1000 Word Excerpt

Contrary to the perceptions of many Americans, World War II did not begin with the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. To be sure, the formal US entry into World War II occurred in December 1941 but much of the world had actually been in major, savage combat since the 1930s in Asia, Europe and North Africa. Before the end of 1940, the Japanese had conquered and were bloodying much of the Asian mainland. The Germans had rapidly overrun Western Europe and Scandinavia and were preparing an invasion of the United Kingdom with an air assault that came to be known as the Battle of Britain Fascist Italy had conquered and was occupying countries in North Africa. All three Axis powers demonstrated a willingness to conquer and consume foreign sources of raw materials.

Overconfident in the imagined protection of great oceans to the east and west, and a mistaken trust that proclaimed neutrality would be respected, even after the Roosevelt administration openly chose sides against the Axis powers, token preparations for effective defense of the US homeland lacked committed resolve. In this fragile pre-war period, the homeland defense perimeter was confined within a set of “frontiers” marked by US territorial waters. Although the inevitability of being pulled into war was a gnawing premonition for many Americans, a replay of World War I history was the imagined script, with US ground troops reluctantly joining allied armies across the ocean, “over there,” in Europe. Exemplifying the Nation’s general mood, songwriter Irving Berlin rewrote his God Bless America (written many years earlier) in prayerful hope that war would be kept “far across the sea” from the American homeland.

Underscored by Roosevelt’s relentlessly scolding foreign policy, the freezing of Japanese assets in the US, an oil embargo against Japan, and the logistic support given to the enemies of Germany and Italy were interpreted as belligerent acts by all three Axis powers. This Axis interpretation led directly to German attacks against ships of any flag believed to be carrying war materiel from the US to its friends across the Atlantic and led also to Japan’s surprise attack at Pearl Harbor.

The strategic importance of the Delaware River and Delaware Bay had been well-understood since World War I. Heavy industries, including shipbuilding, chemicals, steel, and textiles were critically dependent on ports such as Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Trenton. In the early 1940s, much of the crude oil taken to the refineries of New Jersey and Delaware arrived by oceangoing tankers steaming into Delaware Bay. Ships loaded with fuel oil, gasoline and other refined petroleum products then came back down the Delaware River into the bay and out into the ocean to sail along the US east coast to their delivery ports or to join convoys forming to cross the Atlantic. Similarly, vessels carrying military supplies, food, and raw materials were loaded at the Delaware River ports and followed the same routes out into the Atlantic, many to join trans-ocean convoys.



The “gathering storm” described by Winston Churchill, sobered only a part of the American Nation. Significant domestic solidarity with Nazi Germany was openly expressed by uniformed, swastika-bannered “Bund” organizations that paraded and filled American big-city sports arenas. Also, “America First” groups, preaching appeasement and isolation, found outlets in a large percentage of newspapers that echoed their views. Although privately warned of the war dangers by his diplomatic and intelligence advisors, President Roosevelt publicly maintained the reassuring illusion of American isolation with promises to keep war away from the US homeland.

Even as the likelihood of being dragged into war increased to the point that the country’s first-ever precautionary peacetime draft was enacted in September 1940, the partisan mood of the Congress was not wholly convinced. The draft was limited to no more than 900,000 conscripts simultaneously on active duty and then only for one-year enlistments. Also that same September, Coast Artillery units of the Delaware National Guard, with four 12-inch guns, were federalized as the 261st Coast Artillery Brigade (HD) at Fort Saulsbury (near Slaughter Beach). The regular Army’s 21st Coast Artillery Regiment, organized as two battalions, was stationed well inside Delaware Bay at Fort Dupont. However, both the 21st and the 261st had been in “caretaker” status since the early 1930s, when the likelihood of enemy ships appearing offshore was remote. These units were far from combat-ready.

The Roosevelt Administration’s official view was that two wide oceans buffered the US from the rapidly-spreading hostilities abroad and the slumber of coastal defenses was allowed to continue, undisturbed. No Coast Artillery batteries in Delaware maintained an operational watch with guns ready for action in this pre-war period.
East Coast beaches were frequently littered with the flotsam of torpedoed ships and occasional corpses. Warrant Officer Ralph H. Trader Jr., serving in the Coast Artillery, remembers the remnants of torpedoed ships washed up on Fort Miles’ beach. Still, the offshore waters were as close as the majority expected the war to come and, so long as the routines of American daily life could continue, there was little sense of imminent danger. It wouldn’t be until September 1941, as a response to several close-in sinkings, that President Roosevelt issued an “attack-on-sight” order for any German or Italian vessels spotted in US waters.

Military and law enforcement memories were refreshed as late as 1939, when blame for that violent attack, which had killed seven Americans 23 years earlier, was conclusively laid at the feet of Germany. The refresher and its lingering memory served to raise awareness of the threats of sabotage, especially along the coasts and in strategic harbors.
In a military vein, offshore threat assessment was sharply punctuated by the first shots of World War II in Europe. Before dawn on September 1, 1939, the war’s opening salvoes were fired by the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein, which had sailed audaciously into the Polish harbor of Danzig to shell military installations with her heavy main batteries.