A German submarine fires on an American destroyer; the Greer answers with depth charges
The United States was neutral in name, running convoy patrols in the North Atlantic in fact. On September 4, 1941, the destroyer USS Greer, en route to Iceland with mail and passengers, tracked a submerged U-boat for over three hours after a British plane spotted it ahead. At 1249 a torpedo track crossed the Greer's wake a hundred yards astern; a second impulse bubble had come minutes earlier. The Greer lost the contact, searched for two hours, then found it again and dropped depth charges of its own.
The Greer exchange gave Roosevelt his opening. Days later he told the country German submarines entering waters vital to American defense would do so "at their own peril," a shoot-on-sight order issued without a declaration of war. It moved the Navy from patrol-and-report to active combat against Germany three months before Pearl Harbor, reshaping the neutrality debate in Congress and the press.
QWho was the USS Greer named after?
The destroyer carried the name of Rear Admiral James A. Greer, a nineteenth-century naval officer, rather than any figure connected to the Atlantic war. Navy destroyers of that era were routinely christened for past officers, so the Greer's name had no link to the neutrality fight it found itself in in September 1941. The ship simply happened to be the vessel running mail and personnel to Iceland when it stumbled into the confrontation with U-652. That quiet naming convention makes it easy to forget the Greer was, on paper, an ordinary fleet destroyer honoring an obscure admiral, not a purpose-built symbol of American resolve. It became one anyway, only after the shooting started.
QWho chaired the Senate hearing into the Greer incident, and what was his political affiliation?
Senator David I. Walsh, a Massachusetts Democrat, headed the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs and scheduled a hearing on the encounter. Walsh's committee sat at the center of congressional oversight for the Navy, meaning the Greer affair did not stay confined to Roosevelt's fireside chat and Stark's internal report. It moved into open legislative scrutiny, with a sitting senator from the president's own party running point on the questions. That detail signals how quickly a single Atlantic skirmish traveled from a ship's log to Capitol Hill, drawing formal Senate attention within days of the depth charges being dropped.
QHow long did the Greer actually go without any contact on the submarine after the torpedo crossed its wake?
Sound contact vanished at 1300, and the Greer did not reestablish it until 1512, a gap of two hours and twelve minutes. For that stretch the destroyer was searching blind for the same U-boat that had just fired a torpedo across its stern, with no sonar fix to guide it. Only after regaining contact did the crew drop depth charges, meaning the ship spent longer hunting in silence than it had spent chasing the submarine before the torpedo was ever fired. Admiral Stark's written report to Washington logged both timestamps precisely, down to the minute.
