New York at War

by Steven H. Jaffe

  What shocked Hardegen was the utter negligence of New Yorkers and other Americans in the face of a war that was now over a month old. “I assumed that I would find a coast that was blacked out . . . ,” he later recalled. “I found a coast that was brightly lit. . . . Ships were sailing with navigation lights.” For Hardegen and other U-boat commanders who followed, “the glow of New York on the clouds” became emblematic of a stubborn American denial of the reality of war.51

  In New York and Washington, people sought to piece together what was happening in the wake of the sinkings. With the Coimbra’s oil and life preservers washing up on Long Island beaches, and survivors reaching shore, a news blackout was impossible. While navy spokesmen reassured the public that they had the situation in hand, the truth was that Admiral Ernest King, commander in chief of the US fleet, had not taken seriously the risk of U-boat attack—this despite urgent warnings from British admiralty cryptologists who were deciphering wireless transmissions between Doenitz’s headquarters and his vessels at sea.52

  King’s preoccupation with the Pacific war, his conviction that a coastal raid was unlikely, and a shortage of antisubmarine vessels had all impeded precautionary measures. While the army air corps had been urging people on the East Coast to look skyward, the navy had grown accustomed to viewing the Battle of the Atlantic as a conflict being fought far from American shores. For over six months prior to Pearl Harbor, the navy (with FDR’s blessing) had been fighting an undeclared war in the North Atlantic against U-boats, bringing the two nations to the brink of open war. German submarines had torpedoed four American merchant ships (including the Robin Moor and the Sagadahoc , outbound from New York), two American destroyers, and a navy tanker, with a total loss of 164 lives. But the confrontations had taken place hundreds of miles from America, and the continuing political strength of isolationists deterred Roosevelt from declaring war. The navy, in short, was the one service that was already in active combat—and the one service that seriously neglected to prepare for an attack.53

  The navy now took action, albeit slowly, following the Coimbra sinking, coordinating its efforts with the coast guard, the army, and the army air force. As during the last war, an antisubmarine net and boom had already been stretched across the Narrows, with a nine-hundred-foot gate to admit friendly vessels. Acoustic hydrophones placed in local shipping channels would detect approaching U-boats; strategically placed mines would sink them. By the spring of 1942, the navy required coastal cargo vessels to sail in convoys of forty or fifty ships, usually under the protection of cutters, patrol boats, and antisubmarine trawlers lent by the British. Planes from the army’s First Air Support Command at Mitchel Field, Long Island, and seaplanes from the Naval Air Station at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn covered the passage of convoys along the coast.54

  The military command also accepted the services of volunteer pilots in the Civil Air Patrol, and of boatmen in a newly formed Coastal Picket Patrol. The latter, soon nicknamed the “Hooligan Navy,” consisted of hundreds of motorized yachts and other small craft owned by fishermen and amateur sailors eager to serve. Hooligans like Jakob Isbrandtsen, a young steamship company clerk, plied the waters off New York armed with Springfield rifles and Lewis machine guns. Navy men might grin or grimace, but like their predecessors in the Sea Fencibles in 1812, the boatmen played an effective role, exasperating the U-boat captains. The risk of being spotted by a yacht that could radio for a navy depth-charge attack or air force bombing run kept U-boats submerged and away from the convoys. By the spring, Doenitz, convinced that the East Coast was now less vulnerable than the Gulf Coast and Caribbean, shifted most of his U-boats to more southerly climes.55

  The submarines had not left the New York region entirely, however, and for the remainder of the war, U-boats in local waters would remain on the minds of New Yorkers. “In New York, the front was at the sea buoy,” one merchant seaman later recalled. Even as the navy had pondered what to do in the wake of the attack on the Coimbra, U-130 sank a Norwegian tanker off the New Jersey coast in late January 1942, and U-404 sent an American freighter to the bottom in March, silhouetted against the glimmering lights of Atlantic City. When New Yorkers started to forget about U-boats, the Germans reminded them. On the night of November 10, 1942, U-608 laid mines in the waters just off the Ambrose Channel. One was discovered three days later, and for the only time during the war, the port of New York was closed for forty-eight hours, as minesweeping vessels collected and detonated five German mines. On May 5, 1945, with Hitler already dead and the Red Army in control of Berlin, U-853 sank a coal boat at the eastern end of Long Island Sound, only to be depth-charged and sunk in turn by a navy and coast guard patrol.56

