Authors: Ed Offley
While Harry Kane and the other pilots in his squadron were excited to be hunting U-boats, their new base and the surrounding countryside proved a major letdown after Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay area. At that time, Cherry Point was a Marine Corps air station in name only, Kane recalled years later. Although formally commissioned as a Marine Corps base just four weeks before the squadron’s arrival, the place was in actuality a set of runways surrounded by a major construction project.
“It was a very new base,” Kane said. “In fact, there were hardly any paved streets. The runways were paved, the streets, as I recall them, were all dirt.” The ranking Marine Corps officer at Cherry Point in June 1942 was Lieutenant Colonel Thomas J. Cushman, who had reported to the site ten months earlier with a staff of four enlisted men. Since then, the base cadre had grown to 603 Marine Corps personnel, with another 499 navy and USAAF personnel assigned to the patrol squadrons rushed there because of the U-boats offshore. Army and navy squadrons had been on temporary duty at Cherry Point since March 22, and the 396th was there to relieve two other army squadrons that had been temporarily assigned to Cherry Point since mid-May.
The Marine Corps had acquired the 10,000-acre Cherry Point site because it was only fifty miles from Camp Lejeune, an even larger Marine Corps base spread out on 156,000 acres of coastal land, also still under construction to accommodate the recently activated Second Marine Division. Located near the town of Havelock on the south shore of the New River, Cherry Point’s advantage was that because of the local climate, it was one of the three areas in the United States with the greatest amount of annual sunshine—a plus for flying training operations. Its liabilities included vulnerability to Atlantic hurricanes and an abundance of malaria-carrying mosquitoes in the extensive swamps and marshes in the area. “It was desolate country,” Kane said. The only way in or out, a narrow two-lane highway, was clogged with construction traffic around the clock as teams of workers hastened to assemble dozens of office buildings, barracks, hangars, and other structures to accommodate the 310 aircraft and sixteen squadrons of the Third Marine Aircraft Wing, scheduled for
commissioning in November 1942. “We used to kid each other that it was the same as being overseas, being stationed at Cherry Point in early 1942,” Kane added.
During the squadron’s first three weeks of patrols off the Outer Banks, U-boat sightings were rare. However, the enemy was there in force. Of ten U-boats patrolling within the overall Eastern Sea Frontier boundaries during that time, five forayed within fifty nautical miles of Cape Hatteras for varying periods. Because of the stiffened air patrols and heavily escorted coastal convoys, only two U-boats managed to inflict any damage on coastal shipping, sinking four merchant ships totaling 25,909 gross registered tons and a 170-ton navy patrol craft and damaging two more merchant ships totaling 14,241 gross tons.
The aviators of the 396th found the patrols both tedious and tense. “We kept on just flying . . . which got quite boring, because you never would see anything, just freighters and . . . convoys,” Kane remembered. Occasionally, a Hudson aircrew would come upon the aftermath of a U-boat attack. On one flight, Kane and his crew passed over a freighter that had been torpedoed an hour or so earlier. Descending to get a closer look, the pilot saw that the merchantman’s main deck was crowded with about fifty cars and trucks. “There I was without a car,” he said years later, “and I could see all those cars just slowly going under the water.”
On another patrol, Kane and his crew spotted a large storage tank floating in the water. Deeming it a navigation hazard, Kane alerted his crew and dove at the object several times, firing the Hudson’s two fixed forward machine guns in an unsuccessful attempt to sink it. Upon return to base, Kane reported his attempt to Lieutenant Colonel Monteigh. To Kane’s consternation,
the squadron commander verbally rebuked him and threatened to charge him $1 for each of the ninety rounds of ammunition he had expended. Sure enough, when Kane’s next paycheck arrived, it was $90 short.
Kane resumed his place in the patrol schedule, disappointed by the bureaucratic response to his effort but not so chastened that he avoided taking any initiative. In fact, on one midday patrol he found himself deliberately flouting the USAAF’s formal instruction that aircraft fly at an altitude of one hundred feet above the water as they hunted for U-boats. That decision would have unforeseeable consequences for Kane and his crew.
