Unseasonably warm breezes blew over the ocean as the lights of Point Pleasant reflected and danced on the tranquil waters. Residents of this New Jersey beach community were returning from work and preparing their evening meal, unaware of the danger lurking nearby offshore. Prowling silently along the coast was one of Adolph Hitler’s U-boats, commanded by twenty-seven-year-old Captain Helmut Neuerburg, who, along with his crew of fifty-five sailors, had traveled to U.S. shores to sink some ships in the final months of World War II.
With the North Atlantic nearly flat calm on that overcast evening in February 1945, the USS Crow, one of thirty destroyer escorts manned mostly by Coast Guard men, was escorting a convoy from New York to Liverpool, England. Joined by seven other escorts, the vessel was traveling along at fifteen knots when, a little after 4:30 PM, Sonarman Howard Kenneth Denson heard a “ping” indicating a possible U-boat was in the vicinity, about sixty-five miles off the coast of New Jersey.
The Crow chased the submarine for more than three miles as the U-boat dashed away from the East Coast in a frantic run for deeper water. Closing on its target, now only eight hundred feet away, the ship suddenly lost the sonar signal. The DE fired twenty-four hedgehogs. Multiple underwater explosions jarred the ship, indicating that the missiles had hit something solid. The Crow then dropped depth charges over the side. Air bubbles and an oil slick surfaced. More depth charges were fired, and more air bubbles and oil were seen. The Crow called for help and the USS Koiner left the convoy and rushed at flank speed to the site.
Realizing that by leaving the convoy the destroyer escorts left their charges vulnerable to other U-boats that might be prowling the American coastline, they radioed for a hunter-killer group to assist in searching for the U-boat. As they waited the DEs continued to bombard the area with depth charges. The Koiner’s commander lowered a whaleboat over the side to investigate the dark water near the attack site. The whaleboat crew returned with an oil-soaked rags, confirming that the substance on the water was oil.
After three hours the DEs returned to their convoy, and although the commander and crew of the Crow were convinced they had been pursuing and sunk a German submarine, the skipper of the Koiner did not agree. Of course, sailors from the Crow argued that the Koiner had arrived thirty-nine minutes after the initial pursuit by the Crow so did not witness the U-boat turning and speeding into deeper water. The final official assessment was that the object was likely an existing wreck or “nonsub” since the Koiner did not see any discernable movement.
Disappointed, the crew of the Crow never accepted the final assessment. They knew what they saw, and they were convinced that they had been chasing a moving target. Later the German command agreed with the Koiner skipper, stating that they had no U-boats operating off the coast of New Jersey in February 1945. Since neither DE submitted an antisubmarine warfare report on the incident, when the time came for the U.S. Navy to make its final assessment, it sided with the Koiner and ruled that the ships had not been pursuing a U-boat.1
Fast forward forty-six years. In the fall of 1991 a pair of adventuresome Atlantic wreck divers made an incredible discovery about sixty-five miles off the coast of Point Pleasant, New Jersey, in the general vicinity where the USS Crow believed it had pursued and sunk a German submarine. Some 230 feet below the waves off New Jersey’s sandy beaches rested what appeared to be a German submarine with the skeletal remains of its crew still inside. In subsequent dives, crockery bowls dated 1942 and marked with an eagle and a swastika, and a dinner knife with the name “Horenburg” carved in the wooden handle, were recovered. Martin Horenburg was the chief radioman of U-869, a German submarine presumed to have been sunk off Gibraltar. A box of spare parts also were recovered bearing a brass plate inscribed U-869. The divers speculated that the submarine had been sunk by one of its own torpedoes, which had gone astray, circling back and smashing into the U-boat.
Captain Neuerburg took command of U-869, a conventional combat submarine, sailing from Kristiansand, Norway, on 8 December 1944. The boat was to serve as a weather boat for the Ardennes offensive and, later, disrupt shipping operations off the coast of New York. By the end of three weeks, the boat should have reached New York, but German command never received a report from the submarine indicating it had arrived at its destination. Several radio messages to the U-boat went unanswered. By January, having heard nothing from U-869, Germany was certain the boat had met its end. However, on 6 January, U-869 radioed German command advising that it was about six hundred miles southwest of Iceland. Concerned that the boat might not have enough fuel to patrol New York, German command asked for a fuel report from the submarine. It failed to reply to this request.2
Twenty-two-year-old Howard Denson, who had joined the Coast Guard right out of high school, was manning the sonar that early evening off Point Pleasant and was the first to detect the U-boat. “Clearly,” Denson recalled, “it was a moving target.” At first, when Denson heard the telltale “ping” indicating a metallic object below, he was not alarmed as he had detected a number of possible submarines while serving as sonarman on board the Crow. However, when the signal grew stronger and started moving, the skipper called all hands to battle stations as he swung the destroyer escort toward the suspected U-boat and started the chase. “There was no doubt that the submarine was moving,” he said.
The dark sonar shack had no windows, of course, so Denson could not observe as hedgehogs were launched and depth charges fired. The chase lasted about an hour, the crew manning their battle stations the entire time. Finally, after being ordered to return to the convoy, the Crow and Koiner took about six hours to catch up with the collection of ships heading to England.
This kind of excitement was just what young Denson had hoped for when he climbed the old wooden steps of the Woolworth building back in Seymour, Indiana, to enlist. He wanted to join when he was seventeen years old, but his mother wouldn’t sign for him. Finally, after he became eighteen, he no longer needed anyone’s permission. He walked into the recruiting area over the store and saw booths for the Marines, Merchant Marine, and Coast Guard. The Marines were taking people right away, whereas the Coast Guard didn’t call you for a month, which appealed to him. He rejected the Merchant Marine even before he arrived at the Woolworth building because he remembered the newspaper headline of merchant ships torpedoed and sunk right off the New York coast. “That wasn’t for me,” he said. Now, serving as sonarman on board the Crow, he was face to face with the same U-boats that were sinking Allied vessels in clear view of residents living along the East Coast, wreaking havoc on Atlantic shipping.3
Harold Muth, gunnery officer with Denson on board the Crow during that fateful night in February, said the navigator came rushing up to the CIC to use the dead-reckoning tracer to plot the German submarine’s track. The pinging and echoing indicated a strong target, which continued to move away after the DE first picked up the signal some 1,200 to 1,500 yards from the convoy.
