“Open bow cap three, target bearing three-five-six point five, range fifteen hundred,” Hoffmann said loudly from his half-stooped position, “angle on the bow (the difference between the line of sight and the heading of the target) seventeen Green (starboard). Folgen!”
By folgen (“track”) Hoffmann inquired if the bearing, range, and angle were being transmitted by the electromechanical UZO and by his own voice reports to the Vorhaltrechner, the Siemens-made deflection calculator in the tower, and by the calculator to the Torpedo-Schuss-Empfänger (torpedo launch receiver) in the forward torpedo room, which in turn fed the aim-off heading into the guidance system of the Number 3 tube G7a torpedo.
Von Schroeter at the calculator in the tower had cranked in the range and angle. The UZO line of sight was registering automatically in the calculator gauges. The lamp board corresponded to the Number 3 tube. The trigonometric solution of the aiming triangle was indicating. Von Schroeter called back, “Folgen!” From Bootsmaat (Petty Officer) Rudolf Fuhrmann in the forward torpedo room came confirmation of the torpedo launch receiver: “Folgen!” The torpedo gyro was humming in exact parallel with the calculator; now, no matter what change in course the U-boat might take, the gyro system would automatically correct the heading of the torpedo to target and activate the rudder vanes accordingly 0.4 seconds after launch.
Hoffmann shouted back a setting that the calculator did not handle: “Depth three point five meters!”
“Three point five!” the torpedo room acknowledged. The mixers cranked in the depth of run by hand. Fuhrmann placed his palm on the manual launch button in case the electrical launch system on the bridge failed.
At 0149, with the UZO graticule slightly forward of the target’s funnel, Hoffmann hit the electromagnetic launch button and yelled “Los!” The torpedo room yelled back: “Failure!” Fuhrmann hit the manual button and yelled “Launched!” Four seconds had elapsed because of the failure. The torpedo should now hit abaft the funnel. The LI, Schulz, had already begun taking water into the regulator cells to compensate for the lost weight. From the time of manual launch Hardegen and Hoffmann began counting down the estimated ninety-six seconds to target. Hardegen did not like launching from this distance. The chances for accuracy were fewer, and the wait was too long for his liking—over a minute and a half. But at ninety-seven seconds—
WHACK!
A black-and-white explosion cloud with a light streak of yellow fire rose directly aft of the tall smokestack. Immediately the heavily loaded steamer slowed in the water and began to settle by the stern with a slight list to port. Alwin Tolle came up to take photographs. “Puster” Rafalski called from the wireless room: “She’s signaling SSS—struck by torpedo—on the six-hundred-meter distress band … name of vessel Cyclops … giving position now.”
Hardegen called down the voice pipe; “Come to course three-two-zero!” He would go directly at the stricken steamer. “All gun crews to deck! Man guns!” When the C/30 machine-gun crew was in place and had cleared the barrel Hardegen ordered that gun: “Take out the wireless. Aim for the deckhouse below the antenna array. Commence firing!”
The angry dacca-dacca-dacca-dacca of the machine gun spat shells that, owing to their still-considerable distance from the target, fell in white spurts short of the ship. Rafalski reported that the SSS transmissions were continuing. Hardegen ordered cease-fire on the C/30, whose acrid smoke curled over the bridge. As he closed the target he could discern through the 7 x 50s an artillery piece, possibly four-inch, on the aft deck. Even though the steamer’s list made it unlikely that she would be able to bring her gun to bear, he did not want to risk a gun duel. He altered course slightly in order to pass around the bow of the now-stationary steamer, figuring that the lampblack dark would cover him, also that if there were any guns on the foredeck—Bofors, Hotchkiss, Lewis, or whatever—the sharpening rise of the bow would make it difficult for a gun crew to train on him, particularly if the guns were set for high-angle fire. The calculation proved correct and at 0218 hours 123 took a position at steerageway six hundred meters off the steamer’s port side. From there Hardegen saw that Cyclops was still reasonably afloat and that some of the crew who had gone into lifeboats were reboarding. He ordered a coup de grace. With the boat’s stern pointed directly at Cyclops Hoffmann flooded Number 5 stern tube and launched that G7a on zero angle toward a point forward of the bridge. This time the electrical launch button worked properly. After a run of thirty-one seconds the warhead detonated in a fierce eruption of smoke and debris that went one hundred meters straight up. The large hull quivered, collapsed, and began a rattling death plunge as the remainder of her crew went into the boats and rafts or leaped from the deck into the icy water. The final throe sent the bow skyward, where it lingered briefly before, with a shudder, it slipped below the frothy surface. Hardegen marked the time at 0223, only five minutes after the second hit. Almost at once he heard two huge detonations underwater. The U-boat shook from the blasts, which had a metallic sound, much like that of Wabos, and certainly too strong for a boiler blowup. He decided that they were ammunition exploding.
