The armed civilian craft were duly assigned to patrol stations spaced along the fifty-fathom curve of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts in what the Navy called Coastal Picket Patrols. Some Main Navy staffers worried that the small craft might blow themselves to pieces if they dropped three hundred-pound depth charges too near themselves, and COMINCH followed up with cautions that (a) the charges should never be set to less than 50 feet, (b) the speed of the boat should never be less than 10 knots, and (c) charges should never be dropped in water less than one hundred feet in depth since little was known about reflective effect of the explosive wave off the bottom. One message the Navy did not want to receive was, “Sighted sub, sank self.” After a few unhappy experiences proved the point of the cautions, arming of Coastal Pickets was limited to the .50-caliber machine gun. By 12 July the first 49 craft of the 143 armed and available were on station in the Eastern Frontier, where their principal value, apart from rescue operations, was perceived as keeping the U-boats underwater where the enemy’s speed and maneuverability, hence fighting effectiveness, were greatly retarded.57 On a number of occasions during the months that followed U-boats were seen diving on their first sight of a picket boat, for the same reason that U.S. submarines dived at the sight of a Japanese auxiliary sampan in the Pacific: The submersible did not want to waste a torpedo or to give away its position by staying on the surface to shell. The same deterrent role may have been played by offshore fishing boats, which in the same catch-up game had been organized as radio-reporting vessels during April.
The original impetus for a civilian coastal patrol had come not from the British but from U.S. fishermen and sportsmen. As early as 30 June 1941, the owner of a large swordfish fleet at Wakefield, Rhode Island, wrote to the Navy Department suggesting the installation of radio telephone equipment on his and similar fleets for offshore observation (“oilskin intelligence”) and patrol work. The then-acting CNO Ingersoll turned the idea down. It would be revived and supported by CNO Stark on 12 February 1942, but King withheld support and the plan died again. In the summer of 1941 another initiative came from the New York-based Cruising Club of America, which offered to loan the Navy fifty- to seventy-five-foot sailing yachts with experienced skippers and crews for offshore antisubmarine patrol. (The term auxiliary was used to denote a sailing vessel with an auxiliary gas or diesel engine.) On 23 February 1942, at a time when an increasingly critical public thought that the Navy should make more aggressive use of small craft, both power and sail, the Cruising Club renewed its offer. If Main Navy’s admirals had at first looked askance at “Crunch and Des” cabin cruisers, one can only imagine the dismay with which they viewed the pleasure fleet of the white-flannel set. Yet the Cruising Club proposal made some sense. Although lacking in speed and maneuverability to take on U-boats directly, a sailing vessel running silent under a sheet of canvas could observe U-boats or their periscopes without giving warning of its presence. As one devotee of sail, who had served on sub-chasers in World War I, wrote King, “You can creep up on ‘Jerry’ with a stitch of canvas.”58 Then, too, a sailing vessel hove to (headsails backed, helm up) made a steadier observation platform than other patrol craft; and a lookout aloft in the hounds, forty to sixty feet above the deck, had a height of eye equal to that on the bridge of a large patrol vessel. Washington was not convinced. Typically, King’s staff at COMINCH reacted negatively, arguing that sail’s lack of speed and maneuverability outweighed the advantage of silent running.59 In New York, however, where the maritime tradition was strong and rugged, blue-water yachtsmen knew their way around the angriest northern waters, Admiral Andrews seized on the offer as a godsend. Assigning his chief of staff and intelligence officer to the project, and appointing yachtsman Commander Vincent Astor, USNR, to superintend it, Andrews introduced thirty-six of the seagoing yachts into the Coastal Picket Patrol in June to the accompaniment of wide public approval.60 The sail fleet and power craft alike were officially known under the Coast Guard title, “Corsair Fleet.” But nobody called them that. The men who served aboard the civilian craft were privileged amateur admirals, businessmen, professors, college boys, deep-sea charter operators, Ernest Hemingway out of Cuba, ex-bootleggers and rumrunners—anyone who, as Samuel Eliot Morison put it, could “hand, reef and steer”—and the term by which they knew themselves was the Hooligan Navy.
