Plus Fifty

Seafaring men of Britain well know that no naval duty is so anonymous or so hard as life on a destroyer. A destroyer does not roll; she snaps. She does not pitch; she gallops. Food and drink for days on end is taken with an arm and a leg locked around a stanchion.

But last week the stature of destroyers grew. They became much more than busy little sea shepherds. Psychologically they were projected to the bulk of battleships; they became a new hope of victory, a pledge that Britain was not alone, a shock to Axis complacency--all by the simple fact of a horse trade. The U. S. swapped 50 "over-age" flush-decker destroyers for eight Atlantic bases (see p. 18).

Britain's Navy proudly calls itself the silent service, but last week First Lord of the Admiralty Albert Victor Alexander let slip a significant phrase: "The strain upon our destroyer fleet has been very great." Silent facts bore out this admission. Many destroyers have been at sea an average of over 25 days a month. One cruised 111 days with only 19 days in port. Another traveled 52,248 miles -- more than twice the earth's circumference -- in nine months.

At the beginning of war, Britain had 179 destroyers. Since then about 30 more have gone down shipyard ways and into action. By last week Britain had admitted losing 33 (plus the services of 61 French destroyers). Furthermore, so many had been seriously damaged that only about 60 were available for active service in home waters, and the convoy system (largely destroyers) had become so sketchy that transatlantic freighters were thought to be on their own outside a range of about 1,300 miles from home ports. Last week the Germans claimed six more destroyers.

In the long, hill-fringed inlet of Halifax, Nova Scotia, enough Canadian crews for six destroyers and enough crack Royal Navy men for ten, about 2,000 good sailors who could lay a hand on a new gear and feel its system right off, waited last week -- as Winston Churchill explained later -- by "the long arm of coincidence." Three days after the destroyer-base deal was announced, eight of the old U. S. destroyers, looking like absurd little floating factories with their flat decks and four tall funnels, steamed up the harbor. They dropped their anchors, but only long enough for British sailors to go aboard. Then they weighed again, and made out to sea. There, under the Stars & Stripes, gob showed tar how to run the little knifelike craft.

This week those eight--and possibly more which were thought to have been transferred at sea or at Bermuda--flew the Union Jack. Where were they going? What duties would be their detail? Their specifications (see p. 19) decided the answers to these questions. In a pinch they might be called on to do almost anything, but they were built for convoy service, and for convoy they were doubtless destined. If the Battle of Britain had become a war of attrition, they might have considerable influence on the outcome. Their principal service would be to relieve better British destroyers for probable work in the Mediterranean.

The destroyers were a great gain for Britain, but they had some bugs. Their plates were just thick enough, in the words of one U. S. naval officer, "to keep out the water and small fish." Their machinery was delicate and no longer new. They had, in the British view, rather too much torpedo armament (twelve tubes) and not enough anti-aircraft (one 3-inch). British ammunition would not fit their 4-inchers, but Franklin Roosevelt apparently engaged to fill them chockablock with U. S. ammunition and promised more where that came from. The British crews would have to be trained in action, as there was no time for fair-weather spins.

To the British, who have a poetic feel for names, the rechristening of the destroyers became an immediately grave question. One suggestion was that they should bear names of British West Indian islands. A typically British sour note was struck with the suggestion that they should bear the names of British heroes of the U. S. Colonial and Revolutionary period. But the shrewdest suggestion--and one which would please sailors who think name-changing is bad luck--was that they should keep their present names: quiet U. S. heroes like Herndon, Welles, Buchanan, Crowninshield, Abbot, Conner. This would point up the spectacular cooperation which the deal represented.

That cooperation was the most heartening news Britain had had since the Battle of Oran (see p. 22). "What has been done with almost boyish spontaneity this week is . . . one of the most far-reaching commitments in world history," wrote the sober New Statesman and Nation after the deal was announced. "It wants no abnormal quickness of wit to see the implications in this week's arrangement, and we must assume that both the Foreign Office and the State Department have seen them. For our part, we are content that it should be so. We are then brothers in arms, in war, as in peace, for a century to come. This is indeed a miracle of improvisation."

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