Operation Drumbeat

by Michael Gannon

  Asking Kaeding to remain on top, Hardegen righted the boat on a course that took them slightly away from the shoreline and its deceptive sirens. Chastened by his near disaster, he determined to be more careful about lights, which now increased in number and density as he approached on starboard the more populated Rockaway Beach. To port ahead he began to make out the low, thin peninsula of Sandy Hook, which juts north from the New Jersey shore into the Lower Bay.

  “This is getting dangerous, Herr Kaleu,” Kaeding said as he reported the depth readings from below. “We just went from twenty-seven meters to seventeen.”

  “Both ahead slow,” Hardegen told the helmsman. For the first time he worried about grounding. The big steamers knew the traffic lanes that avoided the sandbanks and mud flats. He knew nothing, and there was no ship entering at that hour that he could follow. Already he was beyond the point where he could submerge deeply enough to escape depth charges, and now he was pushing his chances to have water enough to cover his tower and simply hide, if need be. But this was not the first time he had been audacious beyond reason. With a fatalistic touch he made a note for the KTB: “11-/23 is prepared for immediate self-destruction.”29

  Where was the Ambrose Channel Lightship? The tourist map showed it to be a short distance dead ahead. But in the real world it was not there. And if the lightship had horns or bells in addition to lights these were absent, too. Had the ship been removed? (She had, temporarily, to Cape Cod.) Hardegen came to steerageway at two knots or less. He was almost at the former lightship station but he dared not navigate farther, staggered as he was by the luminous spectacle that unfolded before him. The sky at 330 degrees was ablaze from the incandescence of Manhattan and its neighbor boroughs. The huge silver scrim thrown up by a million lights dazzled the waning moon. Though from where they stood Hardegen and the forward bridge watch could not see any of the city’s tall buildings—their boat was well below the Narrows—they sensed the presence of the skyscrapers and neon-splendored avenues. Having seen the city once up close, Hardegen could appreciate better than anyone else on board the feat that they had just accomplished: they were an enemy force on the very front doorstep of the greatest city in the world. Later that year he would attempt to describe the moment on paper: “I cannot describe the feeling with words, but it was unbelievably beautiful and great. I would have given away a kingdom for this moment if I had had one. We were the first to be here, and for the first time in this war a German soldier looked out upon the coast of the U.S.A.”30 He wondered what form the life of the city was taking at that hour, 2200 (10:00 P.M.) Eastern Time. Were the Broadway shows just letting out? Were the jazz clubs just getting started? Were the newsboys hawking the last editions—or the first? In his imagination he fantasized how clever it would be to walk around Times Square and tip his cap to passers-by.

  The moment was as poignant as it was triumphant, for it seemed a shame to have to bring harm to this place, so evocative of man’s ingenuity and style. At the same time the city irritated because its lights glowed while Germany’s were darkened. Didn’t the Americans know there was a war on? Their arrogance was beginning to get under his skin when he looked around at the other members of the bridge watch and found them gazing with stupefaction and thrill at the same scene. For the moment, against all rules, the lookouts peered in the same one direction, their glasses hanging unused against their chests. What need was there for magnification? Hardegen decided to let them have this experience; they could describe it later to their mates below. And call Tolle up with his camera and fast film. He opened the tourist map and took bearings. Due north was Rockaway Beach, many separate incandescent filaments that had coalesced into a tight necklace of pale yellow lights. Farther on, slightly to the left, was Coney Island. There he saw automobile lights moving about and two tall structures, some kind of tower and a Ferris wheel (the 303-foot-high Parachute Jump and Wonder Wheel), silhouetted against the sky-glow backdrop. Behind Coney Island, it appeared, was Brooklyn. And that must be Staten Island ahead in the distance at about 280 degrees, with a vertical string of red lights that indicated a radio tower (WOR) beyond. Dead ahead and close was the tip of Sandy Hook, protruding from New Jersey and forming the southern cusp of the Lower Bay. A prominent navigation light defined its thin northern tip.

  Putting the lookouts back on search duty, he wondered briefly, would he and his men ever get out of here alive? New York was widely known to have major naval installations. U.S. Navy warships had to be around somewhere. If there was a picket line or battle group to fight him he should start seeing it now. Would the enemy descend on his boat and tear it to pieces? Or was his visit a total surprise? Or was the U.S. Navy incompetent—or negligent? He had no way of knowing. He resolved to stand his water. He had come this far. He would not leave until he had found a target, a sizable target, not the little boats that the lookouts were now identifying to port and starboard. The water was aswarm with them: fishing trawlers, tugs, and pilot boats scurrying from point to point on their private missions, like so many water ants. Hardegen wondered, did these boats see J23? Some passed very close. Did they take her for a stationary barge? Or did they see her for what she was, a submarine, and say simply, “She’s one of ours”? Since they all sailed on different courses it seemed that the harbor approaches at this point were mine-free. Past Sandy Hook in the Lower Bay there might be mine fields, even nets, but the crowded water directly around him seemed safe. He lay to where he was to see if larger fish also swam the night waters.

