Operation Drumbeat

by Michael Gannon

  There were many chinks in Andrews’ frontier armor, beginning with the most glaring—a sea and air force so antiquated, so unprepared, so untrained, and so deficient in craft and weaponry that it stunned the Germans and British when they saw it go to war—and that after two and a quarter years of Atlantic war. It embarrassed Andrews. For him to send these defenders out to battle was akin to meeting Panzer divisions with troops of mounted cavalry. He acknowledged the fact in writing two weeks’after Pearl Harbor: “It is submitted that should enemy submarines operate off this coast, this command has no forces available to take adequate action against them, either offensive or defensive.”51 Incredibly, to protect nearly fifteen hundred miles of frontier coastline, Andrews had only twenty ships, not one with a fully trained crew, not one equal to a U-boat in surface speed or armament. “There is not a vessel available,” Andrews stated, “that an enemy submarine could not outdistance when operating on the surface. In most cases the guns of these vessels would be outranged by those of the submarine.”52 His tiny tatterdemalion “fleet,” under orders to “uphold the majesty and might of the United States in the nation’s own coastal water,”53 consisted of the following vessels:

  One 165-foot Coast Guard Argo-class WPC Patrol Cutter, Dioiie (WPC-107), commissioned in 1934;

  Three 200-foot Eagle Boats, PE 27, PE 56, and PE 19, all commissioned in 1919;

  Six 125-foot Coast Guard Ac/iVe-class WPC patrol cutters, Active, Antietam, Dix, Frederick Lee, Jackson, and Rush, all commissioned in 1927;

  Four 110-foot submarine chasers (wooden hull), SC 102, SC 330, SC 412, and SC 437, commissioned in 1918-41.

  Four 170- to 245-foot smaller converted yachts, Sylph (CPY-12), 1940; Siren (PY-13), 1941; Coral (PY-15), 1941; and Tourmaline (PY-20), 1941.

  Two 200- to 328-foot gunboats, Dubuque (PG-17), 1905; and Paducah (PG-18), 1905.

  The fastest ships in this motley collection were the Dione at I6V2 knots and the Eagle boats at “a possible 15 knots,” but the three Eagles were written off as “materially unreliable”: Andrews would tell King that “they are constantly breaking down.”54 The reliability of the remainder of this fleet was revealed in a plaintive letter from Andrews to King two weeks after enemy operations began in his command: By that date only five vessels—the one 165-foot cutter, two 125-foot cutters, one Eagle, and the converted yacht Tourmaline—were “capable of keeping the sea and taking offensive action against enemy submarines.”55 Because of the overall poor seakeeping characteristics of Andrews’ fleet, the distances they had to travel, and the unfavorable winter weather conditions that prevailed, at most only two or three vessels could be kept on station at a time. Thus, in January the paper fleet of twenty would quickly descend to a guard of three, and the seacoast door would fall open wider still. (Perhaps only in the Uruguayan Navy—in which three admirals commanded one antiquated gunboat plus a number of tugs and dispatch boats—could one find a greater disproportion of command to forces.) Of more immediate concern to the present narrative is the fact that in the week ending 12 January, which was the eve of Reinhard Hardegen’s approach to New York Harbor, an ESF “Availability of Forces” chart showed only three vessels in ready status in the Third and Fourth Naval districts (New York and Philadelphia); seven other boats were on ready status in the Fifth Naval District (Norfolk).56

  Two questions leap to mind: Were craft of this small size useful and effective in antisubmarine warfare? If so, why were many more of them not available for such service at war’s start? The answer to the first question is yes. It is true that the destroyer (DD), as also later the destroyer escort (DE)—with its speed, armament, maneuverability, superior sound gear, and ability to keep the sea in conditions that drove small craft into port—was the deadly and traditional surface enemy of the submarine. But Andrews had no DDs. He had none because those that were still in the Atlantic (two squadrons of the newest, long-legged destroyers had been removed to the Pacific theater in late December) had been assigned to King’s relief as CINCLANT, Admiral Royal E. Ingersoll, for cross-Atlantic convoy escort or for local duty in the Sixth and Seventh Naval districts as well as in the Gulf, Caribbean, and Panama frontiers and the Brazilian bases of Recife and Bahia. That there were not more destroyers as a category in commission was owed in part to their elimination (fifty-two had been proposed) from the Naval Expansion Bill of June 1940 for reasons of economy. Cutters and patrol craft of 165, 125, and 110 feet were not so much killers (though they carried a depth-charge rack) as good observers and harassers. Similar small craft had proved indispensable around Britain’s shores in locating (for bombers) and in keeping down U-boats. The German attackers operated on the surface at night: The presence of any observed defender, be it ship or plane, regardless how small, had the effect, psychological if not material, of keeping a U-boat submerged, where its movements and therefore its effectiveness were greatly hindered. The small craft were always at risk since in a confrontation the U-boat would seem to hold all the cards. Yet it was unlikely that a U-boat would waste a torpedo on a sub chaser; and if it chose to duel with deck guns, where, as Andrews conceded, the U-boat would have the advantage, the U-boat if close enough would itself be at risk absorbing four-inch, fifty-caliber gunfire and thirty-caliber machine-gun fire, which, if they did no more, could clear a U-boat’s deck of gun crew. The little boats were not entirely without resources, including, as a last resort, ability to ram. Furthermore, their value for observation and rescue of survivors from sunken vessels should have been obvious.

