The draft destroyers-for-bases deal

On Friday 16 August 1940 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave the journalists gathered at a White House press conference a brief statement. The United States government, he declared, was holding talks with the government of the British Empire on the acquisition of naval and air bases needed for the defence of the Western Hemisphere, and in particular of the Panama Canal, and in parallel was talking with the government of Canada about the joint defence of the hemisphere. He would not answer questions as to whether the old American destroyers that Winston Churchill had been asking for since May were involved. When reporters returned to the subject four days later, he advised them not to speculate, as they had the previous Friday.

It is often said that on 16 August “the first draft” of the destroyers-for-bases agreement “was made public”. That is a simplification. No draft was published that day. All that was publicly confirmed was that negotiations on bases were under way; about the destroyers the White House said nothing. The first written drafts of the notes the two governments were to exchange were prepared a few days later, on 19 and 20 August, by the Under Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, who handed them confidentially to the British ambassador. The public learned the terms of the transaction only on 3 September, when the agreement had already been signed. The statement of 16 August was nonetheless the first official sign that an unprecedented deal was taking shape between neutral America and Britain at war.

Fifty old destroyers

Churchill sent his first request as early as 15 May 1940, a few days after the start of the German offensive in the west and after he had taken office as Prime Minister. He asked then for the loan of 40–50 older destroyers, several hundred aircraft and anti-aircraft equipment. Roosevelt replied that he could not take such a step without the express consent of Congress, and in an election year, with strong isolationist feeling, he was not sure it was even worth asking for. The ships in question were destroyers mass-produced at the end of the First World War and in the first years after it, known from their four funnels as “four-pipers”: vessels of about 1,200 tons of the Caldwell, Wickes and Clemson classes. Most of them had spent years in reserve, and from September 1939 some had been recommissioned for the American Neutrality Patrol in the Atlantic.

For the Royal Navy even such ships were priceless. Destroyers were its workhorses: they escorted convoys, hunted submarines and, in the summer of 1940, were to be the first barrier against a German invasion across the Channel. Yet in Norway and during the evacuation from Dunkirk the British had lost more than a dozen destroyers, and dozens more lay damaged in the dockyards. In July German bombers began attacking convoys and warships in the Channel, opening the Battle of Britain. New destroyers from British yards would not arrive until 1941.

The old problem also had a new legal dimension. The naval expansion act of 28 June 1940, thanks to an amendment pushed through by the chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, David I. Walsh, forbade the transfer or sale of any weapons or vessels belonging to the United States unless the Chief of Naval Operations – in the case of naval equipment – or the Army Chief of Staff first certified that they were not essential to the defence of the country. Admiral Harold R. Stark, who was just then asking Congress for billions for a two-ocean navy, could not easily certify that ships the navy kept in service were superfluous.

On 31 July Churchill wrote to Roosevelt once again, this time dramatically. In the last ten days, he listed, four British destroyers had been sunk and seven damaged. He asked for 50 or 60 ships, as well as motor torpedo boats and aircraft for the fleet. “Mr President,” he wrote, “with great respect I must tell you that in the long history of the world this is a thing to do now.”

The idea of an exchange

The thought of bases came earlier than the idea of linking them to destroyers. At the end of May the British ambassador in Washington, Philip Kerr, Marquess of Lothian, proposed to London that Britain should itself offer the Americans leases of land for bases in Newfoundland, Bermuda and Trinidad. The British Cabinet rejected the idea, partly because the Americans were refusing the destroyers at the time. Only at the end of July did it change its mind and agree to offer limited base rights without asking for anything in return.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, private citizens took the matter up. In July a group of influential supporters of aid to Britain began meeting at the Century Association club in New York: commentators, publishers, lawyers and bankers, among them the publisher of Time, Henry Luce, and the journalist Joseph Alsop. They were known as the Century Group. They believed that America could not wait for Britain to fall, and that the old destroyers should be handed over to her; and to make this palatable to Congress and the voters, they should be exchanged for something that would strengthen the security of the United States itself – bases on the British islands off the American coast. The plan, in a revised version of 25 July, circulated among Washington offices and reached Lothian, and on 1 August representatives of the group put it to the President himself.