Muth, an experienced sailor who had served three years on antisubmarine duty on board the 165-foot Coast Guard cutter Triton prior to his assignment on the Crow, immediately left his temporary duty as watch officer in the CIC and rushed to his battle station, where he supervised the firing of hedgehogs at the target below. “It was a moving target,” Muth said, adding that his ship chased the U-boat more than three miles before launching the hedgehog attack—another reason he is certain the target was moving. The sonar equipment on board, he noted, was not capable of picking up a target outside of one and a half miles. Once the submarine was discovered it made a run for it, with the DE finally overtaking it some three miles away. “Clear echoes and Doppler showed the target was moving,” Muth said.4
Several underwater explosions were detected and an oil slick, diesel fuel, and air bubbles appeared on the water’s surface, indicating to the crew of the destroyer escort that the U-boat had been struck. When the Koiner launched its whaleboat and oil samples were recovered, the crew of the Crow considered it confirmation that they had sunk the boat. However, because the Koiner arrived after most of the action was over and its skipper was senior to the captain of the Crow, he issued the ruling that the target was stationary, and the Crow’s skipper did not wish to challenge his senior officer. Of course, Muth’s view is a bit different. “The target was stationary,” the gunnery officer admits, “because the Crow made it stationary.”5
Lacking concrete proof that they had sunk U-869, they had to wait nearly half a century for confirmation and credit for the “kill.” But twenty-four-year-old Ens. George King knows what actually happened that February day. King, who served as officer of the deck during the incident, is certain they were chasing a submarine, and he witnessed the oil and bubbles on the water’s surface after the hedgehog attack. When the Koiner ruled the target “nonsub.” King told his skipper, Lt. John M. Nixon, he was wrong. “We’re doing what we’re told to do,” Nixon told the ensign. And the matter was settled—at least for that day.6
Herbert Guschewski was a radio operator on U-869 but was taken off the boat with pleurisy just before it set out on its final voyage. Guschewski, who also had served on U-602, said that misguided torpedoes—so-called circle runners—that circle around and hit the submarine from which they were launched were not common. “That happened once in 100 boats, if ever,” he noted. He, like most others, had believed the boat and its crew perished off Gibraltar in some 13,000 feet of water at the hands of the USS Fowler and another French escort. Now he acknowledges that his comrades died in as little as 230 feet of water off the coast of New Jersey.7
The location of the wrecked submarine is only about four and a half miles from the position of the Crow’s attack, a difference experts say could easily be attributed to navigational error. In addition a Coast Guard report noted that if the submarine had traveled at average speed, after its last known contact, it would have arrived on 11 February at the exact location of the Crow’s attack. The commander of the Koiner was correct, the Coast Guard analysis said, that he was bombing a wreck—a wreck, however, that was only one hour and thirty minutes old. “It’s highly likely that the attack on February 11, 1945 was responsible for the sinking of U-869,” the report stated. “The attack most probably prevented the submarine from attacking a ship in convoy CU-58. It’s time to give these aging heroes the recognition they deserve.”8
“I was in my carpenter’s shop in the stern,” Robert Quigley, the ship’s carpenter’s mate, said. Suddenly there was a tremendous explosion that “seemed to lift the entire stern of the ship out of the water.” His first thought was that the Crow had been hit by a torpedo, and he rushed to his battle station on the number one gun. Once on deck, shipmate Theodore Sieviec yelled, “We’re attacking a submarine, this is the real thing.” Quigley said that several hundred yards of diesel oil covered the ocean, and air bubbles were everywhere, indicating that the submarine had been hit.9
Eighteen-year-old Gunner’s Mate Sieviec gazed over the side and saw the bubbles and watched as the oil spread across the ocean. Sieviec, who was assigned to the number two gun, holds the distinction of firing the first hedgehog at U-869, and he was sure the bubbles and oil meant the bomb hit its mark. During the attack, six of the hedgehogs failed to launch, so he hauled each of the 75-pound bombs across the deck, lifting them, one by one, and tossing them over the side of the ship. “The bubbles were moving,” during the attack, indicating that the target was moving also, Sieviec said, convinced they were pursuing a submarine and, in fact, had sunk the boat.10
Now, after all these years, the men of the Crow have a powerful new ally in their quest to receive credit for sinking the German submarine. The leading German authority on U-boat losses during the war has revised his official assessment and concluded that U-869 was most likely sunk by the actions of the Crow and Koiner. In his reassessment Axel Niestle has amended the loss of U-869 “to show that it was sunk on 11 February 1945 by a series of Hedgehog and depth charge attacks from the destroyer escorts USS Howard D. Crow (Lt. John Nixon) and USS Koiner (Lt. Cdr. Charles Judson) in position 39 degrees 33' N/73 degrees 02W.”11
“No U-boat is known to have survived a direct hedgehog hit, thus U-869 is likely to have been seriously damaged by it,” Niestle noted, adding, “Possibly unable to control the inrush of water, the bottomed boat was later destroyed by a series of depth charge attacks, which is likely to have caused the reported damage to the boat’s hull.” He concludes that the Allied A/S Assessment Committee, which ruled U-869 had met its demise near Gibraltar, may have used “incorrect information derived from signal intelligence, which denied the presence of a German U-boat anywhere near the position of attack at the given date.”
