Out of torpedoes, Í/-123 engages in a mid-Atlantic surface gun battle on 25 January 1942 with the armed British freighter Culebra during her return to base after the first American patrol (Paukenschlag). Not before or since, the author believes, was U-boat artillery used with such effect as it was by Hardegen on his two American patrols. The British crew, who were transporting disassembled aircraft parts, made a spirited defense before their vessel was fatally holed. The U-boat photographer who began this sequence of pictures, Alwin Tolle, was badly injured during the battle by an exploding machine gun barrel. In the final picture, taken by another crewman, Hardegen’s men hand survivors bailing buckets, bread, lard, sausages, canned foods, and a knife. They also gave them a position plot and a course to Bermuda. (Credit: Reinhard Hardegen)
This detail from Hardegen’s 1870C Chart of the North Atlantic that he carried on board 1/-123 during his first American patrol (Drumbeat) shows his approach to New York Harbor, including his sinking of Norness in naval square CA 37 and of Coimbra in CA 28. (Credit: Michael Gannon)
The British tanker Coimbra awash and sinking twenty-seven miles south of the Hamptons off Long Island, New York. Her eighty thousand barrels of oil erupted in fire columns that were easily seen by residents of Long Island. Har-degen torpedoed the vessel in the early morning hours of 15 January 1942, his third victim in Operation Drumbeat. (Credit: New York Times)
Tonnage pennants fly from l/-123′s extended periscope as boat enters Lorient harbor following first U.S. patrol. (Credit: Horst Bredow, U-BOOT-ARCHIV)
On return from first U.S. patrol Hardegen (center) and Seaman Karl” Langspleiss” Fröbel (left,), youngest man on board, prepare pennants showing claimed tonnages of ships sunk. These were then hoisted on the attack periscope (rightj before entering home port. (Credit: Horst Bredow, U-BOOT-ARCHIV)
Hardegen (eh) on bridge ofU-123 as U-boat prepares to enter Lorient base after the first American patrol. Device on conning tower casing at left is the wounded badge described in the text. A kettledrum and drumstick are shown at center, symbolizing Operation Drumbeat (Paukenschlag). Officer front and center is Hardegen’s second in command, Oberleutnant zur See Rudolf Hoffmann. Crewman at lower right is painting the U-boat’s total tonnage claim (224,865 GRT) under her two commanders, Móhle and Hardegen. Also displayed, above the wind deflector, were a representation of the Knight’s Cross and two fins of a shark caught off Freetown, Africa, the year before. (Credit: Horst Bredow, U-BOOT-ARCH IV)
Hardegen wears the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross after its award to him by Admiral Karl Dönitz on V-123 s return to Lorient following the boat’s first American patrol (Paukenschlag). (Credit: Horst Bredow, U-BOOT-ARCHIV)
Kapitänleutnant Reinhard Hardegen, Commander (7-123, on second operational cruise to U.S. Coast, 1942. (Credit: Horst Bredow, U-BOOT-ARCHIV)
At his Rastenburg headquarters in East Prussia Adolf Hitler awards Oak Leaves to the Knight’s Cross to Hardegen following the (7-123 commander’s second successful U.S. patrol. (Credit: Horst Bredow, U-BOOT-ARCHiV)
Admiral Karl Dönilz, creator of Operation Drumbeat, is shown fcenterj in the situation room of his U-boat headquarters (BdU). To his left is Chief of Operations Konteradmiral Eberhard Godt and to his right staff officer Kapitänleutnant Adalbert Schnee. This photograph was taken in 1943 when BdU had been moved from France to Berlin. (Credit: Martin Middlebrook)
Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, Commander in Chief United States Fleet (COMINCH) and Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) from 1942 to 1945. (Credit: Official U.S. Navy photograph)
An unusually relaxed Vice Admiral Adolphus Andrews, Commander East-em Frontier, is shown in his office at 90 Church Street in Manhattan congratulating Hans Nielson, master of the Norwegian freighter Reinholt, which survived a gun battle with 1/-752 (Kptlt. Karl-Ernst Schroeter) on 23 April 1942 east of Delaware Bay. (Credit: U.S. Naval Institute)
The Schlüssel M (Enigma) cipher machine of the type carried on board Í/-123. The metal lid has been raised. Shown in front are the plugs. On top are, in order, the keyboard, the glow holes, and three rotors. The machine was portable in an oak box 7 x 11 x 13 inches. (Credit: Imperial War Museum)
t/-123 crew members from the 1942 American patrols gather at Bad König/Odenwald, West Germany, in 1985 to recall their experiences. Left to right are Walter Kaeding, Richard Amstein, Max Hufnagl, Karl Latislaus, Karl Fröbel, Rudolf Meisinger, Heinz Barth, Reinhard Hardegen, Fritz Rafalski, Hans Seigel, and Horst von Schroeter. (Credit: Herbert Bubenik)
