by Oliver North
On our first trip to the American coast, my boat, U-518, operated with U-123. Captain Hardegen, our leader, was a “drumbeater.” He was a tough commander but a very successful one. On April 7, Captain Hardegen made an entry in his kreigstaag logbook, “We are marching again, tight along the land—from lighthouse to lighthouse that burn brightly as if during peace time.”
I’ll give you an example of a typical attack. On April 8, 1942, both of our U-boats were patiently waiting for our next kill off the coast of Georgia. Shortly after midnight, Captain Hardegen spotted an American tanker proceeding northward. It was the SS Oklahoma, a Texaco tanker.
Sometimes we would attack unescorted merchant ships with our deck gun, but this time, because we were so close to shore, he fired a torpedo—but it missed. We had to speed on the surface to catch up with the tanker and an hour and a half later he tried again. This time he hit his target—and the ship exploded instantly. It must have been carrying gasoline.
There were so many unescorted ships that we used up all of our torpedoes in just a few weeks and we had to go back to France to get more. This was the hard part of the trip—because we never knew when we were going into one of the bases in France if we were going to be attacked by British aircraft or ships.
Later on, after the Americans started convoys off the east coast, we took U-boats into the Gulf of Mexico. And when they started escorting down there, we moved further south—off the Panama Canal—and eventually all the way to Brazil. For those kinds of trips we would have to be resupplied and re-fueled at sea. For that, we had “milch cow” resupply submarines or merchantmen converted into tenders and we would replenish our fuel, food, torpedoes, and ammunition at sea.
As the war went on, it got more dangerous to be in a U-boat. The British and Americans built more ships than we could sink. Their sonar, radar, and depth charges got better and more effective. Long-range airplanes with radar were a very big threat. Boats like U-518 actually spent most of the time on the surface, because we couldn’t stay down very long on our batteries. The biggest threat we faced was from airplanes that could spot us from the air with radar and drop bombs and depth charges on us and then call to a destroyer to finish us off.
When I completed my last deployment to the United States, we returned to our base in Norway. When we pulled into our base, we had been at sea for a total of 333 days. The first day ashore we could barely walk, because we had been confined to the U-boat for so long. The U-518 was a very good boat—because we made it back. Most of us didn’t. Serving on a submarine in the Atlantic was very dangerous. Eighty percent of us did not come back.
Petersen’s assessment of how dangerous it was to serve aboard a German U-boat is borne out by the numbers. From December 1939 to the end of the war in Europe in May 1945, Dönitz deployed 830 U-boats into the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Only 134 returned. Overall, the odds were little better. Counting those deployed in the Baltic, Indian Ocean, and the Arctic approaches to Russia, Dönitz committed 1,175 U-boats to the war but lost 781 or them. Of 40,900 German U-boat crewmen, 25,870 were killed and another 4,879 were captured when their U-boats were sunk or—in three cases—captured.
The convoy system, initiated by the British during World War I and implemented again by the Royal Navy in World War II, eventually doomed Hitler’s effort to strangle the British Isles. Though Dönitz attempted to adapt his tactics and deployment patterns to counter the Allied convoy measures, he was never able to make up for losses in U-boats and trained crews as the U.S. and British improved their anti-submarine warfare capabilities. By May 1943, long-range variants of the American B-24 Liberator, Navy PBY-Catalina, and the British Wellington bombers made all but small areas of the mid-Atlantic deadly for U-boats and their crews.
German scientists invented dramatically improved magnetic and then acoustic-homing torpedoes, radar detection equipment, the schnorkel—air-intake devices—and even a hydrogen-peroxide propulsion system. But by mid-1943 Dönitz was losing more U-boats than German shipyards could replace, and Allied shipbuilders were launching more than six new ships for every one sunk.
Navy PBY-Catalina—instrumental in hunting down U-boats.
Though warships were vital, so were transport vessels. The first Liberty ship, the USS Patrick Henry, was launched on 27 September 1941. By 1943, eighteen U.S. shipyards on the East, West, and Gulf coasts were launching “Liberty ships” as fast as they could be welded together. Valued at $1.5 million each, Liberty-class ships were 440 feet long and could carry nearly 10,000 tons of cargo at eleven knots. Over the course of the war, 2,708 Liberty ships were built—the fastest going from keel to completion in just four days.
