The Burning Shore (22 page)

L
INDER
’
S BRUSH WITH THE
US C
OAST
G
UARD
along the shore of Long Island was just the beginning of the difficulties the latest wave of U-boats would face. Now convinced that a massive mine-laying operation was afoot, American commanders hastened to put their men on high alert about the incoming danger.

Vice Admiral Andrews could not have been more explicit in the warning he passed to his subordinates: he predicted that as
defenses against the U-boats improved, “an effort would be made to mine the sea lanes and the approaches to the principal ports.” Andrews recommended an intense effort at all harbors to sweep the channels. He reminded the port authorities that U-boats in May 1918 had dropped a total of fifty-seven mines at key harbor entrances from New York to Wimble Shoals, North Carolina. That brief campaign had caused the sinking of six ships totaling 35,592 gross registered tons, including the 13,680-ton armored cruiser
USS San Diego
, which sank off Fire Island. The clerical staff at ESF typed out multiple copies of the warning message, addressed them to the various naval commands, and delivered them to the post office, where they were postmarked June 13, 1942. Once again, however, ESF was too late. Up and down the eastern seaboard, the timers of forty-five German mines were already ticking.
¹³

10

THE WAR COMES HOME

I
T WAS A PERFECT SUMMER DAY, AND THOUSANDS OF TOURISTS
and Tidewater, Virginia, residents had flocked to the Virginia Beach shore. The late afternoon sun beamed down from a cloudless sky, and a light northerly breeze wafted across the city boardwalk and the bright strip of sand where small waves gently brushed the beach.

Norfolk resident Frank Batten Jr. had not a care in the world that Monday, June 15, 1942. The fifteen-year-old had gone to the beach for the day with his family. As he waded into the surf shortly after 5
P.M
., Batten gazed out at a long column of large merchant ships that seemed to fill the entire horizon. When it first appeared an hour earlier, the convoy had been arrayed in two columns of six vessels apiece, but now it was reorganizing into a single file to enter port. In the bright daylight, Batten and other observers could clearly see that all but two of the ships were massive oil tankers riding low in the water with full cargos. Five escort warships were also in sight. “The ships were so close to the beach that we felt we could almost swim out to them,” Batten recalled years later.

Beachgoers were used to (by now) the sight of escorted convoys arriving and departing from the ports of Norfolk and Newport News. It had been four weeks since the Eastern Sea Frontier had inaugurated the coastal convoy system between Key West, Florida, and Hampton Roads, Virginia. Both the southbound convoys, identified with the letters “KS,” and the northbound formations, which began with the letters “KN,” were leaving port every three days and arriving at the other terminus within four to seven days, depending on the weather and other operational factors. This particular convoy, designated KN109, had gotten underway from Key West on June 11, passing through the Florida Strait along with five escorts and moving up the East Coast without incident. Navy officials were proud of their handiwork: during the past month, eight northbound KN convoys and eleven southbound KS convoys had sailed to their destinations with a total of 312 merchant ships under escort, totaling 2.3 million gross registered tons. Not a single vessel had been lost. This was about to change.
¹

Batten was idly watching the line of tankers when suddenly a massive explosion rocked the fifth ship in line. The giant oil tanker fell out of the formation and quickly began listing to starboard as a towering cloud of black smoke climbed into the sky. At that moment, Batten and the other swimmers experienced a basic physics lesson. While the thundering bellow of the explosion did not reach their ears for twenty-five seconds, the shock wave from the blast arrived in less than five. “The bottom of the ocean appeared to tremble,” eyewitness G. F. Martin later told the
Virginian-Pilot
. “My feet were on the bottom and when the explosion occurred, there was a tingling sensation in my toes.”

Her keel shattered by a mine laid by U-701 at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, the 11,615-ton American oil tanker
Robert C. Tuttle
rests on the bottom of Thimble Shoal Channel. It was the first of four ships either damaged or sunk by U-701’s minefield. The tanker was later successfully repaired and continued to serve until the end of the war. NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION.

