During the first six months of 1942, 86 merchant ships, primarily American and British, were sunk off the Outer Banks of North Carolina. At least 1200 men died.
Many North Carolinians are still unaware of those losses.
The sinkings were part of the larger “Battle of the Atlantic,” which pitted German U-boats (submarines) against Allied merchant vessels throughout the Atlantic Ocean, including such places as the coasts of Newfoundland and Ireland. As for the United States, the entire east coast was affected, but Cape Hatteras was a “favorite hunting ground of the U-boats.”[1]
Many of the ships the submarines attacked off North Carolina were merchant vessels supplying Great Britain with important products, including war matériel, from the United States. For them, the route near Cape Hatteras was attractive. For ships going north, the Gulf Stream was helpful; for ships going south, they hugged the coastline and avoided the Gulf Stream, which was then pushing in the wrong direction. In both cases, the ships avoided going dangerously too far out into the ocean. But in January 1942 they became subject to U-boat attacks.
“[M]ore merchant vessels were destroyed here than in the waters of any other state during World War II,” writes John Michael Wagner.[2] Americans did not destroy a single U-Boat until April 1942.
How It Started
Soon after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the United States declared war on Japan, and Germany quickly responded by declaring war on the United States. About a month later, German submarines began patrolling the U.S. eastern shore. On January 17, 1942, Allan Jackson, a tanker owned by Standard Oil Company, was heading toward New York City and located about 60 miles from the Outer Banks.
Three U-boats had reached the area. At 1:35 am, two of their torpedoes suddenly hit the Allan Jackson, splitting it in two and causing it to sink. The men on board tried to escape—and 13 did, but the rest of the 35 crew members died.[3]
This was the first U-Boat attack in the region. The German submarine officers were highly experienced. They had been sinking British ships since 1939.
U-Boat torpedo attacks continued from January to July off the North Carolina coast with little resistance from the Americans.
Why?
The start of the war had caught the United States largely unprepared. As Edwin Hoyt explains, there were few destroyers on the East Coast, and Americans did not know how to battle submarines. Two Coast Guard stations were located in the area; when war hit, they became part of the Navy. They patrolled to the extent they could and they rescued sailors who survived the U-boat attacks.
Nevertheless, the protection was limited.
Sending ships in convoys protected by destroyers had proven its worth in World War I and had been used by the British earlier in World War II. However, according to James Cheatham, “the U.S. resisted all manner of British advice including, but not limited to, the tried and true Convoy System. The Americans contended that they lacked enough ships for proper escorts . . . . “[4]
Rear Admiral Adolphus Andrews, who was in charge of protecting the eastern coast of the U.S., tried to get help from Washington to combat the U-boats, not just in North Carolina but throughout the East Coast. As Hoyt wrote, “Admiral Andrews called Washington every day asking for help. Give him ships, he asked. But in Washington, Admiral [Earnest J.] King said there were no more ships to give Andrews.”[5] Other parts of the world, such as the Pacific, had higher priority.
Germans called their submarine attacks off North Carolina a “turkey shoot,” says Cheatham, who titled his book The Atlantic Turkey Shoot. The submarines could wait unseen in the shallow waters around Cape Hatteras. Initially, the lights along the shore created a silhouette of the merchant ships as they went by, giving the roaming U-Boats clear targets. Admiral Andrews tried to get those lights turned off up and down the coast. He met opposition from businesses that didn’t want to be in the dark all evening.
However, he succeeded in North Carolina. Residents of the Outer Banks remember learning to cope with lights out. Experiencing the tragic sinkings was not as easy.
“Many older residents of the Outer Banks vividly recount memories of glass-shattering explosions, flaming ships illuminating the night sky, and the discovery of victims on the beaches the following morning,” wrote Kip Tabb in 2020.[6]
Tabb quoted Norma Perry about an experience she had as a young child. “All of a sudden it sounded like a great big thunderstorm coming up. Big booms. Mom and Daddy flew out the back door. It was just a short distance before you came to the sand hills. The water was on fire all around it. Mama would cry for just about a week.”[7]
As Marni Patterson wrote in 2023, “The fighting was so intense that the Outer Banks was called Torpedo Junction. Few people knew about the Battle of the Atlantic because President Roosevelt didn’t want citizens to panic. But Outer Banks residents who were alive during World War II remember it very well.”[8] In addition to wanting to prevent panic, the federal government didn’t want information about the location of the ships—German and Allied—or what happened to them to reach Germany because it would provide useful information for the enemy.
The worst part of the assault was from January to July 1942. In April 1942, the American navy warship U.S.S. Roper battled a German submarine, U-85, off the coast of Bodie Island (not actually an island, but part of a peninsula in the Outer Banks). The submarine sank and there were no survivors of the 29-man crew. The U-boat crew had perhaps become overconfident because so little had prevented them in the past.
And beginning in July 1942, the federal government starting using protected convoys. Thus, the U-boat attacks gradually subsided.