general dislike of such modern refinements as speed keys and typewriters, which were deemed suited to business offices, but not to the hardy calling of Nelson, and out of place aboard a warship. It seemed that the traditional British virtuosity at sea had imbued the Royal Navy with a perhaps unhealthy spirit of conservatism.
Then there were the eccentricities of the ships. The four-stackers were originally fast and relatively durable, but as ancient “war babies,” mass produced quickly, they were not without the defects of premature birth. Their plating was thin and the watertight subdivision of their hulls was not up to modern standards, a structural problem to which advanced age contributed. They were not maneuverable; their turning circle was comparable to that of an old Texas-class battleship. They had been built in the days when escorts were not expected to protect convoys across the entire ocean, and so they lacked range. Long and slender ships, they rolled heavily in any kind of a sea, especially when their fuel was low. In the American Navy, it was common practice to take seawater into the empty fuel tanks as ballast, but the British feared fuel contamination and did not adopt the technique until grim experience demonstrated its necessity. Occasionally, there were condenser and generator breakdowns. The British crews found the destroyers difficult to steer in confined spaces; some thought that this was because the propellers were set too close together, while others thought it was because they were set too far apart. The Americans thought it was because of the inexperience of the British.5
Of the first group of eight ships, the Churchill (ex Herndon), Clare (ex Abel P. Upshur), Chesterfield (ex Welborn C. Wood), Cameron (ex Welles), Castleton (ex Aaron Ward), Chelsea (ex Crowninshield), Caldwell (ex Hale), Campbeltown (ex Buchanan), five left Halifax on schedule. Two were detained when the Chesterfield rammed the Churchill’s stern twice while maneuvering at close quarters, and the Cameron was briefly delayed by generator trouble. During Campbeltown’s voyage across the Atlantic, her officer of the deck fainted from seasickness.
Of the second octet, the Hamilton (ex Kalk), Georgetown (ex Maddox), Brighton (ex Cowell), Roxborough (ex Foote), Bath (ex Hopewell), Charleston (ex Abbot), St. Albans (ex Thomas), St. Marys (ex Doran), commissioned by the British on 23 September, only four were able to leave for England on schedule. The Hamilton and Georgetown sustained propeller damage in a collision while maneuvering to take on fuel; then, after being repaired, the unfortunate Hamilton ran aground on a rocky ledge, breaking her back, and she did not enter service for nine months. The Roxborough began the crossing with her sister ships, but excessive fuel consumption forced her to return; later she burned out a main bearing and required extensive work on her engineering plant.
The next group of six destroyers—the Annapolis (ex Mackenzie), Columbia (ex Haraden), St. Clair (ex Williams), Niagara (ex Thatcher), St. Croix (ex McCook), St. Francis (ex Bancroft)—was commissioned on the 24th of September and, since the ships were transferred to the Royal Canadian Navy, they were already at home.
The next group of eight—Beverley (ex Branch), Broadway (ex Hunt), Broadwater (ex Mason), Belmont (ex Satterlee), Burwell (ex Laub), Burnham (ex Aulick), Buxton (ex Edwards), Bradford (ex McLanahan—was commissioned on 8 October. There occurred a near tragedy during the training of this group. The Broadwater was pulling away from the dock one day when a British rating accidentally released a depth charge. The live drum did not explode, but lay on the bottom alongside the dock, causing what an American called “considerable consternation” until it was recovered by Canadian divers. Seven of the destroyers made it across to Britain on schedule; the Buxton had to return due to an outbreak of diphtheria on board.
The penultimate group was large, ten ships—Leamington (ex Twiggs), Lancaster (ex Philip), Mansfield (ex Evans), Montgomery (ex Wickes), Stanley (ex McCalla), Sherwood (ex Rodgers), Leeds (ex Conner), Lewes (ex Conway), Ludlow (ex Stockton), Lincoln (ex Yarnall)—and its training was complicated because many of the ships were manned by Polish and French sailors, and instructions had to be translated. Anglo-American relations were especially good in the Ludlow, where Commander G.B. Sayer, RN, and Lieutenant Commander Lewis R. Miller, USN, presided. The ship had operated out of Queenstown in World War I, and after an accident, her bow had been replaced in a British yard. Hence, when Sayer first came aboard, Miller drawled, “Say, Cap’n, d’you know your ship has got a British bow!” Whenever the ship’s machinery balked, Miller’s favorite words of commiseration were, “That installation stinks to high heaven!” Sayer was worried that the Ludlow, in the event of bad weather in the Atlantic, might run out of fuel before completing the crossing; but Miller always insisted, “She’s done it once and she’ll do it again.” The ships sailed on schedule after a late-October commissioning, and all ten made it to England on time and without incident. Shortly thereafter, Lieutenant Commander Miller received the following cable: “She stinks to high heaven, but she’s done it again!”
The last group, commissioned into the Royal Navy on 26 November, was also a large one: Reading (ex Bailey), Ramsey (ex Meade), Ripley (ex Shubrick), Rockingham (ex Swasey), Salisbury (ex Claxton), Richmond (ex Fairfax), Newmarket (ex Robinson), Newark (ex Ringgold), Newport (ex Sigourney), Wells (ex Tillman). But only six of the ships sailed on time; four were detained by mechanical trouble. Then the Newmarket, Newark, and Wells crashed into the corner of a dock while moored together when a maneuvering valve in one of them jammed in the ahead position. The British by now were hard pressed for men, and the crews of these last vessels were very green. One skipper conceded that the training of his crew was “a chimpanzee’s tea party.” The Newark suffered damage on her crossing when two inadequately lashed depth charges were washed overboard and exploded.6
British naval opinion, while unhappy at the defects of the four-stackers, generally favored the transaction as a glum necessity, while those in Britain less familiar with the critical need for destroyers felt that an exorbitant price in national prestige and honor had been paid. Nevertheless, the fifty ships were equivalent to 2½ times the annual British production of destroyers; they augmented the British destroyer fleet by 29 percent after a period of very heavy losses and before an anticipated period of even higher losses.7
The President urged speed on the Navy in the development and use of the bases. In November, he inspected the Caribbean sites in the Tuscaloosa and observed the pestiferous French at Martinique. By mid-November, tender-based PBYs were operating from off St. Lucia, Trinidad, and Bermuda. Facilities were planned at Antigua, the Bahamas, British Guiana, and St. Lucia to support seaplanes and a carrier air group; Jamaica, Bermuda, Trinidad, and Newfoundland were destined for more extensive development, with facilities for destroyers and submarines, as well as patrol planes and carrier aircraft. The larger bases could also provide anchorages for task forces, and consideration was given to the possibility of building a Pearl Harbor of the Atlantic in Puerto Rico. But soon the eager Americans were confounded in their attempts to speed utilization of the bases by an unexpected obstacle—their new-found allies, the British.
President Roosevelt was most disinclined to have the United States drawn into the complex social, racial, and economic problems of the West Indian islands,8 and insisted that American responsibilities be strictly limited to the base sites. He joked about Bermuda: “. . . we don’t want it. We think too much of Bermuda! Bermuda is an American resort. Americans go there because they like to be under another flag when they travel. They wouldn’t enjoy Bermuda half so much if it was under our flag. It would lose its quaintness.”9
But
