In June 1999, a World War II-oriented tour program included the University of Chicago campus. The tour group paused at the Stagg Field site where, on 2 December 1942, scientists made one of history's most important discoveries: the first self-sustaining nuclear chain-reaction. The event heralded the dawn of the Atomic Age. Along with top-secret Ultra (the unraveling of the German Enigma cipher), the Manhattan Project, as it was known, became the war's biggest and best-kept secret.
"Fair enough," said someone in the group, "but there was another secret before, during, and after the war. The Manhattan Project was disclosed in 1945, and Ultra was made public in the 1970s. What I know and where I went is still unknown. In November 1941, my ship and two other American troop transports took 20,000 British troops of the 18th Division from Halifax to Cape Town to Bombay and, eventually, to Singapore. We arrived only days before it fell to the Japanese." He finished the brief account almost apologetically before a now-highly-interested audience: "Most of the people I've told don't even believe me."
Why did the United States send its three most important passenger liners into potential harm's way one month before its entry into World War II?
On 20 October 1941, the captains of 18 U.S. Navy warships and transports moored at four East Coast naval bases received a six-page, single-spaced OpNav (Office of the Chief of Naval Operations) message stamped SECRET. Sent by Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Admiral H. R. Stark, the orders read:
Pursuant to a revised agreement with the British government, Task Force Fourteen will proceed on or about 3 November, 1941 from the United States for the Middle East via Halifax, Trinidad, and Capetown, South Africa, and return to the United States. From Halifax to the Middle East Task Force Fourteen will transport one division of British troops consisting of approximately 20,000 officers and men. While no commitment has yet been made, it is possible that a second trip from Halifax to the Middle East may be authorized.
The CNO ordered capacity loads of fresh and refrigerated stores and enough dry provisions for 90 days at sea. Expense allocations were designated: Lend Lease funds would pay for the soldiers' fresh water and meals, but their transit went into an unusual special category. "The troops are to be carried as supernumeraries and records of rations so indicate." All ships were instructed to "obtain full allowances of ammunition for five- and three-inch batteries." The orders referenced "OpNav secret letter serial 077338 of 26 September 1941 to ComTransportDiv 19." Copied to the Commander-in-Chief Atlantic Fleet and to four other Navy commands, the admiral's unusual order ended with a blunt caution: "Attention is invited to the highly secret nature of the movements and plans of this expedition. Information pertaining thereto is not to be disclosed to other than those immediately concerned with its accomplishment."
Perhaps the least known in U.S. Navy annals, Task Force (TF)-14 was anything but a minor movement. Admiral Stark had good reason for requiring strict secrecy. A series of neutrality acts shackled President Franklin D. Roosevelt from aiding friendly nations fighting the Nazis. Even on the eve of war, a revision to the Neutrality Act allowing the arming of U.S. merchant ships barely passed in Congress. But neither the original Neutrality Act nor its revision allowed the peacetime transport of a warring nation's troops in ships of the U.S. Navy. That is exactly what was to take place. The Neutrality Act had to be circumvented.
When the United States entered World War II on 7 December 1941, the 18 ships in the task force had sailed well beyond rescue or reinforcement. With new orders, the remaining warships returned home, but three of the six transports—the convoy's largest troopships—had new orders. The same British troops boarded in Halifax were given a new, unexpected destination, one for which they had neither training nor equipment. The Tommies and the three transports were going to Singapore.
Except for the CNO's "highly secret" designation, Task Force 14's mission appeared similar to other joint maneuvers between the U.S. and British navies in 1940-41. But there was nothing routine about TF-14; it became one of the war's most daring operations. And when it was formed, the United States was months from war.
TF-14's remnants—three vulnerable former ocean liners and their troops—overcame near-impossible odds. They avoided a wolfpack, then floating mines, and somehow eluded the Japanese fleet during its most dominant phase. And as the Japanese 25th Army prepared to break down Singapore's flimsy back door, the fragile transports, dodging bombs and bullets, entered port through the heavily fortified front door. Completing an almost 18,000-mile cruise, they passed under the silent gaze of the useless 15-inch and 9.2-inch naval guns at Fort Connaught.
