The Burning Shore (28 page)

Of particular interest to the American intelligence officers were the saboteur landing missions carried out by the two U-boats during the new-moon period in mid-June. The Abwehr mission to infiltrate the eight saboteurs into the United States to destroy critical economic targets such as manufacturing plants, transportation nodes, and other sites, was already a failure. Within a day of landing at Amagansett on the night of June 12–13, George Dasch and Ernst Berger, two of the four agents landed from U-202, decided to betray the mission and turn themselves in to the FBI. Dasch contacted the FBI several days later, and by Saturday, June 27, the bureau had arrested all eight
infiltrators and seized their two caches of explosives at Amagansett, Long Island, and Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. However, the FBI and Naval Intelligence were desperate to confirm that no other saboteur teams were running free.

American intelligence officials at that time remained suspicious that a third U-boat might have carried a pair of German naval agents who were to be landed in the vicinity of New York or New Jersey, presumably to report on the arrival and departure of merchant shipping. One of the captured saboteurs told his interrogators that the third U-boat with the two-man team had left Lorient during the same two-day period of May 26–28 as had U-202 and U-584. The Americans strongly suspected that U-701 had done this. Unfortunately, in his initial interrogation sessions, Degen had refused to divulge the date U-701 had left for American waters, as part of his tactic to prevent his captors from learning of his mine-laying operation off Virginia Beach.

After several weeks of veiled threats from interrogators that he might face a special tribunal and the death penalty on charges of aiding the saboteurs, Degen finally admitted that U-701 had left Lorient on May 19, but stressed that his operational area had been restricted to the mid-Atlantic littoral. In a conversation with a fellow POW secretly recorded by Naval Intelligence agents in early August 1942, Degen confessed to Oberleutnant zur See Oskar Bernhard, a survivor from U-352, that he had “no wish to sit in an electric chair” as had six of the eight captured saboteurs executed just the previous week in Washington, DC. A Naval Intelligence report on the two prisoners’ conversation noted, “Degen seems to be trying to justify himself before Bernhard for the information he has given the interrogators. Seems to be a trifle worried.”
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Naval Intelligence agents were equally interested in the U-boat Force’s mine-laying operations. They were well aware by the time of Degen’s rescue that Admiral Karl Dönitz had dispatched at least two boats with mines to the Chesapeake Bay and the mouth of Delaware Bay. U-87’s attempt at the entrance to Massachusetts Bay was unsuccessful and thus had not been detected.

Degen knew vaguely about the Abwehr agent infiltration but provided little useful information to the Americans. And he and his six crewmen completely stonewalled the US Navy about their mining mission. The final Office of Naval Intelligence report on U-701 erroneously concluded that the U-boat had proceeded straight to Cape Hatteras on June 12 to hunt Allied shipping with its torpedoes. Degen’s role in mining the Thimble Shoal Channel would not be known for another forty years.
²

Wearing POW dungarees, Degen (at far right) and the six other survivors from U-701 prepare to leave Norfolk for a secure confinement facility in Massachusetts after recovering from their ordeal in the Atlantic. US NAVY PHOTOGRAPH.

A
FTER
U-701
DID NOT ANSWER
requests for situation reports on July 12 and 13, Admiral Dönitz declared the U-boat to be presumed lost at sea. Subsequently, U-boat Force Headquarters learned from a letter mailed by a POW from U-352 that an
aerial attack had sunk U-701 and that Degen and six crewmen had survived.

Eight days after the U-701’s loss, BdU dispatched two more U-boats to attack shipping off the Outer Banks. One was U-402, a veteran Type VIIC boat commanded by thirty-one-year-old Kapitänleutnant Siegfried von Forstner. During his first three patrols commanding U-402, von Forstner sank three ships totaling 11,135 gross registered tons and damaged a fourth for another 11,951 gross tons. Also ordered to Cape Hatteras was the Type VIIC U-576, commanded by a classmate of Degen’s, twenty-nine-year-old Kapitänleutnant Hans-Dieter Heinicke. On four previous patrols, Heinicke and his crew had sunk three Allied merchant ships totaling 13,387 gross registered tons. Patrolling independently from Cape Lookout to north of Cape Hatteras, the two U-boats found heavily defended coastal convoys and saturation coverage by land-based air patrols. The solitary targets that had made the “happy time” so exceptional were now a distant memory.

The convoy system that American planners had been so slow to adopt was proving its worth. In the early morning hours of Saturday, July 11, Heinicke sighted northbound Convoy KN117, consisting of fourteen merchant ships totaling 89,949 gross tons. Escorting the formation were two destroyers, a coast guard 165-foot patrol vessel and two smaller PC craft. Unable to close for attack, Heinicke broke off the chase.

