Five other U-boats were destroyed by U.S. forces in the various frontier waters during the close of the “second happy time,” 14 January-15 July. The first of these was the victim of another small craft, the 165-foot cutter Thetis (WPC-115). Lt. (jg) Nelson C. McCor-mick USCG and his crew were part of a GSF hunter-killer group out of Key West. At 1550 EWT on 13 June they dropped seven depth charges on a sound contact in the Gulf, which resulted in the destruction of U-/57. Huff-Duff bearings fixed V-158 at 130 miles west-southwest of Bermuda on 30 June enabling Lt. Richard E. Schreder USNR in a PBM Mariner of Navy Squadron VP-74 to drop a depth bomb that, amazingly, stuck in the U-boat’s tower and detonated when the boat submerged. U-701, which was on her third war cruise out of Brest (and had been the source of a “man overboard” intercept at Winn’s OIC in January) was fatally bombed by a Lockheed Hudson from U.S. Bomber Squadron 396 while crash-diving 30 miles off Diamond Shoals Lightship on 7 July.9 On 13 July USS Lansdowne (DD 486), in combination with Bomber Squadron 59, dispatched V-153 off Panama. The fifth and last U-boat to be destroyed during the six-month-long concentrated U-boat campaign in American waters was U-576, sunk on 15 July off Diamond Shoals by a joint force of two Navy aircraft from Squadron VS-9 based at Marine Corps Air Station, Cherry Point, North Carolina, and the Naval Armed Guard of the merchant ship SS Unicoi.10 Clearly Eastern and Gulf Frontier defenses had stiffened by midsummer. More surface and air forces were coming on line. U-boat tracking was adopting British standards of precision and sophistication. At ESF headquarters in New York two new reserve officers brought analytical expertise to the team—Harry H. Hess, a professor of physics at Princeton, and Robert Wolf, a statistician for a New York brokerage firm. Training greatly improved over the preceding January, when skill levels had been demonstrably low.11 Three major ASW schools began turning out thousands of skilled sea personnel: the Naval Local Defense Force School, equipped with British-style mechanical “attack teachers,” at Boston; the Fleet Sonar School, at Key West, for instruction in hydrophones and sonar; and the Submarine Chaser Training Center, at Miami, where young officers—older men could not take the strain—learned how to handle the now-desperately-wanted SCs and PCs, called elsewhere in the service the “Donald Duck Navy.” A civilian Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Research Group (ASWORG) applied scientific and mathematical data to the improvement of operational doctrine. And Admiral King was finally getting around to instituting coastal convoys.
What really broke the back of the U-boat campaign in U.S. waters was the coastal convoy. And what made the convoy system possible was the multiplication of small craft. The responsible Navy commanders had not been blind to the need for convoys. As early as 20 January, in a personal communication to Support Force commander Admiral Bristol, Admiral Ingersoll had stated: “The sub situation on the Atlantic coast will result in demands for coastal escort vessels and antisubmarine vessels. Converted vessels will not yield much and until the new PC’s begin to get in service I think we are in for a beating from the subs.”12 Through a similar personal letter channel King himself wrote to Ingersoll on 4 February: “The increasingly serious scale of attack on shipping in the North American eastern seaboard points, in my view, to the desirability of extending the convoy system to cover this area.” He then proposed releasing twenty-one short-legged destroyers for use in establishing an interlocking convoy system up and down the seaboard.13 Ingersoll, who assiduously guarded his transatlantic properties, was sympathetic to the proposal but not so far as to give his DDs to it. Eight days later, King asked Admiral Andrews to canvass the ESF district commandants for ideas and to “submit a plan for a convoy system to protect coastal shipping in this Frontier.”14 In varying degrees commandants advised against the immediate institution of convoys for lack of adequate escort forces. Though the ESF war diary noted certain advantages a coastwise system possessed that a transatlantic system lacked—principally, capacity for merchant vessels to lie over in sheltered harbors during the most dangerous nighttime hours and air coverage afforded by planes operating from shore bases—Andrews recommended to King “that no attempt be made to protect coastwise shipping by a convoy system until an adequate number of suitable escort vessels is available.” He added that, if a system had to be established at once, the first leg should be that south of Hampton Roads.15
