Torpedo Junction: The U-boat War off the North Carolina Coast, 1942

In the first seven months of 1942, German U-boats sank tankers and freighters within sight of the Outer Banks. Families at Nags Head and Hatteras watched ships burn offshore, and oil and bodies washed up on the beaches. The waters off Cape Hatteras became known as Torpedo Junction. This chapter tells how it happened, how it was stopped, and what is still on the bottom.

Why it mattered

Off Cape Hatteras, where the Outer Banks bend toward the southwest, Diamond Shoals runs out to sea for miles. Ships rounding the cape had to pass through a narrow band of water between the shoals and the Gulf Stream. In 1942 much of the oil for the East Coast and Britain moved through that band, in tankers coming up from Texas, Louisiana, Aruba and Venezuela bound for New York, Philadelphia and Halifax, where the transatlantic convoys formed. A U-boat waiting off Hatteras did not have to search the ocean for targets, because the targets had to come to it.

For about four months after Germany declared war on the United States on 11 December 1941, the U-boats sank ships along the American coast faster than at any other time in the war. The National Park Service counts 397 ships sunk in American-protected waters from January to June 1942 (NPS, Cape Hatteras National Seashore, “Torpedo Junction”). The U.S. Navy’s Eastern Sea Frontier, which ran south from the Canadian border and included North Carolina’s waters, lost 85 vessels before its first coastal convoys sailed in mid-May (U.S. Navy, History of Convoy and Routing, ch. IV). A large share of those sinkings came off North Carolina.

For North Carolina, this was the war at its closest. No enemy army came near the state, but the U-boat war was fought within sight of its beaches. Coast Guard boats pulled survivors from the sea, Morehead City and Southport took in burned and oil-soaked crews, and Ocracoke buried British sailors. The wrecks are still there, from about 90 feet deep off Hatteras Inlet to about 700 feet farther out, one of the few World War II battlefields in American waters.

Paukenschlag: five boats for America

Until December 1941, Hitler had kept his U-boats away from American shipping. The incidents of 1941 told in Chapter 3, the Greer, the Kearny and the Reuben James, happened far out at sea, around the convoys, and the American coast itself was off limits. The German declaration of war on 11 December removed that restriction. Karl Doenitz, Commander U-boats, saw at once that the American coast would be full of ships sailing alone, with their lights on, along routes that no navy had yet learned to defend. He planned a sudden blow there, a Paukenschlag, or drumbeat; English accounts call it Operation Drumbeat.

He had few boats to do it with. Clay Blair’s history describes Doenitz asking for a dozen of the large boats and getting far fewer, because the naval staff had sent much of the U-boat force to the Mediterranean and to Norway (Blair, Hitler’s U-Boat War, vol. I). The first wave that sailed for American waters in late December 1941 was five Type IX boats: U-123, U-66, U-109, U-125 and U-130. Some accounts, including the Associated Press obituary of Hardegen, give six; the National Park Service gives five (NPS, “Torpedo Junction”). Only the big Type IX boats had the fuel to reach the American coast, patrol there for weeks, and return to France.

The best known of the five commanders was Kapitänleutnant Reinhard Hardegen of U-123, a 28-year-old from Bremen who had taken command of the boat in May 1941. U-123 left Lorient on 23 December 1941 and was at sea for 49 days (uboat.net, U-123 patrols). The boats were to open the attack together, and Drumbeat officially opened on 13 January 1942. Hardegen had already sunk the British steamer Cyclops off Nova Scotia on 12 January. On 14 January he torpedoed the Panamanian tanker Norness off Long Island, and the next day he sank the British tanker Coimbra (uboat.net, ships hit by U-123). Then he turned south for Cape Hatteras.

An unready coast

The U.S. Navy’s escorts were nearly all committed to the transatlantic convoys between Newfoundland and Iceland. The North Atlantic Naval Coastal Frontier, commanded from New York by Vice Admiral Adolphus Andrews, was renamed the Eastern Sea Frontier on 6 February 1942. It ran south from the Canadian border, and North Carolina’s waters lay inside it. Its forces were small. Even in April 1942, after weeks of reinforcement, the frontier’s war diary listed nine destroyers, five corvettes, nine patrol craft, two gunboats and ten trawlers available to protect more than a thousand miles of coast (Eastern Sea Frontier War Diary, April 1942, ch. III). The National Park Service notes that in the first weeks the 165-foot Coast Guard cutter Dione was the only vessel patrolling the Fifth Naval District, which included the waters off Hatteras (NPS, “Torpedo Junction”).

The British, who had learned the lesson in 1939 and 1940 (see Chapter 1), urged convoy at once. Admiral Ernest J. King, who took over as Commander in Chief of the U.S. Fleet in December 1941 and also became Chief of Naval Operations in March 1942, held that a convoy without enough escorts would only bunch the targets together. Instead the Navy sent the escorts it had on patrols and hunts along the lanes, which rarely found a U-boat. Michael Gannon’s Operation Drumbeat also argues that the British Admiralty’s tracking room had followed the boats across the ocean and passed warnings to Washington that were not acted on. Historians still argue over how much blame belongs to King and how much to the shortage of ships and aircraft, but for about four months merchant ships sailed the American coast much as they had in peacetime.

The most painful example was the lights. The coast had no blackout. Resort towns, boardwalks, highways and lighthouses glowed along the shore, and a tanker passing offshore at night stood out against them. The Eastern Sea Frontier war diary for March 1942 complained of “lights from shore which silhouette vessels against the sky.” Not until 14 March did the Chief of Naval Operations recommend to the naval districts a “dim out” of coastal lights, rather than a full blackout (ESF War Diary, March 1942, ch. I). Burning tankers made things worse; the National Park Service repeats the local memory that on some nights a person could read a newspaper by their glow.

