The Americans in Iceland

On the morning of Monday 7 July 1941 a convoy of American ships approached Reykjavík. The sea was as smooth as glass, and the sun, which at that time of year and in that latitude barely sets, already stood high. Aboard the transports waited 4,095 men of the 1st Marine Brigade (Provisional) under Brigadier General John Marston. Soldiers of the British garrison, which had been on the island for more than a year, waved and shouted a welcome. That same day President Franklin Delano Roosevelt informed Congress that, at the invitation of the Icelandic government, United States forces had arrived in Iceland to “supplement, and eventually to replace” the British troops stationed there.

The United States was not then at war with anyone. Even so, its troops now stood on an island lying far to the east of anything hitherto regarded as an American defence zone, in the very middle of the waters where German submarines were sinking ships bound for Britain. Popular chronologies present it as though the Americans replaced the British and Canadian forces on the island that day. That is a simplification. By then there were hardly any Canadians left in Iceland, and the British remained there for many months to come. The Americans first reinforced them and only later, gradually, replaced them. Two further steps taken in the same weeks completed the American entry into the North Atlantic: the widening of the powers of General Headquarters, United States Army, on 3 July, and the commissioning of the naval base at Argentia in Newfoundland on 15 July.

An island under British protection

The British had occupied Iceland on 10 May 1940 to keep the Germans out. The Royal Marines were soon followed by an army brigade, later by the whole 49th (West Riding) Division under Major General Henry Curtis, and in June and July 1940 also by the Canadian “Z” Force. The Canadians did not stay long, however. Force headquarters and the Royal Regiment of Canada sailed for England at the end of October 1940, and the last Canadian battalion, the Cameron Highlanders of Ottawa, wintered on the island and left it on 28 April 1941. What remained in Iceland were mainly British land forces, numbering some 25,000 men in the summer of 1941, a few hundred RAF personnel and about 2,000 sailors who manned the escorts and minesweepers in Hvalfjörður.

The Icelanders, although they cooperated with the occupying power, resented its presence. They chafed at its control over their foreign trade, and as the Luftwaffe extended its raids they feared ever more that the presence of one belligerent’s troops would draw an attack from the other. As early as July 1940 the government of Hermann Jónasson cautiously asked the State Department whether Iceland might be brought under the protection of the Monroe Doctrine. The hope was that the garrison of a non-belligerent would not attract German bombs, and might even prove unnecessary. For many months Washington refused to commit itself: in February 1941 the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, agreed with the State Department that the Icelanders should be neither discouraged nor encouraged.

Roosevelt’s decision

In the spring of 1941 the situation changed fundamentally. The British were suffering defeats in North Africa, Greece and Crete and needed every soldier, while in the waters south of Iceland German wolf packs were destroying one convoy after another. In April Roosevelt extended the zone of American patrols to the 26th meridian west and took Greenland under protection. In mid-April his adviser Harry Hopkins and the Under Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, returned to the question of American protection in a conversation with the Icelandic consul general. Late in the spring, in the weeks when the Bismarck sank the Hood in the Denmark Strait and the Germans were taking Crete, Prime Minister Winston Churchill asked the President to send Americans to Iceland so as to release the British garrison there.

Roosevelt made his decision between 3 and 6 June, warmly supported by Stimson and the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox. Some army staff officers were opposed: they believed that sending a whole division to a distant island would wreck other war plans. The President laid down one condition: the Americans would go only at the invitation of the Icelandic government. The first echelon had to be the Marine Corps. Legislation of 1940 forbade sending draftees, National Guardsmen and reservists outside the Western Hemisphere, and in many army divisions they made up a large share of the men. The Marines were all volunteers and could be sent anywhere.

