Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy - Ludwig von Mises ...

U.S. Ties to Britain Strengthened 73
hit the Reuben James on her side; an explosion burst her in two.
Forty-fi ve men were saved; a hundred died. 52
Th e United States was still offi cially neutral. Yet it had seized
Axis ships in its harbors and frozen Axis funds. It was supplying
England and her allies with weapons and supplies. Its ships were
escorting British convoys in waters infested with German submarines,
dropping depth charges on them. Its ships had trailed
Axis ships, notifi ed the British of their whereabouts, and stood
by while the Axis ships were sunk. Its ships were being sunk, and
its sailors were being killed. Th e president of the United States,
commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy under the U.S.
Constitution, was doing precisely what he had told Churchill he
might do: he was beginning to “make war,” without “declaring
war.”
52 Abbazia, Mr. Roosevelt’s Navy, pp. 297–308. See also Department of Navy,
United States Naval Chronology, World War II, p. 11, and Samuel Eliot Morison,
Th e Two-Ocean War: A Short History of the United States Navy in the Second
World War (Boston: Little Brown, 1963), p. 37.