Once past the backwash, however, the lifeboat had to make its dangerous way through the flames, from which at one point it rescued the frightened radio operator, Stephen Verbonic. Other crewmen they saw still on deck with their clothes on fire, but instead of throwing themselves into the quenching sea they fell dying where they stood. Clausen kept his oarsmen at their work for more than an hour until, safely past the fires, he raised the lifeboat’s sail. The rigging kept them moving for another three hours, when the men sighted a vessel not far distant and Clausen fired a flare from a Very pistol, and after the flare extinguished he signaled a distress signal in Morse by focusing the beam of a flashlight on the white sail. The answering vessel lay to until morning’s light, when Clausen’s smoke-blackened boatload, the captain on his stool seat, Rand, Vornosoff, and one other—for a total of thirteen survivors out of the ship’s complement of thirty-five—found safe haven. Eight were injured, five seriously.4
The next night Zapp and U-66 were 180 miles east of Hatteras athwart the route of a Canadian ship bound from Montreal to ports in the West Indies and South America. One of five “Lady” ships of the Canadian National Steamship Line, the 7,988-GRT, 419-foot-long, twin-screw, oil-burning liner Lady Hawkins was zigzagging south at fourteen knots through a smooth sea on the moonless night on 19 January with 212 passengers, mostly civilians, including women and children, and a crew of 109, when at about 0135 (ET) she was intercepted by two bright white lights to port. It was U-66 running alongside! The searchlights enabled Zapp to identify the ship for exactly what it was, a Fracht-u. Fahrgastschiff— cargo-passenger liner.5 Zapp then steamed at his highest speed ahead of the ship’s course, swung hard-a-port, and flooded both stern tubes. At exactly 0143 he launched two eels from twelve hundred meters out. Though the Lady Hawkins took emergency evasive maneuvers, both torpedoes found their marks after an eighty-second run, the first exploding in Hold Number 2 forward of the bridge, and the second in Hold Number 3 near the engine room bulkhead. The ship heeled over from the force of the two concussions, and virtually everyone who was on deck at the time was swept overside into the sea. The mainmast toppled with a frightening noise, and all the ship’s lights extinguished. As the stricken hull made water, the passengers and crew groped their way in the darkness down the slanting companionways and decks to the six lifeboats, three of which were seen to get away, the remainder hanging in their davits because of the ship’s list. From the U-boat Zapp watched the victim begin to go down with small fires arrayed along the decks “like fine flowers.”6 After twenty minutes the Lady Hawkins was gone.
For a brief while the three lifeboats remained in sight of each other; then they separated in the darkness, and two boats with their desperate passengers were not seen again. On the third boat fifty-three passengers and twenty-three crewmen were so closely crowded in a craft designed for a maximum of sixty-three they were forced to stand upright, which none minded since their lot was better than that of other men and women who clung to wreckage or swam vainly toward the boat, which had to steer away from them lest it be swamped. The anxiety of the survivors was not lessened when the U-boat cruised within five hundred yards of their bark and illuminated them with a yellow light that was, as one of them described it, “characteristically without glare.” One of the passengers, held tight in her mother’s arms, was a two-and-a-half-year-old girl named Janet Johnson, from Trinidad. Also on board were seventeen Americans, twelve from Saint Joseph, Missouri, all construction workers headed for defense bases in the West Indies; several British Royal Navy, Marine, and foreign service officers; missionary families; and residents returning to their homes in the British West Indies. Chief Officer Percy A. Kelly, of Halifax, to whose seaman’s skills, calm courage, and tact the survivors would attribute their lives, rigged the boat’s sail and dictated the daily regimen, including arrangements whereby some would stand while others would sit to sleep. As the days passed in a seaward lane where, as Kelly knew, there was little traffic, he distributed to each person a daily ration of one biscuit, two ounces of water, and a swallow of condensed milk served in the cap of his flashlight. The Gulf Stream kept temperatures moderate in the daytime, but the nights were chilly. Little Janet, wrapped in a greatcoat, remained amazingly cheerful and lively despite being doused by the continuous salt spray. During one night she ran a fever, and the Chief Officer allotted the tot a spoonful of brandy, which caused her to laugh continuously, with the result, as Kelly said later, that “we were all immensely bucked up.” Their travail in the open boat would last five days. It was an experience, Kelly said, of “bravery and discipline, tears and laughter, alternate hope and despair.” Using the boat’s lantern as a scoop, the construction workers bailed water from the boat, joking with each other about which were the fastest. Mrs. Marian Parkinson, a Canadian missionary en route to Trinidad with her husband, led the group in hymn singing. Her ministry would be called upon in other moments when, to the great grief of all, five men and women, whose strength was unequal to the exposure and the strain, died before rescue. First to go was a seventeen-year-old black crewmember. Next was the ship’s bartender, followed by an elderly man, a woman, and one of the construction workers. As each died Chief Kelly removed the clothing from the body so that it might be worn by another shivering passenger; then he lifted the corpse overside to float off in the waves.