The group worked in concert with the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, led by the Kansas newspaperman William Allen White. Together they staged an event that put the issue on the front pages. On 4 August the almost 80-year-old General John Pershing, commander of the American forces in France in 1917–1918, spoke on the radio and called for at least 50 destroyers to be handed to the British immediately. “Pershing warns U.S.: aid Britain by sending 50 destroyers now”, ran the headline in The New York Times the next day. On 11 August the same paper published a letter from four lawyers, among them the former Under Secretary of the Treasury Dean Acheson, arguing that the President could transfer the ships without new legislation. Polls in mid-August suggested that nearly two-thirds of Americans favoured handing destroyers to Britain, and more than four-fifths favoured acquiring British islands or bases on them.

Decisions in the White House

On 2 August Roosevelt discussed the matter at a Cabinet meeting. He noted afterwards that everyone, without a dissenting voice, had agreed that the survival of the British Isles under German attack might very possibly depend on their getting these destroyers. The Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, proposed that Britain should in return sell the United States some of its possessions in the Western Hemisphere. The Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, objected, since buying colonies would contradict the principles America had championed a few days earlier at the Havana Conference. The President proposed a middle course: not the purchase of territory but the lease of bases. At that point the Cabinet still believed that new legislation would be unavoidable, and that Congress would pass it only if the British gave a cast-iron guarantee that, should the islands fall, their fleet would not pass into German hands but would fight on from the ports of the Empire. The memory of what had happened to the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir barely a month earlier was fresh. It was also agreed that William Allen White would try to obtain from the Republican presidential candidate, Wendell Willkie, a promise that he would not make the destroyers a campaign issue and would help win over the Republicans in Congress.

On 5 August Lothian presented the British wish list: 96 destroyers, 20 motor torpedo boats, 50 patrol aircraft for the navy, dive-bombers and 250,000 rifles. In return the British offered little: an extension of the 1939 permission for limited use by the US Navy of waters and facilities in Bermuda, St Lucia and Trinidad, and landing rights for American aircraft on several islands. Roosevelt considered this too little and wrote down his own terms: an assurance from the Prime Minister that if British waters became too dangerous for the fleet, the ships would be neither surrendered to the Germans nor scuttled but would sail for other parts of the Empire; and the right to bases in Newfoundland, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Jamaica, St Lucia, Trinidad and British Guiana, on land bought or leased for 99 years.

On 13 August, the day the Luftwaffe launched Operation Eagle Attack, the President discussed these terms with a small circle of advisers, among them the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, and sent them to Churchill that same day. In return he promised 50 destroyers, motor torpedo boats and a few aircraft. On 15 August, while the heaviest air fighting yet raged over England, Churchill accepted the proposal in principle. He did not, however, wish to give a new, solemn guarantee about the fleet, only to repeat the assurance in his speech of 4 June, in which he had declared that at worst the Empire beyond the seas, guarded by the fleet, would carry on the struggle. He added that on Newfoundland he would have to reach agreement with Canada. He was already so sure of the outcome that he ordered British crews to be sent to Halifax in Canada to wait there for the ships.

16 August and the days that followed

The statement of 16 August thus came at a moment when the agreement was settled in principle, but its form was still open. That same day Roosevelt spoke at a Cabinet meeting with the Attorney General, Robert H. Jackson. The following day Jackson wrote to Knox that in his view the Chief of Naval Operations could, and should, certify that the destroyers were not essential to the defence of the country, if exchanging them for strategic bases would strengthen rather than weaken the overall defence of the United States. This was the same argument that one of the President’s lawyers, Benjamin V. Cohen, had already advanced in a memorandum on 19 July, and which Roosevelt had then still thought too bold. Now he accepted it. It meant that the President could conclude the agreement on his own, by executive agreement, without legislation and without ratification by the Senate.

The political risk was enormous: Roosevelt was seeking a third term, and the election was less than three months away. Willkie, himself a supporter of aid to Britain, did not want to tie himself formally to the administration’s decision, but neither did he intend to turn it into a weapon against the President. In the speech in which he accepted the nomination on 17 August in his home town of Elwood, Indiana, he did not mention the destroyers, but he acknowledged that the loss of the British fleet would greatly weaken America’s defence and that an Atlantic dominated by Germany would be a disaster. In August several leading Republicans also came out in favour of the idea of an exchange.

