Operation Drumbeat

by Michael Gannon

  He would get rid of them, in the most violent night of his career.

  At 0304 lookouts sighted a northbound light to starboard between 123 and the Outer Banks just north of Oregon Inlet (which was shown on the 1870G chart). As he closed range Hardegen identified it as a freighter, about 4,000 GRT with four holds, heavily loaded, course 340, speed nine-ten knots. With a bow attack position and a clear night for Hoffmann’s UZO, 123 launched the first of her five remaining G7es in textbook conditions from eight hundred meters out. But after some twenty seconds Barths Hydrophone Effect showed that the eel (No. 32774) was not following the 240 heading cranked in by the Vorhaltrechner and T-Schu receiver.

  “She’s off course port ten!” Barth called up the pipe.

  “Damned G7s!” Hardegen responded. After the estimated time of run it was obvious that Barth was right. The eel had swung aft of the target. The first good ship of the night had escaped—for the time being.

  “Helmsman, come to three six zero! Both ahead full!” He would chase this freighter down. “Schroeter, check your launching data!” The Number Two on the deflection calculator was already double-checking the numbers. Hoffmann reconfirmed his data. The launching triangle was faultless.

  “We had a perfect solution, Herr Kaleu,” von Schroeter called up the hatch. “It had to be the eel that fouled up.”

  “Very well,” Hardegen acknowledged. “We’re gaining on that guy. I recommend that we take the same position and launch again with the same triangle as far as that is possible. We can then show in the shooting report that the fault lay with the torpedo and not with us.”

  “Yes, Herr Kaleu.”

  It did not take long to overtake the northbound freighter and pass it on the latter’s starboard side, back north as far as Kitty Hawk.

  At position CA 7668, with a triangle similar to that on the first launch except that 123 launched from only 450 meters out, Hoffmann pinned his hopes on G7e No. 15967, which in fact behaved very much better than its bow mate. “Running hot, straight, and normal on the HE!” reported Barth. After thirty seconds the warhead exploded below the aft edge of the funnel. The fierce detonation crippled the steamer at once. The stern sagged as ship’s parts of various sizes splashed in the water around 123 or banged loudly on her deck. Hardegen looked around to see the bridge watch cowering behind the cowling, and he had to laugh at the sight of them peeking out again.

  “You don’t like it up close, do you?” he said, and redirected his attention to the mortally wounded vessel, which quickly capsized, the stern sinking over the sternposts within ninety seconds of the hit and the bow poking out from the twenty meters’ depth of water. Hardegen added this to his shooting report: “The [first] torpedo failed to run straight. Proof of the correctness of our firing data is the hit after the second attack.”20 In neither the KTB nor the shooting report did Hardegen identify the vessel sunk. He did not interrogate survivors in lifeboats, if there were any, since, as will be seen, he had to move off immediately to take advantage of several steamers passing on a reciprocal course. That he did not identify the sunk vessel leaves the reader of his documents with another “ghost” ship. Jürgen Rohwer names the ship as Brazos, an American steamer, 4,497 GRT, sunk “off Cape Hatteras.” Unfortunately for this identification, the public record establishes that Brazos, a steamer of the Atlantic, Gulf, and West Indies Line, sank six days earlier in a collision with another vessel 150 miles southeast of Hatteras. The student of Operation Drumbeat is left with another mystery sinking to whose reality both Hardegen and his number one attested as witnesses. Again, for whatever reason, no vessel answering the description in Hardegen’s KTB was reported overdue. Naval square CA 7668 corresponded to map coordinates 36-06N, 75-24W.21 The Wreck Information List gives only one unidentified wreck (Number 273) at the gross coordinates 36N, 75W, but that was deleted in the corrections supplement of 1946.22