Several times Kelly sighted wisps of smoke in the distance, but they receded from view. Finally, shortly past midnight on Saturday the twenty-fourth a large steamer appeared suddenly no more than two hundred yards away from the lifeboat. Kelly sent up flares, which brought the ship, SS Coamo, of the New York and Porto Rico Line, to their rescue. When debarked at San Juan, Puerto Rico, the survivors numbered 50 of the 212 passengers and 21 of the 109 crewmen. No trace of the other lifeboats was ever found.7 It is not recorded what material losses occurred in Lady Hawkins’ 270,000 feet of bale space for general cargo and 13,000 feet of space for perishables, but the toll in human lives taken by Paukenschlag to date reached over four hundred.
In the last, dark nighttime hours of 16 January Reinhard Hardegen was on the bridge of V-123 pushing south toward Delaware Bay when Puster Rafalski handed up a sheaf of intercepts. According to one, off the six-hundred-meter band, the Barnegat Lightship and the Five Fathom Lightship ahead had been removed and replaced by light buoys. According to another, V-123 had been sunk! The Army Air Force was announcing that the German submarine that had had the impertinence to sink two tankers in the approaches to New York Harbor had itself been sunk by an Air Force bomber.8 So 123 was now a “ghost” submarine! With luck she would soon have the chance to launch a few phantom torpedoes. By 0400 (CET) the boat was approaching Five Fathom Bank, where Hardegen ordered engines dead slow ahead since soundings showed the water depth below the keel shoaling to eight meters. For the next nine hours, in clear sight of the brightly lighted Jersey shore to starboard, he vainly scoured the seaward horizon for ships on the Hatteras-Delaware Bay-New York routes. One lone fishing boat was all he saw. It was another sour-pickle time. At daybreak he decided to steam east to deeper water and bottom out for the day. At 1700 (CET) he submerged to bottom at depth A + 25 (forty-five meters) and waited for the next night’s cover of darkness. For the crewmen who stayed awake the daylight hours were filled with sounds. At their shallow depth, propeller noise from passing ships was clearly audible throughout the boat. At one point for ten minutes’ duration the men heard soundings: one hundred impulses a minute, a ringing, hard tone. Perhaps, they thought, it was an American echo sounder like ASDIC. Hardegen considered that it might be a steamer taking soundings for the entrance to Delaware Bay, but he concluded that that was unlikely both because the pulsing lasted only ten minutes and the visibility upstairs was good. Shortly after the pulsing stopped the U-boat reverberated slightly from a single distant detonation underwater. Curious, Hardegen thought. Was Zapp nearby?