Ships also gave themselves away: masters hoisted the flags that announced a departure until the CNO forbade it on 5 March. Most ships were unarmed, and the civilian merchant sailors who ran them had little more protection than their lifeboats and rafts.

January: Hardegen and Zapp off Hatteras

The first ship lost off North Carolina in the war was the tanker Allan Jackson, carrying 72,870 barrels of Colombian crude from Cartagena to New York. She was alone, unarmed and sailing without routing instructions when Richard Zapp’s U-66 torpedoed her about 60 miles east-northeast of Diamond Shoals at about 0133 local time on 18 January 1942. Of her 35 men, 22 died. The master, Felix W. Kretchmer, was in the water for seven hours before the destroyer USS Roe found him; Roe landed the 13 survivors at Norfolk the next day (uboat.net, Allan Jackson; NOAA, Monitor National Marine Sanctuary, “Allan Jackson”). NOAA has never located the wreck, which probably lies in deep water.

Hardegen arrived the next night. On the night of 18–19 January U-123, running on the surface close to the beach, sank three ships and damaged a fourth in the waters between Wimble Shoals, off Rodanthe, and Cape Hatteras. The freighter Norvana, bound north with a crew of 29, was hit just aft of her funnel and went down by the stern within a minute about 50 miles north of the cape; no one survived, and the Navy later found only an empty lifeboat off Wimble Shoals. The freighter City of Atlanta, carrying 2,780 tons of foodstuffs from New York to Savannah, was torpedoed about 12 miles south of the Wimble Shoals buoy, eight to ten miles off the beach, at about 0209 local time. Forty-three of her 46 men died. The three survivors clung to wreckage for about six hours before the railway-car ferry Seatrain Texas picked them up. U-123 then torpedoed the tanker Malay, which was damaged but reached port, and the Latvian freighter Ciltvaira, which lost two firemen and drifted for two days before sinking under tow (uboat.net, Norvana, City of Atlanta, Malay, Ciltvaira). Off Oregon Inlet the Norwegian ship Kosmos II even tried to ram the surfaced U-123, which pulled clear (uboat.net, U-123). No warship was near.

U-66 was still on the hunt. At about 0043 local time on 19 January, some 150 miles east of Cape Hatteras, Zapp torpedoed the Canadian liner Lady Hawkins, bound from Boston for Bermuda and the West Indies with 213 passengers. She sank in about 30 minutes. Of the 322 people aboard, 251 died. The chief officer, 20 crew members and 50 passengers drifted in a single lifeboat for five days before the steamer Coamo found them and landed them at San Juan, Puerto Rico (uboat.net, Lady Hawkins). It was the heaviest loss of life of any sinking in this chapter. On the evening of 23 January, local time, Zapp sank the British tanker Empire Gem, loaded with more than 10,000 tons of motor spirit, about 15 miles southeast of the Diamond Shoals buoy. The cargo exploded. Only the master, Francis Broad, and the radio operator lived; a Coast Guard vessel landed them at Hatteras Inlet (uboat.net, Empire Gem). U-66 also sank the American ship Venore off the North Carolina coast on 24 January (uboat.net).

U-123 reached Lorient on 9 February. Doenitz now had proof that the American coast was the easiest place in the Atlantic to sink ships, and more boats, Type VIIs among them, were already on their way.

March: the worst weeks

February was quieter off North Carolina, as the second wave spread out from Nova Scotia to Florida and into the Caribbean. In March the U-boats came back to Hatteras in force. The Eastern Sea Frontier war diary noted that no ship was sunk in the frontier until 7 March. Then “in the course of fourteen days, 21 ships were sent to the bottom,” eight of them from 16 to 18 March and twelve near Hatteras (ESF War Diary, March 1942, ch. I).

Erwin Rostin’s U-158 opened the month off Cape Lookout. At about 0158 local time on 11 March it hit the small freighter Caribsea, carrying 3,600 tons of manganese ore from Santiago de Cuba, about 11 miles east of Cape Lookout Lighthouse. Loaded with ore, she sank in less than three minutes. Seven of her 28 men survived on two rafts (uboat.net, Caribsea). Late on 12 March, local time, Rostin torpedoed the big tanker John D. Gill, with almost 142,000 barrels of crude, about 25 miles east of Cape Fear after she had stopped zigzagging off Frying Pan Shoals. Twenty-three of her 49 men died. The cutter Agassiz brought eleven survivors into Southport. On 15 March U-158 torpedoed the empty tanker Ario near Cape Lookout and then shelled her as the crew abandoned ship. A shell burst on a lifeboat as it was lowered, and eight men died in all (uboat.net, John D. Gill and Ario).

Then Johann Mohr’s U-124 arrived, a Type IXB that had already sunk several ships on the way. Within about a day, on 18 and 19 March (German time), Mohr sank the Greek Kassandra Louloudis and three American tankers between Diamond Shoals and Cape Lookout. The E.M. Clark, carrying 118,725 barrels of heating oil, was hit at about 0227 local time on 18 March, about 22 miles southwest of the Diamond Shoals buoy. She was sailing blacked out, but lightning from thunderstorms showed her up. A second torpedo sank her ten minutes later. Only one of her 41 men died. Some of the survivors came ashore in a motor surfboat from the Ocracoke Coast Guard station (uboat.net, E.M. Clark). The Papoose, in ballast, was torpedoed that night about 15 miles southwest of Cape Lookout and lost two men in her engine room. An hour later the W.E. Hutton, carrying 65,000 barrels of heating oil, was hit about 20 miles southeast of the cape and went down by the bow with 13 of her 36 men (uboat.net, Papoose and W.E. Hutton).

