Authors: Ed Offley
While the army’s B-17 aircraft enjoyed a greater range than its motley collection of utility aircraft and trainers, the bombers’ aircrews were totally unprepared for hunting U-boats. They lacked aerial depth charges, the aircraft had no effective bombsights or radar, and they had received no training in hunting enemy submersibles. A typical incident occurred nine days after Pearl Harbor when one of Krogstad’s B-17s sighted an unidentified vessel in Block Island Sound. It was the
Benham
-class destroyer
USS Trippe
, which was steaming independently from Norfolk Naval Station to Newport, Rhode Island. The 1,850-ton warship had reached a point fourteen miles south-southeast of Montauk Point at the eastern tip of Long Island, when at 0640 hours Eastern War Time (EWT) its lookouts sighted an unidentified multiengine aircraft flying at an altitude of 5,000 feet. As officer of the deck Lieutenant R. C. Williams tersely noted afterwards, “Plane was challenged [by blinking Aldis Lamp] but correct reply not received. Four bombs landed 200 yards on port bow at 0643 as plane circled overhead. . . . Crew was called to General Quarters when attacked, but plane was out of [antiaircraft gunfire] range before fire could be opened.” Fortunately for the destroyer
USS Trippe
, the bomber aircrew’s accuracy matched their vessel-recognition skills, and the bombs fell more than two hundred yards away from the two-year-old warship. Unharmed but doubtlessly energized, the
Trippe
’s crew resumed their normal duties as the warship continued on to Newport.
As if that sorry performance level weren’t bad enough, Krogstad’s command was being disassembled in front of his eyes as the U-boat campaign heated up in late January 1942. At the beginning of the year, he commanded four bombardment groups, three heavy (B-17s and B-18s) and one medium (B-25s and B-26s). Within three months after Pearl Harbor, all but one of these units had been detached from I Bomber Command. Arnold rushed two of them to Australia to form part of an emergency bomber force to defend that country from Japanese invasion. He shifted the third bomber group to the West Coast as part of aerial reinforcements against a feared Japanese attack there. As the USAAF official history later described it, “Army forces were themselves seriously inadequate. In addition to the insufficient number of AAF forces available, Army units began anti-submarine operations under serious handicaps of organization, training, and equipment. . . . Army planes [were] manned by crews who were ill-trained in naval identification or in the techniques of attacking submarine targets.” The U-boats at this juncture clearly had the upper hand in the Atlantic.
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Even the British were still struggling to master air power against the U-boats. The Royal Air Force Coastal Command, which had managed to obtain a small number of effective LB-30 Liberator bombers (a model of the USAAF B-24), was making progress in devising new tactics and deploying new sensors and weapons to bring the fight to the U-boats at sea. Military commanders and civilian scientists at the center of this effort were optimistic that in time the land-based patrol squadrons would prove vital in thwarting Admiral Karl Dönitz’s campaign against Allied merchant shipping. But the overall effort was taking time, and the learning curve was steep: from September 1939 until
the beginning of 1942, German and Italian U-boats destroyed 1,124 Allied ships totaling 5.27 million gross registered tons; until August 1941 Coastal Command patrol planes had yet to sink a single U-boat and, in the subsequent four months, had only managed to destroy five U-boats and force a sixth to surrender to Royal Navy warships.
The British effort to turn around the abysmal performance of antisubmarine patrol aircraft had begun in mid-1941, when a team of civilian scientists attached to Coastal Command employed an investigative technique, which came to be known as operations research, to pinpoint flaws in the U-boat hunters’ tactics, equipment, and weapons. Led by renowned physicist Paul M. S. Blackett, the scientists pored over operational records and closely interviewed aircrews to obtain a detailed picture of what was happening at sea. They quickly came up with some easy-to-implement changes that dramatically improved the lethality of Coastal Command aircraft. When the scientists’ research showed that U-boat lookouts were spotting approaching aircraft far away enough to safely crash-dive before an attack, the team recommended that the paint on the undersides of the bombers be changed from black (Coastal Command had inherited Royal Air Force night bombers) to white. The result: U-boat sightings—and sinkings—jumped 30 percent. Blackett and his team also learned that aerial depth charges were set to detonate at one hundred feet, too far down, they concluded, given the weapon’s lethality radius of just twenty feet. They recommended the detonation take place at twenty feet, which again significantly increased the U-boat kill rate. And a review of squadron maintenance records led the researchers to devise a
straightforward schedule of repairs and flying hours that doubled the number of Coastal Command aircraft available for patrols.
