AT 10 could easily have been delayed. There was no pressing urgency for its departure. President Roosevelt wanted the symbolic presence of a U.S. expeditionary force in British Northern Ireland at the earliest possible date. But no impending campaign required the immediate exchange of troops. Indeed, five months later in Operation “Bolero,” the build-up of U.S. forces in Britain for eventual land offensives against the Germans and Italians, COMINCH recognized that there was no great urgency in getting every AT convoy to sea on the exact day scheduled: “This can be varied a day or two either way for convenience or to avoid regular departure dates for security purposes.”41 For AT 10 with thirteen destroyers to depart when it did in the face of a known, route-identifiable enemy attack was akin to a defensive naval force at Hawaii embarking casually on a convoy to the Philippines while the Japanese were launching their attack on Pearl Harbor. It was inflexibility in extremis.
What of the other destroyers assigned to defend the East Coast when Paukenschlag arrived? Most of the remaining eight remained comfortably in port, except for Bristol, which steamed for Casco Bay on the fifteenth for routine duty, and the previously cited Ellyson, which was ordered to New London for “training.”42 These orders probably came from Bristol. Thus the “maximum number” destroyer force that Admiral King had gathered as “essential” to repel the “imminent” submarine attack of the Germans was inert, assigned to training, or dispersed on missions that could have waited a more favorable departure date. Was Ingersoll to blame for these acts of omission and commission? Was Bristol? Of either man it could be said, simply, that he received his sailing orders and he sailed. Yet there was an underlying principle of command laid down by King himself that neither man seems to have observed. As CINCLANT, King promulgated Fleet Policies that his official biographer asserts he held to “then and later.”43 A principal article in the original version dealt with, “Exercise of Initiative”:
If subordinates are deprived—as they now are—of that training and experience which will enable them to act “on their own”—if they do not know, by constant practice, how to exercise “initiative of the subordinate”—if they are reluctant (afraid) to act because they are accustomed to detailed orders and instructions—if they are not habituated to think, to judge, to decide and to act for themselves in their several echelons of command—we shall be in sorry case when the time of “active operations” arrives.44
In a later version he added the instruction, in italics: “Make the best of what you have. “45 (Admiral Dönitz on the other side had offered the same counsel to his own forces.) The King policy would appear to place both Ingersoll and Bristol in positions where they were expected to make independent command judgments according to the circumstances that faced them. Ingersoll, who “exercised complete responsibility for troop convoys,”46 certainly could have delayed AT 10 long enough to meet the German attack and decisively defeat it—a result that Hardegen’s exposure in the New York approaches fairly invited. Bristol, who held responsibility for the disposition of Support Force destroyers not “borrowed” by Ingersoll, certainly could have sent DD’s to face the enemy that was marauding inside his gates. But neither did so.
Does the principle of “initiative of the subordinate” absolve King of personal responsibility for these command decisions? Hardly so, since he was in overall command and in possession at Main Navy of the “big picture”; since he was the one who had initiated the East Coast destroyer defense against the expected U-boat attack, who had every reason to be concerned for its success, and who could have overruled both Ingersoll and Bristol in the disposition and use of their forces. In the event, unaccountably, he did nothing. Even following Norness and Coimbra, he failed to take a single warlike action. On paper, with his Operation Orders and Fleet Policies, King had been impressive; but at the deckplate level “King of the Atlantic” was a dud. Like a faulty torpedo, he failed to detonate. At Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the responsible Army and Navy commanders were relieved of their commands for less evident dereliction.
