Authors: Ed Offley
Several minutes later,
Funkmaat
(Radioman 3rd Class) Fritz Rafalski reported that the
Cyclops
was transmitting “SSS,” the emergency signal for a U-boat attack, in clear Morse code. Hardegen ordered his machine-gun crew to destroy the freighter’s wireless office and antenna to silence the signal. Then, as the darkness deepened, Hardegen and his lookouts saw a number of crewmen reboarding the ship. He turned U-123 around and fired a second G7a in a coup de grâce from one of his two stern tubes. The torpedo struck the
Cyclops
, and its 616-pound warhead detonated, collapsing the ship’s hull and sending it under
within five minutes. Following his admiral’s general order not to attempt rescue of survivors, Hardegen ordered U-123 back on its base course of 220 degrees, a heading that would place the boat off Long Island, New York, the following day.
Responding to the SSS signal, the Canadian minesweeper
HMCS Red Deer
rescued Kersley, sixty-one crewmen and gunners, and thirty-three of the
Cyclops
’s passengers late on January 13, but the other eighty-seven men aboard the freighter were not so lucky. Two perished in the torpedo attacks, and the other eighty-five died of exposure in the frigid North Atlantic. The U-boat slaughter of Allied merchant ships along the American and Canadian East Coast had begun.
1
As U-123 put down its first merchant ship some 326 nautical miles east of Boston, the other four Drumbeat U-boats were nearing their patrol areas for the designated attack launch on Tuesday, January 13. Admiral Dönitz had assigned them initial operating areas from Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence to Cape Hatteras, spread out in such a way that each U-boat could operate freely without interference from the others. U-123 had orders to patrol near the coast off Long Island and attack shipping coming to and from New York Harbor. The southernmost U-boat—scouring the sea lanes off Cape Hatteras—was the Type IXC U-66, commanded by thirty-seven-year-old
Korvettenkapitän
(Commander) Richard Zapp. The next patrol area alongside Hardegen’s went to the Type IXC U-125 under twenty-six-year-old Kapitänleutnant Ulrich Folkers, who had orders to operate to the east of the New Jersey–New York coastline. By midday on January 11, U-125 was about 420 nautical miles east of New York.
The other two U-boats in Operation Drumbeat had orders to operate off the Canadian coast in proximity to the twelve Type VII boats in Gruppe Ziethen. The new Type IXC U-130 under thirty-six-year-old Korvettenkapitän Ernst Kals was to patrol off Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. At the same time, the Type IXB U-109 commanded by thirty-two-year-old Kapitänleutnant Heinrich Bleichrodt was to enter the Gulf of St. Lawrence between Newfoundland and the Canadian mainland, searching for shipping from the St. Lawrence River. U-109’s risky mission deep inside Canadian territorial waters was par for Bleichrodt’s already exemplary record. During two patrols of the Type VIIB U-48 in late 1940, Bleichrodt sank fourteen Allied ships totaling 77,524 gross registered tons. Unfortunately for them, bad weather off Newfoundland would plague U-130, U-109, and the twelve Gruppe Ziethen U-boats. The initial U-boat attacks in North American waters would not go as smoothly as Admiral Dönitz had hoped.
2
V
ICE
A
DMIRAL
A
DOLPHUS
A. “D
OLLY
” A
NDREWS
was trapped in a naval commander’s worst nightmare. Upon assuming command of the North Atlantic Naval Coastal Frontier—soon to be renamed the Eastern Sea Frontier (ESF)—ten months earlier, the sixty-two-year-old Galveston native had become responsible for the protection of harbors, anchorages, and coastal shipping in five naval districts whose operational areas ran from the US-Canadian frontier at Quoddy Head, Maine, to the command’s southern boundary line at Onslow Bay, North Carolina. His area of responsibility included all the major East Coast seaports,
as well as the Atlantic littoral out to two hundred nautical miles. During the first week of January 1942, the navy decided to expand the Eastern Sea Frontier to include the Sixth Naval District based in Charleston, South Carolina. This brought the rest of North Carolina and all of the South Carolina and Georgia coastlines and ports into the command. Andrews was now responsible for defending 253,400 square miles of ocean, an area approximately the size of Texas.