At 0042 (17 January CET) 123 surfaced in the new darkness and headed back to Five Fathom Bank. On the same
station as before, Hardegen waited for a target to happen by. At 0200 (1900 CET) a star shell appeared to starboard. Von Schroeter, the duty watch officer, called the Old Man’s attention to floodlights at Cape Henlopen on the south, or Delaware, side of the entrance to Delaware Bay. Where they stood, eight miles off Wildwood, New Jersey, von Schroeter was impressed by the fact that the cities and towns were brightly illuminated and that he could even see automobiles moving about on the streets and coastal highways.9 Forty-three years later, in an interview, he would remember: “It was a special experience for us to be that close to the American shore, to be able to see the cars driving on land, to see the lights on the streets, to smell the forests. We were that close.”10 At 0635 one of the lookouts spotted a shadow to port, which on closer examination turned out to be a destroyer. As Hardegen noted later in his KTB, “Since I don’t want to start anything in 15-meter depth I moved away to starboard. At 0713 destroyer out of sight.”11 The waiting continued for five hours until 1200, when lookouts sighted moving lights on the water to the north. Eins Zwei Drei began an approach. The narrative of what happened next must come from Hardegen’s own hand, in his KTB and Schussmeldung (shooting report), since he records there that he approached and sank a four-thousand-GRT freighter whose loss is unaccounted for in the official USN lists of vessels sunk. In his comprehensive register of ships sunk or damaged by U-boats, German naval historian Jürgen Rohwer names the vessel sunk by V-123 on this day (17 January), at this time (1304 CET), and at this position (naval square CA 5756) as the 1,932-net-ton American-owned United Fruit steamship San José. But that cannot have been the case, since San José was sunk that night farther to the north off Atlantic City in a “collision of saints” with the Grace Line freighter Santa Elisa (7,600 tons). The collision was attested to and described by the seventy-plus survivors of both ships involved in the incident. San José’s helmsman explained that his vessel was running blind at the time, with running lights only, by permission of the U.S. Navy. Santa Elisa, which burned for six hours, made it to New York Harbor with the assistance of tugboats despite a twenty-foot hole on the port side forward from the water line to the deck.12
Hardegen’s KTB reads as follows:
Approach! A short while later I recognize a freighter of about 4000 GRT, four holds, heavily loaded. It carries only one lantern on its fore mast. The position lamps are turned off. Course 130°, speed eleven knots. Too bad that the sun is coming up. I position myself in front of the target and close the range. Determined to get it, I close to 600 meters and launch my last stern torpedo on a track angle of 90°. After 57 seconds there is a mighty detonation and a huge, pitch-black explosion column. The hit was under the bridge. With its high speed the steamer ran itself under water. When the smoke lifted only the mast tops were still visible and shortly afterwards they disappeared, too. The water depth is 45 meters. We move with top speed to the east because I need more water under the keel during the daylight hours. The ocean is calm and cloudless, so I stay on the surface in order to make my best speed to Cape Hatteras since, according to a wireless intercept, traffic is piling up there.13
In Hardegen’s shooting report the diagram depicting the relative courses of the two vessels, U-boat and target, shows that the torpedo hit on the target’s port side. The accompanying narrative repeats the data in the KTB except to say that the vessel went under in thirty-five seconds(!). There is no mention of survivors in either account. What “ghost” ship this was that was sunk by the “ghost” U-boat is a mystery. Could Hardegen have been mistaken in claiming the sinking? He had been mistaken once before, in the case of Aurania. But that sinking he had not witnessed. This one he did, as also did IWO Hoffmann, who cosigned the shooting report. No notice of a missing ship in the geographical vicinity or of a ship’s failure to make a port of destination in this general time period is on file in the pertinent archives. Is there a wreck at that position, CA 5756, which corresponds to map coordinates 37-50N, 74-10W? The Wreck Information List compiled by the U.S. Hydrographie Office in 1945 contains no unidentified wreck at that or nearby coordinates.14
Another ghost ship stood just over the horizon.
