At San Diego, Commander W.W. Bradley took command of Destroyer Squadron 31 on 4 September, hoping to have the four-stackers ready for sea in about a month. But the ships needed substantial repairs, as they had been decommissioned after hard service and at that time it had seemed prodigal to expend precious funds to overhaul them. A lot of machinery had been dismantled and spare parts and tools removed, and it took time to get replacement parts and such necessary items as ships’ boats and sonar gear from elsewhere in the country. Because ships’ papers could not be found, defects had to be discovered by the tedious process of trial and error. Dock space and facilities were limited. Then there was the eternal problem of too few people. The first enlisted men to report were just out of boot camp; their unfamiliarity with the innards of a destroyer did not fit them for the surgery at hand. The reservists called to active duty appeared in driblets, and some of them were physically unfit and had to be sent to the base hospital instead of to the ships, causing Commander Bradley to recommend that higher physical standards be set for the Naval Reserve. Inexperience lengthened the time required to perform tasks. Help came from “broken service” men—those who reenlisted after brief stints as civilians—but their numbers were small; other men were drawn from cushy billets in the Naval Districts. But these sources supplied only little over half of the eight hundred men required, and it was necessary to apply the leech to the forces afloat, evoking much lamentation from commands already anemic. It took seven weeks to man all the old destroyers.
The thin crews, assisted by destroyermen from the base and off ships in port, worked in pools on those ships scheduled to leave earliest; thus, some ships received scarcely any attention at all, and as the supply of labor was diminished by sailings, their crews had to ready them without help. Working long hours at oil-clogged machinery and old guns, swapping esoteric parts, and tracing unfamiliar pipes to their source, the sailors tried to make up in tenacity for what they lacked in knowledge. Though he distrusted their inexperience and polyglot backgrounds, Commander Bradley could not help but grow fond of his hard-working crews. They were learning early that things were never easy in the destroyer service.11
At Philadelphia, Destroyer Squadron 30 was suffering similar adversity. Personnel was slow to report, hand tools were scarce, there were no check-off lists, and there had been excessive use of preservatives on equipment and machinery; for years, the Philadelphia yard had been a building yard, not a repair yard, and the workers were not skilled at reconditioning the four-stackers. But ample dry-dock space and good equipment and facilities were available, and the proximity of other East Coast yards made it possible to obtain essential equipment without frustrating delays. The first ships were recommissioned with crews of between 45 and 70 men. But the destroyers were not all in prime condition when they left the yard. The Ellis left for duty with her starboard shaft out of line, leaky heating coils on fuel tanks, dented hull plating, some corrosion on surfaces, and without some of her .50-caliber AA guns and her sonar gear.12
It was hoped that the best of the scheduled thirty-six recommissioned ships would be available for duty at about the end of the first week in October. However, the first of the Philadelphia ships did not report for duty with the Atlantic Squadron until the third week in October, and the last of the destroyers did not arrive until 22 November. The first of the San Diego vessels reported on 24 November; the last did not arrive until 15 December.13
At first, the Neutrality Patrol was fairly named. Admiral Johnson warned his ships:
. . . do not make report of foreign men-of-war or suspicious craft sighted immediately on making contact or while in their vicinity. This is for the purpose of avoiding performing unneutral service. . . . Do not give belligerents the opportunity of utilizing their interception of your radio transmissions for obtaining information useful to them.14
The patrolling ships were to report all belligerent warships, except convoy escorts, by radio. In the event of a submarine contact, “the movements of the submarine shall be observed and a surveillance patrol maintained in the general area . . . .”15
As there were no German warships in the western Atlantic, the Patrol was routine work; sea and air patrols were limited in bad weather to avoid needless risks. Nevertheless, Captain Louis E. Denfeld’s division of new destroyers took some scars from the elements in its Grand Banks sweeps. Heavy seas wrecked boats and damaged bulwarks and lockers; it proved “almost impossible” for the men, who slept aft, to reach forward stations in rough weather. The Benham and Ellet sustained cracked plating and minor equipment failures; the gun ports in their forward turrets were not watertight, so tarpaulins were lashed across the turrets, restricting the guns. Both ships were docked for repairs, but the Davis and Jouett hung on.16
The patrol craft encountered many ships and a variety of temperaments. Some masters willingly provided their ship’s name and destination when hailed, and sometimes a little information about vessels seen during the passage. Often, ships poor at reading signals had to be chased and harried at close quarters to make them respond. Some merchant skippers observed the traditional independence of their calling and refused to cooperate; if the destroyermen were unable to make out a flag or read a bow name, a PBY was called to buzz the hardhead. Sometimes distance or weather precluded identification. In October, 1,072 vessels were identified; 136 were sighted, but not identified. In November, 1,924 were identified and 178 remained unidentified. In December, 2,648 ships were identified, and 241 were not identified. In the three months, about fifty PBYs from Patrol Wing 5 flew 7,070 hours, 740,000 miles, and scanned 15¼ million square miles of sea; and their commanding officer reported that planes and men were in better condition than before the start of the Patrol. The destroyers kept a few rounds of ammunition in their ready racks, but no shot was fired across the bows of an unidentified ship.17
Nevertheless, the President was not satisfied with the scope or intensity of the Patrol. He had recently appointed his old friend, Admiral Harold R. “Betty” Stark, as Chief of Naval Operations. Stark’s white hair, blue eyes, pink cheeks, and rimless spectacles softened his solid, bulldog features and betokened both toughness and gentleness. A calm, reserved man, his honesty and fairness were respected in the service, although some felt that he lacked decisiveness and fire. A careful and thoughtful planner, he had a sound grasp of strategy. But, because he had little aptitude for playing on the fears and ambitions of subordinates to make his purposes their own, he was not always able to coordinate in common effort the sundry independent fiefdoms of the vast naval bureacracy; embarrassed by petty bickering, he sometimes tended to back away from sticky issues, and so was not always a sufficiently forceful administrator. And, despite their friendship, he and the President did not always understand each other.
Stark was restrained and logical; he never confused what was desirable with what was possible, and he trusted in methodical planning and precise thinking. The President, however, was glib, impulsive, and optimistic; he left it to others to work out the contradictions and impracticalities of his sudden inspirations. He distrusted the restraint imposed by fixed plans, and complained that his military advisers were “always conservative,” ever ready to provide myriad technical reasons why something could not be done. Stark’s reticence in argument, sense of propriety, suspicion of the President’s grandiose schemes, and awe of the politician’s flair for words, limited communication between the two men. The President mistook Stark’s thoughtful silences for approbation of his sweeping designs.18
Late in September, when Stark and Roosevelt were discussing the ubiquitous problem of bases, the President abruptly turned to his wall chart of the Atlantic, took up a pencil, and made a sweeping boundary mark along the meridian of 60 degrees west longitude. The line began between Newfoundland and Nova Scotia and ran south all the way to the tip of British Guiana, passing 270 miles east of Bermuda. Roosevelt jubilantly asked Stark, “How would the Navy like to patrol such a neutrality zone?” The line extended a thousand miles east off Charleston; the Navy already had all it could do to maintain a token 200-mile patrol. Stark answered that such a patrol would require a very large number of ships and planes. The President seemed satisfied with the cautious rejoinder and turned to other matters.
Then, on 27 September, Assistant Secretary of State Adolf A. Berle asked the Navy for the details of