Flying three miles above the earth, the twin-engine German bomber unleashed its new secret weapon on two unsuspecting American warships cruising below on the Mediterranean Sea. One of the 3,400-pound missiles exploded on the light cruiser USS Philadelphia, injuring several crewmen, but spared the ship serious damage. The second American warship, the USS Savannah, did not fare as well. The missile ripped through the hull, piercing the armored gun turret roof as it passed through three steel decks and landed in the lower handling room, where it exploded. A gaping hole in the ship’s bottom, a ripped open seam on the port side of the American cruiser, and scores of dead and injured sailors were left in its wake.
Sailors rushed to seal off flooded and burned compartments, but secondary explosions in the gun room slowed fire-fighting efforts. Working around burning debris, blood, and the lifeless bodies of their shipmates, crewmen hurried feverishly to put out the fires and keep the ship from sinking. Once the fires were extinguished and the ship’s list corrected, the light cruiser limped back to Malta for emergency repairs, assisted by two salvage tugs. Casualties were high on board the Savannah, with 197 American sailors dead and 15 wounded.1
German scientists invented this new weapon—a radio-controlled glide bomb—referred to by the Luftwaffe as the Fritz X; it was designed as an antiship weapon and already was making great strides destroying Allied ships, including destroyers, battleships, cruisers, troop ships, and even a British hospital ship. In fact, following Italy’s truce with the Allies, the Germans used a glide bomb to blow up an Italian battleship, the Roma, slicing it in two parts and sending its 1,255 sailors to the bottom of the Mediterranean. Its sister ship, the Italia, was also hit by a missile but was able to return to Malta. The Germans also successfully used the bomb to disable the British HMS Uganda and HMS Warspite and to sink the HMS Spartan and HMS Janus.2
The remote-controlled glide bomb had fins and would appear to glide as the pilots in the airplane high above the target visually controlled its movement using radio signals. Flares or battery-powered lamps on the tails would help the pilots guide the missile in a meteor-like dive to its target. With an armor-piercing warhead packed with 660 pounds of explosives, the weapon could reach speeds in excess of six hundred miles per hour with a range of eight miles. The Luftwaffe’s bombers had to drop the bombs from high altitudes for them to achieve the maximum range, which kept the planes well out of reach of the ships’ antiaircraft guns. Clearly the Allies needed to find a way to counter this deadly new weapon, which threatened to send more and more Allied ships and crews to watery graves.3
The solution, it turns out, would come from the genius of a young American who got his early education in a one-room schoolhouse in Running Water, South Dakota. George Gowling was born in Mitchell, South Dakota, and moved to Running Water when he was in the fourth grade, eventually finishing high school in Springfield. Later he worked for the Bell Telephone Company before joining the Naval Reserve in November 1942. Having graduated with an electrical engineering degree from South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, the Navy decided to put Gowling’s training to good use. He was sent to the University of Arizona for a month of additional hightech training before being enrolled in Harvard and MIT graduate schools for advanced training in “ultrahigh-frequency technique.” Finishing his training in August 1943, Gowling was assigned to the “counter measures” unit of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C.
It was there that Gowling first learned of the existence of Germany’s new glide bomb, which was causing great damage to U.S. and Allied ships traveling in the Mediterranean area. “This is the number one problem for the Navy right now,” he was told, and his assignment was to determine how these new missiles were controlled and to develop an effective countermeasure to them, something the navies of both the United States and Britain had been trying, unsuccessfully, to do for more than a year.
A pretty tall order, thought Gowling, but one he undertook with great enthusiasm. At that time there was wide but unproven speculation about how the missiles were controlled, ranging from infrared to high-frequency radio waves, according to Gowling, who said the Navy—perplexed by the new weapon—even issued bulletins advising that if a ship were attacked by a glide bomb, sailors should turn on their electric razors in what would turn out to be a useless attempt to jam the bomb’s signal. “That was pretty pathetic,” he recalled thinking.