Unfortunately for General Arnold and his bomber crews, Coastal Command and the USAAF had no information-sharing program. This meant that the Americans would have to spend the same prolonged period learning the same painful lessons that the British were on the way to mastering. In the spring of 1942, Allied aerial supremacy over the North Atlantic U-boats remained a vital but elusive objective. For the time being at least, the air war against the U-boats offshore would continue to favor the Germans.
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D
URING THE FIRST WEEK OF
A
PRIL
1942, Vice Admiral Andrews and his staff at Eastern Sea Frontier Headquarters got seemingly excellent news from the Atlantic Fleet in Norfolk. Admiral Royal Ingersoll was assigning six destroyers to patrol off the US East Coast. Two of them had orders to steam for Cape Hatteras. The
Gleaves
-class destroyers
USS Hambleton
and
USS Emmons
were frontline warships, each armed with four 5-inch/38-cal. gun turrets, a quintuple 21-inch torpedo tube launcher amidships, as well as a half dozen .50-cal. machine guns. For attacking submerged U-boats, both destroyers had a pair of depth charge launching rails at the stern, as well as a centerline Y-gun depth charge projector that could heave charges to either side of the ship at lengths of up to fifty yards. Thanks to the new SC-series radar sets, the warships could easily track U-boats running on the surface, and their advanced QCJ sonars would easily find the enemy when submerged. With a flank speed of thirty-two knots
powered by four 50,000-shaft-horsepower steam boilers, they could race through the water at twice the speed of a surfaced U-boat or patrol at twelve knots for 6,500 nautical miles without refueling. Since British Naval Intelligence reports suggested no fewer than five U-boats were operating in the Cape Hatteras area, hopes were running high at ESF Headquarters that the US Navy might finally start evening the score in the inshore battle. All hands involved would soon discover, however, that sending the warships out hunting for U-boats without the proper tactics was like swatting at hornets with a baseball bat.
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Arriving off the Outer Banks at 1600 EWT on Thursday, April 2, the
Hambleton
and
Emmons
quickly fell into a patrol pattern that sent them steaming up and down from Wimble Shoals to Point Lookout a dozen or so miles off the coast. Instead of sighting U-boats, however, the destroyers repeatedly spooked the merchant vessels steaming independently up and down the coast. One of them, the American freighter
Del Sud
, mistook the warships for U-boats in broad daylight and opened fire on them, fortunately with the same poor aim as the B-17 that went after the
Trippe
. Several days later, while responding after sunset to a radioed U-boat sighting report from a nearby freighter, the
Hambleton
fired off a barrage of star shells to light up the vicinity. Instantly, every merchantman within sight of the rockets immediately reported that a U-boat was shooting off illumination rounds. After three days, the destroyer lookouts had not seen a single U-boat.
At least one U-boat operating in the vicinity, however, was well aware of the destroyers’ presence. Oberleutnant zur See Georg Lassen and his fifty-six-man crew in the Type IXC U-160
were ending their first week on patrol off Hatteras and had already sunk three merchant ships totaling 18,568 gross registered tons when the
Hambleton
and
Emmons
arrived in the area. Watching the warships hug the coastline as they steamed turn and turn about from Wimble Shoals to Point Lookout, Lassen regarded the
Hambleton
and
Emmons
as a minor nuisance but not a real threat—and certainly not a reason to break off his hunt.
Near midnight on Saturday, April 4, U-160 had been stalking a large oil tanker when it came close upon the two warships. Lassen calmly crash-dived to avoid the destroyers, which passed by without detecting him, and then resumed tracking his target. The next evening, Lassen’s lookouts spotted the 6,837-ton American oil tanker
Bidwell
steaming independently on a northbound course. He sent a solitary G7a torpedo crashing into the tanker’s port side, ripping a twenty-foot hole at the waterline and sending its cargo of 3.5 million gallons of fuel oil skyward in a towering pillar of fire. But before U-160 could do any further damage to the mangled tanker, the two destroyers inadvertently saved it. Spotting the distant smoke plume, they raced to the scene, prompting Lassen to dive deep to avoid detection. The
Bidwell
’s master and crew assessed the damage and, when the fire unexpectedly died out after a while, were able to resume course for New York. Neither destroyer ever detected U-160. Upon returning to the area several hours later, Lassen found only empty ocean and mistakenly reported to U-boat Force Headquarters that he had sunk the tanker.
