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The Coast Guard boarding parties, working in perfect liaison with the Army, Navy and Marine Corps, struck suddenly and efficiently in 17 U. S. ports, San Juan, Puerto Rico and Cristobal, Canal Zone. Seized were 28 Italian, two German, 36 Danish ships; total tonnage: 300,000. Twenty of the Italian ships, it was found, had been "put completely out of action." Rods and shafts had been cut with acetylene torches, engines and equipment wrecked with sledge hammers, bearings chiseled, bulwarks pried down with crowbars, boilers burned out, movable equipment dismantled. At Norfolk the blue-jacketed guardsmen caught one Italian in the act of sabotage. (On the same Port Everglades pier as the Potomac, guardsmen boarded the German freighter Arauca shortly after the President, tanned and refreshed, left for Washington.)
A total of 875 officers and crew members were detained, pending deportation proceedings. An apparently concerted plot to scuttle or wreck all Axis ships in U. S. waters, to prevent their eventual seizure by the U. S. for aid-to-Bntain, had been broken. The Stars & Stripes were run up on the Italian and German ships; Coast Guardsmen patrolled docks.
In Costa Rica's port of Puntarenas, one German and one Italian ship were set afire. Seizure of Axis ships in South American ports was expected momently. Belief spread that the President would shortly announce U. S. convoy (at least halfway across the Atlantic). And no one expected Adolf Hitler to endure such measures without reprisal.
Nations do not ordinarily destroy their own vessels, even if locked up in foreign ports, unless they expect that war is close at hand. In Washington the rumor was rife that the Axis was preparing to declare war on the U. S. Yet to many Americans the news of sabotage and seizure seemed not to come as a great shock, or as a fearsome step toward war, but with the feeling "It's about time."
Meanwhile the waiting desk in the White House piled up. Soon the President must, however reluctantly, toughen up Government defense relations with labor. He must recommend greatly increased taxes. He must ordain, for the first time, the first U. S. sacrifices. He must decide how far to go in feeding Europe's noncombatants. He must fit unemployment and agricultural relief plans into the defense program.
Averaging about 60 miles a day, the Presidential yacht Potomac, escorted by the destroyer U.S.S. Benson, slid away from the ship lanes, around Great Isaac Island, Great Stirrup Cay, Mangrove Cay and Grand Bahama, little paradises of white beaches, tropical palms and turquoise water. Adviser Hopkins landed a 4-foot, 25-lb. kingfish; Secretary Stephen T. Early hooked an 80-lb. shark.