The seizure of the City of Flint

On 9 October 1939 the German pocket battleship Deutschland stopped the American freighter City of Flint in the North Atlantic, on the route from North America to Britain. The Germans declared her cargo contraband and the ship herself a prize – a lawful capture of war – and sent her with a prize crew towards Germany. She was the first American ship seized by the Germans in the Second World War. For the next four weeks the City of Flint wandered the northern seas, from Norwegian Tromsø to Soviet Murmansk, while the whole of America followed her fate. The affair provoked a diplomatic dispute between the United States and both Germany and the Soviet Union, and put Norway’s neutrality to the test.

Popular chronologies split this story across five dates: 9 October, the seizure of the ship; 21 October, the stop at Tromsø, where the Norwegians gave the Germans less than a day to leave port; 23 October, the arrival at Murmansk, where the prize crew was supposedly taken off and the ship refused permission to leave; 27 October, permission to sail under German control despite the protests of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration; and 28 October, Hitler’s order for the Deutschland to return home. The general course of events is right, but several details need to be made more precise. The ship arrived at Tromsø on 20 October and left on 21 October; some sources give dates a day later. At Murmansk the Soviets first interned the German prize crew and then, three days later, handed the ship back to it. She left port on the evening of 28 October. The Deutschland was recalled home around the turn of October and November, and the sources do not agree on the exact date of the decision.

The ship and the raider

The City of Flint was an old 4,963 GRT steamer, built in 1919 at the Hog Island yard in Philadelphia. She belonged to the United States government’s merchant fleet. Her master was Captain Joseph A. Gainard, a naval reserve officer. The ship was already well known: on 3 September, the first day of Britain’s war with Germany, she had come to the aid of the survivors of the Athenia and taken more than two hundred people on board, many of them Americans. At the beginning of October she was sailing from New York to Britain with general cargo. According to a Soviet communiqué based on German documents, she carried some 3,700 tons of tractors, grain, fruit, hides, wax and other goods; other accounts also mention a large quantity of lubricating oil.

The Deutschland, commanded by Captain (Kapitän zur See) Paul Wenneker, had left Wilhelmshaven on 24 August and before the war took up a position south of Greenland. Like her sister ship the Admiral Graf Spee, she received permission to wage war on commerce only on 26 September. She was to act strictly in accordance with prize law: stopping ships, searching them, sinking or seizing enemy vessels, and neutral ones only if they were carrying contraband for the enemy. On 5 October she sank the British freighter Stonegate east of Bermuda and took her crew on board. That same day the Admiralty formed hunting groups to deal with the raiders, but it did not yet know that the Deutschland was in the North Atlantic.

The seizure

On 9 October the Deutschland stopped the City of Flint on the Halifax convoy route, hundreds of miles east of the North American coast. A German boarding party examined her papers and declared the cargo bound for Britain to be contraband. Under international law the seizure of a neutral ship carrying contraband was permissible, and its legality was to be judged by a German prize court. An eighteen-man prize crew under Lieutenant Hans Pussbach (Pushbach in some sources) went aboard. Wenneker also transferred to the City of Flint the 38 survivors of the Stonegate. The American crew remained on board as de facto prisoners. The Germans painted over the American flags on her sides, altered the look of her funnel and renamed her Alf, passing her off as Danish.

The prize crew was to bring the ship to Germany, avoiding British patrols. The safest route lay far to the north, above Iceland, and then along the coast of neutral Norway, where the Royal Navy could not stop a ship inside Norwegian territorial waters. Meanwhile the Deutschland went on cruising the North Atlantic. On 14 October she sank the Norwegian steamer Lorentz W. Hansen, which was carrying timber to Britain, and transferred her crew to the Danish steamer Kongsdal, which she had stopped and which was bound for a neutral port. When the Norwegian sailors reached the Orkneys on 21 October, the British learned that a second pocket battleship was at work in the North Atlantic.

Tromsø

After an eleven-day voyage, on 20 October, the City of Flint put into Tromsø in northern Norway. The Germans explained that they needed drinking water. Norway was neutral, but the fresh news of the sinking of the Lorentz W. Hansen had caused outrage there, and the government in Oslo, with its Foreign Minister Halvdan Koht, was trying at all costs not to be drawn into the war. The Norwegians supplied water, but ordered the ship’s proper name and American markings to be restored and the ship to leave port within twenty-four hours. The British seamen from the Stonegate went ashore and regained their freedom. On the afternoon of 21 October the Norwegian destroyer Sleipner escorted the City of Flint out of territorial waters.

Murmansk

Instead of turning south, the prize crew took the ship east, to the Soviet Union, which for the past month, since the Boundary and Friendship Treaty, had been the Reich’s closest partner. Murmansk was already serving as a refuge for German merchant ships caught out by the war, including the great liner Bremen. On the evening of 23 October the City of Flint, flying the German flag, entered the Kola Inlet without a Soviet pilot. The next day the TASS agency announced that the port authorities had “temporarily detained” the ship and interned eighteen German seamen.