As the master of the 11,615-ton American tanker
Robert C. Tuttle
, Martin Johansen had been on the ship’s navigation bridge waiting his turn to pick up a harbor pilot when the explosion rocked the vessel at 1704 hours Eastern War Time. The two-year-old Atlantic Refining Company tanker was carrying 152,000 barrels of crude oil for a refinery in Philadelphia.

The blast threw Johansen and the other watch-standers to the deck. As he scrambled back to his feet, Johansen saw that the
Robert C. Tuttle
had apparently suffered fatal damage. The explosion—either a torpedo or antiship mine—had ripped a massive hole in the starboard side at the No. 2 tank about one
hundred feet aft of the bow. Seeing that the
Robert C. Tuttle
was probably doomed, Johansen ordered the forty-seven crewmen and gunners to abandon ship. He grabbed the ship’s codes and confidential papers and threw them over the side in a weighted metal box. Alerted that 2nd Assistant Engineer Ruben Redwine was missing, Johansen and Chief Engineer George Fithen made a last-minute search of the sinking ship without finding him. They and the forty-four remaining crewmen and gunners took to lifeboats and were quickly picked up by a navy patrol craft and taken ashore.

Reaction to the attack was swift. Within fifteen minutes, several navy patrol aircraft and a patrol blimp appeared overhead and circled the slow-moving line of ships. The growing crowd on the beach gasped and cheered as, one by one, the aircraft dove toward the ocean and dropped aerial depth charges at the suspected U-boat. Then another blast shook a second oil tanker.

The 11,237-ton tanker
Esso Augusta
had been in the lead position of the port column as Convoy KN109 approached the Chesapeake Bay entrance. The two-year-old Standard Oil Company tanker was carrying 119,000 barrels of diesel oil from a Texas refinery for ultimate delivery to the United Kingdom. When Master Eric Robert Blomquist had seen the
Robert C. Tuttle
explode, he immediately suspected that a U-boat had torpedoed it. Thirty seconds after the first explosion, Blomquist and his lookouts had seen a second blast about three hundred yards off the stricken tanker’s port bow.

Blomquist had ordered his helmsman to put the wheel hard right and ordered the engine room to make maximum speed. The
Esso Augusta
began hastily zigzagging in a wide circle in order
to avoid being struck. The ship was making sixteen knots by the time it came around to head for the Thimble Shoal Channel. Then a third explosion went off close astern. The shock wave tore off the tanker’s rudder and sternpost, disabled the engines, and severed fuel and steam lines. The
Esso Augusta
slowly glided to a halt several miles offshore. Blomquist ordered his crew below to plug any leaks in the hull, and the British trawler
HMS Lady Elsa
drew near to attempt towing the tanker into port.

While this was going on, several of Convoy KN109’s escorts were reacting to what they thought was a nearby U-boat. Sonar operators aboard the coast guard cutter
USS Dione
reported to commanding officer Lieutenant James Alger that the shallow water conditions and the loud noise from the ships’ propellers made it impossible to detect anything. Alger estimated where a U-boat would most likely have been if it had launched two torpedoes that struck the two tankers, and the
Dione
raced several miles to seaward and dropped a spread of eight depth charges. Not far away, the escort
USS Bainbridge
was attempting the same thing. When its sonar operator called out a “mushy” contact, the destroyer sprinted in and dropped a pattern of eight depth charges of its own. Surprisingly, the attack netted nine explosions. The depth charges had set off another mine.

By now, word of the attack was spreading like wildfire throughout southeastern Virginia. People were racing to the beach by the thousands to witness the action offshore. Coast guard and navy personnel cleared a one-hundred-yard swath of the beach by the local coast guard station as crewmen raced out in surfboats to search for survivors from the two tankers. A hush fell over the crowd as the boat returned with the body of the
Robert C. Tuttle
’s second engineer, whom Johansen and Fithen had been unable to locate after the first explosion. Redwine had been blown overboard by the explosion and drowned.