There was nothing to be done for the ship’s crew in boats and rafts that made their way slowly through the typical surface detritus of planks, doors, ropes, cork life preservers, clothing, and coal dust. The Lion’s orders were emphatic: Commanders were not to pick up survivors (“We must be hard in this war”). Hardegen had violated the rule only once, when he needed Bertie Shaw to confirm his sinking of Aurania. Anyway, there was no room on board 123 for these poor fellows, not to mention the hundreds of others he expected to set adrift as Paukenschlag continued. Turning aside, then, from the spectacle of survivors venturing into the freezing darkness in search of a rescue vessel that might respond to their desperate wireless transmissions, Hardegen called for course 220, engines at 300 RPM. From first sighting to sinking the attack had consumed eight hours. He had to make up a lot of time in order to reach New York the next day, and it was not certain now that he could do it. He did steam with a great personal elation, however. He had begun Operation Drumbeat. Now he asked Rafalski in the radio room to look up Cyclops in Lloyd’s. Rafalski reported a minute later: “Cyclops, twin screw, 9,076 GRT, constructed 1906, owned by Ocean Steam Ship Company, Limited, A. Holt and Company, Managers, length four hundred eighty-five feet, beam fifty-eight point two, depth thirty-nine point five. Home port Liverpool.” Not quite 10,000 GRT, but close enough, thought Hardegen. Poor old Cyclops would never see home again. She was 123′s twenty-fourth victim (not counting Aurania) and Har-degen’s eighth.11
Leslie Webber Kersley was Cyclops’ master. He had brought the vessel out of Panama on 2 January with a general cargo bound for Halifax. Ship’s company was 30 Europeans and 151 Chinese, most of the latter being ferried to other ships’ crews. At position 41-5IN, 63-48W, or approximately three hundred miles east of Cape Cod, while darkened and zigzagging on Pattern 11, course 000 degrees, Cyclops suffered two torpedo hits, the first between Number 6 and 7 hatches on the starboard side. At the time of the first hit two officers were on the bridge and lookouts were posted on the crow’s nest, Monkey Island, fore and after decks, and gun deck. The U-boat was not observed, though lookouts did sight the wake of the second torpedo. Marine Gunner Joseph D. G. Green was getting ready to go on watch when the first torpedo struck. Racing to the gun station, he tried to sight the attacking boat but could see nothing in the darkness. Water was spouting up all around him from openings in the after deck, so he went forward to the boat deck to assist at Number 5 lifeboat if needed. The master ordered him back to gun station but Green, finding the vessel settled by the stern, saw that it was impossible to stand by guns. A few minutes later the second torpedo into the port side blew him off his feet and into the water abreast of Number 6 hatch, where he watched the hull and her Samson Posts sink quickly below the surface.12
Senior Radio Officer R. P. Morrison was on watch in the W/T house when the first torpedo exploded, setting the switchboards loose fro
m the top bolts. Immediately he keyed SSS … SOS and position on the distress frequency, but, fearing that the damaged switchboards were frustrating his signal, he started up the emergency equipment and repeated the call. When no coast station or vessel confirmed receipt, Morrison ran out onto the boat deck to make sure that the portable emergency transmitter and receiver in boat Number 4 were functioning. Satisfied that they were, he returned to the W/T house to try calling out again on the regular emergency system. This time the coast radio at Thomaston, Maine (Station WAG) acknowledged receipt of the call and repeated the whole message. Morrison reported receipt to the master, who ordered him to dump overboard in locked weighted bags the W/T secret codes while Kersley himself dumped weighted bags containing confidential books, ship’s papers, general mail, and one safe hand envelope. Morrison went over the side when the second torpedo hit and joined the forward port raft from the water. Kersley followed overboard and joined the same raft.13
Morrison’s distress signal had its hoped-for effect. Naval Operations Halifax dispatched a PBY Catalina flying boat and two Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) Bangor-class minesweepers to the scene, HMCS Red Deer and Burlington. Dockyard Halifax, which had been Cyclops’ destination, received its first notice of the ship’s distress from U.S. Naval Communications Station at Charleston, South Carolina, via Boston: FROM C. IN C. LANT ACTION c.o. ATLANTIC COAST (R.CN.) HALIFAX FOLLOWING INTERCEPTED 500 KC/S. FROM “CYCLOPS” (BR.) AT 0000 G.M.T. POSITION 41.5 1 NORTH 63.48 WEST S.S. “CYCLOPS” TORPEDOED. NOTHINC HEARD FROM SINCE, u.s. NAVCOM.14 Commander Laurence F. Safford’s On the Roof Gang had proved their mettle. Theirs was the first Atlantic intercept connected with Operation Drumbeat and the first U.S. source to reveal, if anyone in the U.S. Navy was listening, that an enemy force was approaching U.S. waters. Nor was Commander Rodger Winn’s OIC Tracking Room in London unaware of the sinking. The Thomaston (WAG) confirmation of Cyclops’ distress signal was intercepted by Y Service at 0002 GMT.15 The loss of Cyclops confirmed Winn and Patrick Beesly in their earlier estimation that U-/23 and possibly the other two boats associated with her, U-66 and U-/25, would be at exactly that longitude by the time indicated. Emboldened now to believe that his coordinates were correct, Winn set down the overall strategic calculations in his weekly “U/Boat Situation, Week Ending 12.1.42”:
The general situation is now somewhat clearer and the most striking feature is a heavy concentration off the North American seaboard from New York to Cape Race. Two groups have so far been formed. One, of 6 U-Boats, is already in position off Cape Race and St. John’s and a second, of 5 U-Boats, is apparently approaching the American coast between New York and Portland. It is known that these 5 U-Boats will reach their attacking areas by 13th January. Five other U-Boats are between 30 deg. and 50 deg. W., proceeding towards one or other of the above areas, and may later be reinforced by yet another 5 westbound U-Boats, making a total of 21 boats. It was presumably with the object of covering this concentration that the W/T ruse in the N. Western Approaches was carried out as described last week. The U-Boat concerned U-65J is now returning to a Biscay port.16
Based on more detailed position coordinates supplied by Winn and Beesly the Admiralty sent a coded cable on the same date to COMINCH (Admiral King) on third deck, Main Navy, Washington, D.C., where it was retyped for distribution by Operations (OP-38-W) and its information relayed to Captain Frank Leighton’s daily situation map. For days Leighton’s “little toys and other play things,” as King disparagingly called the map graphics, had plainly shown the German advance. Now the estimate of 12 January (not declassified by the U.S. National Security Agency until 3 February 1987) boldly projected the probable U-boat positions, which Leighton displayed on his map by means of four open circles. It read:
12 JAN SUB ESTIMATE X INFO RECEIVED INDICATES LARGE CONCENTRATION PROCEEDING TO OR ALREADY ARRIVED ON STATION OFF CANADIAN AND NORTHEASTERN US COASTS X 3 OR 4 BOATS NEAR40N 65W17
The position 40N 65W at the latitude of Philadelphia was 430 nautical miles off the U.S. seaboard, which slants sharply southwest from Cape Cod. This was the latitude to which U-123 came immediately after sinking Cyclops. That sinking was duly noted in the same estimate: MERCHANT SHIP TORPEDOED IN 41-5IN 63-48W AT 0002 GCT 12 JAN x. Leighton represented the sunk Cyclops at that position by a darkened circle. The sinking of Cyclops, if nothing else in this remarkably clear and exact (except for citing “3 or 4 boats” when 3 was more correct) intelligence estimate, should have alerted all U.S. naval forces to the impending assault. Perhaps no more telling attack warning, in unmistakable language and numbers, had ever come to the military forces of the United States. In no way resembling a cryptic “bomb plot” or “lights code” message such as would fascinate Pearl Harbor students decades later, the 12 January warning contained empirical, verifiable confirmation: Cyclops sunk. The U-boats were coming, and along a known corridor of approach. Although the twin plots at BdU and OIC, relying on dead reckoning, would have both U-66 and U-/25 proceeding abreast of U-123 in their march to the eastern seaboard, Zapp and Folkers were in fact more than a day behind Hardegen. The stormy head seas had slowed their advance and, as a result, Hardegen, even with the Cyclops delay, would enter U.S. territorial waters first and alone. The warning went out to all Naval Coastal Frontiers Atlantic, which included Admiral Andrews’ command; to All Task Force Commanders Atlantic; to CINCLANT “For Action” and to Admiral Bristol’s CONVOYESCORTS WEST LANT, whose twenty-five destroyers lay at Anchor Watch across Gruppe Hardegen’s attack course. With advance notice of this initiation of warfare within the continental limits of the United States one should have thought that Admiral King’s friend, the retired colonel, was entirely correct when he said: “With Ernie King at the helm … America can rest assured that there will not be any repetition of the unfortunate affair at Pearl Harbor.”18
Meanwhile, at sea, a drama was being played out that would have many repetitions ahead. Gunner Green of Cyclops, who had made it onto a raft with eight Chinese, drifted through the freezing night with little hope of rescue. When morning dawned he and his companions, most now suffering from acute hypothermia, tied on to a nearby third mate’s raft. During the day four Chinese died from exposure, two more at night, and two the following morning.19 On another raft nineteen-year-old Midshipman L. J. Hughes, from Vancouver, Canada, survived to say: “Some of the dead men we pushed overboard. The others we kept to give some shelter against the cold and the water which sprayed across the bows.”20 Finally, the Catalina spotted the survivors with their yellow flags and vectored Red Deer to pick them up. The small vessel looked so large and magnanimous to the half-frozen Gunner Green that in his debriefing he called the minesweeper “the Cruiser.” His perspective was understandable. In U-123′s attack only two men had been killed directly, a gunner and the ship’s doctor, but a huge number of lives had been lost to the temperatures: 5 out of the complement of 30 Europeans and 93 out of the 151 Chinese. It was a much-depressed list of survivors that Red Deer brought to Halifax Dockyard. The fruits of Paukenschlag were fresh-taken and bitter.
