Authors: Ed Offley
Admirals King, Ingersoll, and Andrews would have to improvise if they were to have any chance of halting the carnage along the US East Coast while they waited for convoy escort warships to become available. Three of the measures the admirals devised would provide modest results against the U-boats—but by the time they did, a fourth ploy initiated weeks earlier had already resulted in disaster.
5
F
RANKLIN
R
OOSEVELT HAD AN IDEA
for countering the U-boat offensive raging offshore and summoned Admiral King to the White House to discuss it. It was Monday, January 19, 1942—just eight days after U-123 kicked off Operation Drumbeat—and both FDR and the new COMINCH were well aware of how few defenses existed in the Eastern Sea Frontier. The president recounted to King how the British during World War I had used “Q-ships”—merchant vessels with concealed cannons, depth charge launchers, and other antisubmarine weapons manned by naval personnel disguised as merchant seamen—to ambush and sink U-boats when they ventured close in to attack. By
one account, between 1914 and 1918 the British had converted about 180 merchantmen into Q-ships and succeeded in sinking eleven U-boats while losing twenty-seven of the disguised merchantmen. Although the ratio of Q-ships lost to U-boats sunk was high, FDR still believed the ploy merited consideration. Why couldn’t the US Navy revive that concept? FDR asked. King took Roosevelt’s suggestion as an order. Within twenty-four hours of his meeting with the president, King had organized Project LQ and assembled a handpicked team to acquire, convert, arm, and secretly commission two Q-ships into fleet service.
The next day, King’s staff identified two thirty-year-old A. H. Bull Steamship Company freighters, the
SS Evelyn
and
SS Carolyn
, as the best candidates for the project. Within three days of King’s meeting with FDR, the admiral’s staff had identified and assigned twelve officers, six apiece, to the Q-ships and were busy arranging for 135 enlisted crewmen to man each vessel. Shipwrights at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard installed four 4-inch/50-cal. deck cannons on each vessel with painted canvas covers to conceal them until the gun crews were ready to open fire. In addition, each vessel had four .50-cal. machine guns, six Y-gun depth charge projectors, and a QCL sonar system. In all other respects, the two 318-foot-long ships would retain the innocent silhouettes of their original identities. Their cargo holds were filled with lumber to keep them afloat in case of a torpedo strike.
On Monday, March 23, the two Q-ships, renamed the
USS Atik
and
USS Asterion
, got underway for a brief shakedown cruise, then headed into the Atlantic. Two days later, disaster struck. The
Atik
was steaming south about three hundred miles
east of Norfolk when at 1700 hours lookouts aboard a German U-boat spotted the thick cloud from the merchant vessel’s smokestack. Veteran U-boat commander Kapitänleutnant Reinhard Hardegen and U-123 were back in American waters for a second combat patrol. Hardegen closed to within seven hundred yards and fired a single G7e electric torpedo into the freighter’s port side just ahead of its bridge. As the ship took on a list to port, U-123 passed behind the stern, and its lookouts saw sailors climbing down into lifeboats. Then, to his astonishment, the
Atik
opened fire. “I continue to turn hard, when suddenly amidships covers and tarpaulin drop down and he opens fire with at least one gun and two . . . machine guns,” Hardegen later wrote. He ordered U-123 to flank speed and turned away from the Q-ship as 4-inch shells splashed around them and .50-cal. machine gun bullets hammered the bridge. A midshipman on board was fatally wounded. Having pulled away and submerged after the gunfire, Hardegen moved in at periscope depth and fired a second torpedo at the
Atik
, striking its engine room. This shot finished off the Q-ship, whose surviving crewmen this time took to the lifeboats in earnest. Nearly ninety minutes later, a heavy explosion ripped through the partially submerged hull. Hardegen resumed his patrol. None of the
Atik
’s crewmen were ever seen again.
While the Q-ship concept was a miserable failure—on eight patrols during 1942 and 1943, the
Atik
’s sister ship,
USS Asterion
, never sighted, much less, attacked any U-boats—several other makeshift initiatives by the Eastern Sea Frontier proved more successful. Although none of these projects actually managed to destroy any U-boats, they did manage to complicate Germany’s campaign along the East Coast in April 1942.
