North Carolina's Forgotten War Zone |
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By Kevin P. Duffus
 Memories of World War II will again be stirred with the PBS broadcast of Ken Burns’ “The War,” which started on Sunday, Sept. 25. Local coverage by PBS stations will feature noble contributions and sacrifices to the effort by North Carolinians at home, as well as in European and Pacific theaters of the war. But, inexplicably, there will be no mention of the fact that the war was fought within sight of our state’s beaches. In 1942, the U.S. suffered one of its greatest defeats of World War II, not in Europe or the Pacific, but along its eastern seaboard. As military forces were marshaled to foreign fronts, the enemy, unchallenged, entered America’s front door. In just six months, 397 Allied ships were sunk or damaged and nearly 5,000 people, including many civilians, were burned to death, crushed, drowned or vanished into the sea. The U.S. government did its best to keep the disaster secret from the public, especially those living inland. Nonetheless, it was a crisis that embarrassed Washington, panicked Britain, and nearly changed the course of history. By the spring of 1942, the Allied war effort was in jeopardy, and the U.S. East Coast was considered by the U.S. military as the most dangerous place for merchant shipping in the world. The greatest concentration of U-boat attacks occurred off North Carolina’s Outer Banks, on the northern and southern approaches to Diamond Shoals, an ocean passage through which dozens of ships passed everyday. For months, violent explosions of torpedoed merchant vessels rattled windows and the nerves of startled coastal residents. Columns of black smoke filled the skies as beaches were littered with oil, debris, and bodies. “We were all mad as hell if you want to know the truth about it, having to fight German submarines on our coast,” recalled the late Arnold Tolson of Manteo, who at 19-years-old commanded an 83-foot Coast Guard patrol boat off the Outer Banks.  The stress of the war so close to home—one U-boat attack occurred within seven miles of Avon village—spawned widespread panic and outlandish rumors. “People were frightened to death. And if they saw anything strange, any strange people, they would think they were German spies,” said Ocracoke’s Blanche O’Neal. “We locked our doors for the first time ever for fear Germans would come in during the night.” Hatteras fisherman, Charles Stowe and his father nearly rammed a surfacing U-boat on a fishing trip out of Hatteras Inlet, but they quickly spun their boat around and safely returned to port. Rumors that Germans were commandeering fishing trawlers to offload their diesel fuel are generally discounted by historians. Other sensational urban legends of German sailors attending movies or dining in restaurants in coastal communities have also been proven false. Teen-age Coast Guard recruits from America’s heartland—many of whom had never stepped foot on a boat—were suddenly thrust into the deadly war zone off the Outer Banks, replacing many of the native Outer Banks lifesavers who left the islands to enlist in the Army or Navy. The landlubbers did their best to rescue the British and American victims of U-boat attacks who were swimming in a sea of burning oil. “All we could do is go around and around, hoping to pick up somebody that was alive,” recalled the late U.L. Womac of Tennessee who served at Ocracoke Island. His first assignment in the war was to go out to the burning Empire Gem, the largest oil tanker in the world at the time, which had been torpedoed off Hatteras Inlet. Fifty-five British sailors perished as the ship slipped beneath the waves. “It’s a terrible feeling. Especially when you see them jump overboard with flames on to ‘em and know they were goin’ into the fire just as quick as they hit,” Womac remembered, with tears in his eyes. Merchant sailors, like Richard Rushton of San Francisco, whose ship, Dixie Arrow, was sunk off Ocracoke Island, felt like sitting ducks: “We knew we were in trouble because we had been sailing through an oil slick [from another torpedoed ship] for three hours before we reached Ocracoke. We didn’t have any protection, no arms or anything.” Ships became easy prey for U-boats, illuminated by brightly lit coastal towns while Americans were kept in the dark by propaganda that minimized the losses. A naïve and ambivalent nation left merchant seamen to sail in constant peril, risking their lives to deliver vital, war effort cargoes. “It was the damndest thing you ever saw. Nobody took it seriously. Everybody had their lights on, hotels, amusement parks, and we would be lit up plain as day,” said the late Biff Bowker, who survived many close calls off the Outer Banks. It wasn’t until seven months after the first U-boat attacks that a widespread coastal blackout was enforced in August, 1942. By then, thousands were dead and hundreds of ships were sunk. Defensive measures, including air and surface patrols, convoys, and radio detection facilities such as the “Loop Shack” on Ocracoke eventually discouraged Germany’s U-boatwaffe, and the attacks became infrequent after July, 1942. The historic first engagement between a U.S. Navy warship and a German U-boat in U.S. waters took place just 16 miles east of Nags Head on April 14, 1942. The destroyer USS Jesse Roper sank the U-85 in a close gun battle on the surface. After the U-boat sank, the Navy made an unsuccessful effort to dive on the vessel in order to recover its Enigma transcription machine—an advanced version the Allies desperately needed to be able to break Germany’s top secret codes. Had the Navy divers succeeded, the war may have been shortened by as much as a year. The Enigma machine was recovered by Nags Head sport divers, Jim Bunch and Roger Hunting, in 2001 and is now on display at the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Hatteras. Many North Carolinians, like the late Maude White of Buxton, served honorably as volunteer U.S. Navy Intelligence "Coast Watchers." At Elizabeth City Air Station, airships were built and maintained to perform vital air reconnaissance, PBY flying boats and A-29 bombers flew out of Cherry Point on combat missions off the Outer Banks, and Morehead City served as a major refueling depot for anti-submarine patrols. The foundations of the “Loop Shack,” a top-secret U.S. Navy submarine tracking and listening facility which pioneered Cold War-era Soviet submarine surveillance technology, can still be seen near Ocracoke village, but no interpretive signs identify it or its function. Other physical signs that World War II was fought within sight of North Carolina’s coast have mostly vanished from view. Today, Outer Banks beaches still show some evidence of the 150 million gallons of oil spilled, and offshore are the remains of 60 sunken vessels and countless unexploded depth charges, contact mines, and torpedoes from the war zone of 1942. Another little known fact is that North Carolina has four U-boats sunk in its waters, the most of any U.S. state. In all, 65 different U-boats recorded at least one successful attack on Allied shipping in U.S. waters during 1942. “This was a great tragedy that the German U-boat fleet was able to go about its business unhindered in what became one of the great maritime disasters of all time,” said Michael Gannon, author of “Operation Drumbeat.” University of North Carolina professor of history, Gerhard Weinberg has called the forgotten war zone off the United States “the greatest single defeat ever suffered by American naval power.” Unbelievably, this important and fascinating story of U.S. history is not taught in our state’s schools and is largely unknown. North Carolina has overlooked a tremendous resource for education and heritage tourism and has abandoned the memory of the thousands of people who perished and those who struggled mightily to defend our freedom just a few miles off our state’s beaches. (Kevin P. Duffus is the author of “Shipwrecks of the Outer Banks—An Illustrated Guide” and the producer and writer of the three-hour documentary, “War Zone—World War II Off North Carolina’s Outer Banks.” He can be contacted at kevin_duffus@earthlink.net or check his Web site at www.thelostlight.com © 2007 Kevin P. Duffus) |
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