I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.21
* See Appendix D.
8
New York, New York
At midnight beginning 13 January (CET), 1700 hours U.S. Eastern Time (ET) on 12 January, Walter Kaeding reported to Hardegen that 123′s first star sighting in three days showed that the DR line was off by twenty-five nautical miles at a deviation of 79 degrees. The correction was duly entered on the overlay, and the boat pursued a 275 heading at both ahead full. Eins Zwei Drei was going to go at New York Harbor on the surface—not as a lurking, furtive, sneaky underwater intruder, but boldly on the surface as a proud and daring war machine. Hardegen counted the nautical miles to date: 3,379 since Lorient, of which only 55, or .02 percent, were underwater. The only submerging he would do now on his approach, be it daylight or night, w
ould be to evade sighting by aircraft. Anything on the surface he would sink; except small vessels such as the two-masted sailing vessel the lookouts spotted to starboard at 1527 hours. Eins Zwei Drei did submerge twice briefly at 1800 and at 2157, when multiengined aircraft with navigation lights that Hardegen thought were commercial airliners crossed the sky, the first on a heading of 330, the second on 130. (The fact that air patrols of Eastern Sea Frontier did not fly after dark would indicate that they were not war planes.) Other than these two aircraft, Hardegen would see nothing in the approaches to New York to cause him concern, though by 2315 on the thirteenth it was clear that 123 was not going to make her assigned coordinates by the close of that day. She was now in Marinequadrat CA 38 directly south of Nantucket Island and on her present course would make CA 28 and 29 the following day, the fourteenth. The Lion should not be too disappointed. The boat’s delay making station was occasioned by the successful Cyclops diversion; and now also by the heavy sea state that 123 was encountering as the DR line showed her approaching Long Island. By midnight beginning the fourteenth, owing to mounting combers, Hardegen had to reduce power to both ahead half. Still, to look on the good side, there was no sign of a battle group to meet him—no destroyers or patrol craft. And nothing was flying. The night was his.
At 0448, as though to say that the United States welcomed him, Montauk Point Lighthouse sent out a friendly beam ahead to starboard. Barth had already taken a reading on its radio beacon signal: one dash, one dot, and two dashes for sixty seconds, then silent for 120. Hardegen corrected to a slightly more northerly course so as to pass about fifty miles south of the light, the easternmost navigational aid on Long Island. As he did so the sea state improved and visibility extended to ten miles. Hardegen surveyed the horizon from the salt-caked bridge. It was encouraging to discover that there was no blackout. The Americans were gracious hosts. Lacking charts for the coastal waters, he took heart that he could rely on shore lights to lead him from point to point. At 0724 (0024 ET), just before a band of fog descended cutting visibility to 2-4 miles, a lookout sighted moving lights at approximately four thousand meters to port ahead on a near-reciprocal course, bows on. Hardegen ordered the engines slow ahead while he and the lookouts kept a wary watch for the vessel now hidden in the gauze. This could be a destroyer or some other type U.S. Navy antisubmarine vessel, he thought. Keeping his hand close to the alarm bell he worried that he had very little water under him in case he had to dive. It was impossible to know the depths ahead without coast charts, but his soundings currently showed sixty meters. It was not much, and the water was certain to shoal as he approached the harbor channel. These were tight quarters for a U-boat. Now the black loom of the ship to port suddenly came sharply into view—and with all its lights and lanterns ablaze. Hardegen could not believe it. The vessel was clearing New York Harbor as though peace had been declared!
Operation Drumbeat Page 28