World War II and the Delaware Coast

By Michael Morgan

Within weeks of Pearl Harbor, German U-boats arrived off the Delaware coast and attacked numerous ships along the vital shipping lanes to Philadelphia and Wilmington. On February 28, 1942, two German torpedoes hit the destroyer Jacob Jones, which was carrying more than one hundred American sailors. It sank in less than an hour. A center for military activity, Lewes became a refuge for many survivors from such attacks. The dunes along Cape Henlopen hid the massive artillery batteries of Fort Miles. Residents of the beachfront communities rallied amid the blackout regulations and air raid drills with rationing and scrap drives. Spotters watched for enemy warships in concrete towers that still line the coast. Author Michael Morgan tells the remarkable story of a coast at war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781625857118

Michael Morgan

Michael Morgan is seminary musician for Columbia Theological Seminary and organist at Central Presbyterian Church in Atlanta. He is also a Psalm scholar and owns one of the largest collections of English Bibles in the country.

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PREFACE

During the American Revolution and the War of 1812, the British Royal Navy harassed coastal communities and bombarded Lewes, placing the Delaware coast on the front lines. The same was true during World War II, when Nazi submarines prowled North American coastal waters sinking hundreds of ships and killing several thousand sailors and civilians. In Delaware, residents of Lewes, Rehoboth and Bethany Beach lived in fear that the enemy might shell them at any time. During the war, coastal residents endured dimouts, accepted rationing, participated in salvage and bond drives and prayed for the safe return of their husbands, fathers and brothers serving overseas. World War II was fought in many places around the globe. The 198th Coast Artillery from southern Delaware spent much of its time during the war on Bora Bora, a tropical island in the South Pacific, where it built gun emplacements, barracks and other buildings near an undefended beach but did not encounter a single enemy soldier. But in Delaware, on the previously undefended sands of Cape Henlopen, gun emplacements, barracks and other buildings were constructed as Nazi submarines lurked in nearby waters. In 1942, scores of survivors of U-boat attacks landed at Lewes, where residents bound up their wounds and prepared for the next attack. The story of the individual servicemen from coastal towns who fought and died in battles around the globe is a subject for another book. This work tells the story of the Delaware coast during America’s greatest conflict, World War II, when these communities were truly on the front lines.

It would not have been possible to write this book without the assistance of the dedicated people who staff libraries, archives and historical societies. I would like to thank Shawn Heacock and Kaitlyn Dykes of Cape Henlopen State Park for answering my many questions. I would also like to thank Randy L. Goss of the Delaware Public Archives, Michael DiPaolo of the Lewes Historical Society, Nancy Alexander of the Rehoboth Historical Society, George Ward and Dr. Gary Wray of the Fort Miles Association and Roger Theil, who provided guidance on the Civil Air Patrol. Many individuals shared memories of the war; and I would like to particularly thank Joan Marshall Thompson, Grace Wolfe, Ron Dodd, Jack Warrington and Louise Smarrelli. Hazel D. Brittingham, the dean of Lewes historians, shared her wartime experiences and pointed me in the right direction to her extensive files at the Lewes Historical Society.

I would also like to thank my son, Tom, and his wife, Karla, for their support and technical assistance. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Madelyn, for her constant editorial advice and support. She read every word in this book numerous times and spent countless hours correcting my spelling, punctuation and grammar. Without her help and support, this book would not have been possible.

Chapter 1

WAR CLOUDS ON THE COAST

TO GIVE BATTLE TO THE HUN

The United States had been fighting World War I (the War to End All Wars) for over a year on June 2, 1918, when sixteen men and two women—fatigued, frightened and half alive—shuffled their way along the pier to the firm ground of Cape Henlopen. These eighteen weary people were the survivors of an attack by a German submarine on a passenger ship off the American East Coast. Four years earlier, World War I had begun in Europe, and the United States was determined to remain neutral. The sinking of the Lusitania off the coast of Great Britain, German submarine warfare and other factors convinced America in 1917 to send its boys over there. In 1918, the Germans responded by sending its U-boats over here. The U-151, a 213-foot-long German submarine with a bulbous hull that was originally designed as a cargo-carrier, carried two deck guns, eighteen torpedoes, a supply of deadly mines (as big as an oversized beach ball packed with two hundred pounds of explosives) and enough fuel to easily make a transatlantic voyage. In the middle of April, the U-151 left the city of Kiel on Germany’s Baltic coast, arriving along the mid-Atlantic coast one month later. After deploying mines near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay and off Cape Henlopen, the U-151 went gunning for American ships.

On the evening of June 2, 1918, the German sub U-151 spotted the American passenger ship Carolina fifty miles east of Cape Henlopen. Coming to the surface, the sub fired five shots over the bow and stern of the Carolina, which slowed to a stop. As with the other vessels the U-boat had already sunk or damaged, the German orders were brief and precise: fill the lifeboats with everyone aboard and leave the ship in twenty minutes. When the last of the lifeboats, carrying over three hundred passengers and crew, was clear of the liner, the Germans fired seven shells from the submarine’s deck gun into the Carolina, which slowly began to sink, going down bow first. The German crew lined the deck of the sub and waved a fond farewell as the passenger ship slid beneath the waves. After the submarine sailed away, the survivors were adrift in open boats on the calm ocean more than fifty miles from the mid-Atlantic coast.

