The Undeclared War: Lend-Lease, the Reuben James and the Bismarck

In 1941 the Battle of the Atlantic became a war of two navies against one, and then of three. In May the Royal Navy lost HMS Hood and sank the Bismarck in a single week. Through the summer and autumn the United States, still officially at peace, put its destroyers between the U-boats and the convoys, and in October the U-boats began to kill American sailors.

Why it mattered

At the start of 1941 Britain was fighting the Atlantic war almost alone. France had fallen, the U-boats were working from French ports on the Bay of Biscay, and the convoys described in Chapter 2 had lost ships faster than British yards could replace them. Britain was also running out of the dollars it needed to buy American goods.

Three things changed in 1941. First, the escorts began to reach farther. With bases in Iceland and Newfoundland, British and Canadian warships could stay with a convoy all the way across, and in May the Royal Canadian Navy took on a share of the ocean that it would carry for the rest of the war. Second, the German surface fleet made its biggest bid against the convoy routes and lost. The sinking of Bismarck, three days after she destroyed Hood, ended any serious German hope of beating the convoys with battleships. Third, the United States moved step by step from neutrality to an undeclared shooting war: paying for Britain’s supplies through Lend-Lease, garrisoning Iceland, escorting convoys and, after the Greer incident, ordering its warships to shoot first. By the time Germany declared war on 11 December, American destroyers had already been fighting U-boats for three months, and more than a hundred American sailors had been killed doing it.

The year also gave the British a quieter advantage. On 9 May a boarding party took cipher material from a crippled U-boat, U-110, and kept the capture secret. What the codebreakers did with it is the subject of Chapter 5.

A war without a name

The United States had been edging toward the Atlantic war since September 1939, when Roosevelt set up the Neutrality Patrol to watch the waters off the American coasts. Old destroyers like Reuben James spent 1939 and 1940 on that work (NHHC, DANFS, “Reuben James I”). In September 1940 the destroyers-for-bases agreement, told in Chapter 2, sent fifty of those old ships to the Royal Navy in exchange for leases on British bases from Newfoundland to British Guiana.

Three decisions in the first months of 1941 changed the scale. On 1 February the Navy re-established the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, with Adm. Ernest J. King in command. In March a Support Force was formed within it, based at Narragansett Bay and built around older destroyers, to be ready to protect North Atlantic convoys; Reuben James was one of 18 older destroyers assigned to it (NHHC, DANFS, “Reuben James I”). And on 11 March Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Act, which let him lend, lease or transfer war materials to any country whose defense he judged vital to the defense of the United States. It ended the “cash and carry” rule that had forced Britain to pay in dollars for what it bought. By the end of the war Lend-Lease aid totaled about $50 billion, most of it carried across the Atlantic in convoys.

Lend-Lease solved the problem of paying for the cargoes but not the problem of delivering them. That was the point Churchill pressed when he issued his “Battle of the Atlantic” directive on 6 March 1941, giving the struggle the name it has carried ever since and ordering priority for anti-submarine aircraft, escort building and port repairs (Roskill, The War at Sea, vol. I). Through 1941 the American answer to that problem moved steadily east.

U-110 and the Newfoundland Escort Force

In the spring of 1941 the U-boats followed the convoys west, beyond the reach of escorts based in Britain, and the British moved the escorts west too. Iceland, occupied by British forces in May 1940, gave the Royal Navy an anchorage at Hvalfjordur and airfields for Coastal Command.

On 9 May 1941, south of Greenland, U-110 attacked an outbound convoy. Her commander, Kptlt. Fritz-Julius Lemp, was the man who had sunk the liner Athenia on the first day of the war in U-30 (Chapter 1). The corvette HMS Aubretia sighted his periscope and depth-charged him; the destroyers HMS Bulldog, under Cmdr. A. J. Baker-Cresswell, and HMS Broadway joined the hunt. Depth charges forced the damaged boat to the surface, and her crew abandoned ship. Lemp, seeing that U-110 was not sinking, was seen trying to swim back to her and was never seen again; 15 of her crew died and 32 survived (uboat.net, “U-110”). A boarding party from Bulldog under Sub-Lt. David Balme crossed in a whaler, went down into the boat and brought out its Enigma cipher machine, with rotors set, and current code books.

The Admiralty saw at once that the capture was worth more if the Germans did not know about it. U-110 sank under tow the next day, 10 May, and the survivors were landed in Iceland and held apart so that no word of the boarding could reach Germany (uboat.net, “U-110”; Hinsley, British Intelligence in the Second World War, vol. I). The secret held until after the war. The material went to Bletchley Park; how it was used belongs to Chapter 5.

Between Iceland and the Canadian coast lay the gap the escorts still could not cover. On 20 May the British asked Canada to base its new Flower-class corvettes at St. John’s, Newfoundland, and the first Canadian warships sailed from Halifax on 23 May (Milner, North Atlantic Run). The Newfoundland Escort Force came into being at the end of the month; Newfoundland’s heritage history dates it to 27 May 1941. It began with six Canadian destroyers and 17 corvettes, together with seven Royal Navy destroyers, four sloops and four corvettes, and its groups took convoys from a western meeting point off the Grand Banks to a mid-ocean meeting point south of Iceland, where British-based groups took over. Commodore Leonard W. Murray, RCN, arrived to command it on 13 June (Milner; Heritage Newfoundland and Labrador, “War at Sea”).

