis raiders or submarines west of this meridian, broadcasting their positions to the British. On July 19, 1941, American naval convoys were ordered as far eastward as this meridian. The first such convoy left on September 16, 1941. In practice, American escort vessels covered about 1,200 miles of distance in the mid-Atlantic between 52° W. and 260 W., picking up from Canadian escorts south of Newfoundland and delivering their charges to British escorts south of Iceland. This gave the Canadians and British routes of about 650 miles to cover on either end. By this time, Axis submarines had moved from the waters off the British Isles to the mid-Atlantic, where they were operating by a “wolf-pack” technique. Under this method, as soon as a convoy was discovered, a dozen or more submarines would assemble in its path and attack on the surface at night. This proved to be a very effective method, especially against inexperienced American escorts, which maintained too rigid stations too close to their convoys. But this method had the great weakness that it required extensive radio communication with Germany for orders; this revealed the locations of the U-boats, and eventually became a fatal weakness.

American naval escort of British convoys could not fail to lead to a “shooting war” with Germany. The Roosevelt Administration did not shrink from this probability. The growing tension with Japan combined with the American strategic decision that Germany must be defeated before Japan to compel an increasingly active policy in the Atlantic in order to avoid a situation where we would be at war in the Pacific while still at peace with Germany. Fortunately for the Administration’s plans, Hitler played into its hands by declaring war on the United States on December 11, 1941. By that date “incidents’” were becoming more frequent.

On October 17th the United States destroyer Kearney suffered casualties when it was torpedoed; two weeks later the destroyer Reuben James was blown to pieces, with great loss of life, by a chain of explosives from a German torpedo, its own forward magazine, and its own depth charges. On November 10th an American escort of eleven vessels, including the carrier Ranger , picked up a convoy of six vessels, including America’s three largest ocean liners, the America , the Washington , and the Manhattan , with 20,000 British troops, and guarded them from off Halifax to India and Singapore. Pearl Harbor was attacked as this convoy was passing South Africa, and the Washington eventually reached home by crossing the Pacific to California.

Many of the activities of the American Navy in the summer of 1941 were known not at all or were known only very imperfectly to the American public, but it would seem that public opinion generally supported the Administration’s actions. In September, Roosevelt sought congressional action to repeal the section of the Neutrality Acts forbidding the arming of merchant vessels. This was done on October 17th, the vote in the House going 259-138, with only 21 Democrats opposing the change and only 39 Republicans supporting it. On that same day the Kearney was torpedoed. Two weeks later all the essential portions of the Neutrality Acts were repealed (November 13th). The vote in the House, 212–194, once again showed the partisan nature of the Administration’s foreign policy, for only 22 of 159 Republican votes were for repeal. By this vote the United States “resumed its traditional right to send its ships wherever it pleased and to arm and protect them in every way possible.” This meant that open naval warfare with Germany was in the immediate future.

During this period, from June to December 1941, Roosevelt was also kept occupied by the problem of military aid for the Soviet Union. The Nazi forces which flung themselves on Russia, on June 22, 1941, were at the peak of their powers, and the Soviet Union was soon in grave need of any aid it could get. Churchill, although filled with suspicions of the Soviet regime, or the good faith of its leaders, was willing to accept anyone, “even the devil,” as he put it himself, as an ally against the Nazi menace, and to extend whatever aid was available to such an ally. Roosevelt shared these ideas to a considerable extent, but the American people were suspicious of Bolshevism, and American military experts were generally agreed that the Soviet Union could not hold out against Hitler long enough for any aid to be effective. Accordingly, it was several months before Roosevelt was in a position to make Lend-Lease supplies available to the Kremlin.

The Nazi Attack on Soviet Russia, 1941-1942

In planning his attack on Soviet Russia, Hitler used the customary German strategic concepts; these gave priority to the destruction of enemy armies over the seizure and occupation of enemy territory and resources. This destruction was to be achieved (and quickly achieved, according to Hitler), in a series of gigantic pincers movements of the double-arm type which had worked so well against Poland in 1939. In these operations a huge outer pincers of armored-division spearheads and a simultaneous but smaller inner pincers of infantry-division columns would enclose a mass of enemy troops, the armored pincers cutting a large segment of these off from their supplies and communications while the infantry columns would slice up the enclosed mass of enemy forces into smaller masses willing to surrender. This method was used, again and again, with extraordinary success against the Soviet armies, after June 1941, enclosing, and frequently capturing, hundreds of thousands of Russians at a time, but the very size of the operations used up Nazi men, materials, and (above all) time without inflicting any fatal blow on the Soviet capacity to resist.