The sinking of the Robin Moor

In the early hours of 21 May 1941, in the tropical Atlantic some 750 nautical miles west of Freetown in British Sierra Leone, the German submarine U-69 stopped the American freighter Robin Moor with signal-lamp messages. The ship was sailing alone and unarmed under a neutral flag, carrying general cargo from New York to Cape Town and to Lourenço Marques in Portuguese Mozambique. The U-boat’s commander, Kapitänleutnant Jost Metzler, questioned the first officer, examined the papers and declared the cargo to be war contraband. He gave the 46 people on board half an hour to take to the lifeboats, then sank the ship with a torpedo and gunfire. No one was killed, but the survivors spent between two and almost three weeks on the open ocean before passing ships found them by chance.

The Robin Moor was the first merchant ship under the United States flag to be sunk by a German submarine in the Second World War. It is often written that the incident “shocked the nation” and that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt “soon” proclaimed an unlimited national emergency. The sequence, however, was different. Roosevelt proclaimed the emergency on 27 May, while Americans learned of the fate of the Robin Moor only in the second week of June, when the first lifeboat was found. The proclamation was therefore not a response to the sinking. The shock came later, and Washington answered it with the steps it took against Germany in June.

The ship and her voyage

The Robin Moor was a typical freighter of the American First World War shipbuilding programme. She was built in 1919 at the Hog Island yard near Philadelphia, which turned out identical ships in series for the government’s US Shipping Board. Laid down as Shetucket and completed as Nobles, she was bought in 1928 by the American Export Lines and renamed Exmoor. She had sailed as the Robin Moor only for a short time, since passing to the New York firm Seas Shipping Company, owner of the Robin Line, which ran regular services from the United States to southern and eastern Africa. She measured 4,999 gross register tons and could make little more than 11 knots.

On 6 May 1941 she sailed from New York under the command of Captain Edward W. Myers. On board were nine officers and 29 seamen, as well as eight passengers, among them three women and a small child. According to uboat.net, she carried in her holds and on deck some 5,100 tons of general cargo: tinplate, steel rails, refrigerators, cars, lorries and tractors, and also, as was established later, lubricants in drums, agricultural chemicals, sporting shotgun cartridges and a small number of small-calibre rifles for sports shops.

The voyage was entirely lawful under American law. The Neutrality Act of 1939 barred American ships from entering the combat zones around the British Isles and from carrying cargo to the ports of belligerents in Europe, but it allowed sailings to Africa south of the 30th parallel. Cape Town lay within that area, and Mozambique belonged to neutral Portugal. The Robin Moor sailed unarmed and unescorted, with her flag and national markings, which, according to the survivors’ later testimony, were clearly visible. Until the spring of 1941 the central Atlantic between Brazil and West Africa was regarded as relatively safe water. It was precisely then, however, that Karl Dönitz sent the first U-boats there to strike at British shipping assembling at Freetown, where convoys were less well protected than in the North Atlantic.

Stopped and sunk

U-69, a Type VIIC boat, left Lorient on 5 May on her third patrol, a long voyage to West African waters. Metzler, a former merchant navy officer, already had several sinkings in the North Atlantic to his name, and at the beginning of April he had taken part in the attack on convoy SC 26. The conning tower of his boat bore a smiling cow, adapted from the emblem of a French cheese, which earned U-69 the nickname “the Laughing Cow”.

According to the uboat.net account, based on the boat’s war diary, U-69 stopped the Robin Moor at 5.25 a.m. (by the time used in the German log) with a Morse lamp signal, at 6°10′ N, 25°40′ W. The ship’s first officer went across to the submarine in a boat with the papers. Metzler told him that under prize law he had to sink the ship, and gave the crew half an hour to abandon her. The crew were not allowed to use the wireless. The people went down into four lifeboats, and the captain’s boat came alongside the U-boat. The cargo manifest that Myers showed the Germans only confirmed Metzler’s conviction that the ship was carrying contraband for Britain. The first officer later recalled that the Germans had simply told him they had “decided to let them have it”.

