Operation Drumbeat
Page 35
This latest conquest was a Latvian freighter, Ciltvaira, 3,779 GRT, with a crew of thirty-two Latvians, Estonians, Finns, Danes, Swedes, Dutch, one Rumanian, and a mess boy from British Guiana. Most were asleep as the thirty-eight-year-old cargo ship plodded along at eight knots in the predawn hours nine nautical miles abeam of Hatteras Island and ten miles south of Wimble Shoal Buoy. She was not darkened; nor did she zigzag because news of other sinkings on the southern coast had not reached her before departure; nor had she received routing instructions from the Navy at Norfolk, whence she set out the day before with a load of paper for Savannah, Georgia. The burning Malay was not yet in sight to warn her of imminent danger, when a torpedo slammed into the port side of the engine room, pierced the boilers, and flooded the Number 2 hold. Two firemen were killed outright, the only casualties in the sinking. A coal passer, Friederich Lusis, might have been a third fatality had he not chosen that moment to go on deck for a breath of fresh air. Nick Creteu, the Rumanian, was standing near the galley door and was knocked straight off his feet about two feet into the air. Latvian radio operator Rudolph Musts leaped from his bunk at impact to find the lights gone, the door to his compartment jammed shut, and the interior space filling with hot steam. A mighty heave against the door with his shoulder gave him release and he raced to the boat deck which was already listing to port. There he found the master, Karl Skerbergs, and the other officers directing the crew into a large starboard lifeboat. Most of the men were in their underwear. One had rescued a pet cat named Briska and another a puppy named Pluskis. The master and officers followed down the falls in a smaller boat, taking with them the ship’s log and manifest. In the daylight three hours after their orderly abandonment the survivors saw that Ciltvaira was not going down, and the master with eight volunteers reboarded to secure passports, ship’s papers, and warm clothing. They also hoisted a distress-signal flag over the vessel, which, though broken in two and capsizing as far as the guard rails on the port side, was still stubbornly afloat. Back in the boats the survivors waved down the U.S. tanker Socony-Vacuum and the Brazilian freighter Bury, both of which lay to and took them on board. Bury also attempted a tow, but three manila lines and one steel cable parted, and the derelict had to be abandoned. Notice went out about the drifting menace to navigation, which was last seen, awash, two days later far out to sea at 35-46N, 74-37W. No one on board Ciltvaira had seen the U-boat that sank her. Nonetheless, Radioman Musts, described as a bushy-browed man with a ready smile and a thick Latvian accent, said on reaching Charleston, South Carolina, aboard Socony-Vacuum: “We couldn’t fight back this time, but probably our next ship will be armed. It will be different then. You will see what we can do when the devils attack.” The master reported a strong odor of phosphorus after the torpedo’s explosion, which he thought had a surprisingly low intensity given the fact that the rupture it caused in the hull was only four feet in diameter at a point six feet below the waterline. But, of course, he allowed, four feet were sufficient since the warhead was expertly placed.31
The ordeal of Malay was far from over. After torpedoing Ciltvaira, Reinhard Hardegen returned at reduced speed toward the wounded tanker south of his position while Schulz and his mechanics worked furiously on the broken water pipe in the port engine. On the bridge the lookouts searched vainly for fire licks from the tanker’s deck on which to home the boat. Hardegen guessed that with the Swedish ship’s help, Malay’s crew had been able to extinguish the blaze, and he proceeded south using the nearby coast as reference. After a while Hoffmann told Hardegen that he could smell burning wood. Hardegen sniffed several times and agreed. They would follow their noses against the wind. After navigating in this fashion for about ten minutes the lookouts sighted two stationary shadows dead ahead. The time was shortly after 1230 (CET), or 0530 (ET) with sunrise an hour and a half away. Hardegen studied the shadows through the 7 x 50s as he closed. Malay’s exterior fires were out, but several interior fires glowed through the portholes and doors. These must be under control, he reasoned, since the vessel was putting out boiler smoke and getting underway. Hardegen watched as she wheeled to starboard and took a reverse