Operation Drumbeat
Page 43
Through the attack periscope Hardegen could barely see Carolyn about two thousand meters off, where she stood stationary taking the “panic party” back on board. With her flotation cargo apparently unaffected by the torpedo she stood on an even keel. To sink her Hardegen would have to penetrate the engine room. That should not be too difficult, he reasoned, since the target was not moving—a fatal mistake, he thought. The trap’s commander should have left his panic party to pick up later and sped away from the scene while the U-boat was submerged and greatly limited in speed and endurance. Was the commander perhaps fearful of what the U-boat might do to his men in the lifeboats? Did he have some kind of pact with them?—a promise to pick them up regardless? The Carolyn’s commander should have known that if he invited a second torpedo it certainly was not going to be wasted on the holds. Now all his men were put at risk. As 123 advanced von Schroeter flooded Number 1 tube and, at the Old Man’s instruction, set the G7e’s depth at a shallow 2.5 meters. Hardegen wanted the boilers.
The setup was a zero-angle launch sighted through the fixed-angle night lens, on a course of 150 degrees at three knots, range five hundred. After a twenty-four-second run the eel struck precisely in the engines. This time there was a normal detonation column. So much for this trap. But Hardegen knew that it would take a long time to go down. He was willing to wait, submerged, in order to be sure. The sea state began to worsen as he lay to. After a while the Carolyn’s forecastle sank as far as the bridge, and she began to list to portside. The crew, this time all, went into lifeboats. The stern came out of the water, exposing the now-dead screw. Hardegen began moving off. An hour and twenty minutes after the second torpedo the vessel, still awash, was wracked by fierce explosions that filled the periscope lens with smoke clouds and waterspouts. Hardegen thought it was depth charges and ammunition going off, less probably the boilers because of the force. By that time 123 was sufficiently distant not to be affected. He wondered, though, about the lifeboats.
The Old Man came down into the control room to inquire about Holzer. Lorenz reported that he was dead. He had remained conscious and brave until the end, which came about the time of the second torpedo, at 0430 hours. His last words, according to Barth, were: “When I get home again everything will be all right.” Everyone on board was greatly affected. There had been nothing any of them could do to relieve the shock or stop the bleeding. The Old Man directed that the body should be wrapped in canvas for burial. He surfaced soon afterward in the still black night and, while his men at reverent attention held the midshipman’s remains on the after casing, he recited aloud against the wind the words of the burial service in his Evangelical Christian tradition. “We now commit his body to the deep….” Then, as the body was consigned to the dark water and the waves closed over the sailor’s grave, Hardegen led the boat’s company in the “Our Father.”27 Amstein’s accordion played, “Ich hau’ einen Kameraden”—“1 once had a comrade.” Holzer’s tearful comrades wished him Safe Mooring. And the Old Man wrote his resting place for the record in the KTB: 35-38N, 70-14W.
To take the men’s minds off their loss, their commander set them to work transferring two replacement torpedoes from upper-deck containers to the pressure hull below. 123 had sortied with fourteen torpedoes belowdecks, ten fore and four aft. On Type IX boats it was possible to carry ten extra torpedoes in pressure-tight containers housed between the pressure hull and the upper deck. The central part of the deck was steel plating. The lateral surfaces were teak planking for ease of removal. These the crew now lifted to remove, one on each side, the two extra torpedoes, all that 123 had been assigned. By means of a winch that was difficult to operate on the tossing ocean surface the crew manhandled the eels below. When the arduous task was completed the Old Man took course 270 toward a point fifteen nautical miles east of Diamond Shoals. The weather thickened and high swells became breakers that swamped the bridge. The heavy seas and bright moonlight greatly hampered a surface attack that Hardegen attempted at 0434 hours on the thirtieth against a tanker, later identified by wireless intercept as the U.S. 9,511-GRT Socony-Vacuum. The G7e went awry, “made a bayonet,” as Hardegen described it, and detonated on the shallow (thirty meters) bottom. Because of the tanker’s high speed, thirteen knots, it was not possible to position for a second attack.28 Schade! Too bad! But soon the KTB recorded, “Cape Hatteras light is in sight, just as in peacetime, our old acquaintance from the last voyage.”
