FDR - Jean Edward Smith [91]
To provide destroyer escorts for the convoys placed an enormous strain on the Royal Navy. Several destroyer divisions—the eyes of the fleet—were withdrawn from the Grand Fleet for convoy duty, but the shortage of escort vessels remained acute. Rear Admiral William S. Sims, whom Daniels had dispatched to London, reported that unless the American fleet was “thrown into the balance,” Britain and France would “be forced to dire straits.”17 FDR shared Sims’s concern. A token force of six destroyers was sent immediately to the Celtic port of Queenstown (now Cobh), but it required a high-level British mission headed by former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour and then a French mission that included Marshal Joseph Joffre, hero of the Battle of the Marne, to convince Washington of the seriousness of the situation.18
Perhaps because he was one of the few members of the Wilson administration who spoke French fluently, FDR drew the assignment of meeting the French mission at Hampton Roads and escorting it to Washington. As a result, he had “twenty-five hours of quite intimate conversation” with the members before they saw anyone else.19 He also met frequently with the British. In repeated discussions Roosevelt urged both delegations to press for all they needed from the United States. He also pledged to provide Britain with thirty American destroyers, although neither Daniels nor Wilson had authorized him to do so. In this instance FDR’s eagerness served him well. Despite some foot-dragging by the Navy high command, in July 1917 thirty-five American destroyers were on station at Queenstown. Before the war ended, a total of 370 combat vessels had been assigned to the European command.20
The Balfour and Joffre missions went from Washington to New York to raise money and reinforce investor confidence. FDR’s mother, Sara, went to hear Balfour speak at Carnegie Hall (“a perfect little speech”) and the next morning attended a special service for the British delegation at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine on Morningside Heights. Franklin’s half-brother, Rosy, was a trustee of the cathedral and introduced Sara to Balfour. “He is both musical and religious, and wins all hearts, mine included,” she reported. Joffre proved an even greater hit. When Sara discovered that the French hero was staying nearby at the Fifth Avenue mansion of Henry Clay Frick, she asked the marshal’s aide if she might present three of Franklin’s children—Anna, James, and Elliott—to him. The marshal graciously fit them into his schedule, and Sara escorted the children up the grand marble staircase at the Frick residence “to a little bedroom, and Joffre kissed all three children. Then the perfectly charming, brave Joffre spoke to me of my son in a most lovely way. I felt quite queer and rather like shedding a tear but managed to behave decently.”21 Sara asked Joffre for a photograph, which the marshal signed and which she immediately had framed and placed conspicuously on the mantel in the library at Hyde Park.
Like Winston Churchill at the Admiralty, FDR was bubbling with new ideas to confound the enemy. His most notable wartime achievement was the laying of a North Sea antisubmarine mine barrage—a chain of underwater high-explosive charges stretching 240 miles from the Orkney Islands to the coast of Norway. Roosevelt did not conceive the plan, but he promoted it so vigorously that Admiral Frederic R. Harris, the Navy’s expert in construction matters,