and leaders in Bermuda and Trinidad were hostile to the Americans. The war had ruined tourism, the major business of the islands, and adversity made the locals cantankerous. Agriculture was barely viable. The islands imported food, rain was the only source of potable water, and horses were slaughtered for lack of forage.
Many of the islanders felt that the American bases would mean overcrowding, declining real-estate values, destruction of the last vestiges of the tourist trade, unemployment, and disease: unstated fears were of native blacks “spoiled” by high wages, civil strife, and eventual loss of British sovereignty over the islands.10 The Bermudans warned:
The attractions of Bermuda as a resort are its beauty, peacefulness, other-worldliness, facilities for outdoor recreation on land and water in pleasant surroundings, absence of mechanical transport, freedom of movement. . . . In all these respects it is clear that the character of the Colony would be violently changed by the unsightly buildings, noise, bustle, restriction of movement. . . .11
The Bermudans did not want seaplanes landing in Great Sound. The Trinidadans wanted the base there placed in the middle of a swamp. At Newfoundland, squatters on the Avalon Peninsula demanded exorbitant recompense for their holdings. And everywhere local authorities insisted on the right to levy harbor dues on warships using the bases and to place duties on military and naval supplies brought in to the base sites.12
The Foreign Office worried lest the obstinacy of the provincials compromise passage of the Lend-Lease Act. The diplomats persuaded Churchill, himself sulking over the decline of Empire, to treat a delegation of Bermudans to syrupy prose and strong cigars. At a meeting in London with American service representatives, the Governor of Trinidad, Sir Hubert Jones, demanded that the base site be removed from a beach area to a swamp in order not to disturb bathers; one of the Americans then asked him if he knew that there was a war on. The next day, the Americans formally responded to Jones’ proposal by handing him a small slip of paper with but two words on it: “No dice.”
However, as even the anxious Foreign Office was not prepared to complete the transaction without carefully-worked-out arrangements to safeguard British interests, it was not until nearly spring of 1941 that many of the details relating to the extent of the sites and rights of taxation were agreed upon.13 And even then, unfortunately, local authorities were prepared to violate the spirit of the agreements.
There was obstructionism in Trinidad, but the major contretemps occurred in Bermuda. Captain Jules James, a bright, articulate officer, was appointed CO of the Naval Operating Base, Bermuda, and because of the “delicate situation,” he was briefed before his departure by Admiral Stark, Secretary Knox, and even President Roosevelt.
The base was commissioned on 7 April 1941, even though its construction was far from complete. Ominously, no one from the local government attended the commissioning ceremonies, and Captain James felt that the attitude of the populace was “distinctly cold.” Soon he had graver troubles. The local wage boards struggled to keep the wages of native workers down, which tended to produce dissatisfied and apathetic toilers for the Navy; then they attempted to decrease the pay of the American construction men, too, in order to lessen the natives’ dissatisfaction at the disparity of pay scales. Local officials made persistent attempts to collect duties and taxes at the base docks, while the Americans insisted that they would pay only when using Bermudan ports and docks not leased to them. An American-financed service club soon became too expensive for sailors, but the government would not allow the Navy to close it because of the revenue it derived from a duty on the beer sold in the increasingly raffish joint. The Bermudans disliked automobiles, which they felt would impair the picturesqueness of their island and do harm to their light roads; even their governor was not permitted to drive a car. The Americans agreed to use automobiles only upon securing permission from local authorities. However, as with the customs duties, the Bermudans used the authority to harass the Navy. The Governor insisted that Captain James could drive his car only when in uniform. James retorted that the inside of his car was under the jurisdiction of the United States, and thus his driving apparel could not be a matter subject to local regulation!
Not that all of the wrongs were on one side. The constructors lived lavishly in beach-front hotels, and the officer in charge of the building program was later detached as a result of misapplied expenditures. The workers caroused, producing sporadic disorders as well as a significant prostitution problem. Such episodes were one important reason for the eventual formation of the Navy’s own construction battalions, the famed Seabees. The sailors on liberty in Bermuda, worse paid and better disciplined, caused somewhat less difficulty, although they too created disturbances when intoxicated. A strengthened shore patrol improved matters in the short run, and in the long run, the fine Navy Recreation Center at Riddell’s Bay solved the major problems.
Gradually, economic prosperity overcame the local resentment that accrued from too-rapid changes in ancient patterns of life, and the Navy’s relations with the Bermudans grew warmer; eventually, Bermudans were borrowing American cars.
There was no difficulty on the lesser islands, where the bases were smaller and there were fewer vested interests to offend; indeed, the local people seemed quite pleased to be in the limelight of grand events. At St. Lucia, public officials gladly turned out for commissioning ceremonies at the Naval Air Station, which included a fifteen-gun salute fired by the old destroyer Goff and the substantial pomp of Major Max Smith’s Marine detachment off aviation-tender Curtiss.14
As it turned out, the destroyer-bases transaction did not prove vital—merely helpful—to the safety of the United States and Great Britain. Victory in the Battle of Britain mitigated the need for destroyers for anti-invasion duty, and the continued security of Britain meant that the United Kingdom itself could serve as the first line of American defense until the United States entered the war and, thereafter, as an advanced base for offensive operations; the usefulness of the Western Hemisphere bases was thus reduced. There was no need to build a Pearl Harbor in the western Atlantic.
For each nation, the deal was insurance taken out against formidable but transient perils. The Prime Minister feared it would be reckoned sordid; the President feared it would lessen his popularity. But the best result of the transaction was that it became a symbol of their compact against tyranny and dramatized the tacit Anglo-American alliance.
For the Germans, the destroyers-for-bases deal was a stark, shocking warning that they could no longer ignore the growing impact of America upon the war. And so the Germans moved toward the fateful Tripartite Pact, bringing Japan into the Axis alliance.
BY THE SUMMER OF 1940, the Germans had advanced as far toward Britain as their Army could take them. But the crucial weaknesses of the German Navy and Air Force prevented a cross-Channel invasion and, thus, the quick, decisive victory so vital to the Nazi cause.
In the first year of war, Germany ignored the hostility of the United States, hoping to defeat France and Britain before America was strong enough to intervene. However, the destroyers-for-bases transaction, deemed by the Germans “an openly hostile act,” was followed by the defeat of the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain, which made possible a protracted war that Germany lacked the realistic plans to manage and increased the possibility of American intervention. These untoward events moved Germany to act more decisively in regard to the United States. Indignantly, the Fuehrer decided to chastise his upstart foe in distant parts and make use of “Japan as a club to be held over” the United States.
Thus, his response was the Tripartite Pact of September 1940, which sought to confront the United States with the menace of a two-ocean war. The Germans could not themselves strike at the United States for lack of sea power, and so had scant means of deterring American assistance to Britain. Japanese sea power would be