On 5 June Roosevelt instructed the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Harold Stark, to have a brigade ready to sail within two weeks. Its core was Colonel Leo D. Hermle’s 6th Marine Regiment, which at the end of May had sailed from San Diego through the Panama Canal to the East Coast with a possible landing in the Azores in mind. On 16 June, at Charleston, South Carolina, the 1st Marine Brigade (Provisional) was formed from it, an artillery battalion of the 10th Marines, the 5th Defense Battalion (anti-aircraft and coastal) and smaller units. The mission Stark gave it was brief: in cooperation with the British garrison, to defend Iceland against hostile attack.

Waiting in Placentia Bay

On 22 June, the day Germany attacked the Soviet Union, the brigade sailed from Charleston. At sea it was joined by its escort: Rear Admiral David M. LeBreton’s Task Force 19, 25 ships in all, among them the battleships Arkansas and New York and two light cruisers. During the night of 27–28 June the convoy entered Placentia Bay in Newfoundland and dropped anchor off Argentia, where the Americans had been building a base since the winter. There it was to “await further orders”.

The orders did not come, because the Icelandic government would not issue an invitation. The British, who had promised to obtain one, urged Jónasson that their troops would leave in any case and that the only alternative for a defenceless island would be American protection. Jónasson’s government temporised: it did not want a country that had proclaimed perpetual neutrality to look like a party to the war, and it was seeking the best possible terms. The invitation finally came on 1 July, in a telegram to Roosevelt, and was, as American historians put it, rather lukewarm. In it the Icelandic government declared that “after careful consideration of all the circumstances” it regarded the dispatch of American troops, who would supplement and in time replace the British, as being in Iceland’s interest, and that it was ready to entrust the defence of the country to the United States on eight conditions.

Those conditions said a great deal about the position of a small nation. The United States was to withdraw all its land, air and naval forces from Iceland immediately at the end of the war; to recognise its “absolute independence and sovereignty” and work for its recognition in the future peace treaty as well; not to interfere in its internal affairs either while its troops were present or afterwards; to defend the country at its own expense and pay compensation for damage done to the inhabitants; and to supply the island with essential goods and conclude favourable trade agreements with it. Because of the small population, only “picked troops” were to be sent, mindful that the Icelanders had “for centuries been unarmed”. The Icelandic government also demanded adequate defence from the very first moment, aircraft above all. Iceland was taking the decision, it was stressed, “as an absolutely free and sovereign state”, and it expected an immediate exchange of diplomatic representatives.

Roosevelt replied the same day that the conditions were “fully acceptable” to the United States government and announced that American forces would be sent “immediately”. Still on 1 July the President telephoned Admiral Stark from Hyde Park to say that the Marines were to sail. The same day brought a decision that surprised London: the American army was not to replace the British but to reinforce them. Roosevelt did not believe that a garrison of one American division would suffice, and the British, when asked, had admitted at the end of June that they would withdraw no troops until both governments considered the island’s defence secure. The rules on draftees also weighed on the decision. Until Congress lifted the restrictions, the army could not send a division to Iceland without reshuffling thousands of men, and the question of extending draftees’ service beyond twelve months, which the Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, raised in a report published on 3 July, promised a hard political fight in Congress.

The landing at Reykjavík

At 10 p.m. on 1 July the transports weighed anchor and set off north-east. According to the Marines’ recollections, they passed floating wreckage of the Hood on the way, and on 5 July, as the convoy entered the war zone, the men were ordered to keep their life jackets on. One of the destroyers picked up fourteen survivors from a lifeboat of the Norwegian ship Vigrid, torpedoed by a U-boat on 24 June. From 4 July Catalina flying boats of one of the US Navy’s patrol squadrons, operating from a tender anchored in Reykjavík harbour, circled over the convoy’s route and over Iceland.

On 7 July the convoy arrived at Reykjavík. Unloading proved harder than expected. The harbour was shallow, so only some of the ships could come alongside the quays, and the rest were unloaded by landing craft onto the beach. Nobody had warned the Americans that the tide here rose more than four metres: the water flooded the beach and soaked or carried away some of the supplies – cartons of rations, uniforms and equipment. Even so, unloading went on round the clock, and within four days the brigade had brought some 1,500 tons of supplies ashore and the ships could turn back.

