World War II Day by Day

Reykjavik, Iceland · May 17, 1941

On April 9, 1940, Nazi Germany invaded Den­mark and Nor­way, osten­sibly to pro­tect the neu­trality of the two Scan­di­na­vian coun­tries against Franco-Brit­ish aggres­sion. Adolf Hitler had become con­vinced in mid-Decem­ber 1939 that the two West Euro­pean Allies, at war with Ger­many for three and a half months now, were hell-bent on dis­rupting the Swe­dish iron ore supply through Nor­way’s ice-free port of Narvik. So he ordered his Armed Forces High Com­mand to begin pre­li­minary plan­ning for an inva­sion of Nor­way. Den­mark’s con­quest came later at the insis­tence of the Luft­waffe, which claimed it needed bases on the Danish penin­sula to sup­port the Nor­we­gian operation.

A month after Den­mark fell, a small force of Brit­ish Marines landed in Ice­land, which was a sover­eign king­dom in per­sonal union with Den­mark through Den­mark’s King Chris­tian X. Even­tually 25,000 Brit­ish troops were sta­tioned in Ice­land, stra­te­gi­cally posi­tioned at the mid­way point in the con­voy life­line between the Ger­man-besieged Brit­ish Isles and North America.

On this date in 1941 Ice­land’s Althing (parlia­ment) broke with the mother coun­try, pro­claiming the nation to be sepa­rate and neu­tral. A week later Pre­si­dent Franklin D. Roose­velt pledged U.S. aid and sup­port, as neces­sary, to any coun­try resisting Nazi Ger­many. Moti­vated by the Brit­ish and by its own desire to dis­abuse Ger­many of any move it might take to “pro­tect” Ice­land’s neu­trality, the Althing autho­rized another neu­tral, the U.S., to sta­tion its armed forces on the is­land, which occurred between July 7 and 12, 1941. U.S. Marines now relieved Great Brit­ain, deeply em­broiled in the Battle of the At­lantic, of the respon­si­bility for defending the world’s newest nation.

In September and October Roosevelt’s pledge of sup­port to Great Britain against her German adver­sary led to sev­eral pre­war con­fron­tations between the U.S. Navy and German U‑boats that were feasting on Allied merchant ships. On Octo­ber 17, 1941, the USS Kearny, an escort ship in a 50‑ship convoy, was tor­pe­doed off the Ice­landic coast at a cost of 11 dead and 24 wounded while assisting a British plane trying to sink a U‑boat, and on Octo­ber 31 the USS Reuben James, pro­vi­ding convoy escort service west of Iceland, went down with 115 sai­lors, the first U.S. Navy ves­sel sunk by Nazi Germany. To the Amer­i­can public Roose­velt por­trayed these two inci­dents as part and parcel of unpro­voked German aggres­sion (not entirely true), all the while knowing from British inter­cepts of German Enigma (coded) traffic that Hitler had ordered his U‑boats to avoid to the extent possible confronting America on the high seas.

Hitler’s open declaration of war against the United States on Decem­ber 11, 1941, appears to be a page torn from the Wehr­macht’s martial hand­book, as Germany angled for every advan­tage in a con­flict that spelled doom for the loser. Roose­velt had played his poker hand bril­liantly. He knew that only way to ensure the entry of a hesi­tant and divided America into the Euro­pean war on the side of Great Britain was to await an unpro­voked attack on Amer­i­can interests on a gigan­tic scale. Hitler’s Tripar­tite treaty partner, Japan, did that in spades by attacking the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941.

The U.S. Navy on the Eve of War, 1941

Left: The USS Reuben James—a four-funnel, post-World War I de­stroyer—was the second U.S. Navy ship sunk by hos­tile action in World War II. The river gun­boat USS Panay, serving on the Yangtze Patrol in China, was bombed, strafed, and sunk by Japa­nese air­craft on Decem­ber 12, 1937, with a loss of 4 dead; wounded were 43 sailors and 5 civilian passengers.

Right: USS Kearny at Reykjavík, Ice­land, two days after being tor­pe­doed by the U‑568. The USS Mons­sen is along­side. The tor­pe­do hole is visi­ble in Kearny’s star­board side. The Kearny, assisting three other U.S. de­stroyers, came to the res­cue of a belea­guered con­voy whose Cana­dian es­corts were being mauled by a U‑boat wolf­ pack when it came under attack. Casual­ties among Kearny’s crew in­cluded 11 dead and 22 injured. They were among the more than 36,000 Allied sai­lors and navy air­men and 36,000 mer­chant sea­men who lost their lives in the Battle of the Atlantic (1939–1945).

American Singer-Songwriter Woody Guthrie Performing His “Sinking of the Reuben James”