heading, no doubt to her port of origin or to a repair yard. He turned his attention to the rescue freighter, which was hauling up its boat. The freighter was a sitting duck, an easy mark for the last eel. But the tanker was more valuable a prize, and she was already injured. He estimated her new course at 340 degrees. Ordering the starboard engine ahead slow, he called for right rudder to 280 degrees so that Hoffmann could set up for a good track angle. While they waited for their prey to come into optimum range the sky to starboard was suddenly illuminated by star shells fired by Ciltvaira’s survivors. In the shells’ bright white light Hardegen could see the hull of his last victim rolled to portside and collapsing in the center. At 1244 Hoffmann had Malay where he wanted her: speed a surprising eleven knots, range 400, angle on the bow Green 21.32 Los! The last G7e left for a twenty-eight-second voyage, but Hardegen did not stay idly by to watch its immolation. The water was shallow, twelve to fifteen meters, and with all of Malay’s emergency calls to the U.S. Navy at Norfolk, 123 might very quickly find herself under attack by destroyers or aircraft and unable to dive. Schulz was reporting that they had just enough hours of fuel remaining to make it home to Lorient at economy cruise. Hardegen paused for a moment, reluctant to leave these bonanza sea-lanes, then, bowing to reality, he called down the pipe: Ruder hart steuerbord. Kurs Heimat!— “Hard-starboard. Course home!”33
Malay had departed Philadelphia in water ballast after pumping oil she had brought from Port Arthur, Texas. Her crew of thirty-four were Americans except for a Portuguese, a Norwegian, and a Mexican, but fifteen of the complement were new to the ship. Proceeding at night with running lights on a true course of 193 degrees in a line of four ships off Hatteras, she was struck in port wing of the bridge by an exploding shell. Seconds later another shriek and crash carried away the after port lifeboat. On the bridge Second Mate William A. Green gave the order for hard right rudder to take the ship inshore, rang the general alarm, stopped the engines, and switched off the running lights. Three more shells smashed into the crew’s after quarters, one of them piercing the bulkhead over the bunk of Second Cook Adams J. Hay. Badly burned, Hay would die later in a lifeboat. Some crewmen raced on deck to fight fires that were spreading wildly, while others filed along the catwalk toward the lifeboats. In one they placed a crewman with a broken back, but the forward lines fouled, the boat capsized, and the injured man with three others drowned. The forward port boat successfully lowered with nine men including the fatally burned Hay. After an hour the master, John M. Dodge, who had remained with the ship, ordered the boat’s occupants back on board to assist with the fires. In the meantime the wireless had been active signaling the SSS call—“attacked by submarine”—and asking for Navy assistance. That help never came, despite the fact that shore station WBF in Baltimore acknowledged the call and notified the Navy of the tanker’s plight. The passing Scania did lay to and sent fire-fighting equipment by boat. The SS Coamo was also seen to pass, but that vessel, which five days later would rescue survivors from Lady Hawkins, did not stop. Finding that structural damage to the Malay was slight, the master ordered steam up again and the vessel resumed headway at half speed, turning north toward Hampton Roads. After raising speed to eleven knots, at 0544 (ET) the tanker suffered a torpedo detonation on the starboard side, just aft of the mainmast, at about Number 7 tank. The explosion caused a gaping hole three to four feet below the water line, pierced a hole through the opposite, or port, side, and ripped a tear upward through the main deck that nearly took the mast down. As a precaution the master threw overside in a weighted bag the ship’s secret wireless code and routing instructions, but the empty, buoyant compartmentation kept the ship afloat. Dodge determined that the tough old tanker was still seaworthy and capable of making way. Shortly after daybreak Coast Guard vessels arrived on the scene to take off Hay’s body and a number of crewmen with painf
ul injuries, including broken leg, collarbone, and fingers. Boatswain Walter Bruce, with injured hands, commented: “The next time I go to sea it will be in an armed ship. You can’t fight off subs with potatoes.” Others, less bellicose, were simply glad that the oil tanks were empty and that they had not roasted on a flaming pyre.