A week later, on the morning of 26 March, Walter Flachsenberg’s U-71 found the Socony-Vacuum tanker Dixie Arrow about 12 miles off the Diamond Shoals buoy. She was carrying 86,136 barrels of crude from Texas City to New Jersey. Two torpedoes struck her starboard side at about 0859 local time. The second broke her in two, and the forward part of the ship burned almost at once. The master, Anders Johanson, was among the 11 men lost. The old destroyer USS Tarbell picked up 22 survivors, eight from the last lifeboat and fourteen from the water, and landed them at Morehead City (uboat.net, Dixie Arrow).

The men at the bow of Dixie Arrow were trapped between the fire and the sea. The helmsman, Able Seaman Oscar G. Chappell of Normangee, Texas, was injured but still in the wheelhouse. He put the helm over so that the wind would carry the flames away from the forecastle. The men there were able to jump clear, and the fire then swept back over the bridge and killed him (uboat.net, Dixie Arrow; MaritimeQuest).

Merchant Marine Distinguished Service Medal · Posthumous

Able Seaman Oscar G. Chappell, SS Dixie Arrow

Chappell stayed at the wheel of the burning tanker until the men trapped on the forecastle had gone over the side; uboat.net counts eight of them. He was killed when the flames blew back toward the bridge. He was awarded the Merchant Marine Distinguished Service Medal, the merchant service’s highest award, and a Liberty ship, the Oscar G. Chappell, was named for him.

Record of the sinking →

That night, far offshore, the Navy tried a trick of its own and failed. USS Atik was the old freighter Carolyn, converted in secret into a Q-ship: a decoy with concealed guns and depth charges, crewed by Navy volunteers and loaded with pulpwood to keep her afloat. About 300 miles east of Norfolk, at about 2037 local time on 26 March, Hardegen, now on his second American patrol, torpedoed her. When U-123 came in to finish her off, Atik dropped her disguise and opened fire, and a .50-caliber round fatally wounded a young officer on U-123’s bridge. Hardegen dived, came back, and sank her with a second torpedo. Nothing was found of her afterward except debris and five empty rafts. All 141 men aboard were lost, either in the explosions or in a gale that struck soon afterward (uboat.net, USS Atik).

April: Topp, Mützelburg and the trawlers

Erich Topp’s U-552, a Type VIIC that had sunk the Reuben James the previous October, reached the Banks at the start of April. At about 2247 local time on 4 April it torpedoed the tanker Byron D. Benson, carrying 91,500 barrels of crude oil, about seven and a half miles off Currituck Inlet. She was sailing in company with another tanker and two escorts, the minesweeper USS Hamilton and the British trawler HMS Norwich City, which shows how little a light escort could do against a surfaced U-boat at night. Ten men died. The tanker burned for three days before she sank. Hamilton picked up 25 survivors from a lifeboat; a trawler found one man on a raft and the cutter Dione found another (uboat.net, Byron D. Benson; NOAA, “Byron D. Benson”).

Topp went on south. Early on 7 April, German time, he sank the British tanker British Splendour, loaded with 10,000 tons of benzine, east of Cape Hatteras; 12 of her 53 men died, and the British trawler HMS St. Zeno took the survivors to Norfolk. The same day he sank the Norwegian ship Lancing. On 9 April he hit the gasoline tanker Atlas off Cape Lookout. A second torpedo set her on fire and two men drowned. An aircraft found the lifeboats at daylight and guided a Coast Guard cutter to them, and the survivors were landed at Morehead City. Early on 10 April, local time, U-552 torpedoed the tanker Tamaulipas, carrying 70,000 barrels of furnace oil from Tampico, about 18 miles northeast of Cape Lookout. Two men drowned after jumping overboard, and Norwich City brought the other 35 into Morehead City about two hours later (uboat.net, British Splendour, Atlas, Tamaulipas).

Rolf Mützelburg’s U-203 was also off Hatteras. On the night of 9–10 April it fired seven torpedoes before it finally sank the British tanker San Delfino, which was carrying 11,000 tons of aviation spirit from Houston to Hull, east of the cape off Pea Island. Twenty-eight of her 50 men died. Once again it was HMS Norwich City, under Lt. L. H. Stammers, RNVR, that picked up the survivors and landed them at Morehead City (uboat.net, San Delfino). The ship’s Fourth Engineer Officer, Michael Cairns, lies in a small British cemetery at Buxton on Hatteras Island beside an unidentified sailor (Coastal Review, May 2017).

The British trawlers that kept appearing in these rescues were a loan from the Royal Navy. In March 1942 the Admiralty, itself short of escorts, sent 24 armed anti-submarine trawlers across the Atlantic to help the U.S. Navy guard the coast (NCpedia, “British Cemetery”). They were converted fishing trawlers of the Royal Naval Patrol Service, typically about 900 tons, armed with a gun and depth charges and fitted with ASDIC, the British sonar. Some, including Bedfordshire, worked out of Morehead City under the Fifth Naval District. Slow and few, they were still among the only ships on the coast with real experience of hunting submarines.

14 April 1942: Roper and U-85

The first U-boat sunk off the American coast after Drumbeat began was sunk off Nags Head. USS Roper (DD-147), a flush-deck destroyer built at the end of the First World War, left Norfolk on 13 April for an anti-submarine patrol off Hatteras. She was commanded by Lt. Cmdr. Hamilton W. Howe, and the commander of Destroyer Division 54, Cmdr. Stanley C. Norton, was aboard (NOAA, “U-85”; Wikipedia, “Sinking of U-85,” citing the action reports). Just after midnight on 14 April, off Bodie Island lighthouse, Roper‘s radar picked up a faint contact at 2,700 yards. Lookouts then saw the wake of a fast vessel ahead. It was U-85, a Type VIIB under Oblt. Eberhard Greger.

