Operation Drumbeat

by Michael Gannon

  Convoy BT 200 was not the only naval force that cruised along the infested seaboard in the last days of January. On 28 January, Battleship Division Six, consisting of North Carolina (BB 55) and Washington (BB 56) with the carrier Hornet, escorted by seven DDs and a cruiser, departed Key West for home yards Norfolk and New York. Cruising in two columns, the force zigzagged during both day and night except in the darkest hours. Speed was kept high to outdistance U-boats, fifteen to twenty-three knots, which strained the capabilities of the destroyers, especially the twelve-hundred-tonners, which hurt in the strong head seas. One, the Clemson-class flush-decker Noa, damaged herself at twenty-two knots and had to put in at Charleston. The destroyer screen kept a close lookout, maintaining stations ahead and on each bow, distance three thousand to four thousand yards, and abaft and on the beam, distance twenty-five hundred yards. One DD swept astern at night. On reaching home port the screen commander reported, “Although the route lay along the Atlantic coast and submarines were numerous no sound contacts or depth charge attacks were made.”52 Actually, U-boats along the route were not numerous, and never had been. The most that operated off the East Coast at any one time in January was three: U-/23, U-66 (Zapp), and U-/25 (Folkers) for most of the period; U-130 (Kals) descended into New England waters by the twenty-first when 123 was heading home; and U-106 (Kptlt. Hermann Rasch) replaced Kals at the end of the month, with the result that the number continued at three. U-106 was the first of a new wave of five IXB and IXC boats that Admiral Dönitz had sent to the U.S. coast even before learning of any Paukenschlag successes (see chapter 6). During the first week of February four of those boats (U-103, 106, J07, 70S) would operate at the same time in U.S. waters. The fifth, U-128, which had originally been assigned to Paukenschlag, would make five boats together when she took up station off Florida in the third week.

  During the last ten days in January eight ships went down between New England and the Carolinas. Kais (U-130), who on the seventeenth had received BdU’s permission to change his operation area from Cabot Strait to a position between Hardegen and Zapp, steamed south as far as Georges Bank east of Nantucket Island by dusk on the twenty-first, where he sighted the Norwegian motor tanker Alexander Höegh. A submerged launch of two eels added 8,248 GRT to his total.53 The next day, Zapp, who was south of Hatteras and the Outer Diamond Shoal, sank the small (2,677 GRT) U.S. freighter Nor-vana.54 By dark on the twenty-second Kals was off Albermarle Sound approaching Hatteras, where he sank Olympic, a Panamanian tanker, 5,335 GRT.55 Zapp had quick back-to-back kills off Hatteras on the twenty-fourth (CET). The first, the four-month-old motor tanker Empire Gem, bound for Britain via Halifax with a cargo of 10,600 tons of gasoline from Port Arthur, had just crossed ahead of the U.S. ore carrier Venore while both were raising Diamond Shoal Light buoy. At 0240 (CET) she took two torpedoes from Zapp in the after tanks on the starboard side.56 The roaring flames that quickly enveloped her illuminated the ore carrier abaft, and only three minutes later Zapp struck Venore forward on the port side. Empire Gem burned down to the water line. Of her all-British crew of fifty-seven only the master and two radio operators survived—the worst human toll since City of Atlanta.

  Venore, with 22,300 tons of iron ore from Chile, suffered little damage or water intake from her hit, but twenty members of the multinational crew, panicking at the sight of the ignited tanker on the starboard quarter, lowered lifeboats even though the ship was still making headway. All were lost. One other crewman, from the engine room, ran to the stern and jumped to his death. At 0324 (CET) a second torpedo from Zapp exploded in the Number 9 ballast tank just forward of the fire room, and Venore listed forty-five degrees to port.57 The master ordered Abandon Ship and twenty-one men in one boat got away safely, though neither the master nor the radio operator was among them. The survivors rowed and sailed toward land eighty miles to the west, subsisting on rations of sea biscuits and water. Thirty-nine difficult hours later they were lifted aboard the tanker Tennessee. A U.S. Navy report on the twin sinkings commented: “The apparent ease with which the enemy U-boat sank both vessels was alarming and it is presumed that the same U-boat was also responsible for the triple sinking off Wimble Shoals Buoy four days previous.” The report meant to say two ships sunk (City of Atlanta and Ciltvaira) and one damaged (Malay)—actually the work of U-123. The same report noted that Empire Gem had a four-inch gun and that both ships were steaming with their running lights on under a bright moon at the time of the attacks.58