  But none appeared. The east-west approach route was empty of large vessels. Perhaps the Navy or Port Authority had stopped all merchant traffic temporarily in the wake of the Norness sinking. Freighters and tankers steaming north and south on the coastwise lanes might have been diverted to other ports. If so, Hardegen could be wasting time sitting here at Ambrose station, and inviting trouble besides. He leaned to the voice pipe: “Helmsman, come to one zero zero, both ahead one-third.” He would retrace his movements and get outside New York to the Jersey shore. And so, as Hardegen went below and von Schroeter took the conn, 123 steamed east away from the metropolis, past the Long Island landmarks she had steered by earlier—East Rockaway Inlet, Long Beach, a lighted tower east of Jones Inlet, Great South and Mastic Beaches, Moriches Inlet, Shin-necock Inlet—when instead of the forward lookouts sighting a target, as von Schroeter might have expected, one of the stern watch, at exactly 0840 (0140 ET), called out, “Herr Leutnant, steamer lanterns astern!” Von Schroeter wheeled around with his 7 x 50s. Sure enough, there was a vessel following them out of the approaches. So east-west traffic was moving after all. If they had waited at Ambrose station they would have had this morsel within sight of the city itself. But better here than nowhere. “Commander to the bridge!”

  Hardegen followed the point with his glasses. Yes, a ship, a tanker to judge from its beam and masts, a big one, clearing port bows-on, with peacetime lighting. “Both ahead slow, starboard twenty.” He would make a gradual turn and wait for the target on a heading of zero degrees. “UZO to the bridge, steady up on zero, make four knots.”

  Hoffmann took his position and estimated the target’s course at 96 degrees, speed at ten-eleven knots, range closing at three thousand meters. He had her clearly in the UZO. What a sight she was outlined against the now-faint city glow! On she came right into his barrels, 10,000 GRT and deep in the water with a full belly. Hoffmann asked the helm for a lateral shift. “Come to zero one four.” The steamer’s lanterns gave a good position check. With 123 well forward of the target’s beam, with known course and speed and perfect track angle, this one would be by the book.

  “Flood Tube One. Depth setting two-point-five. Speed ten-point-five, range nine hundred, angle on the bow Green twenty.” Von Schroeter and Fuhrmann both confirmed, “Folgen!” Hoffmann aimed for the bridge.

  “Range eight hundred … seven hundred eighty … seven hundred fifty—Los!”

  The pneumatic jolt in Tube 1 was felt slightly on the bridge. Von S
chroeter on the Vorhaltrechner called up the running time: fifty-eight seconds. Hardegen was confident that they had a perfect solution and launch. In the near minute’s time of run he allowed himself the luxury of hoping that the fireworks would be seen as far away as Manhattan, although that was doubtful. Even here, some twenty-seven miles south of the Hamptons, he could not see the shore.

  WHACK!

  From the aft edge of the tanker’s bridge a violent detonation blew yellow and red flame mixed with black oil, water, and ship’s parts two hundred meters into the sky. With bright fire licking the night that high the U-boat’s field of vision was illuminated as though it was day and one could read a newspaper by the torch’s light. On the tanker itself the bridge burned fiercely, which to Hardegen meant no radio calls were going out, while all around the wounded frame falling fireballs turned the water into steam. The hull, which had slowed its way and listed to starboard where it had been holed, clung to the reddened surface on an otherwise even keel. Through the glasses Hardegen saw crewmen running to man a gun on the stern deck. This ship needed another hole and fast because 123 was starkly visible in the flame light from the bridge. Better give it a quick death. Hoffmann readied stern Tube Five. At 0959 he launched from eight hundred meters directly at the engine room of the now stationary vessel. After forty-five seconds the hull erupted in another fire column that flowered into a black mushroom cloud. Broken amidship, the tanker now went down fast and hard by the stern, which settled on the bottom in fifty-four meters of water while the bow remained awash at an angle of about 30 degrees, some of its deck gear carrying away and sliding overside. Hardegen claimed 10,000 GRT in his Schussmeldung and made the sarcastic comment: “The Americans had recalled some of their light ships. So it was a good thing that my wrecks were partly sticking out of the water. Otherwise how would other ships find the harbor? We had carefully laid a ‘buoy line’ for them.”31