HARDEGEN BLEICHRODT SCHUG [U-86 with Group Ziethen] REPORT SITUATION, BDU-OPS.15 The FT. came into Rafalski’s long-wave receiver (twelve thousand to twenty thousand meters) by way of the Goliath transmitter at Calbe. BdU must have thought 123 was bottoming in shoal water, Rafalski thought as he handed the decrypt to Hardegen sitting on his bunk across the passageway. And why not? At Kernével they knew it was daytime on the U.S. East Coast. Actually, 123 was thundering along on the surface in broad sunlight, in sight of shore, destination Hatteras. It was a bold thing for the Old Man to do because they were proceeding directly past the major U.S. Navy anchorage and air station at Hampton Roads-Norfolk on the Virginia coast. “Too many risks,” Rafalski muttered to himself. Hardegen had shifted the watches so that the best eyes in the crew were on the bridge during the daylight run. Five times in the course of the day the sighting of aircraft forced the boat under. Except for one land plane the aircraft were identifiable USN types: the Consolidated PBY-5 Catalina and the Vought-Sikorsky OS2U-3 Kingfisher. While the good eyes on top kept their coastal sprint safe from discovery and harm, Hardegen drafted ideas for his report to BdU: “Operational Area II normal…area from CA 2849 to 2793 [Long Island to Sandy Hook] free of mines … although area CA 54 [Delaware Bay] has medium air and destroyer patrols it appears free of mines … three tankers and one freighter sunk so far … still have five electric torpedoes … fuel remaining 90 cubic meters … Position CA 8145 [directly alongside Hampton Roads].”16 When this information was put into final form, encrypted, transmitted, and received at BdU together with other Paukenschlag and Ziethen reports, Admiral Dönitz recorded his enthusiastic acknowledgment in the BdU KTB: “Reports from the coast of U.S.A. and Canada show that activities of U-boats can be successful much longer than was expected. Report from U-V23 indicates that this boat has had success far above its expectations.”17 The Lion would have been even prouder of his “unfit for U-boats” Kptlt. Hardegen had he been aware that XJ-123 was on a coastal dash passing Hampton Roads in broad daylight. That was the kind of defiance that Dönitz admired—the defiance that an entire German nation would applaud three and a half weeks thence (11-12 February) when in Operation Cerberus the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau together with the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen broke out of Brest and made their Channel dash through the Strait of Dover under the derelict guns of the Royal Navy. At least the Royal Navy, when belatedly aroused, fought gamely against the dashers. The U.S. Navy let 123 dash splendidly unimpeded.
At 0833 hours (0133 ET) on the eighteenth U-123 stood at the western edge of naval square CA 84, twenty nautical miles due east of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. To port side seaward Hardegen and the lookouts sighted a bright red flash on the horizon, and immediately afterward heard two explosions. The Old Man made a note for his KTB: “That must be U-66.”18 (It was; the victim was Allan Jackson.) Rafalski called up the voice pipe to report a lot of traffic on six hundred meters. Apparently numerous ships had sighted the red glare of the same ship’s fire that J23 watched for forty-five minutes. One of those vessels, surely, would make an appearance in Hardegen’s field of vision. Nearly four hours later at 1210 (CET) the bridge lookouts defined a shadow on the port side. Hardegen studied it for a while and in the first glow of dawn identified it as a tanker. The sun was going to ruin his chances, he knew, as he began a surface approach. Sure enough, the tanker turned suddenly to starboard. He had been spotted. A submerged attack had not been possible because of his distance from the target. Now two more sets of steamer lanterns appeared on opposite courses, but again they were at ranges too long to permit a submerged approach. What bad luck! The sun coming up with three good-size targets concentrated at the same position! Hardegen winced, but he took heart from the fact that these Outer Banks seemed to be great waters for hunting. If there were that many ships today there would likely be as man
y tomorrow—unless they got scared off by the sinking. He ordered Hoffmann: “Come to course nine zero, proceed to deeper water, put the boat on the bottom at A-plus twenty-five.”
U-/23 mounted to the surface at 0046 hours beginning 19 January (CET). As the warm Gulf Stream water ran off the bridge and deck and poured in white torrents through the limber holes, and the dieseis startled the night air with their roar, the Old Man, refreshed by a long day’s sleep, stretched his arms and surveyed an evening custom-made for U-boats: sea state 1, wind from the south-southeast at 2, one-tenth cloud cover, and visibility 14. He headed at both engines full toward Cape Hatteras, fifty nautical miles to the south. In his KTB he noted that the hydrophone had picked up evidence of numerous steamers in that general vicinity: “I want to stay close to the coast at Cape Hatteras. Again it’s starry and the sea is calm. I should get rid of my five torpedoes tonight.”19
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