So Gowling went right to work. The young officer was placed under tight security, watched day and night by agents from the FBI, as he went about his task, first at the Naval Laboratory and later on board the destroyer escort USS Frederick C. Davis assigned to the Mediterranean, a major theater of war in 1943–44. After the Allies successfully took control of North Africa in May 1943, American and British forces moved ahead to invade Sicily in July. But the Axis would not give up without a fierce fight and, armed with their deadly new weapon, would be a potent force with which to reckon.
In addition to the electrical engineer from Running Water, another very bright young man, Frank McClatchie, also was working at the laboratory on designs to build a spectrum analyzer to be installed on board destroyer escorts to assist in countering the glide bombs. McClatchie was a German-born American whose father was an inventor doing pioneering work on early tape recorders and vacuum cleaners. So technical genius ran in the family, and young Frank, who had to learn to speak English once his parents returned to the United States in 1930, also started working for the telephone company after graduating from high school in Compton, California. “I was curious about radar,” McClatchie said, “and the only way to learn about it was to join the Navy.” Of course, because he was German born, the young telephone company technician was thoroughly investigated by the FBI to ensure he was not a spy. Once Gowling and McClatchie, who remarkably were not acquainted while working at the lab, perfected the device to counter the glide bomb, it was time to try it out in the field.4
When Gowling and his four assistants boarded the Davis in November 1943, no one, including the ship’s captain, knew the details of their top secret mission, and the crew was instructed not to ask questions. “They didn’t know why I came aboard, or what I was doing there,” Gowling recalled. He said they had two radio receivers and a companion unit with a lighted screen showing the frequency of the signal coming into the receivers. When a receiver was tuned to a certain signal, it would appear as a vertical line in the center of the companion unit. Signals that were lower or higher than that frequency would appear as blips on either side of the vertical line on the screen.
As part of his research, Gowling studied photographs of some of the new bombs that had been damaged during battle and noticed what appeared to be an antenna on the bomb. “I didn’t tell anyone, but from that I had a fairly good idea what frequency it might be,” Gowling said. When they tuned the receiver to the suspected frequency, which was higher than he expected, the bomb’s frequency appeared on the screen. But his job was not yet finished. The Germans were using twelve different frequencies for their bombs, so Gowling and his men had eleven more to discover. The former Bell telephone man said he took notes as one of his assistants worked the companion unit and the other two men handled the receivers. Eventually, they were able to determine each of the twelve frequencies used by Germany’s secret weapon.
The next step was to build a transmitter to jam the German bomb signals. Gowling took his discovery and ideas on board the USS Vulcan, a repair ship traveling in the Mediterranean, and asked a Western Electric employee on the ship to build a variable frequency transmitter to his specifications. “I didn’t tell anyone about this,” Gowling remembered. Back on the Davis the young lieutenant installed the transmitter in the radio shack and climbed to the top of the mast himself to install the antenna, as the ship swayed from one side to the other. His invention worked. When he and his men jammed the signal, Germany’s new secret glide bomb, which had been launched at the convoy of American ships, abruptly veered away from its target, traveling erratically before eventually falling harmlessly into the sea amid applause and cheers on board the destroyer escorts.
Gowling quickly provided the details of his discovery to the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, which, using his specifications, built two units each more powerful than the Gowling prototype for installation on the Davis and another DE, the USS Herbert C. Jones. Thanks to this invention, Gowling said no ship escorted by either of these DEs ever was hit by one of the German glide bombs. For years after leaving the Navy, Gowling remembered receiving an annual letter from the FBI warning him of the penalties for disclosing details of his discovery to anyone. Until now it has remained his secret. “They never released me to this day,” he said. Although Gowling was the actual inventor of the jamming device, he insists it was a “team effort” by him and his four assistants, radar men James A. Combs and Frank A. Frazer and aviation radio technicians Richard L. Youmans and Evan Powers, all of whom worked with Gowling on the receivers and companion unit used to identify the German bomb frequencies.5
In January 1944 the Davis and Jones, both equipped with the new jamming device, arrived in Naples, Italy, to assist amphibious forces with the invasion of the beachhead at Anzio. Their role was to provide protection from submarines and radio-controlled bombs, which they carried out with extraordinary results.