Over the following days Moscow kept changing its position. The American ambassador, Laurence Steinhardt, called every day on the Deputy People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vladimir Potemkin, invoking the Thirteenth Hague Convention of 1907. Under it a prize could enter a neutral port only because of unseaworthiness, stress of weather or want of fuel or provisions, and if she did not leave once the cause had ceased, the neutral state was to release the ship to her rightful crew and intern the prize crew. Secretary of State Cordell Hull bombarded the embassy with instructions and demanded contact with the American sailors. The ambassador, however, did not manage to speak to Captain Gainard, despite arranged telephone calls, and learned of the Soviet authorities’ decisions from TASS communiqués before he heard them from Potemkin. On the evening of 24 October Vyacheslav Molotov summoned the German ambassador, Friedrich-Werner von der Schulenburg.

During the night of 25–26 October TASS announced that the German prize crew had been released from internment because the ship had entered port owing to engine damage. The Germans gave one reason after another: a lack of navigational charts, “damage at sea”, scaled-up boilers. The Murmansk harbour master later admitted in a telephone conversation with the embassy that the ship had arrived under her own steam, had reported no damage and had undergone no repairs, but had been supplied with charts, including charts of Norwegian territorial waters. Late on the evening of 26 October Soviet radio announced that the ship was to leave port at once. On 27 October Potemkin told Steinhardt that since the ship was seaworthy again, she had to leave in the same state in which she had arrived – that is, with both crews and her cargo intact. That day the Germans went back on board. On the evening of 28 October the City of Flint left Murmansk under German control. The American government issued a statement listing the inconsistencies of the Soviet side, and on 30 October demanded that Germany guarantee the safety of the American crew. Steinhardt wrote to Washington that the Soviet Union was acting “in practice, if not formally, as a silent partner of Germany”.

The Deutschland goes home

The news that a pocket battleship had carried off an American ship went round the world’s press and put Hitler in an awkward position. Adolf Hitler was at that time anxious not to provoke the United States, and protests were coming in from Washington and Oslo. Something else worried him too: the loss of a warship named Deutschland would be a propaganda disaster for the Reich. At the end of October the decision was taken to recall the ship. Storms and engine defects were in any case hampering her operations, and since 5 October she had sunk only two ships and captured one. At the beginning of November the Seekriegsleitung, the naval war staff, ordered her home. She passed unnoticed through the Denmark Strait around 15 November and on 17 November put into Gotenhafen, as the Germans called occupied Gdynia. Soon afterwards, on Hitler’s orders, she was renamed Lützow and reclassified as a heavy cruiser; some sources date the formal change to early 1940. Admiral Erich Raeder also hoped that the change of name would mislead British intelligence.

Haugesund

Meanwhile the City of Flint was sailing south along the Norwegian coast, inside Norwegian territorial waters, escorted by Norwegian warships which made sure she did not stop in port. The British were waiting for her at sea. On 3 November the prize crew, in defiance of a ban by the Norwegian minelayer Olav Tryggvason, took the ship into the port of Haugesund, pleading the illness of one of the sailors. This time the Norwegians decided that the Germans had had no right to enter the port. Late that evening an armed party from the Norwegian navy boarded the ship, arrested the prize crew and returned command to Captain Gainard. The Germans were interned in the fortress at Kongsvinger. The Reich government protested, accusing Norway of partiality. The City of Flint unloaded her cargo at Bergen and returned to the United States, where Captain Gainard became a well-known figure.

Echoes in America

The City of Flint affair unfolded in exactly the weeks when Congress was arguing over amending the Neutrality Act. Since 21 September Roosevelt had been arguing that the arms embargo harmed Britain and France rather than Germany. The isolationists replied that trade with the belligerents would drag America into the war, as it had in 1917. The fate of a ship which had set out for Britain with a peaceful cargo and ended up in the hands of a German crew in a Soviet port served as an argument for both sides. It showed that American ships on the routes to belligerent countries were exposed to incidents, and so strengthened those who wanted to keep them away from the war zones, while at the same time stirring American hostility towards Germany and the Soviet Union.

At the end of October the Senate, and at the beginning of November the House of Representatives, passed a new act, which Roosevelt signed on 4 November 1939. It lifted the arms embargo and allowed belligerents to buy arms in America for cash and carry them away in their own ships (cash and carry). In return it barred American ships from entering combat zones designated by the President, including the ports of Britain and France. Had it been in force a month earlier, the City of Flint would never have sailed for Britain at all. Some American shipowners soon re-registered their ships under the Panamanian flag so as to continue serving the Allied routes.

Significance

The voyage of the City of Flint was a minor episode in the Battle of the Atlantic, but it showed clearly what neutrality looked like in the first months of the war. The Soviet Union, formally neutral, shielded a German prize and obstructed the work of American diplomats; in the autumn of 1939 it also gave the Kriegsmarine a bay on the Kola Peninsula for the secret Basis Nord. Norway sent the Germans away from Tromsø and took the ship from them at Haugesund, and from then on the Germans regarded it with suspicion. More German ships slipped along the Norwegian coast inside neutral waters. In February 1940 the British violated Norwegian neutrality when the destroyer Cossack boarded the Altmark, the Graf Spee’s supply ship, in the Jøssingfjord and freed the prisoners held aboard her. This incident hastened the German decision to invade Norway in April 1940.

The Deutschland herself, by then the Lützow, took part in that invasion and was badly damaged. The City of Flint went on sailing the Atlantic and sank in January 1943, torpedoed by the German submarine U-575. The United States, which in 1939 had wanted at all costs to keep its ships away from the war, was by 1941 escorting convoys in the Atlantic, and in December of that year found itself at war with Germany.