The shoot-on-sight order

On the evening of Thursday 11 September 1941 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke to Americans from the White House in a radio “fireside chat”. His starting point was the incident involving the destroyer Greer on 4 September, which the President called “piracy, legally and morally”. He called the German submarines and raiders “the rattlesnakes of the Atlantic” and announced that in the waters the United States regarded as vital to its defence, American ships and aircraft would no longer wait for Axis vessels to strike the first blow. The press at once called this a shoot-on-sight order, although Roosevelt himself did not use those words.

It is often written that Roosevelt ordered the navy to shoot without warning if any ship or convoy was threatened. That is a simplification: the order concerned German and Italian warships that entered waters regarded as America’s defensive zone, and the protection of shipping in those waters, not on every sea. Some chronologies also state that on 26 September the US naval command ordered “total war on Axis shipping in American waters”. That wording is misleading. On 26 September the navy was ordered to protect all merchant ships in American defensive waters by patrolling, covering and escorting them, and to report or destroy any German and Italian naval forces it encountered. The targets were warships and raiders, not Axis merchant ships, of which there were by then hardly any left in the Atlantic. Between these two dates, on 16 September, the first British convoy to be protected on the western stretch of the ocean by American destroyers sailed from Halifax.

A week after the Greer

The President spoke in mourning, with a black band on his sleeve: on 7 September his mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, had died at the family home at Hyde Park. He had earlier invited the Democratic leaders in Congress to the White House and read them the text; according to Thomas A. Bailey and Paul B. Ryan, authors of a history of the undeclared naval war with Germany, they accepted it without objection. For months the advocates of a hard line towards Germany had been pressing the President within the cabinet, above all the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, and the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, together with the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, and the Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes. The isolationist Chicago Tribune called them the “warlike old men” of the cabinet.

The decisions the President was about to announce had in large part already been taken. In August, during his meeting with Winston Churchill, which ended with the Atlantic Charter, Roosevelt had agreed that the US fleet would escort convoys on the western stretch of the route, as far as the meridian of Iceland, regardless of the ships’ flags. On 1 September the commander of the Atlantic Fleet, Admiral Ernest King, issued an operation plan assigning this responsibility to the navy. Formally, the convoys were to sail between two American bases, Argentia in Newfoundland and Iceland, where American troops had been stationed since July, and ships of other flags could “join” them. All that was missing was a clear answer to the question the commanders of the warships were asking themselves: were they allowed to fire first, or only once they had been attacked? The Greer incident gave the President an opportunity to announce that answer in public.

“The rattlesnakes of the Atlantic”

Roosevelt began with the Greer. The destroyer, he said, had been sailing in broad daylight carrying American mail to Iceland, under the American flag, and her identity was “unmistakable”. The German submarine had “deliberately fired a torpedo”, and then a second, and, contrary to what Hitler’s propaganda bureau had invented, it had fired first, without warning and with the deliberate intention of sinking her. If the commander had seen the ship, it was a deliberate attack on a clearly marked American warship; if he had fired from under water at the sound of propellers, without checking whom he was firing at, as the German communiqué suggested, it was “even more outrageous”. The President made no mention of the fact that the Greer had spent several hours tracking the U-boat and guiding a British aircraft onto it. Bailey and Ryan call this omission one of the most sharply criticised instances of misleading public opinion in his entire career.

He then listed other cases. In the spring a German submarine had sunk the American ship Robin Moor in the South Atlantic, leaving her passengers and crew in lifeboats hundreds of miles from land, and the Reich government had neither apologised nor offered compensation. In July a submarine had for a long time shadowed an American battleship in North American waters (the President did not name her; she was the Texas). Five days before the speech an American patrol vessel had picked up three survivors of the Sessa, an American-owned ship sailing under the Panamanian flag, which had been torpedoed on 17 August near Greenland while carrying supplies to Iceland; the rest of her crew had died. In those same days (Bailey and Ryan give 5 September, the navy’s official chronology 7 September) a German aircraft sank the American ship Steel Seafarer, bound for an Egyptian port, in the Red Sea, 220 miles south of Suez; no one was killed.

These events, Roosevelt said, were not isolated but formed part of a plan. The Nazis’ aim was to abolish the freedom of the seas and gain control of the oceans, and after them of the Western Hemisphere. He recalled the plots uncovered in Uruguay, Argentina and Bolivia and the secret landing fields in Colombia, within range of the Panama Canal. Hitler had to destroy the “bridge of ships” that America was building across the Atlantic and silence the British fleet; Americans who believed their own navy to be invincible needed to be told that it would remain so only if the Royal Navy survived. The United States was not seeking a shooting war with Hitler, but: “When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him.” The Nazi submarines and raiders, he said, were the rattlesnakes of the Atlantic.

The key passage declared that the very presence of these vessels in any waters that America deemed vital to its defence constituted an attack, and that in those waters American ships and American aircraft would no longer wait until Axis submarines lurking beneath the surface or Axis raiders on the surface of the sea struck their deadly blow first. From then on, American warships and patrol aircraft were to protect all merchant ships sailing in those waters, not only American ones but those “of any flag”. In support Roosevelt invoked history: John Adams had ordered the navy to clear the Caribbean of French privateers and warships during the Quasi-War of 1798–1800, and Thomas Jefferson had sent it against the corsairs of North Africa. Bailey and Ryan note that Adams had acted with the consent of Congress, and that it was the pasha of Tripoli who had declared war first.

He ended with a warning: from that moment on, German or Italian warships entering waters whose protection was necessary for the defence of America would do so at their own risk, and the orders he had issued as Commander-in-Chief of the United States Army and Navy were to put this policy into effect at once. He added that “the sole responsibility rests upon Germany” and that there would be no shooting unless Germany continued to seek it. He stressed that he had taken this decision neither hastily nor lightly, but after months of constant thought, anxiety and prayer.

