At 2000 hours he came to periscope depth and proceeded on underwater cruise toward the Cape. At 2209 in late daylight he surfaced and straightaway found a ship. It was not the tanker he hoped for but a freighter, northbound, approximately 5,500 GRT. His first inclination was to let it pass, but, as he wrote in the KTB, “I can’t let this one go or fortune will punish us!”93 It took seven hours with one engine still down to maneuver into a position for launching. Finally, at 0511 (CET, 13 April), when 3.5 miles southeast of Hetzel Shoals gas buoy and within sight of Cape Canaveral Light, von Schroeter released the last torpedo of Hardegen’s naval career. Appropriately, it hit its target forty seconds after launch and a high, dark detonation column rose from the freighter’s starboard side abaft of amidships. Hardegen watched the now-familiar scene. The stern settled while the rest of the vessel listed heavily to starboard. Two lifeboats lowered and rowed away. After fifteen minutes the stern was on the thirty-one-meter bottom and the bridge underwater. It was a fine trophy. But it was not a tanker. Eins Zwei Drei had no more eels, but it did have ninety rounds of artillery. Hardegen decided to get a tanker with the gun before heading home to the barn.
SS Leslie was small, at an actual 2,609 CRT. American-owned, chartered to W. R. Grace & Co., she was en route, unarmed, from Antilla, Cuba, via Havana to New York with 3,300 tons of sugar, course 360 degrees true, speed six, radio silent, zigzagging, no lights burning, when Hardegen’s last-ever torpedo exploded in Number 3 hold blowing open the bulkheads, rupturing the overhead domestic tanks, and flooding the shaft alley with sugar and water. With a rapidly developing starboard list, the master, Albert Ericksson, saw that there was no hope of saving the vessel. He put the engine astern and ordered Abandon Ship. No distress message went out because the explosion had knocked out the radio. Of the crew of thirty-one and one consular passenger, twenty-seven men, carrying one body picked out of the water, rowed in two lifeboats to land a short distance north of the lighthouse. Another, rescued by SS Esso Bayonne, was put ashore at Key West the next day. Three persons were missing. Survivors reported that about five minutes after their ship settled the U-boat sent up a reddish orange flare that illuminated a large area. About two hours later, they said, they saw and heard gun flashes about four miles to the southward. They counted ten to twenty rounds.94
This was 11-/23 at work. Hardegen had found his cannon fodder south of Cape Canaveral Lighthouse. He described the target as “a fully loaded northbound tanker of about 8,000 GRT.” It was nothing of the kind. In the sinking of Empire Steel three weeks before he had acknowledged how easy it was to overestimate the tonnage of tankers because of their few reference points. In the present case Swedish Motorship Korsholm was not only 5,353 tons smaller than Hardegen’s estimate, it was not a tanker. Chartered to the British Ministry of Shipping, Korsholm, a freighter, was en route from Port Tampa, Florida, to Liverpool, England, via Halifax with a cargo of 4,593 tons of phosphate. At the time of Hardegen’s sudden bombardment from the starboard side she was on a northerly course, blacked out but not zigzagging, radio silent. The first incoming rounds “exploded” the bridge, wrecked the starboard lifeboat, and decommissioned the radio transmitter. (Rafalski remembered the Old Man’s predilection for gunfire: “He loved it. He would stand on the bridge with arms akimbo, pushing his elbows up and down saying, ‘Give ‘em another one!’”95) After ten minutes the shelling stopped and the crew began abandoning ship. A second volley began while the port lifeboat was still being lowered. Fire then broke out amidships and spread rapidly. The one lifeboat rowed safely away leaving twelve men still on the hulk. Aircraft from Banana River NAS arrived on the scene shortly after 0400 EWT and dropped life rafts and flares. Vectored to the wreck by the planes, the Dutch SS Bacchus rescued two men who were still on board. The American SS £550 Bayonne, which had performed the same service for Leslie only shortly before, picked up a survivor from the water. One body washed ashore. Eight others including the master were missing. Perforated methodically along the waterline, Har-degen’s “tanker” went down.96
“Ruder hart backbord! Kurs Heimat im Golfstrom!”—“Hard to port! Course home in the Gulf Stream!” While von Schroeter conned the boat on a new course zero degrees, and Rafalski looked anxiously at the clock to see how many hours remained to 13 April, Hardegen went below to draft his patrol-end report to BdU. By his reckoning he had sunk ten ships for a total of 74,815 GRT, or, as he boasted in the KTB: “We have broken the record of our last voyage. With 300,141 GRT U-/23 is the second German U-boat to pass 300,000 tons during the war.”97 (Giving him Oklahoma and Baton Rouge [but not Liebre], which by every standard were “sunk” except that, awash in shoal water, they could be refloated and salvaged, his actual total was nine ships sunk. His tonnage total, as usual inflated for most vessels, was a still respectable 52,336.) It remained now to relay these data to BdU. Hardegen composed his report in verse:
Sieben Tankern schlug’ die letzte Stund’.
