FDR - Jean Edward Smith [311]
Three weeks after Hitler’s invasion of Russia, Roosevelt dispatched 4,400 marines to relieve the British garrison in Iceland. The move had been planned for several months, but the White House kept its fingers crossed. Admiral Stark wrote Hopkins that what the Navy was being asked to do was “practically an act of war” and wanted the president’s explicit approval. “O.K., FDR,” Roosevelt scribbled on the bottom of Stark’s request.72 Marines were deployed initially because it was unclear whether Iceland was in the Western Hemisphere, and the Selective Service Act prohibited the use of draftees if it were not. After the marines were in place the State Department redefined the hemisphere to include Iceland, and FDR pressed the American patrol zone one degree of longitude eastward.
It was at FDR’s instigation that he and Churchill met off Newfoundland in early August. “I’ve just got to see Churchill myself in order to explain things to him,” the president told Morgenthau.73 The arrangements were entrusted to Hopkins. Confidentiality was essential. Churchill would have to cross the U-boat-infested Atlantic coming and going, and Roosevelt for his part wanted to avoid provoking his isolationist critics until after the conference took place. Initially FDR envisaged a private one-on-one meeting, but Churchill pressed to have the senior military staffs included, and Roosevelt agreed.
Churchill boarded the battleship HMS Prince of Wales at Scapa Flow on August 4 and sailed with the tide. During his absence, Labour party leader Clement Attlee, who was deputy prime minister in the war cabinet, stood in for Churchill in the House of Commons. Attlee was under firm instructions to answer no questions concerning the prime minister’s whereabouts. On the second day out the sea was so rough the Prince of Wales’ destroyer escort could not maintain the pace. Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, the first sea lord, who was traveling with Churchill, gave the order for the destroyers to drop away. The big battleship plunged on at high speed alone, zigzagging to avoid possible U-boats and maintaining radio silence to avoid detection.74 It seems mind-boggling in retrospect that Great Britain’s prime minister, the chief of the imperial general staff, the first sea lord, and the air vice chief of staff—that nation’s highest political and military leadership—should be traveling together on a single warship in the North Atlantic, fully aware of the U-boat menace they faced.* Two days later, when Prince of Wales crossed the twenty-fifth meridian, a squadron of Canadian destroyers took up screening positions and escorted the mighty vessel to the American fleet lying at anchor in the deep waters of Placentia Bay, off Argentia Harbor—one of the locations acquired by the United States in the Destroyers for Bases deal.
For his own route to Argentia, Roosevelt organized an elaborate charade. On Sunday evening, August 3, he boarded the presidential yacht Potomac at New London, Connecticut, for what was announced as a ten-day fishing vacation off the New England coast. The following day he hosted members of the Danish and Norwegian royal families on board, and that evening, under cover of darkness, rendezvoused with vessels of the Atlantic Fleet off Martha’s Vineyard. The Potomac returned to Massachusetts waters still flying the presidential pennant and for the next week cruised leisurely around Cape Cod, giving every evidence that FDR was still present.†
Roosevelt, however, had boarded the heavy cruiser Augusta, flagship of the Atlantic Fleet, and set sail for Newfoundland. Waiting for the president on ship were General Marshall, Admiral Stark, and General Hap Arnold, each of whom had taken his own circuitous route to the rendezvous. Accompanying the Augusta was her sister ship, the 9,000-ton Tuscaloosa, and five destroyers.