6
The first venture was the brainchild of New York businessman Alfred Stanford, commodore of the Cruising Club of America. Early in April, Stanford offered the services of his members’ fleet of motor yachts and sailing boats as a civilian force of U-boat observers. By now desperate for help of any kind, Admiral Andrews signed them up. The coast guard managed the program, with the civilian owners and civilian crewmen—most of them too old or unqualified to serve in the navy—sent out to sea with small-caliber guns and depth charges. The program got underway in May 1942, steadily expanding over that summer. Ultimately, more than 550 of these tiny auxiliaries were operating along the East Coast and Gulf of Mexico by the summer of 1942, but they neither attacked nor sank a single U-boat.
A far more effective ploy was the navy’s recruitment of the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) to aid the USAAF and navy aircraft in their uphill struggle to search for U-boats offshore. Created six days before Pearl Harbor, the CAP came under the federal Office of Civil Defense, led by New York Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia. Manned by volunteer civilian pilots who owned their own single-engine aircraft, the Civil Air Patrol initially had been conceived as an auxiliary service that could courier documents and people and patrol America’s land borders. But the eruption of U-boat attacks along the East Coast prompted Vice Admiral Andrews to recruit CAP for coastal patrol duties. The program grew rapidly, and by late spring several hundred private aircraft were making scheduled patrol flights along the East Coast and later into the Gulf of Mexico. While also failing to destroy a single one of Dönitz’s marauders, CAP fliers did help in locating lifeboats and rafts, leading to the rescue of 363 survivors from
sunken merchant ships; CAP aviators also called in 173 separate U-boat sightings. Since Admiral Dönitz had issued strict instructions to his U-boat commanders to crash-dive at the sight of any unidentified aircraft, the CAP aircraft significantly complicated Germany’s campaign in American waters. But even this makeshift air force was not America’s most effective stopgap in the Atlantic.
7
The Atlantic Fleet initiated an even more serious U-boat countermeasure as the “Hooligan Navy” and Civil Air Patrol were getting organized. After months of delay and frustration, Vice Admiral Andrews and the Eastern Sea Frontier staff decided not to wait for the formal coastal convoy system to become organized in mid-May. As an interim step, ESF moved in mid-April to create an ad hoc series of protected anchorages along the East Coast and to organize small groups of available escorts to shepherd groups of merchant ships during daylight from one haven to the next. A pivotal site was a massive anchorage the navy built near Cape Lookout along the North Carolina shore sixty-two nautical miles southeast of Cape Hatteras, complementing an existing one near Ocracoke Island. Ships arriving there could pass the night behind torpedo nets, then make the run up to Hampton Roads by daylight. Admiral Andrews and his staff called these convoy escorts the “Bucket Brigade.”
Within a week, the anchorage system was in place. The results were immediate. Total Allied ship losses during the second half of April 1942 showed a sharp downturn: U-boats sank only fifteen merchantmen totaling 76,896 tons during that period, a 50 percent drop from the twenty-four ships totaling 145,735 tons lost between April 1 and 15.
Apparently overlooking the sudden falloff of sinkings after the “Bucket Brigade” convoys began, the ESF staff at first lamented the total shipping losses as the month ended. “April was almost an exact repetition of the proceeding month,” Lieutenant Elting E. Morison—who had succeeded Lawrance Thompson as the ESF war diarist—wrote in the command war diary. “Thus, once again, the Eastern Sea Frontier was the most dangerous area for merchant shipping in the entire world.” Elsewhere, senior officials quickly grasped the shift. In London, Winston Churchill observed, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else.”
In Paris, Admiral Dönitz bluntly acknowledged the increase in American coastal defense but indicated he was not yet ready to abandon U-boat deployments along the Atlantic littoral. “The decline in sinking figures is attributable to unfavorable conditions for attack during full-moon and high pressure weather,” he penned in his war diary. “Boats cannot operate on the traffic routes right under land because they are constantly forced under water by the numerous sea and air patrols and have no chance to operate on the surface and charge their batteries.” Nevertheless, he went on, “attacking conditions in the American area continue to be very good. [U-boat commanders] are all of the same opinion, namely that the American area will remain a highly favorable area for attacks for some months to come and that a high percentage of successes can be scored with very few losses.” Whatever obstacles the Americans managed to throw up, the BdU staff remained confident that the odds were likely to remain in the U-boats’ favor for the foreseeable future.