  “The losses by submarines off our Atlantic seaboard and in the Caribbean now threaten our entire war effort,” General George Marshall had warned in June 1942—a view shared by Churchill and others. True, by the following month, eight enemy subs had been sunk off American and Canadian shores. But in the six months following the initiation of Paukenschlag, U-boats destroyed nearly 400 Allied vessels in North American and Caribbean waters (171 of them off the East Coast), with a loss of some 2,400 lives.57

  When measured against the war-winning goal Doenitz had propounded in December 1941, however, the total results of Paukenschlag were disappointing. Hitler never saw fit to concentrate U-boats off American shores, choosing to place his naval and other strategic priorities elsewhere. Doenitz was forced to refocus his efforts to the North Atlantic after mid-1942. Germans were left to ponder the fleeting vision of an alluring and seemingly vulnerable America offered by Reinhard Hardegen in a book for wartime readers, in which he echoed the comments made by U-boat officer Frederick Koerner twenty-four years earlier. “I cannot describe the feeling with words, but it was unbelievably beautiful and great,” the Kapitanleutnant wrote of gazing at New York’s glow on the night clouds overhead. “I would have given away a kingdom for this moment if I had had one. We were the first to be here, and for the first time in this war a German soldier looked out upon the coast of the U.S.A.” But it would not be the last time.58

  In truth, New York’s unfolding war was very much a maritime affair, and Hitler missed an opportunity to inflict severe damage, if not to win the war, when he turned his attention from the city and its surrounding waters. Already the world’s busiest port, New York now became the great American terminus for the “bridge of ships” linking Franklin Roosevelt’s “arsenal of democracy” to Britain, Russia, and the fronts that would be opened in North Africa and Europe. A continuous armada of vessels laden with weapons, ammunition, and supplies steamed out of the Narrows and Long Island Sound to destinations as far flung as the Texas oil ports, Liverpool, Falmouth, and Glasgow in the British Isles, Casablanca in Morocco after the American landings there, and Murmansk and Archangel above the Arctic Circle in Russia.59

  The transatlantic convoys—clusters of thirty to eighty cargo ships and oil tankers, guarded by escorts of several navy destroyers, corvettes, and cruisers—became the lifeline of the European war, and New York soon became their most important nexus. Learning from British example, the navy knew that merchant ships traveling en masse and guarded by armed escorts had a better chance of repelling and surviving U-boat attacks. Philadelphia, Boston, and other ports also dispatched convoys, and initially Halifax, Nova Scotia, was the main assembly point for the Atlantic runs. But after September 1942, when New York replaced Halifax as the key western terminus, the harbor became the greatest marshalling yard for vessels arriving from the Gulf oil ports, the West Indies, Africa, and even India via the Panama Canal, all in preparation for the Atlantic trek. By the end of the war, a total of 1,462 convoys, consisting of 21,459 ships carrying over sixty-three million tons of supplies, had sailed from New York to sustain the Allied war effort.60

  An air of secrecy, meant to defeat spies, surrounded the departure of these flotillas from New York. Vessels shuttled back and forth across the harbor, loading petroleum at the New Jersey refiner
ies behind Staten Island; or picking up locomotives, electric generators, and refrigerated blood plasma at the world’s largest warehouse, the Brooklyn Army Terminal in Sunset Park; or powdered eggs, flour, and crated airplanes at Hoboken’s piers; or tanks and trucks at Bayonne’s Port Johnson Terminal. Hilda O’Brien, a Columbia University graduate student sharing an apartment on Riverside Drive with several other single women, watched the ships come and go: “We were always curious that at night the Hudson River would be filled with gray boats of all sizes and shapes and the next morning they’d all be gone.”61

  In the waters just past the Ambrose Channel, freighters and tankers arrayed themselves in long columns or in a vast square, several miles across, with US and British naval vessels on the periphery and a trawler trailing behind to pick up survivors should disaster befall the ships. After being joined by additional vessels in Nova Scotia or Newfoundland, the convoys would press as fast as they could across the Atlantic to Iceland, England, or Scotland, in whose waters the Royal Navy took over escort duty from the Americans. Some continued on the Murmansk run to the Soviet Union’s arctic ports.