Die U-Falle sank träger.
Zwei Frachter liegen mit auf Grund
Versenkt vom Paukenschläger!98
For seven tankers the hour has passed,
The Q-ship hull went down by the meter,
Two freighters, too, were sunk at last,
And all of them by the same Drumbeater!
13
final Reckoning
At the Department of the Navy on 1 April the same public relations officers who gave America “Sighted sub, sank same,” announced that, as of that date, twenty-eight German U-boats had been “sunk and presumably sunk” off the U.S. coast, four by Army bombers and twenty-four by the Navy.1 A patriotic national population wanted to believe the Navy. It would have pained the public to learn that the guardians of the shore were equating sub sightings with sinkings, or that the word “presumably” in the Navy’s communique ought to have been italicized. But the fact was that, as of that date, not a single U-boat had been sunk in U.S. or Caribbean waters. In the war against the Ubootwaffe so far only the brash lie had succeeded, and then only in the heartland. Residents of the water’s edge knew better. To them it seemed that the U-boats were more numerous than ever. Night after night the seaward horizons were red from the tankers’ fires. Morning after morning the beaches filled with the freighters’ sodden debris. The sea-lanes claimed by the PR victors in truth presented a scene of total defeat: melancholy graveyards where hundreds of ships’ carcasses lay buried; where the canted bows, foretrucks, and masts of other, half-submerged wrecks formed hazards to navigation inside the ten-fathom curve. Only Admiral Dönitz could draw satisfaction from such a catastrophe: “Our U-boats are operating close inshore along the coast of the United States of America,” he told German war correspondent Wolfgang Frank, “so that bathers and sometimes entire coastal cities are witnesses to the drama of war, whose visual climaxes are constituted by the red glorioles of blazing tankers.”2
Although there were many rumors of it happening, no one, military or civilian, could give a positively authenticated account, much less provide a photograph, of a captured U-boat being towed into an American port. Other rumors, even more widespread, held that U-boatmen were coming ashore to purchase fresh groceries and to attend the movies. Despite persistent stories to that effect in various coastal communities at the date of this writing—a commonly heard Florida story holds that a sunken U-boat recently entered by divers was found to contain Holsum Bakery bread wrappers—no U-boat crewman is known to have gone ashore on the American coast, and surviving commanders like Hardegen firmly deny that it ever happened. U-/23′s propaganda photographer on the second patrol, “Schöner Rudi” Meisinger, asked Hardegen off Florida if he might go ashore in the dinghy to take pictures but was refused. Standing BdU orders forbade anyone to leave the boats. The only exceptions were to permit visits to other U-boats at sea on official business or to land saboteurs on enemy shores, as would happen twice on the U.S. East Coast during the six-month period under study.
In what Abwehr II, the German Military Intelli
gence Corps, code-named Operation Pastorius, after a seventeenth-century German settler in Pennsylvania, U-202 debarked four men with explosives and U.S. dollars at Amagansett, Long Island, on the night of 13 June, and V-584 placed another four men, similarly equipped, ashore at Ponte Vedra, south of Jacksonville Beach, Florida, three nights later. The U-boat oarsmen returned at once to their boats in each instance, though not before scooping up sand as souvenirs. The saboteurs’ mission was to blow up aluminum-manufacturing plants, power plants, waterworks, bridges, and railroad systems. Nonprofessional misfits, they were poorly trained and the details of their cover were badly bungled. Worse (for them), one of the northern group immediately betrayed both landing parties, with the result that the Federal Bureau of Investigation captured all eight, six of whom were electrocuted by the Army in Washington, D.C. on 8 August, the informer and one other receiving long prison terms. The story of the would-be saboteurs has been told before.3 It figures little in this account since it does not bear on the U-boat war as such—the ESF war diary for June (chapter 6) spoke of the “Amagansett Incident”—and the effect of Pastorius was totally inconsequential alongside the U-boat onslaught against seaborne trade. As a training manual prepared by NAS Quonset Point, Rhode Island, put it, “The massacre enjoyed by the U-boats along our Atlantic Coast in 1942 was as much a national disaster as if saboteurs had destroyed half a dozen of our biggest war plants.”4 Not on land but in the coastal water—that was where the sabotage was being done.
