Operation Drumbeat

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by Michael Gannon


  Hoffmann affixed the UZO and began calling data to the tower. It quickly became obvious that this was not a warship but a tanker or freighter—what kind was not immediately apparent although the lookouts scoured its silhouette for clues. Hardegen now swung to a southerly heading that would bring 123′s course at right angles to the target’s bearing. “Helmsman,” he ordered, “come left to two-eighteen, engines slow ahead, make four knots.” To Hoffmann he said, “That should give you about an eighty to eighty-five track.” He raised his glasses to study the target ship now materializing in more distinct form. “It’s a tanker. Number One. A huge one. Two torpedoes. Aim for bridge and aft mast. Permission to launch at eight hundred and seven hundred.”

  Hoffmann refined his numbers as 123 closed on the line of sight range: “Target’s course zero-nine-six, speed ten, angle on the bow Red (port) nineteen.” From below von Schroeter called back confirmation of a solution on the Vorhaltrechner, and the forward torpedo room sang out, “Folgen!” Tubes 1 and 4 were flooded. The two G7es they contained were gyro set for Mehrfach, or multiple launch. At 0835 (0135 ET) on an eight-second interval Hoffmann released the two eels: Los!… Los! The first was calculated to impact at forty-five seconds. Hardegen cautioned the lookouts to continue sweeping all quadrants lest a warship be guarding the tanker. He hoped there was none. If there was one, he would have to take it on since he was sure that he lacked sufficient diving depth to avoid Wabos. At forty-five seconds—nothing. Then, seconds later, WHACK! One violent detonation caused /23′s frames to shudder.

  Both eels had been set for four meters’ depth. Since the second hit exactly where it had been aimed, at the aft mast, Hardegen concluded that the first had run deep: G7s had a tendency to do that; in the future he would set for 2.5 and 3. Now he watched as a fifty-meter-high flame column turned into a black, sinister mushroom cloud 150 meters high, and the fog-streaked sky took on an eerie orange cast. The tanker’s hull sagged a little aft and listed to starboard, but it did not burn. The masts bent and the radio antennas fell crazily on their sides, but close as they were to shore they successfully carried an emergency call that Fritz Rafalski intercepted on the forty-one-meter band: sos HIT BY TORPEDO OR MINE 40 MILES WEST OF NANTUCKET LIGHT SHIP X NORNESS.1 Hardegen told Rafalski to look up Norness. The first torpedo if launched on time would have taken out the W/T house. Too bad it missed. And now this: The ship was not sinking. He maneuvered off for a second launch. Stern Tube 5, depth of run three meters, time 107 seconds: WHACK! Just where he wanted it, below the bridge. Another tall flame and flowering cloud. But, after a few minutes it appeared that the only effect of the second explosion, apart from silencing the wireless, was to set the ship back on an even keel! Because of their inner compartmentation, tankers had been known to make port safely with large holes in their hulls. Hardegen had Hoffmann ready Stern Tube 6. At 0902 hours that eel failed to explode. A miss on a stopped target was not possible! The eel must have run deep, despite being set for three meters.

  Yet one more torpedo, this time from Forward Tube 2, sped toward the smoking target at 0924. Five torpedoes—what a waste! thought Hardegen. But he could not allow this prize to be towed to a nearby harbor. After twenty-six seconds: WHACK! Now, at last, the target ship collapsed and went to her knees. Making water fast by the stern, she raised her dark bow to the sky as though in supplication, then descended noisily in that position, bouncing her stern on the bottom and leaving the bow exposed for thirty meters of its length. If Hardegen needed any demonstration of how shallow the sea had become, he had only to contemplate the head of this dying giant, whose lifeboats milled around her in confusion. He gave a new course and went below to compose his KTB entry, which ended: “Continue toward Ambrose Channel.” That was the dredged channel into New York Harbor itself, as shown on the tourist map. Obviously a large body of shallow and dangerous water lay ahead before he reached the channel. Alarm diving would no longer be possible, that is, with any expectation of protection, and travel underwater was precluded by the unknown nature of the bottom with, Hardegen assumed, numerous banks and shoals. Eins Zwei Drei would have to go in at night, on the surface the whole distance, straight down the throat of harm’s way. Twice now Hardegen had thrown down the gauntlet, with Cyclops and Norness. If the enemy wanted to come out and fight, now was the time to show his fists. The U.S. Navy had all the advantage. The farther 123 penetrated toward the shoaling harbor approaches the more vulnerable—but feisty—she became.