  Kals, meanwhile, had headed back north where on the twenty-fifth V-130 found the Norwegian Varanger twenty-eight nautical miles due east of Wildwood, New Jersey. The 9,305 CRT motor tanker was carrying a capacity cargo of fuel oil from Africa and the West Indies to New York. Kals caught her amidship on the portside at 1002 hours, then put three coup-de-grace torpedoes into the stricken hull at 1007, 1013, and 1024. The last entered the engine room and exploded the boiler. The shock rattled windows in Sea Isle City and was heard as far away as Atlantic City, twenty-five miles to the north. The entire forty-man crew survived, the first instance when a Paukenschlag attack off the U.S. coast caused no human fatalities. The crewmen, who were so thickly coated with black oil they had to be given kerosene baths, managed to save a dachshund puppy, but the mother went down with the ship.59

  Ulrich Folkers (U-/25) got his first-ever sinking the following night after a series of disappointments that included one ship damaged (U.S. steam tanker Olney) and six misses or duds. In a surface attack off Cape Hatteras at 0604 (CET) Folkers launched two G7es eight seconds apart at the southbound West ¡vis, a U.S. freighter. The first exploded below the bridge, the second in the engine room—classic hits—and the steamer sank inside fourteen minutes. Thirty-five men died including the master.60 West Ivis would be Folker’s lone sinking on the Paukenschlag patrol, a disappointing performance in his own eyes and in those of the Lion. He would later go on to higher achievements, however, winning the Knight’s Cross in March 1943, the last of the Drumbeat commanders to do so. Two months afterward he and his boat would be sunk with the loss of all hands by HMS Vidette south of Greenland.61 The souls of West lvis would have their revenge. The final Drumbeat sinking in U.S. coastal sea-lanes came on the night of 27 January (0943 CET, 0243 ET) twelve nautical miles southeast of Winter Quarters Light Vessel, off Chincoteague, Virginia. U-130, which had headed south again, placed one devastating warhead in the port side, aft of the amidship deckhouse between tanks Numbers 4 and 5, of the northbound Atlantic Refining Company tanker SS Francis E. Powell.62 Seeing the amidship section awash, and the radio antenna, twenty-five feet of catwalk, and much of the port rail carried away, and worried about the menacing odors released by eighty thousand barrels of gasoline and furnace oil aboard, the master, Thomas J. Harrington of Baltimore, ordered Abandon Ship, which was effected within five minutes’ time. Three lifeboats were put over the side and two managed to get away. For some reason the master reboarded, possibly to throw over codes and confidential papers. When next seen Harrington was attempting to climb down a rope into the third boat when a sudden lurch of the tanker caused him to be crushed between the hull and the lifeboat. Crewman John D. Alexson, of Bayonne, New Jersey, was in one of the lifeboats: “We started rowing. We ran almost headlong into the submarine. The conning tower and catwalk were out of the water. They seemed to be waiting for us in order to shell us, but they didn’t. We swerved the boat around and pulled away from the submarine as fast as we could.” The boat that carried Alexson and ten others drifted for seventeen hours in constant cold biting rain before being found by the Coast Guard. Seventeen survivors in the other boat were rescued by a merchant ship.63 The master and three others were dead, one of the smallest casualty figures of the Paukenschlag campaign. In Canadian waters “Ajax” Bleichrodt, who had been bedeviled by duds, broke the string with a successful launch from four hundred meters against Thirlby, a British steamer, 4,887 GRT, south of Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.64 Bleichrodt then steamed south to rendezvous with Kals (U-130) north of the
Bermudas and take on fuel from the latter’s larger (IXC) bunkers for the voyage home.65 On the way to the rendezvous Bleichrodt sank two vessels far out to sea, the British freighter Tacoma Star (7,924 GRT), east of New Jersey, on 1 February, and the sizable Canadian motor tanker Montrolite (11,309 GRT), east of Hatteras, four days later.66 The final January sinking in U.S. waters was posted by the new arrival Hermann Rasch (U-/06), who caught the U.S. tanker Rochester (6,836 GRT) off Cape Charles, Virginia, on 30 January.67