The speech’s echoes

That same evening, in an auditorium in Des Moines, Iowa, some eight thousand people were waiting for a rally of the isolationist America First Committee. Before Charles Lindbergh, the most famous opponent of America’s entry into the war, took the rostrum, the President’s speech was relayed over the loudspeakers. Lindbergh then accused three groups of pushing the country towards war: the British, the Jews and the Roosevelt administration. The speech, in which he held American Jews responsible for “war agitation”, provoked outrage even among isolationists and did serious damage to their movement.

The former president Herbert Hoover, Senator Robert A. Taft and other opponents of intervention accused Roosevelt of usurping the powers of Congress and of dragging the country into the fighting without a declaration of war. The Constitution gave the power to declare war to Congress alone, but it did not forbid the President, as Commander-in-Chief, from giving orders to the fleet. Most Americans backed the President. In a Gallup poll published on 2 October, 62 per cent of those asked favoured firing on Axis warships without warning, and 28 per cent were against. The British, entering their third year of war, received the speech with relief. In Germany the press called Roosevelt a liar and a warmonger who “shoots first and asks questions afterwards”.

The first convoys under American protection

On 16 September 1941 convoy HX 150 sailed from Halifax (PL): 50 merchant ships of Britain and other Allied countries, ranging from 1,500-tonners to the 17,000-ton liner Empress of Asia, with a local Canadian escort. Some 150 miles south of Argentia (Morison gives 17 September, the navy’s official chronology 18 September) it was taken over by Captain Morton L. Deyo’s escort group: five destroyers, the modern Ericsson and Eberle and three old four-stackers. The convoy commodore, the retired British Rear Admiral E. Manners, greeted the Americans with a signal that he was “very glad” they would be guarding him for the next few days. The voyage passed without any encounter with U-boats. The only serious incident was a fire aboard the British ship Nigaristan, whose crew of 63 the Eberle took off at night during a storm. On 25 September, at the agreed meeting point in mid-ocean south of Iceland, the Americans handed the convoy over to British destroyers and corvettes, and themselves escorted the ships bound for Iceland to Reykjavík. All the ships reached port. The day before, another American group had taken over the first westbound convoy, ON 18, in the same area, and brought it to the American coast without loss.

Deyo reported that his men at first could hardly believe they were really at war, then saw a periscope in every wave, and after a few depth charges dropped on “nothing” began to calm down. HX 150 was lucky: there were no submarines on its route. Convoys protected by the weaker Canadian escorts paid a high price in those weeks. The slow convoy SC 42 lost over a dozen ships on 9–16 September (among the attackers was U-652, the same boat that had fired on the Greer), and on the night of 19–20 September SC 44 lost four merchant ships and the Canadian corvette Levis. Among those sunk was the Pink Star, another American-owned ship under the Panamanian flag.

The order of 26 September

The navy translated the orders Roosevelt had announced on 11 September into successive instructions. On 26 September it was ordered to protect all ships engaged in commerce in American defensive waters by patrolling, covering and escorting convoys, and to report or destroy any German and Italian naval forces it encountered. Since July the defensive waters had extended as far as Iceland, deep into the zone the Germans had declared a blockade area. This is sometimes described as “total war on Axis shipping in American waters”, but the order was aimed not at Axis merchant ships but at warships, submarines and raiders that might threaten shipping under American protection. It was in essence an order to conduct hostilities in a defined area, issued by a state that had declared war on no one.

By October the system had settled down. American destroyers from Argentia escorted the fast HX and ON convoys between the western meeting point off Newfoundland and a point in mid-ocean, while Canadian corvettes took over the slow SC and ONS convoys. The entire western stretch of the ocean came under American strategic direction, although the United States was formally not a party to the war; the Canadian escorts operated under the orders of the commander of the Newfoundland force, Commodore Leonard Murray. Admiral King handed over the direction of the escorts to Rear Admiral Arthur L. Bristol, commander of the Support Force at Argentia.

Hitler’s response

Adolf Hitler refused to be provoked. On 17 September, when Grand Admiral Erich Raeder briefed him on the situation in the Atlantic and demanded a free hand against the American escorts, the Führer ordered that all incidents with the United States be avoided at least until mid-October. He was counting on the war with the Soviet Union being decided by then, and only afterwards would he deal with America. The commander of the U-boat arm, Karl Dönitz, therefore had to keep his crews away from American warships, even though these were now protecting the convoys the U-boats were hunting. The ban could not, however, prevent clashes where American destroyers were themselves defending convoys under attack.

Significance

The speech of 11 September and the orders that followed it turned American neutrality into an undeclared naval war. Samuel Eliot Morison wrote that it put an end to the awkward position of a fleet that was responsible for protecting vast areas of the North Atlantic but had no right to shoot. Bailey and Ryan point out that in the wording of the speech this was only “defensive” shooting, confined to waters deemed vital to America’s defence, which allowed Roosevelt to maintain that he was not sending American boys into “foreign wars”.

The clashes came quickly. On 17 October, while with convoy SC 48, the destroyer Kearny was torpedoed by U-568; eleven sailors were killed, the first American casualties among the crews of warships. Ten days later, in his Navy Day address, Roosevelt reminded his listeners that the shoot-on-sight orders were “in effect”. On 31 October U-552 sank the destroyer Reuben James, which was escorting convoy HX 156, with the loss of about a hundred men. In November Congress, by a narrow majority, amended the Neutrality Act to allow merchant ships to be armed and sent to the ports of belligerent countries. Even so, until December neither Washington nor Berlin chose to declare war. The Reich did so on 11 December 1941, four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the US Navy entered the war with Germany as a fleet that had already been escorting convoys in the North Atlantic for three months.