To augment further the limited functions of his naval air forces, Andrews could rely on the Army’s First Air Support Command for close-in air scouting. To that end Army aviators assembled a polyglot force of some one hundred single-engine land-observation planes that one observer likened to Joffre’s Paris taxicab army of 1914. Wrote Andrews on 14 January: “The Army First Air Support Command is operating during daylight hours patrols in single-motored land observation planes extending about forty miles offshore from Portland, Maine, to Wilmington, North Carolina. These planes are not armed and carry only sufficient fuel for flights of between two or three hours. The pilots are inexperienced in the type of work they are endeavoring to do. Not more than ten of these observation planes are in the air along the Coastal Frontier at any one time.”77 It was to the credit of both services, many of whose earlier attempts to work together had foundered on the rocks of interservice rivalry, that they successfully consolidated what resources they had in order to meet the present emergency. The airplane was the most dangerous foe of the U-boat, as the British had discovered, and the Army and Navy were correct to pool their forces, however feeble, untrained, and inappropriate they were. For such was to follow Admiral Dönitz’s own principle: Do the best with what you have. Still, it did not appear that Gruppe Hardegen and the waves of U-boats that were in train ran much risk of discovery, much less attack, from the American skies.
Behind these dented shields and virgin swords lay other defenses, planned or in place, for bases and harbors. Some net-and-boom barriers were positioned across the entrances to naval bases by the beginning of 1942, but this type of defense, which required constant manipulation of pegtop buoys, mooring buoys, shackles, and mooring chain, was not practical for commercial harbors, which had to remain open for their constant streams of freighter and tanker traffic (although a modest amount of net material was in place at New York Harbor). Instead, the Army, which held jurisdiction over harbors and intracoastal waterways, laid contact-mine barrages in the approaches to Portland, Boston, New York, and Chesapeake Bay. Notices such as the following, dated 10 December, went out to all shipping companies: “A mined area covering the approaches to New York Harbor has been established. Incoming vessels will secure directions for safe navigation from patrol vessel stationed off Ambrose Channel Entrance.”78 U.S. Navy engineers were preparing a variety of sound detection devices that would alert a harbor defense post, such as the Joint Harbor Entrance Control Post, established at Fort Wright on Fishers Island for New York Harbor, to the presence of an underwater intruder. These included underwater magnetic indicator loops, sound-modulated radio sentinel buoys (sonobuoys), fixed supersonic echo-ranging and listening equipment controlled from shore, and shipborne underwater sound detectors. None of these devices, however, was fully tested and in place by the opening months of 1942: Only Argentia in Newfoundland outside the ESF had a working magnetic loop system.79 Except for its mine fields, a sub chaser here and a scout plane there, New York Harbor remained vulnerable to enemy ingress; so exposed was it, in fact, that Mayor Fiorello La Guardia wondered if the Republic could guarantee the defense of Coney Island!80 In view of events to come it was a good question. (The same question must have worried six-year-old Allen Stewart Königsberg, who was wont to stand at dusk on the Long Beach shore east of Coney Island and, in his mind’s eye, watch a large black U-boat with white swastikas on its tower surfacing and diving in the waters off Long Island. He would recreate that scene forty-five years later when, as Woody Allen, he wrote and produced the motion picture Radio Days.81)
Essential to any seacoast defense in World War II was the darkening of lights that revealed shore positions or provided sky glow against which seaborne targets could be silhouetted. Total darkening came to be called “blackout,” partial darkening “brownout” or “dim-out.” The British, Germans, and Japanese all practiced seacoast blackout. In the ESF during the first three months after Pearl Harbor the United States practiced no darkening discipline whatever. Rep-rehensibly, not a single coastal commander—ESF, Naval District, or Army—seems to have called for so much as a dimout of waterfront cities as security against U-boats. In Washington in 1940 the Coast Guard considered, in the event of war, extinguishing such lighted navigational aids as lighthouses, buoys, and