The boat dived and at 10.05 a.m. fired a torpedo from her stern tube, which struck the ship on the port side amidships. The Robin Moor settled only slowly, however, so after 40 minutes U-69 surfaced and shelled her with the 88 mm deck gun. After 39 rounds the freighter went down stern first. The Germans sank the crates of deck cargo that floated to the surface with fire from their anti-aircraft guns. Before leaving, U-69 came up to the captain’s boat and handed the survivors four tins of bread, two tins of butter, bottles of cognac and bandages. Metzler is also said to have promised to radio their position. No such message ever reached the United States. That same day U-69 also sank the British freighter Tewkesbury, and in the following weeks she laid mines off Lagos and Takoradi and torpedoed a ship lying in the harbour at Accra.

Three weeks in the lifeboats

The survivors were left alone, hundreds of nautical miles from the nearest land. For a day Captain Myers kept the boats at the spot where the ship had gone down, counting on the promised radio report; then, having lashed them together, he set off westwards towards the St Peter and St Paul Rocks and the coast of Brazil. Towing proved unworkable, and after a few days the boats separated. Rations were meagre, the heat was punishing, and the German bread they had been given turned out to be so hard that it could scarcely be eaten.

Rescue came by chance and from two directions. At the beginning of June (on 2 June, according to most accounts) the British freighter City of Wellington, sailing to Cape Town under radio silence, came upon three lifeboats with 35 people, including the captain. Unable to send a report, she left everyone ashore unaware for two weeks that they were alive. The fourth boat, with 11 people under the third officer, was picked up near the equator by the Brazilian ship Ozório – on 9 June according to uboat.net (some studies give 8 June) – after some 18–19 days adrift. The news, relayed by radio from ship to ship, reached Washington, and the survivors were landed at Recife. Only then did Americans learn what had happened to the Robin Moor. As nothing was known of the other boats, their occupants were for several days believed to be missing. The City of Wellington landed them at Cape Town on 18 June. All 46 people survived.

The first reports from Brazil caused a storm in the United States, though not an immediately united one. The isolationist senator Gerald Nye, one of the leaders of the America First movement, suggested on 13 June that the British might have sunk the ship in order to drag America into the war, and the very next day, faced with the survivors’ testimony, he withdrew the claim. Other politicians recalled that in 1937, after the Japanese sank the gunboat Panay, the United States had not gone to war either, while Senator Burton Wheeler argued that most of the cargo was contraband within the meaning of international law.

Prize law and the lifeboats

The dispute over the Robin Moor concerned not the stopping of the ship itself but the fate of the people aboard. The law of the sea allowed a belligerent warship to stop a neutral vessel, inspect her cargo and, under certain conditions, destroy her if she carried contraband. From the German point of view Metzler had acted in accordance with the prize regulations: he had given warning, checked the papers, let the crew leave and left them provisions. Germany, however, was bound by the London Protocol of 1936, which it had accepted together with the other powers after the Second London Naval Treaty. The protocol required submarines, before sinking a merchant ship, to place her crew and passengers in a place of safety, and stated explicitly that lifeboats were not such a place unless the safety of those aboard was assured by the state of the sea and the weather, the proximity of land, or the presence of another vessel able to take them on board. In mid-ocean, hundreds of miles from land, none of these conditions was met. This argument became the core of the American protest.

Since 1939 the Germans had been waging unrestricted submarine warfare in the zones around the British Isles, but towards American ships they had been cautious. Adolf Hitler, who was preparing to attack the Soviet Union, did not want to provoke Washington and restricted the navy’s freedom of action despite pressure from Admiral Erich Raeder. The sinking of the Robin Moor outside the blockade zone and far from the convoy routes was therefore an awkward incident for Berlin, although the naval command did not censure Metzler, and on 28 July, after his return from patrol, he was awarded the Knight’s Cross.