  Immediately Hardegen turned back south to chase three ships’ lanterns. The navigable water close to the Outer Banks was well marked by light buoys. Eins Zwei Drei ran along the string of buoys until, at 0700 (CET), she sighted ahead the wake and lights of a steamer that the Old Man estimated at about four thousand GRT with four holds, speed 10. Soon both the hunted and the hunter would be raising Wimble Shoals Lighted Whistle Buoy, which meant that the steamer would change course seaward to avoid the shoals and Cape Hatteras. Hardegen asked the engine room for all the revolutions they could give him. He noted the depth beneath him: 7-8 meters. This was not U-boat country. Now at 0845 hours he was abreast of the target and pulling ahead. The shoal buoy was abaft. He wanted perfect frontal position before the vessel turned. By 0909 he had it, and Hoffmann, who had a perfect silhouette of the target against lighted beaches, released the third of the last eels. If the bridge watch thought the last launch had been up close and dangerous, this one was from only 250 meters out. The Number 2 Tube torpedo, set at only two meters depth to prevent it going aground in the shoals, leaped from the water twice during its fifteen-second run. The violent concussion that followed, in the target’s stern section, sent shock waves that stunned the watch and jarred even the crewmen below. Again the lookouts ducked as ship’s parts whistled past overhead and splashed all around. The steamer sank quickly beneath its black explosion cloud, the stern going down first, listing the entire vessel to port and eventually rolling it over so that its stack and upper works lay flat on the water even before losing headway. Hardegen did not wait long to see the final agonies. He had two torpedoes left, and there were bound to be more targets around the cape. A course slightly to seaward took him away from the latest ship to die in the United States. And of that one’s name there would never be any doubt. It was Hardegen’s lone case of tonnage underclaiming.

  The City of Atlanta, 5,269 GRT, was long familiar to passengers on the Savannah-New York run, although she had not been in passenger service for several years. General cargo was the ship’s business now, and the 1904-vintage vessel was still a prime property of the Ocean Steamship Company of Savannah. On the night of her doomed passage, her crew comprised forty-seven men. Only three would survive: thirty-four-year-old Second Officer George Tavelle and two oilers, twenty-two-year-old Robert S. Fennell, Jr., and thirty-year-old Earl Dowdy. When the German warhead struck at 0209 (ET) City of Atlanta was proceeding south from Wimble Shoals, two and a half miles inside. Her lights were dimmed according to wartime regulations (although she had just sighted a brightly lighted northbound vessel outside the shoals that seemed oblivious to the regulations). Her speed was 11.75 knots on a slightly choppy sea under light clouds. Cape Hatteras and the beach lights were clearly visible. The master, forty-eight-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen Leman Urquhart, was in his cabin. The second officer and two men were on the bridge. Thirty-three men were in their bunks. The torpedo’s explosion at the Number 3 hold in the aft engine room bulkhead killed three men outright, destroyed the radio shack, blew out the bridge windows, and threw on all the bridge lights. Immediately the ship listed to port, where she had been holed. Some of the aroused crewmembers stopped the engines and turned off the lights, while others rushed to launch the starboard boats, though this last endeavor proved fruitless because of the list. When it appeared that none of the boats would make it down the davits and the U-boat showed itself by means of a blinding searchlight—eight inches in diameter and two hundred candlepower, the survivors estimated—the on-deck crew lined the rails and cursed the U-boat with raised fists. Then the ship’s keel turned abruptly up and all the men went overside. The last Tavelle and Fennell saw of the master, he was on deck giving orders to get the lifeboats down.

  Tavelle barely escaped being crushed between two jammed lifeboats as he washed over. The water was cold and choppy—the sea lane was inshore from the Gulf Stream—but he managed to catch hold of a dining saloon door frame that added buoyancy to his lifejacket. From that handhold he looked around and counted eighteen other men clinging to pieces of the vessel, some singly, others in groups. Fennell, for one, was l
ucky to be among them. Asleep when the torpedo struck, he threw on some clothes and was almost to the deck when he remembered the eight by ten portrait photograph of his wife Marie. He returned to his bunk, removed the picture from its frame, folded it twice, and stuck it in his shirt pocket. He also donned a heavy sheepskin coat that, along with the rest of his belongings, had been blown out of his locker onto the floor. The coat would nearly be his undoing. Once on deck he labored fruitlessly to free up one of the lifeboats, in the process catching the back of the coat’s belt on a rail. He was still struggling to release himself when the ship went under. Now underwater, he managed to break the belt knot on the jacket front and swim free, gasping to the surface, where he found a floating skylight and grabbed hold. The ship sank only a few feet away from him but, to his relief, it created very little suction. Later he spotted a bench from the crew’s dining room and transferred to it. Finding some of the other crewmen nearby, he joined in their general shouting to one another, but as the cold numbed the men, one by one they fell silent, uncurled their hands from the flotsam, and gently surrendered to the corpse-ridden sea. After a while Fennell saw men in their lifejackets bobbing by face down in a macabre dance. At daybreak six hours later Tavelle, Fennell, and Dowdy were the only men left alive to reach for the lines thrown to them by boats from Sea Train Texas, a northbound freighter that had sighted, first, littered wreckage, and then the survivors, twelve miles south of Wimble Shoals Buoy. The ship’s chronometer read 0830.23