Admittedly, the U.S. military has not always done well in the first battles of the wars that it has fought, from Long Island in the Revolutionary War, to Bull Run (Union Forces) in the Civil War, to Pearl Harbor and the Kasserine Pass in World War II, to Osan in Korea and the Albany massacre in Vietnam. But in the set-piece engagement presented by Operation Drumbeat the U.S. military chose not to make a battle of it at all. On Ernest King’s desk as commander in chief must lie the final responsibility for this defeat, this embarrassment, this awful loss of blood and treasure, this failed chance to stanch a wound before it hemorrhaged. Tragically for his country, Ernest King’s irresolution in the face of Reinhard Hardegen’s ruthlessness laid America open to the greatest maritime massacre in her history. Where was the King of the previous July—“Destroy hostile forces which threaten shipping of U.S.”—“Threat exists when potentially hostile vessels are actually within sight or sound contact”?47 That King had a chance to bloody Hardegen’s nose and deliver a crushing Drumbeat in reverse. Admiral Dönitz would have been far more cautious thereafter in approaching America’s shores if the eagle had lashed out first and in force. King, who had the opportunity to avert catastrophe, ended by inviting it. He would spend the next six months compensating for it—and dissembling in his excuses for it.
As in the case of the Japanese bombers at Pearl Harbor the success of the Drumbeat strike was not a failure of Intelligence; it was a failure of Operations. At OIC in London Rodger Winn and Patrick Beesly looked at each other with wild surmise. As Beesly told the writer: “We were really staggered.”48
Now, as the third week of January began and Hardegen moved south while Zapp and Folkers reached their stations, the mauling of U.S. and Allied resources at sea were about to reach a crescendo. There was no halting it now. The wolves were marching boldly into the sheepfold. And there was no one with the will to stop them.
9
Where Is the Navy?
North and south for a distance of 120 miles (192 kilometers) a knuckle of Outer Banks guards the Atlantic coastline of North Carolina. Narrow sand reefs broken by bights and inlets, these barrier islands project three major capes into the ocean: Lookout, Fear, and Hatteras, of which Hatteras, the most seaward, poses the greatest danger to the coastwise vessel, for at its apex the warm northbound Gulf Stream collides with descending Arctic currents and creates winds and waves of such savage fury that only the most skilled captain or master can negotiate them. Nor should the wary mariner think that he has escaped harm by eluding the Outer Banks themselves, for reaching miles out from them underwater, like grasping tentacles, are the shoals—restive sand dunes that bear such names as Wimble, Lookout, and the dreaded Diamond.
Since colonial times coastal trade vessels plied this dangerous passage transporting agricultural products and raw materials from southern ports to the Chesapeake and to the manufacturing cities of the Middle Atlantic and New England states. When American commerce expanded and merchant shipping, both sail and steam powered, connected the industrial centers to South America, the West Indies, and the Gulf of Mexico, much larger vessels and many different national flags approached the perils of the Outer Banks. Whether antique or modern, small or large, U.S. or foreign, wary or careless, a great number of ships from 1526 into the twentieth century wrecked fatally in these shoal-fathomed lanes. Many met their doom in storms, others in ordinary sailing across the hazard-strewn bottom. From Cape Fear in the south up to Currituck Beach, the shore sands filled with relics of those disasters: ribbed wooden skeletons of sailing ships and rusted steel winches, funnels, and posts from steamers and tankers. Then, added to the natural perils of this “graveyard of the Atlantic,” German U-boats worked the adjacent waters in 1918 destroying (by torpedo, mine, or driving aground) six tankers, a schooner, a bark, and the Diamond Shoals Lightship.1
Twenty-four years later on 16 January Richard Zapp arrived in the same waters commanding the Paukenschlag IXC boat U-66. Delayed and wearied by the punish
ing gales of early January, and assigned to an area that required steaming farther than Reinhard Hardegen, Zapp and his crew began patrolling in CA 84, just north of the operational squares CA 79 and 87 and DC 12-13 that were outlined in ink as their Attack Area I on the 1870G chart. Like Hardegen, Zapp was late on station for the original January 13 “beat on the kettledrum,” but there was no doubt on his boat that ample target opportunity would soon present itself, since all north-south merchant traffic had to make the turn around Hatteras, where far out to sea to escape the shoals they exposed themselves to manmade danger of the sort that Zapp had in mind. From the south steamed ships deep in the water with cargoes of bauxite from the Guianas and Brazil, vital for the manufacture of aluminum used in aircraft; oil and gasoline from Curacao and Aruba in the Netherlands West Indies, Venezuela, and the Texas ports of Corpus Christi, Houston, and Port Arthur (Great Britain alone consumed four tankers’ worth each day); iron, tin, rubber, concrete, phosphate, lumber, and cotton; not to mention foodstuffs such as winter vegetables, sugar, coffee, and Florida citrus, from which British children received practically their entire daily allowance of Vitamin C. Some vessels entered the Caribbean and U.S. East Coast waters through the Panama Canal from as far away as Bombay, India, with such varied cargoes as manganese ore, sulfuric acid, and wool. Having discharged their “beans, bullets, and black oil,” the coastwise vessels returned south with general cargoes or in ballast to reload, risking again the Carolina shoals that forced them to deeper water away from the saving shore.