On the evening of 17 August Roosevelt met the Canadian Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, at Ogdensburg on the St Lawrence River. On 18 August they announced the creation of the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, which was to plan the joint defence of North America. The President told the Prime Minister about the negotiations with London, and they discussed how the destroyers would be handed over at Halifax.

After the return from Ogdensburg, Welles prepared the draft notes already mentioned. The British note was to contain an undertaking that the fleet would be neither surrendered nor scuttled; consent to a 99-year lease of bases, with their location chosen solely by the Americans; and a clause granting the United States, within the bases, such rights as it would have if it were sovereign over those territories. The Americans offered 50 destroyers, 20 motor torpedo boats, a few aircraft, 250,000 rifles and ammunition. These terms proved unacceptable to London. On 20 August Churchill publicly confirmed in the House of Commons that the British government had offered America 99-year leases of bases, and stressed that there was no question of any transfer of sovereignty. On 22 August he wrote to Roosevelt that his government had never thought of a bargain: it wanted to give the bases unconditionally, and the destroyers should be a separate gift. For Washington, which needed an exchange to justify the deal to Congress and the voters, this came as a shock. The State Department replied that a gift of the ships was “utterly impossible”.

Significance

The deadlock was broken by the State Department on 26 August. The United States accepted the bases in Newfoundland and Bermuda as a gift, and those in the Bahamas, Jamaica, St Lucia, Trinidad, Antigua and British Guiana in exchange for the destroyers. The word “sovereignty” was removed from the text, and the guarantee concerning the fleet was moved to a separate exchange of letters. On 27 August Jackson issued a formal legal opinion, and Admiral Stark issued the certificate required by law that the ships were not essential to the defence of the country. On the evening of 2 September Hull and Lothian signed the notes, and on 3 September Roosevelt informed Congress, calling the acquisition of the bases an “epochal and far-reaching act of preparation for continental defense”. The agreement, known today as the destroyers-for-bases deal, was welcomed by most Americans as an excellent bargain. Willkie, though he supported the aid itself, a few days later called the manner of its conclusion the most arbitrary and dictatorial act in the history of the American presidency. The British took over the first ships at Halifax as early as September 1940.

The military value of the destroyers proved smaller than promised. The British called them the Town class, because they gave them the names of towns that existed both in Britain and in the United States. Seven went to the Royal Canadian Navy, several were later manned by Norwegians and Dutchmen, and a few were handed over to the Soviet Union in 1944. Many of them needed long refits, and Admiral Bertram Ramsay called them the worst destroyers he had ever seen. One of them, HMS Campbeltown, packed with explosives, destroyed the dry dock at Saint-Nazaire in March 1942 (the St Nazaire Raid). For the United States the bases were far more valuable than the ships: they pushed the American defence line hundreds of kilometres out into the Atlantic and covered the approaches to the Panama Canal. Most of them were closed within a few decades of the war, the last in the 1990s.

The agreement’s real significance was political. The neutral United States had handed warships to one of the belligerents, which Berlin regarded as an openly hostile act, although Hitler chose not to retaliate. The American ambassador in Tokyo, Joseph Grew, reported that the Japanese military read the agreement as a sign that America and Britain were co-operating ever more closely in defence, and that Germany might not defeat the British after all. At the end of September 1940 Japan, Germany and Italy concluded the Tripartite Pact, aimed above all at the United States. As early as his speech of 20 August Churchill had said that the two great organisations of the English-speaking democracies, the British Empire and the United States, would have to be “somewhat mixed up together” in some of their affairs for mutual advantage. The destroyers-for-bases deal was followed in March 1941 by the Lend-Lease Act, which made America the arsenal of those fighting Germany, and in August 1941 Roosevelt and Churchill met aboard warships in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, next to the Argentia base then being built under the agreement, and proclaimed the Atlantic Charter. The statement of 16 August 1940 was the first public step on a road that within a year and a half turned American neutrality into a wartime alliance.