The first sinkings of U-boats by U.S. servicemen took place off Newfoundland during March. Naval Reserve Ensign William Tepuni piloting a Lockheed Hudson with Patrol Squadron 82 (VP-82) out of Argentia on 1 March dropped depth bombs on a crash-diving U-656 twenty-five miles south-southeast of Cape Race. Oil and deck parts rising to the surface gave Tepuni the right to claim a kill, which was confirmed by postwar checks of BdU records. The second sinking was claimed on the fifteenth by none other than Chief Aviation Machinist’s Mate Donald Francis Mason. In a PBY-3 belonging to the same squadron, Mason sighted U-503 southeast of Virgin Rocks and, this time without PR assistance, sank same, thus redeeming his self-esteem and earning an instant ensign’s stripe. Like Tepuni’s, Mason’s kill was later confirmed. The first U-boat sinking in U.S. waters came in the following month, when two U-boats succumbed to patrols of the Fifth Naval District. Headquartered at Norfolk, 5ND by this date was the best organized and trained antisubmarine warfare (ASW) force in the ESF. Its ships and planes patrolled a jurisdiction of nearly twenty-eight thousand square miles of water that lay between the thirty-eighth and thirty-fourth parallels (Chincoteague Inlet, Virginia south to New River Inlet, North Carolina), through which, at any one time, forty-five to fifty merchant vessels proceeded on their lawful occasions, all of them forced to deep water out to sea to avoid Hatteras and the Shoals on the most dangerous legs of their journeys north and south. After 1 April, when it announced a new, aggressive “hunter-killer” doctrine, 5ND maintained all its available craft, surface and air, on intensified ocean patrol.5 The British-like exertion quickly yielded results.
At midnight beginning 14 April the Mc&es-class flush-decker destroyer USS Roper (DD 147) was operating east of Nags Head, North Carolina, on course 162 degrees true, speed eighteen knots. At 0006 she made radar contact bearing 190 degrees at 2,700 yards. New radar installations on ASW vessels gave them an edge over surfaced U-boats, this one being J-85 (Oberleutnant Eberhard Greger) proceeding off the coast on various courses. The contact may have been made by purest chance, but 5ND Operational Intelligence later contended:” ‘ROPER’ did not stumble on the U85 by chance. The finger of 5ND Operations, on the basis of accurate intelligence reports, skillfully and unerringly directed the ‘ROPER’ to the location of the first contact.”6 Whichever the case, the radar finding was confirmed by echo ranging on propellers and, shortly afterward, lookouts sighted the suspect vessel. The skipper (Lt. Comdr. Hamilton W. Howe) called his crew to general quarters and went over to the attack. As the faster Roper (twenty knots) closed the vessel, which fled on constantly changing bearings, she held slightly to the starboard quarter so as not to catch a stern torpedo. It was a wise decision. When the range had closed to seven hundred yards a torpedo indeed passed down the port side of Roper close aboard. At three hundred yards the destroyer’s twenty-four-inch searchlight picked out U-85′s distinctive Type VIIB tower, enabling the executive officer on the flying bridge to make a positive identification. The U-boat made a hard turn to starboard, which placed it inside the turning radius of the destroyer, perhaps seeking an opportunity to dive.
