The destroyers-for-bases agreement

On the evening of 2 September 1940, in Washington, Secretary of State Cordell Hull and the British ambassador, Philip Kerr, Marquess of Lothian, exchanged notes that brought to a close the efforts Winston Churchill had been making since May to obtain American warships. The United States, still formally neutral, was handing 50 old destroyers to a Britain at war. In return it received 99-year leases of land for naval and air bases on British possessions stretching in an arc from Newfoundland to the coast of South America. The next day President Franklin Delano Roosevelt informed Congress. Neither the House of Representatives nor the Senate voted on the agreement. The President had concluded it on his own authority, as an executive agreement.

It is usually said that Britain received the destroyers in exchange for bases in the Bahamas, Antigua, Saint Lucia, Trinidad, Jamaica and British Guiana. That is true, but not the whole truth. The agreement also covered two further territories, Newfoundland and Bermuda, except that the British formally granted the bases there as a gift rather than as payment. This division was no technicality. It was the compromise without which there would have been no agreement at all.

From a plea to a bargain

Churchill had been asking for destroyers since 15 May, a few days after becoming Prime Minister. The Royal Navy had lost many of them off Norway and at Dunkirk, and dozens more were in dock for repairs. In the summer of 1940 destroyers were needed at once to escort convoys in the Atlantic and to repel a possible invasion across the Channel. The US Navy had more than a hundred of them in reserve: ships mass-produced at the end of the First World War and just after it, displacing about 1,200 tons, with their distinctive four funnels. Roosevelt wanted to help, but in an election year, with strong isolationist feeling and a law that forbade the transfer of military equipment unless it was certified as not essential to the nation’s defence, for a long time he could see no way of doing so.

The solution took shape in the August negotiations. Private advocates of aid to Britain came up with the idea that the destroyers should not be a present but the price of bases that would strengthen the security of the United States itself. Only in this form could Roosevelt present the deal to voters. Churchill, for his part, did not want it to look like the sale of pieces of the Empire for a handful of old ships. On 20 August, in a speech in the House of Commons, he announced that the British government would of its own accord make bases available to the Americans, and said not a word about destroyers. Two days later he wrote to Roosevelt that he wished to give the bases unconditionally and that the ships should be a separate gift. The State Department replied that a gift of ships was impossible, because the law allowed them to be transferred only if the country gained something in return.

The deadlock was broken at the end of August by dividing the bases into two groups. Those the British most wanted to offer as a gesture of goodwill, Newfoundland and Bermuda, were to be a gift. The rest were to be payment. Churchill could speak of generosity, Roosevelt of a good bargain. The guarantee the Americans had sought from the outset – that if the British Isles fell, the fleet would not be handed over to Germany – was moved to a separate exchange of letters.

The notes of 2 September

Lothian’s note began with the gifts. In view of His Majesty’s Government’s “friendly and sympathetic interest” in the national security of the United States, Britain granted the Americans, “freely and without consideration”, leases of land for bases in Newfoundland, on the Avalon Peninsula and on the island’s southern coast, and on the eastern side of Bermuda. Newfoundland was then a dominion which, since its bankruptcy in 1934, had been governed by a commission appointed from London, so the British government was in a position to decide on its behalf. Canada, for which the island was the outer bulwark of its own coast, was also consulted.

The second part of the note dealt with the exchange. In return for 50 US Navy destroyers “of the twelve-hundred-ton type”, Britain made available sites on the eastern side of the Bahamas, on the southern coast of Jamaica, on the western coast of Saint Lucia, on the western coast of Trinidad on the Gulf of Paria, on Antigua, and in British Guiana within 50 miles of Georgetown. It is these six territories that are usually listed as the payment for the destroyers. The exact boundaries of the bases were to be fixed jointly by experts from both countries.

