The Burning Shore (6 page)

On March 1, 1941, the navy established a new command called the Atlantic Fleet Support Force whose mission would be “to operate from bases overseas in connection with the protection of shipping.” Under Rear Admiral Arthur L. Bristol, the command quickly selected Argentia, a protected harbor on Newfoundland’s southeast coastline, as an advance base where warships and seaplanes could operate to protect the western leg of the convoy routes between North America and Great Britain. By the summer of 1941, three destroyer squadrons with twenty-seven destroyers were operating with the Support Force. Still, King knew that if Germany’s battleships joined the U-boats’ ongoing war against Allied shipping, the threat in the Atlantic would require even more US warships to cover an even greater area. King stationed a large group of his battleships, cruisers, and destroyers at Casco Bay, Maine, as a backup force should Germany’s surface warships threaten to steam out of port to operate in the North Atlantic. While the main threat remained the U-boat Force, the German navy in 1941 still had a substantial force of major surface warships, including four battleships, six smaller “pocket” battleships and battle cruisers, six light cruisers, and several dozen destroyers. Although the Kriegsmarine leadership largely kept these warships in German waters or Scandinavian ports after 1940, the surface fleet still posed a major potential threat in the North Atlantic.

Events unfolded at an accelerating pace during the middle of 1941. Reacting to aggressive German naval movements in the Atlantic, including the breakout of the battleship
Bismarck
on May 24, Roosevelt proclaimed an “unlimited national emergency” that, in part, publicly committed the navy to protect Allied merchant shipping. Three weeks later, King carried out FDR’s order to occupy Iceland with a US Marine Corps brigade. King formed Task Force 19, which consisted of most of his heavy warships—two battleships, two light cruisers, and thirteen destroyers—to escort three cargo ships carrying the Marine Corps brigade to Reykjavik.

By early 1942, the Allies had organized merchant convoys for the transatlantic passage, but the US Navy failed to organize similar defensive formations along the East Coast, resulting in soaring losses at the hands of the U-boats. OFFICE OF WAR INFORMATION.

Then, on August 2, King executed a task that President Roosevelt had personally set for him, one so secret that even Admiral Stark did not learn of it until the last minute: he ferried FDR, his senior civilian advisers, and US military commanders to a top-secret rendezvous with British prime minister Winston Churchill and his advisers at Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. The Atlantic Conference, as it was later called, lasted four days and
marked the beginning of a formal partnership between the two countries against Nazi Germany. For Admiral King and the Atlantic Fleet, the conference produced an operations order for the fleet to begin escorting convoys between North America and Iceland, effective September 16. When five Atlantic Fleet destroyers met eastbound Convoy HX150 on September 17 about 150 miles south of Argentia, the rendezvous marked the beginning of an undeclared war between the US Atlantic Fleet and the German U-boat Force.
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The first serious encounter between US and German warships occurred on September 4, a month after FDR and Churchill met at Argentia. Proceeding to Iceland with a load of mail, the American destroyer
USS Greer
observed a British Hudson patrol plane whose pilot signaled that he had sighted a U-boat. The
Greer
stood by as the aircraft dropped four depth charges. In return, the German vessel, the Type VIIC U-652, came up to periscope depth and fired a torpedo at the
Greer
, missing the destroyer. The encounter lasted six hours before the
Greer
broke off and resumed its trip to Iceland.

While the incident had little effect on any of its participants, Roosevelt used it as a pretext to escalate the Atlantic Fleet’s activities. In a fireside chat, FDR announced a “shoot-on-sight order” authorizing all American warships to attack Axis U-boats and surface ships without provocation. Six weeks later, on October 15, the first American sailors died in combat in the Atlantic when the Type VIIC U-568 torpedoed the destroyer
USS Kearny
as it escorted eastbound Convoy SC48, seriously damaging the destroyer and killing eleven crewmen.
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Any lingering doubts that the US Navy was now in a shooting war with the U-boat Force vanished on October 31. On that day,
U-552, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Erich Topp—who had taken Horst Degen along on patrol as a
Kommandantenschüler
back in early April—was one of eight U-boats that attacked eastbound Convoy HX156. A single torpedo from U-552 struck the destroyer
USS Reuben James
’s port side, setting off its forward ammunition magazine and blowing the ship in half. The sinking killed 115 of its 160-man crew, including all of its officers.

Unlike the
Greer
incident eight weeks earlier, the sinking of the
Reuben James
elicited a muted reaction in Washington. While Navy Secretary Frank Knox called the attack “worse than piracy,” President Roosevelt told a press conference that the incident had not materially changed the United States’ position of neutrality. Having already denounced the U-boat Force as a gang of pirates and issued shoot-on-sight orders to the Atlantic Fleet, Roosevelt avoided the next logical step on the escalation ladder: a formal declaration of war. But out on the mid-ocean shipping routes, the sailors knew better. Formalities aside, the US Navy was now fully engaged as a combatant in the Battle of the Atlantic.
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U
NTIL THE VERY END OF
1941, the United States and Germany had managed to avoid declaring outright war against each other—an eventuality that both governments wanted to avoid if possible. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, however, instantly transformed both countries’ calculations. The attack immediately thrust the United States into the war against its new Asian enemy and soon propelled it into the fight against Hitler as well.

America’s entry into the war against Germany came after a series of events unanticipated by either side that occurred over
just a seven-day period before and after December 7. The Japanese attack came as a bolt from the blue to everyone in the American high command; while CNO Admiral Stark had issued an explicit war warning to the Pacific Fleet on November 27, he and most of his intelligence analysts believed that Japan would strike first in the Philippines or Malaya. Pacific Fleet commander Admiral Husband Kimmel also thought the first blow would fall in the Far East. So did Roosevelt. The Japanese fooled not just their American enemies, however; they also deceived their German ally.

