At All Costs : How a Crippled Ship and Two American Merchant Mariners Turned the Tide of World War II

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CHAPTER 3 · · · FIRE DOWN BELOW
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 had begun 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. It consisted of 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 urged 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.
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Fred Larsen’s Irish grandfather, the woodcarver Christopher Melia, and William Russell Grace, who founded Grace Line after emigrating from Ireland, were about the same age and had the same eye for beauty. Had they lived long enough to see the Santa Elisa, Melia might have carved a model of her, and Grace would have been proud of her. A flurry of shipbuilding was triggered by the Merchant Marine Act of 1936, passed in order to increase the size of the U.S. merchant fleet. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt prepared for the growing possibility of war, the pace increased. The Santa Elisa was one of 173 freighters built between 1940 and 1945, to Maritime Commission designs for the class called C2. She was 459 feet from bow to stern, 63 feet at beam, and 40 feet between main deck and keel bottom, with a loaded draft of 26 feet and freeboard of 14. Her five holds gave her a gross weight of 8,380 tons, with the ability to stow 8,620 tons of cargo. Because she was specially built for Grace Line, she had some custom touches shared by only her sister ship, the Santa Rita. Her bridge was enclosed, keeping the helmsman out of the weather and providing protection against shrapnel from bombs. Powered by a double reduction General Electric turbine making 6,000 horsepower and driving a single screw, she could run all day and night at 17 knots.
Larsen was junior third officer on the Santa Elisa, in charge of the lifeboats and lifesaving equipment, but the chief officer also assigned him to supervise the fire equipment. He did much more than the manual described for a third mate, because he could. At 27, he had done it all. He’d been a teenage prodigy in the engine room of his first ship, the Attila, working with diesel, steam, and hydraulic systems. He could navigate and operate radios. He'd been a quartermaster, purser, bosun, and cargo mate; he was certified in firefighting and lifeboats, and liked guns. He'd even been a stevedore on the San Pedro wharf in California. He could speak English, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, and Spanish, and was beginning to study German, although he despised it.
He acted with a natural sense of authority based on experience, and carried himself with conspicuous self-discipline. When he stepped into territory that was not a third mate’s, other officers could usually see that his involvement was driven by efficiency, not ego, and they generally welcomed it, but his rigidity could be difficult. “He was a square-head all the way,” said Peter Forcanser, the junior engineer who maintained the deck machinery. “A real sonofabitch. He was only the third mate, but he acted like he owned the ship.”
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Santa Elisa had returned to Brooklyn, where she was armed by the War Shipping Administration, primarily with two .30- caliber Browning machine guns on the afterdeck. Armor plating was added to the bridge, 36 inches high, on each wing just outside the wheelhouse door. A steel visor projecting downward at 45 degrees was welded to the top of the wheelhouse, and a crow's nest with a telephone to the bridge was built between the two king posts at the forward end of the number one hatch. Steel gun tubs had been welded to the bow and four corners of the bridge, intended for 20- millimeter Oerlikon rapid-fire cannons, but the tubs were empty, because the guns weren’t available so early in the war.
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On the afternoon of Saturday, January 17, 1942, Kapitan Hardegen and his U-boat were lurking off the New Jersey coast, as the Santa Elisa steamed south from Gravesend Bay in Brooklyn after loading ammunition for her new guns. She was headed for Cristobal, at the mouth of the Panama Canal, where an attack by the enemy was feared, and then to Arica, Antofagasta, Valparaiso, and San Antonio, Chile. There were 552 cases of matches in wooden crates stowed on the starboard side of the upper 'tween deck level of her number one hold, the most forward of five. In the lower 'tween deck of that same hold there were 1900 drums of highly explosive carbide crystals. Such drums had been used during the Spanish Civil War like rolling depth charges; republican forces sent them barreling down steep hillsides onto rebel encampments. Word of the U-boat sinkings had moved over the merchant fleet's radios. Small craft hugged the coast, but the freighters still ran offshore. At about 7:15 that evening, the Santa Elisa was s...