  Norness was a modern diesel single-screw motor tanker built in 1939 by a German yard, Deutsche Werft AG, of Hamburg (No wonder, Hardegen mused when he looked at Lloyd’s, she took so long to go down). At 9,577 GRT, 494-feet long, with a 65-foot beam, she was owned by a Norwegian company, Tanker Corporation, which had moved its offices to New York after the German conquest of Norway, and sailed under Panamanian registry. The U.S. Navy Bureau of Ships had just two months before issued the ship one four-inch fifty-caliber gun and four thirty-caliber machine guns.2 Her forty-man crew was Norwegian. At 0135 Eastern Time on the fourteenth, while at 40°28’ north, 70°45’ west, or sixty miles southeast of Montauk Point, as twenty-five-year-old seaman Sverre Sandnes on the wheel was steering a course for Nantucket Lightship, a torpedo struck hard on the port side. The violent shock toppled men from their feet and tumbled others from their bunks. A shower of oil from the ship’s cargo of petroleum in bulk splattered the exterior deck and tackle. In his pajamas, Captain Harold Hansen grabbed a cap and overcoat and raced to the deck to survey the damage. A lookout yelled that he could see a U-boat maneuvering to port. Hansen, who at first thought he had struck a U.S. Army mine, now realized that the U-boat might strike again. Deciding not to use his guns but to concentrate effort on saving lives he ordered Abandon Ship. The oil-slicked tackle made the task difficult. Sandnes and a pump man named Kaare Reinertsen worked together lowering Number 1 boat when the oil-drenched lines slipped from their hands and the boat fell to the water, where it capsized. Reinertsen went under and was not seen again. Sandnes grabbed a hove line thrown to him by Anton Slettebarg but repeatedly, while the waves beat at him, it slipped through his oily hands. Finally he managed to hang on long enough to be pulled back on board, where he and Slettebarg, the latter with a jacket, pair of bedroom slippers, and prized gold watch, made for another boat. Sandnes described the water: “Was damn cold.”

  Captain Hansen and seven men succeeded in lowering the ship’s one motorboat, only to discover on reaching water that the engine did not run. The men paddled with their hands to get away from the stricken vessel. Twenty-four men made it safely into a lifeboat and six found refuge on a raft. Chief Engineer Henry Danielson, who had survived a torpedoed ship in the North Sea during the last war, had slept fully clothed except for shoes and hence was better prepared than most, who were half-dressed or in their underwear, to face the wind and spray. “Wind was blowing and was cold like hell!” he said later. Twenty-one-year-old Paul Georgsen, who had fallen into the water while attempting to enter the first lifeboat and had scrambled back on board ship, searched the compartments for a white-haired mongrel puppy named Pete that he had bought in Buenos Aires five months earlier. He found the pup shaking and whimpering in the messroom. In that condition Pete had no chance to survive a cold lifeboat, he decided. “So I said good-bye to him, then brained him on the deck,” he said later in a choked voice. One more life would be lost. Seventeen-year-old oiler Egil Bremseth, the youngest on board, who was still standing on the deck when the second torpedo hit, was blown off to his death.

  From Captain Hansen’s motorboat the men could see in the gloom the U-boat that had attacked them as it half-circled the dying Norness. At one point it came so close that they could hear the “guttural voices” of the Germans. Fearful that the U-boat might shoot at them with machine guns they crouched low in the boat. Third Officer Oivind Ask would later report, however, that the U-boat made no attempt to shoot any of the survivors. During the night and morning hours the lifeboats and raft became separa
ted. The men suffered terribly from the cold. Those in Hansen’s boat had to bail constantly to keep their tiny boat afloat, but the activity helped keep them warm. They hoisted a peajacket on an oar and hoped that it would be seen by someone since they were close to shore. Indeed, as Hansen would say later, “Nobody was expecting a submarine so close in American waters. I think we are just as safe there as in New York Harbor.”3 The survivors would drift for half the day, however, without anyone knowing of their plight. (Nowhere in the records is there any explanation why Norness’s SOS on the forty-one meter band received no practical response. Nor is there any evidence that it was even received except by U-123.) The men with Officer Ask were confident that they would be rescued. They sang songs to keep up their spirits, including a sea chantey, “Hej á há jungman Jansson!” and the American “Jingle Bells.”