"A Most Impressive Sight"
At 0700 on 30 October 1941, 39 officers and 915 "other ranks" in the First Cambridgeshire Regiment of the 18th Division left Liverpool's Princess Jetty on the Orient Line's weary, plodding SS Orcades. Seven other vintage transports in convoy William Sail 12X (WS12X) held other 18th Division regiments, totaling 20,800 officers and men. All were going to the Middle East via Halifax—or so they thought.
At a midocean meeting point on 2 November, the First Cambridgeshire's adjutant recorded a "historic event" in the regiment's war diary:
At 0830 the masts of a fleet were seen over the horizon on the starboard side. The first sight of the Americans came when two planes flew low over the convoy. It is the first time a British troop convoy has been escorted by the U.S. Navy. A most impressive sight.
The masts were those of Task Group 14.3, split from TF-14 to escort the convoy from the meeting point to Halifax and transfer to U.S. Navy transports. Consisting of the battleship New Mexico (BB-40), carrier Yorktown (CV-5), a fleet oiler, the light cruisers Savannah (CL-42) and Philadelphia (CL-41), and screened by Destroyer Squadron Two, Task Group 14.3 had come prepared to take on the German Navy, if that was needed to get the convoy to Halifax.
Designated OpPlan 14.3-A, there was no ambiguity in the lengthy orders issued by Rear Admiral H. K. Hewitt, TG-14.3's commander: "Destroy, repel or cripple threatening surface raiders." The Tirpitz, Prinz Eugen, Gneisenau, Scharnhorst, Admiral Scheer, and Zeppelin were designated as possible adversaries. The orders continued: "This would be a 'captains battle,' where the task of each captain is to get (the) maximum numbers of shells and torpedoes into the enemy as quickly as possible."
Because it needed only German targets, the entry of the United States into World War II well could have been in the Atlantic instead of at Pearl Harbor seven weeks later.
No one in convoy WS12X or TF-14.3 could have imagined it, but the cruise took almost three months to complete. It covered the entire world, and its outcome claimed the lives of one in three men in the unlucky 18th Division.
The mission, which began in peacetime and nearly ended in the chaos of Singapore, originated during 9-12 August 1941 meetings in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, between President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Held on board the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the heavy cruiser USS Augusta (CA-31), the conference became best known for its issuance of the Atlantic Charter—the moral underpinning for the United Nations. The world did not know it, but the meeting was, in fact, a war council. Prime Minister Churchill put it to President Roosevelt that Field Marshal Erwin Rommel might move toward the Suez Canal by Christmas 1941. Great Britain, being desperately short of troopships, urgently needed to send troops to the Middle East on larger and faster U.S. transports. To avoid prying eyes and probing questions in New York or Boston, Halifax became the departure port. Neither leader could have foreseen, however, that TF-14's mission would change drastically after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
That Day, They Began Training for Pearl Harbor
On 6 November convoy WS12X crept into foggy Halifax harbor, mooring opposite the six waiting U.S. transports. On board the Mount Vernon, the crew took notice. "They had winter wool uniforms, wore helmets, carried their rifles, and many even boarded with bicycles, but that's all they had," according to Seaman George Ramos, of Imperial Beach, California. Consisting of part-time Territorials, the British equivalent of the National Guard, the 18th Division had trained two years expecting a desert fight. Neither they nor the U.S. sailors knew that on the same day, half a world away in Kagoshima Bay, Japanese pilots began training for the Pearl Harbor attack.
Crossing to the decks of the Halifax transports in their greatcoats and battle dress, the troops saw a startling contrast between their austere quarters and the streamlined U.S. transports. Snowdon Fiskin recalled his first view of the West Point in Halifax: "I never saw a bigger or more beautiful ship." A butcher's apprentice from Watford, near London, "Snowy," a 19-year-old private, served in the "Beds and Harts" (Bedfordshire and Hartfordshire) regiment. "We were a crack division and only a madman would have predicted that we would end up in Singapore with little more than our uniform kit, or that over 7,000 would die as prisoners."
