Authors: Ed Offley
In his “Day of Infamy” address to a joint session of Congress on December 8, Roosevelt did not mention Germany once. Instead, he focused his eloquent wrath on the Empire of Japan. The next day, however, the president gave a blistering radio address to the nation in which he lumped all three Axis nations together as a collection of “crafty and powerful bandits” led by Hitler and hell-bent on world domination. He even stretched the truth about the degree of their complicity:
Your Government knows that for weeks Germany has been telling Japan that if Japan did not attack the United States, Japan would not share in dividing the spoils with Germany when peace came. She was promised by Germany that if she came in she would receive the complete and perpetual control of the whole of the Pacific area and that means not only the Far East, not only all of the islands in the Pacific, but also a stranglehold on the west coast of North, Central, and South America. We also know that Germany and Japan are conducting their military and naval operations in accordance with a joint plan.
If Roosevelt intended his jab at Hitler to goad the German dictator into declaring war, he succeeded brilliantly. In a rambling, eighty-eight-minute address to the Reichstag on Thursday,
December 11, Hitler thanked Providence for making him the Leader in the present “historic conflict . . . decisive in determining the next five hundred or one thousand years” of European history. He essentially blamed the twelve Nazi-occupied countries in Europe for getting themselves invaded by the Wehrmacht and held Franklin Roosevelt “primarily responsible” for the entire war. After a series of boorish and nearly obscene taunts about Roosevelt’s background and personal life, Hitler recounted the US Atlantic Fleet’s aggressive movements in the North Atlantic and concluded by announcing that Germany and Italy were in a state of war with the United States. Within hours, the United States reciprocated.
Keitel, Raeder, and Göring’s shared elation over Hitler’s agreement to radically shift Germany’s offensive military priorities did not last long. Upon returning to Wolfsschanze, Hitler became furious when he learned that the Soviets had counterattacked outside Moscow, pushing German forces back in retreat. When Keitel transmitted the formal directive on December 19 that Hitler had verbally approved reposturing German army groups in the Soviet Union into defensive positions, the Führer threw a screaming fit and fired army commander-in-chief Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch. Hitler then took personal command of the German army and ordered it to continue offensive operations against the Soviets. As the year ended, he was still bogged down in the east and had created what he himself had long feared—in Jodl’s words, “a strong new enemy.” In fact, the Americans and British at that time were preparing to cement the very alliance that Hitler’s generals had long dreaded.
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T
HREE DAYS AFTER
H
ITLER SACKED VON
B
RAUCHITSCH
and ordered the Wehrmacht to carry on its bloody offensive against the Red Army, the stately silhouette of a British battleship appeared at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. The 37,000-ton
HMS Duke of York
had left the Firth of Clyde outside Glasgow, Scotland, on December 12 on its shakedown cruise, just five weeks after a formal commissioning ceremony at the John Brown & Company shipyard in Clydebank. Escorted by a half dozen destroyers, the 745-foot battleship proceeded south through the Bristol Channel into the Bay of Biscay to avoid a massive winter storm in the North Atlantic. In doing so, the formation passed through U-boat-infested waters but avoided the threat with the help of British intelligence. The formation then turned west to cross the Atlantic at a lower latitude than the shorter Great Circle route, which would have brought the warships on a more northerly passage in the storm-tossed waters south of Iceland and Greenland.
In addition to its crew of 1,556 officers and enlisted men, the
Duke of York
carried Prime Minister Winston Churchill, his senior military commanders and political advisers, and a delegation of more than eighty officials heading to a critical conference in Washington with President Roosevelt and his military commanders. After the warship docked at the Norfolk Naval Station at 4:15
P.M
., Churchill and his delegation flew to Washington, DC, where the president himself met them at the airport. The summit, known formally as the First Washington Conference and informally by the British as Arcadia, began the next morning.