To man these thousands of new vessels—and the new tankers and coastal freighters being constructed—the U.S. Merchant Marine put out an urgent call for able-bodied seamen. Nearly a quarter-million American men answered the call—many of them too old to be drafted, others who had been spurned by military recruiters for poor eyesight, others who were just too young. And unlike the military, the U.S. Merchant Marine service wasn’t segregated.
Those who volunteered to serve in the Merchant Marines were putting their lives on the line just as much as any soldier, sailor, airman, Guardsman or Marine. Going to sea in a Liberty ship exposed a seaman to risk of being bombed by the Luftwaffe, sunk by a German surface combatant like the Bismarck , torpedoed by a U-boat, or attacked by one of Germany’s ten surface raiders—deceptively constructed to look like a merchant ship, but every bit as lethal as any warship.
Throughout the war, the vessels most at risk of being attacked by a U-boat or a merchant raider were those that traveled alone. Though convoy operations were well underway by 1942, delays in loading, port and pier availability, and the need to deliver priority cargoes urgently were all problems that caused thousands of ships to make their transits without escorts. On 10 September 1942, George Duffy, of Newburyport, Massachusetts, the Third Mate aboard the Liberty Ship MV American Leader, found out just how dangerous steaming alone could become.
GEORGE DUFFY
MV AMERICAN LEADER
South Atlantic Ocean
10 September 1942
I had wanted to go to the Naval Academy but failed the physical exam so I went into the Merchant Marine instead. For the first six months in the classroom—learning mathematics, navigation, rules of the road, Morse radio code, seamanship—you name it. Once we got our mates licenses we were automatically ensigns in the naval reserve.
In early 1942 I was assigned as third mate on the American Leader, a C-1 class Liberty ship—the smallest of the four classes. It was a little over 400 feet long, had a 27-foot draft, and could carry about 10,000 tons of cargo.
We left New York Harbor on 26 April 1942, with a full cargo of war supplies for the Russians and the British forces in the Middle East. We were carrying barbed wire, army boots, steel ingots, steel plates—and nine twin-engine bombers lashed on deck with all of their spare parts in the hold.
On the routing we were assigned there were no convoys and no escorts available. All we had for protection was our high speed—we could make eleven knots—and firepower from our ten-man navy gun crew—using a single 4-inch gun and two .50-caliber machine gun mounts in case of air attack.
We headed first to Trinidad, where we filled up with fuel—enough to go 7,500 miles. We spent a few days there until we got clearance for the first leg of our run—all the way to Cape Town, South Africa. There, we took on more fuel and then got our routing—and once again, no escorts were available—up through the Indian Ocean and into the Persian Gulf.
At Bandar Abbas, Iran, we offloaded all the equipment for the Russians and took on ten tons of opium—for making morphine back in the States. We then went up the Shatt al Arab to the British offload facility in Iraq where we discharged all their military equipment. We took on some Arab tobacco consigned to Philip Morris and headed for India, where we offloaded the steel. After that we made port in Colombo, Ceylon—now called Sri Lanka—and took on
7,000 tons of rubber and drums of latex and coconut oil.
Following the British routing instructions we made it back into Cape Town on the night of the third of September and the captain went to the admiralty office to get our routing instructions for New York while we took on fuel and made a few minor repairs. The British said that there were U-boat wolf packs operating off the U.S. coast so they routed us due west to Cape Horn, up the west coast of South America to the Panama Canal where we were to pick up an escort to New York.
We had heard about two German raiders operating in the South Atlantic—but the British Admiral in Cape Town said they had been sunk or driven off. In these waters we were more concerned about raiders than U-boats. They were faster and better armed than U-boats and the raiders were pirates—flying anybody’s flag they felt like. A raider looks like an ordinary merchant ship until it goes into action.
