THE ORANGE BEACH/PERDIDO KEY AREA OF THE northern Gulf of Mexico was virtually uninhabited during World War II—at least the beach itself had no permanent homes. Fishermen and their families lived inland, within access of the Gulf. They built houses where they could dock their boats—on the bays and coastal rivers—and except for a weekend cottage or two, there were no structures at all close to the unpredictable waves of the Gulf. Those dwellings that did exist were set back in the dunes, far from the beach, and were usually more than a mile from each other.
Highway 3 (now Highway 59) from Foley, Alabama, ran due south to the water’s edge while County Roads 180, 182, and 292 generally paralleled the beach from Fort Morgan at the mouth of Mobile Bay to the Pensacola Sound. Most of the area’s population at that time worked close to home, shrimping, fishing, or farming, but a few drove east or west every morning to newly created jobs in the defense industry. Brookley Field was on the outskirts of Mobile, and the Pensacola Naval Air Station marked the eastern boundary of Perdido Key.
Lois Metcalf has lived by herself since her husband died nine years ago. In the tiny community of Lillian, she sits on her back porch every morning and looks out over Perdido Bay. She is a small woman, and her hair is dyed a shockingly dark shade for a person of her age—what my wife calls “Loretta Lynn black.” I was referred to Mrs. Metcalf by several of our mutual friends. “She grew up here,” they said, “and can tell you everything you’d need to know about the history of the area.”
She was twelve years old in 1942, she told me. Then she grinned and admonished me about doing the math in my head. I liked her immediately. I asked her if she knew anything about German U-boats in the Gulf during World War II. Her daddy was a shrimper, she told me in a strong voice, and she remembered him grumbling about a particular commercial fisherman whom he suspected of selling fuel and food to “Nazi subs.” She pronounced the word “Natsey.”
“Did he ever find out if it was true?” I asked.
“No,” she replied, “and I know that for sure . . . ’cause he’da shot him if he had.” Then she added, “My daddy was just that way, you know.” I nodded as if, indeed, I did.
I was about to ask her if she knew anything else, rumors even, when she volunteered some new information. “We all hated them sneaky Nazi submariners. When they sunk them boys from Mobile, that was it.”
“What was this?” I asked. “When?”
“End of February, 1942,” she said. “It was a freighter. Beautiful ship named after Mobile . . . the SS Azalea City . We all went down to the docks to cheer her out of port. Lots of local boys manning her. My older sister went to a dance with one of ’em, as I recall. Anyhow, the Nazis stuck a torpedo in her off Ocean City somewhere. Maryland, you know? We heard about it a week after it happened. Killed every man on board. More’n thirty of ’em, seems it was.”
She was right. According to several Internet sources I checked as soon as I got home, the SS Azalea City was torpedoed by a German U-boat on February 20, 1942. She went down with thirty-eight crew. There were no survivors.
During the following week, I talked with Mr. Fern Cottrall and Mr. Hollis Parker—both residents of the Baldwin County Nursing Home. I also spent a great deal of time with Mr. and Mrs. Halkman, the parents of a local fireman, and Barton and Frances Dale, a couple who volunteer at the local library. All were at least in their seventies and had interesting stories about U-boats, German agents, and mined harbor entrances. This group provided nothing verifiable or new, however. Add those unproductive sessions to my unease at the certainty Mr. Cottrall displayed about German submarines still stalking the Gulf, still sinking ships, and due to invade Florida any day, and you will get some idea of my frustration at the time. In addition, he repeatedly called me Carl.
The next Monday morning, Mrs. Theresa Larson and her son, James, who appeared to be sixty-something or so, sat on the dock and had coffee with Polly and me. Mrs. Larson and her first husband (for some reason I did not write his name down in my notes) often camped on the beach during those years with their young family. On two consecutive evenings, during the hot calm of the full moon in July 1942, the entire family saw a submarine surface. While it was some distance offshore, Mrs. Larson insisted they were able to see the outline of the U-boat quite clearly in the moonlight.
And what’s more, she told us, on the second night, men came out of the sub’s tower and entered the water to swim. She assured me that, with the breeze in their favor, she and her husband heard the splashing and laughter—along with a few German words—quite clearly. Her son, James, told us that while he must have been too young to remember the incident, it was the same story his father had told until he died.
Though there was no specific proof of what Mrs. Larson claimed, I did uncover anecdotal evidence in several of the Kriegsmarine diaries available to historians that shows evidence of U-boat crews often being allowed out on calm nights for fresh air and a swim.