Niestle believes that Captain Neuerburg never received the radio message from U-boat command to steer to the Gibraltar area and instead continued toward its original destination, the East Coast of the United States. The area where the wreckage of U-869 was discovered is “almost identical” with the original patrol area assigned to the submarine, according to Niestle, lending more credence to the claims of the crew members of the Crow that they attacked and sunk a U-boat in that vicinity. With twelve antisubmarine attacks recorded in this area during February, only one attack was listed within a twenty-five mile radius of the wreck site of U-869, the German researcher concludes.12
Battling the enemies of his country was just what young Robert Quigley was looking for when he signed up for the Coast Guard after Pearl Harbor. Following the Japanese attack, the seventeen year old quit school and joined several of his friends who wanted to do their duty to defend America. “That’s what our generation did,” he said. Unfortunately when he tried to enlist in the Navy he was turned down because of high blood pressure. The Air Force said no too. Then he tried his luck with the Merchant Marine, where he also was rejected for the same reason. Finally, when a dejected Quigley was leaving the Merchant Marine recruiting office in Boston, he noticed colored footprints on the sidewalk and an attached message: “Follow these footprints to action.” He did just that and arrived at the Coast Guard recruiting office, where a doctor, after taking his blood pressure, told him to go outside, walk around, and then come in and lay very still on the cot for a time. When the doctor took his blood pressure again, he passed. The proud teenager was now in the U.S. Coast Guard and was ready for some action.13
And action was what Ernest Hughes of Saratoga Springs, New York, was hoping for when he piled into his father’s 1936 Oldsmobile and headed for Glens Falls to sign up. His father, who worked at General Electric Company in Schenectady, and his mother, a worker in the Van Raalte Knitting Mills in Saratoga, had hoped their seventeen-year-old son would finish high school before joining up; however, after a few older neighborhood kids joined the Navy, young Ernest quit school and enlisted too.
After filling out the paperwork, Ernest and his father then made the trip down Route 9 to Albany, New York’s capital city, where the young sailor-to-be would join hundreds of other recruits ready to fight for their country. Hughes and the other recruits then boarded a troop train from Albany to boot camp in Sampson, New York. After basic training, Ernest was shipped off to the Great Lakes Training Center, where he received specialized instruction in engineering before being assigned to another new U-boat fighter, the USS Holton, being commissioned in New Orleans. Cold winds and snow of the Great Lakes chilled the recruits, required to attend night school, with classes starting at midnight and running until 5 AM, when they were given breakfast. They had to teach around the clock because there were so many recruits needing training. Hughes’ engineering and damage-control training would soon pay off.14
On the Holton’s second duty escorting a convoy of ships across the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, young Ernest Hughes got a taste of just how dangerous a job convoying could be, regardless of whether the ships encountered any German submarines or bombers. In the mid-October 1944 crossing, all hands rushed to their battle stations as the sailors prepared for what they assumed would be a nighttime fight with an enemy submarine about four hundred miles off the African coast.
Hughes, part of the damage-control party, finished a routine inspection to ensure all hatches were secured and came out of a forward hatch to the sight of bright orange and yellow flames soaring high into the dark night skies. He, like his twenty-seven-year-old captain, John B. Boy, thought the ships, on the starboard quarter of the convoy, likely had been torpedoed by an enemy submarine. Captain Boy ordered his ship to proceed closer to the burning vessels for a better assessment. But what they found had nothing to do with an enemy submarine. Instead the SS Howard L. Gibson, an American Liberty ship, had veered off course and collided with a British tanker, the SS George W. McNight, a regular danger when so many ships were moving so closely together across the dark waters of the North Atlantic.15
“We saw a flash of fire,” Boy remembered. “We didn’t know if it were torpedoed, so we took off for the ship.” Once they determined that the Liberty ship had plowed into the bow of the tanker, Boy ordered his DE alongside and readied the hoses to start pouring water on the roaring flames, maneuvering dangerously close to the burning vessel. Although the crew on both ships were fighting the fire, once they realized that they were doing little to kill the flames, the sailors starting to abandon ship, lowering lifeboats and rafts into the dark and turbulent waters. The Holton picked up the sailors, and after being briefed on the ship’s condition, Captain Boy decided to assemble a repair party to go on board the flaming ships. After fighting the fires all night, they finally extinguished the flames.
Once the smoke cleared, Hughes, who jumped to the burning ship to help fight the fire, remembered seeing a body lying on the charred deck. “He looked like he had been fried to death, like a fried egg,” Hughes said. The sailor’s remains literally had to be scraped from the deck. A second sailor was presumed thrown overboard when the ships collided. Both were buried at sea the following morning. Several other crewmen suffered serious burns on the face and hands and were being treated on board the destroyer escort. “This type of experience turns you into a grown-up fast,” Hughes said.16
Collision on the high seas was not uncommon during the war, when hundreds and hundreds of vessels were traversing the North Atlantic, many of those vessels manned by mostly “green” crews and commanded by skippers with minimal experience at sea. Traveling darkened to avoid detection by the enemy only heightened the danger of ship collisions. Bronx native Norman Taylor learned firsthand about what happens when ships collide on the cold and dark ocean. Taylor, whose father pulled him out of school at fifteen to work for forty-nine cents an hour in the New Haven Railroad machine shops, decided he had enough of that type of work after two years, and signed up for the Navy. Boarding what was referred to affectionately as the “Black Diamond Special” because of the soot spewed out by the coal-burning train, seventeen-year-old Taylor and his fellow recruits were spirited out of New York City to their new “home” at the Sampson training facility.17
After basic training and advanced gunnery instruction, Taylor was sent to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to await his ship, the USS Weber, returning from convoy duty in England. Taylor boarded his new ship, moored in the navy yard, and was assigned to chip paint while awaiting his first convoy duty. This would be the first time the seventeen-year-old Bronx kid had ever been on the water, and he was in for some wild ride.
Taylor said, “I had the midwatch” on one particularly black night on the North Atlantic crossing from Norfolk, Virginia, to Sicily in late October 1944. “I was up on the 20-mm gun, when all of a sudden this fishing vessel comes across our bow.” Taylor said the five-hundred-ton Portuguese fishing trawler, trying to sell fish to ships in the convoy, crossed from right to left directly in the path of his ship. “We hit him right in the middle. We climbed up over top of him,” Taylor said. The collision ripped a twenty-eight-foot gash in the DE.