Coastal defense had long been a backwater function of the US Navy, but as 1942 dawned, Andrews and his staff knew well that the U-boat threat was imminent and that the US East Coast was about to become a major maritime battlefield. Looming above all else was the fact that Andrews’s command lacked any significant combat capability to fight the U-boats.
3
Peacetime direction of the Eastern Sea Frontier was not a glamorous assignment like commanding a blue-water fleet, but it still required significant leadership and management skills. It also required diplomacy, for ESF was one of the few military headquarters where the US Navy and Army Air Forces—locked elsewhere in a protracted dispute over the control of land-based maritime patrol aircraft—literally rubbed elbows on a 24/7 basis. Andrews had honed these skills during his thirty-eight-year career since receiving his commission as an ensign. Graduating the top-ranked midshipman in the Naval Academy Class of 1901, Andrews had held a series of increasingly responsible jobs both in the battleship fleet and ashore. In a previous three-star assignment between 1938 and 1941, he commanded the Battle Force, a prewar formation of the navy’s aircraft carriers and battleships. He had earlier commanded the battleships
USS Massachusetts
and
USS Texas
after serving as a department head or executive officer on four others. His shore assignments included command of the navy’s Navigation Bureau and a stint as assistant chief of staff to the Atlantic Fleet commander. Andrews also had a talent for ingratiating himself with presidents, politicians, and senior military officers while holding a wide range of staff assignments ashore.
Andrews’s reputation among his fellow admirals was mixed. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison condescended to describe Andrews as “senatorial in port and speech,” while Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, weary of his stilted, formal way of speaking, dismissed Andrews as a “terrible old fusspocket.” To the junior members of his ESF staff, Andrews was a typical admiral: formal, reserved, distant, and a bit of a brass hat. Ensign Peter Rollins found this out one day in late 1941 at the First Naval District Headquarters on the Boston waterfront. In preparation for an inspection by the admiral, the staff members had scoured the office to a state of perfection. The scheduled inspection time came and went with no sign of the great man. After two hours, Rollins leaned back against a window and lit his pipe. A moment later, Andrews and a large delegation of senior officers swept into the room. The staff snapped to attention. Rollins hastily dumped the smoldering tobacco from his pipe but missed the ashtray, and it landed on the varnished surface of his desk, creating a cloud of pungent smoke. All heads turned to the frantic young man whose desktop threatened to burst into flames. As Andrews glared at the young officer, Rollins hastily brushed the glowing embers into his waste can. The mass of paper inside the can ignited. Rollins began stamping on the blaze. His foot
became wedged in the can and flames began climbing up his leg. In desperation, Rollins hopped around, banging the waste can on the floor until the flames finally went out. Foot still wedged in the can, leg blackened with soot, he finally snapped to attention. Andrews was still staring at him, his features bleak and unmoving. Then, without a word, the admiral turned on his heel and swept out of the room, the inspection abandoned. The staff gathered around the sooty ensign and congratulated him for making such a profound impression on the admiral. It was Rollins’s first day on active duty.
4
Behind his wooden façade, in the first weeks of 1942 Andrews was clearly worried about his command’s shortcomings in the face of the imminent German U-boat threat. The US military’s general war plan WPL-46 (Rainbow Five) charged ESF with defending the sea frontier, protecting and routing coastal shipping, supporting the Atlantic Fleet, and supporting army and other military forces within the frontier. And as Andrews well knew, the Germans would be an exceedingly dangerous enemy.
Based on prior experience, Andrews and his fellow admirals recognized the revived U-boat Force as the most likely threat they would face. American commanders had been forced to contend with a similar U-boat offensive off the US East Coast in 1918, at the tail end of World War I. That campaign had been brief, intense, and deadly. During a six-month period, just six U-boats sank ninety ships for a total loss of 166,907 gross registered tons and 435 fatalities. Faced with an even more dangerous situation, Andrews already knew that no help was available. Admiral Ernest King wrote Andrews on New Year’s Day in reply to a request to transfer some destroyers to his command: “A review
of the situation indicates that it would be inadvisable to detach any vessels from their present duty with the fleets, at least until additional new construction destroyers have been commissioned and have joined” the service.
5
Andrews had taken a number of steps to bring the command to a state of maximum readiness. He ordered naval district staffs in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Norfolk to lay defensive minefields and deploy torpedo nets and booms, to organize inshore patrols, and to ready all available patrol craft and airplanes for possible combat.