To that end, Dönitz and his operations staff added two top-secret U-boat operations to the campaign. One mission would require two U-boats to insert German saboteurs on the American mainland to attack vital industrial and transportation sites. The other called for three more U-boats to lay minefields in three major US ports. The Battle of the Atlantic along America’s shores was about to enter a deadly new phase.
8
O
NE MORNING IN EARLY
M
AY
1942,
AFTER FOUR WEEKS
spent supervising German shipwrights as they repaired his storm-battered U-boat at the bunker complex in Brest, Kapitänleutnant Horst Degen found himself on the
BdU Zug
, an express train reserved for U-boat personnel, to Paris. After a week of growing impatience and anticipation, he had finally received the summons to U-boat Force Headquarters at the avenue du Maréchal Maunoury for an appointment with Admiral Karl Dönitz and the senior BdU staff. Once there, Degen received thrilling news: the admiral and operations chief Fregattenkapitän Eberhard Godt told him that his next patrol would begin with a mine-laying operation at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, where the Thimble Shoal Channel enters the Atlantic.
BdU had chosen the night of June 12–13, when a new moon would help obscure the U-boats as they moved close inshore, for the mine-laying operation. Two other U-boats would attempt to lay minefields at the same time at the mouth of New York Harbor and Delaware Bay. Closing the main shipping lanes at those
three sites would strike a major blow against the Americans, especially if the mines managed to sink large ships in the narrow passages, thereby bottling up the major ports. After the frustrations of his first two patrols, Degen returned to Brest excited that Dönitz had picked U-701 for this “very special” operation.
1
Around this time, Degen also learned that other elements of the U-boat Force had a completely different operation planned for the night of June 12–13. The German high command had ordered BdU to ferry eight German Abwehr (military intelligence) saboteurs by U-boat across the Atlantic and land them ashore in the United States. The mission—codenamed Operation Pastorius—called for the saboteurs to attack critical manufacturing sites, power plants, and transportation hubs using high explosives they brought along. Degen learned of the plan from twenty-nine-year-old Kapitänleutnant Hans-Heinz Linder, a fellow member of the Class of 1933 and close friend who commanded the Type VIIC U-202. He and U-584 commander Kapitänleutnant Joachim Deecke, also twenty-nine, were each to carry four agents and one-half of the explosives. Deecke, yet another classmate of theirs, had visited and befriended the Marston family in San Diego during the
Karlsruhe
port visit along with Degen eight years earlier. U-202’s landing site was at the far eastern tip of Long Island, while U-584 would use a beach south of Jacksonville, Florida.
Dönitz and his staff were confident that the mining operation would be a success but regarded the saboteur infiltration as yet another sideshow foisted on the U-boats that would do little but add to the danger and distract the crews from their primary mission of sinking ships. Korvettenkapitän Günter Hessler,
a senior BdU staff officer, later wrote, “The U-boat Command was averse to embarking these individuals in U-boats, for some of them were not actuated by patriotic motives. . . . But the task had to be undertaken since there was no other means of transportation to the United States.” Aware that most of the saboteurs had been selected for the sabotage mission primarily because they had lived in the United States before the war, Hessler doubted their reliability, later recalling his fear at that time that they would readily betray the mission “to save their skins.” His suspicions would prove correct.
2
Dönitz’s shift in U-boat tactics from direct attacks on Allied merchant shipping to mine-laying marked the BdU staff’s recognition that the period U-boat commanders called
der Glückliche Zeit
(the happy time) was finally drawing to a close. For four months, the U-boats had operated at will from the Gulf of Maine to Florida, seemingly impervious to the ineffective American sea and air patrols. “But by the end of April,” Dönitz later wrote, “it became apparent that the routing of shipping and the anti-submarine defense measures in the immediate vicinity of the American coast were becoming more efficient.” The Atlantic Fleet’s countermeasures were beginning to take their toll.