Taylor was thrown from the gun tub to the deck below. There was complete mayhem as the ship’s crew rushed to reverse the engines to get the DE off the top of the sinking fishing trawler. The Portuguese fishermen were frantically trying to cut the lines holding the lifeboat so they could escape to safety before their vessel sank. Taylor said he would never forget the eerie sound of the two ships scrapping together: “It was a wailing, screeching sound, as we reversed, buoyancy returned to the fishing boat and she popped up out of the Atlantic with her lights still on.”
The Portuguese sailors piled into the lifeboat and headed for safety on board the DE. They watched as the hatches on their trawler sprung open, releasing their catch of thousands of pounds of fish. With each wave washing over the fishing vessel and the initial crash damage, the hatch covers began to break loose and the contents flowed out into the sea. “When she pulled apart, you could see under the hull, fish and fish and more fish,” Taylor recalled. The fishing vessel disappeared below the ocean’s surface. The Weber took the fishermen to Gibraltar, where the vessel also underwent repairs. Taylor said the only casualty, besides the fish, was a single caged canary on the trawler.
Robert Hoenshel, executive officer on the Coast Guard–manned destroyer escort USS Marchand, was on the bridge during one North Atlantic crossing when the convoy encountered a severe gale. With mountainous waves and torrential rain, visibility was near zero as his ship escorted a convoy to Ireland. Without warning there was a tremendous explosion as two ships, unable to see each other in the thick fog, collided.
The American tanker, the Murfreesboro, was carrying 125,000 barrels of high-octane gasoline en route to the British Isles when a Panamanian ammunition ship, the El Coston, plowed into it. The tanker exploded in flames but remained afloat. The El Coston was not so fortunate, sinking with a loss of nine crew members. Although the tanker was towed to port and salvaged, some sixteen Navy gunners and twenty-nine crew members, including the captain, died in the flames that engulfed the ship.18
But most of the action on the North Atlantic had more to do with submarines than fishing trawlers, something that William C. Stanback would soon discover after boarding the USS Gandy in January 1944 as an ensign or, as the captain called him, “the most junior of all junior officers.” Born in the small railroad town of Spencer, North Carolina, Stanback eventually went on to the University of North Carolina, where he joined the Naval Reserve and became what affectionately was called “a 90-day wonder,” skipping boot camp and going directly to midshipman school in New York City. Unlike many others who went on board destroyer escorts, Stanback loved the water and had learned to sail as a boy in Salisbury, North Carolina.
His skills would be put to the test on what he calls “his first day of the war,” when on a foggy spring morning his ship helped sink a submarine before breakfast. “I was seated at breakfast when we could feel the distant explosion and general quarters was sounded, and we went out searching,” Stanback said. The Gandy headed for an area about seventy miles south of Nantucket Island, where U-550, commanded by twenty-six-year-old Captain Klaus Hanert, had risen to periscope depth and fired a salvo of three torpedoes at the Pan Pennsylvania, a tanker that was in a convoy of twenty ships en route from the Caribbean via New York to Northern Ireland. The tanker burst into flames and eventually sunk, along with its cargo of 140,000 barrels of gasoline and seven airplanes on its deck.19
The Coast Guard–manned destroyer escorts Joyce and Peterson rushed to the area and, after picking up a sonar contact of the U-boat, fired depth charges that ruptured the air and fuel lines on the submarine, causing flooding and other damage. The submarine captain surfaced and decided to fight it out with, what he thought, was a single destroyer escort. He was wrong. Not only were the Joyce and Peterson there, but the Gandy had just arrived to recover survivors from the sunken ship and also search for the U-boat. Captain Hanert’s boat, now surfaced in broad daylight, readied its guns for firing at the American escorts.20
“Instead of surrendering, they tried to man their guns and they shot at us, and we shot at them, and the captain said ram,” said Stanback, who was on the bridge during the attack, which injured some of the Gandy crew. “Full speed ahead, ram,” the Gandy captain ordered, as the destroyer escort hit the submarine well aft, on the starboard side, causing minimal damage on the DE due to its reinforced bow plate. All three DEs then opened fire on U-550. Realizing all hope was gone, Captain Hanert ordered his crew to abandon ship and scuttled the submarine, preventing a capture and boarding at sea. Thirteen survivors, including the captain, were picked up by the Joyce.21
Milton Stein, another 90-day wonder who also had lots of experience on the water as a boy growing up along the California coast, reported for duty on his birthday in September 1943 on board the USS Brough. Stein’s decision to join the military came at the end of his third year at UCLA, when he saw a notice in the newspaper about the Army Air Corps and left college to join up. Although he did fine in his pilot training, the Air Corps was only taking a limited number of recruits and he was not one of the ones selected for further training. So he turned to the Navy, where he signed up for the V-7 program in which he could become an officer provided he had at least two years of college.22
After training on board a battleship and a short stint on board a Liberty ship, Stein was assigned to a brand–new destroyer escort, the USS Brough. Although the Brough saw little enemy action, it did experience some serious problems following the shakedown cruise. Upon arriving at the ship, Stein quickly discovered that he was the only officer with deep-sea experience as well as battleship knowledge, most of the other officers having been reassigned from desk jobs to go to sea. Following the traditional shakedown cruise in Bermuda, the ship encountered a severe storm with gale-force winds in the North Atlantic that had severely damaged the ship’s gun shield. Without changing course the captain went forward to inspect the damage and was immediately struck down by a giant wave. He hit his head on the deck and died instantly. Stein moved up to the second in command once the executive officer assumed the captain’s duties, and after the newly installed captain was transferred to another ship, Stein became the Brough’s skipper.23
But it seemed that all of the Brough’s troubles were not yet over. The day after taking command, twenty-five-year-old Captain Stein said his ship was ordered to join a hunter-killer group. “As was customary, we tested all gun circuits,” Stein said. “A new seaman aboard was talking to someone while leaning on a K-gun drum. The gunner’s mate on deck mistakenly signaled all clear to the bridge and the firing button was pushed.” The K-gun was fired, carrying the new seaman with it into the sea, exploding on contact. The seaman’s body later was recovered and he was buried at sea.24
German U-boats, enemy aircraft, raging seas, and mistakes by an unseasoned crew were not the only threats American sailors had to face on the high seas. Another unseen and deadly danger lurked just beneath the oceans waves and could quickly send a ship and its crew to the bottom of the sea. The crew of the USS Rich learned that lesson the hard way, only eight months after the ship was commissioned in Bay City, Michigan, when it was ordered to provide screening for the Utah Beach bombardment group at the invasion of Normandy in June 1944.