Until requisitioned by the U.S. Navy in June 1941, the three liners maintained a sensitive commercial service evacuating refugees to New York from Lisbon, Bremerhaven, Hamburg, and the Channel ports. Giant U.S. flags painted on sides and hatch covers and illuminated at night warned U-boats and the Luftwaffe of the ships' neutrality.
Cabins meant for four held eight passengers. Lounges, cinemas, and gyms became berthing spaces, the cots separated by clothes hanging from lines. Even the large inside swimming pools were drained and converted to crude but effective dormitories. On board the SS Washington, conductor Arturo Toscanini shared a cabin with the ship's surgeon. Cosmetics pioneer Helena Rubinstein did not rate a cabin; she occupied a sofa in the smoking room. All prayed for first sight of the Statue of Liberty.
Converting the liners into troop transports produced impressive results. At the Philadelphia Navy Yard, the Mount Vernon's installation included four 5-inch, and four 3-inch 50 caliber mounts, plus a variety of smaller caliber weapons. The British installed four Bofors 40-mm antiaircraft guns. A Marine detachment guarded each ship. Coast Guardsmen manned the Wakefield, Joseph T. Dickman (AP-26), and Leonard Wood (AP-25). The U.S Navy crewed the other transports. The Mount Vernon's commanding officer, Captain Donald B. Beary, a 1906 U.S. Naval Academy graduate, became convoy commander. TF-14's commodore, Rear Admiral Arthur B. Cook, Commander Air Force Atlantic Fleet, flew his flag from the Ranger (CV-4).
Far from the Shore
Led by the Ranger, Quincy (CA-39), and Vincennes (CA-44), TF-14 sailed on the tide at 0800 on 10 November 1941.
The big-bellied transports followed in column like roasters on the spit. A Canadian destroyer, HMCS Annapolis, briefly shielded the convoy, then passed astern, her crew manning the rails and cheering. Destroyers from Destroyer Squadrons 8, 16, and 17 scoured the flanks at 2,000 yards, sonars nervously pinging in search of U-boats they knew were somewhere ahead. Near Cape Race the previous week, Convoy SC-52 lost four merchant ships to U-boats. In September, only evasive action saved the U.S. destroyer Greer (DD-145) from U-boat torpedoes. The new $5-million destroyer Kearney (DD-432) took a torpedo near Greenland in mid-October. Only two weeks before TF-14 sailed, a U-boat sank the destroyer Reuben James (DD-245), killing 115 crewmen and all officers on board.
John H. Horrigan, a 17-year-old Navy seaman from Weymouth, Massachusetts, assigned to the Mount Vernon's gun crew, recalled the departure:
When we left Halifax, the weather and the ship's crew were in the same fog about our destination. We got along well with the British boys, and had over 5,000 officers and men just on the Mount Vernon. We were so overcrowded the soldiers had to leave their winter uniforms, helmets, and rifles on their bunks during the day and on deck at night. When I look back I wonder what happened to them after the fall of Singapore, and could never have imagined that our cruise would take us literally to the ends of the earth.
Refueling at Trinidad and joined by the fleet oiler Cimarron (AO-22), the convoy, minus the Ranger and two destroyers that returned home, began the 6,000-mile South Atlantic crossing to Cape Town, the voyage's longest section. During the day the ships zigzagged, averaging 14 knots, and at night darkened lights and secured doors and hatches. The soldiers exercised, attended lectures, had two hot meals daily, and organized boxing matches, soccer games, and skits on the teak decks. The U.S. crews and Marines trained on the guns, and all hands drilled in abandon-ship procedures. At 1200, Sunday, 23 November, the convoy crossed the Equator, and in the ancient ritual of mariners everywhere, Davy Jones boarded, the Jolly Roger flew, and all paid homage to King Neptune and his royal court. The Pollywogs became Shellbacks. Then it all changed.
Alerted by Ultra intercepts, the British Admiralty warned that four tracking U-boats were planning a coordinated attack on the convoy near St. Helena Island. Given the exact grid coordinates, the escorting heavy cruiser HMS Dorsetshire, having evaded two torpedoes, failed to sink any of the U-boats, but found and sank their supply ship, the Python. She reported: "One enemy supply ship or raider sunk. Six boat loads of survivors. Strongly suspect U-boat present."
