The torpedoing of USS Kearny

Shortly after midnight on 17 October 1941, several hundred kilometres south of Iceland, a torpedo fired by the German submarine U-568 struck the starboard side of the American destroyer USS Kearny. For several hours the ship had been defending convoy SC 48, bound from Canada to Britain, against U-boat attack. The explosion tore open the forward boiler room. Eleven sailors were killed and twenty-two wounded. The destroyer did not sink: her crew brought the flooding under control, got the after boiler room working and two days later brought the ship into Iceland. The United States was not at war with Germany, yet for the first time in this war American naval personnel had been killed by German weapons.

The men killed on the Kearny are often called the first American military casualties of the war. This needs some refinement. They were the first sailors of the United States Navy killed by German weapons in the Second World War and the first American servicemen killed in the undeclared war in the Atlantic. Americans had, however, died from German torpedoes before: 28 United States citizens were killed on the liner Athenia, sunk on 3 September 1939, and later so were seamen on American-owned merchant ships. And American naval personnel had already been killed by foreign weapons in December 1937, when Japanese aircraft sank the gunboat Panay on the Yangtze.

The undeclared war in the Atlantic

By the autumn of 1941 American neutrality was already largely a fiction. Since July American troops had been stationed in Iceland, and the navy escorted supply ships to the island. On 4 September a German submarine fired torpedoes at the destroyer Greer, which had been tracking it for several hours and guiding a British aircraft onto it. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used the Greer incident to announce on 11 September that American warships would not wait for U-boats to strike first. The press called it the shoot-on-sight order. From mid-September American destroyers from the base at Argentia in Newfoundland escorted the fast HX and ON convoys on the western stretch of the ocean, as far as a rendezvous point south of Iceland where the British took them over. The slower SC convoys were escorted mainly by Canadian corvettes.

On the other side Adolf Hitler still wanted to avoid war with America until he had decided the war in the east, where the offensive against Moscow was then under way. Grand Admiral Erich Raeder demanded freedom of action against American escorts, but in September the Führer ordered incidents to be avoided at least until mid-October. The commander of U-boats, Karl Dönitz, had to keep his crews away from American warships. Such a ban, however, could be observed only by day and on an empty sea. In a night battle around a convoy, with destroyers of several nations dropping depth charges and a U-boat commander seeing nothing through his periscope but the silhouettes of ships, he had no chance of telling one flag from another.

Convoy SC 48

Convoy SC 48 left Sydney, on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, on 5 October 1941. It consisted of 52 ships carrying war materials to Liverpool. Like most slow convoys that autumn it had a weak escort: the Canadian destroyer Columbia, handed over by the Americans in 1940 under the destroyers-for-bases deal, and several corvettes, among them Canadian ones, the British Gladiolus and the Free French Mimosa. A storm scattered some of the ships, and in mid-October a group of U-boats, directed onto the convoy by Dönitz from his headquarters in France, lay in wait on its route. On the night of 14–15 October the German submarines sank the first ships. On the night of 15–16 October U-568 fired three torpedoes and sank the British freighter Empire Heron, carrying sulphur. Of the 43 men aboard, one seaman survived, picked up by the corvette Gladiolus; he was lost the following night together with her entire crew.

Calls for help reached the command in Iceland. The nearest ships were an American group of five destroyers under Captain L. H. Thebaud, which were escorting the westbound convoy ON 24. They were detached and sent to SC 48: the modern Plunkett, Livermore, Kearny and Decatur, and the old four-stacker Greer, the same ship that had evaded German torpedoes in September. British destroyers also set out from Iceland. The Americans reached the convoy on 16 October. Thus, only a few weeks after they had begun escorting convoys, American warships found themselves in the very midst of a battle with a U-boat pack.

The night of 16–17 October

The Kearny was a ship of an entirely different class from the Greer. This Gleaves-class destroyer, displacing more than 1,600 tons, had been built by the Federal Shipbuilding yard in the town of Kearny, New Jersey, and commissioned on 13 September 1940. She was named after Commodore Lawrence Kearny, a naval officer of the first half of the 19th century. Her captain was Lieutenant Commander Anthony L. Danis. At the beginning of 1941 the ship served on the Neutrality Patrol in the Caribbean, and in August she moved to Argentia to escort convoys in the North Atlantic.

On the evening of 16 October the U-boats renewed their attacks. During the night they torpedoed several ships, including tankers whose burning cargo lit up the sea. The American destroyers circled the convoy dropping depth charges on suspicious contacts; the Kearny did so all night. According to American accounts, at one point she had to slow sharply to avoid colliding with a corvette, and found herself silhouetted against a burning ship.

From the deck of U-568 things looked different. Her commander, Kapitänleutnant Joachim Preuss, had been trying for several hours to overtake the convoy on its port side, but each time he was driven off by a two-funnelled destroyer that the Germans took for a British A- or D-class ship. In the end Preuss fired a spread of four torpedoes at her. One struck the Kearny on the starboard side, abreast the forward boiler room. The Germans observed the explosion and were convinced that the destroyer had broken in two and sunk. That the ship they had hit was American, and that she had survived, emerged only from American announcements.

