The USS Greer incident

On Thursday 4 September 1941, a few hundred kilometres south-west of Iceland, the old American destroyer USS Greer spent several hours tracking the submerged German submarine U-652. In the early afternoon the U-boat turned and fired a torpedo at her, then a second. Both missed. The destroyer replied with depth charges, which likewise did her opponent no serious harm. No one was killed and neither vessel was badly damaged, but it was the first clash of the war in which a warship of the Third Reich opened fire on a warship of the United States, a formally neutral country.

Popular chronologies describe the event as the first time a German submarine fired on an American warship, and add that from then on the United States was engaged in escorting convoys between the Western Hemisphere and Europe. The first part is true, though incomplete: the Greer was no innocent victim of an attack on an empty sea, but had been shadowing the U-boat for more than three hours and broadcasting its position, while a British aircraft operating in the area had dropped depth charges on the Germans. The second part gets the sequence wrong. The decision that the US Navy would take over convoy escort in the western Atlantic had already been made in August, and the first convoy under American protection did not sail until 16 September. The incident was not the cause of that decision, but it gave the President a way of justifying it in public.

The undeclared war in the Atlantic

In the summer of 1941 the United States was at war with no one, but its neutrality was by now a mere formality. Since March, under the Lend-Lease Act, it had been supplying Britain with weapons and materiel; in April it had extended its navy’s patrol zone as far as the 26th meridian west and taken Greenland under its protection, and on 7 July it had landed in Iceland, which the British had occupied for a year. American warships were not yet escorting British convoys and were not permitted to attack, but they shadowed German submarines and raiders and openly broadcast their positions, which the Royal Navy put to good use. Under the orders issued to the destroyers of the Atlantic Fleet, they were to “trail and report”. In July Admiral Ernest King, commander of the Atlantic Fleet, ordered escorts for American and Icelandic ships sailing to Iceland, which ships of other flags were free to join.

In August, during his meeting with Winston Churchill in Placentia Bay, which ended with the proclamation of the Atlantic Charter, Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed that the US fleet would take over the protection of convoys on the western stretch of the route, as far as the meridian of Iceland, regardless of the ships’ flags. Churchill later reported to the War Cabinet that the President had said he would wage war but not declare it, and would look for an “incident” that would justify opening hostilities. Historians warn against taking these words literally: Churchill needed good news for his cabinet, and Roosevelt often told the people he spoke to what they wanted to hear. On 1 September 1941 Admiral King issued a new operation plan under which the navy assumed responsibility for transatlantic convoys from a point off Newfoundland to the meridian of Iceland. From then on the ships in the North Atlantic were to operate under wartime conditions and sail darkened.

On the other side, Adolf Hitler wanted at all costs to avoid war with America until he had settled the war with the Soviet Union. Grand Admiral Erich Raeder had for months been demanding a free hand against the American warships that were helping the British, but the Führer refused. The commander of the U-boat arm, Admiral Karl Dönitz, was under orders that his crews must not attack American warships except in self-defence. The German blockade zone around the British Isles, extended in March 1941 to beyond Iceland, nevertheless overlapped with the American security zone. In those same waters south of Iceland the Germans and the British were fighting a bitter battle over the convoys, and a week earlier a British aircraft had forced U-570 to surrender.

The morning of 4 September

USS Greer was a ship from another age. She had been launched in 1918 as one of the hundreds of four-funnelled Wickes-class destroyers built for the First World War; fifty similar ships had been handed over to the British by the United States in September 1940 under the destroyers-for-bases deal. After years in reserve she had returned to service in the autumn of 1939, sailed on the neutrality patrol in the Atlantic and the Caribbean, and in 1941 operated from Argentia in Newfoundland and from Iceland. She was commanded by Lieutenant Commander Laurence H. Frost, who had taken over the ship only a month before. Also on board was his superior, Commander George W. Johnson, commander of Destroyer Division 61. On 4 September the Greer was steaming alone from Argentia to Reykjavík with mail, cargo and eleven passengers, army and navy personnel. She was not escorting any convoy.

At 8.40 a.m., some 175 nautical miles south-west of her destination (Morison gives the position as 62°45′ N, 27°37′ W), the destroyer sighted a British patrol aircraft, according to most accounts a Lockheed Hudson from an airfield in Iceland. The airmen signalled by lamp that a submarine had dived about ten miles ahead of the destroyer’s bow. Johnson ordered the speed increased to 20 knots, sounded general quarters and zigzagged towards the spot indicated. He had no intention of attacking. He judged, however, that under the President’s policy and the fleet’s orders he could not ignore a U-boat lurking in waters through which American ships passed. On arrival the Greer slowed to 10 knots so that her sonar (PL) would work as well as possible, and at around 9.15–9.20 she picked up the echo of a submarine some two thousand yards ahead.