Ironically, by the time the Hooligans were on station in force (June and July) the U-boats had shifted the brunt of their operations southward to the Caribbean and back to the trans-oceanic convoy routes. Thus, the Hooligan Navy would not be tested in full-scale combat conditions. But its members had their moments: U-boats forced down by the civilian boats’ presence, aircraft (in a test) detected (missed by naval vessels and shore stations), and torpedoed merchant seamen rescued. They also had their hard times, for example, motor cabin cruisers unable to hold the sea; and, it must be said, their embarrassing moments, as when off Florida a U-boat surfaced alongside a sport cruiser and its commander yelled in excellent American: “Get the hell out of here, you guys! Do you wanna get hurt? Now scram!”61 The Coastal Picket Patrol was gradually reduced in force during 1943 after it was decided that the U-boat menace had subsided, and as part of the draw-down the Hooligan Navy was disbanded. The maritime minutemen would have had a more critical role at sea, one may suppose, had they been called to service in the time of greatest need, when the U-boats first arrived. But that call would have required of the Navy more imagination and flexibility and less apathy and arrogance than, unfortunately, it displayed in January and February 1942 or earlier. Years later, in his semiofficial history of the Navy in World War II, Samuel Eliot Morison memorialized the Hooligans: “The Coastal Picket Patrol is another of those things which should have been prepared before the war came to America…. More of the Dunkirk spirit, ‘throw in everything you have,’ would not have been amiss … when regattas were being held within Chesapeake Bay while hell was popping outside the Capes. The yachtsmen, or some of them, were eager to stick their necks out; but at the time of greatest need, the Navy could not see its way to use them.”62 When the Navy Department finally decided that the private craft were a good thing after all, the public relations staffers were ready: They announced to the press that twelve hundred small craft were already conducting antisubmarine patrol in coastal waters during July. The actual figure was 143.
The idea of the civilian fleets was one of a large number of ideas presented to the Navy by the general public after it became clear that the Navy did not have the U-boats under control as it earlier had boasted. Some ideas were of the crackpot variety but others had merit, such as this suggestion, found in the King Papers, submitted by Robert K. Miller, of Rahway, New Jersey: “I had a thought last night that probably isn’t worth a damn, but I thought I would pass it on to you…. Why couldn’t tankers leave in the night, then at some secret rendezvous, pick up one of those ‘Mosquito’ boats and let the tanker tow it. The ‘Mosquito’ boat would be hard to see and if they are equipped with listening devices, they could pick up the submarine and be ready for her. … I hope some young lieutenant will not take it upon himself to throw this in the waste basket. If he is so inclined, I hope he will remember of [sic] the lieutenant who refused to do anything when the private at Pearl Harbor reported he heard planes in the listening device.” Rear Admiral Willis A. Lee, Jr., Assistant Chief of Staff, answered for King: “The particular measure suggested by you is already in hand together with many other methods which we are exploiting in our effort to combat the submarine menace.”63 One of the better ideas floated before the Navy had been the use of Civil Air Patrol (CAP) aircraft proposed by the Tanker Committee of the Petroleum War Council on 4 March. At that meeting the chief War Department representative, Major General Carl Spaatz, of the Air Force, expressed no objection to the idea, but Navy opinion, particularly King’s, was cool. The Civil Air Patrol, composed entirely of civilian volunteer pilots from every state, many with their own planes, had first organized a week before Pearl Harbor with
expectations of being useful in coastal patrol, rescue, and ferrying service. The Army Air Force showed interest early on, and at Atlantic City the 112th Squadron Army Ground Air Support Command offered to experiment with CAP participation in overwater patrols. Accordingly, on 8 March a variety of civilian craft—Luscombes, Cessnas, Stinson Voyagers, and Waco cabin jobs—lifted off on the first CAP antisubmarine flight. No interest in their patrol services was forthcoming from the Navy. On 12 March Admiral Andrews attempted to turn his service’s mind around with a well-reasoned letter to King in which he proposed that the general aviation fleet be organized into what he called a Scarecrow Patrol. Such a coastal patrol, if numerous enough, would force U-boats underwater at more frequent intervals than at present, thus restricting the range and cramping the operations of the enemy.64 When King asked his staff for reactions, Rear Admiral Donald B. Duncan, Assistant Chief of Staff, argued that the proposal was no more than “a scheme promoted by the builder of pleasure aircraft,” and Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations Rear Admiral Richard S. Edwards contended that, “It will serve no useful purpose except to give merchant ships the illusion that an adequate air patrol is being maintained” while at the same time leading to false contact reports, clogged communications, and “the probability that lost amateur flyers will require the use of anti-sub vessels to look for them.”65 King answered Andrews that the “Scarecrow Patrol” was rejected on grounds of “operational difficulties.”66