The chase lasted most of an hour. At about 0034, with Roper some 700 yards astern, the U-boat fired a torpedo that missed by about 50 yards. Roper closed in, switched on her searchlight at about 0045, and turned inside the U-boat’s turning circle. Some of her guns misfired at first. Chief Boatswain’s Mate Jack Wright cleared a jammed machine gun and fired on the men running to U-85’s deck gun, and a 3-inch gun crew under Coxswain Harry Heyman put a shell into the hull near the base of the conning tower. NOAA’s divers can still see the hole in the wreck. U-85 began to sink, and men came out of the hatches into the water (NOAA, “U-85”).

What happened next is the hardest moment of the chapter. Roper ran over the spot and dropped eleven depth charges set for 50 feet, to make sure the U-boat was finished. The explosions killed the men in the water. Fearing other U-boats nearby, Howe attempted no rescue before daylight. In the morning Roper recovered 29 bodies, and two more were searched for documents and allowed to sink. All 46 men aboard U-85 died (NOAA, “U-85”; uboat.net, U-85). The dead were buried with military honors at Hampton National Cemetery in Virginia on the night of 15 April. Their graves are still there.

The wreck lies on its starboard side in about 100 feet of water, roughly 14 nautical miles from Oregon Inlet. Navy divers tried for about a week to get into it in 1942 and gave up, and the boat was left on the bottom (NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources). Sport divers found it decades later. In July 2001 divers recovered U-85’s Enigma cipher machine, which is on loan from the German government and on display at the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Hatteras village (NC DNCR, 2012 and 2016).

The Bucket Brigade and the first convoys

Even before U-85 was sunk, the Navy had started to change how ships moved along the coast. In March, Andrews’s headquarters ordered merchant ships to make the run between Cape Lookout and the Chesapeake in daylight, and set up protected anchorages at each end where they could wait out the night. The anchorage at Cape Lookout, behind the hook of the cape, was guarded by ships with listening gear, depth charges and guns until a minefield could be laid. Ships would follow patrolled lanes by day and “lie over in patrolled or protected anchorages” at night (ESF War Diary, April 1942, ch. III). By 22 April the commandant of the Fifth Naval District reported that the system was “practically in effect now”: all northbound ships were escorted from Lookout, and southbound ships had air cover. Samuel Eliot Morison called this system of short daylight hops the “Bucket Brigade” (Morison, vol. I).

Full convoys followed in May. The Navy’s administrative history lists the first Hampton Roads-to-Key West convoy, KS-500, as sailing from Norfolk on 14 May 1942 with 25 merchant ships and seven escorts. The coastal convoy system formally began the next day, 15 May. By the end of August the system linked New York, Key West, Guantánamo, Trinidad and the Gulf ports (History of Convoy and Routing, ch. IV). Army and Navy aircraft, Navy blimps and more patrol craft covered the lanes. Ships were still sunk off North Carolina after May, but far fewer.

Civilians joined the patrol. North Carolina’s wing of the Civil Air Patrol, founded in Raleigh on 30 December 1941, soon had more than 500 members and about 150 private aircraft. Coastal Patrol Base 16 began flying from the Skyco field on Roanoke Island on 10 August 1942 and moved late that year to the new airport north of Manteo. Its pilots patrolled from Norfolk to Ocracoke Inlet, escorted convoys, reported wrecks and searched for survivors. A second base opened at Beaufort in 1943 (NC DNCR, marker B-68). The work was dangerous. On 21 December 1942 two members of Base 16, Frank M. Cook of Concord and Julian L. Cooper of Nashville, North Carolina, were killed on duty; their names are on the Civil Air Patrol monument at the Dare County airport (Dare County, Civil Air Patrol monument). Only two vessels were torpedoed off the coast while the North Carolina bases operated (NC DNCR), but by then the worst was over.

In their words

The losses by submarines off our Atlantic seaboard and in the Caribbean now threaten our entire war effort.

May: Icarus, U-352 and the loss of Bedfordshire

The second U-boat lost off North Carolina was sunk by a Coast Guard cutter commanded by a former Prohibition patrol sailor. Lt. Maurice D. Jester, born in 1889 in Chincoteague, Virginia, had enlisted in 1917 and was commissioned in late 1941. In January 1942 he took command of USCGC Icarus (WPC-110), a 165-foot cutter of the same class as Dione (USCG Historian’s Office, “The Long Blue Line: Maurice Jester”). On 8 May Icarus left Staten Island for Key West. The next day, about 25 miles off Cape Lookout, her sonar operator reported a contact about 2,000 yards away. Minutes later a torpedo exploded about 200 yards off the cutter’s port side, either a dud or a hit on the shallow bottom.

The U-boat was U-352, under Kptlt. Hellmut Rathke, on her second patrol without a single success. Jester attacked with depth charges in diamond and V patterns, then dropped single charges where air bubbles came up. U-352 was badly damaged. NOAA’s account says the crew first tried to play dead; after the last charge, the boat came to the surface. As men came out of the conning tower, Icarus opened fire with machine guns and her 3-inch gun, fearing they would man the deck gun, and several were killed. The U-boat sank within minutes. Jester stood off for about an hour waiting for instructions, then came back and picked up 33 survivors, one of whom died on board (NOAA, “U-352”; USCG, “The Long Blue Line”). Icarus reached Charleston Navy Yard with her prisoners on 10 May 1942. They were among the first German combatants captured by American forces in the war.