3
B
Y MID
-J
UNE
1942, the Allied struggle against Germany and Japan remained desperate, and the fight against the U-boats was nearing a critical juncture. Allied military planners were well aware that an acute shortage in merchant ship tonnage, caused in great part by the U-boat campaign in American waters, was emerging as a major handicap to any future operations against Nazi Germany and its Axis partners. Without a solution, the United States, Great Britain, and their allies could not hope to thwart, much less roll back, the ongoing Axis campaign that was continuing on several fronts. Whereas the Japanese navy was withdrawing from the central Pacific after its June 4–5 defeat at Midway, Nazi Germany was very much on the move. By mid-June 1942, the German army was preparing to launch a massive mechanized force out of the Ukraine toward the Caucasus Mountains to seize the rich oil fields at Baku on the Caspian Sea. A second army group was preparing to lay siege to the city of Stalingrad in
the south-central Soviet Union, a move that threatened to cut that country in half. Germany was also at the brink of scoring a major victory in the Mediterranean and North Africa. Field Marshall Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps launched a major attack against the British army in Tunisia on June 12, while at the same time the Luftwaffe and a number of Italian naval units repulsed a major naval attempt by Britain to reinforce its bastion at Malta.
The sense of impending crisis prompted President Franklin Roosevelt to invite Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his staff back to Washington, DC, for the second time since Pearl Harbor. After a twenty-seven-hour island-hopping flight across the Atlantic in a Boeing 314 flying boat, Churchill and his delegation arrived in Washington on Thursday, June 18, for what was termed the Argonaut Conference. The British delegation’s agenda included persuading the Americans to forgo a planned invasion of France; identified as Operation Sledgehammer, the invasion was tentatively scheduled for later in 1942, but Churchill and his generals believed that the hastily cobbled-together plan was “certain to lead to disaster.” As an alternative, they argued for a reconsideration of Operation Gymnast, the planned Anglo-American invasion of French Northwest Africa.
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To their surprise, the British found their American counterparts at one another’s throats over the U-boat offensive. The havoc wrought by Horst Degen’s minefield in the Chesapeake Bay channel four days earlier prompted Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall to unleash an uncharacteristically harsh attack against Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernest King. In a memorandum to King on Friday, June 19, the day after the British delegation arrived in Washington, Marshall wrote,
The losses by submarines off our Atlantic seaboard and in the Caribbean now threaten our entire war effort. . . . I am fearful that another month or two of this [rate of ship losses] will so cripple our means of transport that we will be unable to bring sufficient men and planes to bear against the enemy in critical theaters to exercise a determining influence.
In his reply to Marshall, King chastised the USAAF for clinging to its doctrine of offensive “hunter-killer” air patrols while minimizing defensive convoy escort flights. The offensive patrols favored by pilots and aircrews, King wrote, had “time and time again proved futile” against the U-boats. The only efficient way to kill the enemy submersibles at sea, King added, was to go “continuously and relentlessly” after those drawn to escorted convoys. He ended by requesting that Marshall transfer a force of 1,000 radar-equipped aircraft to patrol for U-boats. Marshall refused.
Even FDR was drawn into the mêlée. Pressured by Churchill, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, General Marshall, and others, Roosevelt that week complained to King in a private letter about the delays in organizing the coastal convoy system: “I think it has taken an unconscionable time to get things going, and further, I do not think that we are utilizing a large number of escort vessels which could be used, especially in the summertime. We must speed things up.” The president conveniently overlooked two of his own earlier decisions that had helped create the dire situation now confronting the Allies. Shortly after the British declaration of war against Germany in September 1939, the navy’s General Board—a high-level advisory panel of senior rear
admirals, which at that time included Ernest King—had urged Roosevelt to give highest priority to developing an effective warship for convoy escort duty. King got the board to recommend mass construction for the navy of the
Treasury
-class coast guard cutter design as a cost-effective alternative to using multimission destroyers for convoy protection. FDR rejected the plan. Roosevelt also rebuffed a subsequent proposal that the navy build a fleet of destroyer escorts modeled after a Royal Navy frigate design. Like the
Treasury
-class cutters, the “DE’s” would be simpler and less expensive than destroyers but would carry the necessary armaments to fight U-boats. After Pearl Harbor, the president continued to give the destroyer escort such a low priority that the first warships of that design would not enter fleet service until well into 1943.