At 0945, her engines started once again, the redoubtable Malay made way at defiant speed to Hampton Roads, which she entered the next day under her own power and anchored at 2145 off Newport News, the first U.S. merchant ship to survive combined shelling and torpedoing by an enemy submarine. Her master praised the crew “for the courageous way they did their duty under fire,” and added, “I hope the Malay will keep her good luck.”34 The New York Times, in reporting the attack on Malay, stated: “The Navy, engaged in a ranging hunt for the submarine pack responsible for the attacks, continued to veil any successes it may have had behind strict censorship.”35
Though brightly confident in public, the Operations staff at Main Navy in Washington wore worried expressions in private. Tanker and freighter losses to U-boats in U.S. waters were reaching serious proportions. The war effort would soon be affected if sinkings continued at the same pace of the last five days. Logistics experts calculated the long-range effects on war materiel: The sinking of two six-thousand-ton freighters and one three-thousand-ton tanker with their cargoes meant the equivalent destruction of forty-two tanks, eight six-inch Howitzers, eighty-eight twenty-five-pound guns, forty two-pound guns, twenty-four armored cars, fifty Bren gun carriers, 5,210 tons of ammunition, six hundred rifles, 428 tons of tank supplies, two thousand tons of stores, and one thousand tanks of gasoline. The loss of the freighter’s cargo equaled the loss of goods carried on four trains of seventy-five cars each. If, on the other hand, the two freighters and one tanker successfully made port and discharged their cargoes the amount of enemy force required to destroy those goods in dispersal would approximate three thousand air-bombing runs.36 The military advantages of getting loaded merchant ships safely to port were manifest.
Of equal concern to Naval Operations was the fact that U-boat dominance of the Atlantic seaboard was rapidly becoming a public relations disaster. For six months the Navy had presumed to hold sway over four-fifths of the Atlantic as far east as Iceland and the Azores, and here the United States was having its nose rubbed publicly in the Navy’s own front yard. The obvious question was spreading rapidly among the public and, not unexpectedly, was put to Franklin D. Roosevelt at the President’s Oval Office press conference on 20 January: Where was the Navy? The President’s response could not be directly quoted under press rules existing at the time. The New York Times version ran: “Mr. Roosevelt asserted that the only answer would be to take such people [who asked that question] into a White House room where there were maps showing the location of every naval ship. This, he added, he could not do.” The paper added that Mr. Roosevelt implied that units of the fleet and its air arm were busy elsewhere.37 This has been the usual answer since of Navy apologists. In fact, one CINCLANT advocate, writing as recently as 1975, stated: “In the time of slaughter the public asked, ‘Where is the Navy?’ The Atlantic Fleet was fighting the Battle of the Atlantic.”38 While that answer may not have appeared fatuous in 1942, when the data were lacking, it will hardly serve today. There was no “Battle of the Atlantic” elsewhere during January (or February through June) to divert forces from the Battle of the Atlantic that was being waged directly on America’s doorstep. The cross-oceanic convoy routes became so quiet in early 1942 that merchant seamen on those routes became careless about showing lights.39 During the first four months of 1942, in fact, only one convoy, ON 67 in late February, experienced significant enemy contact, losing six ships to torpedoes off the Newfoundland Bank. By that same date (22, 24 February) sixty-two ships had been lost in waters closely abutting the U.S. and Canadian shorelines; and nine more in the Caribbean. In March a total of seventy-nine Allied and neutral vessels would be sunk worldwide; of that number seventy-four went down in the Atlantic; all but four of the seventy-four were sunk in the coastal or offshore waters of North America west of 50 degrees west. During the same period—one of “comparative safety of the sea lanes to England,” noted the ESF war diary for March—519 ships completed the passage from the New World to the Old. Yet USN destroyer strength was distributed as though just the opposite was true: In the Northern Convoy Waters (Halifax, Argentia, Hvalfjord, Londonderry sectors) where 6.33 percent of tonnage was lost 41.7 percent of destroyer strength was stationed; while in ESF waters, where 49.3 percent of tonnage was lost (thus where shipping was most endangered), only 4.9 percent of destroyer strength was assigned.40 The plain fact is that from January forward the bulk of U-boat forces were operating off, proceeding to, or returning from North America. For the Atlantic Fleet not to have concentrated defensive units where the enemy was, and not to have gone after him where, thanks to the British Tracking Room, the Navy knew him to be, is the mystery that no amount of smoke will explain.