  Three hours later J23 was set up again for a UZO attack. After passing a small coastal vessel that was not worth one of his last two torpedoes, Hardegen watched with high anticipation as five larger vessels with lanterns lit advanced south along the buoys in a straight line ahead. With the beach lights providing a luminous backdrop, he need only keep the ships to shoreward, sit back, and launch away at the silhouettes. What a war! Too bad the Tommies were not as accommodating as the Americans. Here one could take a camp chair like a Prussian deer hunter and wait for game to be driven in front of the gun.24 Von Schroeter would later relate: “I remember Cape Hatteras where ships going to and from New York were steaming with full lighting. We cruised slowly and observed them passing: ‘There’s one—no, it’s too small. He doesn’t make it into the frying pan. There—we’ll take that one.’ Steaming with their lights on. Really, totally crazy, that situation, something I never experienced elsewhere during the entire war.”25

  Everyone was at battle stations as the first ship in line came into view, a disappointingly small four-thousand-tonner, as Hardegen estimated it. He was hoping for six- to eight-thousand-ton targets. He hesitated as the black form of the ship, a tanker, passed against the lights. Then, he suddenly realized that he could still keep his last two eels but cripple and possibly sink this tanker by artillery.

  “Gun crews to action stations!” The 10.5-cm crew vaulted into place on the fore casing, the aimer bringing up with him the sensitive optical sight, which he affixed to an L-shaped bracket on the port side of the gun. The layer took his station on the same side while the loader removed the tampion (watertight muzzle plug) to a storage hole on the gun pedestal, then took his firing position at the breech. Three ammunition ratings passed the heavy shells that came up the tower hatch by hand from the magazine of 180 rounds under the floor plates belowdecks. IIWO von Schroeter, commanding guns, ordered the first round loaded and the breech closed. The aimer focused on the stern of his target, and the layer turned his elevation and traverse wheels to the correct barrel position. Although a U-boat deck did not provide a stable gun platform, the seas at force 1 were relatively calm and von Schroeter was confident of good shooting as he reported: “Forward gun ready to fire, Herr Kaleu!”

  Hardegen leaned forward to the voice pipe: “Helmsman, port ten, both ahead slow. LI, just so everyone will know what we are doing, the boat is going to slip into a line of steamers. We will come up on the wake of a tanker proceeding south and disable it, perhaps sink it, with artillery alone. Then we will pivot and use our last two torpedoes on the second and third ships in line. Distance to tanker one thousand meters.”

  Hardegen told Hoffmann, who was standing up by the UZO: “This is going to be tricky. I’ve never had a course in artillery, so I don’t know how effective artillery alone will be. We’re making the turn into the tanker’s wake now. Range about five hundred meters.”

  To the helmsman: “Steady up on one-nine-five. Both ahead two thirds.” The U-boat was now positioned directly astern the target and gaining on it. Hardegen picked up the megaphone and leaned across the bridge fairwater. “Permission to fire at two hundred meters! Ten rounds!”

  Then Hoffmann spoke up: “Herr Kaleu, we’re boxed in fore and aft by steamers. We’re bound to be seen. If any one of them is armed we could be receiving fire as well as giving it, and at this range we’re more vulnerable than the steamers. They can catch fire, but we can be sunk. It’s a real risk.”