King accepted Andrews’ judgment particularly since each day by Andrews’ count there were 120 to 130 merchant ships proceeding within the boundaries of the frontier, and all that ESF could offer for escort of convoy were nineteen vessels with speeds of twelve to fourteen knots, and they were all small craft. When King thought of convoys he thought of destroyers. Lacking destroyers on the seaboard he thereupon announced his doctrine: “Inadequately escorted convoys are worse than none.”16 A British historian has recently commented: “The senior American commanders, acknowledging the lack of small craft, instead of striving with might and main to remedy the evil in 1941, used it as an argument against convoy just as alarmists in the Admiralty had done twenty-five years earlier. So the fatal doctrine was propounded that ‘a convoy without adequate protection is worse than none.’”17 This was the exact opposite to all that British experience had taught in the second world conflict and, indeed, as late as 19 March the First Sea Lord (Pound) advised King that, on the contrary, convoys with weak escorts were a superior tactic to no convoys at all, and that the introduction of convoys was a matter of “urgency.”18 King’s resistance to the tactic may have been the result of persistent Anglophobia. It may have derived from the U.S. Navy’s long tradition of the offensive as against the passive role of warships having no more splendid duty than that of shepherding seaborne trade to safe and timely arrivals: One should not forget that King and his generation were shaped in the dream of great fleet actions and in the glory of single-ship enterprise. Moreover, he no doubt genuinely feared that concentrating attractive ill-defended targets in convoy invited rather than repelled attack. But that was precisely the point, the British argued. Convoys drew U-boats to warships. Instead of fruitlessly searching for the elusive Germans—“hunting the hornets all over the farm,” Woodrow Wilson called the practice in World War I—the escorts had the U-boats in known positions where they could attack them. Conversely, convoying had the effect of mathematically reducing individual ship targets, since if a U-boat was not correctly positioned to attack a convoy it would miss all the ships that formed it, and it would have a long wait for another target opportunity.19
Exactly when and under what circumstances King changed his mind is not clear. Perhaps it was the influence of Andrews’ growing conviction that patrol and search violated the two great principles of war, “conservation of energy” and “concentration of force,” and that the more economic and effective method of combating U-boats was the coastal convoy.20 Certainly one sees a change in King by 16 March, before the date of the First Sea Lord’s communication, when COM-INCH called for a meeting to take place in four days’ time of representatives of the Eastern, Gulf, and Caribbean Frontier commanders for the purpose of discussing the institution of an East Coast-Caribbean convoy system. A report from that meeting on the twenty-seventh proposing such a system was approved by King.21 On 1 April, Andrews inaugurated a partial convoy arrangement, labeled the “Bucket Brigade,” whereby ships moved only in the daylight hours and took cover in protected anchorages by night, including a patrolled anchorage behind Cape Lookout. Elaborate plans were put under way to inaugurate a full coastwise system no later than 15 May. The most pressing question was escorts. The minimum strength thought necessary was five escorts per convoy of forty to fifty ships. Where would they come from? Only nine destroyers permanently assigned to ESF duty were available. But to them could be joined nine new 173-foot-class PCs, four 165-foot-class Coast Guard cutters, seven new and old gunboats, two Eagle boats, and twelve British-manned trawlers. Also the District Local Defense Forces were stripped of all small craft available, especially seventy-five- and eighty-three-foot Coast Guard cutters, PC-452 and
SC-453 classes from the 60-60 program, and seakeeping vessels then engaged in laying mined anchorages for the protection of independently routed vessels, which, because of speed or lack of it, were not expected to join the convoys. 5ND contributed forty small craft to the escort pool, among them twenty eighty-three-foot cutters, which, though originally thought “of very limited usefulness,” proved to be the short-leg workhorses of the New York-Delaware run. Thus, the much denigrated small craft, against which King himself had animadverted, proved to be the key to the solution of the escort deficit.