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Roosevelt and Churchill were well acquainted by the time the two leaders shook hands at the Washington-area airport,
although they had previously met in person only twice. In July 1918, Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the navy, traveled to Great Britain on official wartime business. At a dinner organized by his British hosts, the thirty-six-year-old Roosevelt met Churchill, who at forty-three had already served (and been forced to resign in 1915) as Britain’s first lord of the Admiralty. Churchill was at that time serving as minister of munitions. It was an inauspicious start to what would become one of the most important friendships of the twentieth century. Churchill later said he did not remember the encounter at all, while FDR left the evening with an active “dislike” for Churchill’s brusqueness.
Twenty-one years later, however, in the fall of 1939, circumstances and events prompted Roosevelt to reach out to Churchill. On learning that his onetime British acquaintance had become first lord of the Admiralty for the second time, FDR wrote Churchill to tell him “how glad I am that you are back here in the Admiralty.” He and Churchill began a secret correspondence in which they exchanged news and opinions on the deteriorating political landscape in Europe. This relationship blossomed and deepened even as the war news went from bad to worse for the British and French. It became a truly personal friendship, even though each man had obvious political interest in the other. FDR wanted to maintain a link to the Englishman who, he correctly foresaw, would be the United Kingdom’s next prime minister, and Churchill was keen on keeping Roosevelt interested in British affairs and supportive of its wartime goals.
Behind closed and guarded doors at the Washington Conference, the American and British military commanders discussed the proper course of action for their alliance in the months and
years ahead. The British goal was simple: ensure that the goals of the ABC-1 war planners remain intact, with top priority given to defeating Germany first. Nevertheless, Roosevelt, Churchill, and the military leaders could not ignore the rapidly deteriorating situation in the Far East. They spent many hours debating how to organize an effective defense against the advancing Japanese. The British had suffered their own major defeat three days after Pearl Harbor when land-based Japanese aircraft sank the battleship
HMS Prince of Wales
and the battle cruiser
HMS Repulse
off the Malay coast, with heavy loss of life. At the same time, Roosevelt and Churchill alike believed it imperative for American and British soldiers to go on the offensive against Germany as early as possible in 1942, both to bolster morale on their respective home fronts and to reassure Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin that he was not fighting the Germans alone.
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By Sunday, January 11, the Arcadia Conference participants had hammered out a priority list of actions to be taken during the upcoming year. The measures ranged from rushing reinforcements to the newly formed American-British-Dutch-Australian (ABDA) Command in the Far East, to continuing the flow of Lend-Lease war supplies to the Soviet Union, to deploying US marines to Iceland to enable British troops there to transfer to the Middle East. The leaders also discussed two possible Allied offensives, including an Anglo-American invasion of North Africa and a possible emergency operation to land Allied troops in France in late 1942 to relieve the pressure placed by the German army on the Soviet Union.
At this juncture, the Allied leaders collided with a very hard reality: there were neither enough combat-ready army units nor
enough merchant ships available to carry out those high-priority missions on the schedule that the leaders wanted. Most of the initiatives would be delayed for months because of the United States’ general unpreparedness. Both American and British leaders bitterly lamented the shipping shortage. Churchill himself wrote, “Shipping was at once the stranglehold and sole foundation of our war strategy.”
To address the shortfall in merchant shipping, Roosevelt pledged a massive expansion of new construction in American shipyards, doubling the objective that his administration had just announced in early December. FDR now told his administration that he wanted to increase the merchant shipbuilding goal from 12 million deadweight tons (5 million in 1942 and 7 million in 1943) to 24 million tons (9 million in 1942 and 15 million in 1943). That translated to a crash program to build 2,250 new tankers, freighters, and bulk carriers within a twenty-two-month period.
FDR and Churchill most strongly advocated the Arcadia Conference recommendation to reinforce Northern Ireland with American soldiers. While third on the final priority list, the deployment of American soldiers to Iceland and Northern Ireland would constitute a very public demonstration of the Anglo-American military partnership; it would also serve as a boon to British civilian morale and confirmation to Stalin that the Allies were on the move.