Built in eighty-seven days at the DeFoe Shipbuilding Company in Michigan, one of two of the seventeen DE shipyards without direct ocean access, the newly minted destroyer escort Rich, with its skeleton crew, was towed down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico for its final outfitting, with commissioning ceremonies on 1 October 1943. After its shakedown cruise it was assigned to escort and patrol duty, making three successful transatlantic crossings. On 12 May 1944, it would make its last.
During the Normandy invasion the following month, the Rich provided screening for the heavier ships that were supporting the troops landing on Utah Beach. Six destroyer escorts were dispatched for the initial invasion, including the USS Maloy, Blessman, Amsbury, Borum, and Bates, which was assigned with the Rich to provide screening for the bombardment group.25 Bates soundman Tom Eddy kept a personal diary of the invasion. After arriving in Plymouth, England, on 31 May, Eddy observed that the harbor was filled with scores of landing ships and troop ships. On Friday, 2 June, Eddy wrote, “Catholic priest came aboard today and heard confessions and gave communion to Catholic members of the crew. Feel 100 per cent better now.”
At this point Eddy learned the job expected of his ship for the upcoming invasion. “Our mission,” he wrote, “is to take over two islands before the main force can take over the beach. Task considered dangerous one since we will have to go through unswept waters. Our mission is complete we will screen USS Nevada. Next job is to be part of picket line. Danger from ‘E’ boat attacks.” E-boats, as they were referred to by the Allies, were German fast-attack craft used in coastal warfare.
The next day Eddy received a shipboard promotion to second class soundman. “Almost resembles a going away gift,” he wrote in his diary with a sense of foreboding. “Would have liked to be able to show it to Mom and Dad. May get that chance eventually.” On 5 June he wrote, “Got underway this morning for Northern France. Expect to reach it tomorrow morning. Big things are in the making. Dread the thoughts of operating the sound gear during the battle.”
Eddy and his crewmen soon would be in the thick of battle as they approached the Saint-Marcouf Islands, an area found to be uninhabited but filled with land mines, wounding many soldiers as they set foot on the beach. The injured were taken on board the Bates for treatment. “As we came in,” Lt. Cdr. Henry Wilmerding Jr., Bates’ executive officer said, “we could see anti-aircraft fire against the paratroops being landed.”
The Allied invasion fleet, which totaled thousands of ships, more than 2,400 of which were American naval vessels, pounded Utah Beach with gunfire and unloaded thousands of troops, while C-47s dropped paratroopers behind enemy lines and German fighter planes bombarded the invading naval forces with gunfire. Of course the Allies had been successful at leading Hitler to believe their invasion would take place at Pas de Calais rather than Normandy, which was chosen in part because of its proximity to the relatively undamaged ports of southern and western England, and in close range of English fighter plane bases. About 124,000 U.S. naval officers and men participated in some fashion in the invasion, with some 87,000 men on board landing craft and smaller escort vessels. Another 15,000 men were on board combat vessels and 22,000 attached to the amphibious bases in Europe.
“Missed death notice twice this morning,” Eddy wrote in his diary. “Once when shell made a very close miss and secondly when three Spitfires stopped German aircraft as it was diving to strafe us. Hope our luck will continue to hold out.”
Wounded soldiers were brought on board ship for medical treatment before being transferred to the USS Joseph T. Dickman, a former passenger ship taken over by the Navy during the war. The next day, about 4:00 AM, a bomb narrowly missed the Bates. “Slept through it all,” Eddy wrote. On the third day of the invasion, the USS Meredith stuck a mine and started to list badly, taking on water. The Bates rushed to the scene, mooring near the crippled ship’s bow as sailors leaped across to safety. Injured and dead sailors also were taken on board. The American destroyer went down so quickly that tugs alongside quickly had to cut lines in order not to get swallowed up as the ship sunk.
Although the Bates came under heavy fire during the invasion, it escaped any direct hits. Wilmerding’s biggest impression, he said, was the complete lack of confusion during the initial landings on the beach. “It ran like a piece of well-oiled machinery,” he noted. “I was impressed by the silence on all the ships. Everything ran like a railroad timetable. There were no orders given. Radios were not used. There was absolute silence with people moving around like a bunch of ghosts.”26
As the battle raged on, one American destroyer, the USS Glennon, struck a German mine about three miles northwest of the Saint-Marcouf Islands in the morning hours of 8 June. Although the ship suffered damage to the stern, its captain, Edward Michel, was confident that it would not sink. One sailor standing on the fantail of the tin can when the mine hit was thrown forty feet into the air before splashing into the ocean. He suffered two broken legs, but he, along with other sailors who were swept overboard in the explosion, was rescued. Minesweepers rushed to the scene, as German salvos were launched at the injured ship. When the Rich arrived to offer assistance, putting a whaleboat overboard to rescue sailors floundering in the water, the destroyer’s captain said no help was needed, warning the destroyer escort to “clear area cautiously; live mines.” But the warning came too late.
“The Rich circled the damaged destroyer and had just begun rescue operations when an underwater explosion shattered its stern. The smoke had hardly cleared when another blast smashed its bow and it went down,” a horrified Lieutenant Commander Wilmerding said.27 The Rich’s sonarman, Dan Schmocker, was on the flying bridge when they struck their first mine, blasting the young sailor fifty feet into the air. ”When I went up in the air, I remember seeing other guys up in the air. I was just spinning,” Schmocker recalled, adding that the blast was so powerful that it blew off his helmet, earphones, shoes and socks, and his girlfriend’s class ring. Both his legs were broken.28
The first mine exploded off the Rich’s starboard beam. Three minutes later a second mine went off directly under the ship, blowing off fifty feet of the Rich’s stern. Two minutes later a third mine exploded under the ship’s forecastle. Lt. Clarence Ross was at his station in the deckhouse midships when the first blast came. “I hurried up to the bridge and told the captain it appears that we hadn’t been damaged,” Ross said. “I returned to my station and had no sooner arrived than there was another explosion that picked up the whole ship and shook it like a dog with a rat in his mouth.”