The first southbound convoy sailing, designated KS 500, left Hampton Roads on 14 May. The next day northbound KN 100 departed Key West. The plan called for a forty-five-ship convoy to run the gauntlet in each direction every three days, following precise sea-lanes drawn on the trackless water. Sailings were timed so that the formations would be in daylight when they steamed from Cape Lookout to the Chesapeake past Hatteras, where the narrowness of the continental shelf had for so long enabled the U-boats to operate in deep water close inshore at night with marked profit and relative impunity. Later in May a northern link, New York-Halifax, was added to the chain; and in August and September a Galveston-Mississippi-Key West link made the coastal system complete. The Caribbean routes required more complex coverage with fewer resources, but a subsidiary set of convoy links was established in that Frontier beginning in July, thanks in part to the dispatch of a number of British and Canadian destroyers and corvettes from the northern transatlantic routes (to the joyful relief of their crews).22
The Caribbean would take some time to show the effects of convoy practice, but the effects in the Eastern and Gulf Frontiers were nearly immediate. In the Eastern Frontier sinkings fell in number from twenty-three in April to four in May. They rose to thirteen in June (when, as part of their last-gasp effort on the East Coast, U-boats sowed mines in the ship channel at the Chesapeake, where on 15 June near Buoy 2 CB, two ships from northbound convoy KN 109 sank from collisions with the explosive charges, and another was damaged).23 June figures were encouraging to President Roosevelt, who noted the disparity between the number of convoyed vessels sunk and the much larger number of independently sailing vessels sunk. He wrote to King, “I think it has taken an unconscionable time to get things going…,”24 In July, sinkings dropped to three, and then to zero for the remainder of the year. On 19 July, Admiral Dönitz withdrew the last two U-boats that operated off Hatteras, V-754 and V-458, and eight days later he transferred the main effort in the U-boat war away from the seaboard and back to wolf-pack attacks on shipping in the mid-Atlantic air-coverage gap. The Battle of the Atlantic was back where it began.
In the Gulf Frontier, sinkings declined sharply after convoys became the routine mode of passage in late summer, and the last ship to go down in the Gulf itself was sunk on 4 September. The Caribbean continued to be a problem area throughout the summer and into the fall, but the concentrated campaign in U.S. waters was over. Ships would continue to be sunk here and there along American shores: There would be a U-boat semi-blitz against East Coast and Caribbean shipping in the period April-December 1943, as well as sporadic nuisance attacks until the very last month of the war in Europe, but after the institution of convoys the American coastline for the first time could be declared secure. On 21 June 1942, speaking in the hyperbole of the convert, Admiral King stated: “Escort is not just one way of handling the submarine menace; it is the only way that gives any promise of success. The so-called patrol and hunting operations have time and again proved futile.”25 The promise was not that the escorts would actually sink U-boats but that the U-boats, recognizing the hazard that the convoys posed to them, would abandon American waters, which happened. What sinking of U-boats occurred came in every instance, paradoxically, at the hands of hunter-killer groups or of single aggressively patrolling ships or planes, contrary to King’s dictum.
The end of the six-month period of maximum destruction left nearly four hundred hulks on the seabeds of the Eastern, Gulf, and Caribbean Frontiers. By frontier, they numbered 171 (ESF), 62 (GSF), and 141 (CSF). An additional twenty-three vessels were sunk in the Panama Frontier—an aggregate of 397 ships sunk in U.S. Navy-protected waters. And the totals do not include the many ships damaged. Overall, the numbers represent one of the greatest maritime disasters in history and the American nation’s worst-ever defeat at sea. For Germany this was the most successful sustained U-boat campaign in the whole course of the war. In exchange for negligible losses of men and boats the Ubootwaffe had carried off a triumph that was fully the equivalent of victory in a major battle on land. For America’s chief ally Great Britain, the losses proved so grievous they imperiled that trade-dependent island nation’s ability to continue as an effective contributor to the war. For the Soviet ally it cast doubt that the West would be able to deliver the weapons required to defeat the Wehrmacht’s eastern operations. For the United States, in terms of raw resources and materiel, Paukenschlag and its aftermath constituted the costliest defeat of World War II. Most calamitous of all was the toll in human lives, which can be estimated at hardly fewer than 5,000 souls—U.S., British, Norwegian, and other merchant seamen; U.S. and Royal Navy officers and men; and civilian passengers. Whether shot, drowned, scalded, set on fire, frozen, smothered, crushed, starved, or maimed by sharks, they rested now everlastingly on the bed of the sea.