At that moment came the worst blow of all. At 1915 hours, just as Redwine’s body was being brought ashore, the seven-year-old antisubmarine trawler
HMS Kingston Ceylonite
was approaching the 2CB buoy that marked the entrance to Thimble Shoal Channel. The
Kingston Ceylonite
was not part of the escort for Convoy KN109 but rather one of several dozen Royal Navy trawlers dispatched to the US East Coast in April to beef up coastal defenses. Lieutenant William McKenzie Smith and his thirty-one-man crew were escorting the 3,478-ton American freighter
Deslisle
, which had been damaged in a torpedo attack off Jupiter Inlet, Florida, on May 5, and was being towed by the tug
Warbler
. Now, as it approached the channel, the
Kingston Ceylonite
triggered yet another mine. The 448-ton trawler vanished in a towering column of fire and seawater. Eighteen of its crew, including Lieutenant Smith, died instantly.

The men who perished aboard the
Kingston Ceylonite
would not be the last casualties of Horst Degen’s minefield. Within hours of the initial explosions, Fifth Naval District officials realized that a U-boat had mined the ship channel. At daylight on June 16, Rear Admiral Manley H. Simons dispatched a small fleet of minesweepers to clear the area. Due to a misunderstanding, however, the minesweepers failed to clear a broad swath of the area to the east and northeast of Buoy 2CB. The error became apparent at 0750 hours the next day when the 7,117-ton American collier
Santore
, proceeding down-channel to join southbound Convoy KS511, set off another TMB mine. Although
the twenty-four-year-old ship capsized and sank in less than two minutes, all but three of its forty-six-man crew managed to escape. United Press correspondent Walter Logan and a photographer were embarked on one of the convoy escorts and had a front-row seat for the incident. He later wrote, “I was standing on deck lazily watching a grimy old collier when she blew up in my face.”

The crowds anxiously watching the initial spectacle from the beach that Monday evening had no idea exactly what was taking place just offshore. Like the harried crewmen on the
Dione
and
Bainbridge
, they were experiencing firsthand the fog and confusion of war. Many saw what they thought was a pitched battle between a marauding U-boat and the escort warships and patrol aircraft. Reporter Frank Sullivan documented the confusion in the
Virginian-Pilot
: “For several hours after the attack, bombs were dropped from the planes and the blimp in an attempt to force the submarine to the surface. Some of those on shore said the submarine appeared on the surface. There was a terrible explosion, they said, after a bomb was dropped, and the U-boat disappeared. From the shore, it appeared that the craft had been blown to bits.”

In fact, at that time U-701 was patrolling more than two hundred nautical miles away to the south-southeast off Cape Hatteras, its crewmen still unaware of the havoc their mine-laying operation had caused.
²

W
HILE
D
EGEN
’
S MINES
were still lying dormant in the Thimble Shoal Channel, the fifteen A-29 Hudsons of the 396th Medium Bombardment Squadron had been cruising from California
to North Carolina to join in the coastal defense there. The cross-country flight from Sacramento to Cherry Point was far from uneventful. Fifteen of the 396th’s aircrews left Sacramento beginning early on the morning of Saturday, June 13, and flew in loose formation for about four and a half hours before landing in Tucson, Arizona. Following a night of crew rest, the unit proceeded east for 825 miles, landing in Dallas, Texas. There, one of the Hudsons was involved in a landing mishap that rendered it unfit for flight, although the aircrew escaped unharmed. After a second night for crew rest, the fourteen remaining A-29s lifted off for the third leg of the trip, a 421-mile flight up to Memphis, Tennessee. There, a second Hudson sustained major damage upon landing, leaving its crewmen unhurt but forcing them to complete their journey to North Carolina ignominiously by ground transportation. The surviving thirteen Hudsons refueled at Memphis and took off for the final 647-mile leg of the trip, landing at the Marine Corps air base late in the day on Monday, June 15. They had only a few days to get organized on the ground, secure temporary housing, and service their planes before Lieutenant Colonel D. O. Monteigh drew up the schedule for the six daily patrol flights.