The Sinking of the Reuben James

A War Nobody Declared

Ask most Americans when we entered World War Two, and they'll say December 7th, 1941. Pearl Harbor. That's the date in the textbooks.

But for sailors in the Atlantic, the war started earlier. The Navy's own historians put it plainly. Before Pearl Harbor, the United States Navy was already in an undeclared shooting war with Nazi Germany at sea.

Here's how it happened. It started small. War broke out in Europe in September 1939, and within days President Franklin Roosevelt set up the Neutrality Patrol. American ships and planes would watch the waters off our coasts and report on the warships of the nations at war.

But Britain began to struggle. German submarines, the U-boats, were sinking merchant ships faster than they could be built. Roosevelt and many American leaders were convinced that Britain could not be allowed to fall.

So, step by step, America leaned in. In March 1941, Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act, which let the United States send weapons, food and supplies to Britain. That same month, the Navy set up a Support Force in the Atlantic Fleet, destroyers, patrol planes and supply ships, to protect convoys. A convoy is a crowd of merchant ships crossing together, with warships guarding the edges.

By that fall, American destroyers were escorting convoys across our side of the ocean, as far as Iceland. There, British escorts took over.

The U-boats were under orders not to attack American warships. But in the dark, in heavy seas, in the middle of a fight, telling one destroyer from another was not easy.

Sparks in the Atlantic

The first sparks came on September 4th, 1941. The destroyer USS Greer was tracking a German submarine and passing its position to a British patrol plane. The plane dropped depth charges. The submarine fired a torpedo at Greer. It missed. Greer answered with depth charges of her own. Those missed too.

After the Greer incident, President Roosevelt approved new rules that became known as the shoot on sight order. American warships could now attack any U-boat they found.

Then, on October 17th, the destroyer USS Kearny went to help a convoy under attack by a pack of U-boats. She dropped depth charges. Then a torpedo hit her.

Kearny was a brand new ship, and she stayed afloat and made it to port. But eleven American sailors were killed, and twenty-two more were wounded. And America was still officially at peace.

Ten days later, on Navy Day, October 27th, Roosevelt went on the radio. "America has been attacked," he said. "The U.S.S. Kearny is not just a Navy ship. She belongs to every man, woman, and child in this Nation."

And then he said this. "We have wished to avoid shooting. But the shooting has started. And history has recorded who fired the first shot."

Four days later, the shooting found an old destroyer that was already at sea.

The Old Four-Stacker

She was named for a sailor from the Navy's earliest days. Boatswain's Mate Reuben James served with Stephen Decatur in the war against the Barbary pirates. Navy tradition credits him with putting himself between Decatur and an enemy blade during a fight at Tripoli in 1804.

The ship that carried his name was commissioned in 1920. She was a Clemson class destroyer. Long, narrow and fast, with four tall smokestacks. Sailors called ships like her four-stackers, or four-pipers. By 1941, she was more than twenty years old. One of the old destroyers keeping the Atlantic convoy lanes open.

Her commanding officer was Lieutenant Commander Heywood Edwards. He was thirty-five years old. And he had given his crew an order: every man was to keep his life jacket with him, at all times.

I'll tell you something as a sailor. On a long, quiet watch, an order like that can feel like a nuisance. Keep it in mind anyway.

On October 23rd, 1941, Reuben James sailed from Argentia, Newfoundland, with four other American destroyers. Benson. Niblack. Hilary P. Jones. And Tarbell. Their job was to guard convoy HX-156. Forty-four merchant ships, heading east toward Britain, loaded with supplies.

For a week, they pushed east across the gray Atlantic. There were false alarms. One destroyer charged a sonar contact that turned out to be a school of porpoises.

But on October 30th, Reuben James made what was recorded as a good contact on a suspected submarine. She dropped two depth charges. Her crew readied more.

Something was out there.

The Hunter

Somewhere in that dark water was U-552. She was commanded by Erich Topp, a twenty-seven-year-old German officer who would become one of the most successful U-boat commanders of the war. His boat was less than a week out of Saint-Nazaire, France, on her sixth war patrol.

Before dawn on Halloween, Reuben James was in her night position on the convoy's port quarter. That's the back corner on the left side. She was steaming at about nine knots. Most of her crew was in the forward part of the ship. The men who would end up on the stern were the ones asleep, or on watch, farther aft.

I served in the Navy, and what stays with me about this moment is how ordinary it was. A night watch. A convoy. A routine position on the port quarter.

At roughly five thirty-four in the morning, U-552 fired on the convoy.

Halloween Morning

The hit came on Reuben James's port side. The blast set off her forward magazine. That's where a warship keeps her ammunition. Survivors reported a lurid orange flame and a tall column of black smoke that could be seen for miles.

The front of the ship was torn away. Which brings us back to the men on the stern.

One of them was Norman Hingula, a twenty-five-year-old fireman from Brooklyn. He'd been asleep after his midnight-to-four shift in the engine room. He scrambled topside and looked forward. Fifty years later, he described what he saw. "The lifeboats blown up, the No. 3 stack toppled forward and just no ship at all forward of that. Midships was now the bow."

From the forward part of the ship, where most of the crew had been, only two men survived. The helmsman, and the boatswain's mate of the watch.

The lights flickered and went out. Sailors got three rafts into the water and jumped. And the captain's order, the one about life jackets, saved lives.

Then the stern began to slide under. As it went down, at least two of the ship's own depth charges exploded among the men in the water. Nobody knows exactly how many were killed in those last blasts, struggling in the cold, black, heavy oil. Hingula was in that water when the charges went off. He said it felt like being hit in the back of the head with a baseball bat. And when they pulled him out, he was covered in oil, but unhurt.

On the destroyer Benson, the escort commander called each ship by radio. Reuben James didn't answer. He sent Niblack and Hilary P. Jones back to look. The sea was smooth that morning, a mercy. Niblack's sailors and officers went over the side, into the freezing, oily water, with cargo nets, ladders and lines. Niblack brought thirty-six men aboard. Hilary P. Jones pulled in ten more.

As a Navy veteran, that's what I want you to hold onto. Men climbing down into that water, on purpose, to pull other sailors out of it.

Their Names

All seven officers were killed, including Lieutenant Commander Edwards. Forty-four men survived in the end. The Navy counts one hundred dead. Other sources say one hundred fifteen. Even the count was never settled.

Maybe that's why the folk singer Woody Guthrie wanted the names. As Pete Seeger later told it, Guthrie's first draft tried to list every man who died. His friends steered him toward the story instead, with a chorus everyone could sing. The Sinking of the Reuben James came out in 1942, and its chorus keeps asking you what their names were, and whether you had a friend aboard.

Five weeks later came Pearl Harbor, and the undeclared war became a declared one.

Any sailor can tell you the ocean doesn't care whether a war has been declared. You stand your watch anyway. The men of the Reuben James stood theirs, all the way to the end.

On that smooth gray sea, Niblack's sailors are still climbing down the cargo nets, into the oil, after the men from the stern.

Tomorrow: the first family moves into a house that isn't ready for them. The Daily Muster is supported by Parcaut Supply Co. Subscribe, and it'll be waiting at seven Eastern. Muster's done. Fair winds. I'm Ed Parcaut, and I'll see you tomorrow.