  The cargo ships and tankers were manned by merchant seamen: professional sailors whose vital work earned them draft deferments. At the National Maritime Union hiring hall on West Seventeenth Street in Manhattan’s Chelsea, seamen from New York and all over the country lined up to take berths on board the convoy vessels. High wartime pay was an incentive, but most crewmen also were deeply committed to the war’s cause. Moray Epstein, a young seaman from New Jersey embarking on the freighter John Walker for Russia in August 1942, wrote expectantly to his future bride, Sylvia, about seeing the land of his parents’ birth and about his duty. “I know that someone has to sail these ships, and that the work we are doing is work that must be done. But it could be so easy,” he added, “so tempting to give this up just to be able to walk with you in East River Park.”62

  Seamen were aware of the risks they faced. Many convoys arrived at their destination with six or a dozen ships missing. In March 1943, thirty-eight U-boats converged on two convoys outbound from New York in the mid-Atlantic. Over four days, in a battle zone stretching across six hundred miles of stormy seas, the submarines sank twenty-two out of a total of eighty-nine cargo vessels, despite the defense put up by British escorts; 379 crewmen lost their lives. Most daunting of all was the “Bomb Alley Run” to Murmansk or Archangel, during which convoys braved attacks by subs and bombers from Nazi-occupied Norway.63

  Surviving a convoy run could be both harrowing and exhilarating. On board the freighter Richard Henry Lee off Norway in May 1942, seaman Sam Hakam from Brooklyn watched as German bombers sank a sister ship: “You could see a lot of blackened heads—the heads of men still alive—on the water. The heads looked like floating bowling balls. Many of those boys weren’t rescued.” Survival occasioned pride as well as relief. “Ambrose Light. Excitement and tension rose,” Moray Epstein jotted down as the John Walker returned intact from Archangel in February 1943. “We passed Coney Island. Emotion washed over me when I saw the Statue of Liberty, the symbol that gives meaning to our voyage. I wanted to cry. . . . Did my mother have the same feelings when she came to America?” Epstein mused. “I shall never forget this homecoming.”64

  The nautical chain between North America and Europe was vitally important to the Allied war effort, and the men and communities involved paid a heavy price to sustain it. About one in every twenty-six US merchant seamen lost his life, a higher mortality rate than that of any other American armed service during the war. The convoys manned by these men and boys (many were still teenagers) won the war on the western front by bringing America’s industrial might to bear against Hitler. The four hundred Sherman tanks and engines carried by two New York convoys to Suez in July and August 1942, for example, arguably enabled Montgomery’s British Eighth Army to beat Rommel’s Afrika Korps at El Alamein. New York convoys also provisioned Allied troops in Britain in preparation for D-Day and continued supplying them as they fought their way across Europe. With up to 540 ships docked or anchored at any one time, and a vessel arriving or departing every fifteen minutes, the port of New York remained a logical target for U-boats and Luftwaffe planning, and for New Yorkers’ apprehensions of sabotage and attack.65

  While supplies and armaments flowed day and night, so did GIs. “Liner Row”—the series of piers built during the 1930s between West Forty-Sixth and West Fifty-Fourth Streets to berth luxury ocean liners—became the nation’s prime departure point for GIs embarking on troop transports to Britain and elsewhere. The ships that carried them were liners converted into troop carriers: floating cities like the Queen Mary, the Queen Elizabeth, the Aquitania, and the Nieuw Amsterdam, each of which could hold between eight thousand and sixteen thousand soldiers and their gear—more human beings than had ever before sailed on a single vessel. Regiments readied at Camp Shanks in Rockland County, Camp Kilmer in New Jersey, and Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn often arrived directly at the piers by ferry and poured up the gangplanks onto the liners. “There was humanity from end to end,” one awed soldier noted. The fastest ships afloat, these transports counted on their speed (about twenty-eight knots) to outrun U-boats and sailed alone without escort protection. None sank during the war, and by V-E Day they had conveyed over three million American troops from the Hudson River to Europe. No other port came close in manning the Allied North African, Italian, and western fronts. Men slept in steel and canvas bunks often stacked eight high. Seasickness, claustrophobia, and fear of sinking made the voyage miserable for many young soldiers. During a stiff mid-Atlantic storm, a British sailor on the Queen Mary listened as GIs screamed “in absolute fear and terror.” But the passage was over in five or six days.66