The same week marked a turning point in convoy practice. Convoy HX 129, which sailed from Halifax on 27 May 1941, was the first to be escorted across the whole ocean, handed in turn from the local Halifax escort to Newfoundland-based ships, to Iceland-based ships and finally to the Western Approaches groups (Milner; Roskill, vol. I). From then on, an HX or SC convoy was in theory never without an escort. In practice the escorts were few, and many of the Canadian crews had been civilians a few months before.

Rheinübung: Bismarck breaks out

While the escorts stretched west, the German Navy prepared a different kind of attack. Raids by the battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau early in 1941 had sunk or captured 22 ships before the pair put into Brest in March (Roskill, vol. I). The plan for May, Operation Rheinübung (“Rhine Exercise”), was to send the new battleship Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen into the Atlantic to attack convoys. Adm. Günther Lütjens, who had led the battlecruiser raid, commanded the operation from Bismarck.

Bismarck had been in commission only since 24 August 1940, under Capt. Ernst Lindemann. She displaced about 41,700 metric tons standard and more than 50,000 tons fully loaded, carried eight 38-centimeter (15-inch) guns in four twin turrets and had made just over 30 knots on trials. Her main armor belt was 320 millimeters (12.6 inches) thick (Garzke and Dulin, Battleships: Axis and Neutral Battleships in World War II). She carried about 2,200 men. She left Gotenhafen (now Gdynia), on the Baltic, early on 19 May 1941.

The British knew something was moving. On 21 May the ships anchored near Bergen, in Grimstadfjord, where their crews painted over their Baltic camouflage. That afternoon an RAF photographic-reconnaissance Spitfire flown by Flying Officer Michael Suckling photographed Bismarck in the fjord. When aircraft returned the next day, the anchorage was empty. Adm. Sir John Tovey, commanding the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow, had already sent VAdm. Lancelot Holland with the battlecruiser Hood, the new battleship Prince of Wales and six destroyers toward Iceland, and he followed with the battleship King George V, the carrier Victorious and their escorts (Roskill, vol. I).

Lütjens chose the Denmark Strait, the passage between Iceland and the Greenland ice. It was narrowed that May by the ice to the north and by a British minefield off Iceland to the south. Two heavy cruisers were waiting there under RAdm. Frederic Wake-Walker: Norfolk and Suffolk. Suffolk carried one of the Royal Navy’s early radar sets. At 1922 on 23 May, in the German record, Bismarck‘s hydrophone and radar operators detected Suffolk at about 12,500 meters; Norfolk came up about an hour later and was driven off by five salvoes from Bismarck, three of which straddled her (Garzke and Dulin; Bercuson and Herwig, The Destruction of the Bismarck). The two cruisers then did what they had been sent to do. They fell back and shadowed, Suffolk using her radar to hold the German ships through snow squalls and the half-darkness of the subarctic night, reporting their course and speed to Holland and Tovey.

Holland’s ships were closing from the south. Shortly after midnight Suffolk lost contact for about two and a half hours; just before 0300 she regained it, and Holland, about 35 miles away, raised speed to 28 knots (Roskill, vol. I; Bercuson and Herwig).

The Denmark Strait, 24 May

Hood was the most famous warship in the world. Completed in 1920, she was 860 feet long, and for twenty years she had been the largest warship afloat and the symbol of the Royal Navy on its cruises around the world. But she was a battlecruiser, designed during the First World War with speed bought partly at the cost of armor. Her deck protection was thin by the standards of 1941. Prince of Wales, beside her, had the opposite problem: she was so new that civilian technicians from the builder were still aboard working on her main armament when she sailed.

Prince of Wales sighted the German ships at about 0535, some 17 miles off. Holland turned to close the range quickly, which meant approaching nearly bow-on, so that only the forward turrets of his ships could bear. At 0552 Hood opened fire at about 26,500 yards. She fired first at the leading German ship, which was Prinz Eugen; the two ships looked alike at that range, and the cruiser had moved into the lead after the blast of Bismarck‘s own guns put her forward radar out of action the evening before. Prince of Wales correctly engaged Bismarck. The German ships answered at about 0555, both concentrating on Hood. A shell from Prinz Eugen started a fire among the ready-use ammunition on Hood‘s boat deck (Roskill, vol. I; Bercuson and Herwig).

At about 0600 Holland ordered a turn to port to bring his after turrets into action. Bismarck‘s fifth salvo arrived as the turn began. Men in Prince of Wales and in the German ships saw a column of flame rise from Hood near her mainmast, followed by a huge explosion. The ship broke in two. Her bow and stern rose almost vertically, and within about three minutes she was gone. Of the 1,418 men aboard, three survived: Midshipman William Dundas, Able Seaman Robert Tilburn and Ordinary Signalman Ted Briggs. The destroyer Electra pulled them from the water about two hours later. VAdm. Holland and Capt. Ralph Kerr died with their ship (Roskill, vol. I; HMS Hood Association).

Prince of Wales now had both German ships firing at her. She was hit four times by Bismarck and three times by Prinz Eugen. One 38-centimeter shell passed through her compass platform, killing or wounding most of the men there; Capt. John Leach was one of the few unhurt. Mechanical faults in her new quadruple turrets cut her firepower further. Shortly after 0600 Leach turned away under smoke. She had lost 13 killed and 9 wounded (Roskill, vol. I; Bercuson and Herwig).

She had also done the damage that would decide the operation. Prince of Wales hit Bismarck three times. One shell passed through the bow without exploding but opened it to the sea; another burst below the waterline amidships, flooding a generator room and partly flooding a boiler room. The hit forward cut Bismarck off from about 1,000 tons of fuel oil in her forward tanks and left her trailing an oil slick, down by the bow with a list to port (Garzke and Dulin; Bercuson and Herwig). Lütjens decided to detach Prinz Eugen to raid alone and to take Bismarck to Saint-Nazaire, on the French coast, where the only dry dock on the Atlantic coast large enough to take her lay.