  To the second question it can be answered, first, that the U.S. Navy failed to produce a sufficient number of small craft because, like their counterparts in the German Kriegsmarine, the Navy’s Operations and General Board admirals were intent on fighting another Battle of Jutland—this time against the Japanese in the Pacific, where battleships and heavy cruisers “crossed the T” and concentrated main-battery salvos in a decisive blue-water engagement. It was the “gun club” at Main Navy that did not want to fiddle around with small craft, lest naval appropriations be diverted from the great-hulled, impregnable, rakish brutes that were the battle line of the fleets. There is even evidence, uncovered by Senator Harry S. Truman’s Special Committee Investigating the National Defense Program, that before 1942 the General Board often acted in league with the big-ship lobby of the larger private shipyards, where profits were a factor of size and tonnage.57

  President Roosevelt, who had been Assistant Secretary of the Navy (1913-20) when U-boats first operated in the Atlantic and U.S. waters, and who subsequently followed U.S. naval developments more closely than anyone else in civilian life, was devoted to small craft as an indispensable means for control of coastal waters. At one point, recalling with pride the mosquito fleet of 110-foot subchasers the Navy put in the water in 1918, he offered a prize for the best design of a similar-size antisubmarine patrol vessel. As U.S. involvement with the U-boat war in 1941-42 deepened in intensity, FDR had to contend not only with Navy Department indecision and inertia that resulted from a belief that patrol craft, if they were ever to be needed, could be extemporized and produced rapidly in small shipyards, but with the overt prejudice of the “gun club.” “My Navy has been definitely slack in preparing for this submarine war off our coast,” FDR would write Churchill. “As I need not tell you, most naval officers have declined in the past to think in terms of any vessel of less than two thousand tons. You learned the lesson two years ago. We still have to learn it.”58 In this prepossession U.S. officers differed little from their opposite numbers on the Kriegsmarine Naval Staff, who—to the disgust of Admiral Dönitz—preferred capital ships to U-boats because they “couldn’t parade a band on the deck” of a U-boat.59

  In one of his “Random Notes,” written sometime after 1943, Admiral King stated that, “F.D.R. did not understand the fact that the Nazis had very much improved their U-boats; he believed that we could combat the submarines with small boats of 50-60 foot length and light airplanes. Despite this, Admiral Stark—backed
by myself and others—argued for proper escort craft; length 250-300 feet, speed 25 knots, displacement 1000 tons or better.”60 In 1946 he would write, “The early months of 1942 gave abundant proof of the already well-known fact that stout hearts in little boats cannot handle an opponent as tough as the submarine.”61

