New York at War (40 page)

As the torpedo slammed into the hull of the
Coimbra
, it ignited the tanker’s eighty thousand barrels of oil and sent a blinding sheet of fire boiling up into the night sky. Surveying the blaze from the bridge of U-boat 123 a quarter of a mile away,
Kapitanleutnant
Reinhard Hardegen estimated its height as over six hundred feet above the Atlantic’s choppy surface. Somehow, crewmen aboard the stricken British tanker managed to ready a gun on the stern deck to fire at their attacker. Hardegen promptly ordered a second torpedo. This one sent the
Coimbra
to the bottom, taking thirty-six men with her. Several others, some of them wounded, boarded a raft and a dory and began the long row toward the shore of eastern Long Island, some twenty-seven miles distant, in the early morning hours of January 15, 1942.

Hardegen exulted at this, his third “kill” since leaving the German submarine base at Lorient, France, three weeks earlier. Already, U-123 had torpedoed and sunk a British steamer three hundred miles east of Cape Cod and a Norwegian tanker sixty miles southeast of Montauk, Long Island, with a combined loss of over eighteen thousand tons of shipping, seven thousand tons of general cargo, twelve tons of fuel oil, and 110 lives. U-123 was the lead vessel of Admiral Doenitz’s Operation Paukenschlag. The admiral recognized that if a concentrated U-boat onslaught sank Allied vessels faster than they could be built, the toll on shipping would effectively cut the transatlantic supply line to Britain. With its economy throttled, England could never become the launch pad for an Allied invasion of continental Europe. The U-boats’ chokehold would leave the island’s people nearly starved and its factories and vehicles bereft of oil; Winston Churchill would be driven to his knees, enabling Germany to fight a one-front war against Russia. Paukenschlag was Doenitz’s demonstration to Adolf Hitler that U-boats must be concentrated off the American coast in order to win the war.
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A few hours before sinking the
Coimbra
on January 15, Hardegen had ventured near the acknowledged target for the raid. “My mission was to get to New York,” he later wrote. When Hardegen had unsealed his instructions at sea, two American guidebooks to New York City tumbled out of the envelope. The brightly colored cover of one showed skyscrapers and the Statue of Liberty towering over a scene of colonial Dutchmen trading with Indians and bore the legend “1626—Bought for Twenty Four Dollars. 1939—Valued at Twenty Four Billion!” More germane to Hardegen’s task, the guidebooks included fold-out tourist maps of the city—maps that showed the location of the Ambrose Channel leading into the port.
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As a young naval cadet, Hardegen had visited New York during a round-the-world German training cruise nine years earlier. Like many tourists, he had ventured to the top of the Empire State Building and gazed out on the bright lights, skyscrapers, distant factories, piers, and moored ships spread before him. Hardegen and Doenitz both knew that New York harbor, the world’s busiest, was destined to play a crucial role in the war. On the evening of January 15, the commander brought U-123 in for a close look.
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Due south of Rockaway Beach, U-123 bobbed on the surface. The submarine was so close to shore that
Leutnant
Horst von Schroeter “could see the cars driving along the coast road, and I could even smell the woods.” But the real attraction was to the west: clearly silhouetted against the sky were the three-hundred-foot Parachute Jump and the Wonder Wheel, the world’s largest Ferris wheel, both at Coney Island, and beyond them the red lights of a radio beacon on Staten Island. And behind them all was a glow in the night sky—the reflected gleam of Manhattan’s millions of lights on the clouds above. Hardegen found himself musing whether the Broadway shows were letting out just over the horizon, and the jazz clubs tuning up for a night of revelry. Already, on the wireless below, his men had been listening to the Gramercy Chamber Trio, broadcast by Manhattan’s WNYC, after passing up WOR’s “The Goldbergs,” a popular comedy about a Bronx Jewish family.
