The March roll call of torpedoed ships continued. Ario, Australia, Acme, Kassandra Louloudi, E.M Clark, Papoose, W.E. Hutton, Esso Nashville, Atlantic Sun, Naeco, Atik, Equipoise.
Visions of a Knight's Cross for sinking more than 100,000 tons drove men like Johann Mohr to unprecedented risks. Off the North Carolina capes in mid-March, Mohr sank or damaged nine ships in seven days. No longer did the insolent U-boats retreat to the ocean floor at the first blush of daylight. No longer could merchant sailors breathe a sigh of relief at dawn. When the sun rose on the 8,000-ton oil tanker Dixie Arrow on March 26, the ship had just survived a dangerous night crossing the bloody waters of Raleigh Bay. Bul death was still lurking close by.
At 9 am., two torpedoes from U-71 slammed into the ship causing a monstrous conflagration of burning oil. The fire whipped up a raging wind and cast skyward a towering cloud of black smoke seen up and down the Outer Banks.
"I was on my way to school," Gibb Gray remembers, "and the whole ground shook, a violent explosion. When we looked down toward the lighthouse, it was south of the lighthouse but a little bit to the east where the smoke was coming from. That was the Dixie Arrow. And we skipped school then."
"We didn't go to school. We went right over to the beach and started running down and was watching the life boats."
On the ship, quick thinking helmsman Oscar Chappel saved many of the crew who had escaped toward the bow, by turning the crippled tanker into the wind. The reversing flames raced aft, consuming Chappell on the bridge. When seaman Frederick Spiese jumped overboard, be revealed to his best! friend Alex that he didn't know how to swim. Spiese then proceeded lo vanish into the sea 'of burning oil. When the survivors were plucked from the water by the USS Tarbell, 11 of the 33 crew members had not survived. But Freddy Spiese did. On the morning of March 26, Spiese learned how to swim.
When U- 123 surfaced alter twenty-eight days at sea within sight of the Cape Hatteras lighthouse, Hardegen and his watch officers at once sensed a change from their last visit to the Outer Banks.
"By the time Hardegen returned to U.S. shores at Cape Hatteras on March 30, 1942, says Michael Gannon "he was surprised at how many ships, most of them small, were cruising around the Outer Banks. There were British motor torpedo boats manned by Canadian crews. There were U.S. cutters. There were overhead planes with lights flying about. And he knew that at long last the American coast was alert but still had not doused its lights."
After months of meetings. memos, and 122 vessels lost or damaged, tile U.S. Navy implemented a series of defensive measures. They first moved to dim the lights.
Hatteras and Ocracoke residents well understood the effect of distant lights reflecting off the often present sea haze and dutifully hung thick drapes on their windows. Cars, trucks and buses were required to have black tape covering headlights, leaving a narrow opening to light the way. Beach driving at night was restricted. Outer Bankers took their war responsibilities to heart, even peeking around window shades when far off rumblings meant another ship had been attacked well out sea.
Without enough heavily armed destroyers and escort craft for organized convoys, the Navy devised a relay system. Ships stopped overnight at harbors and mined anchorages, including Cape Lookout, in a procedure called Bucket Brigades. Aftet sunrise, patrol craft would shepherd ships on the dash to the mined anchorage within Hatteras bight. And so on, up the coast.
"One hundred twenty miles is roughly the distance that a freighter or tanker would travel during daylight hours," says Joe Schwarzer. "It was a way of having a group of ships in relatively protected circumstances making their way up the coast and thus avoiding attacks by U-boats at night."
Merchant ships faster than the U-boats' maximum of 18 knots had heavy guns mounted fore and aft. The Navy formed a unit known as the Armed Guard and stationed these men on the larger, faster tankers. A recruiter convinced Wallace Beckham of Avon to join the Armed Guard because he would be served lavish meals by uniformed waiters. Only after he signed the papers did his friends offer their opinion.
"They said, 'Oh my God, that's a suicide outfit!'" Beckham says. "I didn't know what to think then, just being a young boy. I was assigned to a merchant tanker. And I made six trips by Cape Hatteras on this merchant tanker in WW II. It was a fast tanker. It would do 21 knots, and, of course, we always traveled by ourselves because we were fast. They didn't lie to me when they told me I would eat good, and I'd have a man wait on my table."
In addition to the Armed Guard and Bucket Brigades, the Hooligan Navy was born of the government's desperation in the spring of '42.
"The American Navy," says Schwarzer, "took a tip from the British at Dunkirk and started to requisition private pleasure craft, yachts, motor launches, whatever could be used, and these were adapted lo carrying depth charges."
