Destroyers for Bases Agreement
In the spring of 1940 the German Army smashed through the Low Countries and France, nearly captured the bulk of the British Army in the process. With the French knocked out of the war only the British remained to oppose the Germans in Europe. Many refer to this period as the time in which they stood alone, but they were not really alone. The British Empire, including India, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand stood alongside England. But in order to get men and supplies from the Empire, and from the officially neutral United States, the British needed to protect their shipping from U-boats.
The British lost masses of supplies when they evacuated their army from Dunkirk, and FDR bypassed the strict requirements of the Neutrality Act by declaring tons of American military supplies as surplus, allowing him to send them to the British. Throughout the summer of 1940 the Battle of Britain raged, and Churchill became increasingly reliant on aid arriving from North America. The U-boat menace remained a serious threat. In the late summer of 1940 a deal was arrived at in which the US would acquire the land and favorable leases to build bases on British held islands in the Atlantic.
The United States acquired basing rights (although they would have to build the bases) on seven islands in the Atlantic and Caribbean. In return, 50 surplus destroyers which had been mothballed after the First World War were transferred, 43 to the Royal Navy and 7 to the Royal Canadian Navy. The British later provided five of the destroyers to crews of the Royal Norwegian Navy. After the Germans attacked the Soviet Union some of the destroyers were transferred to the Russian Navy for use protecting the lend lease convoys to Murmansk.
The ships were not in good shape, having in some cases been in mothballs for twenty years, and in the opinion of Winston Churchill the deal was far more advantageous to the United States than to the United Kingdom. After America entered the war anti-submarine patrols operated from all of the islands acquired by the United States in the deal, but initially submarine attacks on ships along America’s Atlantic coastline were devastating, mainly because the US Navy was at first reluctant to operate convoys in coastal waters. That soon changed.
The destroyers for bases agreement clearly violated the spirit of the Neutrality Act and angered the isolationists, but it did not break the letter of the law. The arrangement made it clear to the Axis countries that FDR was squarely on the side of the British, and would continue to seek out ways and means of helping the British Empire in its war against Germany and Italy. Nine of the destroyers were lost during the war, six of them to U-boats. The remaining were either broken up or sunk as target ships following the war.