“The Germans didn’t take this sitting down,” he said, noting that once they became aware that the Americans had developed a jamming device, they sometimes would leave frequencies on for bombs that were not in the air in order to make it more difficult for Gowling and his men to pinpoint the actual bomb’s frequency. Gowling said the Germans knew what was happening on board the Davis, adding that Axis Sally, radio propagandist for the Third Reich, would sometimes make oblique references to the work he and his men were doing. “I understood the significance of what she was talking about,” he said, when she spoke about the jamming device, although he added that most of the others on board his ship did not.6
“Let’s all concentrate on Frau Meier,” a German pilot was overheard by a Davis radioman monitoring transmissions from four Nazi planes flying overhead. The DE radioman was fluent in German and knew that “Frau Meier” was German slang for “gossipy woman,” a term Axis Sally had used in her radio broadcasts to describe the Davis. Within seconds the German bombers peeled off and headed straight for the DE. Although the planes dropped thirteen bombs, ringing the Davis, the only damage from the attack was a shrapnel injury to the shoulder of a crewman and some shrapnel holes in the superstructure on the ship’s port side. The Davis had one more advantage, according to gunner’s mate William Riemer: There were six German patriots on board who had defected to the United States and would monitor German radios to determine when bombers left their bases—in essence, an early warning system for the Davis.7
The Davis and Jones stayed in the Mediterranean for the duration of the Anzio operation and were very successful at stopping the glide bombs from reaching their marks. During the twelve-day period, 22 January to 2 February 1944, twenty-six radio-controlled glide bombs were launched, and the DEs were able to divert all of them with the jamming device; during the period 2 February through 7 February and 12 February through 14 February 1944, there were thirteen glide bombs launched at Allied ships in the Mediterranean. No ship was hit by the bombs, thanks to Gowling’s work, and the success of the Allies at Anzio is due in no small part to the work of Gowling and his men. The task force battle report credits the two DEs with spectacular success in protecting the Allied ships from the radio-controlled bomb, noting that “the efficiency with which the F.C. Davis and H.C. Jones jammed radio-controlled bombs is an outstanding achievement on the part of these vessels.”
Gunner’s mate Riemer also recalled the Davis being threatened by German frogmen, who attempted to attach limpet mines to the bottom of the ship to blow it up. Watches were set up on the port and starboard sides of the ship, and crewmen dropped quarter-pound blocks of TNT over the side, hoping the explosion who discourage German swimmers from coming too close. None of them ever succeeded in harming the Davis.
Gowling believes the DEs were chosen for the jamming work because they were more maneuverable than destroyers, had a shorter turning radius, and were able to move into position to jam the signal more quickly. Jamming devices later were installed on other Allied ships, including the Normandy invading fleet. Germany made a total of 1,386 glide bombs from April 1943 to December 1944, when manufacturing was discontinued since Gowlings’ invention of the jamming device rendered them mostly useless.8 Despite this major success for the Allies in the Mediterranean, however, U-boats in the North Atlantic remained a problem for the Allies, albeit a diminished one from December 1941 to the end of 1942, when German submarines sunk some two thousand Allied ships, sending more than 9 million tons of ships and cargo to the bottom of the sea.
Although the United States now was turning out new ships at lightning speed—with American shipyards building more than 6 million tons each year—Hitler’s U-boats still had not given up hope of winning the Battle of the Atlantic, as evidenced by their continued presence in the North Atlantic shipping lanes. Destroyer escorts, radar, sonar, and other antisubmarine measures were making great stride in turning the “hunters” into the “hunted” to be sure; however, U-boats still posed a very real danger to ships at sea. In fact, another one thousand Allied ships were sunk by U-boats from September 1942 to the end of the war.9
U-boats routinely would prowl the coastal waters of America, making traveling around offshore waters a dangerous experience. Admiral Döenitz’s young and fearless U-boats captains were skilled and cunning adversaries and frequently took what some might consider great risks traveling in shallow waters near America’s shores, sometimes even attacking in the daylight hours. But the Nazi submarines had little to fear because the U.S. Navy was not prepared for the U-boat attacks, which accounts for the large number of Allied ships sunk in the United States’ own home waters. The first U-boat, U-85, was not sunk until May 1942 off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, by the USS Roper, a World War I–era four-stack destroyer. All forty-six sailors on board the U-boat were killed. By stark comparison, the Nazis already had sunk six hundred Allied vessels during the same period.