Kingston Monroe, known to everyone as “Mr. King,” works as a greeter at the South Baldwin Regional Medical Center. He is still tall and ramrod straight, but snow-white hair and blotchy skin give evidence of the eighty-something years he has lived. I met him for lunch at Chicken & Seafood, my favorite restaurant just south of the hospital in Foley, which serves—surprise—chicken and seafood. Mr. King filled in quite a few blanks about what people knew and thought back then.
“Early ’42,” he began, “or at least by the spring of . . . ever’body was talking about U-boats. Them that hadn’t seen one in person, or at least heard them jokers out in the dark, knew somebody who had. Now, for sure, I know all these folks wadn’ seeing ’em. But just as for sure, they was there. And they was gettin’ fuel somewheres too.”
Now came the question I really wanted to ask: “Mr. King, do you think any of the U-boat crews ever came ashore?”
He rolled his eyes and looked at me like I was crazy. “Well, son, what do you think? There wadn’ no potato chip machines in them things, and they weren’t gassin’ up every Monday morning in Berlin!” I chuckled politely as he took a deep breath. “Listen here, you look it up, the navy boys captured one sub and got into it before the Nazis could scuttle her. There was Campbell’s Soup cans in the galley . . . and a big box of fresh turnip greens.” I raised my eyebrows, and the old man looked pleased that he’d obviously told me something I hadn’t heard.
Then he cocked his head, smiled, and leaned closer. “And I’ll tell you somethin’ else. Don’t matter now noways. Several of them German boys, when they yanked ’em out of the U-boat, had ticket stubs from the Saenger Theatre in their pockets.” He studied my surprised expression for a beat or two, then added, “Yep. The Saenger Theatre. That’d be North Rampart Street in downtown New Orleans.”
Mr. King smiled as I scribbled furiously in my notebook. “Course you won’t find anything in the history books about that particular little event.”
Sheesh, I thought, I couldn’t find anything about any of this in history books! Glancing up, I asked the obvious question anyway. “Why not?”
“’Cause nobody knew. Navy boy from Elberta told me. Bernard Hanson. Bernie’s dead now, but he told me. Things was differ’nt back then, son. The government was keeping it quiet as they could. They figured if we knew the Nazis was ashore and mingling with us—hey, folks’d be shootin’ ever’ blue-eyed stranger that came to town. Probably a good thing. Not to tell, I mean.”
I agreed with him, talked a bit more, paid for our meal, thanked Mr. King, and left. I did check some records to which I had access through a United States Navy source. Mr. King was correct. The items found in the U-boat are still on file at the Pentagon. For some reason, however, after all these years, that specific U-boat’s number is still classified and not even available through the Freedom of Information Act. But with my own eyes, I saw the four ticket stubs from the Saenger. They are preserved in heavy lamination and rest on an admiral’s desk at Annapolis. By the way, in case you are curious . . . the soup was tomato.
My most meaningful contact came about quite by chance really. We were leaving church one Sunday morning, me with our younger boy in my arms, when I happened into Mr. and Mrs. Newman. They have been members of Orange Beach United Methodist Church since the congregation began meeting in a doublewide trailer years ago. The Newmans appeared to be in their eighties, maybe older, and he had been a commercial fisherman in his younger years.
As strange as it may seem to call an old couple “cute,” everyone agrees they are exactly that. He calls her “Mrs. Newman,” and she calls him just plain “Newman.” They are among the nicest, most popular people in the church. I rarely see them together that they are not holding hands. She is always laughing and smiling, while Mr. Newman, also jovial and quick to tease, is quite a hit with the kids. He carries candy and gum in his pockets, and my boys, especially, love him.
After saying hello and allowing time for the children to collect their usual favorite (root beer lollipops), I realized that, for whatever reason, I had neglected to talk to the Newmans about my latest obsession. Both had been supposed pioneers of the area, I knew, and were favorite people of mine so, less careful than I was with someone I didn’t know, I blurted out a quick question: “Hey, do you two know anything about German U-boats in the Gulf during World War II?” They continued to look at the boys, and thinking they had not heard me, I started to ask the question again when Mrs. Newman fixed me with her usual smile. “Why in the world do you ask that, Andy?”
I shrugged. “I found some stuff—pictures and buttons. Anyway, I’m just doing some research.”
“Writing a book?”
“I don’t really know yet. It’s more a novelty than anything else at this point. But I gotta tell you, I am somewhat amazed that most people do not seem to remember this . . . You and Mr. Newman lived here then, didn’t you?” She nodded, and we looked at her husband, who had kneeled and was playing with my children. I asked again: “What do you know about all that?”
She put her hand on her husband’s shoulder. Still looking at me, she said, “Well, Newman knows a lot about it, but nobody wants to listen to our old stories anymore.”