The two emergency wireless messages from USS Atik (SS Carolyn) were received by the Third Naval District receivers at Manasquan, New Jersey, and Fire Island, New York, and direction bearings taken by each station established her location at the intersection of 150 degrees and 146 degrees, respectively, or east by south of Norfolk.29 Neither station knew what to make of the messages, however, other than that they represented yet another in a long March litany of merchant vessels torpedoed. When the messages reached the ESF Army and Navy Joint Control and Information Center, on Church Street in Manhattan, the duty officer, who had not been briefed on Carolyn’s secret identity and mission, simply forwarded the messages as information items to COMINCH in Washington. Several hours later an alarmed officer who was in the know at Operations in Main Navy telephoned the ESF duty officer to inquire if either Admiral Andrews or his chief of staff Captain Kurtz had been notified. When told no, the operations officer said that they should be, immediately. Both Andrews and Kurtz were in Norfolk that night, so the duty officer rang up ESF Operations Officer Captain John T, G. Stapler, USN (Ret.), at his home. The result was that early the next morning, about nine hours after Atik’s calls, a U.S. Army bomber, the destroyer USS Noa, and the tug USS Sagamore were sent to the attack site. The bomber returned without finding a trace of either Atik or her crew. A second Army flight that day and a sweep by a Navy seaplane from Bermuda similarly were unsuccessful. Unable to keep the heavy seas, Sagamore was recalled on the twenty-eighth; Noa searched the area without result until the thirtieth when, low on fuel, she was forced back to New York. On the thirtieth, too, two Army aircraft and a PBY-5 out of Norfolk reported sighting wreckage about ten miles south of Atik’s position, but the next day an Army bomber and a seaplane from Bermuda examined the area without any notice of survivors. On a hunch, Navy investigators boarded the Norwegian freighter SS Minerva, which had passed through the same area, when that vessel reached Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands. None of her crew, however, reported sighting survivors.30
A thorough search was also conducted by Atik’s sister ship Asterion, whose log provides a good indication of the weather conditions in which Atik’s lifeboats would have struggled. During evening watch on the twenty-sixth, 150 miles north of Bermuda in a heavy-running sea, Asterion intercepted Atik’s distress call and immediately made for the coordinates given. Lieutenant Commander Legwen, USN, recorded:
March 27. Passed lifeboat with stern stove in and about half submerged. Looked as if it had been in the water a long time. Could make out no identifying marks. Definitely not one of ATIK’s boats.
March 28. Continued westerly course. Wind had increased to gale force. Made good about two knots over ground. No signs seen of ATIK.
March 29. Steering gear jammed. Shifted to hand steering and removed two shackles from steering chain. Wind force nine…. During storm bottom of hot well sprang several leaks and began to use more water than we could make. Discontinued search for ATIK and set course for Hampton Roads.31
Legwen concluded that, “In view of the state of the wind and sea, all hands perished with the ATIK.”32 Further news of Atik’s fate came from a Berlin, Germany, radio broadcast on 9 April: “The High Command said today that a Q-ship—a heavily armed ship disguised as an unarmed vessel—was among 13 vessels sunk off the American Atlantic coast and that it was sent to the bottom by a submarine only after a ‘bitter battle.’ “33 (This information, of course, had come by F.T. from U-/2J.) Admiral Andrews then expressed his belief “that there is very little chance that any of her officers and crew will be recove
red” and recommended that if no further information was forthcoming by 27 April they be considered missing in action and that next of kin be notified. Such notification went out on 6 May, although on the hope that some of the men had survived, perhaps as prisoners, files were kept open until May 1944, at which date the families were notified that the Atik men were presumptively dead. The Navy Department posthumously awarded the ship’s skipper, Lieutenant Commander Hicks, the Navy Cross.34