On 7 December, news of the Pearl Harbor attack pulsed through the convoy. The four-page Mount Vernon News gathered 32 reports through the radio room, ending the EXTRA issue with a plea for all hands to "remain away from the Radio Room except on business." Rumors were rampant. Scuttlebutt had the convoy either remaining on course for Suez, heading for Burma, or relieving Hong Kong. But those who followed radio reports learned that Japanese forces had landed in Malaya, concluding correctly that Singapore would be their final destination. The eager men of the 18th Division were untroubled. Many preferred fighting the Japanese, for whom they had little regard as soldiers, to battling Rommel and his dedicated forces. And was Singapore not an "impregnable fortress" as assured by Prime Minister Churchill and confidently portrayed in film and the press?
With new OpNav orders, the warships either returned to the United States or went to other convoy escort duties. The six transports went to Bombay, where the smaller ships, the Orizaba (AP-24), Leonard Wood, and Joseph T. Dickman, landed troops and returned home unescorted. The Washington and Wakefield awaited a second convoy. On 29 December, this left only the Mount Vernon, a mixed-nationality escort, and three British transports ordered to take their troops from Mombassa to Singapore.
The "Impregnible Fortress" Had Only Days to Live
In January 1942, few places on earth were more perilous than Singapore. Under relentless Japanese siege from an unanticipated and undefended place—the Malayan Peninsula—Singapore's fragile underside lay open. The "impregnable fortress," Britain's greatest naval base in the Far East, had only days to live.
Much has been written about Singapore's undefended landside, but little about its water defenses. The six Royal Navy small craft used for harbor and offshore defense—only 60 feet long—were mechanically unsound and had a maximum speed of only 4.5 knots and a minimum turning circle of 150 yards. Each boat had a coxswain and two mechanics, none of whom, it was later learned, had seen a boat engine prior to assignment. Worse still, the boats were unarmed, although two had mountings for twin Lewis guns, but not the guns themselves. And the Royal Navy liaison officer to 18th Division headquarters was an army ordnance officer. He was unable to read navy charts.
The Royal Air Force (RAF), so splendid at home, was hors de combat from the outset in Singapore. Enemy artillery almost immediately made unusable three of the four airfields. Fighting courageously but futilely, the RAF had been equipped with a ragbag remnant of 22 obsolete Hudsons, Blenheims, Buffaloes, open-cockpit Wildebeests, and three lumbering Catalinas. They were no match for 530 first-line Japanese warplanes. "I never saw a single British plane the entire time I was there," recalled "Snowy" Fiskin 60 years later. And only one British tank stood between Johore and Singapore.
On Sunday, 11 January 1942, the Mount Vernon passed Krakatoa Island and transited the narrow Sunda Straits. Some 85,000 British, Australian, Indian, and locally enlisted Asians were being funneled by the Japanese toward the narrow causeway leading to the island. That same Sunday at divine service on the Mount Vernon, U.S. sailors and British soldiers shared the spiritual bonds of the old comforting hymn: "Now Thank We All Our God."
Two days later, numerous Japanese bombers overhead awaited a break in the cloud cover as the Mount Vernon disembarked her troops. From her log: "1214: slowed to one-third speed approaching Singapore dock yard. 1303: landed on pier. 1315: moored port side to dock at Navy Yard, Singapore, Malay Peninsula, with lines 1-8 singled. 1342: secured main engines on 12 hours notice."
George Ramos watched an air raid from the Mount Vernon's bridge. "We counted 40 Japanese planes; the leader dropped his bombs, and the others followed. Six bombs exploded only 100 yards away in a pattern the exact length of the ship." The 155th Field Regiment's historian made an entry in the official war diary: "1400, disembarked USS Mount Vernon in tropical deluge which lasted until the small hours of the following morning. Weather conditions fortunate for us as 90 Japanese planes overhead at time of disembarkation." With little more than the shirts on their backs, soft from months at sea, the troops went almost immediately into combat.