On the Kearny the explosion killed eleven men, mostly in the boiler room, and wounded twenty-two, eight of them seriously. The ship lost power and for almost half an hour could not even send a distress signal. The crew nevertheless managed to confine the flooding to the forward boiler room and to get the after one working. The destroyer left the battle area and set course for Iceland at 10 knots. She was accompanied by the Greer, and in the evening the destroyer Monssen, sent from Iceland, joined them. On 19 October the Kearny entered Hvalfjörður, where she was patched up alongside the repair ship Vulcan. On Christmas Day 1941 she sailed for Boston for a thorough refit and returned to service in April 1942.

Convoy SC 48 paid dearly for those nights. It lost nine merchant ships, and its escort two warships: the corvette Gladiolus, which went down with all hands, and the destroyer Broadwater, one of the fifty old four-stackers handed over to the British by the Americans, torpedoed on 18 October by U-101. The remaining ships reached Britain.

Washington

The news of the Kearny’s torpedoing reached Washington just as the House of Representatives was debating an amendment to the Neutrality Act. On 9 October Roosevelt had asked Congress to repeal the provision that prohibited the arming of American merchant ships. On 17 October the House passed the amendment by 259 votes to 138. The result was clear, but far from unanimous: the isolationists, especially Republicans and politicians from the Midwest, continued to argue that the President was step by step dragging the country into a war that no one had declared.

The isolationists also asked what an American destroyer was doing in the middle of a battle for a British convoy, hundreds of miles from America’s shores. Formally, the Kearny was carrying out the September orders: she was protecting shipping in waters the United States regarded as essential to its defence, and these extended as far as Iceland. In practice it amounted to fighting alongside the British and Canadians. Unlike after the Greer incident, it was hard this time to argue about who had started it: the destroyer had been dropping depth charges on U-boats all night, and one of them had answered with a torpedo.

“America has been attacked”

On 27 October, Navy Day, Roosevelt spoke at the annual dinner of the Navy League at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. The speech was broadcast by radio across the country and abroad on short wave. The President recalled the Greer and the Kearny, and said that the United States had wished to avoid shooting, but the shooting had now started; history had recorded who fired the first shot, but in the long run only the last shot would count. He went on: “America has been attacked.” The Kearny, he said, was not merely a navy ship but belonged to every man, woman and child in the country. To show this, he listed the twelve states from which the dead and wounded came, from Illinois and California to Georgia and New York, far from the sea and from the guns. Hitler’s torpedo, he said, had been aimed at every American.

The greatest stir, however, was caused by two “documents” the President told his listeners about. The first was a “secret map made in Germany by Hitler’s government”, on which experts in Berlin had supposedly divided South America into five vassal states, one of which included Panama and the Panama Canal. The second was an alleged plan to abolish all religions – Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism – to confiscate church property and to replace the churches with an “international Nazi church”. The Reich government declared both documents forgeries, and Roosevelt refused to show the map to journalists. Historians, among them the British propaganda scholar Nicholas J. Cull, later established that the map most probably came from the workshop of British Security Coordination, the British intelligence network in America headed by the Canadian William Stephenson. Whether the President knew it was a forgery is not known. Cull points out that Roosevelt struck out of the text of his speech the words about the map’s “undoubted authenticity”.

The President also called for merchant ships to be armed and protected by the navy. He recalled that the House of Representatives had already voted to amend the “outmoded” Neutrality Act, and that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had recommended removing further restrictive provisions, and he ended by declaring, very simply and very bluntly, that the country was pledged to “pull our own oar” in the destruction of Hitlerism. He did not, however, ask for a declaration of war.

Significance

The torpedoing of the Kearny was the first clash in which the undeclared war in the Atlantic took a bloody toll of American sailors. It also showed that Hitler’s orders could not prevent fighting with warships that defended convoys at night alongside the British and Canadians. For Roosevelt it was an opportunity to win Congress and public opinion over to amending the Neutrality Act; for the isolationists it was proof that escorting convoys led straight to war.

Two weeks later matters took an even more serious turn. On 31 October U-552 sank the old destroyer Reuben James while she was escorting convoy HX 156, with the loss of about a hundred men. In November Congress, by narrow majorities, repealed the most important restrictions of the Neutrality Act: the Senate on 7 November by 50 votes to 37, the House of Representatives on 13 November by 212 to 194, and the President signed the act on 17 November. From then on American merchant ships could carry guns and sail with cargo to British ports. The United States was still not at war, however; Germany and Italy declared war on it on 11 December 1941, four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Kearny survived the war. In 1942 she escorted convoys and took part in the landings in North Africa, and in 1944 she provided fire support to Allied troops at Anzio and during the landings in southern France. U-568 later moved to the Mediterranean and on 28 May 1942 was sunk by British warships north-east of Tobruk. Her entire crew, Preuss among them, were taken prisoner.