A “rending, crushing, breaking sound” was heard, meaning only one thing: The ship had been hit and was badly damaged. Ross rushed out on deck and was shocked to see one-third of the Rich gone. He could see the half-submerged stern of his ship floating away. Although the engine room was starting to flood, Ross thought the ship could still be saved. The captain told him he should do what was necessary to keep what was left of the vessel afloat. “As I was running down the passageway there was another explosion,” which threw the young lieutenant up to the overhead, knocking him unconscious. When he awoke, he opened the door and found no one standing.
“The mast was lying over the bridge and the bow was partially submerged. The sailors on the forecastle were a tangle of bodies,” Ross said, adding that when he climbed up an outside ladder to the bridge, he found everyone dazed and either lying down or holding on to something. Captain Michel appeared to be in shock. The executive officer, Lt. Cdr. William Pearson, severely injured, told sailors to attend to others before him. Everywhere people were groaning and crying for help. The ship had begun its death throes.29
Donald Lawrence, water tender on board the Rich, was a fireman on board the USS Patterson during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, having joined the Naval Reserve in 1936. When the first explosion hit the Rich on that 8 June morning, Lawrence was in the fireroom. Plunged into darkness, he heard escaping steam and knew that somewhere in that darkness was a “thin, stabbing finger of steam so hot it can sear the flesh off the bones.” He found a flashlight and was able to locate the source of the escaping steam. Lights then came back on—but not for long. “We didn’t have much time to think about what damage might have occurred, because no sooner had the lights come on again than we were thrown to the deck by a second explosion. Again we were plunged into darkness, and again that hissing of steam in the inky black told us a steam line had ruptured somewhere,” Lawrence said.
Groping their way through the maze of machinery below, the sailors finally found a ladder, climbing to the hatch above—just as the ship was rocked by a third explosion. Once on deck they realized that the end was near. Remarkably Lawrence said there was no panic as the ship slowly sank beneath the waves. “Those who were unhurt had only one thought in mind—to care for those who needed help,” he recalled. “Every man did something. Some went about the ship administering morphine to the more painful cases. Others got the wounded onto stretchers and over the side to the waiting PT’s, and when there were not enough stretchers, volunteers descended to the officers country and brought up mattresses on which the wounded could be transported.”
Most of the wounded were transferred to the waiting torpedo boats and Coast Guard vessels swarming around the wreckage. Bodies and parts of bodies were everywhere. Water had mostly covered the Rich’s main deck as the gunnery officer went about his duty to ensure that the depth charges were set to “safe” so that, when the ship sunk, the ash cans would not automatically detonate, injuring sailors struggling in the water. “The ship began to roll, slowly and as though reluctant to give up its hold on life,” Lawrence said. “Those in the water turned on their backs as they swam, to watch the ship. The little DE went down, all the time slowly and gracefully, with her colors still flying.” Lieutenant Commander Pearson, who had told sailors to care for others first, went down with the ship. The captain was injured but survived. The ship sunk within fifteen minutes of striking the first mine. Ninety-one sailors lost their lives that day, with the remaining seventy-one suffering injuries.
Meanwhile, sailors on board the Glennon, the destroyer the Rich was assisting when it struck the mine and sunk, were busy trying to lighten the ship in order to free the ship’s fantail, which had been anchored by its starboard propeller following the blast. They pumped fuel forward and jettisoned depth charges. Sailors even rushed forward “sallying ship,” an old-time method in which they rush from side to side or stern to bow in order to use their body weight to help extricate the ship. It did not work.
Finally, on 10 June, additional crew members returned to the ship with equipment they thought would help free the crippled destroyer. But the Germans were not about to allow that to happen. A fired salvo hit the vessel amidships, cutting off all power. The Germans continued firing until finally the order was given to abandon ship. The ship rolled over and sunk, with twenty-five crewmen lost and another thirty-eight injured.30
Mines were a serious hazard for sailors at sea, and especially so during the Normandy invasion, since Hitler had ordered mining along the British coast as far back as 1939 in planning his attack on France and ordered the installation of offensive mines along the French coast two years later. Minesweepers were kept very busy detonating these underwater dangers. On 7 June alone, thirty mines were detonated near the boat lanes near Utah Beach. Some mines, whether of the magnetic or pressure variety, were deployed by surface ships, set by U-boats through their torpedo tubes, or dropped by Luftwaffe’s aircraft. Mines could be attached to anchors allowing them to float at a predetermined depth. Others could lie in wait on the seabed in shallower water.31
The primary goal of mine laying was to cut off the flow of troops and supplies from England to the Continent, noted historian Clay Blair, explaining that a secondary aim was to disrupt or shut down British merchant shipping and unleash a psychological terror among the populace. The Germans certainly can claim some success in that effort. Within a short time of the Germans mining the seacoast in the fall of 1939, three freighters were sunk and the new British heavy cruiser Belfast had suffered severe damage in the Firth of Forth on 21 November. The battleship Nelson was mined while entering Loch Ewe on 4 December.32
Minesweeping operations took on a higher priority, and scientists were tasked with finding a way to detonate the magnetic underwater bombs. As Winston Churchill noted, “The whole power and science of the Navy were now applied; and it was not long before trial and experiment began to yield practical results.” Within three months they devised a method using two wooden vessels, sailing on a parallel course about 300 feet apart, each dragging two buoyant electrical cables. One cable constituted a negative electrical pole, the other a positive one. Energized by a current from the two ships, the saltwater completed the electrical circuit, creating an intense magnetic field almost ten acres in size, safely exploding the mines in that area.33
In addition to the wooden minesweepers, the British developed a technique for “degaussing” or neutralizing the magnetic fields of the ships, reducing their vulnerability to the magnetic mines. At first they clamped a big, permanent electrical cable around the ship’s hull and energizing it with shipboard current. Later they discovered that they could achieve the same result by passing a very powerful electrically charged cable along the hull while the ship was in port, providing “degaussing” for about a three-month period.34
But the Germans were not the only ones to use mines during the war. Japan also utilized them, as James Mitchell, an eighteen-year-old New Jersey native, eventually would discover. Mitchell, who enlisted in the Navy while still attending high school in Newark, needed his mother to sign for him since he was too young to join on his own. The Navy wasted no time in calling him to duty once school ended. Mitchell attended high school graduation ceremonies on Friday night and arrived at boot camp in Sampson, New York, in the wee hours the following Tuesday morning after taking an overnight train Monday from Grand Central Station in New York City.