  Finally, twelve hours after Norness went bow up, a fishing trawler out of New Bedford, Massachusetts, named Malvina D happened to sight Hansen’s boat. At first thirty-two-year-old skipper Magnus Isaksen, on his first voyage as captain, thought that the boat was a floating log. When he neared the object he saw what it was and immediately hove to. The husky blond survivors, half-frozen and exhausted, had to be helped on board; one of them, Trygen Merkesdal, had a broken kneecap. Isaksen wrapped them in blankets, fed them hot coffee, and made for New Bedford. He recounted later that Hansen and crew had little to say other than that they had been sunk by a U-boat. They simply seemed glad to be alive. It might have occurred to Isaksen to ask himself as he sped home, where was the U.S. Navy?

  Some of the Navy was taking life slow and easy these days. It was good for a destroyer crew to have the pressure off. Home port, a little liberty, late-hour rising, routine training, back by supper. This was better duty than escort of convoy. On the morning of 14 January USS Ellyson (DD 454), flagship of DesRon 10, was moored starboard side to East Dock at Torpedo Station, Newport, on Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, with six doubled six-inch lines out fore and aft. Boiler Number 2 was lit for auxiliary use. At 0800 the skipper, Lt. Comm. John B. Rooney, decided that it was a good brisk day for a little peacetime steaming, to noplace in particular, just around the patch and do a little test torpedo firing in the process. The wind was southwest by south, force 5; the temperature was expected to be forty-two degrees Fahrenheit by 1100 and the visibility thirty-five miles under cloudy skies. So the engine room lighted fires under Number 3 boiler while the executive officer handled the morning paperwork. Two men were absent over leave since 10 January. The Condition 2 watches needed assigning. The general mess inspected as to quantity and quality 110 gallons of milk fresh from Aquidneck Dairy, 600 pounds of bread from Ward Baking Company, and 60 pounds of cottage cheese from T. J. Murphy. At 1102 Ellyson made preparations for getting under way. At 1110 she cut in all boilers on the main steam line. At 1127 she was under way, steaming on various courses and at various speeds, the captain conning, the navigator on the bridge. After passing through the entrance nets Ellyson came to course 220, changed to full speed, twenty knots, 188 RPM. (By this time Norness’s crew had been in the water ten hours.) At 1156 Ellyson changed to flank speed, twenty-five knots, 255 RPM. At 1153 she changed course to 155 and made daily inspection of magazines and smokeless powder samples. Conditions normal. At 1200 she was steaming as before—until a radio call came in that sent the exec to the speaker system: “This is not a drill! This is not a drill! General Quarters! General Quarters! All hands man your battle stations!” A naval patrol plane had sighted the near-perpendicular bow of Norness and the remaining lifeboat and raft. Newport ordered Ellyson to pick up the survivors. It seems not to have occurred to anyone at Newport that Norness might have been torpedoed by a U-boat, despite the fact that Admiral Bristol commanding CONVOYESCORTS WEST LANT, which included Ellyson, was an addressee of the exact attack warning issued two days previous. Missing from the orders sent to Ellyson was: “Seek out the enemy and engage.”

