The sinking of USS Reuben James

At dawn on Friday 31 October 1941, halfway between Newfoundland and the British Isles, the German submarine U-552 fired two torpedoes at a destroyer escorting convoy HX 156. The ship hit was the American USS Reuben James. The explosion set off the forward magazine. The fore part of the ship, with the bridge and all the officers, sank at once, while the stern stayed afloat for about another five minutes. As it went down, depth charges that had not been set to safe exploded and killed some of the sailors swimming in the icy, oil-covered water. According to the US Navy, a hundred men were killed; 44 sailors survived, but not a single officer. She was the first United States warship sunk by the Germans, more than five weeks before America entered the war.

It is often said that the destroyer sank near Iceland and that she was the first American “neutral warship” to be lost. Both statements need qualifying. The position of the sinking (51°59′ N, 27°05′ W) lay more than 600 nautical miles west of Ireland and a good 700 miles south of Iceland, towards which the convoy was heading. The United States was formally neutral, but the Reuben James was no neutral observer: she was escorting a British convoy carrying war cargo, with orders to attack any Axis warships that threatened shipping. Nor was she the first American warship sunk by a foreign power. In December 1937 Japanese aircraft had sunk the gunboat Panay on the Yangtze. The Reuben James was, however, the first US Navy ship lost in the Second World War in combat with Germany. Some studies, including Polish ones, wrongly give the date as 30 October.

An old four-stacker

USS Reuben James (DD-245) belonged to the Clemson class, one of the series of hundreds of “four-stackers” built by the United States at the end of the First World War. She was built by New York Shipbuilding at Camden and commissioned on 24 September 1920. She displaced about 1,200 tons and carried four 102 mm (4-inch) guns and twelve torpedo tubes. In September 1940 the United States handed fifty similar ships over to the British under the destroyers-for-bases agreement. She was named after Boatswain’s Mate Reuben James, a hero of the war with Tripoli of 1801–1805, who according to naval tradition shielded Lieutenant Stephen Decatur with his own body from a sabre blow during the fight for a gunboat in Tripoli harbour in 1804. Historians rather attribute the deed to another sailor, Daniel Frazier, but the legend stuck to James.

The ship had twenty years of typical service behind her. In 1921–1922 she cruised the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, where among other things she supported the American Relief Administration’s aid operation in the Free City of Danzig. She patrolled the coasts of Nicaragua during the civil war in 1926 and Cuban waters during the revolution of 1932–1933, and was then based at San Diego. In January 1939 she returned to the Atlantic, and from September 1939 she served on the Neutrality Patrol. In March 1941 she joined the escort forces that the Americans were organising for convoys bound for Britain; their forward base was in the Hvalfjörður fjord in Iceland, where American troops had been stationed since July. She was commanded by Lieutenant Commander Heywood L. Edwards.

A war no one had declared

From September 1941 the US Navy was waging a war in the Atlantic that no one had declared. On 4 September a German submarine fired torpedoes at the destroyer Greer, which had been tracking it, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt used the incident to announce on 11 September that American warships would no longer wait for U-boats to strike first. From mid-September American destroyers, operating under this shoot-on-sight order, escorted British convoys across the western part of the ocean as far as a meeting point south of Iceland. On the night of 17 October, while escorting convoy SC 48, U-568 torpedoed the destroyer Kearny, killing eleven sailors. On 27 October, in his Navy Day address, the President declared: “America has been attacked.”

Adolf Hitler still did not want war with America until he had settled the war with the Soviet Union, and the commander of the U-boat arm, Admiral Karl Dönitz, was under orders to avoid incidents with American ships. On the convoy routes, however, the ban was a dead letter. In twilight or at night, seen through a periscope, an old American four-stacker looked almost exactly like one of the fifty already flying the British flag, and to a U-boat commander every destroyer with a convoy was an enemy that could sink him.

Convoy HX 156

The Reuben James left Argentia in Newfoundland on 23 October together with the four other destroyers of escort group 4.1.3: Benson, Hilary P. Jones, Niblack and Tarbell. They were to take over the fast convoy HX 156, which had sailed from Halifax, and shepherd it across the middle of the ocean to a rendezvous with the British escort. The ships were carrying supplies and war materials to Britain, and at least one of them had a cargo of ammunition. Five destroyers with no air support in mid-ocean made a weak escort, but a typical one for that autumn.

U-552 was one of the most successful German submarines. Her commander, 27-year-old Kapitänleutnant Erich Topp, had worn the Knight’s Cross since June 1941 for the ships he had sunk. The crew had painted a “running devil” emblem on the conning tower. At the end of October the boat was operating on the convoy routes west of Ireland.

