The United States takes Greenland under its protection

At noon on Thursday 10 April 1941 the State Department in Washington published the text of the “Agreement relating to the Defense of Greenland”. It had been signed the previous day, 9 April, at 4.30 p.m. – the first anniversary of the German invasion of Denmark – by the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, and the Danish minister in the United States, Henrik Kauffmann. In it the United States, still formally neutral, recognised Danish sovereignty over Greenland while taking on its defence and acquiring the right to build airfields, naval bases, and radio and weather stations on the island. In a statement accompanying the announcement, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt expressed the hope that Denmark would soon be liberated.

It is often said that Greenland was “occupied by the United States with the consent of Free Denmark”. Both parts of that phrase need correcting. It was not an occupation: the Americans sent no troops to the island either on 10 April or in the weeks that followed, and the first soldiers landed there only in July, under an agreement that expressly confirmed Danish sovereignty. Nor was there in 1941 any “free Denmark” capable of giving consent. The government in Copenhagen was working under German occupation, knew nothing of the agreement and rejected it at once. Kauffmann signed it on his own responsibility, “in the name of His Majesty the King of Denmark as sovereign of Greenland”, with the reluctant consent of the island’s two Danish governors. In those same days the United States took two further steps in the North Atlantic: an American destroyer dropped depth charges for the first time on a suspected U-boat, and Roosevelt decided to push the boundary of the zone patrolled by the US Navy far to the east.

An island cut off from the mother country

In 1940 Greenland was a closed Danish colony. According to American wartime figures it had some 18,000 Greenlanders and fewer than five hundred Danes. Outsiders could not go there without the permission of the colonial administration in Copenhagen, and all trade passed through Denmark. To the outside world, however, the island held two treasures. The first was the only large-scale cryolite mine in the world, at Ivittuut (Ivigtut); the mineral was needed for smelting aluminium, and therefore for building aircraft. The second was its position: Greenland lies on the shortest air route from North America to Europe, and the weather that reaches the British Isles and Scandinavia a few days later is born over its ice cap.

On 9 April 1940 Denmark was overrun by Germany within a few hours, and King Christian X and the government of Thorvald Stauning stayed in the country and cooperated with the occupier. The colony lost touch with the mother country. The British occupied the Faroe Islands almost at once, and Iceland in May, and considered a similar step in Greenland, where Canada stood ready to land. Washington objected. Unlike Iceland, Greenland lay unquestionably in the Western Hemisphere, within the scope of the Monroe Doctrine, and the State Department feared that a British-Canadian “safeguarding” of the Danish colony would become a precedent that Japan could invoke when reaching for the Dutch East Indies.

The colony was run by two governors (landsfogeder): Eske Brun in the north and Aksel Svane in the south. Invoking an emergency provision of the 1925 act on the administration of Greenland, they assumed full authority on the island. On 3 May 1940 the provincial councils of both parts of Greenland, meeting jointly for the first time, renewed their oath of allegiance to the King and expressed the hope that the United States would bear in mind the “endangered Danish flag” on the island. The Americans opened a consulate in Godthåb, today’s Nuuk, headed by James K. Penfield, and cutters of the Coast Guard brought supplies and small guns to defend the cryolite mine, manned by former Coast Guardsmen who had been formally discharged and taken on by the mine. In July 1940, at the Havana Conference, the American republics resolved that European possessions in the Western Hemisphere must not pass into the hands of another non-American power. Greenland was not named in those documents, but Roosevelt let it be understood that the same principle applied to it as well.

The envoy who broke with Copenhagen

The key figure in the whole affair was Henrik Kauffmann, an experienced diplomat who had taken up his post in Washington in the summer of 1939. On 10 April 1940, the day after the Germans marched into Denmark, he declared publicly that he would work for one aim: the restoration of a free and independent Denmark. He told the State Department that he did not regard the government in Copenhagen as free and would not carry out instructions issued under duress. The Americans continued to recognise him as Denmark’s lawful representative. From the very first days Kauffmann also regarded himself as Greenland’s spokesman in the outside world, which aroused the distrust of both governors, but it was through his legation that food was bought and cryolite sold.

In the autumn of 1940 the British and Canadians again pressed for airfields to be built in Greenland, needed for ferrying aircraft across the Atlantic and for covering convoys. In November the Assistant Secretary of State, Adolf Berle, first floated the idea of American bases on the island in Washington, and in the first months of 1941 Kauffmann gradually persuaded the Americans to conclude an agreement with him rather than with the governors. On 6 February 1941, at a meeting in Berle’s office, representatives of the War and Navy Departments concluded that it would be better for the United States to take over the defence of Greenland than for the Canadians to land there. At first the airfields were to be built by the island’s Danes with American money, but on 5 March it was decided that the US Army would build, man and run them, and that the State Department would negotiate a suitable agreement. On 17 March the cutter Cayuga sailed from Boston with an expedition charged with choosing sites for airfields. Among the places its members picked were the moraines at the mouths of the fjords near Narsarsuaq and at Søndre Strømfjord.