Navy Cross

Lt. Maurice D. Jester, USCG, commanding USCGC Icarus

Awarded “for extraordinary heroism and distinguished service in the line of his profession” as commanding officer of Icarus in the action of 9 May 1942 that sank U-352 off Cape Lookout. The Coast Guard’s historians record him as the first Coast Guardsman to receive the Navy Cross. Icarus had no sonar range finder; he plotted his depth-charge attacks from the sonarman’s spoken ranges and bearings. His report was brief: “Contacted submarine Destroyed same.”

USCG account →

Two nights later the coast lost one of its British defenders. HMT Bedfordshire (FY 141), a 913-ton Grimsby trawler built in 1935 and converted for anti-submarine work in 1939, was one of the 24 trawlers lent to the U.S. Navy. She worked out of Morehead City under Lt. Russell Bransby Davis, RNR (uboat.net, HMS Bedfordshire). She had a crew of 37. Late on the night of 11 May, about 2340 local time, while she was on patrol off Cape Lookout, Günther Krech’s U-558 torpedoed her. She blew up and sank almost at once. No one survived. One of her crew, Sam Nutt, lived because he had missed the ship’s sailing (uboat.net). The Navy did not know she was gone until bodies began to come ashore (NOAA, “HMT Bedfordshire”).

On 14 May two bodies were found in the surf at Ocracoke. They were identified as Sub-Lieutenant Thomas Cunningham, 27, and Ordinary Telegraphist Stanley Craig, 23. Two more men, never identified, came ashore days later. The Coast Guard and the people of the village buried all four in a small plot given by a local family next to an island cemetery (NCpedia; UNC Media Hub, “British Cemetery”). A Royal Navy flag covered Cunningham’s coffin. Hickam records that Cunningham had given such flags to a local man only weeks earlier, for any British seamen who needed burying (Hickam, Torpedo Junction). A bronze plaque carries the lines from Rupert Brooke’s 1914 poem “The Soldier”: “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England.”

Summer: mines, U-701 and convoy KS-520

Convoys made the ships harder to reach, so the U-boats tried other methods. Kptlt. Horst Degen’s U-701 came to the American coast in June carrying mines. On the night of 12 June it laid 15 of them in 36 feet of water in the shipping channel at the entrance to Chesapeake Bay, all within about half an hour (NOAA, “U-701”). They sank the tanker Santore and the trawler HMS Kingston Ceylonite and damaged three more ships (uboat.net, ships hit by U-701).

Degen then went south to Hatteras. On a dark, moonless night, 19 June, U-701 surfaced near the Diamond Shoals buoy, about 20 miles south-southeast of the cape, and opened fire without warning on the Navy patrol boat YP-389, the former fishing trawler Cohasset. Her only deck gun was out of order, and she could answer only with machine guns. Shells set her on fire and hit her fuel tanks. She sank after about two hours. Six of her 24 men died; Coast Guard boats picked up the survivors a few hours later (uboat.net, YP-389). On 28 June Degen sank the 14,054-ton tanker William Rockefeller, one of the largest ships lost off the Banks, off Hatteras. Her wreck is one of the deep sites NOAA has surveyed.

On 7 July Lt. Harry Kane of the Army Air Forces’ 396th Bombardment Squadron was flying a Lockheed Hudson bomber, the A-29, out of Cherry Point on patrol off Hatteras when he attacked U-701. He dropped three depth charges, and the boat sank. About 36 men got out, and the Gulf Stream carried them along for 49 hours. A Navy blimp found the survivors, and a Coast Guard seaplane picked up the seven still alive, Degen among them. Thirty-nine men died (NOAA, “U-701”; uboat.net, U-701).

The last U-boat lost off North Carolina went down fighting a convoy. Convoy KS-520 left Lynnhaven Roads, near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, on 14 July 1942: 19 merchant ships and five escorts bound for Key West at 8.5 knots (NOAA, “U-576”). On the afternoon of 15 July, off Cape Hatteras, a Coast Guard cutter got a sonar contact and dropped depth charges. At about 1615, U-576, under Kptlt. Hans-Dieter Heinicke, fired four torpedoes into the convoy. Two hit the freighter Chilore, one hit the Panamanian tanker J.A. Mowinckel, and one sank the small Nicaraguan freighter Bluefields within minutes. All 24 of Bluefields‘ crew survived (NOAA, “U-576”; uboat.net, Bluefields).

After firing, U-576 came to the surface among the ships of the convoy. The Navy Armed Guard gunners on the merchant ship Unicoi opened fire and scored a hit. Two Navy OS2U Kingfisher floatplanes of scouting squadron VS-9 from Cherry Point, flown by Ens. Frank C. Lewis and Ens. Charles D. Webb, straddled the boat with depth charges. U-576 sank with all 45 men aboard (uboat.net, U-576; NOAA). The damaged Chilore and J.A. Mowinckel then strayed into the American defensive minefield off Hatteras. Chilore later sank under tow at the mouth of the Chesapeake, and the tug Keshena hit a mine and sank while trying to save the ships. Mowinckel was repaired (NOAA, “U-576”).

By then the U-boats had already left. Once the coastal convoys started, the Navy’s convoy history records that “the U/Boats promptly shifted attention to the largely unprotected Gulf, Caribbean and Panama Sea Frontiers” (History of Convoy and Routing, ch. IV). In May and June 1942 the heaviest losses were in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, until the convoy network was extended there in July and August. Off North Carolina, the sinkings almost stopped. A defensive minefield guarded the waters off Hatteras, escorts and aircraft covered the lanes, and the convoys rounded Diamond Shoals with few losses for the rest of the war.