The destroyers’ weeklong foray off Cape Hatteras ended on Thursday, April 9, as the
Hambleton
and
Emmons
and their exhausted crews headed back to Norfolk. Their mission had been a
failure: neither warship had even spotted, let alone sunk, a single U-boat, and despite the brief surge in Atlantic Fleet destroyers assigned to coastal defense, merchant ship sinkings for the first half of April in the Eastern Sea Frontier remained horrific. During the first week of the new month, eight U-boats operating within the sea frontier boundaries sank ten merchant ships totaling 66,026 gross registered tons and damaged another two vessels for 13,894 gross tons. By mid-month, U-boats operating in the ESF had sunk twenty-four ships totaling 149,695 gross tons and damaged another five for 37,298 gross tons. Of that total, eight merchantmen totaling 49,705 gross registered tons went down in the Cape Hatteras–Cape Lookout area, and another four totaling 30,058 gross tons sustained damage.
At ESF Headquarters, the mood was grim as the after-action report from the destroyer surge came in. The
Hambleton
and
Emmons
returned to Norfolk with nothing to show for their efforts but deck logs charting a weeklong, 2,830-nautical-mile trek from Wimble Shoals to Cape Lookout and back. Commander Charles Wellborn Jr., leader of Destroyer Division 19 and the senior officer aboard the two destroyers during the patrol, was blunt in his after-action report. “It will be extremely rare for patrolling destroyers to make actual contact with a submarine in which an alert submarine commander attempts to avoid contact,” he wrote. “While patrolling operations of this type are of some value in combating enemy submarine activities, the submarine menace on our Atlantic coast can be defeated only through the operation of a coastal convoy system.” Slowly but surely, other American commanders were coming to share Wellborn’s assessment.
Vice Admiral Andrews and his counterparts in the Gulf and Caribbean sea frontiers were by now convinced that only a
coastal convoy system guarded by escort warships and land-based patrol aircraft could thwart the U-boats. At a conference in Washington, DC, on March 20, they outlined a convoy system to be put in place as soon as the navy could assemble sufficient escort ships. Since, on average, thirty-five merchant ships a day departed the Gulf of Mexico or Caribbean for northern ports, the planners determined that two separate coastal convoy routes—one connecting America’s northeastern ports with the Gulf of Mexico and a second linking them with the Caribbean—would be necessary. The plan called for Caribbean shipping to muster at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and Gulf of Mexico shipping to gather at Key West, Florida, with each northbound convoy comprising between forty and fifty merchant ships. Each convoy would proceed up the East Coast and arrive at Hampton Roads on the fourth day after getting underway. Continuing north, the formation would arrive in New York on the morning of the fifth day. Southbound convoys would follow the route in reverse. Six escort groups of five warships apiece would protect the north-and southbound convoys between Key West and New York, with four groups at sea on any given day and the other two in port for maintenance and crew rest. Another forty-eight escort warships would service the Caribbean convoys. The only problem with the plan was there was still no sign that COMINCH could make the desperately needed escort ships available. The Atlantic Fleet’s cupboard remained bare. Admiral Ernest King told the conference that there wouldn’t be enough escorts to begin the coastal convoy system until mid-May at the earliest—and that was the best-case scenario.
With the US Atlantic Fleet tied up in major operations from western Africa to the British Isles, coastal convoys remained
relatively low on the list of naval priorities. During the month of April, the Atlantic Fleet mounted eight separate major support operations from Iceland and Scapa Flow, Scotland, to West Africa and the South Atlantic. The missions ranged from escorting troopship convoys, to ferrying fighter planes to Ghana for the Royal Air Force, to reinforcing the British Home Fleet. They tied up both Atlantic Fleet aircraft carriers, two of the fleet’s five battleships, nearly half its fourteen cruisers, and more than fifty destroyers.