Lost and found

The loss of Hood stunned Britain, and the Admiralty threw everything it could reach into the hunt. Tovey was closing from the east with King George V. The battleship Rodney, on her way to the United States for a refit, was detached from a troop convoy. From Gibraltar, Force H under VAdm. Sir James Somerville sailed north with the battlecruiser Renown, the carrier Ark Royal and the cruiser Sheffield (Roskill, vol. I).

Tovey’s best chance of slowing Bismarck before his battleships arrived was Victorious, so new that her air group was barely trained. Late on 24 May she launched nine Swordfish torpedo bombers of 825 Squadron, led by Lt. Cmdr. Eugene Esmonde, in rain and failing light. They found Bismarck around midnight and attacked through heavy fire. One torpedo hit, on her main armor belt amidships, and did little harm beyond shaking the ship (Roskill, vol. I). All the aircraft returned, landing on Victorious in the dark.

A few hours later, early on 25 May, the British lost Bismarck. The shadowing cruisers had been zigzagging against U-boat attack, and Suffolk lost radar contact on the outward leg of one zigzag. Lütjens seized the moment, turned away and broke free. For more than a day nobody on the British side knew where she was. Then Lütjens, apparently believing he was still being tracked, sent a long radio message to Germany. British direction-finding stations took bearings on it, but the position was plotted wrongly aboard King George V, and for several hours Tovey steamed northeast, as if Bismarck were heading back toward Norway, before the error was recognized and the fleet turned for France (Roskill, vol. I; Kennedy, Pursuit). By then Bismarck had gained a lead that Tovey’s battleships could not make up without help.

The help came from a flying boat with an American at the controls. On 26 May RAF Coastal Command sent Catalinas of 209 and 240 Squadrons from Lough Erne in Northern Ireland to search the approaches to France. Catalina AH545 of 209 Squadron, commanded by Flying Officer Dennis Briggs, carried as co-pilot Ensign Leonard B. Smith, one of a group of U.S. Navy aviators lent to Coastal Command, while the United States was still neutral, to help bring the new American-built Catalinas into service. Smith’s own report, written for the U.S. naval attaché in London two weeks later, says they took off at 0325, reached their search area at 0945 and at 1010 sighted a ship bearing 345 degrees, eight miles off. Coming out of the cloud at about 2,000 feet to identify it, they met an intense antiaircraft barrage. Smith jettisoned the depth charges and took evasive action. The ship was Bismarck (Smith, “The Scouting and Search for Bismarck,” Office of Naval Intelligence report, 9 June 1941). British accounts usually time the sighting at 1030; the difference is likely a matter of clocks and logs. She had been missing for more than a day.

Swordfish from Ark Royal found her soon after and took over the shadowing. But neither Tovey nor Rodney could catch her before she came under the cover of German bombers off the French coast unless something slowed her down.

The Swordfish and the rudder

The Fairey Swordfish was a fabric-covered biplane with an open cockpit and a top speed of about 140 miles an hour. It looked like a survivor from another war, and in the evening of 26 May it was the only weapon that could reach Bismarck in time. Ark Royal‘s first strike, 15 Swordfish launched at 1450, went badly wrong. The aircrews had not been told that Sheffield had been sent ahead to shadow Bismarck, and in poor visibility they attacked her instead. Several of the torpedoes, fitted with new magnetic detonators, exploded as they hit the water; Sheffield dodged the rest. The torpedoes were then refitted with contact pistols (Roskill, vol. I).

At 1910 Ark Royal launched 15 Swordfish again, from a deck pitching in a heavy sea. They made contact with Sheffield, which directed them on, and began their attack at 2047 in low cloud and rain squalls, coming in by sub-flights from different directions through heavy fire. The attack lasted about half an hour. Two torpedoes hit. One struck amidships on the armor belt and did little. The other struck right aft, on the port side near the rudders. Bismarck‘s rudders jammed at 12 degrees to port, and she began to steam in a slow circle, at first toward the oncoming British fleet (Bercuson and Herwig; Garzke and Dulin). No Swordfish was shot down.

That night Capt. Philip Vian’s destroyers came up: Cossack, Maori, Sikh and Zulu, with the Polish destroyer Piorun. From about 2238 until dawn they harried the crippled battleship with torpedo attacks and star shell. None of their torpedoes is known to have hit (Bercuson and Herwig). Aboard Bismarck the crew knew what the morning would bring. At 2340, in the usual English translation, Lütjens signaled Group West: “Ship unmanoeuvrable. We will fight to the last shell. Long live the Führer.”

Distinguished Service Order · later the Victoria Cross

Lt. Cmdr. Eugene Esmonde, RN, 825 Squadron

Esmonde led the nine Swordfish of 825 Squadron from Victorious against Bismarck on the night of 24 May 1941 and was awarded the DSO. Nine months later, on 12 February 1942, he led six Swordfish of the same squadron against Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen as they ran up the English Channel. All six aircraft were shot down and Esmonde was killed. He was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously. Born in Yorkshire in 1909, he is buried in Woodlands Cemetery, Gillingham, Kent.

Biography and award →

27 May: the last battle of the Bismarck

Tovey waited for daylight. The morning of 27 May came in with a gale from the northwest and a heavy sea. Norfolk sighted Bismarck first; at 0843 King George V had her in sight at about 25,000 yards. Rodney opened fire at 0847, and King George V followed within a minute. Bismarck answered at 0850, and her second salvo straddled Rodney (Bercuson and Herwig).