“I do,” I replied.
Mr. Newman stood as his wife invited me for coffee the next day. “You’ll tell Andy some stories, won’t you, honey?” she asked him.
“Sure, if you want to listen,” he said to me as we shook hands and walked toward the church parking lot. “Course my memory ain’t what it used to be . . . what was your name again?” I raised my eyebrows, and he chuckled at his own joke. “Nine in the morning okay with you?”
I ARRIVED AT THEIR HOUSE THE NEXT MORNING PROMPTLY ON the hour. At the end of a tree-lined street, the Newmans lived in one of Foley’s older neighborhoods. They had moved away from the water more than a decade earlier when he sold his fishing boat and, with a tidy profit from the bay-front property that had been theirs since 1948, bought this three-bedroom brick home for cash on his seventieth birthday.
Familiar with the place, I stepped from my vehicle and ventured over to the edge of the driveway to look at the famous Newman blueberry bushes. They were bare now, but in late spring would be loaded with the tiny, luscious fruit. And then would come the packs of kids, mine included, who picked from the bushes, stuffing more berries into their mouths than into the buckets they held. Neither of the Newmans ever ate a berry—stained their dentures, they claimed—but both of them watered and fertilized those bushes as if their lives depended on it.
I climbed the steps to the porch where Polly and I had sat many times, eating sandwiches and drinking sweet iced tea with the older couple while our boys gorged themselves with ripe blueberries. Mrs. Newman met me at the front door. Her hair was the gray-blue color I had seen on many older women, and the dress she wore was awash with bright pink and dark red triangles. I had never seen a picture of her as a young woman, but it was easy enough to imagine. She was still beautiful.
“Come on in,” she said, holding the door open. “You like lots of sugar in your coffee, don’t you.” She stated it as a fact, not as a question.
“Yes, ma’am, with cream . . . and could you put some extra caffeine in it?” I teased.
She laughed politely and led me into the kitchen where Mr. Newman waited. He rose from his seat at the breakfast table as I entered the room. About five ten or so in brown work pants and a plaid flannel shirt, he still had the ruddy complexion of a man who had spent his life outdoors. Extending his hand, he greeted me. “Sit down, sit down. I got ahead of you on the coffee. It’s the only thing keeping my heart beating, I think.”
“That and me, you old man,” Mrs. Newman said with a cackle, which prompted her husband to grin and wink at me. After pouring more coffee for him and a first cup for me, Mrs. Newman sat down at the table with us. She moved her chair to face me and eased her left hand into his right.
“At church yesterday,” Mrs. Newman began, “you mentioned you found some things . . . buttons and photographs, I believe you said. Photographs of what?”
I answered their questions—they were mostly her questions—and before long, I was afforded two unexpected surprises. One, they were extremely computer literate, something seldom seen in people of their generation. And two, they knew more about the subject of U-boats in the Gulf of Mexico than anyone with whom I had been able to speak.
Mr. Newman brought out a cardboard box of files printed from Web sites and copied from library books. He showed me a list of every American vessel sunk by U-boats during the war, their tonnage, location, and crew numbers. He answered questions that, frankly, I had not thought to ask. I was shocked at the average age of a U-boat crew (just twenty years old) and amazed at the conditions they endured.
Mr. Newman allowed me to examine written accounts by crew members of torpedoed tankers and freighters. The versions varied wildly according to the ship and the teller of the tale. Some stories were bitter narratives by survivors of sunken vessels whose crews had been savagely machine-gunned from their lifeboats by the U-boat that had torpedoed their ship, then surfaced in their midst. Others carefully recorded accounts of U-boats allowing the crew members to row away from their doomed ship before it was sunk. Then, in amazement, they watched as the U-boat’s officers emerged from the conning tower only to give them food, water, and compass bearings toward land.
“There was a difference between a German and a Nazi,” Mr. Newman stated. “The Kriegsmarine had a lot of Germans . . . not so many Nazis.” I frowned. Honestly it was not a distinction I had ever made. Noting my confusion and perhaps interpreting it as disbelief, the old man said, “You see a difference between Americans and the Ku Klux Klan, don’t you?” I nodded. “Well, there you go.” I was silent for a moment, while he wiped his face roughly with his hand.
Mrs. Newman interrupted. “While I never actually saw a U-boat,” she said, “I talked to a few who did. Newman and I have always been curious about this period in history. The submarines were here. They were in the Gulf, though it seems no one remembers. In any case, we became curious about the men. Obviously—I mean, read the accounts of the sinkings—more than occasionally there were compassionate men in positions of leadership.”