Timeline

Torpedo Junction, 1942

1. 11 Dec 1941Germany declares war on the United States.
2. 23 Dec 1941U-123 sails from Lorient, one of five Type IX boats in the first Drumbeat wave.
3. 13–15 Jan 1942Drumbeat opens; U-123 sinks Norness off Long Island (14 Jan) and Coimbra (15 Jan).
4. 18 Jan 1942U-66 sinks Allan Jackson, the first ship lost off North Carolina; 22 dead.
5. 18–19 Jan 1942U-123 sinks Norvana, City of Atlanta and Ciltvaira off the Banks; U-66 sinks Lady Hawkins 150 miles east of Hatteras, with 251 dead.
6. 11–19 Mar 1942U-158 and U-124 sink Caribsea, John D. Gill, Ario, E.M. Clark, Papoose and W.E. Hutton.
7. 14 Mar 1942The Chief of Naval Operations recommends a dimout of coastal lights.
8. 26 Mar 1942U-71 sinks Dixie Arrow; that night U-123 sinks the Q-ship Atik with all 141 men.
9. 4–10 Apr 1942U-552 and U-203 sink Byron D. Benson, British Splendour, Lancing, Atlas, San Delfino and Tamaulipas.
10. 14 Apr 1942USS Roper sinks U-85 off Bodie Island; all 46 die.
11. 9 May 1942USCGC Icarus sinks U-352 off Cape Lookout; 33 picked up.
12. 11 May 1942U-558 sinks HMT Bedfordshire, about 2340 local time; all 37 lost.
13. 14–15 May 1942Convoy KS-500 sails from Norfolk; the coastal convoy system begins.
14. 19 Jun 1942U-701 sinks the patrol boat YP-389 off Diamond Shoals.
15. 7 Jul 1942Lt. Harry Kane’s A-29 sinks U-701 off Hatteras; seven survive.
16. 15 Jul 1942U-576 attacks convoy KS-520, sinks Bluefields, and is sunk with all 45 men.
17. 10 Aug 1942Civil Air Patrol Coastal Patrol Base 16 begins flying from Roanoke Island.

People

Reinhard Hardegen (1913–2018), of Bremen, commanded U-123 on both of her American patrols in 1942. He was awarded the Knight’s Cross and left U-boat command in mid-1942 for a training post. After the war he founded an oil business in Bremen and sat for years in the city’s parliament. He died in June 2018 at 105 (Associated Press obituary).

Adm. Ernest J. King (1878–1956), Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet, and from March 1942 also Chief of Naval Operations, bore final responsibility for the Navy’s slow move to coastal convoy. His defenders point to the shortage of escorts; his critics, Gannon foremost among them, point to the warnings and British experience he did not act on.

VAdm. Adolphus Andrews (1879–1948) commanded the Eastern Sea Frontier from New York from its creation in February 1942 until November 1943. He had to defend the coast with almost nothing; the daylight runs, protected anchorages and early convoy plans recorded in the frontier’s war diary came from his headquarters.

Johann Mohr (U-124), Erich Topp (U-552), Erwin Rostin (U-158), Rolf Mützelburg (U-203) and Richard Zapp (U-66) were the commanders who did most of the killing off the Banks after Hardegen. Topp and Zapp survived the war, and Topp later became an admiral in the West German Navy. Rostin and Mützelburg were dead by the end of 1942, and Mohr was lost with U-124 in April 1943.

Lt. Maurice D. Jester, born in 1889, a Chincoteague waterman who enlisted in 1917, sank U-352 with the cutter Icarus and became the first Coast Guardsman to receive the Navy Cross.

Lt. Russell Bransby Davis, RNR, commanded HMT Bedfordshire and was lost with her and all his crew on 11 May 1942. Sub-Lt. Thomas Cunningham and Ordinary Telegraphist Stanley Craig are the two named men in the Ocracoke graves.

Oscar G. Chappell of Normangee, Texas, an able seaman, died at the wheel of the burning Dixie Arrow so that his shipmates on the bow could escape. Frank M. Cook of Concord and Julian L. Cooper of Nashville, North Carolina, Civil Air Patrol members, died on duty with Coastal Patrol Base 16 on 21 December 1942.

Losses and uncertainty

No two sources give the same total for ships lost off North Carolina, because they count different things. NOAA’s Monitor National Marine Sanctuary counts 90 vessels lost off the state from 1942 to 1945: 78 merchant ships, eight Allied warships and four U-boats. Its 2009 expedition materials and the National Park Service say “more than 80.” The state’s historical marker program says U-boats sank 78 vessels and damaged 18 (NC DNCR, marker B-68). NOAA’s 2014 announcement of the U-576 discovery gave “more than 50 merchant ships” in the first eight months of 1942. The totals differ over how far offshore to count (Lady Hawkins and Atik went down 150 and 300 miles out), whether warships, patrol craft, U-boats and mine losses are included, and whether the count covers 1942 or the whole war.

The death toll is even less settled. NOAA and the Park Service both say only “hundreds.” The figures for individual ships are better, because crew lists survived, and the chart below shows the deadliest of the sinkings covered in this chapter. The 21 ships in the table below alone account for 572 dead. That figure does not include the 141 men of Atik, the many other ships lost off the state, or the 145 Germans killed in the four U-boats.