  Understandably, the stories of merchant seamen who survived these attacks received far greater coverage in the press than did accounts of cargoes and bottoms lost, though to the strategists on both sides the latter weighed more prominently in the scale, since in wartime seamen were the more easily replaced. To more sensitive observers who happened also to be aware of the British OIC submarine plot, the sinking of Rochester signaled more than the arrival of a new wave of IXB and IXC boats to replace the Drumbeat fleet, more even than the loss of yet another ship and cargo: With three crewmen killed by the torpedo blast and four more men dead weeks later from wounds suffered in the explosion, the sinking meant that the hemorrhaging of human life offshore was going to continue, particularly since the U.S. Navy had thus far proved unable to stanch it. Already in nineteen days’ time more than 500 seamen and civilians had lost their lives to Drumbeat—one-fifth the U.S. Navy fatalities at Pearl Harbor; a larger toll than that taken in any of America’s previous coastal battles since colonial times; the largest concentrated loss of merchant mariners’ lives in that service’s history; and the greatest Atlantic coast disaster since 8 September 1934, when the luxury liner Morro Castle burned off Asbury Park, New Jersey, with the loss of 125 passengers and crew. More yet were to die as Reinhard Hardegen (U-723) made his way back across the Atlantic. And a frightful loss was looming ahead as the post-Paukenschlag fleets, finding the stable door still open, arrived to increase the number of operational boats on the bloodied coast. (Meanwhile, up to 31 January, in their own version of unrestricted submarine warfare, U.S. Navy S- and Fleet-class boats in the Pacific had sunk fifteen Japanese ships of all descriptions with an unknown number of fatalities.)

  It was estimated that an Atlantic merchant seaman’s chances of surviving if a ship sank under him were fifty-fifty. American survival equipment was not yet as effective as British devices, which by 1942 included lifejacket lights, protective clothing, and manual pumps for expelling water from lifeboats. Working against survival for many crewmen in the Drumbeat waters was the number of lifeboats that were destroyed by the upward blast of torpedoes or that became unusable because of the ships’ rapidly developing lists to one side or the other. Unlike British vessels, on most of which guns had been swung aboard, the typical U.S. freighter or tanker in coastwise traffic had as yet no U.S. Navy gun crew, or Armed Guard, as such units came to be called. Excepting the passengers lost from Lady Hawkins, the deaths at sea occurred among men committed to the sea and to its dangers. As seaman-novelist Nicholas Monsarrat said of them, “Some men died well… some men died badly … some men just died.”68 But of those who survived it may be said that they exhibited a notable courage and tenacity in hiring on to other tankers, freighters, and troop transports as soon as they could. Sizable bonuses for the riskier routes were a significant incentive, but something more than money seems to have motivated many of the ordinary seamen, firemen, oilers, electricians, stewards, cooks, and jacket men (formerly waiterson the now defunct or diminished passenger ship trade) who in late January filled the hiring halls of the National Maritime Union at 346 West Seventeenth Street in New York City. “It’s like this,” said one survivor matter-of-factly. “If your house burns down, you move to another house. If a sailor loses his ship, he gets another ship. That’s his house. That’s the way it is.”69 In another vein a “tanker stiff” explained his motive: “Good dough. You don’t think about torpedoes. You figure if one’s got your number on it, that’s too bad. If it hasn’t it won’t get you.”70 Some others, though, worried about the torpedo addressed, “To Whom It May Concern.” One Canadian chief steward in the British merchant navy, who had been torpedoed four times, complained to New York reporters about the “loose talk” of his American counterparts. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised,” he said, “if some of the present torpedoings so close to your shores were due to fifth-column work. New York is full of loose talk.”71 Although a major U.S. propaganda campaign would shortly be launched in support of the steward’s allegation, under the general title “Loose Lips Sink Ships,” there is no evidence that the interception of sailing information played any role whatever in the German U-boat campaign in American waters during the first months of 1942. There were so many unescorted ships blithely sailing in perfect target formation that no U-boat commander in the period, even if he possessed “loose lips” information, and it is not certain that any of them did, had need of data other than the fat images steaming one after the other against a bright background into his UZO lens.