The CAP forged its first official relationships with the Army’s First Air Support Command (later with First Bomber Command, finally with the Twenty-fifth Wing of the Antisubmarine Command). Under those auspices from March forward the CAP maintained a continuous air patrol over coastal shipping lanes within sixty miles of shore during daylight hours. Fifty percent of all aircraft carried either one 325-pound depth charge or two 100-pound demolition bombs, together with a simple garage-built bombsight. Frequently pilots had to saw off a bomb fin in order to taxi and lift off. The CAP flew in every kind of weather, even the foulest when military pilots were grounded. Coastal residents and fishermen became accustomed to seeing the low-flying, brightly colored red, blue, and yellow one-engined planes—mostly high-winged, with red or white pyramid insignia-pass overhead. For their part, U-boat commanders cursed the persistent presence of what they called the “yellow bees.” CAP pilots, whose rules forbade them to claim draft deferment, wore specially devised uniforms in the event of capture. The Army supplied the aviation fuel but the pilots had to provide their own maintenance and hangars. By and large these men were not from the wealthy set associated with sailing yachts, and often the money to keep going came hard or had to be begged. There are few finer examples in the war of civilian generosity and intrepidity than those found in the CAP units, of which twenty-one eventually were established from Bar Harbor, Maine, to Brownsville, Texas. Typical were the units based in Florida, which flew two-plane patrols continuously, daylight to dark, during June and July 1942. Fifty percent of the planes were equipped with bomb racks and bombs. From Daytona Beach, twenty-three planes covered the sea-lanes from Melbourne to Jacksonville; from Lantana, fifteen planes surveyed the water from Melbourne south to Riviera Beach; and from Miami, twenty planes scouted the sector from Riviera Beach to Molasses Reef in the Keys.67 As CAP activity increased King and the Navy grudgingly accepted the value of the civilian units and began to make use of them, their first modest use coming shortly after 26 March 1942 when all offshore air patrols, Army as well as Navy, came under the overall command of the Sea Frontier Commanders. On 16 November, by which date U-boat activity had significantly diminished in the various frontiers, King reduced the scale of CAP flying. And on 18 May 1943, in a letter that began, “The Commander in Chief, United States Fleet appreciates the valuable contributions rendered by these civilian aircraft in Sea Frontier operations,” King peremptorily ordered the deactivation of all remaining CAP patrol operations. Even the ESF war diary noted the “bluntness” of the directive. As though to make amends the diary writer officially saluted “the interesting record of service” achieved by the CAP Coastal Patrol:
Missions flown: 86,685
Hours flown: 244,600
Radio reports on submarine positions: 173
Vessels reported in distress: 91
Irregularities observed at sea: 836
Special investigations made at sea or along coast: 1,046
Floating mines reported: 363
Dead bodies reported: 36
Bombs dropped against enemy submarines: 82
Enemy submarines definitely damaged or destroyed: 2
Special convoy missions performed at Navy request: 5,684
Airplanes lost: 90
Fatalities: 26
Personnel seriously injured: 768
Since the first quarter of the sixteenth century numerous European invaders had showed their flags off Florida. The original native peoples of the Timucua, Calusa, and Apalachee tribes who inhabited the peninsular shoreline—the Seminóles being latecomers to Florida and invaders themselves in the 1700s—saw the likes of Juan Ponce de León, Panfilo de Narváez, and Hernando de Soto, would-be conquistadors with terrifying armies, horses, works, and pomps. The Spaniards’ ocean-going galleons and caravels with their tall masts, sails, and pennants flying must have made their own alarming impressions. Over the space of two centuries the Spaniards themselves became natives of Tierra florida— the land of flowers—where twice each year they watched with pride the columned march of stolid black-and-green-colored hulls of the plate fleets that sailed north with the Gulf Stream burdened with gold, silver, precious gems and minerals from Peru, Mexico, and the distant Philippines. They were the first armed convoys of modern times, precursors of British convoys in the Napoleonic Wars, World War I, and World War II. After the first appearance of the Spaniards, Florida beheld invading navies, successively, of the French, the English, the Union (in the American Civil War), and, finally, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the tourists. But when in the winter and spring of 1942 U-boats first appeared in these same semitropical waters—gray spectral menaces to the playground of sunbathers, boatmen, and anglers—it may fairly be said that, since the arrival of Ponce de León in 1513, the Germans were the most unexpected hostile force ever to approach Florida’s shoreline.