By the numbers

The deadliest sinkings off North Carolina, 1942

People killed, selected ships, January–May 1942

Lady Hawkins251

Empire Gem49

City of Atlanta43

Bedfordshire37

Norvana29

San Delfino28

John D. Gill23

Allan Jackson22

Caribsea21

W.E. Hutton13

British Splendour12

Dixie Arrow11

Dates and times are a separate problem. The times in uboat.net’s ship records, and in the U-boat war diaries they draw on, are German time. In January 1942 that was seven hours ahead of the Eastern Standard Time used on the Outer Banks. From 9 February, when the United States adopted year-round “war time,” the difference was six hours. A night attack can therefore carry the next day’s date in German records. U-558’s torpedo hit Bedfordshire at 0540 on 12 May by the German clock and 2340 on 11 May by the local one, which is why the National Park Service and NCpedia give 11 May. Likewise, Dixie Arrow‘s recorded 1459 German time matches survivors’ accounts of an attack at about 0900 local time. In this chapter’s narrative, times are converted to local time. The table keeps uboat.net’s German dates so that readers can find the records.

Smaller details also differ. Sources describe Britain’s loan as 24 trawlers (NCpedia) or as Bedfordshire “and 24 other” trawlers (Wikipedia’s summary of Conn). The perpetual lease of the Ocracoke plot is dated 1976 by the University of North Carolina and Wikipedia and 1977 by uboat.net. U-701’s wreck is given as about 100 or 110 feet deep. The distance between U-576 and Bluefields on the bottom is given as about 200, 240 and “less than 250” yards. Where the record conflicts, this chapter gives both figures.

Questions readers ask

How many ships were sunk off North Carolina?

NOAA counts 90 vessels lost off the state from 1942 to 1945, including 78 merchant ships, eight Allied warships and four U-boats. Most were lost between January and July 1942. Other official sources say “more than 80” (NOAA’s 2009 expedition and the National Park Service) or 78 sunk and 18 damaged (NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources), depending on what they count and where they draw the line.

Why was it called Torpedo Junction?

Because so many ships were torpedoed off Cape Hatteras, where the coastal shipping lanes came together to round Diamond Shoals. The same waters had long been called the Graveyard of the Atlantic because of their shipwrecks. Homer Hickam used Torpedo Junction as the title of his 1989 history of the 1942 campaign.

Why didn’t the Navy start convoys right away?

Admiral King and his staff believed that a convoy without enough escorts would only make the targets easier to find, and in January 1942 the Eastern Sea Frontier had very few escorts. The escorts the Navy did have were committed to the transatlantic convoys. Critics, led by the historian Michael Gannon, argue that even weakly escorted convoys, a blackout and better use of British warnings would have saved ships and lives. The Navy began daylight escorted runs in March and April and full coastal convoys on 15 May 1942. Losses on the North Carolina coast fell sharply afterward.

Why are British sailors buried on Ocracoke?

They were from HMT Bedfordshire, one of 24 Royal Navy anti-submarine trawlers Britain lent to the U.S. Navy in 1942. U-558 sank her off Cape Lookout on the night of 11 May with all 37 men. Four bodies washed ashore on Ocracoke and were buried by the Coast Guard and the villagers. The plot is leased in perpetuity to the British government and cared for by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission with the Coast Guard and local volunteers. Michael Cairns of the tanker San Delfino and an unknown sailor are buried in a second British cemetery at Buxton on Hatteras Island.

Can you dive the wrecks?

Many of them, yes. U-85, U-352 and U-701 lie in about 100 to 120 feet of water, and Dixie Arrow, Bedfordshire and others lie at similar depths. Dive operators from Hatteras, Morehead City and Beaufort run trips to them. Strong currents make most of them advanced dives. The U-boats, Bedfordshire and other ships lost with their crews are war graves, and nothing may be removed from them. Several, including U-85 and Dixie Arrow, are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the Bedfordshire wreck is covered by a 2016 agreement between NOAA and the Royal Navy. U-576 and Bluefields, at about 700 feet, are far beyond recreational diving.

How it connects

Torpedo Junction was made possible by the events of December 1941: Pearl Harbor, told in the Pearl Harbor collection, and Germany’s declaration of war four days later. It followed the undeclared naval war of 1941 described in Chapter 3: The Undeclared War. The lessons the Navy ignored were the ones Britain had learned in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2: ships sailing alone get sunk, and convoys, even weak ones, save them. The Germans called the months on the American coast the second “happy time.”

Code-breaking also left the Allies short of help in 1942. On 1 February the U-boats in the Atlantic changed to a new four-rotor Enigma key, which the British called Shark. Bletchley Park could not read it again until December 1942 (Hinsley, British Intelligence in the Second World War). That story, and the radar and direction-finding that helped turn the battle, is the subject of the next chapter, Chapter 5: Codes and Science. The merchant mariners who died off the Banks, and how they are remembered, return in Chapter 9.

What happened afterward

After July 1942 the war moved away from the North Carolina coast. Convoys ran regularly past Hatteras for the rest of the war and were rarely attacked there. The U-boats concentrated on the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean until convoys and air patrols reached those waters too, and by the autumn of 1942 Doenitz had turned his main force back to the mid-Atlantic convoy routes and the air gap, the subject of Chapter 6. The coastal defenses grew, and the Civil Air Patrol base at Manteo was commissioned as Naval Auxiliary Air Station Manteo in March 1943 (NC DNCR).

The men taken from the water off North Carolina spent the rest of the war in American prison camps. U-352’s survivors were held with the seven from U-701 (NOAA). Rathke painted a watercolor of his boat as a prisoner; it is now in the National Archives. On the Cape Fear River at Wilmington, the North Carolina Shipbuilding Company was launching Liberty ships to replace the tonnage lost; the yard built 243 ships between 1941 and 1946, 126 of them Liberty ships (NC DNCR).