At about 0902 a 16-inch salvo from Rodney hit Bismarck‘s forward superstructure, knocking out her bridge and main fire-control station; Lütjens and much of the command staff were probably killed then. One by one her turrets were put out of action, and by about 0931 all four main turrets were silent. The British battleships closed the range until Rodney was firing at about 3,000 yards, almost point-blank for guns of that size. Norfolk and Dorsetshire joined in. By about 1000 Bismarck was a wreck, on fire from end to end, listing to port and settling, but still afloat. With fuel running low, Tovey broke off the battleships shortly after 1015 and ordered any ship with torpedoes left to use them (Roskill, vol. I; Bercuson and Herwig).

The cruiser Dorsetshire, under Capt. Benjamin Martin, fired torpedoes into her at close range from both sides. On board, the survivors later said, the order had already been given to scuttle the ship, and charges were set below. Bismarck rolled over to port and sank stern first at about 1040, more than 300 nautical miles west of Brest, in nearly 16,000 feet of water (Bercuson and Herwig). Whether she would have gone down without the torpedoes and scuttling charges is taken up below.

Hundreds of men were in the water. Dorsetshire and the destroyer Maori stopped and lowered ropes and nets. Then a lookout in Dorsetshire reported what he took to be a periscope, and the two ships, fearing a U-boat, got under way, leaving hundreds of men behind. Dorsetshire had picked up 85 men and Maori 25; one died of his wounds the next day. A U-boat, U-74, found three more men on a raft that evening, and the German weather ship Sachsenwald picked up two. Of about 2,200 men aboard, 114 survived (Bercuson and Herwig; Müllenheim-Rechberg, Battleship Bismarck: A Survivor’s Story).

On 28 May German bombers sank the destroyer HMS Mashona on her way home. Prinz Eugen, detached on 24 May, found no convoys, was troubled by engine defects and put into Brest on 1 June. No German battleship ever again entered the Atlantic to attack the convoys. Bismarck‘s sister, Tirpitz, spent her war in Norwegian fjords, where she threatened the Arctic convoys described in Chapter 6.

In Washington that evening, 27 May, Roosevelt gave a radio address proclaiming an “unlimited national emergency.” The timing was a coincidence, but the subject was the same ocean. Six days before, on 21 May, the U-boat U-69 had stopped and sunk the American freighter Robin Moor in the South Atlantic, about 750 miles west of Freetown, after giving her crew and passengers time to take to the boats. All 46 survived, some after 19 days adrift (uboat.net, “Robin Moor”). She is usually described as the first American merchant ship sunk by a U-boat in the war.

Iceland, Argentia and the Greer

Through the summer the United States took over pieces of the British burden one by one. On 7 July 1941 the 1st Marine Brigade (Provisional), 4,095 Marines under Brig. Gen. John Marston, came ashore at Reykjavik to relieve the British garrison of Iceland. The Icelandic government had, in the words of the Marine Corps’ own history, “finally, and reluctantly, invited the American occupation” on 1 July. Their convoy of 25 ships was escorted by the battleships New York and Arkansas (Donovan, Outpost in the North Atlantic). With American forces in Iceland, the U.S. Navy had a reason of its own to escort ships there.

From 9 to 12 August Roosevelt and Churchill held their first meeting of the war, in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, off the new American base at Argentia. Roosevelt came in the heavy cruiser Augusta; Churchill crossed the Atlantic in Prince of Wales, repaired after the Denmark Strait. On Sunday 10 August the two leaders attended a church service on her quarterdeck with British and American sailors. The joint declaration they agreed, released on 14 August and known as the Atlantic Charter, set out eight common principles, among them no territorial gains, self-government for peoples who had lost it, and freedom of the seas (NHHC, “Atlantic Charter”). Less publicly, Roosevelt agreed to provide American destroyers to escort HX and ON convoys between the Canadian coast and Iceland.

Before those escorts were organized, an American destroyer and a U-boat met head-on. On the morning of 4 September 1941 the old four-stack destroyer Greer was carrying mail and passengers in the waters southwest of Iceland when, at 0840, a British patrol plane signaled her that a U-boat had crash-dived about ten miles ahead. Forty minutes later Greer‘s soundman picked up the submarine, and she began trailing it, broadcasting its position. At 1032 the British plane, low on fuel, dropped four depth charges and went home. Greer kept trailing. At 1248 the U-boat, U-652 under Oblt. Georg-Werner Fraatz, fired a torpedo at her. Greer went to flank speed and turned hard; the torpedo passed about 100 yards astern. She counterattacked with eight depth charges; a second torpedo passed about 300 yards to port. After a two-hour search she regained contact and dropped 11 more. She held sound contact for three hours and 28 minutes. Neither side was damaged (NHHC, DANFS, “Greer”; uboat.net). It was the first time an American warship had attacked a German one in the war.

Roosevelt went on the radio on 11 September. He told the country that the German submarine “fired first upon this American destroyer without warning, and with deliberate design to sink her.” That was not the whole story: the U-boat had fired only after hours of being hunted, and after the British plane’s depth charges, which its commander may well have thought came from the destroyer. But the policy did not depend on the details. American warships would no longer wait to be attacked.

In their words

These Nazi submarines and raiders are the rattlesnakes of the Atlantic.

