The Burning Shore (2 page)

Cutaway diagram of a Type VIIC German U-boat. ILLUSTRATION BY ROBERT E. PRATT.

A
BOUT
120
MILES EAST-NORTHEAST
of Cherry Point that morning, beneath a featureless spot on the surface of the Atlantic, forty-six German sailors were suffering in almost unbearable agony as they waited out the dangerous daylight hours submerged near the seabed. Their Type VIIC U-boat was in its fifty-eighth day at sea since leaving its base in France on May 19. The air inside the 220-foot-long submersible was fouler than usual because the primitive scrubbing units that stripped the air of dangerous carbon dioxide were failing. Worse, the ambient water temperature rose above seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit each day. Without cooler water outside the boat to offset the heat from the U-boat’s batteries and electric motors, the machinery pushed the interior temperature to well over one hundred degrees. The sailors suffered splitting headaches and fits of vomiting from the foul stench of diesel fumes, unwashed bodies, and human waste.

The only good news for the crew was that the boat had used up all but two of its torpedoes, so the crewmen were no longer cramped by the extra torpedoes kept in storage racks above the deck plates in the bow compartment, where most of them slept. Just aft of the bow compartment was the officer’s berthing space, the commander’s cubbyhole, and two tiny spaces where the duty radiomen stood watch. In the small hydrophone room, one of the two radiomen wore a headset listening for sounds of approaching enemy warships. The second radio watch-stander sat in the cramped radio room, waiting to pick up signals from U-boat Force Headquarters in Lorient, France. But most activity took place in the center of the boat in the larger
Zentrale
(control room).

Throughout the morning of July 7, the U-boat loitered in a restless state of suspended animation several hundred feet down. In quieter sea conditions, the U-boat could rest on the seabed. However, the flow of the Gulf Stream was strong enough to drag the boat against the sand and rocks, increasing the chance of damage or, even worse, detection by enemy sonar. Under the supervision of the first watch officer (1WO), a half dozen crewmen in the U-boat’s control room worked to maintain a careful hover just a few feet above the seabed. The helmsman and another control plane operator oriented the submerged U-boat head-on into the Gulf Stream current, while a machinist’s mate operated the trim tanks to maintain the boat’s neutral buoyancy by shifting ballast water from forward to aft, or vice versa, as the situation dictated. Farther aft in the stern compartment, sailors monitored the two electric motors that drove the boat’s twin propellers at just enough speed to neutralize the current. It was tedious, never-ending work to keep the five-hundred-ton U-boat properly suspended.
⁵

Despite the atrocious atmosphere inside the U-boat, the crew’s morale was good. They endured these hellish conditions with stoic indifference. Both the commander and his men were proud of their accomplishments thus far in their third war patrol. Their record to date was four Allied ships sunk totaling 21,789 gross registered tons, including two naval patrol vessels, and four damaged merchantmen for another 37,093 gross tons. With a fuel state approaching the minimum required for the 3,000-mile return trip to France, the U-boat commander told his men he planned to hunt for only “a day or two more” before breaking off patrol.
⁶

The bow compartment of a U-boat is crammed with perishable foods and spare torpedoes at the outset of a patrol. CLAY BLAIR COLLECTION, AMERICAN HERITAGE CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING.

At about 2:00
P.M
. local time, the commander decided to cleanse the submersible of its foul air. He had taken this step on previous days to bring some much-needed relief to his crew. Blowing the ballast tanks, the crew brought the U-boat to periscope depth. Up in the conning tower, the commander raised the thin search periscope above the surface and made a quick circle. The ocean and sky appeared empty. The hydrophone operator reported no underwater sounds that would indicate the presence of an enemy patrol vessel. The commander ordered the U-boat farther up until its slender bridge structure was barely out of the water, its main deck awash.

“Blow all tanks! Diesels full speed ahead,” the commander called. He popped the circular hatch open, quickly climbing up
onto the U-boat’s narrow, exposed bridge with three lookouts. As he and the others began scanning the sky, the boat’s chief engineer ordered the two Germaniawerft six-cylinder M6V 40/46 diesel motors lit off. However, instead of opening the bridge-mounted air intakes that fed air directly to the two engines, the crew left them shut. As the two engines thundered to life, they sucked sweet sea air into the boat through the open bridge hatch in a welcome, man-made gale. The longer the diesel engines ran, the cleaner the atmosphere inside the ship would be—and with the U-boat some thirty to thirty-five miles away from the Outer Banks, it had ample room to maneuver before it would arrive in the dangerous waters above the continental shelf. The U-boat slowly headed on a course of 320 degrees toward the distant shore.

T
HE FIRST OF THE TWO
L
OCKHEED
H
UDSONS
on midday patrol was into its fifth hour of flight and on the reciprocal leg of its southwesterly patrol route when it arrived in the vicinity of Cape Hatteras, flying parallel with the coastline about thirty miles offshore. The squadron’s tactical doctrine at that time, reflecting the USAAF’s inexperience in hunting U-boats, dictated that the aircraft fly at an altitude of just one hundred feet above sea level. However, the bomber’s pilot opted to exploit the current weather conditions on this patrol, particularly a cloud layer at 1,200 feet. He was flying just above the broken canopy of clouds on the assumption that he and his crew could see much farther than at the lower altitude and that the clouds would cloak the aircraft from any U-boat lookouts.

