Bringing World War II to America’s Shores
A German submarine torpedoed the S.S. Pennsylvania Sun on July 15, 1942, destroying 107,500 barrels of U.S. Navy fuel oil. (Public domain via Wikimedia Commons)
Between 1942 and 1943, German submarines sank 56 Allied ships in the region and damaged another 14, losing just one of their own in the process
Early on June 29, 1942, the 8,032-ton British steam tanker HMS Empire Mica cruised east through calm waters toward Key West, Florida, where it planned to join a convoy bound for the United Kingdom. The ship carried 47 men and 11,200 tons of kerosene (then known as vaporizing oil). Little did its crew know that just half a mile away, the nearly 252-foot-long German submarine U-67 was preparing to strike.
Around 1 a.m., U-67 fired two torpedoes toward the tanker in quick succession. The Empire Mica caught on fire, sending giant plumes of black smoke into the air and a massive puddle of flaming oil into the surrounding water. The tanker listed on the surface for a while, enabling its crew to evacuate into lifeboats. “The next thing I remember, we were rowing away as fast as we could,” engineer Alex Green recalled to the Tallahassee Democrat in 1986. “We couldn’t see the ship for the smoke and flames.”
Only one lifeboat made it to safety, with the survivors eventually getting picked up by two civilian vessels and brought ashore for emergency treatment around 25 miles northeast, in Apalachicola. Seven of the most severely injured were moved to Panama City, Florida, for further treatment. Of the 47-person crew, only 14 survivors remained.
German crew watch the sinking of the HMS Empire Mica from the bridge of their U-boat, U-67, on June 29, 1942. Collection of Martin K.A. Morgan
As the Empire Mica burned, U-67 surfaced, and some of its crew spilled onto the bridge to watch the Allied ship slowly break in two and sink beneath the waves. (The wreck settled at 110 feet below the surface and is now a popular diving spot.) A German sailor immortalized the moment in a photograph, capturing a rare reminder of one of World War II’s least-known histories: when Nazi U-boats stalked the waters just off the United States’ Southern coast.
The Empire Mica was neither the first nor the last casualty of U-boat attacks in the Gulf of Mexico (now the Gulf of America) during the summer of 1942. The body of water, which stretches from the shores of Florida to Texas to the Yucatán Peninsula, was a target of Operation Drumbeat, a broad initiative undertaken by the Germans during the Battle of the Atlantic, a six-year fight for control of the eponymous ocean. Beginning in January 1942, just a few weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Nazis set out to sink any Allied commercial shipping vessels in American coastal waters. By May, the campaign had expanded into the Gulf, where 24 German U-boats hunted, with great success, into 1943.
Over the course of that brief, concentrated period, U-boats sank 56 Allied ships and damaged another 14, losing just one of their own submarines in the process. (The Allies also sank two U-boats in the Straits of Florida, which connect the Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean.) In these first months of the Gulf campaign, the Germans “thoroughly dominated [the U.S., which was] completely unprepared,” says military historian and author Martin K.A. Morgan. “I struggle to sometimes make people fully appreciate the extent to which the Germans brought the [Americans] to their knees quickly.”
The first U-boat to enter the Gulf was U-507, which cruised into the area on April 30, 1942. By May 12, it had sunk five Allied tankers and cargo ships. One of these vessels, the tanker Munger T. Ball, was torpedoed twice on May 5 some 80 miles northwest of Key West. It carried 65,000 gallons of gasoline, resulting in “a fireball” when the ship was struck, says Corey Malcom, lead historian at the Florida Keys History Center. “They talk about it being a mushroom cloud of flame going up into the sky.” The tanker sank within 15 minutes of the second torpedo hit.
In May 1942, German U-boats sank nearly one Allied vessel in the Gulf each day. This concentrated blitz made the Gulf the most dangerous body of water in the world at the time. The trawlers, tankers and freighters targeted by the Nazis carried resources—including bauxite, refined petroleum products and gasoline—crucial to the ongoing war effort in Europe.
The attacks were unrelenting and compounded by two factors: First, the U.S. was drastically unprepared, so it was unable to enforce coastal blackouts or deploy naval escorts, which left freighters and cargo ships vulnerable to attacks. The Americans’ lack of foresight surprised even the Germans. “The Tortugas navigational lights burn as though it were peacetime,” wrote Harro Schacht, the commander of U-507, in his ship log as the submarine cruised into the Gulf. Second, between February and October 1942, the Germans changed the anatomy of their Enigma cipher machine, meaning the Allies were unable to decode the messages sent to and from U-boats.
German U-boats U-156 (foreground) and U-507 (background) in September 1942 Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Early in the Gulf campaign, the U.S. Navy deployed the Civil Air Patrol, a group of civilian volunteer fliers tasked with patrolling the waters between Maine and the Mexican border to prevent Allied sinkings. While the pilots’ efforts were useful for spotting purposes, they were not enough to deter attacks in the Gulf, especially as many of the planes were unarmed and therefore unable to carry out aerial attacks. None of the three German submarines lost in the Gulf or the Straits of Florida was sunk by airplanes—a “critical detail when you consider World War II is suddenly a war where aircraft were so powerful,” says Morgan.
Throughout the Gulf campaign, the U.S. Office of Censorship limited the press’s coverage of the sinkings. The reasoning was twofold: to prevent widespread panic among the American public and to avoid informing the Germans just how destructive their campaign was. This censorship has created a blanket of silence that persists even today. “By not having it out there, it’s created historical amnesia,” says Malcom. “It never really took root in the public consciousness, and in a large way still hasn’t today.”