We got under way for Cape Horn on the night of 7 September. Three nights out of Cape Town we were making nine knots on a heading of 270 degrees, and all of a sudden, shortly after dark, up out of nowhere came another vessel. Without warning they opened fire with deck guns and we were on fire.
I ran out on deck and there were flames everywhere and this strange ship was still firing at us. Some of their 4-inch and 5.9-inch shells had exploded in the engine room and ruptured our fuel tanks and we lost all power. The lifeboats had been destroyed by the gunfire so when the order came to abandon ship, we had to throw the life rafts into the water and jump over the side into the oil that was burning on the sea.
While we were getting the rafts in the water, another shell burst burned me and caught my life jacket caught on fire. So when I went into the water, I was glad to find a life raft. Able seaman Ken Pride helped pull me into the raft and pretty soon there were twenty-three of us in this raft, sitting there in 56-degree water watching our ship burn.
She didn’t sink right away because of all the rubber in the holds—and so this ship that looks like a merchantman—but isn’t—fires two torpedoes into the American Leader to send her down and stop the fire, which could have attracted attention. Shortly after she sank, this big ship pulls up alongside and starts to pick up survivors. We were worried that it might be a Japanese ship—but then we heard them speaking German.
Out of a crew of fifty-eight on the American Leader, they rescued forty-seven of us—and that’s how we learned that we had been sunk by the German raider Michele. We were put in the hold with almost 500 other POWs—British, Indian, South African, Canadian, and New Zealanders—whose ships had also been sunk or captured by the Michele. I think we were their eleventh victim.
I have to say that they fed us well and gave us very good medical attention—otherwise a lot of us would not have survived. On 29 November, the Michele sank another American transport, the MV Sawokla—but there were only nineteen survivors from that one.
We hoped that they would take us to some neutral country to be interned—but instead they turned us over to the Japanese. That’s when things really got rough.
It was quite an experience. Having started the war as a Merchant Marine officer on a Liberty ship, I got sunk by a German auxiliary raider and ended the war as a Japanese POW—doing slave labor on a railroad in Indonesia. Nobody can tell me that life in the Merchant Marine isn’t interesting.
The ten German auxiliary raiders sank or captured 138 Allied merchant ships, totaling a million gross registered tons. The Michele was struck by a torpedo from the American submarine USS Tarpon on 17 October 1943, and the surreptitiously armed merchant ship that had sent nineteen Allied vessels to the bottom was sunk herself.
German raiders like Michele preferred unescorted merchantmen as targets. No Allied vessel in a convoy was ever attacked, sunk, or captured by a lone auxiliary raider. Forays by major German capital ships like Bismarck or Tirpitz were certainly threats to convoys—but so rare that losses in such action are remarkable only because there were so few.
Attacks on merchant shipping by Luftwaffe aircraft were likewise most effective against unescorted vessels. Though a large number of slow-moving merchantmen all within a confined sea-space might seem an attractive target, the escorting warships with effective radar and anti-aircraft guns increased the risk to the attacking aircraft.
It was the same for the U-boats. Though “wolf pack” attacks on convoys sound ominous, the numbers show otherwise. The majority of the Allied merchant vessels sunk were not in protected convoys, but were mostly single ships crossing alone.
The challenge then for the British—and the Americans after Pearl Harbor—was to find enough well-armed escorts to economically organize and protect the convoys plying the routes across the Atlantic. Battleships, cruisers, and destroyers had far too many other tasks and were too few in number to be employed exclusively in convoy duty.
The best ships for the job were smaller, lightly armored vessels, equipped with sonar, radar, and an effective suite of anti-aircraft and anti-submarine weapons. Based on a British design, the Americans called them “destroyer escorts”—and they became the guardians of the Atlantic convoys, crucial to eliminating the U-boat threat.
The dead and wounded are transferred from the USS Menges after the ship was struck by a German torpedo.
The USS Menges, DE-320, was one of more than 500 destroyer escorts built in U.S. shipyards between 1943 and the end of the war. Captained and crewed by the U.S. Coast Guard, the Menges—with Lt. (JG) Ed Nash aboard as gunnery officer—was assigned to convoy escort duty shortly after she was commissioned in the autumn of ’43. The experiences Nash and his shipmates had aboard the Menges were typical of the perils faced by merchantmen and the crews of the little ships that protected them.