Dawn on 31 October

According to American accounts, in the last hours of the night the Reuben James was positioned between an ammunition ship and the area where U-boats were suspected to be; according to some descriptions she was just then checking a radio direction-finding bearing on a submarine. U-552 approached the convoy in darkness. According to the German war diary, at 8.34 a.m. German time, that is just before dawn local time, Topp fired two torpedoes at the destroyer.

The torpedo struck the fore part of the ship. The magazine exploded, and the blast tore the destroyer in two. The bow, together with the bridge, sank almost immediately. Sailors who had survived in the after part jumped into the sea. About five minutes later the stern went down. On it, in the racks, lay depth charges ready for use. No one had had time to set them to safe, and some of them exploded underwater, killing and injuring men swimming nearby. The survivors fought for their lives in the cold water, covered with oil from the ruptured tanks.

The destroyers Niblack and Hilary P. Jones picked up the survivors. Niblack rescued 36 men, one of whom died of his wounds on 2 November, and Hilary P. Jones ten. The casualty figures vary from source to source, because it is not clear exactly how many men were aboard that night. According to the figures most often given, there were 144 men on board – seven officers, 136 sailors and one passenger – of whom a hundred were killed, including all the officers, and 44 survived. Other tallies, such as that of the uboat.net website, speak of 160 men, 115 killed and 45 survivors. Among the dead was the commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Edwards.

The reaction in America

America reacted to the news of the sinking of the Reuben James more quietly than might have been expected. After the Kearny the President had delivered a fiery speech; this time he did not address the nation, break off diplomatic relations with the Reich or ask Congress to declare war. Many historians point out that the public received the deaths of a hundred sailors with surprising indifference: after two years of war in Europe and two months of undeclared war in the Atlantic, the sinking of an old destroyer was no longer sensational news for many Americans. Most of them still supported aid to Britain and the USSR, but did not want war. The day before, Roosevelt had promised Stalin a billion dollars of Lend-Lease aid, and the isolationists argued that escorting convoys and arming merchant ships led straight to a war that most Americans did not want.

The sinking of the destroyer nonetheless came at an important moment in the debate in Congress. On 17 October the House of Representatives had agreed to arm merchant ships, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee went further, proposing the repeal of the provisions of the Neutrality Act that barred American ships from entering combat zones and the ports of belligerent states. On 7 November the Senate passed the change by 50 votes to 37, and on 13 November the House of Representatives by a mere 212 to 194. Roosevelt signed the bill on 17 November. From then on American merchant ships could carry guns and take cargoes straight to British ports.

Woody Guthrie’s song

The dead of the Reuben James are remembered thanks to a song. The folk singer Woody Guthrie wrote “The Sinking of the Reuben James” soon after the ship went down. According to Pete Seeger’s account, the first version listed the names of the sailors who had died, but it was so long that Guthrie’s fellow members of the Almanac Singers, Seeger among them, persuaded him to replace the list with a chorus. That chorus asks: “Tell me what were their names, tell me what were their names, did you have a friend on the good Reuben James?” The verses were sung to the tune of the old ballad “Wildwood Flower”. The Almanac Singers, who in the spring of 1941 were still singing songs against American involvement in the war, changed their tune after the German attack on the Soviet Union and recorded it as a war song. It was later sung by Johnny Horton and the Kingston Trio, among others, and for later generations of Americans it became the best-known memorial to the first ship lost in this war.

Significance

The sinking of the Reuben James was the bloodiest clash of the undeclared war in the Atlantic and also its culmination. A hundred dead persuaded neither Roosevelt nor Hitler to declare war. The President knew that Congress would not vote for it, and Hitler still wanted to settle the war with the Soviet Union first. In the Atlantic, however, both sides fought on. American destroyers escorted convoys, and German submarines attacked them whenever they had the chance. The amendment of the Neutrality Act in November removed the last legal obstacles to the US Navy’s full participation in the Battle of the Atlantic.

The United States formally entered the war only after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, and on 11 December Germany and Italy declared war on it. Soon afterwards Dönitz sent U-boats to the American coast, where in the first half of 1942 they sank hundreds of ships. Erich Topp took part in that campaign as one of the most successful commanders; he survived the war and in 1969 became a rear admiral in the West German navy. His boat, U-552, survived until the end of the war and was scuttled by her own crew at Wilhelmshaven in May 1945. The name Reuben James was later borne by two more American warships: a destroyer escort of the Second World War and a frigate of the 1980s.