  The tanker was Coimbra, British, 6,768 GRT, 422.8 feet long with a sixty-foot beam and a capacity of eighty thousand barrels of oil. Like Norness she had been built by a German yard, in this case Howaldtswerke AG, of Kiel. The captain and thirty-five of the crew were killed, six were wounded.32 On the south shore of Long Island many residents saw the funeral pyre from their homes and alerted local authorities, including the police chiefs of Quogue and Hampton Bays as well as the Coast Guard, whose Quogue station later informed the press that one of its patrol planes had sighted survivors in a dory and on a raft about twenty-three miles off Shinnecock Inlet and had dropped food and whiskey to them. Coast Guard rescue vessels went out into the rough sea that was whipped by a cold northeast wind so severe that fishing boats remained in port. One boat from the Long Beach station was forced to return by a broken propeller blade. At 90 Church Street, Admiral Andrews refused to confirm the sinking, stating that he had “no information.”33 When at 1600 (ET) on the sixteenth the Navy Department in Washington announced that Coimbra, flying the flag “of a United States ally” had been observed “in a sinking condition” off Long Island, Andrews’ ESF headquarters continued to insist that it had “no information.”34 An examination of the ESF war diary shows that it possessed that information by 0830 and in more detailed form by 1045 on the fifteenth: “Ship reported awash at eight-thirty hours, sixty-one miles from Ambrose Light, ninety-six degrees true, is torpedoed British tanker Coimbra. “35 Why Andrews refused to confirm the sinking even after Washington’s announcement is not explained in the records. Main Navy’s communique warned that the U-boat menace on the coast was “increasingly serious.”36

  That was certainly Hardegen’s intention, to be increasingly serious, as he withdrew from the Coimbra hulk at 1100 (CET) on a due-south course of 180. He had done what he had come to do in New York waters. He had humiliated the United States at its very front door. He had avenged his frustrations at Freetown. He had spilled tons of Allied oil and taken three bottoms out of the sea bridge. Somewhat to his surprise, but certainly to his pleasure, he had shown that the U.S. Navy was a paper fleet and that its commanders were either incompetent or negligent, or both. With six eels left he would exact still more tribute from the enemy. Like an unsated leopard he moved away from the last carcass in search of new prey. The southerly heading would take him along the New Jersey coast to Delaware Bay. He would stay on the surface as long as he could before daybreak two hours ahead. The sky was overcast and the water choppy. Eins Zwei Drei began to feel the sea again, ploughing and pitching at three hundred RPM. At 1410, shortly after sighting a fishing boat to starboard in the first gleam of the rising sun, Hardegen submerged on a course of 230 and told the officers that they would stay down for the day. Not until 2400, ending 15 January (1700 ET the fifteenth), did he surface at dusk. But no sooner did the foam run off the bridge and the lookouts take their positions when one of them spied a small shadow to port against the evening sky. ALARMMM! An aircraft had intercepted their course just as they surfaced. Hardegen saw it turn toward them just as, last man down, he reached for the hatch cover. “All hands forward!” he yelled from the ladder to Kaeding. “Hard angle down!” It seemed to take forever to get below the surface. Finally they heard the last of the choppy seas against the tower and the LI Schulz announced: “Ten meters and descending.”

  “Hold her at thirty meters, Chief,” Hardegen ordered, “we don’t know how deep it is here. I don’t want to hit bottom nose first.” The tower was under but their swirl would still be visible to the pilot. How had he sighted them in the darkness? Was it marine phosphorescence?

  POW! POW! POW! POW!

  Four bombs exploded to starboard but far to starboard. Bad aiming, Hardegen thought, the Yankees still had a lot to learn. “Port 10, half ahead.” He moved to be farther away yet from the second run. He waited. Ten minutes went by. Twenty. There was no second run. The pilot must have expended his full load on the one attack. But he surely would have called in other aircraft which would be on the scene shortly because of the proximity of land. And, no doubt, he would have vectored destroyers to their position. That is, unless the pilot was not really certain that he had seen a U-boat and was simply bombing away at anything that looked like one.

  “Chief, come to periscope depth and give me the sky scope.” At fourteen meters the wide-angle observation scope came hissing up from its well. Hardegen adjusted the focus and looked slowly around the horizon. He saw nothing except sea and clouds. “Chief,” he hollered down from the tower, “prepare to surface, but keep her heavy, decks awash. Lookouts to the tower. Stand by, gun crews. Surface!”