All the leases, whether granted as gifts or exchanged, ran for 99 years, free of rent and charges, with a single exception: the United States was to compensate private owners whose land was expropriated. Within the bases the Americans received all the rights and powers needed to build, operate and defend them, but the word “sovereignty”, which had appeared in the first American drafts, vanished from the text. For London this was an absolute condition: the islands remained British.

Hull replied with a note the same day. The United States government accepted the proposal and undertook to transfer the 50 destroyers “immediately”. In a separate exchange of letters Lothian confirmed on Churchill’s behalf that the declaration made in his speech of 4 June stood as the settled policy of the government: if the waters around the British Isles became untenable for the fleet, it would be neither surrendered nor scuttled, but would sail away to defend other parts of the Empire. Churchill stressed, however, that this was not a promise made to the Americans in return for the ships, but a statement of existing policy. The detailed agreement on the base leases was not signed until 27 March 1941, in London.

Several items also disappeared from the American offer of August. The motor torpedo boats Washington had promised earlier were still under construction, and the law forbade the transfer to a belligerent of warships built with that belligerent in mind. In the end Britain received the destroyers alone.

Jackson’s opinion and the message to Congress

The legal basis for the agreement was an opinion by Attorney General Robert H. Jackson, dated 27 August. Jackson held that the President could accept the base leases by executive agreement, without a treaty and without the consent of the Senate, because the agreement imposed on the United States no obligations requiring legislation and fell within the President’s constitutional powers as commander-in-chief of the armed forces and director of foreign policy. On the destroyers, he pointed out that an act of 28 June 1940 permitted the transfer of warships if the Chief of Naval Operations certified that they were not essential to the nation’s defence. Such a certificate could be issued, since in return the country was receiving bases that strengthened its defence. An act of 1917, on the other hand, forbade sending to a belligerent any vessel built or armed with the intention of delivering it to that belligerent. The old destroyers, built for the US Navy more than twenty years earlier, did not fall under this provision; the boats under construction did. The Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Harold R. Stark, duly provided the required certificate.

On 3 September Roosevelt, returning by train from Tennessee, where the day before he had dedicated Great Smoky Mountains National Park, announced the agreement to journalists and sent Congress a message enclosing the notes and Jackson’s opinion. He was not asking for approval but informing. He called the agreement “the most important action in the reinforcement of our national defense that has been taken since the Louisiana Purchase”, and argued that now, as then, the deciding consideration was security against attack from overseas. The new bases were to protect the Panama Canal, Central America, the northern part of South America, the Antilles, Canada, Mexico and the eastern seaboard of the United States. The step, he wrote, was in no sense inconsistent with the country’s state of peace, still less a threat to any nation; it was “an epochal and far-reaching act of preparation for continental defense in the face of grave danger”. The destroyers took up a single sentence of the message.

Reactions in America

Most Americans welcomed the agreement. Polls in August had shown clear support for handing over the ships and even greater support for acquiring the bases, and the public saw the transaction above all as an excellent deal: a few dozen old ships for strategic positions in the Atlantic and the Caribbean. The objections concerned not so much the substance of the agreement as the way it had been concluded.

The Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, himself in favour of aid to Britain, declared on 3 September that the country would undoubtedly approve of giving the British every possible help, but regretted that the President had not gone to Congress. A few days later, in the heat of the campaign, he went further and called the agreement the most arbitrary and dictatorial act ever committed by any President in the history of the United States. Willkie had no intention, however, of fighting the aid itself, and the destroyer question never became the centrepiece of the campaign. The isolationists reacted more sharply. The Republican congressman George Tinkham claimed that Roosevelt’s conduct was no different from that of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch headed an editorial “Dictator Roosevelt Commits an Act of War”. Many lawyers and constitutional scholars, among them Professor Edward Corwin of Princeton, criticised Jackson’s opinion as a dangerous expansion of presidential power.