Holding her light on the German, Roper commenced firing, first with the Number 1 machine gun, which accurately cut down the U-boat’s gun crews as they raced to their stations. The Number 5 three-inch gun was under the command of a gun captain who had never before been in command of a firing. He acquired the range quickly, however, and placed a shell directly on the tower. Before Roper could get off a torpedo of its own the U-boat went down, either by choice or as a result of artillery damage. About forty German crewmen abandoned the boat as it submerged. Choosing not to rescue them, but determined to assure a U-boat’s destruction in ESF waters after three months of humiliating failure and frustration, Roper dropped an eleven-charge barrage across the swirl of the diving boat. The charges destroyed the boat. Their concussions also killed the men in the water. Roper lay to until daybreak, when a PBY dropped a depth bomb over an oil slick and assorted floating debris, and Roper added two more. By 0830 seven aircraft, including a blimp, were overhead and a British trawler, HMS Bedfordshire, arrived to assist in recovering bodies. Twenty-nine were found, some with personal diaries (a forbidden practice) that described the boat’s last days. Not only 5ND but also the beleaguered Eastern Sea Frontier headquarters on Church Street in Manhattan finally had something to cheer about. The U-boats were beatable after all. Destroyer men in the frontier were particularly well pleased with themselves.7
Not to be outdone, the small craft, too, would have their day. On the afternoon of 9 May the 165-foot cutter Icarus (WPC-110) was proceeding alone from New York to Key West when, off Cape Lookout, she acquired a “mushy” sound contact about nineteen hundred yards at 15 degrees on the port bow. As the contact came abaft the beam it increased in definition and the skipper, Lt. Comdr. Maurice D. Jester, USCG, was called to the bridge. At 1629 EWT, nine minutes after the first echo return, a fierce explosion was “seen, heard, and felt” some two hundred yards on the port quarter. It was a torpedo either misfiring or detonating on the shoal bottom that had been launched by U-352 (Kptlt. Hellmut Rathke). The warhead’s geyser corresponded in location with the screw noises heard by the cutter’s hydrophones. Jester therefore decided to drop a diamond pattern of five depth charges directly over the swirl left by the explosion. It was a good decision because Kptlt. Rathke had made a bad decision: He grounded his boat in 120 feet (36 meters) of water at exactly that position, thinking, as he said later, that that was the least likely place for the cutter to drop charges. The rain of Wabos that hit him at 1631 hours caused immense damage as well as killed his number one. Icarus returned to drop three more charges in a V pattern at 1645. Two charges later, at 1709, U-352 broached the surface stern-down by 45 degrees.
Icarus immediately swept the decks with machine-gun fire to prevent guns being manned while three-inch gun pointer Charles E. Mueller earned himself a promotion to Chief Boatswain’s Mate by ricocheting his second round off the water into the tower and placing six more rounds into the now mortally wounded hull. During the bombardment the U-boat crew abandoned ship through the tower hatch in order of seniority, or as Icarus reported, “in clock-like precision.” Some were caught in the gunfire, which ceased at 1714 when U-352, broken and punctured, sank from view with twelve of her crew, one dead, still aboard. Thirty-three survivors bobbed in the water, one with a severed leg whom the commander assisted by fashioning a tourniquet to stop the bleeding. Another held up the stump of an arm in supplication to the Americans
not to shoot them; later the same man, in great pain, would beg, in English, to be shot. Jester was not at all sure how to manage such a large number of prisoners on his small craft, and he sent a plain-language radiotelephone message to shore stations asking for instructions: HAVE SUNK SUBMARINE. 30 TO 40 MEN IN WATER, SHALL ICARUS PICK UP ANY OF MEN? Sent repeatedly, the transmission elicited no response for thirty-six minutes until, finally, Sixth Naval District directed Jester: PICK UP SURVIVORS, BRING THEM TO CHARLESTON. Despite their ordeal the Germans, except for the wounded, seemed to be in excellent physical and morale condition when brought aboard the cutter. Commander Rathke imposed silence on his crew, going so far as to caution them to avoid the company of any German-speaking girls to whom they might be introduced on shore. At 2250, before reaching Charleston, the crewman who had lost his leg died.
Two days later Naval Intelligence interrogated the German officers and crew, who had remained under the martinetlike discipline of the thirty-two-year-old Rathke. Even had they been willing, the Germans could not have divulged much about the U-boat war as such, since their boat had not a single sinking to its credit since being launched the preceding summer. About tactical, technical, and mechanical details the crew remained obediently silent. The most that Navy questioners learned was that during the last four days off the Outer Banks the boat dived repeatedly to avoid patrol aircraft and that the crew much enjoyed the “jazz” from U.S. broadcast stations that was played over the boat’s loudspeaker. Other marginal data obtained included the names of the best bars for enlisted ranks in Lorient, Brest, Saint-Nazaire, Kiel, Flensburg, and Gotenhafen. In order to obtain more substantial information, including, if possible, a TRITON cipher book and rotors, an attempt was made to raise the U-boat. The tug USS Umpqua (ATO-25), with deep-water diving equipment sent down from New York, departed Charleston on the nineteenth and next day found British trawlers HMS Northern Duke and Northern Dawn standing by a buoy they had planted to mark the wreck site. On the twenty-third a diver found the U-boat lying on its starboard side at an angle of 60 degrees. Every attempt by the tug, assisted by the trawlers, to raise the wreck failed, and on the twenty-ninth the project was abandoned. A second effort in August similarly was abandoned after grapnels succeeded in bringing up no more than one 20-foot section of “upper deck grating.”8
Operation Drumbeat Page 50