No Ordinary Time: The Greer and The Tonkin Incident (and Iraq)

From No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II by Doris Kearns Goodwin (p.277-278). This passage covers the Greer incident, which happened on September 4, 1941.

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While Eleanor attended her dying brother, Franklin was readying a major speech for delivery to the nation on September 11. He had committed the United States to convoys at the Atlantic Conference, but he had not yet revealed the new policy to the American people. A submarine attack on the U.S.S. Greer gave him the incident he needed to mobilize public support behind convoys.

The events surrounding the Greer attack were not quite as the president described in his nationwide radio address. He said the German submarine had "fired first upon the American destroyer"; he claimed the Greer's identity as an American ship was "unmistakable." In fact, the Greer had deliberately stalked the German sub, having been alerted to its presence by a British plane. The British plane had attacked the U-boat with depth charges while the Greer continued in pursuit. The sub fired a few torpedoes, the Greer responded with a few depth charges, and the chase came to an uneventful end. There was no positive evidence, the navy told the president, that the sub knew the nationality of the ship at which it was firing.

But the fact that German torpedoes had been fired on an American ship was all Roosevelt needed to reassert the principle of freedom of the seas. "No matter what it takes, no matter what it costs," the president warned the Axis powers, "We will keep open the line of legitimate commerce in these defensive waters.... Let this warning be clear. From now on, if German or Italian vessels of war enter the waters, the protection of which is necessary for American defense, they do so at their own peril.... When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him. These Nazi submariners and raiders are the rattlesnakes of the Atlantic."

To implement this warning, the president announced the final decision of the government to convoy British supplies, and a new policy by which the navy would shoot on sight any German raiders that came into our defensive zones. "It was," Stimson wrote, "the firmest statement and the most forward position yet taken by the President." Churchill was exultant. The shooting war in the North Atlantic had begun.

The president's "shoot on sight" policy won the solid support of 62 percent of the American people. "Sentiment on Capitol Hill has changed almost overnight," Washington correspondent David Lawrence reported. The news of the attack led "many a Congressman to say that the American people will not have their ships fired on and that defense of the freedom of the seas will once again command substantial support in both houses."

Yet, for all the positive results that the president's depiction of the Greer attack produced, an unfortunate precedent was set that would return in later years to haunt the American republic. "Roosevelt's deviousness in a good cause," Senator William Fulbright said after the Gulf of Tonkin incident helped propel escalation in Vietnam, "made it easier for Lyndon Johnson to practice the same kind of deviousness in a bad cause."

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Notes:
The Maine was sunk in Havana harbor in 1898
The Greer incident occurred in 1941.
The Gulf of Tonkin Incident occurred in 1964.
This book was written in 1994, nine years prior to the invasion of Iraq.