A captured German submarine with a round mine near the canning tower. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

People in an open boat at sea faced two immediate dangers: hypothermia and capsizing. A fully clothed person pitched into the ocean by an overturned boat might drown, or if he was able to reboard the boat, the drenched person could be susceptible to hypothermia—the deadly loss of body heat—which can be accelerated by moisture. In extreme cases, hypothermia can cause death in less than an hour. In June, however, the weather and water were warm, the ocean was calm and the lifeboats were in the busy coastal sea lanes. One boat from the Carolina capsized, and sixteen people were lost. Another boat reached shore at Atlantic City; most of the other survivors were picked up by the steamship Mexico. The Appleby, a British steamer, picked up the sixteen men and two women who landed in Lewes.

With news of the attacks off the coast spreading quickly, all outgoing vessels were stopped from leaving Delaware Bay, but two oil tankers, the Herbert L. Pratt and the Arco, were cruising northward between Rehoboth Beach and Lewes. The Pratt was bound for Philadelphia with a load of Mexican crude oil; the Arco was sailing nearby, not fully loaded and riding high in the water. Early summer vacationers at Rehoboth could easily see the two ships, which were only two or three miles off the coast when an explosion lifted the Pratt as if it were bumping over a sandbar. As the bow of the Pratt filled with water, Captain H.H. Bennett steered for the safety of the Breakwater at Lewes, but after fifteen minutes, the engines stopped running. Believing that his ship was sinking, Bennett ordered the men out of the engine rooms and sent all hands into the lifeboats to be picked up by nearby ships.

A short time later, the sailors landed at Lewes, and Captain Bennett reported, "I saw the wake of what appeared to be a submarine approximately 1,000 feet from starboard. This wake, I should say, was about 2 miles from where my vessel, the Herbert L. Pratt, was struck. I do not suppose the time or duration of this wake lasted more than a minute."

The report of a submarine caused consternation among the sailors of the US Navy patrol boats and the captain of the tanker Arco. In the best tradition of jingoistic journalism, the New York Times reported:

The Herbert L. Pratt after being hit by a German mine. Courtesy of the Naval History and Heritage Command.

But the captain of the Arco did not agree with the pirate, and headed under full steam for the Delaware Breakwater, inside which he found safety, and at sundown was well on his way to Philadelphia. He ran a gauntlet of shellfire, but managed to keep out of range till well inside the barrier, where the submarine would not follow.

The gauntlet of shellfire was imaginary and did not exist, but the report that a German U-boat was off Cape Henlopen sent a small flotilla of patrol boats scurrying in pursuit of the phantom submarine. The New York Times breathlessly reported:

When they had reached a point seven miles off the coast they began firing violently, and it was believed by seafaring men here that they had picked up the trail of one of the U-boats. The firing continued until the scout ships went over the horizon.…Tonight the waters surrounding the southern end of New Jersey and the Delaware shore are swarming with chasers to give battle to the Hun.

The firing of the patrol boats rattled windows in Lewes but failed to hit any enemy submarines. At the time of the explosion, it was believed that the Herbert L. Pratt had been hit by a torpedo, but the damage was done by a submerged mine, which had been planted by the U-115 days earlier. The enemy vessel was long gone by the time the waters off Cape Henlopen were swarming with patrol boats to give battle to the Hun.

The U-151 was not the only German submarine to prowl the waters of the Delaware coast. In August 1918, the U-117 arrived off Fenwick Island, where the crew planted a field of deadly mines and headed back to Germany. Several weeks later, as the vacation season was coming to a close, the 456-foot-long battleship Minnesota arrived off Fenwick Island when the deadlock of World War I appeared to be breaking. The exhausted German army was near collapse, much of German navy was bottled up in European ports by the Allies and some were predicting that the fighting would be over in a matter of weeks. With a clear horizon and the war winding down, the Minnesota blithely sailed along the Delaware coast into the minefield laid by submarine U-117.

The peaceful cruise of the Minnesota was abruptly interrupted when a thundering explosion blew a large hole in the ship’s hull, sending the sea flooding into the battlewagon. The Minnesota was severely damaged, but prompt action by the crew enabled the ship to limp back to Philadelphia. Several days after the Minnesota had been damaged by one of U-117’s mines, the cargo ship Saetia was sailing off Fenwick Island when a devastating explosion ripped through the vessel. The Saetia filled with water as the crew raced to launch the lifeboats. It quickly disappeared beneath the waves, but the ship’s sailors were rescued by the Coast Guard. The landing of the Carolina survivors at Lewes, the sinking of the Saetia and the damage to the Minnesota were demonstrations of the destructive power and transatlantic range of German submarines that would only improve during the next twenty years, when there would be another wartime opportunity for the Delaware coast "to give battle to