On 12 June 1943 twenty-year-old Elmo Allen was at his duty station in the radio shack when the USS Edgar G. Chase was dispatched to Jupiter’s Inlet off West Palm Beach, Florida, to investigate a confirmed U-boat sighting. The DE, accompanied by the destroyer escort USS Reuben James and two Coast Guard cutters, raced full speed to a point east of the inlet. The ships searched the area for hours, but no U-boat was found.
Suddenly the klaxon sounded and all hands rushed to battle stations. The Reuben James reported “submarine contact.” Another false alarm. Three hours later, though, things would change dramatically. The Chase sonar operator, Thomas L. Hardwicke, reported “contact” with a strong propeller noise detected. “Loud and clear,” reported Hardwicke, noting the U-boat was 1,600 yards away, moving from left to right. Contact was lost again, as a Coast Guard cutter on the attack cut across the DE’s bow. A few minutes later, they picked up the signal again, with the sonar operator shouting, “Echo Clear, range 1,600 yards.”
“Fire hedgehogs,” Capt. John J. Morony of the Chase ordered, making a quick course change, as he pursued the submarine at a speed of twelve knots. When the ship closed within two hundred yards of the submarine, twenty-four hedgehogs were launched. Twenty-three explosions were heard under the water, indicating that the weapons had struck something solid. To make sure, eleven depth charges were rolled off the ship, and tremendous underwater explosions were heard, and the sea rose up, splashing over the ship’s deck. Sonar contact was lost. A strong pungent odor of diesel fuel was reported in the water, and several men on the DEs reported seeing clothing, splinters, and other debris floating in the water. After searching for another twenty hours, the DEs were ordered to return to port. They were sure the U-boat had been sunk, but there was little evidence to support their belief.10
Years later the evidence finally was found. The U-boat they were pursuing was U-190, under the command of Captain Max Wintermeyer. The submarine had been dispatched from the German base at Lorient, in occupied France, on 1 May on a mission to sink Allied shipping off the East Coast of the United States, from Virginia to the Florida straits. Years after the war ended, during a chance encounter in Hoboken, New Jersey, between the former U-boat commander, now skipper of a German supertanker, and the Chase’s former engineering officer, Lt. Robert Shanklin, it was learned that the German submarine had survived the assault and, as the DEs searched the area, had stayed submerged during the entire twenty hours, exceeding the twelve-hour limit for a submarine to remain safely underwater.
The U-boat commander ordered complete silence on the part of his crew, as the submarine sat motionless on the bottom of the sea. No movements were allowed on board the boat for fear they would be detected by the DEs. U-boat crewmen simply sat silently at their duty stations, waiting for the Allied vessels to leave the area. Unfortunately for many of the German sailors, this cat-and-mouse waiting game would turn deadly, as oxygen supplies became depleted and sailors started to become incapacitated. After the American ships finally called off their search and the boat was able to depart the Florida coast, most of the crew were too ill to perform their duties, and they scarcely were able to make it back to their French base.
Captain Wintermeyer, speaking of destroyer escorts to Lieutenant Shanklin, his former adversary, admitted, “I hated those damn things,” and recalled that the encounter off the Florida coast was “the worst experience I had in all of World War II.” He said, “They kept us down there for 20 hours—I thought we were kaput and then they went away and we came up for air.” It could not be learned whether the presence of debris in the water after the attack had been discharged by the U-boat from its torpedo tubes to fool the American ships into thinking they had destroyed the boat, a tactic often used by U-boats, or whether, in fact, some damage did occur as a result of the DE attack.11
By the fall of 1944, Admiral Döenitz was trying to rebuild his U-boat force, which had been suffering since the Allies had been making great headway in curtailing U-boat successes in the North Atlantic, due in no small part to the arrival of the destroyer escorts and stepped up air patrols. Several submarines, so-called nuisance boats, were still prowling the North Atlantic, particularly in the area of the Cape Verde Islands. But the intense Allied attention in the area was starting to make Döenitz rethink whether he should establish a base in Penang, off the Malay Peninsula, as the Japanese had suggested, allowing more direct access to Allied prey in the Indian Ocean and the South Atlantic.