The same day Roosevelt made public in Washington the exchange of telegrams with Iceland. In his message to Congress he wrote that the United States “cannot permit the occupation by Germany of strategic outposts in the Atlantic” that could serve as bases for an attack on the Western Hemisphere. A German occupation of Iceland, he argued, would pose a threat in three respects: to Greenland and the northern part of the American continent, to all shipping in the North Atlantic, and to the steady flow of munitions to Britain, which was the policy adopted by Congress. As Commander-in-Chief he had therefore ordered the Navy to take “all necessary steps” to ensure the safety of communications between the United States and Iceland. He assured the Icelanders that American forces would not interfere in their affairs and would leave immediately once the present “international emergency” was over. On 10 July the agreement was approved by the Icelandic parliament, the Althing.

Marines under the British polar bear

On the island the question of who answered to whom had to be settled from the start. The British wanted the brigade placed under their command, since they had far more troops there and General Curtis outranked Marston. Admiral Stark refused to subordinate the troops of a formally neutral state to the army of a belligerent. Marston was therefore to coordinate his operations with the British “by mutual cooperation” and to report directly to Washington. In practice cooperation went well. The British commander assigned the 6th Marines to the reserve, ready to counter-attack anywhere along the road from Reykjavík to the fleet base in Hvalfjörður, and the 5th Defense Battalion was incorporated into the anti-aircraft defence of the town, the harbour and the airfield. The Marines moved into camps of Nissen huts vacated by the British and, at Curtis’s suggestion, adopted his division’s emblem, a white polar bear on an ice floe, which they wore on their sleeves for the rest of their time on the island.

The army arrived later, and in smaller strength, than had been planned in June. On 6 August the first contingent, some 1,100 men, reached Reykjavík; Curtiss P-40 fighters of the 33rd Pursuit Squadron flew to the island from the deck of the aircraft carrier Wasp. On the same day flying boats of two Navy patrol squadrons began operating from Reykjavík. On 16 August Churchill, returning from his meeting with Roosevelt at Argentia, took the salute at a parade of British and American troops in Reykjavík. In mid-September the main convoy arrived with troops of the 5th Infantry Division, and on 22 September Roosevelt placed the Marine brigade under Major General Charles Bonesteel, commander of US land forces in Iceland. The Marines spent the winter building camps for the army that was to relieve them, and in March 1942 their last units sailed for New York. Most of the British left the island only in the spring and summer of 1942, when further American convoys arrived. Indeed, in July 1941 London had sent an additional battalion to Iceland. The official history of the Marine Corps concedes that the expedition “did not actually release many British troops”.

New tasks for General Headquarters

The Iceland expedition coincided with a change in the command of the US Army. General Headquarters, United States Army (GHQ), set up in July 1940 under the de facto direction of General Lesley McNair, had until then dealt solely with organising and training the field forces at home. Operational planning and the command of forces sent abroad remained in the hands of the War Plans Division of the General Staff. In planning the Iceland expedition, in which at least seven offices and bureaux were involved by mid-June, this division of labour proved exceptionally awkward.

The formal directive extending GHQ’s tasks was issued on 3 July 1941. From then on, in addition to training, General Headquarters was to plan and conduct military operations in areas assigned to it by the War Department and to command the task forces sent there. Marshall put it briefly: GHQ “now replaces the War Plans Division in the organisation and control of task forces and operations”. It is sometimes said that GHQ was given command and planning of operations in the “zone of the interior”, that is, on United States territory. The opposite was true: the point was precisely operations outside the zone of the interior, above all the new Atlantic bases. On 8 July the Newfoundland Base Command, headed since 1 July by Brigadier General Henry W. Harms of the Air Corps, was designated a task force directly subordinate to GHQ (with effect from 10 July); Bermuda was treated in the same way, and later in July Greenland as well. GHQ also took over the detailed planning of the defence of Iceland, whose operational plan was largely ready by 10 July.