For Mitchell and this round of recruits, boot camp lasted much longer than normal because all of the service schools and available slots on ships were filled and there was a long waiting list to get in. Consequently the regular six-to-eight-week training lasted thirteen weeks. Eventually he was shipped off to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for training in radar before being sent to Pier 92 in New York City in November 1944 to await his ship, the USS Roche, commissioned nine months earlier.
On 26 November the Roche, with young radar striker Mitchell on board, was under way on its first North Atlantic convoy crossing, which, fortunately for its newly minted crew, was uneventful. “If you were over twenty-five years old, they would call you ‘pappy,’” Mitchell said, recalling the young age of his fellow sailors. “We were all just a bunch of kids.” Although the Roche did not sink any U-boats on its several crossings, Mitchell does remember some concern when they picked up a signal that, upon investigation, turned out to be a big wooden platform with a wire-wrapped pole in the middle, obviously placed as a decoy by the Germans. After the discovery, the ship beat a hasty retreat back to the convoy.35
In May 1945 the Roche was ordered to the Pacific—the beginning of the end for this destroyer escort, which had made several successful Atlantic crossings, safely escorting hundreds of ships with supplies and troops from America to England. After passing through the Panama Canal and picking up supplies in San Diego, it sailed to Pearl Harbor for additional training. In August, en route to Eniwetok, word was received of the Japanese surrender. Later it was assigned to antisubmarine patrol looking out for any Japanese submarines that might not have received word of the surrender.
On one assignment to escort a troop ship, the USAT Florence Nightingale, with the first occupation troops on their way to Japan, they were rendezvousing somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, escorting the ship into Tokyo Bay. Mitchell said the harbor was full of floating debris—wooden crates, logs, and a variety of garbage. He was on the flying bridge when someone on the bow spotted a floating mine in the midst of all the debris as the tide was going out. “He yelled and was pointing” at the mine as general quarters was sounded, Mitchell recalled. “They gave a left full rudder, and it skidded along the starboard side of the ship, almost got beyond the fantail—but not quite, when it detonated.”
The violent explosion lifted the tail end of the ship almost vertically and turned the ship’s fantail into a mass of twisted steel, nearly blowing it off completely. Three men were killed and dozens of others injured, including one of Mitchell’s good friends, William Weiss, a seaman from Pittsburgh who was part of a working party that had just mustered on the fantail. Thanks to the quick action of the repair parties, the ship remained afloat. But the Roche would not live to sail another day. Judged too costly to repair, it eventually was decommissioned and sunk off Yokosuka.36
Word that hostilities had ceased also came too late for one of Hitler’s U-boats, which was traveling very close to the East Coast of the United States just twenty-seven hours before Germany surrendered. In broad daylight on 5 May 1945, twenty-four-year-old Captain Helmut Fromsdorf was sailing U-853 within four miles of the Rhode Island coastline near Point Judith when, at periscope depth, he spotted the SS Black Point, an aging collier carrying 7,500 tons of soft coal through what was thought to be friendly waters. No escorts accompanied the ship on the final leg of its journey from Newport News, Virginia, to Boston.
Traveling alone into the shallow continental shelf waters of Rhode Island Sound, the freighter suddenly was blown apart by a tremendous explosion, opening up a forty-foot hole in its stern. It sank within a half hour. A torpedo had smashed through the starboard side of the vessel, just aft of the engine room. Although the Frederick C. Davis remains the last American warship sunk in the Atlantic during the conflict, the Black Point was the last U.S.-flag merchant vessel sunk in U.S. waters during World War II.37
“We were having dinner in the wardroom,” said William Tobin, gunnery officer on board the destroyer escort USS Atherton, which had just completed a successful transatlantic crossing escorting a Liberty ship from Gibraltar to New York and was south of Block Island on its way to Boston. “The radioman came down and told the captain they were picking up traffic about a torpedoing off Point Judith.” The twenty-three-year-old Yale graduate, who grew up as a grocer’s son in Waterbury, Connecticut, rushed to his battle station as Capt. Lewis Iselin ordered the destroyer escort to the scene along with another destroyer escort, the USS Amick, and the USS Moberly, a Coast Guard frigate.38
Tobin’s ship already had defused its weapons in anticipation of docking in Boston Harbor, but now it was back to battle. “We rearmed our weapons and headed down the Narragansett channel, and when we got there lots of small boats were in the harbor,” Tobin said. “We got to the scene of the torpedoing that was only three miles off shore, between Block Island and Point Judith.” The SS Black Point was no longer visible, but debris and thirty-four survivors were in the water. Rescue operations were under way by the local boats.
Realizing there was little left for them to do, the captains of the Atherton, Amick, and Moberly quickly headed south to the open ocean in search of the Nazi U-boat that had torpedoed the ship resulting in the death of twelve merchant sailors. “With startling accuracy,” as the New York Times reported, the Atherton picked up a sonar contact in about twenty minutes, believed to be the submarine silently sitting one hundred feet below on the bottom of the ocean. After passing over the suspected contact, Captain Iselin of the Atherton and Capt. Leslie B. Tollaksen of the Moberly ordered weapons deployed. “That’s a pig-boat down there, all right! Hold your hats boys! We’re going in!”