On the new moon night of 18 January, a night as black as any that had blanketed U-66′s Feindfahrt to date, in a mild sea with a light wind from astern, Zapp’s boat raised the Winter Quarter Lightship northeast of Diamond Shoals. As she did so the totally darkened form of an approaching northbound tanker moved obscurely, black on black, before the lookouts’ sensitive binoculars. It was close. Zapp estimated three miles. He slowed to seven knots and waited in a bow attack position like a night game hunter sitting without sound or movement in the blind. The target was shoreward of the UZO. Zapp’s number one called out the numbers: target speed eleven knots; range 2,000; angle on the bow, 21. He decided, with Zapp’s approval, on a multiple launch from Tubes 1 and 2. The Vorhaltrechner programmed one G7e on a heading of 282 degrees aimed at the bridge, the other at 283 degrees aimed to hit in the engine room. At 0833 hours (CET) with the range closed to 1800 U-66 entered the Battle of the Water’s Edge. Though the sea was calm and both eels were set at normal depths, one at three meters, the other at four, unaccountably one of them en route to target broached the surface in a splashy jump that had to have been sighted by an alert lookout because the tanker, which had not been zigzagging, seemed suddenly to go hard left rudder, though not with sufficient effect to escape the 122- and 126-second torpedo runs. The first eel slammed into the starboard side forward of the bridge by the foremast and the second, four seconds later, aft of the deckhouse. Zapp’s pupils narrowed before the bright ball of flame that arched over the mortally fractured victim, and he watched amidst the smell of oil and the sound of grinding steel as the forward end twisted off to port amidships and sank from view five minutes after the detonations. Ten minutes more, and the ragged, bleeding stern stump canted to starboard and disappeared, while fierce surface fires spread nearby a quarter mile around the site where ruptured oil tanks had poured their black viscous contents onto the sea. With no identifiable name or colors that Zapp’s lookouts could sight, and the Puster reporting from below that the tanker had gotten off no wireless transmissions that he could hear, it was not possible to identify the kill. Zapp ordered the searchlight played on the lifeboats but he decided not to venture closer to interrogate survivors because of the fires. After twenty minutes he withdrew to resume patrolling and put the success down in his Schussmeldung as simply, “Tanker about 9200 tons.”2
The Allan Jackson, built in 1921, was actually 6,635 CRT. The American-flag single-screw 435-foot-long Standard Oil of New Jersey tanker had departed Cartagena, Colombia, on 11 January with 72,870 barrels of oil bound for an unknown consignee at New York. On a recent southbound passage in December the master, Felix W. Kretchmer, was told at Norfolk, Virginia, that two days before Pearl Harbor, Eastern Sea Frontier headquarters in New York had established “Coastal Sea Lanes” for the protection, in case of war, of coastwise shipping and that he would receive these routing instructions from the United States consul in Cartagena before his next sailing. When Kretchmer called for those instructions, however, the consul stated that he had no knowledge of them.3 On his own Kretchmer decided to black out the ship on the northbound voyage even though, by his departure date, 11 January, there had been no reports of U-boat attacks off the U.S. East Coast. He also made certain that the lifeboats were well equipped with food, water, and signals. No guns had been swung aboard, so his only defense was the night, and he timed his voyage so as to make the turn at Hatteras when the night was blackest. Zigzagging he did not think necessary, since the new moon assured protective cover. Or so he thought. Kretchmer’s crew numbered thirty-five, all Americans save for a Dutchman and a Russian. On the night of 18 January, with most of the off-duty crew turned in and the rest playing cards, Allan Jackson was proceeding at ten knots on a course of 356 degrees true and had reached position 35-47N, 74-20W, or seventy-five miles