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Hardegen turned back to business. While the camouflage-gray hull of U-123 was surrounded by a medley of oblivious fishing smacks and tugs on the harbor’s outer reaches, a worthy prize—a big tanker or cargo ship heading into or out of New York—was nowhere in sight. As tempting as the Ambrose Channel and New York harbor might have been, Hardegen knew that once he entered and wreaked havoc, he might not get back out alive. Instead he turned his vessel east, sinking the
Coimbra
. From there he ventured south and found rich hunting grounds along the coastal route favored by freighters and oil tankers shuttling between New York, Philadelphia, and the Gulf Coast ports. Off Cape Hatteras he sank three more ships. He was soon joined by the five other U-boats of Paukenschlag. Over the next four weeks, the six submarines sank twenty-one Allied cargo ships in the waters between Newfoundland and South Carolina. So commenced what the submariners called “the great American turkey shoot.”
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What shocked Hardegen was the utter negligence of New Yorkers and other Americans in the face of a war that was now over a month old. “I assumed that I would find a coast that was blacked out . . . ,” he later recalled. “I found a coast that was brightly lit. . . . Ships were sailing with navigation lights.” For Hardegen and other U-boat commanders who followed, “the glow of New York on the clouds” became emblematic of a stubborn American denial of the reality of war.
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In New York and Washington, people sought to piece together what was happening in the wake of the sinkings. With the
Coimbra
’s oil and life preservers washing up on Long Island beaches, and survivors reaching shore, a news blackout was impossible. While navy spokesmen reassured the public that they had the situation in hand, the truth was that Admiral Ernest King, commander in chief of the US fleet, had not taken seriously the risk of U-boat attack—this despite urgent warnings from British admiralty cryptologists who were deciphering wireless transmissions between Doenitz’s headquarters and his vessels at sea.
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King’s preoccupation with the Pacific war, his conviction that a coastal raid was unlikely, and a shortage of antisubmarine vessels had all impeded precautionary measures. While the army air corps had been urging people on the East Coast to look skyward, the navy had grown accustomed to viewing the Battle of the Atlantic as a conflict being fought far from American shores. For over six months prior to Pearl Harbor, the navy (with FDR’s blessing) had been fighting an undeclared war in the North Atlantic against U-boats, bringing the two nations to the brink of open war. German submarines had torpedoed four American merchant ships (including the
Robin Moor
and the
Sagadahoc
, outbound from New York), two American destroyers, and a navy tanker, with a total loss of 164 lives. But the confrontations had taken place hundreds of miles from America, and the continuing political strength of isolationists deterred Roosevelt from declaring war. The navy, in short, was the one service that was already in active combat—and the one service that seriously neglected to prepare for an attack.
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The navy now took action, albeit slowly, following the
Coimbra
sinking, coordinating its efforts with the coast guard, the army, and the army air force. As during the last war, an antisubmarine net and boom had already been stretched across the Narrows, with a nine-hundred-foot gate to admit friendly vessels. Acoustic hydrophones placed in local shipping channels would detect approaching U-boats; strategically placed mines would sink them. By the spring of 1942, the navy required coastal cargo vessels to sail in convoys of forty or fifty ships, usually under the protection of cutters, patrol boats, and antisubmarine trawlers lent by the British. Planes from the army’s First Air Support Command at Mitchel Field, Long Island, and seaplanes from the Naval Air Station at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn covered the passage of convoys along the coast.
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The military command also accepted the services of volunteer pilots in the Civil Air Patrol, and of boatmen in a newly formed Coastal Picket Patrol. The latter, soon nicknamed the “Hooligan Navy,” consisted of hundreds of motorized yachts and other small craft owned by fishermen and amateur sailors eager to serve. Hooligans like Jakob Isbrandtsen, a young steamship company clerk, plied the waters off New York armed with Springfield rifles and Lewis machine guns. Navy men might grin or grimace, but like their predecessors in the Sea Fencibles in 1812, the boatmen played an effective role, exasperating the U-boat captains. The risk of being spotted by a yacht that could radio for a navy depth-charge attack or air force bombing run kept U-boats submerged and away from the convoys. By the spring, Doenitz, convinced that the East Coast was now less vulnerable than the Gulf Coast and Caribbean, shifted most of his U-boats to more southerly climes.