automatic lights and declared in a semper paratus memorandum on blackouts, “The Coast Guard will be fully ready if and when called upon to accomplish the desired result effectively and with the least possible delay.”82 But when war came the Coast Guard would leave all the lights blazing in what was nothing less than a brilliant invitation to the U-boats, which, certainly in J-123′s case, much appreciated the assistance. The U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis on the Chesapeake was equally watchful in 1940, deciding that “a routine daily darkening of the station will be required as an intermediate step preliminary to complete blackout”; but such plans at the time were predicated on the “risk of attack from the air.”83 Possible German air attacks also occupied the attention of the Third Naval District, which issued an “Illumination Control Plan” that called for blackout of shore lights, New York City and surrounding urban lights, and all beacons, lighthouses, and aids to navigation—but only in the case of “air raids.”84 Except in air raids the lights would stay on, but for a few New Jersey boardwalk communities that responded positively to the “request” made to them on 18 December 1941 by the Army’s commanding general, Second Corps Area, Eastern Defense Command, that they “consider” dispensing with boardwalk lights (though not city lights).85 The majority of boardwalk communities chose to ignore the request and would continue to ignore it for three months into the war in favor of more important tourism, recreation, and business interests. Even Admiral Andrews, who surely on one or another of his battleship billets must have noticed another ship in the water silhouetted against the distant loom thrown up by urban or harbor lights, underestimated the advantage that sky glow gave even to U-boats operating some distance from shore. As late as 10 February 1942, in the midst of the tanker and merchant carnage in the waters of his command, Andrews would state: “The lights of beach resorts frequently furnish a background against which vessels running close to the coast may be silhouetted by others further seaward. This is objectionable, but inasmuch as submarines are reluctant to operate in waters less than about 10 fathoms in depth, this is not at present regarded as creating a problem requiring drastic measures.”86 Andrews was dead wrong. Shore lights revealed passing commerce to U-boats far out to sea. Furthermore, the Gruppe Hardegen boats and those that followed would operate in very close proximity to shore, particularly V-123, which gave no quarter to shoal water. Drastic measures were, indeed, required. Because Andrews foolishly supposed they were not, scores of merchant seamen would go to watery graves, and desperately needed raw materials, not to mention “bottoms”—ships—would litter the continental shelf.
In January 1940 Commander Edward Ellsberg, USN, gave a comforting interview to the Montreal Daily Star. Described as “a world authority on submarines” and recently famous for his role in raising a sunken American S-Class submarine, Ellsberg stated that to expect German U-boats to operate in any significant way in Canadian or American waters was “ridiculous.” Hitler, he said, might send over two or three boats as a “gesture” to put a “scare” into the Canadian people, but serious naval operations that far distant from home bases were “hardly worth while from a military point of view.” Germany would be better advised to concentrate her undersea forces in the North Sea. “I am certain,” Ellsberg continued, smiling, “that Churchill would be only too pleased to subsidize the German Admiralty to send their U-boat fleet to this side.” Anyway, he said, modern defense measures had greatly lessened the striking power of U-boats, which themselves had not been improved on very much since the last war. Furthermore, U-boat warfare against merchant ships “can never have any real effect on the outcome of the war.” Commander Ellsberg’s final conceit was to claim that the U-boat [U-29] that sank the British aircraft carrier Courageous in th
e Western Approaches on 17 September of the foregoing year never made it safely back to Germany. “I don’t care what the Germans say,” he asserted, “I know that no submarine could have lived in shallow water with all those destroyers round after taking a potshot at the Courageous. I’ll wager that the submarine and her crew are lying on the sea bottom within a quarter of a mile of the hull of the aircraft carrier.”87 The assertion would have made interesting reading for the commander of U-29, Kptlt. Otto Schuhart, who went on to sink enough additional ships to win the Ritterkreuz (Knight’s Cross).