The most lasting result of these passions was an organisation. On 4 September, two days after the exchange of notes, the America First Committee was founded on the initiative of Yale students, led by the retired general Robert E. Wood, chairman of Sears, Roebuck. The committee became the principal isolationist pressure group in the United States, and in 1941 its most famous speaker was the aviator Charles Lindbergh. From then on, the dispute over how far aid to Britain could go without entering the war accompanied the entire election campaign and lasted until December 1941.

What the destroyers were worth

The first eight ships were taken over by British crews at Halifax, Canada, on 9 September 1940, and further groups were handed over during the autumn. The 50 vessels comprised three destroyers of the Caldwell class, 27 of the Wickes class and 20 of the Clemson class. The British called them the Town class, because each was named after a town that existed in both Britain and the United States (hence HMS Campbeltown, Broadway and Lincoln). Some went straight to the Royal Canadian Navy.

In 1940 the fighting value of these ships was slight. After years in reserve many needed lengthy refits, had worn-out boilers and obsolete equipment, handled badly in confined waters and behaved atrociously in an Atlantic sea. Admiral Bertram Ramsay called them the worst destroyers he had ever seen. Only a small number entered operational service before the end of 1940, and according to some studies about 30 were serviceable in May 1941. Only after conversion, with fewer guns and torpedo tubes and a larger stock of depth charges, did they become useful convoy escorts. In the Battle of the Atlantic they sank, or helped to sink, several U-boats. Ten of them were lost during the war.

For the United States the bases proved far more valuable. They pushed the American line of defence hundreds of kilometres out into the Atlantic, covered the approaches to the Panama Canal and gave the navy and air forces footholds from which to patrol the shipping lanes. In 1941–1942 they included the Argentia naval base on Placentia Bay in Newfoundland, an airfield in Bermuda and an extensive naval base on the Chaguaramas peninsula in Trinidad.

The German and Japanese reaction

In Berlin there was no doubt that this was an open breach of neutrality. Churchill himself later wrote that the transfer of the ships was a “decidedly unneutral act” which, by the standards of any earlier age, would have justified Germany in declaring war on the United States. Adolf Hitler, however, did not want war with America at that moment and made no military response. The response was diplomatic. The Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, had already sent a special envoy, Heinrich Georg Stahmer, to Tokyo; he arrived at the beginning of September and opened talks with the Foreign Minister, Yōsuke Matsuoka. The aim was an alliance that would deter the United States from entering the war in Europe or in the Pacific.

Japan read the agreement in much the same way. The American ambassador in Tokyo, Joseph Grew, reported that Japanese soldiers and politicians saw it as proof of ever closer cooperation between the Anglo-Saxon powers and as a sign that Germany might not, after all, defeat Britain. In the government of Fumimaro Konoe the advocates of alliance with Germany, led by Matsuoka, argued that only a strong bloc with Berlin and Rome would force Washington to tread carefully. The navy had serious doubts on this score, fearing war with the American fleet.

Its place in the war

The destroyers-for-bases agreement was the first great step by which the neutral United States sided with Britain. It did not change the course of the Battle of Britain or of the Battle of the Atlantic in 1940, but it had enormous political and moral significance: just as the Luftwaffe was beginning its massed raids on London, the British received proof that America would not let them go under. Roosevelt also showed that he could act without Congress, and the public accepted what only a few months earlier could not have been carried through.

The consequences came quickly. On 27 September 1940 Germany, Italy and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact in Berlin, aimed above all at the United States. In November Roosevelt won the election and a third term, and in March 1941 Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act, which extended the principle of aid to those fighting Germany on a vast scale. In August 1941 Roosevelt and Churchill met in Placentia Bay, next to the Argentia base then under construction on land obtained under the September notes, and proclaimed the Atlantic Charter. The Americans handed back most of the bases in the decades after the war, the last of them in the 1990s. The exchange of 2 September 1940 remained a symbol of the beginning of the “special relationship” between the two countries, and at the same time of a dispute over the limits of presidential power that continues in American politics to this day.