  At 1324 Ellyson sighted the lifeboat and took on board its twenty-four men. She then commenced zigzagging and searched for the raft. Not finding it but sighting the pointed hulk of Norness, she turned back toward Newport with her freight of shivering survivors.4 A Coast Guard cutter, Argo (WPC-100), later found and rescued the men on the raft. At the Tanker Corporation Office in New York a spokesman stated that the Navy had forbidden the disclosure of any information about Norness’s port of origin (New York) or destination (Halifax). For their part, Navy spokesmen observed with clinical detachment, “The leisurely attack on the Norness followed the same pattern as that employed in the sinking of a ship earlier in the week about 160 miles off the coast of Nova Scotia, with the loss of ninety lives.”5 This was, of course, Cyclops. The Navy’s matter-of-factness about the sinking contrasted with the public’s alarm, best represented by the full-page New York Times headline and lead the next day: “TANKER TORPEDOED 60 MILES OFF LONG ISLAND: The Battle of the Atlantic flared within 150 miles of New York City yesterday.”6 But after describing the grim details of the Norness “tragedy,” the Times found comfort in the fact that there was a “powerful and numerous fleet of submarine chasers operated by the United States Navy on constant patrol” that made the German U-boat venture “extremely hazardous.”7

  On the fourteenth floor at 90 Church Street, the Times account of Eastern Sea Frontier’s “powerful and numerous” force no doubt provided a few sardonic chuckles. The ESF staff were bone-tired from their lengthy vigil. They had been on alert of one kind or another since 7 December. Lt. Richard (“Dick”) Braue’s son Richard (Rick) remembers how on that Sunday afternoon he and his father were tossing a football in the yard of their home on Green Avenue in Middlesex, New Jersey, while half listening to a football game on the radio. Suddenly the lieutenant froze on hearing something, and the ball thrown by nine-year-old Rick hit him in the chest and bounced away. Lieutenant Braue raced into the house, changed into his uniform, and drove off. The family would not see him again for three months, after which he returned for a few days and told Rick and his sister Margaret (Peggy) that he had been sleeping on his desk and that he was in communication with “someone named King.”8 Now on 15 January, with the alert upgraded to Condition Red, Braue, the most junior member in rank of the small defense team at ESF headquarters, watched the drama developing on the Operations wall chart. He may well have wondered why Admiral Andrews did not send out every ship and plane he had at his disposal, however few and inadequate, to meet the enemy. Perhaps the other, more senior, staff officers wondered the same: Captain John T. G. Stapler, USN (Ret.), chief of staff, and five lieutenant commanders: Louis C. Farley, USNR, Operations; P. P. Bassett, USNR, War Plans and Army Liaison; F. W. Osburn, Jr., USN (Ret.), Routing; R. G. Payne, USNR, Air; and a recent addition, C. F. McNamara, USNR. The ESF war diary plainly acknowledges receipt of the attack warning, on 13 January: “Submarines may be expected off our coast at any time. At least four were known to be about 300 miles east of Nantucket Light on January 12, and are probably proceeding westward.”9 The most that Andrews’ command did to repel the aggressor was to close the ports of Boston, Portsmouth, and Portland at 0012 on the 14th(!). Hardegen struck Norness an hour later.

  Standard tactical doctrine since the time of turn-of-the-century American naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan held that in the face of enemy attack one ordered everything afloat into the fray. Whether or not one’s own forces were equal to the enemy’s was immaterial. The accepted doctrine demanded that when one was defending a position with inferior forces only an aggressive response was in order. “From such a position,” Mahan stated, “there is no salvation except by action vigorous almost to desperation.”10 Desperate, certainly, but correct, had been the action of the three outgunned British cruisers Ajax, Achilles, and Exeter, which engaged the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee and brought her to self-destruction at the River Plate in December 1939. It was slow, fabric-covered biplanes (British Swordfish torpedo bombers) that had crippled the rudders of the mighty Bismarck. In that same spirit Ma
jor James P. Devereux’s 500 U.S. Marines at Wake Island had driven off a strong seaborne Japanese invasion fleet before, unreinforced, they had to succumb. Under that doctrine, too, six months later in the defense of Midway, forty-one ancient, lumbering, outmatched Douglas TBD-1 Devastator torpedo bombers would take off against the most powerful invasion fleet Japan had ever assembled, from which only four would return to their home carriers. The fact that both U.S. actions were futile was beside the point. It was what navies should do, wrote Mahan: The “nation that would rule upon the sea must attack.”11 But Dolly Andrews did not attack. He covered up and waited for the other boxer’s blows. And when Norness went down he simply picked up survivors and sent out a cutter, a minesweeper, a blimp, and a few planes to examine the derelict and report its condition.

 

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