American neutrality patrol
The neutrality patrol of the United States Navy began shortly after the start of World War II in Europe on September 12, 1939 and lasted until the USA entered the war on December 7, 1941. The official aim of the operation was to protect the neutrality of the United States and other American states against attacks by the warring parties. For this purpose, all foreign warships within the operational area should be continuously monitored by the American Navy.
operation area
The operational area was expanded several times during the war. On September 12, it stretched across the US coastline from the Canadian border to the Caribbean. On October 2, 1939, a conference of the Pan-American foreign ministers meeting in Panama declared a 300- nautical-mile zone around the coasts of North and South America (with the exception of Canada, which was participating in the war) to be neutral and prohibited the warring nations from any hostile or military operation there (Warships were still allowed to pass through the area). The American Navy monitored this zone up to the height of Trinidad . On April 24, 1941, the area was expanded again to 26 ° west longitude and 20 ° south latitude (this roughly corresponds to the height of Rio de Janeiro ). Furthermore, on April 9, 1941, the United States concluded an agreement with the Danish ambassador in Washington , Henrik Kauffmann , which entrusted them with the defense of Greenland and allowed them to set up and use bases there. Kauffmann acted on his own initiative in this case, since he has not accepted any instructions from Copenhagen since the German occupation of Denmark. Nevertheless, the Allies accepted him as a legitimate representative of Denmark. In July 1941, the US stationed troops in Iceland after signing a similar agreement with the Icelandic government .
implementation
The neutrality zone was more or less ignored by the warring parties. So it came on December 13, 1939, well within the 300-mile zone in front of the Río de la Plata between Germany and Great Britain. The fact that there were no further major combat operations within the neutrality zone was more due to the fact that the battle in the Atlantic was fought even further east during this period and only extended to the western part of the Atlantic in 1942.
American surveillance was designed in favor of the Allies because of the strongly pro-Allied attitude of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration . For example, sighted German ships (merchant ships that were surprised by the war in America and blockade breakers) were shadowed by American ships, which sent their continuous position reports unencrypted. In this way, Allied warships could overhear the reports and intercept the German ships. If this happened within the neutrality zone, the American observation ships did nothing to prevent this, although in theory they were supposed to prevent all fighting within the zone.
With the takeover of the defense of Greenland and Iceland in April and July 1941, the situation between the USA and the Axis powers worsened. From that point on, American convoys between the west coast of the United States and Iceland with American escorts traveled the same route as British convoys between Halifax and Great Britain. The USA also invited foreign ships to join their convoys. The German Reich accused the USA of provoking the sinking of American ships by German submarines through this behavior .
The most famous of these incidents occurred on September 4, 1941, when the American destroyer USS Greer was alerted by a British aircraft to a submarine that had recently dived in front of the aircraft. The Greer sought and found the German submarine U-652 and the aircraft more depth charges on the Greer reported position of the submarine throwing. The German submarine commander then believed that he had been attacked by the destroyer itself, and therefore attacked him unsuccessfully with torpedoes . The Greer then launched an unsuccessful depth charge attack on the submarine.
The US government used this incident as an opportunity to order an immediate attack on all Axis ships and aircraft sighted within the neutrality zone. As a result of this shoot-on-sight order , the American armed forces in the Atlantic were in an undeclared war with the Axis powers practically from September 1941.
On November 6, 1941, the cruiser USS Omaha and the destroyer USS Somers captured the Odenwald in the South Atlantic , which had disguised itself as the American merchant ship Willmoto . Hitler mentions the fate of the Odenwald in his declaration of war by Germany and Italy on the United States .