Monsters of the Deep in Two World Wars
German U-Boats Made Crossing the Atlantic Pure Hell on Water. They Didn't Ignore the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico, either.
The remarkable thing is how close to American shores those undersea warriors came. One of the more outlandish stories told of U-boat crew members wearing captured Swedish naval uniforms, taking a raft up the channel from the Gulf all the way to New Orleans for a night on the town. Another revealed that American sailors had fished trash from an oil slick left by a destroyed U-boat, containing grocery wrappers from stores in Gulfport, Mississippi. Yet another placed a U-boat, on the surface in New York Harbor at night, looking directly up Broadway.
However fictitious such tales may be, the truth is that American preparedness was incomplete at the outset of WW2. Lights from cities along the eastern seaboard enabled ships in the sea lane to be silhouetted from the shore after dark. Thus they became easy targets for German submarines prowling offshore. That was corrected only by 1943.
In Daytona Beach, FL, starting in July of 1942, sirens could be heard all over town at dusk. It was the signal there and around much of the country that people had to turn out lights in their houses or cover their windows with blankets before dark. The penalty for not obeying was severe —- a fine of $300 ($5,500 today) and 90 days in jail. The town had marshals on patrol every night to enforce the ruling. Lives were at stake.
And lives were indeed lost. This was deliberately kept from the American people, ostensibly to avoid a mass panic but more likely to conceal ineptitude.
The Germans, under Admiral Karl Donitz, had developed a deadly strategy to use U-boats by taking advantage of American inexperience and even ignorance. The commander of U-boat 123, Reinhardt Hardegen, didn’t have any good charts as he headed towards Rhode Island Sound in January, 1942, but it didn’t matter because the Montauk Point Lighthouse provided a very helpful navigational aid. Hardegen went on to sink the huge tanker, Norness which was silhouetted against the brightly lit coast, destroying 12,299 tons of crude oil destined for England. Thirty-nine of the crew were later rescued.
Then, after midnight on January 15, 1942, Hardegen saw the lights of Manhattan skyscrapers from the bridge of his submarine. He wrote about that experience:
“I cannot describe the feeling in words but it was unbelievable and beautiful and great. We were the first to be here.”
Between January and March of that year, German submarines sank 141 American ships between Nova Scotia and Venezuela. Almost 2,500 crewmen were killed. People on America’s Atlantic beaches could see the glow of burning ships at sea and knew that men were dying out there.
And the sirens went off at twilight.
The Germans referred to their U-boat success in 1942 as their “happy time.”
Such naval exploits have awed me since I was a kid hearing those spooky twilight sirens in Daytona Beach. Having grown up not far from the Gulf Coast, I became fascinated by tales of U-boats operating in Gulf waters. One of them in particular was identified as U-166.
This submarine had been sunk near midnight on July 30, 1942, after torpedoing the combined freighter/passenger ship Robert E. Lee off the Louisiana coast, killing 25 people. All 52 officers and crew of the U-boat were killed. The submarine’s captain was 27-year old Hans Guenther Kuhlmann, shown here with his wife, Gertrude and several of his officers aboard the U-166.
I made this unlikely discovery thanks to Kuhlmann’s wife, Gertrude. She had packed away a collection of pictures after the war and her husband’s death and had then given them to the American non-profit PAST Foundation. From there they went to the U.S. World War Two Museum in New Orleans. I was captivated by the images.
On July 11, Kuhlmann’s U-166 approached a small freighter at night far offshore from Tampa, FL. The boat was too small to waste a torpedo on so he pulled close to it intending to use the surface cannon. With a bullhorn and in perfect English, Kuhlmann told the crew of three to get into their lifeboat, that he was going to sink their vessel. He also pointed out to them the direction they should head to best reach land. He may have smiled when the crew shouted the name of their boat. It was “Gertrude”, the same as his wife’s.
The New York Times breathlessly reported this as done by the starving Germans in order to capture “desperately needed” food supplies of the “Gertrude” but it was hogwash propaganda. The boat’s cargo consisted only of onions which the Times knew and elected not to report. The Gertrude’s survivors were rescued at sea 72 hours later.
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