The war in the Atlantic forced the pace. At the end of March 1941 the Germans extended their blockade zone around the British Isles as far as the waters of Iceland and eastern Greenland, German aircraft appeared over Scoresby Sund on the east coast, and rumours reached Washington that the Germans had set up a hidden weather station there. At the beginning of April the State Department and Kauffmann agreed the text of the agreement. On 4 April Consul Penfield was instructed to present it to the governors. Aksel Svane was shaken by the way he had been confronted with a fait accompli, and on the evening of 5 April, after several hours of hesitation, he gave his consent “under the extreme pressure of circumstances”. The governors suspected that Kauffmann had exaggerated in presenting the agreement to them as the only alternative to a British occupation. Eske Brun had long regarded such an arrangement as inevitable, but resented the manner of the ultimatum. The government in Copenhagen was not consulted at all: as it later stated, the Americans had demanded for military reasons that the agreement not be put before it before signature.

At 4.30 p.m. on 9 April Kauffmann arrived at the State Department. In the presence of Berle and of his own aide, Povl Bang-Jensen, he signed the agreed text with Hull. He said as he did so that in his view he was doing what was best for King and country: bringing Greenland into the American system of hemisphere defence was the surest way of preserving it for Denmark until the day Denmark was free again.

The terms of the agreement

The preamble referred to the resolution of the Greenland councils of 3 May 1940, to the Act of Havana and to the importance of Greenland’s defence for the security of the American continent. It stated that Danish sovereignty over the island was fully recognised, but that “present circumstances” for the time being prevented the government in Denmark from exercising it. In the agreement the United States reaffirmed Danish sovereignty and accepted responsibility for helping Greenland maintain its existing status. It received the right to build, maintain and operate landing fields, seaplane bases, radio and meteorological installations and other defence facilities, as well as the right to dredge harbours, build roads and fortifications and “do any and all things necessary” for their operation and protection. The land required was to be leased for the duration of the agreement, but the Americans could begin using it at once.

In the defence areas the United States received exclusive jurisdiction over all persons other than Danish nationals and native Greenlanders, its own post offices and shops for its personnel, and exemption from customs duties and taxes. In return it undertook to give consideration to the welfare, health and economic needs of the local population, to respect the island’s administration and its regulations concerning the native people, and to open the bases to the aircraft and ships of all the American nations. Once the threat to the continent’s security had passed, the two governments were to consult on modifying or terminating the agreement, after which either party could give a year’s notice. The official American history of the war notes that, compared with the agreement on the British bases concluded in March 1941 in the wake of the destroyers-for-bases deal, the Greenland text was much shorter and more general, and so left the Americans more latitude.

Copenhagen’s response

Kauffmann informed his ministry only once the agreement was public: his telegram, sent after the text was published at noon on 10 April, reached Copenhagen late, on 11 April. In it he wrote that he had been obliged to take this unusual step in the interests of Denmark and Greenland, and asked that judgement of his decision be withheld until the day Denmark was free. The reaction came quickly. On 12 April, after a three-hour visit by the German minister to the Danish Foreign Ministry, the foreign minister Erik Scavenius handed the American chargé d’affaires a note of protest. In it the Danish government stated that Kauffmann had exceeded his powers, that the agreement he had signed did not bind Denmark under international law, and that Copenhagen protested against the building of American bases. The same day Kauffmann was recalled by royal decree and ordered to hand over the legation to its counsellor, Blechingberg, and to return home at once. In conversation with the American, Scavenius made no secret of the fact that it would have been far more convenient for Denmark had the United States dealt with Greenland on its own, without the Danish minister’s involvement.

Kauffmann refused. On 13 April he wrote to Hull that he regarded Copenhagen’s decisions as taken under duress and therefore void, and that he would continue to carry out the mission entrusted to him by the Danish government while it was still free. All the Danish diplomats and consuls in the United States backed him. On 14 April Hull replied that the American government considered the action of the government in Denmark to have been taken under compulsion and continued to regard Kauffmann as the lawful minister. Neither the letter of recall signed by Christian X on 12 April and handed to the Americans on 16 April, nor Scavenius’s telegram of 17 April, changed this. Washington answered that it would recognise Kauffmann until the Danish government could decide his status as freely as it had requested agrément for his appointment in 1939. In Denmark proceedings for high treason were opened against the envoy. Yet the American chargé d’affaires reported from Copenhagen that Washington’s step had been received with great satisfaction in every section of Danish society, as a guarantee of Denmark’s rights to the island.