For the next three hours and twenty-eight minutes the destroyer stayed with the U-boat, keeping her bow pointed towards it, the position in which she was hardest to hit with a torpedo. Her signal lamp passed the submarine’s position to the British aircraft. At around ten the airmen asked whether the Americans intended to attack; Johnson replied that they did not. At 10.32 the aircraft, which was running short of fuel, dropped four depth charges several thousand yards ahead of the destroyer, all of them far from the target, and flew back to base. At 11.30 the Greer broadcast the submarine’s position by radio on the international distress frequency, and half an hour later a second British aircraft appeared over the sea, to which the destroyer immediately passed the bearings.

As seen from U-652

U-652 was a new Type VIIC boat, in service since April 1941. Her commander, Oberleutnant zur See Georg-Werner Fraatz, had one patrol behind him, in Arctic waters, where on 6 August he had sunk the small Soviet auxiliary PS-70 off Murmansk. On 23 August he left Trondheim on his second patrol and belonged to a group of boats that Dönitz was deploying in the waters between Greenland and Iceland across the convoy routes. On 26 August he torpedoed and damaged the British auxiliary minelayer Southern Prince.

From a depth of several dozen metres the situation looked quite different from how it looked on the Greer’s bridge. Fraatz knew only that since the morning he had been pursued by a destroyer that kept constant sonar contact with him, and that depth charges had fallen nearby. A submerged crew could not tell whether they had been dropped by an aircraft or a ship. When the commander briefly raised his periscope, he saw the bow of a four-funnelled destroyer pointed at him, not her flag or the number on her side. According to the American historians Thomas A. Bailey and Paul B. Ryan, who compared the American reports with U-652’s war diary, Fraatz concluded that he was being pursued by one of the fifty destroyers handed over to the British, in other words a British warship. He also understood that his opponent wanted to keep him under water until his batteries ran down and the boat had to surface, at which point she would be at the mercy of the destroyer and the aircraft. From his point of view he had been under attack for several hours and was entitled to defend himself. That was also what the German command’s orders said: against American warships, weapons could be used only in self-defence.

Torpedoes and depth charges

Shortly after noon, when U-652 had been under observation for nearly four hours, Fraatz decided to hit back. At 12.40 the Greer’s sonar operator reported that the submarine was turning towards the destroyer. When the range had closed to about 150 yards, the Greer turned to keep her bow towards her opponent. The manoeuvre seems to have forced the German to fire earlier than he had intended. At around 12.45 the destroyer’s crew saw an air bubble indicating that a torpedo had been fired, and a few minutes later its track crossed the ship’s wake about a hundred yards astern. A few minutes after that a second torpedo passed nearby. It was then that the Greer hit back for the first time: at 12.56 she dropped a pattern of eight depth charges. They missed, although U-652’s diary shows that the boat suffered minor damage.

Accounts differ in the details. The US Navy’s official historian, Samuel Eliot Morison, writes that the second torpedo was not fired until after the destroyer’s first attack, at around 1 p.m. The report of the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Harold Stark, released in October at the demand of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, as summarised after the war by the historian Charles A. Beard, spoke of a torpedo sighted at 12.49, after which the destroyer lost contact, and of a depth-charge attack only after contact was regained at 3.12 p.m. All the sources agree on the essential point: the first shot that day was fired by the German submarine, but only after a pursuit lasting several hours, during which the destroyer had been guiding the British onto it and a British aircraft had dropped depth charges on it.

There followed hours of searching. At around 2.15 p.m. a British destroyer arrived and proposed a joint search of the area. Johnson, mindful of his orders, declined; the British ship dropped a single depth charge and left. At 3.12 p.m. the Greer again picked up an echo some 900 yards ahead and attacked with eleven depth charges. According to U-652’s diary the explosions were by then “distant”, and the contact was most likely false. According to Bailey and Ryan the destroyer did not break off the search until 6.40 p.m., almost ten hours after the aircraft’s first report; Morison gives an earlier time. In all the Greer dropped 19 depth charges and U-652 fired two torpedoes. Neither side suffered any loss. The destroyer entered Reykjavík the next day undamaged, and the U-boat headed west.

Washington: “eliminate”

Admiral Stark received the destroyer’s reports as they came in and informed the President of the clash. According to Bailey and Ryan, Roosevelt had an order passed to Rear Admiral Robert C. Giffen in Iceland that the U-boat was to be “eliminated”. Giffen, unsure of what the clash had really looked like and fearful of the consequences, did nothing, to the annoyance of Admiral King; in any case the search was already over. Still on 4 September the Navy Department announced that a submarine of unknown nationality had that morning attacked the Greer, which was carrying mail to Iceland, and that the destroyer had counter-attacked with depth charges with unknown results. The next day dispatches from Iceland reported that the ship had entered port undamaged and that British aircraft had helped her beat off the attack.

On 5 September Roosevelt confirmed at a press conference that there had been more than one attack, that they had taken place in broad daylight and “definitely on the American side of the ocean”. To reporters who asked whether the submarine could have identified the ship’s flag, he replied that the destroyer had a number on her side and was flying the flag. The objection that the Greer had entered the German blockade zone he brushed aside by saying that the United States had never been formally notified of it, and that a blockade was not recognised unless it was effective. He also told a parable about children who were shot at from the bushes on their way to school: their father decided that since no one had been hit, nothing needed to be done, but he, the President, saw himself in the role of the teacher responsible for all the pupils. Asked what the teacher would do with the gunman once he found him, he replied: “Eliminate him.” He gave no further details, pleading secrecy.