Reinhard Hardegen and U-123 were not the first, as has been noted. V-128 (Heyse) entered the Straits of Florida in February and sank two tankers, the first off Cape Canaveral, the second north of Bethel Shoals. In the same month V-504 (Fregattenkapitän Fritz Poske) similarly sank two tankers in Florida waters, the first three miles off Jupiter Inlet, the second 12 miles northeast of the same site. Since February, however, no German nationals crossed the Florida state line until, on the night of 9 April, Hardegen and fifty-one companions slipped past the St. Marys River border and the northernmost Florida city, Fernandina, which was as brightly lit as a welcome station. Ahead, according to the charts and the Handbuch, was the mouth of the St. Johns and the U.S. Navy base at Mayport. As predicted, the St. Johns River Lightship anchored five miles east of the river jetties came into view. Its surprisingly intense light worried Hardegen, who thought that 123′s profile might become visible to an alert lookout on shore. Since the chart showed an anchorage inside the jetties, Hardegen gambled further on detection by closing the mouth of the river with the lightship to port. When, finally, he could look into the river’s mouth, he saw no vessels of any kind, naval or merchant, though red warning beacons atop the few structures on the south bank suggested that there was an airfield nearby. (There was not, and there would not be until 1943.) The whole scene had a silent, sleepy cast to it, leading Hardegen to conclude (correctly) that Mayport was not the major military threat he had expected it to be. Moving south of the river and out of the lightship’s glare, Hardegen conned the boat close to shore where he recognized resorts and cabanas, a pier, a roller coaster, other amusement rides, and beach houses. That had to be Jacksonville Beach, he reasoned. Everything w
as richly illuminated and automobiles with bright headlights cruised incredibly back and forth on the beach itself, throwing white reflections on the dancing waves to starboard. Hardegen had risked detection enough for one night and there was no steamer traffic to keep him on the surface, so he came to 150° and, nearing daybreak, put the boat on the bottom three miles offshore.
At 1400 hours local Eastern War Time (2000 CET) on 10 April 123 rose from her sand bed as far as periscope depth. In his saddle Hardegen scoped the sunlit horizon and saw nothing. He wanted to be off St. Augustine Lighthouse by dusk, but a surface run in daylight might be too dangerous now that American search patrols apparently had intensified. He decided to proceed underwater and wrote in his KTB: Unterwassermarsch nach St. Augustin— “underwater advance to St. Augustine.” In her near-four hundred years of existence the city of St. Augustine, oldest in the country, had been sailed against by numerous foreign hostile forces, but none underwater. This would be a first for a city that boasted of many. By late afternoon the slow-moving boat, 13.5 meters down, had a periscope view of the radio tower of St. Augustine’s local 250-watt station WFOY. Rafalski had its powerful signal on the earphones. Though the Puster had no way of knowing it, the tower’s radial copper ground wire lay underwater on the marsh shore, accounting for the unusually strong carrier wave that traveled to 123. Rafalski listened with curiosity to the strange American banter: “Yes, that’s Tommy Dorsey’s Boogie Woogie announcing another Touchton’s Telequiz, brought to you by Touchton’s Rexall Drug Store, Forty-seven King Street, in downtown Saint Augustine. As usual we’ll play two mystery tunes, and if we call you and you can identify the tunes, you’ll win today’s giant jackpot of eleven dollars, yes, eleven dollars!”69 As 123 came abeam the city, which—except for the Exchange Bank Building, the Cathedral campanile, and the twin Spanish-Moorish towers of the Ponce de León Hotel—was hidden by the north end of a large island, Anastasia, that ran fifteen miles down the coast, Hardegen decided to surface. The sun was red and falling slowly behind the black-and-white-banded St. Augustine Lighthouse when, with a roar that startled the gulls and mullet, 123 broached the surface dripping brine, and a bridge detail in short sleeves mounted watch in the warm April air. Hardegen and the lookouts trained their glasses carefully across all quadrants. They were clear. No defenses. Eins Zwei Drei seemed to be alone. Coming up on starboard was St. Augustine Beach. Hardegen would write in the following year: “The coast was clearly visible. Houses, trees, the dunes of the beautiful beach, the slender lighthouse beyond it, everything could be seen without binoculars. One of my bridge lookouts suddenly said, ‘Herr Kaleu! Can you see the little girl in the third beach chair from the left?’ He was kidding, but if there had been beach chairs we would have seen them. We were that close to the shore.”70 It was an idyllic experience to savor on the eve of what would be one of the most dangerous nights of Hardegen’s career.
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