Without firing a shot at the enemy, the Mount Vernon remained unharmed. Replenished with 362,970 gallons of bunker oil, 350 tons of fresh water, and carrying a fortunate few refugees and officials, at 1511 she cleared the Changi buoy and escaped. Two weeks later in the middle of an air raid, the West Point and Wakefield disembarked the 18th Division's last regiments.
Britain's Last Proud Symbol of Pacific Dominance
On 30 January, as the West Point and Wakefield cleared their troops, across the island the last 30,000 British defenders crossed from the mainland to Singapore. The decimated Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, the best-trained and led unit in the 400-mile retreat, had fought well in the steady retreat from the Siamese border almost to the causeway. The Argyll's commanding officer and regimental pipers were the last to cross. As the final sad skirl of the bagpipes drifted into the jungle murk, dynamite blew sky-high the causeway's railroad tracks, water mains, and lock gates. British imperialism also vanished into the smoke and flame that day. The new $100-million naval base, with its 22 square miles of deep-sea anchorage, million-gallon oil storage tanks, pristine graving docks, massive floating dry dock, machine shops, and vast ammo dumps, became as impotent as the mythical "fortress." It was Britain's last, proud symbol of Pacific dominance.
Another casualty made it impossible for the 18th Division to mount a rear-guard fight. The tired Empress of Asia, the ship carrying almost all of the 18th Division's artillery, ammunition, trucks, automatic weapons, rations, and heavy equipment, went down in the channel. Unable to keep up with the Mount Vernon and the other ships, she was caught by Japanese dive-bombers, the only ship lost from all the convoys sent to Singapore.
At 0935, also on 30 January, as European and Asian women and children boarded, a bomb from an air raid hit abreast the Wakefield's Number 2 hatch, penetrating to "B" deck and killing five men in sick bay. Then only 25 miles away, the propaganda value of two superb U.S. transports and crews was almost within the enemy's grasp. But as 30,000 Japanese swarmed onto the island the next morning, the Wakefield, able to jury-rig repairs, and the undamaged West Point let go all lines and cleared the submarine net, disappearing into the haze and smoke.
Holding a white flag in one hand and the Union Jack in the other, Lieutenant General Arthur E. Percival surrendered 16 days later to General Tomoyuki Yamashita the 85,000 man garrison, the naval base, and the fictitious fortress. Japanese casualties were only 3,500 for the 70-day campaign. It was the single greatest victory of the war for Japan, and the greatest defeat ever for British arms.
Epilogue
The luckless 18th Division, thrust into jungle conditions after training for a desert war they would never fight, perished by the thousands at Changi and in building the Rangoon Railroad and the fabled bridge over the river Kwai. They died from torture and cholera epidemics, cardiac beri-beri, recurrent malaria, amoebic and bacillary dysentery, lack of medical supplies, inadequate diets, and utter exhaustion.
Snowy Fiskin, who sailed from Halifax to Singapore in the Mount Vernon, survived 42 months in captivity. Sent from Changi to the railway camps, the Kwai River Bridge, then to a death ship and forced labor in a coalmine on the Japanese mainland, he was finally freed by U.S. troops in August 1945. He weighed 77 pounds. "We are still a forgotten army," he said.
Jack Horrigan and George Ramos served 49 months in the Mount Vernon. Neither they nor the ship got so much as a scratch.
Beginning in peacetime and almost ending with the enemy at the gates, the three U.S. Navy transports inadvertently began the Pacific offensive, but it would be almost four years until another U.S. flag flew from a ship in Singapore harbor.
The three ships concluded the war without firing a shot.
Mr. O'Connor, a Chicago business consultant and U.S. Navy destroyer veteran, was the 2000 Naval History Magazine Author of the Year. This article is the result of his two-year investigation of U.S. Navy Department files at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and British War Office files in the Public Records Office near London, England. He also conducted interviews with former crewmen in Chicago and San Diego, California, and located 18th Division survivors in London. In September 1964, he and his wife sailed on the final transatlantic cruise of the SS America. On handrails along a section of the boat deck were hundreds of initials carved by troops, refugees, repatriated prisoners, and other wartime passengers, offering silent witness to sacrifice and valor, and to the undervalued role played by U.S. troop transports in World War II.