Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings Read Online Free PDF Page B

ferocious military giant. Hitler believed that the defeat of Russia would be only moderately more challenging than the defeat of France had been, and to ensure it, he applied overwhelming force. More than a hundred divisions crossed the Soviet frontier on that first day. The Germans achieved complete surprise and were soon deep inside the Soviet Union.
    Roosevelt now had to decide whether Russia, like Britain, should be eligible to receive Lend-Lease matériel and equipment. It was one thing to provide war matériel to America’s British “cousins,” it was quite another to send arms and military equipment to Stalin and Communist Russia. In the end, pragmatism trumped ideology, and soon convoys of American ships were crossing the Atlantic bound not only for British ports but also on the long and arduous haul around the North Cape of Norway to Soviet ports on the White Sea. That strained American sealift capability further and also complicated the U.S. Navy’s undeclared war against German U-boats.
    Indeed, by midsummer the situation in the Atlantic was becoming critical. Frank Knox insisted that it was folly to dispatch valuable war supplies, which had been built by American workers and paid for with American money, via American ships, only to see those ships sunk en route to Britain. Stark agreed, arguing that unless the U.S. Navy became more active in convoy protection, the effort to supply Britain would become “hopeless.” But how far could Roosevelt extend American naval protection over those convoys before it became a hostile act? He had already pushed the boundaries of neutrality beyond any generally accepted meaning of the term, and he was aware that there was a line that, if crossed, would constitute active belligerency. He worried far less about the legal niceties of such a line than he did about the reaction of American voters. Though he was a trained lawyer, his instincts were entirely political. Consequently, he acted incrementally, expanding America’s commitment to convoy protection bit by bit, as if probing the limits of what the country would tolerate.
    In mid-July, as Roosevelt and Hopkins sat in the White House, the president tore a map of the Atlantic Ocean out of the pages of
National Geographic
. Spreading it out on a table, he took a pencil and drew a north-south line on it from a point two hundred miles east of Iceland down to theAzores, roughly approximating the twenty-sixth parallel. He suggested to Hopkins that the U.S. Navy should assume full responsibility for policing the area west of that line, thereby allowing the thinly stretched Royal Navy to focus its attention on the war zones closer to Europe. It was not only another step toward active American belligerency in the Atlantic but another tie linking the British and American navies. 26
    By now, the American Atlantic Fleet, under the leadership of Admiral Ernest J. King, was operating under full wartime conditions. Even before the
Greer
incident in September or the
Kearny
and
Reuben James
torpedoings in October, American warships in the Atlantic came to general quarters with sufficient regularity that it became almost routine. At night the ships ran blacked out, and day or night they steered zigzag courses to throw off any hostile submarine that might be lining up for a shot. It was both reasonable caution in an active war zone and valuable training for war if and when it came.

    FROM TIME TO TIME , Roosevelt managed to escape from Washington and spend several days or even weeks at sea, sailing or fishing. He was good at both, and he genuinely enjoyed them. Ashore, even the most routine activities were difficult and occasionally humiliating, especially when it involved his having to be carried from one place to another. At sea, however, he could maneuver a sailboat with a simple command and a hand on the tiller; he could land the biggest of fish from his fighting chair using his powerful arms and shoulders, developed from years of