At war’s end captured U-boat commanders were interrogated closely on whether they had seen or rescued any of Atik’s men. None could provide help.35 Navy records at the highest levels do not disclose that information was sought from either Reinhard Hardegen or Admiral Dönitz specifically; nor do they indicate that any attempt was made to study the pertinent KTBs, then in British possession. On 10 January 1946, the Washington Post published the first public account of the Atik incident. For the families of the lost officers and crew, the article provided their first knowledge from any source of the nature of vessel on which their men had served.36 Not publicized were the Navy’s findings in the winter of 1943 that Atik probably never had a chance to withstand a U-boat attack. In January of that year Asterion, which fortunately had not encountered a U-boat on six missions in the Atlantic and Caribbean, put into the New York Navy Yard for overhaul. The next month inspectors from the Bureau of Ships, Damage Section, pronounced the Atik’s sister ship “unseaworthy” and raised doubts that, because of her three large holds, she could remain afloat if hit by a single torpedo. The ESF war diary commented on this finding: “Undoubtedly this weakness had been demonstrated several months earlier and was responsible for the rapid sinking of the sister vessel, USS Atik.”37
After eight months of costly reconstruction of her bulkheads and replacement of her pulpwood cargo by 16,772 empty steel flotation drums, Asterion stood out to sea on a seventh cruise that proved to be as unproductive as those before. In October she was withdrawn from O-ship service and a short time later was converted for use as a North Atlantic weather ship. The several cruises of the former beam trawler, Wave, originally commissioned USS Eagle (AM 132) and later changed in name and classification to USS Captor (PYC 40) were just as fruitless. Encountering no U-boats off Boston or on Georges Bank, she ended the war as a regular, nonsecret, armed patrol craft. Admiral Andrews had his Q-ship wishes fulfilled in July 1942 when COMINCH approved the arming and commissioning of a tanker, SS Gulf Dawn, as USS Big Horn (AO 45). With thirteen officers and 157 enlisted men Big Horn, disguised as a fleet oiler, made numerous coastwise cruises and two Atlantic convoy runs (playing the role of a straggler) but not once sustained the attack she invited. In early 1944, her complement replaced by Coast Guard officers and crew, she was retired to join Asterion as a “rainmaker” on weather patrol.
The last of the Q-ships to be fitted out was a twenty-three-year-old, 144-foot, wooden three-masted Canadian coasting schooner, Irene Myrtle, which was commissioned USS Irene Forsyte (IX 93) and sent to sea duty with a volunteer crew in late September 1943 under, alternately, Portuguese and Spanish flags. Not only was her first and only cruise as barren of results as those of her predecessor decoy ships, but caught in a hard storm east of Bermuda she nearly went down from opened seams. Displeased that the vessel had been allowed to sail in such unseaworthy condition, the naval inspector general, COM-INCH, characterized the schooner’s conversion “an instance of misguided conception and misdirected zeal” that cost the Navy nearly half a million dollars and a serious waste of effort. He recommended appropriate disciplinary action in view of the “unprofessional incompetence on the part of the officers concerned.” With this debacle the practice of authorizing frontier commanders to arm and commission decoy vessels came to an end. British naval historian Stephen Went-worth Roskill, agreeing with his American counterpart Samuel Eliot Morison, has lamented: “The Americans … certainly seem to have been slow in putting much of our experience to practice. They first tried every conceivable measure—except convoy and escort. Even ‘Q Ships’ were sent out, and one cannot but agree with Professor Mor-ison’s description of them as ‘the least useful and most wasteful of all methods to fight submarines.’”38
30 March, twenty-eighth day at sea, daylight hours. U-123 submerged on the bottom off Hatteras Light in twenty-five meters of water. Total distance covered to date: 3,895 nautical miles, of which 207 were submerged. Forced down earlier in the dawn than expected by a patrol craft, Hardegen was surprised by the number of small pickets that now patrolled the Outer Banks and by the frequency of overhead flights by Army and Navy reconnaissance aircraft. This was not going to be a vacation cruise like the first patrol.39 Waiting for nightfall he heard six steamers pass over or near his position and wondered if the Americans had wakened to the fact that the safest time for seaborne trade to make passage in deep water around the Carolina shoals was in the daylight. If so, his pickings here no doubt would diminish in number. At dusk, 2145 hours (CET), he surfaced to take a quick look around. While Kaeding checked their DR position against the Hat-teras Lighthouse, lookouts spotted a U-boat surfaced about 3,500 meters to shoreward, with its periscope standard extended. Hardegen assumed that it was one of theirs.40 After it disappeared he consulted his coastal charts and sailing directions and steered southwest toward Buoy 14 off Cape Lookout, where, after a night’s travel, he sighted a shadow to starboard sailing on a 057 degree heading at eleven knots.
