The Atlantic Squadron’s routine operations were not without certain trials and, sometimes, cost.
Occasionally, a nervous Allied merchant crew would nearly open fire on a low-flying PBY, but no planes were harmed.46
The carriers were getting new planes to replace their obsolete ones, but new planes meant teething troubles; the early “bugs” of the aircraft restricted night operations and high-altitude flying. Hence, in the carriers, the price of inexperience was sometimes high. On 16 January 1940, a young Ranger flier stalled his fighter while pulling out over the wrong side of the ship after a fifth wave-off. The plane crashed, sinking inside of a minute, and dragged the pilot under with it. For a moment, the tail section protruded out of the water, a bulky, cross-shaped headstone.47
In December 1939, the Reuben James was driven onto a reef in Long Island Sound; her belly was ripped so badly that she required four months in dry dock. The bridge watch had not been sufficiently alert, and both the skipper and the Exec were court-martialed for negligence.48
The skipper of a hastily converted transport was unable to adjust to leading a green crew and had to be replaced for lack of “force and effectiveness.”49
On the morning of 25 November 1939, the recently recommissioned four-stacker Yarnall was anchored placidly in Lynnhaven Roads. She had been operating for but twenty days, and the process of qualifying men for bridge watch had been slowed by the press of more compelling needs in making the old ship fit for sea. The destroyer bobbed and swung out with the sway of the tide, the water slapping against her sides with a lulling, soughing sound. It took the green watchstanders too long to sense a subtle change in the motion of the ship and take a sighting of the coastline. The destroyer was moving. The captain came to the bridge as general quarters was sounded and he gave orders to get under way, but he did not order emergency engineering procedures for fear of danger to the machinery and black gang. The lack of emergency action was academic, for the destroyer quickly drifted aground. A defective link had caused the anchor chain to part; the bridge watch had failed to provide the CO with sufficient warning to enable him to prevent the accident. But a skipper’s responsibility is as broad as his authority, and the failure of personnel was held to reflect inadequacy of command. The destroyer skipper was relieved of duty.50
Although the sailors considered the patrol inefficient, the President insisted on retaining it. Thus, the importance of political considerations over purely technical needs was one of the Navy’s first lessons in the President’s new kind of war.
The President, whose self-proclaimed “map mind” had assimilated the doctrines of Mahan and applied them to the age of the airplane, was resolved to keep Axis power beyond the fringes of the outposts of the New World.a51
The patrol allowed the President to act, yet retain flexibility, which he liked. He once said that in the Atlantic, where the Germans were forced to play with his deck of cards (naval warfare) instead of Hitler’s (land warfare), all the “jokers were wild.” Deliberately, he left the scope and duties of the patrol nebulous. When asked at a press conference how far he thought American waters extended toward Europe, he answered cryptically, as far as necessary. One reporter, recalling FDR’s late-lamented quip that in an age of progressive military technology the American defense frontier was on the Rhine, asked if American waters reached as far as the Rhine. The President laughed and said that he was talking only about salt water.52
The patrol had symbolic value, warning the Nazis of the enmity of the American people and reminding them that there were things that the Americans cherished more than peace. It served the President as a halfway house between craven idleness and dangerous boldness. It reduced German naval power in the western Atlantic to nothing, allowed Allied convoys to organize safely in American waters, and freed Allied warships for duty elsewhere,53 yet it avoided divisive domestic antagonisms; isolationists could only applaud a scheme to bar belligerent ships from the approaches to the Western Hemisphere, and the absence of shooting and bloodshed soothed liberals of pacifist bent.
The President’s temperament required activity; movement and flux inspired him, stagnation depressed his spirit and enervated his will. He had to act. Yet if to do nothing seemed unthinkable, the risks of diplomatic threats, as his Quarantine Speech appeared to show, outweighed their meager efficacy. Only the President’s Navy could safely challenge the enemy. The Atlantic Squadron was all that Franklin Roosevelt had to fight with in the first months of World War II,54 and he used it to test the purposes of the German Fuehrer. He soon discovered that his foe lacked the will to give battle at sea. That discovery proved of inestimable future value, and Mr. Roosevelt’s Navy, the U.S. Atlantic Squadron, was given more formidable tasks.
Hence, the Neutrality Patrol was more than the empty, wasteful gesture that many in the Navy deemed it and less than the German Navy feared from the Americans.55 But, by diminishing training, the patrol weakened the Atlantic ships for future tests. In naval terms, the Neutrality Patrol was not worth the massive effort that the President demanded; but in political terms, it had value. It deserved to be retained but, as the sailors wanted, much reduced in scope in order to lessen the strain on the Atlantic Squadron. The President, however, liking its symbolism, ordained that the patrol be maintained without change.
And so, the patrol continued, testing the merit of the Atlantic sailors. A careless or luckless handful failed their ships and were replaced. Most worked with skill and dedication to make old ships and new men ready for the long, bad days ahead.
a FDR said of Mahan: “He wrote that to all intents and purposes, America separated from Europe and Africa and Asia by a wide ocean, is insular in geography and that, therefore, threats of aggression can best be met at a distance from our shores rather than on the seacoast itself.”
THE COLLAPSE OF FRANCE in the desperate spring of 1940 ended the American reverie of a war without sacrifice.
On 20 May the British ambassador in Washington wrote a friend:
The USA is at last profoundly moved and frightened. It had been dreaming on that it could keep out and that the Allies would keep the tiger away. And now the spectre has suddenly arisen that the British fleet may disappear and then what is to happen to itself? It has only one navy. Is it to keep it in the Atlantic or Pacific? If it keeps it in the Pacific, Germany and Italy will be able to take Brazil . . . and threaten the Canal. If it keeps it in the Atlantic the Japanese will take over the Pacific. If it divides its fleet it will be impotent in both oceans.1
Several days later, President Roosevelt ordered the preparation of emergency plans for occupation of the Allies’ West Indian possessions and for an expeditionary force to support Brazil in the event of an Axis-inspired revolt, though the latter proved beyond the means of the U.S. Army. The planners warned that if the Germans acquired significant numbers of French ships, the United States would have but a six months’ grace period, concluding, “the date of the loss of the British or French fleets automatically sets the date of our mobilization.” And Admiral Ellis grimly warned: “The present composition of the [Atlantic] Squadron is quite inadequate to cope with the forces which the progress of events in Europe may soon release to operate against it.”2
Because of the uncertain situation in Latin America, the heavy cruiser Quincy was ordered south from her Neutrality Patrol station at Guantanamo Bay. She spent a few days in Rio without incident, except that on 15 June a liberty party was recalled to the cruiser because of a clash between police and pro-Allied demonstrators. The American officers found the leaders of the Brazilian Navy friendly, but felt the Army was pro-German. President Getulio Vargas, who understood the vulnerable geographic position of his country in relation to Vichy-dominated northwest Africa and feared a coup