The press called it the “shoot on sight” order. Five days later, on 16 September, convoy HX 150 sailed from Halifax, the first convoy with an American escort. Five U.S. destroyers, Dallas, Eberle, Ellis, Ericsson and Upshur, took it from 17 to 25 September as far as the mid-ocean meeting point south of Iceland, where British ships took over. It reached Liverpool on 30 September (Warsailors.com, “Convoy HX 150,” after Hague, The Allied Convoy System). From then on, U.S. destroyers escorted the fast HX and ON convoys in the western Atlantic while the Canadians took most of the slow SC convoys. That autumn the Newfoundland Escort Force itself came under the operational control of an American admiral, though Canada was at war and the United States was not.

The Canadian escorts were already taking the worst of it. Between 9 and 16 September a wolf pack caught slow convoy SC 42 off Greenland and sank 15 or 16 ships, depending on the count, against a Canadian escort of one destroyer and three corvettes (Milner, North Atlantic Run). On the night of 10 September two corvettes reinforcing the escort, HMCS Chambly and HMCS Moose Jaw, forced U-501 to the surface south of Angmagssalik, Greenland, rammed her and sank her; 11 of her crew died and 37 survived (uboat.net, “U-501”). It was the first U-boat sunk by the Royal Canadian Navy in the war.

Kearny and Reuben James

In the middle of October the wolf packs caught another slow convoy. SC 48 had sailed from Sydney, Nova Scotia, on 5 October with 52 ships. On the night of 14–15 October U-boats of the “Mordbrenner” group began picking off its ships south of Iceland, and the escort called for help. Four American destroyers of Destroyer Squadron 13, Plunkett, Decatur, Livermore and the new Kearny, were detached from westbound convoy ON 24 and reached SC 48 on 16 October (Roskill, vol. I; Blair, Hitler’s U-Boat War, vol. I).

The night of 16–17 October was chaotic, the convoy silhouetted against burning ships. Shortly after midnight, ship’s time, Kearny stopped to avoid colliding with a British corvette, and U-568 under Kptlt. Joachim Preuss fired a spread of torpedoes at her; uboat.net, following the German log, gives about 0415 German time. One hit her starboard side abreast of No. 1 fireroom, about 1 minute 39 seconds after firing. She lost all power. Eleven men were killed and 22 wounded, eight of them seriously. Her crew got steam from the after fireroom and brought her to Iceland at 10 knots, escorted by Greer; she arrived on 19 October and was patched alongside the repair ship Vulcan (uboat.net, “USS Kearny (DD 432)”; NHHC, DANFS, “Kearny”). SC 48 lost nine merchant ships and two British escorts.

Kearny‘s eleven dead are commonly described as the first U.S. servicemen killed by German action in the war. She was a new destroyer, and her survival was credited partly to her divided machinery: with power restored from the after fireroom she could still steam. Her escape strengthened the Navy’s support for splitting firerooms and engine rooms in its warships (Friedman, U.S. Destroyers: An Illustrated Design History). On 27 October, Navy Day, Roosevelt told the country in a broadcast that America had been attacked and that the shooting had started. Congress was then debating whether to repeal the remaining restrictions of the Neutrality Act.

Navy Cross

Lt. Cmdr. Anthony L. Danis, commanding USS Kearny

Danis, born in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, in 1899, received the Navy Cross “for distinguished service in line of his profession” as commanding officer of Kearny, for bringing his torpedoed ship safely to port under very difficult conditions after 17 October 1941.

Award record →

Two weeks later the U-boats sank an American warship. Reuben James (DD-245) was a flush-deck, four-funnel destroyer of the First World War type, commissioned in 1920 and named for a boatswain’s mate of the Barbary Wars. On 23 October she sailed from Argentia with Niblack, Hilary P. Jones, Benson and Tarbell to escort the 44 ships of eastbound convoy HX 156. Lt. Cmdr. Heywood L. Edwards was in command (NHHC, DANFS, “Reuben James I”).

Before dawn on 31 October she was on the convoy’s port quarter, steaming at about 8.8 knots. U-552, a Type VIIC boat under Oblt. Erich Topp, had been trailing the convoy. At about 0534, by the Navy’s account, two torpedoes struck Reuben James on the port side. The explosions came near her forward fireroom; most accounts say her forward magazine went up, and the whole forward part of the ship was torn away. The rest of her sank within minutes. Men went over the side and launched three rafts. As the stern went down, at least two of her depth charges exploded among the men in the oily water, killing or drowning an unknown number of them (NHHC, DANFS, “Reuben James I”). Her position was about 600 miles west of Ireland, at roughly 52°N, 27°W.

Niblack sighted men in the water at 0555 and began picking them up five minutes later. By 0805 the rescue was over. Of the crew, 100 men died, including all seven officers and Edwards himself. There were 44 survivors, one of them a passenger, and only two men survived from the forward part of the ship. One of the rescued, Fireman Third Class Donald E. Olmstead, died of his injuries on 2 November (NHHC, DANFS, “Reuben James I”). Reuben James was the first U.S. Navy ship sunk by enemy action in the Second World War.

Her loss came in a week of attacks on American ships. On 19 October U-126 sank the American freighter Lehigh off West Africa; all 44 aboard survived (uboat.net, “Lehigh”). On 30 October U-106 put two torpedoes into the Navy oiler Salinas, sailing in convoy ON 28 about 610 miles east of Newfoundland. She reached Argentia under her own power with no one killed (uboat.net, “USS Salinas (AO 19)”). The sinking of Reuben James became the subject of a song by Woody Guthrie, “The Sinking of the Reuben James,” which has kept the ship in American memory ever since.