The reform proved a half-measure. GHQ received operations, but supply and administration stayed with the General Staff and the services, and its requests for full command of theatres – for example a North Atlantic defence command covering Newfoundland, Labrador, Greenland and Iceland – found no favour. McNair complained that General Headquarters had been left with only “such inspection and coordination as is possible under the circumstances”. Similar disputes over control of the air arm had led a few weeks earlier to the creation of the USAAF. In March 1942, in the great reorganisation of the War Department after America entered the war, GHQ was abolished, and the planning and direction of operations returned to the General Staff.

Argentia

On 15 July 1941, on Placentia Bay at the south-western edge of the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland, the US Navy commissioned Naval Air Station and Naval Operating Base Argentia – a naval air station and a fleet operating base. The United States had obtained the site under the destroyers-for-bases agreement of September 1940: Britain handed over the Newfoundland bases formally as a gift, on 99-year leases. Argentia was chosen for its proximity to Europe, its sheltered, rarely frozen bay with deep anchorages and a flat headland on which an airfield could be built. The Commission of Government that ran the dominion expropriated the local inhabitants – more than four hundred families, according to various accounts. The compensation, usually no more than a few thousand dollars, was not enough amid wartime shortages to build comparable houses.

Work began on 29 December 1940; before the runways could be laid, a layer of peat, in places six metres deep, had to be removed from the headland. On 13 February 1941 the American flag was raised at Argentia, and by May Catalina flying boats were operating from there off the tender Albemarle; they took part in the hunt for the Bismarck. On 1 July the Navy’s Patrol Wing 7 was formed at Argentia for operations in the North Atlantic. The ceremony of 15 July was therefore less the beginning of the base than its formal commissioning; guard duty there was taken over by a detachment of a hundred Marines. Some studies give a separate date, 28 August 1941, for the commissioning of the air station itself.

Argentia is often called an important Allied “staging post”. Above all it was one for the fleet. Less than a month after the base was commissioned, on 9–12 August, Roosevelt and Churchill met aboard warships in Placentia Bay, and their talks ended with the Atlantic Charter, announced on 14 August. From 1 September the US Navy was responsible for escorting convoys bound for Britain on the leg from a point off Argentia to the meridian of Iceland, and American escort destroyers sailed from Argentia. Aircraft being ferried to Britain mainly used other airfields in Newfoundland and Labrador, above all Gander and later Goose Bay. After the war Argentia remained a US naval base until 1994.

A step towards war

For Germany the landing of Americans in the zone Berlin had declared a blockade area around the British Isles was a challenge. Grand Admiral Erich Raeder had for months been demanding a free hand against American warships, which were shadowing German U-boats and reporting them to the British. Adolf Hitler, however, preoccupied with the war against the Soviet Union, which he expected to end soon in victory, ordered in July that incidents with the United States be avoided. He wanted to put off the reckoning with America until later.

Washington meanwhile went further. In the second half of July Admiral Ernest King’s Atlantic Fleet received orders to escort American and Icelandic ships to Iceland; ships of other flags could join them. The defence of the island garrison thus became the basis for the US Navy’s participation in protecting Atlantic convoys. In the autumn, after the incident involving the destroyer Greer on 4 September, Roosevelt issued his order to fire on German submarines without warning, and in October U-boats torpedoed the destroyers Kearny and Reuben James, the latter sinking with about a hundred sailors. An undeclared naval war was under way between the United States and Germany, and Iceland, Greenland and Argentia were its bases. When Germany declared war on America in December 1941, American troops had already been in Iceland for five months.

Iceland remained formally neutral until the end of the war. The American garrison grew to several tens of thousands of men, and the airfields near Keflavík became a stop on the route by which thousands of American aircraft flew to Britain. On 17 June 1944 Iceland dissolved its union with Denmark and proclaimed itself a republic, and the United States, in keeping with its promise of 1 July 1941, promptly recognised the new state. The promise to withdraw troops immediately after the war was fulfilled late: the last Americans left in 1947, and four years later, now within NATO, they returned for more than half a century.