The first depth charges

On the evening of 10 April, a few hundred miles south-west of Iceland, the German submarine U-52 torpedoed the Dutch steamer Saleier, which was carrying coal from Britain to South Africa and had left the dispersed convoy OB 306 the day before. The ship sank, but all 63 of her crew got away in three lifeboats. Not far off was the American destroyer USS Niblack, which at the beginning of April had been tasked with reconnoitring the waters around Iceland with a view to a future American presence. While the ship was picking up the survivors, her sonar detected an echo that was taken for a U-boat moving in to attack. The commander of the destroyer division, Commander Denis L. Ryan, ordered an attack: Niblack dropped three depth charges and then made off with the rescued men for Reykjavík.

The clash is sometimes presented as the first fight between American and German forces in the Second World War, in which Niblack drove off a U-boat that had just sunk a Dutch ship. The reality was more modest. The official US Navy chronology and the uboat.net website date the rescue and the attack to 11 April, the day after Saleier was sunk, although many accounts give 10 April. No German submarine reported an attack that day, and a German naval inquiry found that there had been no U-boats in the vicinity. The US Navy concluded that Niblack had attacked a false echo. Nobody was killed and nothing was hit, but the incident showed how close the two countries’ warships had already come.

A boundary on the 26th meridian

The same days brought a decision far more important than Niblack’s lone attack. The Neutrality Patrol, which the US Navy had been running since the autumn of 1939 in the zone proclaimed at the Pan-American Conference in Panama, had so far covered waters a few hundred miles from the American coasts. On 1 March 1941 Rear Admiral Arthur L. Bristol’s Support Force, Atlantic Fleet, was formed for future convoy escort, and on 7 April a new naval base began operating in Bermuda. On 10 April, after a long conference with his senior military advisers, Roosevelt took a map and drew a line roughly down the middle of the Atlantic. The next day, 11 April, he informed Winston Churchill in a secret message that the United States would extend its security zone and patrol area to the waters of the North Atlantic west of approximately 25 degrees west longitude. Ships and aircraft were to operate from Greenland, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, the United States, Bermuda and the West Indies. The President asked to be informed in the strictest secrecy of convoy movements, and promised to pass the British at once the positions of any ships or aircraft of the “aggressor nations” that were sighted. He stipulated that, for reasons of domestic politics, the step had to look like a unilateral decision by Washington rather than the fruit of talks with London.

A few days later the Navy fixed the boundary on the 26th meridian west, with a bulge taking in the whole of Greenland and the waters around the Azores. The Western Hemisphere Defense Plan that introduced it came into force on 24 April. American warships did not yet escort convoys and were not to open fire, but they shadowed German warships and raiders and broadcast their positions in the clear, which the Royal Navy put to use. Because the Germans had extended their blockade zone westwards at the same time, the two areas overlapped in the waters south of Iceland. It was precisely there, in April 1941, that wolf packs were savaging convoys such as SC 26. For Roosevelt, who a month earlier had signed the Lend-Lease Act, making sure that supplies for Britain did not go to the bottom was an extension of the same policy. The Greenland agreement, in turn, gave him bases from which patrols could operate far to the north-east.

Its place in the war

The agreement of 9 April was another link in the chain of steps by which the United States, without declaring war on anyone, pushed its line of defence ever further east: from the Pan-American zone of 1939, through the bases obtained from Britain in September 1940, to Greenland and the middle of the Atlantic. On 19 June 1941 fewer than 500 soldiers and engineers under Colonel Benjamin Giles sailed from New York; at the beginning of July they went ashore near Narsarsuaq and began building the Bluie West One airfield. Further bases soon followed, among them Bluie West Eight at Søndre Strømfjord, today’s Kangerlussuaq. Greenland became a staging post on the ferry route for aircraft flying from America to Britain, a base for anti-submarine patrols and an important point in the war for weather data. On 7 July 1941 American marines landed in Iceland, where they began to replace the British garrison.

The patrol boundary and the presence of American warships in the North Atlantic were bound to lead to the clashes that the Niblack incident had foreshadowed. In September 1941 the Coast Guard seized the Norwegian trawler Buskø off the coast of Greenland, carrying men who were to set up weather stations for the Germans. On 4 September a U-boat attacked the destroyer USS Greer, after which Roosevelt gave the order to fire on Axis warships threatening shipping under American protection, and on 31 October U-552 sank the destroyer USS Reuben James – Niblack too took part in the rescue. In December 1941 the United States found itself at war, and Greenland with it. Between 1942 and 1944 the Germans several times set up hidden weather stations on the island’s empty east coast, which were hunted down by the Danish sledge patrol and the US Coast Guard.

The Danish government never recognised the agreement during the occupation. After Denmark’s liberation in May 1945 the charges against Kauffmann were dropped, he himself joined the government as a minister without portfolio, and the Rigsdag approved the 1941 agreement. The Americans, however, had no intention of leaving an island that in the Cold War became a forward outpost between America and the Soviet Union. On 27 April 1951 the Hull–Kauffmann agreement was replaced by a new defence agreement, concluded by Denmark now as a member of NATO. It provided the basis for Thule Air Base, today Pituffik Space Base. A decision taken in April 1941 by a single diplomat acting without authority thus settled Greenland’s place in the American defence system for many decades.