Berlin: “provocation”

On 6 September Berlin issued a communiqué, evidently based on U-652’s radio report. It claimed that it was not the German submarine that had started the fight. On the contrary, the boat had been attacked with depth charges, “continuously pursued in the German blockade zone” and bombed until midnight. The communiqué accused Roosevelt of trying “by all the means at his disposal” to provoke incidents in order to drag the Americans into the war, and called the reporting of U-boat positions by American warships a complete violation of neutrality. The Reich government, however, lodged no official protest with the State Department. Instead, the same day, the Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop instructed the chargé d’affaires in Washington, Hans Thomsen, to pass the communiqué discreetly to the isolationist leaders in Congress and to induce them to demand that the Greer’s crew be questioned and that it be revealed who had ordered the destroyer to attack. He wrote that the matter was of particular interest “at the highest level”, and saw in it an “exceptional opportunity” to deal a decisive blow to Roosevelt, Knox and Stimson. Thomsen reported on 9 September that through suitable intermediaries he had reached sympathetic senators, congressmen and journalists.

Who attacked whom

The dispute over who had attacked first went on for months. The isolationist chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, David I. Walsh, demanded an explanation, and in October Admiral Stark submitted a written report. It confirmed that the Greer had used depth charges only after the first torpedo was fired, but it also revealed what the President had not mentioned: that the destroyer had on her own initiative searched for the submarine on the strength of the British aircraft’s report, had shadowed it for more than three hours and broadcast its position, and that the aircraft had meanwhile dropped depth charges. The destroyer’s orders, Stark stressed, allowed her “to give information but not to attack”. The New York Times columnist Arthur Krock observed at the time that if an attack was understood as the aggressive opening of a fight, then in the cases of the Greer, and later the Kearny and the Reuben James, it was the American destroyers that had attacked. After the war Beard wrote that Stark’s report showed the President’s statements to have been “in some respects incomplete and in others untrue”.

Bailey and Ryan, authors of the classic history of the undeclared naval war between Roosevelt and Hitler, concluded that to the U-boat’s crew the Greer was in the position of someone pinpointing a target for a British killer, and that both sides could sincerely claim to have been attacked first, the U-boat with even better reason. Samuel Eliot Morison, who after the war defended Roosevelt’s policy against its critics, put it in his own way, comparing the incident to the shooting at Lexington in 1775: the side that had not fired first burned with virtuous indignation. For him, from 4 September 1941 the United States was waging a de facto naval war with Germany in the Atlantic, although each side was fighting with one hand tied behind its back: the Americans were constrained by the Neutrality Acts, the Germans by Hitler’s orders.

The later fate of U-652

The incident did not cut short the German boat’s patrol. U-652 joined the Markgraf group, which a few days later attacked the slow convoy SC 42, sailing from Canada under a weak Canadian escort. On the night of 10 September, north-east of Cape Farewell, Fraatz torpedoed and damaged two of its ships, the British tanker Tahchee and the cargo ship Baron Pentland. The convoy lost over a dozen ships in a battle lasting several days. On 18 September U-652 entered Lorient. In November she passed through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean, where in March 1942 she sank the British destroyers Heythrop and Jaguar off the coast of North Africa. On 2 June 1942, badly damaged by a British aircraft’s depth charges in the Gulf of Sollum, she was finished off with a torpedo by another U-boat. Her entire crew survived.

Significance

The Greer incident was a minor clash in which no one died, but it became a turning point in the undeclared war in the Atlantic. Roosevelt gained what he needed: proof that German submarines were firing on American warships, which allowed him to present the expansion of the fleet’s operations as self-defence. On 11 September, in a radio address to the nation, he called the attack “piracy” and announced that American ships and aircraft would no longer wait for Axis vessels to strike first. On 16 September HX 150 sailed from Halifax, the first transatlantic convoy to be protected on the western stretch of its route by American destroyers. The address, however, passed over in silence the fact that the Greer had herself been tracking the U-boat and guiding the British onto it, and that omission is among Roosevelt’s most frequently criticised moves. Historians later pointed out that a similarly exaggerated incident in the Gulf of Tonkin served Lyndon Johnson in 1964 as grounds for escalating the war in Vietnam.

Hitler did not take up the challenge. On 17 September, after a conference with Raeder, he ordered that all incidents with the Americans be avoided at least until mid-October, when, as he believed, the war in the east would be decided. But once American destroyers began escorting convoys, clashes were inevitable. On 17 October U-568 torpedoed the destroyer Kearny while she was with convoy SC 48, killing eleven sailors, and on 31 October U-552 sank the destroyer Reuben James, with the loss of about a hundred men. In November Congress agreed to the arming of merchant ships and to their entering war zones. Yet the United States was still not at war: it was Germany and Italy that declared war on it, on 11 December 1941, four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. From the Greer incident onwards, however, the US Navy and the German U-boats were already fighting each other in the Atlantic, even though neither government called it a war.