Dead Shell

Late Wednesday night last week Franklin Roosevelt called up members of his Cabinet to tell them that he had just received a message from Berlin so important that the usual Friday Cabinet meeting would have to be advanced a day.

When the Cabinet assembled next afternoon, the President, who likes nothing better than to pop a dramatic surprise, was grave. He wanted their opinions, he said, as to whether he should make public the message he had received. He told them what it was. The Secretaries were variously shocked, disgusted, amused. They split, 5-to-5, on whether to make the information public. The President thereupon cast his own deciding vote, told them he had made up his mind: he would tell the people. Later in the day newspapermen were called in and given a bulletin:

Yesterday the head of the German Navy, Grand Admiral Raeder, officially informed the American Government, through the United States Naval Attache in Berlin that according to information on which he relied, an American ship, the Iroquois, is to be sunk when it nears our American east coast.

The sinking of the Iroquois, Admiral Raeder said, would be accomplished through a repetition of circumstances which marked the loss of the steamship Athenia.

The S. S. Iroquois, formerly in our coastwise trade, was chartered by the Maritime Commission recently to go to Ireland to bring back Americans who had been caught in Europe at the outbreak of the war.

The Iroquois sailed from Ireland on Oct. 2 with a full list of 566 American passengers.

The President made no comment on the obvious implication of the warning: The British would sink the Iroquois, as Germany claimed they had sunk the Athenia, and then try to pin the blame on the enemy.

Meanwhile the State Department rushed into action. A wireless was coded and dispatched to the vessel, which was about 800 miles west of Cobh, Ireland. To their surprise a casual message came back from Captain Edgar A. Chelton saying he had no code key; would they mind sending whatever they were saying in International Code--which anybody could decipher.

The second wireless informed Captain Chelton of the warning, instructed him to search every cranny for possible time-bombs, not to worry the passengers by telling them, and finally, since crazy though it was, the warning was too serious to dismiss altogether, he was to expect "a Coast Guard vessel and several Navy ships" which would accompany the Iroquois to an unspecified American port.

In Berlin Admiral Raeder was reported to have demanded (apparently to gain verisimilitude) that U. S. Naval Attache Commander Albert E. Schrader sign a statement acknowledging receipt of the warning. Asked for the source of the information, Admiral Raeder's office replied: "Ask Britain--we have done our duty by giving the warning. It is up to Britain to explain."

Britain's reply was masterly. What maddens German officers more than anything else in the world is the air of honorable, gallant superiority every British officer buttons on with his uniform. "The fact," stated the Admiralty, "that the German Government made such a suggestion enables us again to realize and measure the criminal mentality of Nazi Party leaders. But it is surprising that an officer of the Imperial German Navy like Admiral Raeder should demean his uniform to such baseness."

What was the answer? What motivated this fiasco?

Perhaps the implied accusation was founded on truth; Admiral Raeder was really doing the U. S. a favor. At least one Cabinet member was unwilling to reject this possibility. Said the New York Herald Tribune on the subject: "Maybe the British are really planning to sink the Iroquois, maybe the Poles really did attack an innocent and peaceful Germany, maybe the Czechs were actually vicious warmongers, maybe the Jews really are responsible for every evil in the world, maybe Nazi race mysticism, history and economics are gospel truth, maybe the German Armies were not beaten in 1918, and maybe the Third Reich is going to last for 1,000 years."

And maybe Admiral Raeder, nervous over the chance that one of his submarine commanders might repeat the Athenia incident, was taking this subtle way of both commanding them not to, and covering them in case they did.

Perhaps--this was the best bet--it was fizzled propaganda. Every artillery officer expects to send over a certain number of shells which fail to explode. The Iroquois case was a shot which proved a dud. Almost no one in the U. S. could be persuaded to believe--even if the Iroquois should be sunk as predicted--that the British could entertain such a plot. But they could believe the opposite corollary from the strange race who murdered Austria's Premier Engelbert Dollfuss to prove that he could not keep order, who burned down their own Reichstag to prove that the Communists were arsonists.

Admiral Raeder's accusation reminded Naval Expert Commander Edward Ellsberg of a parallel incident. At Christmas time, 1915, the U. S. S. Texas (on which Edward Ellsberg was an ensign) was in the New York Navy Yard. A weird story broke in the papers: two bombs had been found "attached to the rudder chains" of the Texas; they had been removed; ship and men had been spared a bloody death. German papers played the tale up as a dastardly Allied plot to blame Germans for destruction of the Texas. Only trouble with the story: no U. S. battleship built since the Civil War has had rudder chains.

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