Reinhard Hardegen in 1986 stands before his portrait painted in 1942 and an inscribed photograph of Admiral Dönitz that hang in his home in Bremen-Obemeuland, West Germany. (Credit: Michael Gannon)
With daybreak coming he submerged for a Stern Tube 5 attack and waited until the target, a loaded freighter about 6,000 GRT, came before the lens at a 90-degree track angle and so close that it filled half the periscope at a magnification of 1.5. With textbook numbers a miss was not possible. And yet, for the second straight time, a G7e went askew. Barth reported from the sound room that the eel took a heading twenty to thirty degrees off course and maintained it until going aground. No explosion was heard. Hardegen ordered the guidance systems of all remaining eels checked and double-checked. It was a frustrating night and morning, as was the next night, 1 April, when all that was sighted were patrol craft and search planes, and 123 spent indolent hours on the bottom ten nautical miles abeam Buoy 14 light and whistle. Surfacing at 2128—diving at 2131 when a “bee” showed on the horizon—and surfacing again at 2205, 123 sighted another likely target. The blacked-out shadow approached rapidly at an estimated twelve knots on a zigzag base course of 220 or 230 degrees. Because of the brightness of the moonlit night Hardegen decided to launch an attack underwater. But everything went wrong. The night periscope lens fouled; the Vorhaltrechner broke down; when he turned for a zero-degree-angle stern attack Hardegen saw that the target’s speed was eleven not twelve; the electrical launch mechanism failed, and the Tube 6 torpedo had to be launched manually three seconds late; and after forty seconds at the end of its six-hundred-meter run the eel simply died. How could it have missed? At a range of five hundred meters the target covered the whole periscope field of view on low magnification. The track was a classic 90 degrees. Was the target’s speed off? Gröner showed her to be the U.S. tanker SS Liebre, 7,057 GRT, speed in the range of ten to eleven knots. If the eel bottomed, why did it not explode? Hardegen guessed that the ship had nets of some kind hung below the waterline. (She did not, and a more likely reason for the miss was that Hardegen misread Liebres course and speed: Survivors reported later that their course was 273 true and speed was nine knots.41) Whatever had happened, Hardegen was not going to let this one get awa.
“Surface! Battle stations gun!”
The forward gun began firing from the 2,500-meter range at a rate of two shells per minute against the tanker’s port side. There were numerous misses, but hits showed up on the flying bridge, the midship house, crew quarters, deck erections, and hull. One shell exploded the ship’s signal rockets in a brilliant pyrotechnic display. The illumination enabled Hardegen to see that the tanker was steaming in ballast and he ordered IIWO Schüler, commanding guns, to aim for the waterline and engine room. After more pounding Liebre blew off steam and lost way. Soon her crew were seen going into lifeboats. Rafalski reported up the pipe that a SOS … SSS had gone out and had been acknowledged. Holding his fire while Liebres crew abandoned ship and his own men passed the spent shell casings down the tower, Hardegen worried that shellfire might not be enough to cause this tanker, with her empty bunkers, to sink. Another eel might be required—a thought interrupted by a lookout’s cry: “Patrol craft starboard beam!” Hardegen raised his 7 x 50s to see a narrow shadow with a frothy white wake bows-on. It could be close enough to ram!
“Alarm!”
The boat went down quickly enough to avoid a ramming, but just barely, and Hardegen could hear the propellers pass overhead. A ramming would
certainly tear up a small craft’s bow, thought Hardegen, but the impact could also separate the plates of a U-boat’s hull, which would be worse. The American up there had guts. Hardegen ordered periscope depth and rigged for Wabos. “She’s turning back, Herr Kaleu,” Barth called up the pipe as Hardegen took his place on the saddle in the upper tower.
“Up periscope!”
It was a risk poking the scope above the surface on a small sea in moonlight with unlimited visibility at close quarters with the enemy, but he took it. There—at 265—a small patrol vessel in a turn. With his Weyer identification manual Hardegen identified it as an Argo-class WPC patrol cutter. (He was wrong: It was British Motor Torpedo Boat 332, on loan to the U.S. Navy, with a Canadian crew.42) For a few minutes there seemed to be no inclination on the enemy’s part to press the attack. There was no ASDIC pinging. He reasoned that the enemy crew were uncertain in which direction the submerged U-boat was traveling.
“Down scope. How much depth do we have here, LI?” he asked Schulz below.
“The fathometer reads thirty meters, Herr Kaleu.”