The unlimited national emergency

While the survivors drifted across the ocean, a decision was taken in Washington that is often linked with their fate. On the evening of 27 May, the day on which the German battleship Bismarck went down in the North Atlantic, Roosevelt gave a radio address from the White House in the presence of the ambassadors and ministers of the American republics, the members of the Governing Board of the Pan American Union, and the Canadian minister. Tens of millions of Americans listened. The President said that the Battle of the Atlantic now stretched from the Arctic ice to the Antarctic, that ships, neutral ones included, were being sunk in the South Atlantic, off West Africa and the Cape Verde Islands, and that German sinkings were more than three times the capacity of British shipyards. He warned that German control of the Azores, the Cape Verde Islands or Dakar would directly threaten the Western Hemisphere. He announced that American patrols, which since April had reached far out into the Atlantic, were helping to ensure the delivery of supplies to Britain, and that “all additional measures necessary to deliver the goods will be taken”. He recalled the American tradition of the “freedom of the seas”.

Finally he announced that he had that evening signed Proclamation No. 2487, declaring that the country faced an “unlimited national emergency” requiring its military, naval, air and civilian defences to be put in readiness to repel any act or threat of aggression directed towards any part of the Western Hemisphere. The proclamation referred explicitly to the “limited” national emergency proclaimed on 8 September 1939, which had allowed defences to be strengthened only “within the limits of peacetime authorisations”. Now those limits fell away. The emergency gave the President wide statutory powers over industry, transport and communications, and it called on workers and employers to set aside their disputes for the sake of arms production.

Neither the speech nor the proclamation mentioned the Robin Moor, because no one in Washington yet knew she had been sunk. The speech was, rather, a summing-up of a spring in which the United States, still not fighting, had moved a long way towards Britain: from the Lend-Lease Act in March, through the Greenland agreement and the extension of the patrol zone in April, to the May losses in the Atlantic, when the British were fighting the wolf packs and on 9 May seized an Enigma machine from U-110. At a press conference the next day Roosevelt dampened the expectations of those who looked for the immediate introduction of convoy escorts or an amendment of the Neutrality Act. He said that for the time being he did not intend to ask for either.

Place in the war

The real response to the sinking of the Robin Moor came in June, once the survivors’ accounts were known. On 14 June Roosevelt froze German and Italian assets in the United States, and on 16 June the State Department demanded that all German consulates and several German agencies be closed by 10 July. A similar demand soon covered the Italian consulates, and Berlin and Rome responded in kind. On 20 June the President sent Congress a special message about the ship. In it he stressed that the submarine had not shown its flag or revealed its nationality, that the ship had been sunk within 30 minutes of the first warning although her American flag was well known to the commander, and that the passengers and crew had been abandoned in lifeboats in mid-ocean, where only chance had saved them. He called the sinking “the act of an international outlaw”, and described it as both a disclosure of policy and an example of the method of a Reich that sought to drive American commerce from the seas and intimidate the United States into abandoning its aid to Britain. He ended with the words: “We are not yielding and we do not propose to yield.” Washington demanded full compensation from Germany. In September the State Department put it at $2,967,092, but the German chargé d’affaires, Hans Thomsen, replied that the American notes were not of a kind that could induce the Reich to respond.

The incident came at a bad moment for Hitler. On 21 June, the day after Roosevelt’s message and on the eve of the attack on the Soviet Union, Hitler ordered the navy to avoid any incident with the United States, and the U-boats were placed under strict restrictions with regard to American warships and merchant vessels. In the autumn of 1941, at the trial of Fritz Duquesne’s spy ring in New York, the prosecution produced testimony that one of the defendants had passed the Robin Moor’s sailing date to Germany, though it is not known whether this had anything to do with the attack itself.

The Robin Line freighter proved to be the first of many. In September 1941 a German submarine attacked the destroyer USS Greer, after which Roosevelt issued his order to fire on Axis vessels threatening shipping under American protection. In October the destroyer Kearny was torpedoed, and then the Reuben James was sunk. In November Congress allowed merchant ships to be armed and to sail into combat zones, which spelled the end of the old Neutrality Act. In December, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war, the United States found itself at war, and the German submarines moved to its coasts. The memory of the Robin Moor also survived in practice: the ship’s third officer, John J. Banigan, later wrote, together with a journalist, a guide for seamen, How to Abandon Ship, based on the experience of the lifeboats. The sinking of 21 May 1941 did not lead to war, but it showed Americans that neutrality did not protect their ships even in the remotest waters of the Atlantic.