It was 2:12
P.M
. when the pilot spotted a tiny, feather-like line on the water about ten miles from his left-hand window. He instinctively lifted the aircraft higher up into the cloud layer, turned left to a heading of due west, and pulled back on the throttles to reduce engine noise that U-boat lookouts might detect, while alerting his four crewmen over the intercom. After a minute, the pilot quickly dropped the aircraft’s nose below the layer for several seconds as everyone peered out of the aircraft. The line in the ocean was still there and becoming clearer. The Hudson remained concealed in the clouds as it approached the potential target, the pilot and crew tense with apprehension. No Army Air Forces warplane had ever sunk a U-boat in American waters. If all went well in the next few minutes, that distinction would be theirs.
⁷

*
For a comparison of naval officer ranks in the American, British, and German navies of World War II, see Appendix on
page 267
.

1

PREPARING TO FIGHT

A
LINE OF ARMY TRUCKS DROVE SLOWLY UP TO THE MAIN GATE
of Florida’s Drane Army Airfield, where uniformed military policemen waved them through. The trucks halted in front of the airfield’s induction center, and several dozen men in civilian clothes climbed down, each lugging a small suitcase. It was a weekday in early March 1941, and the latest crop of army aviation cadets was reporting for active duty at the busy airfield outside of the town of Lakeland.

One of the cadets who stepped down from the truck at Drane was a stocky, twenty-two-year-old New Yorker named Harry Joseph Kane Jr. The day before, he had boarded the southbound
Tamiami Champion
at Penn Station in New York for the overnight trip to central Florida and a chance at winning a commission—and his pilot’s wings—in the US Army Air Corps.
¹

Over the course of 1940, Kane—like many of his contemporaries—had deemed it prudent to prepare himself for war. While the United States officially remained neutral as the global conflict raged in Europe, the violence was metastasizing worldwide like a runaway cancer. Germany’s invasion of Poland
in September 1939 had finally prompted Hitler’s European foes to declare war on the Nazi regime, but the subsequent fifteen months had brought nothing but more German conquests. The Wehrmacht had invaded and occupied seven more European states and launched a prolonged air war and U-boat campaign against Great Britain. Adolf Hitler’s reach now extended from the Arctic Circle to the Pyrenees and from the English Channel deep into Eastern Europe. Germany’s Italian and Japanese allies were also on the move from China and the western Pacific to North Africa and the Middle East.

In Washington, DC, President Franklin D. Roosevelt pursued a two-track response to events overseas throughout 1940. He staunchly reaffirmed neutrality while arming America to the teeth. The US Navy grew from 193 to 337 warships during that period, with another 119 under construction at the end of 1940. The navy’s ranks doubled from 106,000 to 210,000 men by year’s end. The army also expanded—from 190,000 men in the fall of 1939 to nearly 2 million in early 1941. The US military would expand at an even greater rate during the next four years. Production of military equipment such as aircraft, artillery, tanks, and trucks was soaring. Still, during his campaign for a third term in the White House in the fall of 1940, FDR remained adamant about keeping America out of the war. He stated in a Boston speech on October 31, “I have said this before, but I shall say it again, your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” He also defended his ongoing expansion of the US military, saying his objective was to create “a force so strong that, by its very existence, it will keep the threat of war far away from our shores.”
²

Despite Roosevelt’s reassurances, Kane and many others of his generation were aware that American neutrality could quickly become a casualty of the spreading global conflict. In a way, the United States had already taken sides in the fight. FDR was steadily bolstering the British in their struggle against Hitler. On September 2, 1940, the United States and Great Britain concluded the Destroyers for Bases Agreement. The British agreed to provide ninety-nine-year land grants for American naval or air bases in eight British possessions in the Western Hemisphere. In turn, the United States provided the Royal Navy and Royal Canadian Navy with fifty World War I–era flush-deck destroyers. Two weeks after that, the possibility of personal military involvement became obvious for everyone in Harry Kane’s age group. On September 16, Roosevelt signed the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, which imposed military conscription on American males between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five (the range would expand after Pearl Harbor to between eighteen and forty-five). The winds of war were clearly rising. With no desire to become a common foot soldier, Kane recalled years later that he needed “to get into something so that I wouldn’t have to go into the infantry.” The Brooklyn native decided to become a military aviator.
³

For Harry Kane, this was not an impetuous decision. Rather, it was an act of cool calculation typical of the young New Yorker. Although born into a family of wealth and prestige, Kane had been forced to learn self-reliance at an early age. Kane’s maternal grandfather was the co-owner of a prosperous cotton-exporting firm in Brooklyn. When his son, Henry J. Kane Sr., married Gertrude Rose Heaney at the imposing Church of Saint Francis Xavier in Manhattan on October 28, 1916, more than nine hundred family members, friends, and business acquaintances attended, making it the city’s largest wedding of the year. Kane’s parents bought a stately home at 306 Garfield Place in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, where Harry, the first of three sons, was born on June 24, 1918.