“The Kriegsmarine,” Mr. Newman said, “and specifically the U-boat service, was an area in the German military where a vessel’s crew was generally able to think and act as smaller, individual entities. The captain was law, and whatever he ordered was carried out. Therefore, if the ship’s officers were decent men, the crew behaved and dealt with their enemies in a decent way . . . that is to say, at least, they fought under the rules of the Geneva Convention . . . none of this shooting helpless men in the water. In the Gulf, a U-boat crew was two thousand miles from the High Command, and though there were Nazi party officials on every boat and ship, the officers and crews, for the most part, considered themselves German—not Nazi—and didn’t hold the same sadistic beliefs as Hitler and his cronies.”
The second time we got together, Polly and I met with the Newmans at Wolf Bay Lodge, a favorite lunch place in nearby Elberta. I had more questions to ask, and Mrs. Newman wanted to see the items I had uncovered beneath the tree. Between bites of fried oyster sandwiches and crab claws and sips of sweet iced tea, we talked—mostly about the pictures. The Newmans seemed to have the same fascination about the family picture that we had, and both were curious about the Iron Cross and the U-boat officer’s ring.
By my third visit, we had almost run out of things to discuss. Mr. Newman had taken ill and was not his usual jolly self. As he went to the bedroom to lie down, his wife moved me into their living room. She showed me pictures of fishing boats and satsuma groves and what the beach looked like before anyone knew what a condo was.
We sat on the couch, and she smiled as the gentle sounds of her husband’s snoring drifted through the closed bedroom door. “He is a good man,” she said simply.
“Yes, ma’am,” I agreed with a nod. I didn’t really have anything else to say.
“Day after tomorrow, we are going to Louisiana for a few weeks. Do you need to talk to us anymore?”
“Not about this, I don’t think.” I shrugged. “I’m sort of at a dead end. I appreciate your help, though. It’s all so interesting, and yet . . .” I paused, searching for the completion of a thought I couldn’t quite grasp.
“And yet what?” she prodded.
I sighed. “I guess I was hoping to wrap it all up in a neat little package.”
“Life is seldom that way.”
“Well, don’t think I’m just finding that out.” She smiled. “I was just hoping, at least, to find out where the things I found buried in our yard came from. But, I suppose, that’s too much to expect. After all, it’s been more than half a century.” Chuckling dryly, I added, “And my wife is still concerned about the family in the picture.”
Mrs. Newman reached over and patted my hand. “Things have a way of working out, son. You tell your sweet Polly that that family is fine.”
“All right, I will,” I said, not really convinced that it mattered. Preparing to leave, I hugged her and asked her to thank Mr. Newman for me. As it turned out, she didn’t have to. He woke up as we were saying good-bye and insisted on walking me to my car.
I drove home with an uneasy feeling. Things in my life generally “came together,” but this had not. Instead, I struggled with a perplexing riddle that had consumed my time, derailed my writing schedule, and was apparently unsolvable to boot. What a mess!
That night after dinner, Polly herded the boys to the bathtub while I cleaned the kitchen. When the phone rang, I answered and was surprised to hear Mrs. Newman’s voice on the other end. She wanted to let me know, she said, that Newman was better.
“Thanks,” I replied, somewhat curious that she would call just to relay that information, but I played along. “I’m glad to hear it. He is a great guy.”
“Yes, he is.” She stopped briefly as if to make up her mind about something, then continued, “Andy?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Have you ever been to the old Civil War fort?”
I knew she was talking about Fort Morgan. The massive old stone-and-earthworks stands on the tip of a peninsula that runs almost twenty miles due west of town. The peninsula is squeezed by the Gulf on its southern shore and the waters of Mobile Bay to the north. I answered her question. “Yes, ma’am. I’ve been there.”
“I never mentioned this because it was only a rumor . . . Newman says I shouldn’t say anything . . .” She spoke haltingly, and her voice grew faint as if she were pulling the phone away from her mouth.
“Mrs. Newman . . . ,” I said.
“Yes?”
“Tell me.”
“Well, people used to say a Nazi spy was shot out there . . . on the peninsula . . . that’s what people used to say . . . that one was killed and buried, and no one ever found out. I just thought you might want to know.”
I hung up the phone and sat down heavily in one of the kitchen chairs. “She just thought I might want to know,” I said to myself out loud. My mind was spinning. I have Nazi medals and a picture of Adolf Hitler in my backyard. German U-boats torpedoed tankers right off the coast here, and nobody remembers. “And, oh, by the way, I think a spy was shot down the street . . . just thought you’d want to know!”
Shaking my head, I stood up and, before I got back to the dishes in the sink, turned to the telephone in its cradle and said, “Thanks a lot.”