In all, nearly 2,000 vessels were signed into service. Orders called for at least four, 300-pound depth charges, one 50-caliber machine gun, and a radio transmitter to be on board. There was no specified limit of good fortune that would be required.
"We were on a wooden sailboat," remembered Mack Womack. "The one I was on was 70 feel long, I remember that. And it was equipped with six or eight depth charges on the stern .... We didn't have a gunner's mate, so the first class bos'n's mate was in charge of the ship. He had to set whatever he thought the depth of it was. I mean, but we was lucky. We didn't find one. It'd probably would have done more damage to us than it would the submarine."
In every war, there are paradoxes of human folly and frailty in the face of overwhelming odds. Off the Outer Banks in 1942, none were greater than America's Hooligan Navy.
A less dangerous method of tracking the movements of U-boats was installed about a mile to the northeast of Ocracoke Village. The top secret "Loop Shack," as named by the locals, employed new underwater magnetic indicator loops, sound modulated radio sentinel buoys, listening equipment controlled from shore and radio direction finding technology. Along with other stations along the coast, including Poyners Hill near Corolla, RDF receivers could intercept and triangulate the location of the U-boats when they transmitted their daily reports back to France.
Ultimately, an organized convoy strategy was extended along the entire eastern seaboard and succeeded in disrupting tile domination of U-boats.
"The convoy system that the U.S. Navy organized in May of 1942 dramatically changed the condition of the U-boat war," Gannon says. "This was something Admiral King very belatedly and reluctantly come to an understanding of the importance of convoy. Prior to his establishment of convoy, he argued that an inadequately defended convoy is worse than no convoy at all. And this was against all of the experience that the British had acquired in two years of opposing the U-boats. Finally, Admiral King was forced to consider the convoy. And when he finally established convoys in May there was a noticeable, immediate drop in sinkings. And Admiral King started saying instead. 'Convoy is the only way to defeat the U-boat.' Too bad he came to that conclusion too late, after the loss of much steel and flesh,"
The battle of torpedo Junction, as it came to be known, was soon over, By July, four U-boats had been sunk in the Graveyard of the Atlantic. As more of his U-boats failed to report from their American patrols, Admiral Donitz moved his forces back to the North Atlantic and Mediterranean theaters. He hardly felt defeated.
Says Michael Gannon: "During the first six months of 1942, 5,000 merchant mariners and some other merchant passengers were lost at sea along the American seaboard, the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. Five thousand. Twice the number who were lost at Pearl Harbor. A total in six months of 397 vessels sunk in what has to be counted as one of the great maritime disasters of all time. And as the long-lime professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Gerhard Weinberg, has said. 'That maritime disaster has to go down as the greatest single defeat ever suffered by American Naval power.'"
Upon Adolph Hitler's suicide in late April of 1945, Grand Admiral Karl Donitz was promoted above Goring and Himmler to become the next Fuhrer. One Week later, Donitz initiated Germany's unconditional surrender. Serving on Donitz' staff at the time of the surrender was Reinhard Hardegen.
With Germany's surrender, the servicemen and the civilians on the Outer Banks could finally let down their guard.
Arnold Tolson was on Ocracoke, the skipper of the 63-067 air and sea rescue craft, when the end of die war came, and there was "one hell of a big party." Blanche Joliff and her mother were standing on their Ocracoke porch when they heard. Calvin O'Neal says a group of islanders got in a jeep and rode up and down the island "just whooping and hollering and having a great time. It was wonderful, the war was over."
The fears and worries of war were soon obscured from memory. Island life, although a different one. slowly returned to normal. The next summer. "The Lost Colony" outdoor drama reopened for the first time in five years. Beach hotels and cottages refilled. On Ocracoke, the once bustling Navy base was empty. Barracks and buildings were torn down, dismantled for materials or moved lo other spots in the village. Beyond the oil stained beaches, the ocean bottom was littered with unexploded depth charges, contact mines and the debris of more than 60 ships.
The Outer Banks was no longer apart from tile rest of the world, in a couple or' years, an asphalt highway would wind its way south, a ribbon of promise, a lifeline, a long awaited signature of change. The islands would never be thc same.
"Things never got back to normal," says Ocracoke's Calvin O'Neal. "because we lost our innocence. Before that, we just were not part of the rest of the world, isolated as we were. But it did change things. Your outlook on life was different. You had experienced something close hand that normally would change your attitude, your life, your everything."
Additional Sources:
www.njscuba.net
www.bbc.co.uk
www.milartgl.com
www.wreckhunter.net
www.british-merchant-navy.co.uk
www.cityofcocoabeach.com
www3.nf.sympatico.ca
www.u-boot-archiv.de
www.english.uiuc.edu
www.history.navy.mil