Captain Karl Albrech, the thirty-seven-year-old commander of U-1062, a torpedo supply boat, was about to leave Penang in July 1944, after delivering forty torpedoes to the Axis forces there. The U-boat had arrived at the Far East location in April, unloaded its torpedoes, and stayed before embarking on its return journey in order to repair its broken air compressor. The three-month visit was not a pleasant one for the Germans, however, especially because of the unpalatable food available. U-boat sailors were used to a heavy diet of sausage, dark bread, and sauerkraut, not the Japanese fare of rice garnished with vegetables and tinned fish. Unable to stand eating the rations provided, the Germans set up their own small factory to prepare food more to their liking.12
By the time July arrived, the crew of U-1062 was more than ready to go home, and they happily started the long trip back to France. But Albrech and his crew of fifty-five soon would run into something a lot more unpleasant than rice and fish. Tenth Fleet intelligence indicated that the U-boat was planning to rendezvous with U-219, headed to the Far East, and they were in the vicinity of the Cape Verde Islands. Three destroyer escorts sped to the scene the morning of 30 September. The USS Fessenden, USS Douglas L. Howard, and USS J. R. Y. Blakeley, all part of the hunter-killer group with the escort-carrier Mission Bay, arrived at the location southwest of the islands and started to search. It wasn’t long before sonar picked up U-1062, and Fessenden launched a full pattern of hedgehogs. Fourteen seconds later four underwater explosions were heard and a geyser of water erupted. The Fessenden followed up with seventeen depth charges. As night fell a large oil slick covered the area of attack, indicating that Albrech and his crew likely had succumbed.13
Ernie Pyle, the celebrated World War II newspaper correspondent who earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for his riveting stories about life as an American GI, took a ride on a destroyer escort, the USS Reynolds, as the little ship carried the famous journalist—who later would write about his adventures— from Iwo Jima to Guam in February 1945.
“Drenched from head to foot with salt water,” Pyle wrote of his experiences on board the Reynolds. “Sleep with a leg crooked around my rack so I won’t fall out. Put wet bread under my dinner tray to keep it from sliding. Even got my Jesus-shoes ordered.” He continued, describing destroyer escorts for his readers: “A DE, my friends, is a destroyer escort. It’s a ship long and narrow and sleek, something like a destroyer. But it’s much smaller. It’s a baby destroyer. It’s the American version of the British corvette.” His column, which, although it was mailed back to his newspaper from somewhere in the Pacific, was never published.14
“They are rough and tumble little ships,” Pyle wrote. “Their after decks are laden with depth charges. They can turn in half the space of a destroyer. Their forward guns can seldom be used because waves are breaking over them. They roll and they plunge. They buck and they twist. They shudder and they fall through space.” Living on board a DE was certainly a challenge, Pyle wrote, but getting on board one of these little ships in the middle of the vast ocean was an even more hair-raising adventure.
Transfer between ships was accomplished by use of a breeches buoy, consisting of a canvas sack, a heavy line, and a bunch of strong sailors to ensure that you made it. Ships would use this method to transfer sailors, mail, movies, and supplies among other items, between ships. Sometimes the cargo in the sack would end up in the drink when the line would unloosen from the clamps, allowing the cargo to drop into the water. “To help give you an idea what this operation is like,” Pyle wrote, “suppose you ran a rope from the roof of your house to the roof of your barn, and left a little sag in it. Then you put a pulley on the rope, hang a sack to the pulley, get into the sack, and then slide from the house to the barn. Fun, eh?”15
Pyle, who transferred from the carrier USS Windham Bay to the Reynolds, remembered the cold winter day when the larger ship came alongside of the destroyer escort, which was disappearing behind the giant Pacific Ocean waves. The wind was howling as they readied the reporter for his nerve-wracking trip between the two warships. He was strapped in a life jacket and then placed inside the canvas sack: “When they’re all set, the sailors shoot a line across from ship to ship. They actually shoot it, with a rifle, for you could never throw a line that far in these winds.”