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The submarines had not left the New York region entirely, however, and for the remainder of the war, U-boats in local waters would remain on the minds of New Yorkers. “In New York, the front was at the sea buoy,” one merchant seaman later recalled. Even as the navy had pondered what to do in the wake of the attack on the
Coimbra
, U-130 sank a Norwegian tanker off the New Jersey coast in late January 1942, and U-404 sent an American freighter to the bottom in March, silhouetted against the glimmering lights of Atlantic City. When New Yorkers started to forget about U-boats, the Germans reminded them. On the night of November 10, 1942, U-608 laid mines in the waters just off the Ambrose Channel. One was discovered three days later, and for the only time during the war, the port of New York was closed for forty-eight hours, as minesweeping vessels collected and detonated five German mines. On May 5, 1945, with Hitler already dead and the Red Army in control of Berlin, U-853 sank a coal boat at the eastern end of Long Island Sound, only to be depth-charged and sunk in turn by a navy and coast guard patrol.
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“The losses by submarines off our Atlantic seaboard and in the Caribbean now threaten our entire war effort,” General George Marshall had warned in June 1942—a view shared by Churchill and others. True, by the following month, eight enemy subs had been sunk off American and Canadian shores. But in the six months following the initiation of Paukenschlag, U-boats destroyed nearly 400 Allied vessels in North American and Caribbean waters (171 of them off the East Coast), with a loss of some 2,400 lives.
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When measured against the war-winning goal Doenitz had propounded in December 1941, however, the total results of Paukenschlag were disappointing. Hitler never saw fit to concentrate U-boats off American shores, choosing to place his naval and other strategic priorities elsewhere. Doenitz was forced to refocus his efforts to the North Atlantic after mid-1942. Germans were left to ponder the fleeting vision of an alluring and seemingly vulnerable America offered by Reinhard Hardegen in a book for wartime readers, in which he echoed the comments made by U-boat officer Frederick Koerner twenty-four years earlier. “I cannot describe the feeling with words, but it was unbelievably beautiful and great,” the
Kapitanleutnant
wrote of gazing at New York’s glow on the night clouds overhead. “I would have given away a kingdom for this moment if I had had one. 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.” But it would not be the last time.
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In truth, New York’s unfolding war was very much a maritime affair, and Hitler missed an opportunity to inflict severe damage, if not to win the war, when he turned his attention from the city and its surrounding waters. Already the world’s busiest port, New York now became the great American terminus for the “bridge of ships” linking Franklin Roosevelt’s “arsenal of democracy” to Britain, Russia, and the fronts that would be opened in North Africa and Europe. A continuous armada of vessels laden with weapons, ammunition, and supplies steamed out of the Narrows and Long Island Sound to destinations as far flung as the Texas oil ports, Liverpool, Falmouth, and Glasgow in the British Isles, Casablanca in Morocco after the American landings there, and Murmansk and Archangel above the Arctic Circle in Russia.
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The transatlantic convoys—clusters of thirty to eighty cargo ships and oil tankers, guarded by escorts of several navy destroyers, corvettes, and cruisers—became the lifeline of the European war, and New York soon became their most important nexus. Learning from British example, the navy knew that merchant ships traveling en masse and guarded by armed escorts had a better chance of repelling and surviving U-boat attacks. Philadelphia, Boston, and other ports also dispatched convoys, and initially Halifax, Nova Scotia, was the main assembly point for the Atlantic runs. But after September 1942, when New York replaced Halifax as the key western terminus, the harbor became the greatest marshalling yard for vessels arriving from the Gulf oil ports, the West Indies, Africa, and even India via the Panama Canal, all in preparation for the Atlantic trek. By the end of the war, a total of 1,462 convoys, consisting of 21,459 ships carrying over sixty-three million tons of supplies, had sailed from New York to sustain the Allied war effort.
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An air of secrecy, meant to defeat spies, surrounded the departure of these flotillas from New York. Vessels shuttled back and forth across the harbor, loading petroleum at the New Jersey refineries behind Staten Island; or picking up locomotives, electric generators, and refrigerated blood plasma at the world’s largest warehouse, the Brooklyn Army Terminal in Sunset Park; or powdered eggs, flour, and crated airplanes at Hoboken’s piers; or tanks and trucks at Bayonne’s Port Johnson Terminal. Hilda O’Brien, a Columbia University graduate student sharing an apartment on Riverside Drive with several other single women, watched the ships come and go: “We were always curious that at night the Hudson River would be filled with gray boats of all sizes and shapes and the next morning they’d all be gone.”
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