  At 0042, with the roar of air blowing out the diving tanks, 123 broached the Jersey waters just enough for the bridge to be exposed and ready for a quick return underwater should that be necessary. Hardegen and the lookouts leaped above. A 7 x 50 sweep showed nothing. They peered intently toward shore seeking the narrow shadows of oncoming destroyers or patrol craft. There was nothing. “Anything on the wireless, Puster?” Rafalski called back that all he was getting was six-hundred-meter traffic from the Hydrographie Institute in New York declaring the area around Sandy Hook a danger zone until 31 January. So, Hardegen concluded, the air attack had been a fluke. There was no organized resistance here at all.

  He was correct. The one errant bombing that evening would be the only military attack he would experience during the entire American patrol.

  The ESF diary for 16 January listed this belated attack and one other on an unidentified target. They were the only attacks made to that date on the known submarine “menace” in U.S. waters: “1000-2100. Numerous contacts with submarines by Army planes, Navy planes and ZNPs [blimps]. Bombs dropped by an Army plane and by the K-G [blimp]. Results unknown.”37 To date one lone vulnerable U-boat had rampaged on the U.S. littoral unopposed except by one hapless bomber that stumbled upon it surfacing (and at dusk, which was not the normal flying time) and dropped as many bombs, and with the same effect, as another Army bomber had dropped against the American destroyer USS Trippe weeks before. So far U.S. defenses had expended
about as much munitions against the enemy as they had against themselves. The residents of Long Island bungalows who walked their beaches finding encrustations of oil, life preservers, timbers, ropes, and other grim testaments to war’s astonishing close presence might well have wondered, Where was the Navy? How could this have happened? If they had been privy to secret Navy orders, which of course they had not, they could have asked the more telling question: Where were Admiral Bristol’s twenty-one Support Force destroyers that had been stationed on the coast precisely to prevent this?

  The twenty-one destroyers had done other things. Some stayed in port, some went off for training, and some went back on convoy escort seeking a distant danger rather than the one that was already on their plates. Taking the diversion to escort duty first, it would seem that Vice Admiral Royal Eason “Budge” Ingersoll was the immediately responsible person for that decision. At Newport two weeks earlier Ingersoll had broken his flag as CINCLANT, replacing Admiral King, at the mizzen of the frigate USS Constellation, the oldest ship in the Navy. Described as short, sandy-haired, saturnine, Indiana gothic, unassuming, publicity shy (he had his magazines delivered to “Mr. Ingersoll”), a piano player and stamp collector, Ingersoll had served thirty-seven years in nearly every commissioned post the Navy had to offer, both ashore and afloat, including most recently deputy chief of Naval Operations under Admiral Stark, from 24 July 1940 to assumption of CINCLANT. In that last assignment he had to have been aware of King’s decision to reassign Support Force (Task Force Four) destroyers to their East Coast home bases because of “the imminent probability of submarine attack in that area.”38

  On 5 January an order went out from Main Navy that U.S. Marines in Iceland and British forces in Northern Ireland were to be relieved by U.S. Army troops and that these were to be taken across the Atlantic in ten transports escorted by a task force consisting of battleships, cruisers, carriers, and destroyers. The troop convoy was designated AT 10 and the escort Task Force 15. On the following day Ingersoll directed Rear Admiral Alexander Sharp, commander, Battleship Division Five, to command the task force. Specifically, Ingersoll ordered that the movement “will proceed from New York on January 15, 1942.” As the CINCLANT Administrative History (1946) records: “To supply enough destroyers he [Ingersoll] had borrowed from Commander Destroyer and from Admiral Bristol.”39 So, on 14 January, the day U-123 was blowing up Norness, U.S. destroyers May-rant, Rowan, Trippe, and Wainwright from Norfolk, Roe from Newport, and Gwin and Monssen from Boston were leisurely assembling at New York for the departure of AT 10. None of them sortied in search of Norness’ attacker. On 15 January, the day U-123 was blowing up Coimbra, U.S. destroyers Livermore from New York, Charles F. Hughes from Boston, and Lansdale, Ludlow, Ingraham, and Hilary P. Jones from Casco Bay were joining up for the same mission.40 Thus thirteen battle-ready destroyers were vacuumed in a flash from the area where they were most needed. Amazingly, U-123 did not encounter some of them on their passages. With a convoy forming and departing in the very harbor off which he operated, it is astonishing that Hardegen did not bump into some element of it. Even apart from the question, Should destroyers be diverted from what King called their “essential” assignment for this purpose at this particular moment, there is the disturbing one, Why would any commander send troop transports with their precious human cargoes directly into known U-boat waters? (The Navy was not sure how many “raiders” were operating outside the harbor.) Fortunate indeed were the twenty-two thousand Army troops whose transports happened not to cross the UZO of U-123. And reckless were the commanders who sent them directly into harm’s way.