Yet, despite the efforts of Andrews and his ESF subordinates, the navy’s divided command organization in the Atlantic would thwart attempts to mobilize a defense against the U-boats. As Eastern Sea Frontier commander, Admiral Andrews was responsible for coastal defense and escort of shipping, but he had no major warships with which to carry out those vital missions. They belonged to the Atlantic Fleet commander—Admiral King between December 7 and 31, 1941, and Vice Admiral Royal E. Ingersoll, who relieved King on January 1, 1942. Between mid-December and January 11, the US Atlantic Fleet had seen a sizable reduction in its combat power as a result of Pearl Harbor, but it still remained a strong naval force. Admiral Harold Stark, succeeded on December 31 by Admiral King as Commander-in-Chief of the US Fleet (COMINCH), had ordered transferred to the Pacific Fleet the aircraft carrier
USS Yorktown
, battleships
USS Mississippi
,
USS New Mexico
, and
USS Idaho
, and eleven frontline destroyers to offset combat losses on Oahu. Even with those transfers, Admiral Ingersoll still had three aircraft carriers, five battleships, and a half dozen cruisers on his fleet roster, as well as a potent
force of eighty destroyers and six
Treasury
-class coast guard cutters. Moreover, in late December—during the final days of his Atlantic Fleet command—Admiral King wrote Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Admiral Stark to apprise him of the decline in U-boat attacks on the transatlantic convoy routes and to warn that “the imminent probability of submarine attack” along the US East Coast and “the weakness of our coastal defense force make it essential that the maximum practicable number of our destroyers be based at home bases.” King himself would then turn and ignore his own clear-sighted and straightforward recommendation after his ascension to overall command of the US Navy.
6
What remains inexplicable more than seventy years after the fact is the failure of either Admiral King or Vice Admiral Ingersoll to carry out King’s own earlier advice to Admiral Stark to redeploy a sufficient number of destroyers to fight off the anticipated U-boat offensive in American coastal waters. On January 12, 1942, the Atlantic Fleet destroyer force was spread out across the Atlantic from Iceland to the coast of Brazil in the following formations: a total of thirty-nine destroyers and six
Treasury
-class coast guard cutters were assigned to five convoy escort groups operating out of Argentia, Newfoundland, and Hvaljfordur, Iceland (although a half dozen of them on that day were in East Coast naval shipyards undergoing repairs); another twelve destroyers were operating in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean; five destroyers were assigned to the South Atlantic Patrol; yet another five destroyers were on individual operating assignments in Bermuda and elsewhere. That left a group of nineteen frontline Atlantic Fleet destroyers at anchor or tied up to the piers at East Coast naval bases from Casco Bay, Maine, to Norfolk on January 12.
7
Andrews had only a small, ramshackle fleet with which to take on the U-boats. It comprised two small coast guard cutters and eighteen tiny patrol boats that had to cover the entire 1,200-mile swath of the Atlantic from the Canadian border to Jacksonville, Florida. On December 22, Andrews had warned outgoing CNO Admiral Stark, “There is not a vessel available that an enemy submarine could not outdistance when operating on the surface. In most cases the guns of these vessels would be outranged by those of the submarine.” His ships were too slow and outgunned—no match for the U-boats. Nor was that his only problem.
The Eastern Sea Frontier’s coastal defense air arm was even more pathetic than its bathtub flotilla. In December 1941, Andrews—on paper—had a fleet of 103 aircraft. In reality, only a dozen could be described as a combat capable. Even the six PBY-5A Catalina flying boats assigned to ESF were militarily problematic. Andrews noted in his command’s war diary that it would take six hours to load them with live depth charges, rendering them useless to mount quick-reaction flights in response to a U-boat sighting.
8
Andrews did have one useful tool at his disposal: each day the British Operational Intelligence Centre in London transmitted updated U-boat positions and other vital intelligence to US Navy Headquarters in Washington, DC, which then routed them to other subordinate commands, including Eastern Sea Frontier. On Monday, January 12, ESF communications officer Lieutenant j.g. Richard H. Braue knocked on Andrews’s door and entered, carrying a locked message box. Following a well-established procedure, Braue unlocked the box, removed a sheet
of paper with the decrypted message, and held it out at arms length for the admiral to read. The message stated, in part,