1942: THE OUTER BANKS WAR

In 1942, German U-boat commanders lurking off the coast of North Carolina referred to their wildly successful target practice as “the Great American Turkey Shoot.” Americans would come to call the spectacle “Torpedo Alley.” Whatever you want to call it, it was a bloody massacre of American ships, and to avoid a panic, political leaders deliberately witheld the debacle from American newspapers.

For the residents of the Outer Banks, particularly Ocracoke Island, Avon, Cape Lookout and Cape Hatteras, the danger was all too real. Midnight blasts, house-shaking explosions, an occasional U-boat sighting (one fisherman almost rammed a U-boat that surfaced directly in front of his twenty-foot boat) and the fear of German invasion were a more-thanvivid reality.

The terror began shortly after the United States joined the fight against Japan and Hitler. Germany had arranged for a small fleet of submarines to systematically pick off merchant supply ships along the Atlantic coast. From a German standpoint, the Outer Banks of North Carolina proved to be an ideal killing ground—affording easy targets along well-known shipping routes, an absence of defensive weaponry and a complete and perplexing failure to respond to the threat. German submariners would remember the experience as the “happy time,” when U-boats destroyed enemy vessels at will. Most often, U-boats ran out of torpedoes before they ran out of targets. In a period of eight months, the Germans sank almost four hundred ships off the North Carolina coastline, killing over five thousand mariners, most of whom were civilians.

Outer Bankers watched their pristine shorelines morph into oil slicks, their skies transform into billowing plumes of burning oil and their beaches become littered with ship debris and human corpses. They would become the only civilian community on the North American continent to come under prolonged attack by the Germans.

By late 1942, military forces had finally begun to mobilize, and over the course of the next few months, four U-boats were sunk along the Carolina coast (by an army bomber, a US Coast Guard patrol boat and two navy destroyers). With this abrupt setback, the Germans redirected their submarine crews to the North Atlantic, and the Outer Banks would see no further action for the remainder of the war. The brief and devastating “Great American Turkey Shoot” would add to the tragic lore of the Graveyard of the Atlantic and would temporarily hamper America’s war efforts.