Destroyers For Bases Agreement - The Deal

The Deal

On September 2, 1940, as the Battle of Britain intensified, United States Secretary of State Cordell Hull signaled agreement to the transfer of the warships to the Royal Navy. In exchange, the U.S. was granted land in various British possessions for the establishment of naval or air bases, on ninety-nine-year rent-free leases, on:

• Newfoundland (today part of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador).
• Eastern side of the Bahamas
• Southern coast of Jamaica
• Western coast of St. Lucia,
• West coast of Trinidad (Gulf of Paria)
• Antigua
• British Guiana (present day Guyana) within fifty miles of Georgetown.

The agreement also granted the US air and naval base rights in:

• The Great Sound and Castle Harbour, Bermuda
• South and eastern coasts of Newfoundland

No destroyers were received in exchange for the bases in Bermuda and Newfoundland. Both territories were vital to trans-Atlantic shipping, aviation, and to the Battle of the Atlantic. Although enemy attack on either was unlikely, it could not be discounted, and Britain had been forced to wastefully maintain defensive forces, including the Bermuda Garrison. The deal allowed Britain to hand much of the defence of Bermuda over to the still-neutral US, freeing British forces for redeployment to more active theatres. It also enabled the development of strategic facilities at US expense which British forces would also utilise.

The Royal Air Force and the Fleet Air Arm (FAA) each maintained air stations in Bermuda at the start of the war, but these only served flying boats. The RAF station on Darrell's Island served as a staging point for trans-Atlantic flights by RAF Transport Command and RAF Ferry Command, BOAC, and Pan-Am, as well as hosting the Bermuda Flying School, but did not operate maritime patrols. The FAA station on Boaz Island existed to service aircraft based on vessels operating from or through the Royal Naval Dockyard, but attempted to maintain maritime patrols using pilots from naval ships, RAF Darrell's Island, and the Bermuda Flying School.

The agreement for bases in Bermuda stipulated that the US would, at its own expense, build an airfield, capable of handling large landplanes, which would be operated jointly by the US Army Air Force and the Royal Air Force. The airfield was named Kindley Field (after Field Kindley, an American aviator who fought for Britain during the First World War). RAF Transport Command relocated its operations to the airfield when it was completed in 1943, though RAF Ferry Command remained at Darrell's Island. Prior to those, the US Navy had established the Naval Operating Base at Bermuda's West End. This was a flying boat station, from which maritime patrols were operated for the remainder of the war (the US Navy had actually begun operating such patrols from RAF Darrell's Island, using floatplanes, while waiting for their own base to become operational). The RAF and FAA facilities were closed after the war, leaving only the US air bases in Bermuda. The Naval Operating Base ceased to be an air station in 1965, when its flying boats were replaced by Neptune landplanes, operating from the Kindley Air Force Base (as the former US Army airfield had become). These US air bases were in fact only two of several US military facilities that operated in Bermuda during the Twentieth Century. The United States abandoned many of these bases in 1949 and the remaining few were closed in 1995. The US does retain the right to base military forces at Bermuda and Newfoundland.

The US accepted the "generous action… to enhance the national security of the United States" and immediately transferred in return 50 U.S. Navy destroyers "generally referred to as the twelve hundred-ton type" (also known in references as "flush-deck" destroyers, or "four-pipers" after their four funnels). Forty-three destroyers initially went to the British Royal Navy and seven to the Royal Canadian Navy. In the Commonwealth navies the ships were renamed after towns, and were therefore known as the Town class, although they had originally belonged to three ship classes (Caldwell, the Wickes, and Clemson). Before the end of the war, nine others also served with the Royal Canadian Navy. Five Towns were manned by crews of the Royal Norwegian Navy, with the survivors later returned to the British Royal Navy. HMS Campbeltown was manned by Royal Netherlands Navy sailors before her assignment to ram the drydock gates and sacrifice herself in the St. Nazaire Raid. Nine other destroyers were eventually transferred to the Soviet Navy. Six of the 50 destroyers were lost to U-boats, and three others, including the Campbeltown, were destroyed in other circumstances.

Britain had no choice but to accept the deal, but it was so much more advantageous to America than Britain that Churchill's aide John Colville compared it to the USSR's relationship with Finland. The destroyers were in reserve from the massive U.S. World War I shipbuilding program, and many of the vessels required extensive overhaul due to the fact that many were not preserved properly when inactivated; one British admiral called them the "worst destroyers I had ever seen", and only 30 were in service by May 1941. Churchill also disliked the deal, but his advisers persuaded the prime minister to merely tell Roosevelt that

We have so far only been able to bring a few of your fifty destroyers into action on account of the many defects which they naturally develop when exposed to Atlantic weather after having been laid up so long.

The agreement was much more important for being the start of the wartime Anglo-American partnership. Churchill said in Parliament that "these two great organisations of the English-speaking democracies, the British Empire and the United States, will have to be somewhat mixed up together in some of their affairs for mutual and general advantage".