From neutrality to war

The sinkings did not bring a declaration of war, but they moved Congress. The Neutrality Act of 1939 still barred American merchant ships from carrying guns and from entering combat zones or the ports of countries at war. In mid-October, as news of the Kearny came in, the House voted 259 to 138 to allow merchant ships to be armed. On 7 November the Senate voted 50 to 37 to go further and repeal the bans on entering combat zones and belligerent ports (Proceedings, “Notes on International Affairs,” December 1941). The House agreed, more narrowly, on 13 November, by 212 to 194. Roosevelt signed the joint resolution at 1630 on 17 November 1941. It repealed sections 2, 3 and 6 of the 1939 act and let the president arm any American vessel during the national emergency (Public Law 294, 77th Congress). American merchant ships, armed and with Navy gun crews, could now sail to British ports.

The narrow House vote showed how many Americans still hoped to stay out of the war. Hitler, for his part, had ordered his U-boat commanders to avoid incidents with American ships, and Doenitz’s boats were under orders not to attack American warships unless attacked themselves.

The decision came from the other side of the world. On 7 December 1941 Japanese carrier aircraft attacked the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, the subject of this site’s Pearl Harbor collection. The United States declared war on Japan the next day. On 11 December Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, and Congress answered with declarations of its own that afternoon. In his speech to the Reichstag that day, Hitler cited Roosevelt’s shoot-on-sight order and the American escort of British convoys among his grievances. The day before, on 10 December, Prince of Wales, the ship that had damaged Bismarck and carried Churchill to Placentia Bay, had been sunk by Japanese aircraft off Malaya, with Capt. John Leach among the dead.

For the U-boats, the declaration opened a coast. Doenitz had argued for months for a free hand against American shipping. Within days he was preparing the first long-range boats for the American seaboard, where coastal traffic still sailed unescorted. What followed off Cape Hatteras is the subject of Chapter 4.

Timeline

The undeclared war, 1941

1. 1 FebU.S. Atlantic Fleet re-established under Adm. Ernest J. King; a Support Force for convoy work follows in March.
2. 11 MarRoosevelt signs the Lend-Lease Act.
3. 9 MayU-110 captured south of Greenland by HMS Bulldog, Broadway and Aubretia; Enigma machine and code books recovered.
4. 19 MayBismarck and Prinz Eugen leave Gotenhafen (Operation Rheinübung).
5. 24 May, about 0600Hood blows up; three of 1,418 men survive. Prince of Wales hits Bismarck three times.
6. 26 May, 1010–1030Catalina of 209 Squadron, with Ensign Leonard B. Smith, USN, as co-pilot, finds Bismarck.
7. 26 May, 2047Ark Royal’s Swordfish attack; one torpedo jams Bismarck’s rudders.
8. 27 May, 0847–1040Rodney and King George V destroy Bismarck; 114 survive. HX 129 sails, the first convoy escorted across the whole ocean.
9. 7 JulU.S. Marines land at Reykjavik to garrison Iceland.
10. 9–12 AugRoosevelt and Churchill meet in Placentia Bay; the Atlantic Charter is released on 14 August.
11. 4 SepU-652 fires on USS Greer southwest of Iceland.
12. 11 SepRoosevelt’s fireside chat: the shoot-on-sight order.
13. 16 SepHX 150 sails from Halifax, the first convoy with an American escort.
14. 17 OctU-568 torpedoes USS Kearny with SC 48; 11 killed.
15. 31 OctU-552 sinks USS Reuben James with HX 156; 100 killed.
16. 17 NovRoosevelt signs the repeal of the Neutrality Act’s shipping restrictions.
17. 7–11 DecJapan attacks Pearl Harbor; Germany and Italy declare war on the United States on 11 December.

People

Adm. Günther Lütjens (1889–1941) commanded the German fleet in Operation Rheinübung, with Capt. Ernst Lindemann (1894–1941) commanding Bismarck. Lütjens chose to press on for France after the Denmark Strait rather than return to Norway. Both men died aboard on 27 May.

VAdm. Lancelot Holland (1887–1941) commanded the Battle Cruiser Squadron in Hood. His decision to close the range quickly, bow-on, has been debated ever since. He died with Hood.

Capt. John Leach (1894–1941) took the brand-new Prince of Wales into action in the Denmark Strait and broke off after Hood was lost and his own ship was damaged. He commanded her at Placentia Bay and was lost with her off Malaya on 10 December 1941.

Ensign Leonard B. Smith, USN, was co-pilot of the Catalina that found Bismarck on 26 May. He was one of a small group of U.S. Navy pilots serving with RAF Coastal Command while the United States was neutral, and his report of the flight survives in the Navy Department Library.

Commodore Leonard W. Murray, RCN (1896–1971), commanded the Newfoundland Escort Force from June 1941. In 1943 he became Commander-in-Chief, Canadian Northwest Atlantic, the only Canadian to command an Allied theater of operations in the war.

Lt. Cmdr. Heywood L. Edwards, a Naval Academy graduate, commanded Reuben James and was killed with all of her officers on 31 October 1941. The destroyer USS Heywood L. Edwards (DD-663) was named for him.

Erich Topp (1914–2005) commanded U-552 from her commissioning in December 1940 until September 1942 and became one of the most successful U-boat commanders of the war; uboat.net credits the boat with 30 merchant ships sunk. After the war he served as an admiral in the West German Navy.

Ted Briggs (1923–2008), an 18-year-old signalman on Hood‘s compass platform, was the last of her three survivors. For the rest of his life he was a witness for the 1,415 men who died.

Burkard Freiherr von Müllenheim-Rechberg (1910–2003), Bismarck‘s fourth gunnery officer, was the senior officer among her survivors. His memoir, Battleship Bismarck: A Survivor’s Story (1980), is the main German eyewitness account of the sortie.