Shown in center is Admiral Karl Donitz’s headquarters chateau (BdU) at Kemével near the mouth of the harbor at Lorient, France. (Credit: Michael Gannon)
The U-boat bunkers, or “pens,” at Pointe de Keroman, near the harbor entrance at Lorient, where 1/-123 was refitted for her two American patrols. Entrance to the bombproof bays was to the left. The seven-meter-thick roofs were never penetrated by Allied bombs. (Credit: Michael Gannon)
Oberleutnant zur See Horst von Schroe-ter, second watch officer, playing carols on accordion at Christmas tree in the control room during the first operational cruise to New York Harbor, 24 December 1941. The photograph of Adolf Hitler on the tower ladder well was standard issue on U-boats. (Credit: Horst Bredow, U-BOOT-ARCHIV)
Crewmen Franz Loosen and Karl “Karlchen” Latislaus (oldest man on board) open presents on Christmas Eve 1941 en route to the U.S. East Coast. (Credit: Horst Bredow, U-BOOT-ARCHIV)
Walter Kaeding, navigator. (Credit: Horst Bredow, U-BOOT-ARCHIV)
Fritz Rafalski, radio operator. (Credit: Horst Bredow, U-BOOT-ARCHIV)
Richard “Kraxel” Amstein, control room machinist, on first cruise to the U.S. East Coast. (Credit: Horst Bredow, U-BOOT-ARCHIV)
Left, Max Hufnagl, diving planes operator. Right, Heinz Schulz, chief engineering officer (LI). (Credit: Horst Bredow, U-BOOT-ARCHIV)
(L-R) Rudolf Hoffmann, first watch officer; Hardegen; Horst von Schroeter, second watch officer. The UZO post in center held the target-aiming binoculars used for surface attacks. (Credit: Horst Bredow, U-BOOT-ARCHIV)
Johannes “Hannes” Vonderschen, the cook who doubled on the machine gun crew. (Credit. Horst Bredow, U-BOOT-ARCHIV)
Thanks to British Admiralty decrypts of German Navy radio (wireless) messages, a daily Sub Estimate (intelligence summary of U-boat positions and courses) was prepared in London and sent daily to the U.S. Navy Department in Washington, DC. The first three lines of the “12 JAN SUB ESTIMATE” shown here clearly warned the U.S. Navy that three or four U-boats on the latitude of New York-Philadelphia were proceeding toward the U.S. Coast. It was, says the author, perhaps the most telling attack warning ever received by the military forces of the United States. All Atlantic coastal commands (upper right boxes) were notified, including “For Action CINCLANT [Commander in Chief Atlantic Fleet].” Yet the U.S. Navy did nothing. (Credit: National Archives and Records Administration)
From “Ultra” decrypts of German Enigma wireless traffic, transmitted to Washington by the British Admiralty, U.S. Navy Intelligence knew that (7-123 and other Drumbeat (Paukenschlag) boats were hea
ding from their Biscay bases toward Canada and the U.S. East Coast. Their progress across the Atlantic was plotted day-by-day. Above, the USN Daily Situation Map for 24 December 1941 shows the departure of the U-boats from France. Note the group of U-boats to the south returning from Gibraltar. Right, the USN Daily Situation Map for 12 January 1942 shows the approach of Hardegen’s group to the New England and New York coasts. The German attack, which has already begun with (7-123′s sinking ofSS Cyclops, would carry as far south as Cape Halteras. Despite this detailed advance warning the U.S. Navy did nothing to resist the attackers. Five Paukenschlag boats sank twenty-five ships in the space of twenty-six days. (Credit: Operational Archives, Naval Historical Center)