  With a city full of German Americans and Italian Americans just beyond the docks, fears of maritime sabotage and espionage were inevitable. “New York is full of loose talk,” a Canadian seaman complained to reporters after the Coimbra sinking. When the majestic French liner Normandie burst into flame and capsized at the foot of West Forty-Eighth Street in February 1942, saboteurs were suspected, although the true cause proved to be a fire ignited by workmen busy converting her into a troop carrier. One rumor had it that spies were attaching messages for U-boat captains to the undersides of lobster buoys floating off Long Island. Others worried that the Italian fishermen who brought their boats into the Fulton Fish Market might be loyal to Mussolini, and hence aiding the German raiders. The Office of Naval Intelligence actually enlisted Joseph “Socks” Lanza, the market’s Mafia capo, to help scrutinize the activities of the fishing crews for evidence of disloyalty. But the bleak reality was that by following the shipping lanes and receiving deciphered Allied wireless messages from Doenitz’s headquarters, U-boats cruising offshore didn’t need spies to tell them where to find their prey.67

  The city’s material bounty, flowing in ever-greater quantities eastward across the Atlantic, signified just how vital New York was becoming to the Allied war effort. Even before Pearl Harbor, federal spending on military preparation was funneling billions of dollars in war contracts to shipyards, automotive plants, and aircraft factories across the country, putting millions of Americans to work. Alarmed city officials saw that the big contracts were bypassing New York’s thirty-five thousand workshops with their specialized parts manufacturing and going instead to the vast assembly-line factories converting to war production—places like the Ford plant at Willow Run, Michigan, and the aircraft assembly lines of Curtiss-Wright in Buffalo and Grumman on Long Island. By mid-1941, the New York State Division of Commerce was lobbying in Wash-ington to ensure that the state and the city got their share of war largesse. By August, the division was also sponsoring “production clinics” in city hotels where major contractors like Connecticut’s Pratt & Whitney, Pennsylvania’s Baldwin Locomotive, and Long Island’s Republic Aviation could link up with those the New York Times described as “the little fellows”—subcontracting firms like the Duro Brass Works on Lafaye
tte Street, which employed fifteen workers, or the S. & W. Sewing Machine Attachment Company on Sixth Avenue, whose twenty employees could shift into making wrenches and other tools for engine production. President Roosevelt, too, belatedly did his part, ensuring in 1942 that his home state’s dominant city—a crucial Democratic electoral bastion—would get a healthy share of war contracts.68

  The capsized liner Normandie in its berth, West Forty-Eighth Street, February 1942. PHOTO BY HULTON ARCHIVE / GETTY IMAGES.

  Larger plants, like Brooklyn’s Murray Manufacturing, Sperry Gyroscope, and Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, were soon benefiting along with “the little fellows” from wartime demand, hiring thousands, including many women, to make trench mortar shells, instruments for air force bombers, and penicillin. At the block-long Bell Telephone Laboratories in the West Village, the nation’s largest industrial research complex, scientists designed over one hundred different types of radar equipment for navy and air force use, developed a sonar device for detecting U-boats, and created torpedoes that could seek out Doenitz’s vessels by homing in acoustically on their motors. Out of the factories and warehouses the armaments, drugs, and appliances flowed onto the ships bound for Liverpool, Casablanca, Archangel, and Normandy; into the pockets of their makers flowed government pay. By 1943, the city had attained something approximating full employment, making the last three years of the war a boom time for New Yorkers. In 1945, 1.7 million city residents would be working in factories and war plants.69

  For New Yorkers, it was the Brooklyn Navy Yard—a city unto itself—that most dramatically exemplified the city’s role in fighting the war. By 1944, over seventy thousand men and women labored around the clock in ten-hour shifts in a two-hundred-acre complex containing three hundred buildings, thirty miles of railroad track, several dry docks, massive cranes for hoisting gun turrets, and twin thousand-foot-long trenches that served as launching ways for warships. It had become the nation’s—and probably the world’s—biggest and busiest shipyard. During the war the yard’s workers built five aircraft carriers and three battleships, including the Missouri, upon whose deck the Japanese would surrender in September 1945.