Despite their concern, the Argonaut Conference participants could not focus solely on the U-boat threat; events in the war’s other theaters demanded too much of their attention. On Sunday, June 21, three days into the conference, the Americans and British alike were stunned when word came that 35,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers had surrendered the Tunisian city of Tobruk to the Afrika Korps. It now appeared possible that the Germans might rout the rest of the British army in North Africa and seize control of Egypt, severing the vital Suez Canal lifeline and cutting Great Britain off from its Asian colonies. The Argonaut Conference disbanded on June 24 with no firm consensus as to the next strategic move to take against the Axis. The U-boats, meanwhile, grimly pressed on.
5
I
T TOOK
U-701
TWO DAYS TO REACH
C
APE
H
ATTERAS AFTER
laying the minefield off the Chesapeake Bay. Fearing detection from land-based patrol aircraft, Kapitänleutnant Horst Degen ordered a high-speed run to deeper waters offshore and then submerged the boat shortly before sunrise on Saturday, June 13, just hours after jettisoning his deadly cargo in the Thimble Shoal Channel. While U-701 ran quietly on its two e-motors, Degen organized the boat for the planned inshore patrol. His torpedo gang transferred four torpedoes—two hanging from the steel I beams overhead in the bow compartment and another pair stored below the deck plates—to the forward torpedo tubes. Next, they retrieved the spare torpedo below the e-motor compartment for the solitary stern tube. The procedure took two hours. “Everybody was happy to get rid of those big ‘cigars,’” Degen later recalled. “Now that they were pushed into the shooting tubes, the sailors were able to rig up a table and sit down for their meals.” But even as they enjoyed their newfound elbow room, the crew remained on high alert; at sunset, Herbert Grotheer
decrypted a message from U-boat Force Headquarters ordering U-701 to remain totally submerged in daylight hours because of the ramped-up defenses reported by other boats.
Degen’s work, however, was far from done. Waiting for the cover of darkness, he undertook the risky task of transferring the two G7a torpedoes from their topside storage canisters. Shortly after midnight on Sunday, June 14, he ordered a working party up on deck to unload the two torpedoes. The first went down the bow hatch without difficulty, but during the second loadout at the stern, a cable jammed. The men worked feverishly to untangle the loading mechanism. “We would have been dead ducks if someone had come upon us on the surface with our open hatches, tangled ropes and a dozen men on deck,” Degen recalled. Several hours passed as the cursing sailors tried one option, then another, without success. Finally, as the sun peered above the eastern horizon, the working party managed to clear the rig, lower the second torpedo inside U-701, and secure the hatch. Degen ordered the boat to dive. All together, U-701 had nine torpedoes, five ready to fire from its torpedo tubes and four spares: two more G7e electrics and the pair of compressed-air G7as. Although five fewer torpedoes than the standard loadout of fourteen, this was nevertheless enough to engage the Allied shipping he hoped to find.
Four hours later, U-701 got a nasty lesson in America’s beefed-up aerial defense tactics. Traveling on the surface, Degen’s lookouts spotted a multiengine bomber quickly closing in on the boat. He ordered a crash dive and reached a depth of 150 feet when several depth charges exploded close by. The shock waves shattered instrument dials and slightly damaged the main
periscope. Degen decided to keep the boat submerged until his men could complete repairs and darkness once again concealed their presence. Several hours later, lookouts sighted the flashing light of the Diamond Shoals navigational buoy. Degen and his men were ready to hunt but, to their dismay, found the ocean empty of ships.
Disappointed though they might be, Degen and his lookouts were not surprised to find the shipping lanes devoid of merchant vessels. They had braced themselves for a grueling ordeal. The instructions from Admiral Karl Dönitz to remain submerged by day meant that U-701 had to move about one hundred miles offshore before sunrise each day to reach that part of the continental shelf where the depth of the water fell to three hundred feet and made concealment possible. The forty-six men confined inside U-701’s pressure hull accepted the need to remain invisible, but they suffered for it. The residual heat inside the boat from its batteries and e-motors, combined with the high water temperature outside, quickly spiked the thermometer above one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. In addition, the boat’s air-cleansing system was proving inadequate to rid the boat of carbon dioxide gas. For up to seventeen hours each day, the crew stewed in this hellish environment, slowly waiting for the hours to pass and the safety of darkness to finally arrive before they could surface and ventilate the boat.
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