  In Washington, meanwhile, public relations officers at the Department of the Navy agonized over the uncontrollable stream of survivors’ tales. Perhaps it was not enough after all to imply that the Navy was taking care of the U-boats by asking the public to keep quiet about the boats that it had seen “destroyed” or “captured.” Perhaps some more-active strategy was required. Accordingly, when it was learned on 28 January that a Navy pilot, Chief Aviation Machinist’s Mate Donald Francis Mason, had dropped bombs on a “U-boat,” the prior “secrecy” policy, only five days old, was abruptly abandoned. Mason was too good to pass up. Whether he sank the U-boat or not was beside the point. An enlisted man besting a German commander was dynamite copy. The basic facts: Mason, a PBY-Catalina pilot in Atlantic Fleet Squadron 82 out of Argentia, Newfoundland, sighted what he thought was a U-boat and dropped a brace of bombs. That was the full report he made by radio to base. In Navy public relations hands the report was transmuted into language that had Mason compared in the next morning’s New York Times and elsewhere to Oliver Hazard Perry at the Battle of Lake Erie (1813), who had sent the terse and memorable message: “We have met the enemy and they are ours.” The finely crafted message prepared for Mason was no less terse or memorable. It not only won front page play in newspapers across the country but, more important, it won rapid acceptance into the national locution. Few Americans who were alive at the time will not remember the immortal, sibilant, and alliterative words: “Sighted sub, sank same.” A nation was thrilled. Mason was embarrassed. The Navy wordsmiths breathed a sigh of relief. For a few more days the pressure was off.

  10

  Course Home!

  When Reinhard Hardegen turned away from the smoking Malay and set course for home he had every reason to believe that this last victim of U-123 was headed for the bottom. The ship’s emergency radio calls were increasingly desperate. Hardegen recorded one of them, in the original English, in his KTB: “SOS sinking rapidly, next ship please hurry, torpedoed, sinking”; and he added his own comment in German: “Well, we finally cracked this one, too.”1 On a 90-degree heading 123 made her fastest one-engine speed east out of the ten-meter water into depths where she could dive if need be. At 1300 (0600 CET) one hour before dawn, and while Kraxel was still welding the port cooler pipe, Hardegen sighted a large shadow on the port bow—a very large shadow, larger than he had ever seen at sea, except for capital ships and liners, and it was only four hundred meters away! And cutting across his course! God in Heaven! “Hard-a-starboard! Hard-a-starboard! Starboard ahead emergency’. LI, give me every turn you’ve got! Maximum load! Push it!” Barth started shouting up wireless intercepts from the mammoth apparition: “She’s Kosmos II, Norwegian whaling factory…. Calling nearby ships…. Now saying there’s ‘something wrong’ about us…. Now calling the Navy to send planes! … Now says she’s going to ram!”

  Stocky, thirty-six-year-old Einar Gleditsch, a native of Sande-fjord, Norway, prior to the war the world’s leading whaling port, had been at sea for eighteen y
ears, always on whalers, and his biographical folder in the files of the Norwegian Shipping and Trade Mission in New York described him as “always a fearless, almost foolhardy, courageous fellow,” very much like the characterization commonly made of Reinhard Hardegen—from whom he was now separated by only four hundred meters. Master since the year before of Kosmos II— reputedly at 16,966 GRT the largest cargo carrier in the world and now operating as a tanker—Gleditsch had sighted Malay burning between himself and shore, then had sighted a second ship or boat about which he signaled other nearby vessels, in English, that there was “something wrong” with it. He, the chief engineer, and the officer on watch studied the low black silhouette that was crossing his bow and watched it abruptly turn to starboard and away in the clear, smooth morning sea.

  “It’s a U-boat!” he decided. “Must have been the one that hit that tanker to shoreward. Give me 17 knots! Helmsman, stay on that boat’s tail! Try to ram him!” With no gun on board, ramming was Gleditsch’s only tactical weapon. He knew that if he could catch up his huge stem would splinter the German. Seventeen knots was the highest speed he had ever gotten from Kosmos 11 in ballast, but he ordered the chief engineer, if he knew any way he could force extra RPMs from the power plant, to do it quickly. “If the German can outrun us,” Gleditsch said, “he’s going to have to do it on the surface. If he tries diving that will slow him up and we’ve got him!”