“All right, if we have to dive, go to twenty.”
Hardegen hoped he would not have to take Wabos in water this shallow. The explosive power of the charges would be greatly enhanced by the reflective hydraulic pressure wave off the bottom. He ordered the scope raised again and saw the enemy vessel which was facing him at a zero degree angle immediately accelerate. Damn! It had seen the scope!
“Dive! Dive! Down scope! Brace for Wabos!” he yelled as he fell down the ladder into the control room. Moments later the boat lurched violently from a single Wabo inexpertly dropped too far from the hull to cause damage. Barth reported that the vessel was turning for another pass. “Screws coming on!” he sang out. Again the men held on. The propellers crossed overhead. But nothing happened. Strange. Barth reported the vessel moving off toward the stricken Liebre. Was it a trick? When Barth reported the vessel had stopped, probably at Liebres position, Hardegen ordered the boat to periscope depth and confirmed the fact by eye. The enemy had simply given up when it had them fairly well located, and in shoal water. Was it because they lacked ASDIC? How much good luck did 123 deserve? Better not push that luck too far, he thought, since there were bound to be more patrol craft assembling here soon in response to the tanker’s distress call. With regret, and some anger at himself for not getting off a coup-de-grace eel at Liebre, he moved slowly away from the scene underwater. An hour and a half later, under a bright moon, he surfaced and resumed his descent of the coast south toward Florida on the two-hundred-metercurve. The ploughshare of the bow sliced into the western edges of the opposing Gulf Stream, dividing the warm black masses that retarded their progress. Eventually, like the southbound merchantmen he had observed on his first patrol, Hardegen hugged the shore to avoid the three-knot currents. To the KTB he confided: “To what extent [Liebre] will fill up with water from holes at the waterline is hard to say, but from my experience it is quite possible that she will sink. In any case, no one will be happy with her condition now.”43
Liebre had sailed in ballast from New York on 30 March, bound for Beaumont, Texas. She was seventeen miles east of Cape Lookout Outer Buoy, blacked out and zigzagging on Navy Plan No. 2, when the first shells arrived on the port side. The crew counted forty rounds fired but only ten to fifteen hits. An SOS… SSS went out, the first time the radio had been used since departing New York, and a strong “R” was received from a shore station, probably Charleston. The engine room hit disabled the starboard generator, plunging the ship into darkness. Thinking the damage greater than it was, the master, Frank C. Giradeau, ordered closed the main stop valve from the boilers to the main engine, which killed way and enabled lifeboats Numbers 1 and 4 to be safely lowered. Of the thirty-four-man crew, two had been killed outright in the engine room and seven others, panicking at the be-wilderingly sudden attack, had jumped overboard and drowned. The boats pulled away and lay to until daybreak. Some crewmen reported seeing a craft of some kind approach Liebre and show lights on her, which probably was Canadian motor torpedo boat 332. In the ensuing daylight the survivors saw that the mangled tanker was still riding steadfastly afloat. They were rowing back to board her when rescue vessels arrived, some to take them in to shore and others, a tug and a trawler, to tow the tanker into Morehead City, North Carolina. In subsequent developments Liebre was reconstructed at Baltimore and returned to service on 19 July, and Master Giradeau was criticized by naval authorities for not having removed the confidential papers, which included both British and American codes, although there was no sign that these had been molested. (Reinhard Hardegen never boarded a ship that he had torpedoed or shelled.) Fifth Naval District at Norfolk speculated that since no torpedo attack had taken place (so far as anyone knew), and it was ordinarily the policy of U-boats to finish off targets with torpedoes when shelling alone failed to sink, it “cannot be overlooked in the case of the Liebre” that the attack “might possibly have been made by a surface raider.”44
Leaving behind this tantalizing hypothesis as his calling card Hardegen on the night of 8 April, the Wednesday after Easter, was making knots in a slight sea south, along the coastal barrier islands of Georgia. Here there were few lights on shore since the broken land chain, storied as the Guale, Golden, or Sea Islands, was thinly populated, most residents being gulls, herons, wood ibis, clapper rail, an occasional feral hog, Spanish horse, or three-hundred-pound sea turtle waddling ashore to lay eggs. Passing St. Catherine’s, Blackbeard, and Sapelo islands, U-123 came upon St. Simons Island where lookouts spotted two shadows under the quarter moon proceeding northbound in tandem three miles apart on an inshore routing two miles off buoys. Hardegen put a torpedo into each of them, 52 minutes apart, the shock waves rushing across the dark water to rattle among the sand dunes and sea oats. The first in line, SS Oklahoma, was a 9,264-GRT Texaco, Inc., tanker with a cargo of one hundred thousand