east of Cape Hatteras, when twenty-five-year-old Second Mate Melvin A. Rand on the bridge sighted the white spray from a broaching torpedo on the starboard side. He yelled the alarm, but before the helmsman had the wheel full over the first of two shattering explosions rocked the bridge. Knocked down, Rand scrambled to the quarterdeck, absorbing as he went the shock waves from the second torpedo, and made for his assigned lifeboat station. When that boat jammed in its skids he jumped overside and swam for his life as surface fires spread rapidly from the ignited cargo. Struggling on the red surface he looked back to see the tanker “fold up like a hinge” and sink in halves, while in the distance the eerie glare of a white searchlight swept the scene intermittently. Finally, after about an hour in the water, where he was repeatedly bumped by fish and bitten hard on one hand, Rand found a lifeboat section called a strong-back and clung to it. He was soon joined by Third Mate Boris A. Vornosoff. The junior third mate, Francis Bacon, swam to the same strongback but, exhausted, could not hold on and drowned.
Captain Kretchmer was sleeping fully clothed (as he advised his officers to do also) in his cabin topside on the forward end of the deckhouse when the torpedoes hit and rolled him from his bunk. The explosions had twisted shut the cabin door, trapping him inside. After struggling futilely with the door and feeling it grow hot from the flames outside, he forced his body through the porthole. As he fell to the boat deck on the lee side, the forward end of the ship sank beneath him and he swam vigorously away from the suction, eventually finding a small round seat from a wooden stool that kept him barely above the water for the next six hours. There had been no opportunity to sound Abandon Ship or to dispose properly of the ship’s wireless codes and confidential papers, though with the ship gone, he hardly had cause to worry about either. Paramount in his mind was staying afloat and awake.
Some of the crew were killed outright in the explosions. Others jumped overside. Some, like Ross F. Terrell, made the correct decision. When the torpedoes interrupted a belowdecks poker game as he held a hot hand with twenty-five dollars in the pot, “Shanghai” Terrell said, “To hell with the money,” and raced for the Number 3 boat. Another crewman in a game on deck made a bad decision, electing to run belowdecks to rescue eighty dollars in a locker. When, later, rescuers found his body floating on the surface, his eighty dollars were intact, not even singed. Chief Engineer Thomas B. Hutchins, by contrast, left behind his upper and lower teeth in exchange for his life. There were clear-headed leaders when there had to be. Boatswain Rolf Clausen took charge of the only serviceable lifeboat, Number 3, the other three being wrecked, surrounded by flames, or jammed in the chocks. Clausen ordered the boat swung out from its skids and t
he boat fell smartly to the water, its lines whistling through the blocks with Clausen and seven others aboard. The water surface around them was dangerously aflame, but the still-functioning discharge from a condenser pump forced the burning oil away as Clausen unhooked the falls, cut the painter, and unlashed the oars. By the time the oars were manned the men saw to their horror that they were being sucked toward the whirling ship’s propeller! With a strength born of the certainty of death if they failed, they bent their backs to the task of oaring for their lives. As the aft section of the ship listed to starboard they could clearly see the tops of the huge blades still grinding away at high revolutions. Pulled inexorably toward this lethal machine by the suction it generated, the men, armed by frenzied desperation, opposed it with human power alone, and at one point, when the blades cut loudly at the wood of the very boat in which they rode and the men cried out in their understandable terror, they pushed, and pushed again, against the tanker’s plating with their oars and somehow cleared the awful screw, their boat carried safely away in the backwash through the conflagration of burning oil astern.
Operation Drumbeat Page 32