Chapter 3: Loose Cannon

2006-12-01 07:35:38

At twenty-eight, Lieutenant Reinhard Hardegen, a German U-boat

captain, was a loose cannon. He carried unchecked ambition and relentless

intensity along with his war wounds—a short leg and bleeding

stomach—from the aviation crash that had ended his previous career as a

naval pilot. He had concealed the injuries in order to qualify for command

of U-123, and then began an impatient rampage of sinkings with the neutral

Portuguese freighter Ganda. The 4,300-ton ship didn’t go down after

two torpedo hits, so Hardegen surfaced U-123 and sank her with its four-inch

gun. When the attack became an international incident, Admiral

Karl Dönitz, commander of Germany’s U-boat fleet, claimed it was a

British sub that had sunk Ganda.

Dönitz chose U-123 to be among the first five U-boats with orders to attack

the eastern seaboard of the United States. He had begun planning the

attack four days after Pearl Harbor, on instructions from Hitler to destroy

merchant ships from New York to Cape Hatteras. Five 1,050-ton Type 9B

U-boats, with a range of 12,000 nautical miles cruising at 10 knots on the

surface, left their pens at the port of Lorient in France on separate dates

around Christmas 1941. Dönitz called the operation “Drumbeat,” for the

effect he expected it to have.

The Submarine Tracking Room at the Operational Intelligence Centre

of the British Admiralty in London, Royal Navy headquarters, had located

the U-boats crossing the surface of the ocean, and their positions were

passed on to the U.S. Navy and charted on the wall in the headquarters of

the Eastern Sea Frontier in New York City. But a vicious winter hurricane

hit the Atlantic with winds of 100 mph, tossing the subs like surfboards off the lips of big waves, and enabling them to lose the Americans tracking

them.

The Eastern Sea Frontier, commanded by Admiral Adolphus “Dolly”

Andrews, didn’t have much of a fleet: Coast Guard cutters with wooden

hulls, turn-of-the-century gunboats, and converted yachts with a machine

gun and maybe a few depth charges on deck. The boats were often

broken down in port. The day before the first U-boat left France, Admiral

Andrews complained in a memo to Admiral Ernest King, commander in

chief of the U.S. Navy: “It is submitted that should enemy submarines operate

off this coast, this command has no forces available to take adequate

action against them, either offensive or defensive.”

Early on the morning of January 12, 1942, off the coast of Nova Scotia,

U-123 sank the 9,100-ton British freighter Cyclops. Ninety-eight men died,

almost all of them freezing in lifeboats. Operation Drumbeat was supposed

to be a sneak attack off New York, coordinated with the other U-boats, and

by attacking the Cyclops, Hardegen had disobeyed Dönitz’s orders and

blew the element of surprise; not that it mattered, because the Eastern Sea

Frontier was so unprepared.

The New York Times ran a two-paragraph story, picked up from a boast

by Radio Berlin, but the story didn’t attract much attention. The U.S. Navy

issued a lying press release claiming to have “liquidated” U-boats off the

coast, adding that national security prevented the disclosure of more information.

“This is a phase of the game of war secrecy into which every American

should enter enthusiastically,” said the navy’s statement, printed by

the Times. The release added that the media and civilians could make the

same “great, patriotic contribution” by not mentioning what they might

see with their own eyes.

The next day, U-123 traveled south from Nova Scotia, steaming at 18

knots in broad daylight. It submerged a couple of times when aircraft flew

over, but the ESF’s Fleet Air Arm was no more of a threat to U-boats than

its bathtub navy. U-123 had traveled more than 3,300 nautical miles from

France, only 55 of them submerged, without being challenged. The big

U-boat passed south of Nantucket late in the afternoon, and that night

was beckoned down the coast by Montauk Point Lighthouse.

Kapitan Hardegen was excited by the glow from the lights on shore, exposing

his targets. “Don’t they know there’s a war on?” he asked his chief

mate. The U.S. Navy had suggested cities and towns along the coast to

black themselves out, but merchants declined because business would suffer.

After midnight, Hardegen spotted the Norness, a 9,600-ton Norwegian

tanker, and split her apart with three torpedoes. He continued to New York

and submerged at sunrise in the harbor. U-123 spent the day on the bottom,

ninety feet down in the mud.

The New York Times was still on the street with a headline now shouting

TANKER TORPEDOED 60 MILES OFF LONG ISLAND when Hardegen surfaced

after dark, awed by the dome of white light rising almost religiously into

the black sky above Manhattan. He knew the moment was profound. “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.,” he said.

Later that night, during an icy nor’easter, he torpedoed the 6,800-ton

British tanker Coimbra, whose 80,000 barrels of oil exploded in a giant

fireball, killing thirty-six. Witnesses saw flames from the beach at

Southampton. Admiral Andrews told the press that the navy knew nothing

about it, which was almost the truth. His feeble fleet was grasping at

the wisps and ghosts of ocean spray in its lame attempt to find U-123.

Sam Moses

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