The ‘Phoney War’, the Graf Spee Incident, the Beginning of the Bases

Life went on as usual, very little changed in those first few months from September 1939 to the end of the year. The novelty and excitements of the first practice air raid sirens (September 14, 1939) and blackouts soon wore off. A couple of spectacular fires in downtown Port-of-Spain were due to human carelessness, as happens with monotonous regularity in the capital city.

It was the Graf Spee Incident that first brought the war home to the people of Trinidad. All Trinidad was glued to the radio for news of this, the first major battle of the war, for if the Germans could menace shipping off the coasts of Argentina and Uruguay, they were a real threat to Trinidad.

It happened like this: the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee was ordered to the South Atlantic to sink merchant ships and to lure British and French warships away from Europe. The Allies (British and French) sent four hunting groups - in all 22 warships — to the South Atlantic to deal with the intruder. The heavy cruiser, HMS Exeter and two light cruisers, HMS Ajax and HMS Achilles, discovered the Graf Spee. Kelshall relates that on December 13, 1940, there was a vicious day long fight in what became known as the Battle of the River Plate.

HMS Exeter was badly damaged and steamed to the Falkland Islands for repairs; HMS Ajax and HMS Achilles shadowed the Graf Spee, also badly damaged, as she ran for shelter to Montevideo, Uruguay - which was a neutral country. Not wanting to be drawn into a European conflict the Uruguayan authorities, according to the rules of war, only allowed the Graf Spee to stay 72 hours in their territorial waters.

Gaylord Kelshall tells that the War Office warned the Governor that, should the Graf Spee break out from Montevideo, its most likely target would be Trinidad oil, either by shelling at a distance or by sending in a landing party to destroy the oil installations.

Trinidad took this warning seriously. Every available member of the Defence Force and the Police took part in the coast watch for the pocket battleship which would have been a valuable prize because she was fitted out with secret equipment (including the very latest radar).

Meanwhile, in Montevideo, the captain of the Graf Spee believed British radio broadcasts that there was a heavy concentration of big battleships, including the aircraft carrier, Ark Royal, waiting for the Graf Spee to emerge from the River Plate (it seems even in wartime the Germans trusted the BBC to tell the truth). Believing he would have no chance to steam back to port in Germany, Captain Langsdorff refused to surrender; he sailed the Graf Spee into international waters and scuttled her by blowing her up. Hitler was furious. The crew was taken to Buenos Aires where the disgraced Captain Langsdorff committed suicide. As far away as Uruguay seems to us today, in December 1939 Trinidadians realised that if German battleships were attacking shipping in the South Atlantic, they could easily attack shipping in the Gulf and around the coasts of Trinidad, too; that meant they could cut off the colony’s food supplies and this being Trinidad, the first rumours of U-boat sightings began to circulate.

Yet the ‘Phoney War’ went on through January; Carnival was just around the corner, Lord Beginner was singing "Run you run, Adolf Hitler, run you run", and everyone, it seemed wanted to play Hitler mas’ for Carnival 1940. In his book The Making of Port-of-Spain, Volume Two 1939-1945 Michael Anthony writes: "Despite war precautions - such as a prohibition of the wearing of masks - it was a time of gay abandon and relief."

In the first days of June the adoring fans of screen idol Errol Flynn mobbed the star as his escort tried to smuggle him into the Queen’s Park Hotel.

As his fans attempted to love the cinema heart throb to death came the shattering news, on June 5, of the defeat of the Allies and the evacuation of 335,000 British troops from Dunkerque, and the German occupation of France.

The ‘Phoney War’ was at an end. Responding to the news Attila the Hun, Destroyer, Growler wrote calypsoes the like of "Britain will never — fall, Britain will never Surrender to Hitler."

The first inklings of the American Invasion came on September 3, 1940, when US President Franklin Roosevelt, with an anxious eye on what was happening in Europe, announced in a message to Congress "this Government has acquired the right to lease naval and air bases in the islands of . . . Jamaica, Antigua, St Lucia, Trinidad and British Guiana. ... it is a far-reaching act of preparation for continental defence in the face of grave danger ... they (the bases) are essential to the protection of the Panama Canal, Central America... and our own Eastern and Gulf (of Mexico) seaboards... The (Caribbean) bases mentioned have been acquired in exchange for fifty of our overage destroyers."

In response to that statement the British Ambassador in Washington wrote that the British Government "would make available . . . naval and air bases and facilities on . . the West Coast of Trinidad in the Gulf of Paria . . . for a period of 99 years, free from all rent and charges other than such compensation to be mutually agreed on to be paid by the United States in order to compensate the owners of private property for loss by expropriation or damage arising out of the establishment of the bases and facilities in question."

Which brings up some delicate questions for the owners of property in Tucker Valley and elsewhere in what was, from 1940, the US Naval base at Chaguaramas. Does Government still hold that land for the rest of the 99-year lease due to expire in 2039? Or was the lease torn up when the US finally gave up the base in 1977?

Roosevelt’s message to Congress confirms, for any who doubt, that Hitler did indeed have plans to include Trinidad in the Greater German Reich, to threaten the Panama Canal, Central America and the Gulf Coast of the US ...

By December 1940, a full year before Pearl Harbour and the US entry to war with the Axis powers - Germany, Italy and Japan — American engineers and architects were in Trinidad surveying, drawing plans for the Naval base.

The Sea Scouts were to come in to their own with the arrival of the Americans for it was they who patrolled the Gulf.

That may seem an easy task but, as Gaylord Kelshall tells the story of the Battle of the Atlantic, those patrols played an important part in keeping an eye on both warships and the merchantmen transporting food and essential supplies for the civilian population.

Trinidad, explained Gaylord Kelshall, was the terminus of the North Atlantic Convoy route. Merchantmen coming from Argentina and Brazil, from Venezuela and Colombia would steam to the Gulf of Paria where the convoy assembled. With merchantmen carrying supplies of food, tankers with oil in the centre, warships of various sizes on the flanks and bringing up the rear, guarding stragglers, the convoy would steam from the Gulf, up the Eastern seaboard of the US, calling at one or other ports for more supplies for the beleaguered UK, then across the North

Atlantic to Britain and finally to Russia, to the USSR.

Films of the U-boat war invariably showed British seamen in Arctic gear chipping ice off the starboard, or whatever rail as they raised binoculars to scan the seas for U-boats, or dashed to rescue survivors when a merchantman or another warship was torpedoed because a man could only survive a few minutes in those Arctic waters.

Twenty or more years later I travelled from Europe to Trinidad on a Dutch12-passenger cargo ship. Each night the passengers and senior officers gathered in the Captain’s cabin for a night-cap, sandwiches and yarns as only sailors can tell them.

One night the subject was the war and the North Atlantic convoys.

"Were you torpedoed?" I asked the Chief Engineer. He nodded

"Where?" I asked, expecting a thrilling account of stormy seas and freezing temperatures.

"About a mile off Mayaro," he replied, "we were picked up and taken to Port-of-Spain. I spent about 18 months in Trinidad, waiting for a ship staying in the officer’s quarters in, I think it was a place called Coblentz House . . .?" Next week Gaylord Kelshall will have more much more to tell us about the Battle of the Atlantic, U Boats and the American Invasion of Trinidad.