Atherton gunner’s mate Preston Davis, who had joined the Navy after graduating from high school in Arlington, Virginia, in 1943, dropped the first round of thirteen magnetic depth charges. One exploded within minutes, indicating that it hit either the submarine or some other metallic object below the water. Since the eastern seaboard was littered with scores of shipwrecks, Davis could not be certain. The Atherton pounded the water with depth charges and hedgehogs for hours, well into the wee hours of the next morning. Tobin said his ship dropped five patterns of depth charges and three or four patterns of hedgehogs, periodically losing and then picking up sonar contact with the submarine. During the course of the barrage, the Amick was ordered to leave the scene and escort a merchant ship on its way from New York City to Boston. The destroyer USS Ericsson arrived to assist in the search for the U-boat as the bombardment continued, rattling the windows of the distant Block Island post office.
As the fog lifted in the early morning hours, debris believed to have come from U-853 was strewn about the water, including oil, wood, escape lungs, a wooden flagstaff, a rubber life raft, a rubber patch with German writing indicating how to use a life raft, a crushed cigarette tin, and the submarine captain’s hat. Although the oil and wood debris could have been discharged by the U-boat to trick the Navy vessels into thinking the submarine had sunk, the Atherton sailors were convinced that their depth charges and hedgehogs had hit their mark based on the other debris. Later a diver from a Navy salvage ship descended to the ocean floor and found the submarine’s conning tower smashed and a great split in its side. Bodies of U-853 sailors also were strewn about some one hundred feet below the ocean’s surface. U-853 would be the last German submarine sunk by the United States in the Atlantic during the war.39
Although there were no survivors of U-853, sailors on board the Atherton remember taking on board a Nazi prisoner of war suffering from a burst appendix just hours before the encounter with U-853. Twenty-two-year-old Carl Barth joined the Navy right out of high school and went on board the Atherton as a signalman. The only water he saw before joining the Navy was the Ohio River. The Kentucky-born sailor took a message from a merchant ship that there was a German POW on board who was seriously ill while the destroyer escort was on its way back from delivering a convoy to Gibraltar.
“The only doctor of the whole group of ships was on our ship,” Barth said, “so we went alongside the merchant ship and put a line across, put him [the doctor] in a bag, and hooked onto a pulley up and sent him across to the other ship.” Barth said that once the young doctor, Lt. Maurice Vitsky, who was Jewish and a recent graduate of a Virginian medical school, examined the prisoner, Franz Krones, he ordered him returned to the Atherton, where he could operate on him. “We brought them both back. This was the doctor’s first major operation, and all he had were meager operating facilities and a pharmacist mate to assist,” Barth remembered.
With a surgery textbook in front of him and the assistance of twenty-year-old pharmacist mate Thomas J. Ciaccio, the young doctor opened up his German patient and removed the ruptured appendix. However, infection had spread and it was clear that the German’s life was hanging in the balance. “He put handfuls of sulfur into the wound,” Tobin, the gunner’s mate, remembered. “We didn’t have much penicillin, so he put in handfuls of the sulfur [sic] powder along with a deep drain.” Five days later, the doctor was forced to reopen the incision and install a deeper drain. “It was touch and go for awhile,” said Tobin, the youngest officer on board. But the patient survived and the last time the Atherton sailors saw him, he was being off-loaded on a stretcher in Boston, heading for a Navy hospital, where he did recover.40
Captain Iselin showed uncommon caring not only for the German prisoner but also for his entire crew. From all accounts, in fact, the captain had the utmost respect and loyalty of his crew due in no small part because of the personal interest he showed in his men and his willingness not to ask them to undertake an assignment he was not willing to do himself.
Iselin, like many DE skippers, knew how to instill loyalty in those under his command. Most of his crew were in their late teens, with one sailor being fifteen years old and another only thirteen. An incident that continues to this day to be retold by crewmen from the Atherton illustrates the skipper’s innate ability to earn the admiration of his young crew. “I was on watch that day,” said the ship’s signalman, Carl Barth, describing an incident in early 1945 that would forever leave an impression on the entire crew of his ship. The Atherton had left the shipyard where it had been serviced, and once out to sea Barth noticed that the steel antenna atop the mast, some ninety-three feet above the water, was flopping back and forth in the wind. Someone in the shipyard had forgotten to tighten the bolts.
Barth immediately reported the problem to the officer on deck, who called Captain Iselin. Watching the swaying antenna, Iselin noted that if it continued to flop back and forth, it would not be long before the bolts sheared off and the twelve-foot steel antenna came crashing down. Obviously someone had to go up and tighten the bolts, Iselin said. Barth suspected he might be selected by the captain to climb the mast and secure the bolts. “The skipper called for the ship fitter to bring up a set of crescent wrenches,” Barth said. “The captain stuck those crescent wrenches in his hip pocket and climbed the mast himself.”
“That day, every man who was not on watch was out on that deck praying that he would get down safe,” Barth said. “From that day on, that man could ask us to do anything.” Barth said that Iselin took a real chance climbing the mast himself. “Captains don’t do that,” he noted. Barth said he should have sent either him or a ship fitter up to do the job, but “that’s just the kind of man he was.”41
Gunnery officer Tobin was standing below, watching in astonishment as Iselin climbed the mast. “I get paid more than you do,” Iselin reportedly told Radioman Carl Heitzel, who also assumed he might be asked to tighten the bolts. Iselin put the wrenches in his back pocket and ascended the ninety-three-foot tower, swaying back and forth as the ship rocked on the heaving seas. “It must have been lunch time [in the shipyard] or the end of the day, and somebody just forgot to tighten the bolts,” Tobin said. “The captain was an experienced sailor and was not a neophyte, but he never bragged about it. He was a good navigator. He didn’t know much about gunnery. He didn’t know much about engineering. And he would let the officers who were in charge do what they have to do. But he was on top of everything.”42
“A fine officer is what makes a ship,” Tobin said. “A ship is a ship. It’s a lot of steel put together in a form. One DE is just like another—it’s the people aboard that make the difference. Lieutenant Iselin was a fine officer.”43