The Pacific Pearl Harbor lasted two hours and ten minutes on a Sunday morning. The Atlantic Pearl Harbor lasted six months. The American people understandably were stunned and angered by what happened at Hawaii, where the naval losses included proud, allegedly impregnable battlewagons and the lives of thousands of young men, though the full account of ships sunk and damaged and the full enumeration of human casualties (2,403 dead, 1,178 wounded) would not be released until after the war. Compounding the shock of those losses was the abhorrent nature of the Japanese tactics, which, carried out while her diplomats were still negotiating in Washington and without prior declaration of war as required by international law, were widely condemned in this country as a “treacherous” “sneak attack” that “hit below the belt.” Yet any close examination of the fleet losses at Hawaii discloses that they were not nearly as severe as popular opinion held them to be. No aircraft carriers were in the harbor on the day the attackers struck. Together with all the heavy cruisers and more than half the fleet’s destroyers, they were off elsewhere on missions. The anchored victims were mainly aged, slow, obsolete battleships that had no role in the immediately forthcoming carrier battles with the Japanese. By the date when heavy guns were needed for shore bombardment of invasion beaches much of the Pearl Harbor battle line had been rebuilt. Four battleships disabled on 7 December, USS California, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Maryland, participated in the U.S. naval victory at Surigao Strait on 24-25 October 1944. The repeatedly holed Nevada, which managed to slip her moorings during the attack on Pearl Harbor and beach herself on Waipo Point, supported the Marine landings on Iwo Jima in February 1945. Ironically, those battleships and other warships that were raised from the muck of Pearl Harbor and restored to action would probably never have survived to fight again had they been off soundings instead of at their anchorages. Another piece of luck that the Navy enjoyed was the incredible failure of the Japanese attackers to hit the three targets that would have taken the Navy out of the Pacific war for at least twelve months: (1) the Navy fuel farm in the hills beyond Pearl City; (2) the port installations, including repair yards; and (3) the submarine base with five submarines on manila lines. The judgment of Morison persuades: “One can search military history in vain for an operation more fatal to the aggressor.”26
Though the public had no way of knowing it, the German assault on U.S. coastal shipping was far the greater disaster for the United States and her allies. Here for a long while the losses were irremediable. Unlike Hawaii, where the undamaged fleet units were able to take the offensive almost at once after 7 December and to score the major victory at Midway just six mont
hs later, in the Western Atlantic, Gulf, and Caribbean sunken bottoms and lives, not to mention cargoes, could not that quickly be made good. Some U.S. military leaders, like Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, were late in realizing the magnitude of the catastrophe. On 19 June Marshall wrote to King:
The losses by submarines off our Atlantic seaboard and in the Caribbean now threaten our entire war effort. The following statistics bearing on the subject have been brought to my attention: Of the 74 ships allocated to the Army for July by the War Shipping Administration, 17 have already been sunk. 22% of the bauxite fleet has already been destroyed. 20% of the Puerto Rican fleet has been lost. Tanker sinkings have been 3.5% per month of tonnage in use. We are all aware of the limited number of escort craft available, but has every conceivable improvised, means been brought to bear on this situation? I am fearful that another month or two of this will so cripple our means of transport that we will be unable to bring sufficient men and planes to bear against the enemy in critical theaters to exercise a determining influence on the war.27
To this memorandum King responded two days later in more detail than can be repeated here, but with this particular answer to Marshall’s query about “every conceivable improvised means”:
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