When US Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall told the conference that 4,100 soldiers comprising an advance guard of the 34th Infantry Division would sail from New York for Belfast on January 15, Churchill exclaimed, “It is of the greatest
importance that these troops get to their destination at the earliest possible moment.” He would soon have reason to regret his enthusiasm.
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U-
BOAT
F
ORCE
H
EADQUARTERS IN
L
ORIENT
, F
RANCE
, was a beehive of activity during the last three weeks of December 1941. Working out of a crowded operations center in a handsome four-story château near the Lorient waterfront, Admiral Dönitz and his staff kept close watch on the U-boats assigned to Lorient and the four other Biscay ports. The same Sunday night that the B-Dienst message announcing the attack on Pearl Harbor arrived at Hitler’s command bunker in East Prussia, a similar text came clattering out of a teleprinter at BdU’s communications center.
While Dönitz’s superiors in the German Naval Staff and senior officers in the other armed services were stunned by the news, at Kernével the admiral and his operations officers regarded the entry of the United States into the war with “relief,” as one senior staff officer later described it. Dönitz and his U-boat commanders had endured a very frustrating year. In addition to heeding Hitler’s insistence that they adhere to strict rules of engagement so as not to exacerbate relations with Washington, both Grand Admiral Raeder and his Naval Staff—as well as the Führer himself—were constantly diverting U-boats to secondary missions, thus depleting the number of boats available for attacks on Allied merchant shipping in the North Atlantic. Thirty-two-year-old
Fregattenkapitän
(Junior Captain) Günter Hessler, who had just joined the headquarters as senior staff officer under Dönitz (and who was also the admiral’s son-in-law),
described the sense of frustration at BdU: “No senior officer of the German Navy was more emphatic than Dönitz that the issue of the war depended on sinking as much enemy shipping as possible. . . . The Naval Staff [under Grand Admiral Raeder] made every effort to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of the auxiliary tasks requested of the U-boats, but too often circumstances such as the Führer’s orders, requests from the Supreme Command, crises in the various theaters of war . . . forced them to act.” Between July and early December 1941, U-boats were deployed as weather stations to aid the Luftwaffe’s aerial attacks against Great Britain. They were ordered to serve as escorts for German surface raiders and blockade-runners. Eight training U-boats at Kiel were reassigned to protect the maritime flank of Army Group North as it swept through the Baltic States. Six U-boats were transferred to Norway to attack Soviet shipping. Nor was that the worst: the deteriorating position of the Afrika Korps in North Africa in late November 1941 prompted Raeder’s staff to order BdU to station no fewer than twenty-five U-boats in the eastern Mediterranean and approaches to the Strait of Gibraltar. By December 10, of eighty-six operational U-boats, fifty were either operating in the Mediterranean or on standby to relieve others on patrol. Most of the remaining thirty-six U-boats were either unavailable for North Atlantic service due to repairs or operating in other theaters, such as the Arctic or South Atlantic. Hitler’s fixation on the Mediterranean, Hessler later recalled, “had brought our Atlantic operations almost to a standstill.”
The Pearl Harbor attack completely changed Hitler’s outlook. Dönitz must have breathed a sigh of relief as he wrote
the BdU War Diary entry for December 9, 1941: “The lifting of all restrictions regarding U.S.A. ships and the so-called Pan-American safety zone has been ordered by the Führer,” the admiral wrote. “Therefore, the whole area of the American coasts will become open for operations by U-boats. . . . There is an opportunity here, therefore, of intercepting enemy merchant ships under conditions which have ceased almost completely for some time.” Whereas the U-boats had to contend with enormous distances and dedicated escorts out in the open ocean, along the American shore ships plied predictable routes, and the American defenses were almost nonexistent. Dönitz, his operations chief Fregattenkapitän Eberhard Godt, and Hessler began plotting a massive strike against Allied merchant ships along the US East Coast, which, Hessler noted, was suddenly the richest target area in the Atlantic. And the U-boats were ready: “After two and one-half years’ war experience our crews were at the peak of efficiency, while the American [antisubmarine warfare defenses] and air forces would lack experience,” Hessler added.
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