Sport divers found U-352 in 1975 and U-701 in 1989. From 2008 the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary, with East Carolina University, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the UNC Coastal Studies Institute, began systematic surveys of the battlefield. These covered the U-boats in 2008, YP-389 and Bedfordshire in 2009, other wrecks in 2010 and 2011, and the KS-520 site, where U-576 and Bluefields were found in August 2014 (NOAA, Battle of the Atlantic expeditions; Live Science, 22 October 2014). In 2016 the NOAA ship Nancy Foster mapped many of the sites with multibeam sonar, and crewed submersibles dived to U-576 and Bluefields. The same year NOAA proposed enlarging the sanctuary, which surrounds the Civil War ironclad Monitor 16 miles off Cape Hatteras, to take in many of these World War II wrecks, including Dixie Arrow, E.M. Clark, Ario, Bedfordshire, U-85, U-352, U-701 and U-576 (NOAA, proposed boundary expansion). Check the sanctuary’s website for the current status of that proposal.

Walking the ground today

Start at the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum, at the end of NC 12 in Hatteras village beside the Ocracoke ferry docks, run by the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. Its World War II exhibits include U-85’s Enigma machine. From the beach at Buxton, near the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, you look out over Diamond Shoals, where many of the ships in this chapter were sunk. The small British Cemetery at Buxton, where Michael Cairns of San Delfino and an unknown sailor are buried, is on Hatteras Island.

Take the free state ferry across Hatteras Inlet to Ocracoke. The British Cemetery is a short walk from the harbor on British Cemetery Road: four headstones inside a white picket fence under a Royal Navy ensign. Every May, on or near the anniversary of the sinking, the Royal Navy, the Royal Canadian Navy, the U.S. Coast Guard, the National Park Service and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission hold a memorial service there. A senior from Ocracoke School reads the names of Bedfordshire‘s crew, and a similar service is held at Buxton (NPS; UNC Media Hub; Coastal Review). The service is open to the public.

Farther north, the Dare County Regional Airport outside Manteo, the old Coastal Patrol Base 16, has a small aviation museum and the Civil Air Patrol monument with the names of Frank Cook and Julian Cooper; marker B-68 stands on Airport Road. Dive boats from Morehead City, Beaufort and Hatteras run to the wrecks. If you dive, treat them as the war graves they are. In Virginia, the graves of U-85’s crew are at Hampton National Cemetery.

NOAA’s Monitor National Marine Sanctuary publishes site histories, archaeological site plans and dive slates for the U-boats and many merchant wrecks, a way to explore the battlefield without getting wet. Check museum, ferry and ceremony schedules before you go.

Sources and further reading

• NOAA, Monitor National Marine Sanctuary: shipwreck site histories, including U-85, U-352, U-701, U-576 and convoy KS-520, HMT Bedfordshire, Dixie Arrow, Byron D. Benson and Allan Jackson; World War II: Battle of the Atlantic Expeditions; Battle of the Atlantic 2009 mission; proposed boundary expansion; 2016 Battle of the Atlantic expedition fact sheet.
• uboat.net (Guðmundur Helgason): boat histories of U-123, U-85, U-352, U-701 and U-576; ship records for Allan Jackson, City of Atlanta, Norvana, Lady Hawkins, Empire Gem, Caribsea, John D. Gill, E.M. Clark, Dixie Arrow, USS Atik, Byron D. Benson, San Delfino, HMS Bedfordshire, USS YP-389 and Bluefields; and type data for the VIIC, IXB and IXC.
• Eastern Sea Frontier War Diary, March and April 1942, transcribed at uboatarchive.net (March, ch. I) and (April, ch. III).
• U.S. Navy, History of Convoy and Routing (U.S. Naval Administration in World War II), ch. IV, “Coastal Convoys,” HyperWar.
• National Park Service, Cape Hatteras National Seashore: “Torpedo Junction” and “Ocracoke British Cemetery.”
• U.S. Coast Guard Historian’s Office, “The Long Blue Line: Maurice Jester”; Legion of Valor, Navy Cross citation, Maurice D. Jester.
• North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources: “Civil Air Patrol (B-68)”; “Enigma Machine Plucked from Its Watery Grave”; “Torpedo Junction: A Twist in the Story of the Graveyard of the Atlantic.” Dare County, Civil Air Patrol monument.
• NCpedia, “British Cemetery”; UNC Media Hub, “British Cemetery: ‘Cared for by the people of Ocracoke’”; Coastal Review, “Coast Honoring British Allies” (May 2017); Commonwealth War Graves Commission, Ocracoke Island (British) Cemetery.
• MaritimeQuest, “Dixie Arrow” (Oscar Chappell); Live Science, “Two World War II Shipwrecks Discovered off North Carolina” (22 October 2014); WRAL/Associated Press, “Reinhard Hardegen, Who Led U-boats to U.S. Shore, Dies at 105” (2018).
• Books: Homer H. Hickam Jr., Torpedo Junction: U-Boat War off America’s East Coast, 1942 (Naval Institute Press, 1989); Michael Gannon, Operation Drumbeat (Harper & Row, 1990); Clay Blair, Hitler’s U-Boat War: The Hunters, 1939–1942 (Random House, 1996); Samuel Eliot Morison, The Battle of the Atlantic, 1939–1943 (History of U.S. Naval Operations in World War II, vol. I, 1947); Stephen Roskill, The War at Sea, vol. II (HMSO, 1956); F. H. Hinsley et al., British Intelligence in the Second World War, vol. II (HMSO, 1981); Stetson Conn et al., Guarding the United States and Its Outposts (U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1964); Timothy J. Runyan and Jan M. Copes, eds., To Die Gallantly: The Battle of the Atlantic (Westview, 1994).

Photographs: U.S. National Archives and NOAA Monitor National Marine Sanctuary, public domain.