  King’s recollections appear to have been flawed. First, according to the record, FDR never proposed building patrol craft smaller than the 110-foot subchaser he personally favored. Second, as King does not acknowledge, within four months after Pearl Harbor, he personally was requisitioning hundreds of privately owned pleasure craft smaller than 100 feet for offshore antisubmarine patrol.62 Third, by four months into the war King was authorizing armed flights by private aviators in light planes of the Civil Air Patrol over the threatened sea-lanes.63 Fourth, in enlisting Stark’s name as support for his views King ignored Stark’s long though unsuccessful struggle, dating from at least October 1940, to secure small craft: “One of the hardest fights I have had,” Stark wrote, “has been to obtain small craft…. We may wake up some morning and find … submarines operating at our focal points and all that goes in its train.”64 Fifth, King was apparently unaware that in June 1941 a list of “urgent and important shortcomings” prepared at Stark’s request for the Secretary of the Navy ineluded the request: “Authority to construct 101 smaller vessels. … In addition to 10 ocean going tugs, a large number of 165’ PC [Patrol Craft] and a few 110’ PC should be laid down. Reason: The War Plans show a very great need for patrol vessels for the Naval Local Defense Forces.”65 Sixth, on 15 December Stark urged the naval districts in the ESF to recruit small private vessels, crewed by naval personnel or by “undoubtedly loyal civilians,” and to outfit them with either voice or Morse transmitters so that ESF might station them at fifty to eighty miles offshore where they could report on approaching enemy aircraft, surface vessels, or U-boats to the Army Aircraft Warning System.66 (This farsighted suggestion would not be implemented until four months later, at about the time Stark was being eased out of Washington.) Seventh, on 12 February, one month after Gruppe Paukenschlag struck, Stark would propose “arming a considerable number of the Cape Cod fishing boats, particularly with depth charges, for antisubmarine operations on the Grand Banks and other fishing grounds in the North Atlantic, and employing them as a volunteer force under Naval control.”67 Eighth, that small patrol craft became more essential rather than less as the coastal war got under way was indicated on 20 January 1942, when Admiral Ingersoll cautioned Rear Admiral Bristol in a personal letter, “Until the new PC’s begin to get in service, I think we are in for a beating from the subs.”68 Ninth, in April, Vice Chief for Naval Operations Frederick J. Home acknowledged that, “the services of the new submarine chasers are urgently needed in the various sea frontiers. Every effort is being made by the Department to expedite the construction and delivery of these craft.”69 Tenth, in May, King himself sent a handwritten note to Home that began: “Please make arrangement to continue the building of 173’ PC’s … [emphasis in original].”70 By the beginning of that month, thanks to a crash program for construction of small antisubmarine vessels, King had available thirty-three patrol craft and thirty-four sub chasers, most on the East Coast, enough (at last) to begin full-scale convoying of merchant traffic. Eleventh, Admiral Andrews’ headquarters declared in the middle of July, six months after the U-boat campaign in American waters had begun: “The importance of the utilization on Eastern Sea Frontier of all small craft of various types cannot be overemphasized. These vessels are being used for rescue, patrol, for submarine observation, and the reporting of floating mines. When armed, they can take offensive action against submarines.”71 Finally, twelfth, “stout hearts in little boats” did handie “an opponent as tough as the submarine”: 165-foot Coast Guard cutters Icarus and Thetis sank two of the first three U-boats destroyed in U.S. waters (see chapter 13).

  Despite the above, King would reconstruct events according to the filters of his own memory. Both in June 1942 and at war’s end (as will be noted in a later chapter), he would claim that he and his staff had very early improvised the use of small craft and light planes to meet the U-boat challenge—expedients that in fact he and his staff appear to have opposed at every turn with force and ridicule until at last rigor alone proved unavailing in the conduct of seaboard affairs and the impact of events themselves broke through a recalcitrant ego to demand level good sense and innovative action. Stark had been no fool, as those same events would prove. Small craft were necessary to the nation’s defense. Somehow Stark had escaped the prevailing big ship-big gun arrogance of his own operations staff. He deserved to escape guilt by association with Admiral King’s wrong-minded dicta. Roosevelt, too, would be proved right. If the President’s knowledge and advice had been heeded, and more of what Samuel Eliot Morison called the “indispensable small craft for anti-submarine warfare” had been built, the Eastern Sea Frontier would have been better prepared to face invasion.72 But Stark and Roosevelt were of no help now, in the opening dark wintry weeks of January 1942, when the magnetic markers on his wall chart told Admiral “Dolly” Andrews that everything he feared was beginning to happen, and that all he had on station at any one time were three lonely craft between Calais, Maine, and Jacksonville, North Carolina.

  No less inadequate than Andrews’ bathtub navy was his naval air arm, which consisted of 103 aircraft of varying capabilities, about three-quarters of them unsuited to the tasks of coastal patrol and antisubmarine defense. From Salem (Massachusetts) Naval Air Station (NAS) in the north to Elizabeth City (North Carolina), NAS, in the south, ESF could count the following planes: fifty-one trainers, eighteen scouts, fourteen utility, seven transport, six patrol, three torpedo, three fighters, and one bomber. Not one was capable of maintaining a long-range maritime patrol. Most were suitable at best for inshore scouting since carrying depth bombs greatly limited their radius of action. For certain aircraft the long time lags required for arming with depth bombs between the receipt of an alert and the moment of takeoff made their use impractical: To arm an XPBM-1 or PBY-5 “flying boat” with MK-XVII depth bombs at Norfolk NAS, for exampie, required six-hour notice (!).73 Andrews doubted that Admiral Dönitz would be so accommodating. For anything approaching medium-search ranges he had to depend on the few PBMs and PBYs and Coast Guard amphibians available at Norfolk, Salem, Floyd Bennett NAS (New York), and Elizabeth City, as well as on two nonrigid lighter-than-air craft (dirigibles) from ZP Squadron 12 at Lakehurst (New Jersey) NAS. For the rest, lamented Andrews, his air forces “have no place in modern war.”74 Yet he passed on to all his aviators the best received wisdom from the British Royal Air Force (RAF) that had arrived in the last week of December by way of Admiral Stark. British analysis had disclosed that in 35 percent of air attacks on U-boats the target was still partially visible at the time of bomb release. In another 15 percent of cases the U-boat disappeared fewer than thirty seconds prior to the attack. The best recommended attack procedures, therefore, were the following:

  (a) Use shallowest possible depth setting for charges and depth bombs.

  (b) Close U-boat by shortest path at maximum speed, attacking from any direction.

  (c) Use lowest release altitude consistent with existing instructions.

  (d) Space charges or bombs 60 feet apart.

  (e) Drop all charges or bombs in one stick.

  (f) If U-boat surfaces after bombs are expended, attack repeatedly with guns.75

  Thanks to his support relationship with the Army’s Northeast Defense Command, as symbolized by the Army and Navy Joint Control and Information Center on Church Street, Andrews was able to turn to the Army Air Forces (AAF) for long-range seaward antisubmarine patrols of which his Navy craft were incapable. Accordingly, on the afternoon of 8 December 1941, units of the First Bomber Command of the First Air Force began search-out/search-back flights over water to the limit of their range. The range varied according to the type of aircraft. Divested of most of its premier pl
anes and best-trained crews for missions on the West Coast and overseas, First Bomber Command scrambled three different types of “in commission”—that is, flyable twin- or four-engine aircraft: nine B-17 heavy bombers; six B-18 medium bombers, of which two could not fire or bomb; and thirty-one B-25 medium bombers. The Boeing B-17 “Flying Fortress” had been introduced in 1937 as “the best bombardment aircraft in existence, particularly for coastal defense.”76 The Douglas B-18 “Bolo,” introduced the same year as the B-17 and the standard U.S. bomber when war broke out in Europe in 1939, had shorter range than the B-17 and just over half the latter’s bomb load; it would see little service in the war. The North American B-25 would fight effectively in all theaters and be the aircraft of choice for the sixteen-plane Tokyo Raid of Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle on 18 April 1942. Seventy-three other aircraft were in or out of commission, mostly out, during December and January.

  The First Bomber Command patrols flew their missions from airstrips at Langley Field, Virginia, Mitchel Field, New York, Westover Field, Massachusetts, and (after 11 January) Bangor, Maine. Weather permitting, two flights daily, averaging three planes each, from each of the four bases swept the sea approaches. The B-17s could reach a maximum distance of six hundred miles before turnaround; the B-18s had the least range. For the pilots the dangers of being aloft over the Atlantic in land-based aircraft during midwinter were daunting, all the more so since the partially trained crews, thrown together as hurriedly as was the flight line, had the barest experience in navigation over water. Further diminishing their effectiveness was the fact that none of the crews had received training in ship recognition: It was questionable that over the threatened sea-lanes they would know a U-boat if they saw one. With navigation and recognition skills at a minimum, it is not surprising that First Bomber Command flew only in the daytime, though this was the period when U-boat lookouts could easily spot them and give the diving alarm. The small number of aircraft available for search, the limited number of coastal sectors that could be patrolled at any one time, the intermittent flight periods, and the absence of nighttime sweeps (when a surfaced U-boat’s position could be betrayed to the practiced eye by phosphorescence or wake) combined with thin training, which means faulty planning, destined First Bomber Command’s long-range aerial reconnaissance for inevitable failure. Compounding the futility was the fact that none of the crews, which had been conditioned for land bombardment, was familiar with the techniques of attacking submarines at sea, and even if they had been, the demolition (not depth) bombs they carried on board would have been useless, in the absence of great luck, against such targets. Though First Bomber Command may not have been the most quixotic force ever to lift off in wartime it deserves mention all the same—in the same breath with the Navy PBY-5 Catalina squadrons at Pearl Harbor, which in December had patrolled some sectors on the compass rose but not the twelve o’clock sector, which was exactly the path down which Admiral Nagumo sent his carrier-based Mitsubishis, Nakajimas, and Aichis. It could be argued, of course, that limitations of air resources led to both failures, which is another way of saying: unpreparedness.