Fortunately, such recklessness on the part of the USN’s “world authority” on submarines did not reflect the thinking in the rest of his service, where one could find a healthy respect for the modern U-boat and a confident expectation that the Ubootwaffe would move into U.S. waters as quickly as possible following Hitler’s declaration of war. The Eastern Sea Frontier staff faced the danger with knowing, open eyes. It was to be expected, the ESF war diary acknowledged, that U-boats would operate in the U.S. coastal shipping lanes, for two reasons: First, because “what the Germans had done with some success and with less efficient submarines in the last war, they would try to do again in this war.”88 One German boat, U-53, paid a “goodwill” visit to Newport in 1916 prior to U.S. entrance into that war; on the day of her departure she sank five British and neutral steamers. In April-November 1918 six other U-boats operating in U.S. coastal waters sank twenty-four commercial ships of two thousand to ten thousand GRT and seventy-six small schooners and fishing trawlers. The depredations of that earlier U-boat campaign had inflicted no serious lasting damage, certainly none that adversely affected America’s ability to maintain coastal shipping and to wage war in Europe. Whether the United States would get off so lightly in 1942 gravely concerned many of the Navy’s more thoughtful officers, who did not share Commander Ellsberg’s improvidence.
The second and “more compelling reason” why the ESF staff expected to see U-boats in U.S. waters was that the convoy protection given to the cross-Atlantic lifelines of the United Kingdom had proved so successful that fall and winter that the enemy very likely, it was thought, would shift both the method and location of his attacks. “The German has always been quick to discover the weakest link,” said the diary, and the weakly guarded sea-lanes of the eastern shore and Caribbean, where tankers and merchant vessels ordinarily sailed alone for the lack of escorts, provided an “excellent opportunity for Admiral Dönitz to reveal his gifts for improvisation.” In frustration the diary added: “Those responsible for the security of sea-lanes have had to spend far less time in hunting for theories than in searching for forces.”89 A third reason why Admiral Andrews for one could soon anticipate U-boats on his doorstep, though a reason he could not write into the diary for security reasons, was his day-by-day receipt of the British U-boat estimate. It would have been hard for Andrews, looking with growing alarm at the decrypted messages held at arm’s length in front of his face, to believe that Edward Ellsberg was a world authority on submarine operations. He would have felt reassured, though, to know that a top secret war plan presented to the President by a joint Army-Navy war plans team on 21 December had confirmed his own judgment that on the North American coast “we can expect frequent appearance of submarines” and that in ESF waters “the most pressing danger is from enemy submarines”; as he also would have been reassured to know that the appropriate “decision” rendered was: “Increase as rapidly as possible coastal forces for defense against submarines.”90
By that date even Ernest J. King himself was concerned. Still commander of the Atlantic Fleet (CINCLANT), the flinty Anglo-phobe admiral, if he did not want to heed the secret estimates from London’s OIC and the daily situation maps of his own ONI, could hardly blink the fact, as ESF’s staff had deduced, that with shrinking success in the cross-oceanic trade routes combined with the dangling temptation of single-sailing unescorted war cargoes in the U.S. coastal lanes it was inevitable that Admiral Dönitz would send an attacking force to the Boston-Cape Hatteras line. Accordingly, King wrote to CNO Stark: “Enemy submarine activities in the North Atlantic are considerably reduced. The naval insecurity of the outlying bases [Argentia; Reykjavik-Hvalfjordur; Londonderry, North Ireland; Gare Loch, Scotland], their distance from the U.S. Atlantic seaboard, the imminent probability of submarine attack in that area, and the weakness of our coastal defense force, make it essential that the maximum practicable number of our destroyers be based at home bases [emphasis added].”91 The importance of this decision cannot be over-stressed. King was pulling Support Force DDs from distant bases as well as from convoy routes where U-boat activity had slackened, and he was committing them to defensive positions along the U.S. East Coast.
It is not recorded when this decision reached the eyes or ears of Admiral Andrews, who must have been enormously relieved and encouraged by it, but it was obvious that the decision was acted on since in the first two weeks of January the Atlantic ports from Casco Bay (Portland, Maine) to Norfolk filled up with ocean-tested destroyers from Destroyer Squadrons (DesRons) 7, 8, 10, 11, 30, and 31. All were equipped with Sonar (Sound-Navigation, Ranging) the U.S. equivalent underwater detection system to British ASDIC.92 All were well munitioned with Mark-VI (three hundred-pound) and Mark-VII (six hundred-pound) depth charges—“ashcans”—on Y throwers. All were Atlantic hardened, on ready status, with steam up or fed from the docks. With no fewer, in fact, than twenty-one destroyers bracketing Gruppe Hardegen’s approach course, it appeared that the seaboard was going to be protected after all! Paukenschlag was headed for certain disaster. Coiled at dockside on 13 January were three Wickes-class “flush deckers,” three Benham-, four Sims-, three 1940 construction Benson-, and eight Gleaves- (the newest) class ships. The litany of their names evoked Rudyard Kipling’s World War I minesweepers in the English Channel:
Dawn off the Foreland—the young flood making Jumbled and short and steep—
Black in the hollows and bright where it’s breaking-Awkward water to sweep. “Mines reported in the fairway, Warn all traffic and detain.