barrels of kerosene, gasoline, and diesel oil from Port Arthur destined for Providence, Rhode Island. The second was SS £550 Baton Rouge, a 7,989-GRT Standard Oil of New Jersey tanker, bound from Baytown, Texas, to New York with seventy thousand barrels of lubricating oil and twenty thousand barrels of heating oil. Hit in the engine room, Oklahoma made water quickly astern and her master, Theron P. Davenport, ordered Abandon Ship. Eighteen men went overside in boats, but the master and three others reboarded when they heard screams from the vessel and found one critically wounded officer, who subsequently died. Eighteen more men were apparently trapped below in or near the flooded engine room, and could not be saved. Shortly after the boarding party returned to the boats they saw their attacker surface about three points off the port bow and begin shelling the carcass in its now-grotesque posture with stern against the bottom (depth twelve meters) and funnel, bridge, and forecastle above the surface. The survivors had a clear view of the U-boat and later described in detail how it fired about twelve rounds and then made off at high speed toward the £550 Baton Rouge. A G7e below the waterline between bunkers and engine room of the second tanker set her fuel oil ablaze and the engine, fireroom, and crew quarters immediately flooded causing the stern to sink to the bottom in a reprise of Oklahoma’s plight, the decks at ten-degree list to starboard and the bow draft reduced to seventeen feet. Two men on watch in the engine room were killed by the torpedo’s explosion. A third crewman, a naturalized German, unaccountably jumped overboard in a rubber suit and was not seen again. One survivor reported hearing a voice from the U-boat say in broken English, “Come over here and we will save you,” but there is no mention of the incident in Hardegen’s KTB. Thirty-five men successfully abandoned ship in Numbers 1 and 3 lifeboats. Hardegen fired a few shells into the bow to release the air giving buoyancy, after which he pronounced the ship a Totalverlust!— “total loss!”45 Joining up with the boats from Oklahoma the survivors were eventually towed into Brunswick by a USN patrol boat. The two tankers remained awash and drifting, the oil from their bunkers fouling wilderness beaches until
the week following, when it was decided by naval and shipping investigators that the two sunken hulls could be raised and refloated. After preliminary salvage both tankers were towed to repair yards and returned to ocean service seven months later. So, U-123′s last three tanker kills were illusory.
In Hardegen’s view he had sunk them all. Liebre he had left a helpless derelict. These last two tankers he had brought as low as they could be brought. In his mind they were legitimate sinkings. “We seem to be specializing in tankers,” he wrote in his KTB.46 If the ships had gone down in deeper water certainly they would have been lost for good. But a stern bumping on the bottom could keep the bows full of air, and thus, technically, one could deny Hardegen the trophies. Or one could backdate claims, since both tankers would be sunk again, and that time for good—the first, Esso Baton Rouge, on 23 February 1943, when U-202 (Kptlt. Günter Poser) caught her 100 miles due south of the Azores; the second, Oklahoma, late in the war on 28 March 1945, when U-532 (Fregattenkapitän Ottoheinrich Junker) got lucky in mid-Atlantic.47
After spending the daylight hours of 8 April on the Georgia seabed 123 rose like a sea monster at nightfall twelve miles southeast of St. Simons Sound light buoy. Shortly afterward the lookouts sighted a northbound vessel that Hardegen quickly identified in the ample moonlight as a fast (thirteen-knot) cold storage motor ship named SS Esparta, property of the United Fruit Company. Even though it was small, only 3,365 GRT, Hardegen considered it a valuable prey because of its sophisticated refrigeration system; besides, its food cargo was also a fuel of war. Taking a position four hundred meters off the target’s course and slowing to three knots 123 launched G7e Number 9283 from Tube 1 on a course of 305 degrees. Von Schroe-ter’s data called for a hit at forty-two seconds. Right on time, WHACK!, and a dark detonation column rose above the aft mast. Within a short time the stern to the front edge of the funnel submerged. Under the glare of red and white emergency flares Hardegen could see that the ship had a smooth deck with almost no superstructure, conforming to the silhouette in Gröner, where he also learned that she was 101 meters long with a 7-meter draft. Certain that she would sink—and this time he was right—Hardegen resumed navigation south. On Esparta, meanwhile, several men jumped overboard to escape the fumes released from twelve hundred pounds of ammonia gas used in the ship’s refrigeration system, while most of the rest of the forty-man crew abandoned ship in Numbers 1 and 3 starboard lifeboats and forward raft. After throwing codes overboard in a weighted bag and sending distress signals, the master and radio operator jumped into the water alongside the raft. Only one crewman, who panicked, was lost, by drowning. The rest were rescued seven hours later by Navy Crash Boat USS Tyrer.48
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