Losses and uncertainty

The two surface losses of May 1941 dwarf everything else in this chapter, though the smaller American numbers mattered more to the politics of the year. The chart uses the figures most often published.

By the numbers

Killed in the ships of 1941’s turning points

Men killed or died of wounds, selected ships, May–October 1941

Bismarckabout 2,100

Hood1,415

Reuben James100

U-11015

Prince of Wales13

Kearny11

Bismarck‘s toll cannot be fixed exactly because nobody knows precisely how many men were aboard. Her complement for the operation is usually given as about 2,220, crew and fleet staff, plus supernumeraries whose number was not recorded with certainty. The survivor count is firm at 114: 110 picked up by Dorsetshire and Maori (of whom one died the next day), three by U-74 and two by Sachsenwald. Published death tolls therefore range from “over 2,000” to about 2,200, with “about 2,100” the most common.

Hood‘s figure is more secure: 1,418 aboard and three survivors, which gives the 1,415 dead used by the HMS Hood Association and most histories. Some reference works print other totals, such as 1,428; the differences appear to come from how men who joined or left the ship at the last moment were counted, and from errors repeated between books.

The American figures differ in small but telling ways. For Reuben James, the NHHC history gives 100 dead (seven officers and 93 enlisted men) and 44 survivors, and records that one rescued man, Fireman Olmstead, died on 2 November; it is not clear from the text whether he is counted among the 100. The U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings, writing in December 1941, gave 101 lost from a complement of 145; uboat.net gives about 100 of 144. For Kearny, every source agrees on 11 killed; the wounded are given as 22 by uboat.net and the NHHC, but as 10 injured in the December 1941 Proceedings. Dates also slip: the Proceedings dated the loss of Reuben James to 30 October, while the Navy’s history uses 31 October, the date at sea.

Times are uncertain in the Bismarck story for a simpler reason: the two navies kept different clocks. British ships used British time and German ships used German time, which differed by an hour or two. Ensign Smith’s report gives 1010 for the Catalina’s sighting where most British accounts give 1030. This chapter follows the British times used by Roskill unless it says otherwise.

Questions readers ask

Why did Hood blow up so quickly?

Two Admiralty boards of inquiry concluded that a 15-inch shell from Bismarck penetrated to one of Hood‘s after magazines, where the cordite charges for her guns exploded. Her deck armor was thin by 1941 standards, and at the range of the action the German shells were falling steeply enough to reach it. The boat-deck fire was examined as a possible cause and rejected. Forensic studies of the wreck, found in 2001 at about 2,800 meters, support a magazine explosion aft.

Did the United States fight Germany before Pearl Harbor?

Yes, at sea. From September 1941 American destroyers escorted British and Allied convoys in the western Atlantic under orders to attack U-boats on sight. Greer depth-charged U-652 on 4 September; Kearny was torpedoed with 11 killed on 17 October; Reuben James was sunk with 100 killed on 31 October. There was no declaration of war, but it was a shooting war in all but name.

Was Bismarck sunk by the British or scuttled by her crew?

Both, in a sense. By about 1000 on 27 May British gunfire had wrecked her and she was sinking slowly. Survivors said scuttling charges were set, and Dorsetshire fired torpedoes into her. Expeditions to the wreck, which Robert Ballard found on 8 June 1989 at a depth of about 4,800 meters, have not settled which finished her. Most historians agree that she was doomed by the gunfire and would have gone down within hours whatever her crew did.

Who found Bismarck after she was lost?

A Catalina flying boat of 209 Squadron, RAF Coastal Command, from Lough Erne in Northern Ireland, on the morning of 26 May. Its pilot was Flying Officer Dennis Briggs and its co-pilot was Ensign Leonard B. Smith of the U.S. Navy, who was flying with the RAF while his country was neutral.

Why didn’t the loss of the Reuben James bring the United States into the war?

Because opinion at home was still divided, and there was no sign that Congress would vote for war over an incident at sea. The sinking helped pass the repeal of the Neutrality Act’s shipping restrictions, but the House vote on 13 November, 212 to 194, showed how narrow the support was. It took the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and Germany’s own declaration of war on 11 December, to settle the matter.

What did the capture of U-110 give the British?

An intact Enigma machine with its rotors set, and current code books and settings documents, taken before the Germans could destroy them. Because the boat sank under tow the next day and the prisoners were kept apart, the Germans assumed she had sunk with her secrets. What Bletchley Park did with it is told in Chapter 5.

How it connects

The escort crisis of 1941 grew directly out of 1940. The French bases, the first wolf-pack attacks and the slaughter of convoy SC 7, told in Chapter 2, forced the British to push escorts west and drew the United States into the destroyers-for-bases deal. The convoy system itself, and the sinking of Athenia by Lemp’s U-30, are in Chapter 1. When Germany declared war in December, the U-boats turned on the American coast, and the result, off the Outer Banks of North Carolina, is the subject of Chapter 4, Torpedo Junction. The Enigma material taken from U-110 leads to Chapter 5, and the Arctic convoys that Tirpitz threatened after her sister was sunk lead to Chapter 6. The attack that ended American neutrality is told in full in the Pearl Harbor collection. For the whole Atlantic story, return to the Battle of the Atlantic collection or the World War II hub.

What happened afterward

The Royal Navy never again faced a German battleship loose on the convoy routes. Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen ran home from Brest through the English Channel in February 1942, the action in which Esmonde was killed, and Tirpitz stayed in Norway until British bombers sank her in November 1944. The fight for the Atlantic became, almost entirely, a fight between escorts and aircraft on one side and U-boats on the other.