Nash was a green young officer just out of OCS and advanced training at the Navy School in Miami. He joined a crew of the newly commissioned USS Menges in late fall of 1943, and took the ship for its shakedown cruise out of Bermuda during the next two months. By early April 1944 he was still getting used to the rigorous life of a seaman on the Menges, doing convoy escort duty from the Norfolk to Gibraltar and back.
LIEUTENANT (JG) EDGAR “ED” NASH, USCG
USS Menges, DE-320
Atlantic-Mediterranean Convoy Escort Duty
3 May 1944
The Menges was just 306 feet long, had a beam of thirty-six feet, seven inches, and could make about 22 knots. We had a crew of fifteen officers and 200 enlisted—and were armed with three 3-inch guns, and three 40 mm anti-aircraft mounts—one “quad” and two twin mounts. We also had sonar, radar, depth charges, and assorted smaller caliber weapons, and of course, three-eighths-inch-thick welded steel to protect us from whatever the enemy or the sea threw at us.
Right after our shake-down cruise and some specialized ASW—anti-submarine warfare training—we were assigned to escort duty for convoys, crisscrossing the Atlantic. Depending on the size of the convoy, there would be anywhere from six to fifteen escorts—and the whole convoy could only go as fast as the slowest merchantman. Depending on where we were in the screen we would be zig-zagging constantly—usually at about twelve to fifteen knots.
If any of the ships in the screen detected a U-boat or picked up aircraft on radar, we would go to General Quarters instantly—and stay that way—with all the watertight doors dogged shut and the men in their gun mounts for six to eight hours at a time.
As soon as we got far enough east, so that we might be in range of German aircraft, we usually went to GQ as a matter of routine just before dusk. The U.S. and British air forces owned the sky during the day, but after dark, the Luftwaffe would come out hunting for unescorted merchant ships—and of course, convoys. That problem didn’t get better until after France was liberated in the fall of ’44.
On 30 March 1944 we were escorting a big convoy from Norfolk into the Mediterranean. At Gibraltar, ComNavNAW—Commander, Naval Forces in North African Waters—had warned us that German torpedo bombers were making forays over the shipping routes looking for targets. Sure enough, that
night, just at dusk, thirty planes hit our convoy.
Two or three planes came over at very high altitude dropping flares to illuminate the convoy. This was a huge concentration of ships—carrying reinforcements and supplies for the battles in Italy—and the build-up for the invasion of southern France later in the summer.
As the flares were dropping, about ten Ju-88s came in low from dead in front of us, trying to get inside the escort screen and at the “softer” transports and merchant ships to drop their torpedoes and bombs. Only a few from the first wave made it through—but they followed up with a second and then a third wave.
We were shooting at anything we could see—and we nailed one with our 40 mm twin-mount—square in the nose of the bomber—and it crashed into the water. One of our 20 mm mounts also damaged another—so we weren’t doing too badly. I wanted to use the 3-inch battery but the German planes were so low the skipper told us not to fire because he was worried that our shots might hit one of our ships.
My combat station was on the wing of the bridge, giving me an extraordinary view of the battle. It was during the third wave of the attack that one of the German planes got through and suddenly the MV Paul Hamilton—about 800 yards off our beam, exploded in one huge fireball. She was full of ammunition—and had aboard almost 500 soldiers from an army ordnance unit—plus the ship’s crew and the navy armed guard detachment—over 580 men.
One of the escort ships behind us was sent to pick up survivors. They didn’t find a soul. Three other ships suffered damage from torpedoes and bombs but none of the others went down.
We had another serious air raid on the convoy but this time we had some warning. A radar picket well out in front of the convoy picked up the inbound raid and alerted us. But even then, some of the planes got through and a Navy destroyer, steaming just ahead of us and off to port, took a torpedo amidships and went down in a hurry. We picked up 107 of her men and another Coast Guard DE behind us picked up more. We also picked up two German airmen who had survived being shot down.
