Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [61]
It turned out to be sooner. The United States Navy was already at war, though it had not yet been declared. The logic of events was dictating that the United States could no longer stand aloof. If the Americans were going to provide all aid short of war to Great Britain, it made no sense for them to fill up ships with materials, and then see those ships sunk in the Atlantic because the British were critically short of escort vessels. Even before the Newfoundland meeting, the navy was escorting convoys through the Western Atlantic as far as Iceland, where they were picked up by the Royal Navy. This placed the Germans in a considerable dilemma; officially they wished to avoid infringing American neutrality, but on the high seas that became more and more difficult. American destroyers were picking up German U-boats and shadowing them until they could call in British boats for the kill. Some sort of collision was inevitable.
On September 4, the U. S. S. Greer received a signal from a British patrol plane that there was a submarine ahead. Greer picked up the contact and held it for three hours: she made no attacks, but the British plane dropped depth charges on the sub. Finally, the U-boat fired a torpedo at Greer; it missed, and Greer went in to attack with depth charges. They missed too, but now both sides had exchanged shots. The respective governments expressed their indignation, and Roosevelt announced that the Germans were little more than pirates, and from now on American ships would shoot on sight. It is easier to continue fighting than to start it, and public opinion in the United States was on the whole supportive of the tough line, whatever the legal niceties of the matter. On October 16, U. S. S. Kearney was hit by a torpedo in the middle of a wolf-pack attack on the convoy she was escorting, but she made it to Iceland. Then on October 31, the Reuben James, an old four-stack destroyer, was hit and sunk 600 miles west of Iceland.
The Congressional response was an alteration of the Neutrality Acts. By clear, though certainly not overwhelming, majorities, both houses of Congress amended the acts so that American merchant ships might be armed, and declared that they might now sail into war zones. Congress also extended a $1 billion Lend-Lease credit to the Soviet Union.
The German government still chose not to respond to what was in fact American belligerence. Both parties had now committed overt acts of war against each other. In a court of law, the United States would have been declared the aggressor against Nazi Germany, and the U. S. Navy in the Atlantic was on a war footing; in fact, it was doing more in 1941 than it would be able to do in 1942, after it became officially involved, because then almost all its efforts were of necessity thrown into the desperate fight to stop the Japanese.
The United States and Germany were at war, and yet they were not at war. Sailors from the Atlantic convoys came back to a country that still pretended it was at peace. The last six months of 1941—at least until December—were a sort of twilight zone, and it was in the interest of neither party to alter the status quo. Roosevelt was doing all he could, and the domestic opposition had already branded him a warmonger. War industry had brought the United States finally and fully out of the Depression; few people really wanted to go any farther than that. It was extremely unlikely that the American public could be carried into the war on behalf of a couple of sunken destroyers; too many Americans would charge that the destroyers should not have been where they were anyway.
If the United States were to go to war, some massive overt shock was required. But Hitler was deeply embroiled in Russia, with his invincible armies marching on Moscow. In the first week of December of 1941, the Wehrmacht was closing in for the kill in Russia. Americans were concerned bystanders, but most of them still thought it was not their war.
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