  “Thank you, Number One. I believe in my luck, which has never failed me. The bolder you start something the more bewildering it is to others. When the first shots hit home not only that ship but the others in line will lose their heads. I want to exploit that moment of confusion.”26

  Hardegen was well aware of the risk, also that he was violating standard U-boat rules. But audacity seemed the virtue of the moment—

  CRACK! It had been a long time—the sinking of Ganda, in fact, eight months before—since Hardegen and his men had used the 10.5 Bootskanone, so they were startled both by the report and the brilliant muzzle flash of the first shot. The second, third, and fourth shots got off in quick order, then the remaining six followed at a slower rate since the crew passing the heavy shells from below, long unaccustomed to the drill, were unable to maintain an unbroken flow. Hardegen counted the hits, starting with the first projectile, which exploded in a bright red-and-white ball on the tanker’s bridge. Then three—four—five—more hits out of ten shells fired. Not bad. Debris blew up from the bridge and stack. The tanker lost headway. Was the engine room also hit? Fires spread along the deck.

  “Cease firing! Forward gun crew stand by gun! All gun crews look alive!”

  With the tanker losing way and 123 still with both engines ahead two-thirds, the U-boat was catching up to the target.

  “Port ten!” Hardegen intended to pass on the port side. Von Schroeter joined the Old Man and Hoffmann on the bridge just in time to have a good view of the wounded tanker as they came abreast and passed.

  Damn! It was huge! Much larger than the bridge had estimated, maybe as much as eight thousand tons. They had misjudged it because it lay very deep in the water. Hardegen surveyed the decks with his glasses. “Look for guns!” he yelled, now frightened by the realization that a ship this size could easily be armed and, if so, 123 at this range could be blown out of the water with one good shot.27

  “No guns, Herr Kaleu!” the lookouts reported.

  Hardegen looked at his officers and expelled air between pursed lips. Von Schroeter essayed in a dull tone, “Herr Kaleu! Mit die Dummen ist Gott!—God stands by fools!”28

  “Yes, yes,” Hardegen agreed. “Hard-a-port! Look aft!” The officers lifted their glasses toward the line of ships astern, which were turning off their position lights and dispersing. “They’ve seen the tanker’s fire. We’ll come back and finish it off with our last eel. First, let’s make an approach on one of the first two ships in line. Both engines slow.”

  After making a turn to the north and west on 282 degrees in order to place the next ship, an advancing freighter, against the shore lights, Hardegen realized that he had miscalculated the target’s speed. Making an unusual time of fourteen to fifteen knots, the freighter passed in front of 123 before Hoffmann could get a setup. Too bad, Hardegen thought, because it appeared to be a six-thousand-tonner. All right, they would wait for the next one. While they waited a darkened northbound steamer stumbled by to seaward, but fast, and before Hardegen could get turned around for a bow shot—the only two to
rpedoes left were in Tubes 1 and 4—that target, too, moved out of range on an oblique heading.

  At that point two things happened. First, Rafalski called up with an intercept from the shelled tanker. She was SS Malay, signaling that she had been attacked by a submarine’s artillery and asking repeatedly for help from the U.S. Navy station at Norfolk. Rafalski had looked her up: 8,207 GRT, owned by the U.S. firm Grosvenor-Dale Company, Inc., 464.4 feet long, capacity seventy thousand barrels, launched 1921. From another intercept Rafalski reported that a passing steamer, the Swedish Scania, lay alongside to assist with its fire extinguishing equipment which it transferred by lifeboat. The second thing that happened was a break in the major cooling water pipe of the port diesel. The LI, Schulz, reported to the bridge that the engine had to be shut down until the pipe could be disassembled and welded. Great! Hardegen thought. Here he was with steamers all around and 123 was a lame duck, her surface maneuvering power cut by half. He need not have worried, however. In the confusion that he had predicted a large southbound shadow appeared suddenly on a 160-degree course within five hundred meters of where they lay. With hardly enough time to collect launching data, Hardegen steadied the boat on 253 degrees and Hoffmann punched the trigger on Tube Number 1. The next-to-last eel popped out at point-blank range of 450 meters for a 32-second run. Time of launch: 1201 (CET), 0501 (ET), two hours before sunrise, but anyone on the bridge could have thought it was sunrise from the incredibly bright fireball that exited from the freighter’s port side.29 The explosion’s concussion waves buckled the knees of /23′s crew belowdecks, where, as soon as they recovered, men said matter-of-factly to one another: Wieder eins— “another one.” Hardegen noted for his KTB: “Our boat has now conquered over 200,000 tons and I, myself, over 100,000.”30 That was the figure at which commanders began to get “neck itch,” since one hundred thousand was the tonnage that usually qualified for the Knight’s Cross, which was worn around the collar.