It’s easy to see why the campaign was and continues to be overshadowed. While German U-boats were hunting in the Gulf in the spring and summer of 1942, American and Japanese fleets clashed at the Battle of Midway, the Soviets fought to repel a German invasion during the brutal Battle of Stalingrad, and American forces mounted their first major amphibious landing of the war at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.
“The [Gulf] story continues to be a footnote, and the fascinating thing that has happened is that the subject has largely been consigned to mythology,” says Morgan. Thanks to the lack of common knowledge of the campaign, urban legends have continually cropped up, including tales about the bodies of German soldiers washing up on the shores of Tampa Bay—whose waters were too shallow for U-boats to operate effectively—with local theater tickets and bread wrappers in their pockets.
Morgan estimates that the 56 sinkings in the Gulf in 1942 and 1943 claimed the lives of some 600 Allied sailors, naval personnel and civilians. This number—low when compared with better-known battles like D-Day, which had a single-day death toll of 4,414 Allied troops—is likely part of the reason the attacks haven’t gained as much recognition. “The story remains sort of remote, and that’s because of the way people consume World War II history,” Morgan says. “They only want to consume the most famous or infamous parts of that history.”
The historical importance of the Gulf campaign, Morgan adds, comes down to the value of the resources lost when the Allied vessels sank. As historian Michael Gannon wrote in his book Operation Drumbeat, “The U-boat assault on merchant shipping in United States home waters and the Caribbean during 1942 constituted a greater strategic setback for the Allied war effort than did the defeat at Pearl Harbor.”
The attack on the American motor tanker S.S. Pennsylvania Sun was one of the U.S.’s biggest losses of the campaign. Torpedoed by U-571 off the coast of Key West on July 15, 1942, it didn’t sink and was eventually repaired and put back into operation for another 20 years. It did, however, lose its precious cargo: 107,500 barrels of Navy fuel oil, which was essential for powering battleships, destroyers and other combat machinery. The sinking of the American steam tanker Benjamin Brewster represented another major loss. Late on July 9, 1942, the German U-67 torpedoed the tanker twice while it was anchoring for the night off the coast of Louisiana. It had been carrying more than 70,000 barrels of lubricating oil and aviation gas—combustible cargo that burned for nine days.
The Germans’ losses in the region were comparatively low. In the Straits of Florida, a U.S. Coast Guard ship sank U-157 on June 13, 1942, while a ship on loan from the U.S. to the Cuban Navy sank U-176 off the coast of Havana on May 15, 1943. Perhaps the most famous German victim of the campaign is U-166, which sank around 50 miles south of the mouth of the Mississippi River on July 30, 1942.
U-166 had entered the area earlier that month but had little luck finding a large target. As it made its way deeper into the Gulf, it sank a sailing ship, a merchant steamer and a fishing vessel off the coasts of Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Then, on the afternoon of July 30, U-166 finally found what it was looking for: the 5,184-ton American passenger steamer S.S. Robert E. Lee, which was carrying survivors of other U-boat attacks around the Atlantic Ocean. Struck by a torpedo, the steamer sank in just 15 minutes. Twenty-five of the 407 people on board died in the disaster.
The S.S. Robert E. Lee, a passenger steamer that was sunk by a German U-boat on July 30, 1942 Collection of Martin K.A. Morgan
While the German attack was successful, U-166 had made a fatal error of judgment. The Robert E. Lee was being escorted by a Navy patrol craft, PC-566, which promptly launched depth charges toward the German submarine, sinking it just a few minutes after its victim. The two wrecks settled some 5,000 feet below the surface, less than a mile from each other.
Though PC-566’s captain was sure he’d hit the German U-boat using only depth charges, the Navy rejected his version of events, instead crediting the sinking to a Coast Guard aircraft that dropped a torpedo two days later, more than 100 miles away. It was only in 2001 that an oil survey discovered the wreck of the missing U-boat and rewrote the official story, confirming the captain’s account.
The tide of the war in the Gulf shifted around the time of U-166’s sinking. “Coastal lights were shut off, lighthouse beacons were dimmed, and strict information blackouts [were] enacted,” noted a 2007 report published by the U.S. Department of the Interior. “Aerial reconnaissance and radio listening posts helped American naval and Coast Guard units track the U-boat threat. Merchant vessels were ordered to travel in convoys with naval escorts.” Touchet, a tanker traveling from Texas to New York without an escort in December 1943, was the last Allied ship sunk in the Gulf during the war.
While historians know the locations of the majority of the wrecks of the 56 sunken Allied ships, a handful remain consigned to the shadows of history. Many of the vessels were sunk in very deep water, and a reconnaissance mission would require a significant amount of time and funds, by which point the more than 80-year-old wrecks could be little more than rust stains on the seafloor. While Morgan has come to accept that the Gulf has likely forever swallowed parts of the story, he hopes that the campaign will eventually find its rightful place among the larger fabric of World War II history.
“The campaign marked a moment during World War II when the German enemy reached all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to attack the United States in a place [it was] notably vulnerable,” he says. “It brought [the war] to American shores, and yet it remains a largely obscure and unfamiliar chapter in the history of the conflict.”
Source: smithsonianmag.com. Author: Asia London Palomba