Sent up Unity, Claribel, Assyrian, Stormcock, and Golden Gain.”93
In this case the flotilla that could be “sent up” read: Livermore, Bristol, Ellyson, Roe, Monssen, Dupont, Bernadou, Gwin, Upshur, Gleaves, O’Brien, Mustin, Trippe, Wainwright, Mayrant, Rowan, Ludlow, Lansdale, Ingraham, Hilary P. Jones, and Charles F. Hughes.94 It was a stirring list. To name them was to see them in imagination charging out their channels with flags flying and sirens whooping to meet the invader. All that was needed was to light off their boilers, load ashcans on their Y-guns, sound general quarters, and wheel their steel bows toward the enemy—whose position, it bears repeating, was known to fair precision. That was what any defender, United States or British, had a right to expect, what any German assailant had a cause to fear. It was right there, in print, page eight of Operation Plan 8-41, promulgated by Admiral King on 20 December: “TASK FORCE FOUR [Support Force] will: … when available, detail one or more suitable hunting groups to operate in connection with reported submarine concentrations.”95 One such concentration was only hours away. Doubtless not a salt in the Atlantic on either side, and in the know, would have anticipated that, instead of fighting, the squadrons would either hold in port or find other things to do.
7
Beat on the Kettledrum
1000 hours Central European Time, 0500 U.S. Eastern Time 9 January, U-123 on the surface, both ahead half, position CB 3321, estimated 560 nautical miles east of Cape Cod, course 250, heavy snowstorm, wind northwest force 6, seas running 5. Distance covered in the previous twenty-four hours: 124 nautical miles. Total distance since departure: 2,597 nautical miles. Total distance submerged: 50 nautical miles.1 On the bridge, Watch Officer von Schroeter strained in the predawn dark to see anything at all through the windswept snow that, mixed with sprays of icy saltwater, stung the eyes and cut the face. In his ears the surrounding howl meant that the seas must be climbing to ten meters.
Every half minute, as though in confirmation, whole waves broke over the conning tower, leaving von Schroeter and the lookouts of the forenoon watch gasping and hanging on. With miserable regularity steep crests lifted the boat’s bow high on the shuddering surface, then smashed it down and forward so that dark rollers from the mountainous water attacked across the foredeck and exploded against the tower. With one hand on their harnesses and their binoculars in the other, the lookouts stared futilely at the angled curtains of snow, acquiring, von Schroeter figured, no more than one hundred meters lateral visibility. Underneath their gray-green oilskins and sou’westers that the wind alternately flattened and ballooned, the bridge watch wore their leathers with lamb’s wool linings, sweaters, towels around the neck, wool caps, sea boots, and gloves. Upright wood slats fitted to the inside of the bridge prevented the oilskins or gloves from freezing fast to the steel surfaces. Around their cork-soled boots dark water rushed and foamed. With the upper hatch battened down to prevent flooding, their only communication with the rest of humanity was by voice pipe, into which the weaker angels of their natures felt time and again like crying for relief as the “bathtub” in which they stood pitched, rolled, and yawed in the riled-up seas, and yet another wall of unseen ocean crashed heavily against their necks. To von Schroeter who braced his back between the UZO post and the periscope housing, it seemed that all the violence of the war was directed at him personally. Verdammter Atlantik! Was it for this that he had been born? Aft the two diesel exhaust fumes profaned the snow with their answering refuse, and engine noise competed with the outcry from the ocean breast. Now and again smothers of foaming seas swept across the exhausts and caused the ports to cough and grunt. And when the bow, after hanging momentarily over deep troughs, plunged sickeningly downward, the stern lifted naked from the water and the twin bronze screws shrieked in their unaccustomed freedom.
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