Night had fallen in the Masurian woods outside the East Prussian town of Rastenberg that pivotal Sunday when an urgent telegram arrived at Hitler’s command bunker at Wolfsschanze, the Wolf’s Lair headquarters complex. Transmitted by the German Funkbeobachtungsdienst (Navy Cryptologic Service, or B-Dienst) the message was hand-delivered to the Führer:

JAPAN BEGAN HOSTILITIES AGAINST THE UNITED STATES ON 7 DECEMBER, AT 1930 HOURS CENTRAL EUROPEAN TIME—STRONG AIR FORMATIONS ATTACKED PEARL HARBOR (HONOLULU).

Adolf Hitler was stunned. Although Japanese ambassador Hiroshi Oshima had told the Führer just days earlier, “War may come quicker than anyone dreams,” the German dictator fully expected to be informed in advance. Initially angry and embarrassed that Tokyo had left him in the dark, he now had to make one of the more profound wartime decisions since ordering the invasion of Poland twenty-seven months earlier: whether to preserve the fraying neutrality between Germany and the United
States or go to war with Great Britain’s staunch ally. Although the German and Japanese regimes had been discussing a military partnership over the past ten months, they had yet to sign a supplemental accord to the 1940 Axis Treaty to coordinate their military campaigns. On the other hand, the military and political factors that had prompted the Führer throughout 1941 to avoid an overt clash with the United States—particularly with the Atlantic Fleet—were still very much in play as he read and reread the B-Dienst telegram. The biggest factor was Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, now nearing the six-month milestone. Just five days previously, on Tuesday, December 2, a unit of the German 258th Division had reached a town north of Moscow, from which its soldiers could see the spires of the Kremlin in the distance a dozen miles away. More than 4.3 million German soldiers were battling in the subfreezing Russian winter against 3.3 million Soviet troops. This, the largest military operation in world history, on a scale almost impossible to measure, was placing a serious strain on the German armed forces in the field and the Third Reich’s economy back home.
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But while it was unclear whether Germany could afford to open a new front against the United States, that possibility had slowly been becoming a reality over the course of 1941. For months, Hitler’s naval commanders had pressed him to declare war against the United States. Roosevelt’s actions at sea, they argued, had created a de facto state of hostilities. After the
Greer
incident on September 4,
Grossadmiral
(Fleet Admiral) Erich Raeder, commander-in-chief of the Kriegsmarine, and Admiral Dönitz had pleaded with Hitler to relax the stringent rules of engagement that were hampering their operations and to allow the U-boat Force to wage unrestricted submarine warfare
within twenty miles of the North American coast. Still hoping to avoid formal conflict with the United States, Hitler refused, leaving in place a complex set of regulations limiting the steps his U-boat commanders could take in an encounter with American warships. And the decision was Hitler’s to make. In 1941, he reigned supreme over the German state and its armed forces through the
Führerprinzip
(leader principle), whereby, under Nazi law, he—and only he—exercised supreme political and military authority.
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For several days after the Pearl Harbor attack, Hitler seemed to lean against going to war with the United States, telling General Alfred Jodl that he wanted “a strong new ally [Japan] without a strong new enemy [America].” The Führer’s restraint was quite remarkable, especially considering what he knew about FDR’s attitudes toward Germany. In addition to confronting the suddenly changed strategic situation in the Pacific, Hitler was now fully aware that the Americans and British had created formal military plans to wage war together against Germany. Three days before the Pearl Harbor attack, the
Washington Times-Herald
and the
Chicago Tribune
, both owned by the Chicago isolationist media tycoon Robert R. McCormick, appeared with a huge headline emblazoned across the top of the front page: “F.D.R.’s WAR PLANS!” Reporter Chesly Manly had gotten hold of a copy of the top-secret Rainbow Five war plan and printed its explosive contents in minute detail. The plan called for the creation of a 10-million-man US Army, including an expeditionary force of 5 million soldiers that would invade Europe alongside the British to defeat Germany. In the United States, the Rainbow Five revelation sparked relatively little controversy. The reaction in Germany was more profound.

Within twenty-four hours of the article’s publication, the entire transcript of the Rainbow Five plan was under scrutiny in Berlin. On Friday night, December 5, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht, huddled with Grand Admiral Raeder and Luftwaffe commander-in-chief Hermann Göring to study the war plan line by line. The three senior commanders—famous for squabbling with each other over issues great and small—made a heart-stopping discovery and instantly came to a unanimous decision. According to Rainbow Five, the United States would be unable to mount a military offensive against Germany until July 1943 at the earliest. American planners also assumed that the Soviet Union would likely collapse militarily before then. This left Germany with an eighteen-month window of opportunity. By shifting its military priority from the Soviet invasion to mounting a knockout punch against Great Britain before the United States became strong enough to intervene, Germany could forestall an Allied invasion of the continent and refocus its efforts on beating the Soviets. The Third Reich would, in effect, become impregnable.
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Hitler returned to Berlin on Tuesday, December 9, and convened two days of meetings with his military commanders to assess the torrent of events worldwide. His commanders urged the Führer to pull the three army groups on Soviet territory back into defensive positions to regroup and rearm, while organizing a massive new offensive to take over the entire Mediterranean basin. The generals told Hitler this move would allow them to deploy over one hundred army divisions for the capture of key targets in the Mediterranean and North Africa, effectively severing Great Britain’s maritime lifeline to its colonies—which, like the United States, were a primary source of its sustenance.
Keitel, Raeder, and Göring were delighted when Hitler agreed. On December 16, after a week of intense planning, the German army headquarters staff issued a formal directive calling for a halt in offensive operations against the Red Army and a withdrawal to defensive lines. The redeployment order came just in time, for Germany and the United States suddenly found themselves formally at war.