The arrangements of 1941 outlasted the year. The Newfoundland Escort Force was merged with the British escort groups into the Mid-Ocean Escort Force in early 1942, and the Royal Canadian Navy, which had begun the war with a handful of destroyers, carried a large share of the North Atlantic convoys until the end. Argentia and Iceland remained key American bases. The U.S. Navy’s escort role, begun with HX 150, was soon squeezed by the demands of its own coast and the Pacific.

Kearny sailed for Boston on Christmas Day 1941 for permanent repairs and returned to service in April 1942. She served through the war, in North Africa, at Anzio and in southern France (uboat.net). The Navy has since named several ships Reuben James, among them the frigate FFG-57. The Marines left Iceland in early 1942, replaced by Army troops.

Walking the ground today

The ships of 1941 lie in deep water far from any coast. Hood‘s wreck, located in 2001 in the Denmark Strait, and Bismarck‘s, found by Robert Ballard in 1989 about 650 kilometers (400 miles) west of Brest, are both war graves. Hood‘s ship’s bell was recovered from the seabed in 2015 and is displayed at the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth, England. The memorial to her crew is in the Church of St. John the Baptist at Boldre, in Hampshire, Admiral Holland’s parish church, where services of remembrance have been held on the anniversary of her loss. Reuben James lies somewhere west of Ireland; her wreck has not been publicly located.

On the western side of the ocean, HMCS Sackville, the last surviving Flower-class corvette, commissioned in December 1941, is preserved at Halifax, Nova Scotia, as Canada’s Naval Memorial and is open to visitors in summer. In St. John’s, Newfoundland, the Crow’s Nest Officers’ Club, opened in 1942 for the officers of the escort groups, still keeps its collection of wartime crests and relics, and Signal Hill overlooks the harbor the escorts used. Argentia, the American naval station on Placentia Bay, has long since closed, but the bay where Augusta and Prince of Wales anchored in August 1941 can be seen from the shore.

In North Carolina, the battleship USS North Carolina (BB-55), commissioned at New York on 9 April 1941 as the first of the Navy’s new generation of battleships, is preserved at Wilmington, across the Cape Fear River from downtown. Her decks give a good sense of the size of the ships that fought in the Denmark Strait. The Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum at Hatteras tells the story of what the U-boats did off the Outer Banks after December 1941, which is the subject of the next chapter. Check each site for current hours before you go.

Sources and further reading

• Stephen W. Roskill, The War at Sea, 1939–1945, vol. I, The Defensive (HMSO, 1954). The British official history; chapters on the Bismarck operation and the Atlantic in 1941.
• Samuel Eliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, vol. I, The Battle of the Atlantic, September 1939–May 1943 (1947), on the Neutrality Patrol, Iceland, the Support Force, Greer, Kearny and Reuben James.
• Naval History and Heritage Command, Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships: Reuben James I, Greer; NHHC, “Atlantic Charter” photograph collection.
• Ensign Leonard B. Smith, USN, “The Scouting and Search for Bismarck,” Office of Naval Intelligence report, 9 June 1941, Navy Department Library.
• David J. Bercuson and Holger H. Herwig, The Destruction of the Bismarck (2001); Ludovic Kennedy, Pursuit: The Chase and Sinking of the Bismarck (1974); Burkard Baron von Müllenheim-Rechberg, Battleship Bismarck: A Survivor’s Story (1980); William H. Garzke Jr. and Robert O. Dulin Jr., Battleships: Axis and Neutral Battleships in World War II (1985).
• HMS Hood Association, hmshood.org.uk (crew, loss and survivors).
• uboat.net: U-110, U-552, U-501, USS Kearny, USS Salinas, Robin Moor, Lehigh, USS Greer.
• Marc Milner, North Atlantic Run: The Royal Canadian Navy and the Battle for the Convoys (1985) and Battle of the Atlantic (2003); Heritage Newfoundland and Labrador, “War at Sea: Newfoundland’s Role”; Royal Canadian Navy, “Rear-Admiral Leonard Murray”.
• Clay Blair, Hitler’s U-Boat War, vol. I, The Hunters, 1939–1942 (1996); Arnold Hague, The Allied Convoy System, 1939–1945 (2000), as summarized in Warsailors.com, “Convoy HX 150”; Jürgen Rohwer and Gerhard Hümmelchen, Chronology of the War at Sea.
• F. H. Hinsley et al., British Intelligence in the Second World War, vol. I (HMSO, 1979), on the U-110 capture.
• Col. James A. Donovan, USMC (Ret.), Outpost in the North Atlantic: Marines in the Defense of Iceland (Marine Corps Historical Center, 1992); Marine Corps History Division, “Marines in the Atlantic, Europe and Africa.”
• Franklin D. Roosevelt, Fireside Chat, 11 September 1941, American Presidency Project; House Joint Resolution 237, Public Law 294, 77th Congress, approved 17 November 1941: text; U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, “Notes on International Affairs,” December 1941; Council on Foreign Relations, “FDR’s Shoot-on-Sight Fireside Chat.”
• Award records: Eugene Esmonde, VC, DSO; Anthony L. Danis, Navy Cross. Imperial War Museums photograph collections (A 4386, A 4816, A 5826, CS 159, ZZZ 3130C).

Photographs: Royal Navy and RAF official photographs (Imperial War Museums, Crown copyright expired), official U.S. Navy photographs (National Archives and Naval History and Heritage Command), and a 1924 photograph by Allan C. Green (State Library Victoria); all public domain.