Pyle, who said he could not swim a stroke, continued: “On one ship the line is made fast. But on the other it runs through a pulley, and behind the pulley is a long line of sailors holding to the line. An order is shouted. Then men on the heavy line pull it up taut, raising me off the deck. Half a dozen hands lift me over the rail. Another order. The men on the other ship run with their lines, and I’m on my way across.” On the way over, Pyle wrote, “you whiz up and you whiz down, just like you were a yo-yo. Sometimes your sack almost smacks the water,” which, in fact, is designed so that if the bag falls into the ocean, the passenger would automatically be provided with a flotation device—little comfort for the individual who is dangling in the air as he is pulled across the open waters. “Finally, you arrive on the other side. A dozen hands grab your sack, and pull you onto deck, and steady you until you’ve got out of the devilish contraption. You heave a great sigh of relief.”16
Owen Nicholson, a twenty-year-old sonarman on board the Reynolds, watched as Pyle arrived on his ship and said the reporter told him that, in spite of the countless dangerous battles on which he had reported, the transfer between the two ships was one of the most frightening trips of his life. Nicholson, an early high school graduate in Denver, Colorado, who had just started college as the war broke out, volunteered for the Navy and, after boot camp, was assigned to the Reynolds, originally built for the British. After being redesignated as an American destroyer escort, the Reynolds spent its entire career in the Pacific theater.
It was a cold and windy late afternoon, and all the enlisted men on board the Reynolds knew was that they were to come alongside the carrier to “transfer a man” to their ship, unaware that they were about to meet the most famous reporter of World War II, according to an entry Nicholson made in his wartime diary. “The officers were all lined up waiting for him,” Nicholson said. “After Ernie Pyle shook hands with all the officers, he told them he was going to eat with the men.” Nicholson said Capt. Marvin Smith and the other officers all were “quite miffed” that the famed journalist chose to eat with the enlisted men rather than dine with the officers, who had a special meal prepared in anticipation of his arrival. But Pyle was “a regular guy,” Nicholson said. “He was interested in what you [the enlisted guys] thought, and what you were going through.”17
Pyle, best known and most beloved for his stories about regular GIs, seldom wrote about or spent time with officers during his time as a war correspondent. Nicholson recalled one supper with the journalist, who was on board three days and two nights, when he held up a piece of bread to the light to show Pyle the weevils. “We told him that was how we got our protein. Ernie got a kick out of that.” He said that a provision ship in his convoy gladly sent over flour when the Reynolds ran out. “They were glad to get rid of it” because the flour was full of weevils. But he did remember that, while Pyle was on board, the sailors were given the best food in a long time.
Pyle seldom slept while on board, Nicholson said, instead choosing to spend as much time as possible with sailors, sitting in a corner on deck, talking to them during their watches, and recording his conversations in a little notebook. “He was the most engaging individual I had ever met.” Nicholson wrote in his diary, “Ernie Pyle is a swell, regular guy. He won’t even talk to the officers, but spends his entire time talking to the enlisted men. You can talk to him just as any enlisted man and he talks back just as if he’s one of us.”
Pyle told the sailors they were on a “luxury cruise” compared to the fellows in Europe, Nicholson wrote. He said his shipmates asked Pyle whether the European or Pacific wars were the worst places to be, to which Nicholson said Pyle replied, “War is hell, wherever it is, but at least in Europe the guys are on the front lines, then they get relieved for a few days. They could go back to civilization and could steal some chickens and get some wine and at least have some semblance of normalcy before they’d have to go back to the front.” Comparing the men in the European theater to the DE sailors, Pyle noted that the boredom on board a DE in the Pacific was “uncanny.” He told the sailors “You go to sleep at night, you see the water. You get up in the morning and see the water. That is something that few people can understand.”18
Pyle obviously enjoyed, and was proud of, his three days on board the Reynolds, as evidenced by the words he wrote: “We mothered ships that were big and slow. We were tiny in comparison. We ran ’way out ahead, and to the side. We and DEs like us formed the ‘screen,’ and there was nothing bigger than us in it. We felt like strutting.” The reporter went on, comparing the DEs’ role to that of a little boy: “We felt like the little boy of the plains left at home for the first time to protect his mother from the Indians—the only man on the place!”19