A cacophony of voices sounded in Washington. Senator Tom Connally of Texas, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, argued that the “wanton raids” by the Nazi “assassin” were timed to intimidate the twenty-one American republics that were meeting in an Inter-American Conference at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.41 President Roosevelt rejected that interpretation, stating that he knew the reason why the U-boats had come, but he declined to say what it was.42 Meanwhile, the Navy was spoonfeeding news of merchant ship sinkings to the public, keeping details of the carnage to a minimum while fostering the notion that the coastal sinkings were of no special importance.43 On the twenty-second, in an attempt to cover the Navy’s failures to that date by a carefully crafted suggestion that naval forces had sunk one or more of the U-boats offshore, a Navy spokesman in Washington declared “emphatically” that there would be no announcements of submarines sunk and that newspapers were forbidden to publish reports of such successes “as part of the security program.”44 The New York Times headlined the statement: “NAVY HIDES ITS BLOWS.”45 That the Navy had in fact destroyed U-boats in the preceding week was further suggested by a statement (totally false) that had been made two months before by Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox. On 21 November, referring to pre-Pearl Harbor convoy warfare, Knox had declared to the press: “After careful weighing of the evidence, I can now state that in the Atlantic Ocean United States naval forces have up to the present time probably sunk or damaged at least fourteen enemy submarines.”46 (To this brash claim a classified internal Navy history would retort that, “There was no positive proof that [the Navy] had knocked out even one U-boat during 1941.”47) In the last weeks of January, with desperate need for a good press, the Navy made no effort to discount widespread rumors that captured U-boats were being towed into Navy ports from Maine to Florida.48
The Navy’s plight, in fact, led it to abandon the “hidden blows” strategy only two days after it was announced. On 23 January, in one of the more regrettable (and, in retrospect, laughable) propaganda efforts of the war, the Navy announced for front-page consumption that during the preceding nine days it had liquidated an unspecified number of U-boats off the East Coast, saying sarcastically of these “excursionists,” as it called them, that “some of the recent visitors to our territorial waters will never enjoy the return portion of their voyage.” The Navy spokesman detailed to sustain this fiction appealed to U.S. citizens who might “have seen a submarine captured or destroyed” to keep silent. “The Nazis think themselves pretty clever,” he went on, but by regarding “secrecy as his own personal antisubmarine weapon” the U.S. citizen could be cleverer still. It was not explained how that was so, but everyone was invited to play the “game”: “This is a phase of the game of war secrecy into which every American should enter enthusiastically.” The Navy will “take care” of enemy submarines; the public can help by “keeping quiet.” The press and radio can make the same “great, patriotic contribution.”49 Thus the Navy effectively put the muzzle on the peopl
e’s wonderment. It was the Big Lie, nicely handled, in a cynical and meretricious sort of way. The Atlantic Navy’s image as sub-busters was restored. And no one would know that the only place where CINCLANT actually took the offensive was in public relations. If there were doubters they seem not to have broken the muzzle, even after “Dolly” Andrews, on 29 January, offered two hundred dollars to each naval crew that sank a U-boat, which must have seemed a curious inducement given the Navy’s already potent success against “excursionists.”50
In reality the Navy had not made a single planned attack on the Paukenschlag boats, and the only U.S. shots fired in the vicinity of one appear to have been the four bombs dropped harmlessly against U-/23 on the fifteenth when a bomber chanced to sight the surfacing U-boat. On that occasion there had been no follow-up by air or sea, and so far as the Eastern Sea Frontier was aware, the action was no different from a number of other reported attacks on targets, real or imaginary, where no one stayed around to pick up the commander’s cap. The kill board at ESF was still empty by the date that Reinhard Hardegen set Eins Zwei Drei on a homeward course, and it would remain empty for three long months; although it should be noted for the record that Fast Minesweeper Hamilton (DMS-18), a converted flush-deck destroyer, did its level best to post a trophy. On the night of 26-27 January off the coast of Florida, Hamilton was patrolling astern of Troop Convoy BT 200 bound from New York to the Panama Canal Zone. The seven transports with their screen were zigzagging south at fourteen to fifteen knots under a first-quarter moon when, at 0500 hours, Hamilton sighted a vessel on her starboard hand that looked like a submarine on the surface. Going to general quarters, she fired a gun across the bow and came to a collision course. When very close aboard and bearing down at full speed with crew bracing for the impact, Hamilton’s skipper noticed that the “U-boat” was a small darkened freighter! He called for emergency back full and rudder put hard over, but it was too late. In a screech of torn and twisted metal the minesweeper slammed into the freighter’s portside. The 1,946 GRT American motorship SS Green Island survived the “attack.” After repairs she would go to sea again, only to be sunk south of Cuba three months later on 6 May by Ulrich Folkers, who was on a second American patrol in V-125. After her ramming attack Hamilton was detached from the convoy and sent into Key West for repairs to her starboard bow, which took ten days.51 Shortly afterward, she was removed from patrol duty and converted to Miscellany Auxiliary (AG). It was embarrassing.