Both U-402 and U-576 came under aerial attack during the next two days. Eastern Sea Frontier logs show that during this time, land-based coast guard, army, and navy aircraft made four separate air attacks against sighted U-boats. Von Forstner sent a
message to BdU on July 14 to report heavy damage and a battery explosion as a result of one attack and that he was aborting his patrol. Heinicke sent a similar message. Only one of them would make it back to France.

On Wednesday, July 15, U-576 was south-southeast of Cape Hatteras when Heinicke’s lookouts spotted southbound Convoy KS520. This formation consisted of eighteen merchant ships totaling 107,840 gross tons en route to Key West and an escort of five warships, including the destroyers
USS Ellis
and
USS McCormick
, and four smaller vessels. At 1600 hours Eastern War Time, Heinicke closed and fired a spread of four torpedoes at the convoy. One struck and damaged the 8,310-ton American freighter
Chilore
, a second hit and damaged the 11,147-ton Panamanian tanker
J. A. Mowinckel
, and a third sank the 2,063-ton Nicaraguan freighter
Bluefields
. Escorted by the corvette
USS Spry
, the captains of the
Chilore
and
J. A. Mowinckel
sought to beach their damaged ships in shallow water near Cape Hatteras but instead blundered into the navy’s defensive minefield. Both were extensively damaged, and the
Chilore
later sank while being towed to Norfolk.

Heinicke did not have long to celebrate. Reaction from the convoy’s defenders was swift and deadly. U-576, most likely as a result of earlier damage, became destabilized after firing the torpedoes and broached the surface in the middle of the convoy. Naval Armed Guard gunners on the American freighter
Unicoi
opened up with their 5-inch gun, and two navy OS2U-3 Kingfisher aircraft dropped a pair of Mark XVII depth charges that straddled the U-boat. As with U-701, the depth charges ripped open U-576’s pressure hull, and it quickly sank. Unlike the men
of U-701, Heinicke and his crew were out in several thousand feet of water, and none of them escaped.

Four days later, on July 19, Admiral Dönitz—unaware that U-576 had been destroyed—recorded in his command war diary,

In the sea area off Hatteras successes have dropped considerably. This is due to a drop in the traffic (formation of convoys) and increased defense measures. . . . Of the boats stationed there in the recent period only two, U-754 and U-701, have had successes. On the other hand U-701 and U-215 have apparently been lost, and U-402 and U-576 badly damaged by depth charges or bombs. This state of things is not justified by the amount of success achieved. The two remaining boats (U-754 and U-458) will therefore be removed.

For six long months, the U-boats had waged a ruthless campaign against Allied shipping in American coastal waters. Re-focusing their efforts from the central North Atlantic to the entire North American East Coast, the U-boats later expanded the campaign to the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico as well. From mid-January to late June, the U-boats rampaged practically unopposed along the East Coast, sinking 226 Allied merchant ships totaling 1,251,650 gross registered tons.

While no part of the Atlantic seaboard escaped the violence, the shallow waters off the North Carolina Outer Banks experienced the full fury of the onslaught. Within one hundred nautical miles of Cape Hatteras, twenty-one U-boats carried out twenty-two patrols from their bases in occupied France between mid-January and mid-July. For seventeen weeks of the twenty-
six-week period after the Type IXB U-123 moved down from the New York area on January 19 to hunt Allied merchantmen off the coast of the Outer Banks, there was at least one U-boat in the vicinity—and for seven of those weeks, there were anywhere between two and four U-boats on patrol in the area.

The U-boats had concentrated their efforts along the Outer Banks for one particular reason: until late June 1942, it was a relatively safe place to operate. By July 1942, that was no longer the case. Admiral Dönitz understood as much; his July 19 redeployment order signaled that the deadly and vicious U-boat campaign along the US East Coast was finally over. The Battle of the Atlantic, however, was not.
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A
FTER TEN WEEKS OF PATROL MISSIONS
from Cherry Point, the 396th Medium Bombardment Squadron returned to California on August 22, 1942. Another bombing squadron took its place carrying out maritime patrols. Although Lieutenant Harry Kane and his flight crew would not participate in the later phases of the Battle of the Atlantic, no end was in sight for that battle or the war itself. The squadron would remain in Sacramento for another three months and then be transferred to Naval Air Station Alameda once more to conduct maritime patrol missions off the West Coast. Throughout the period, small groups of officers and enlisted men transferred out to form cadres for newly created squadrons, just as the first men to join the 396th had done in January 1941.

Harry Kane returned to the West Coast with more than the distinction of being the first US Army Air Forces pilot to sink a
German U-boat, a feat for which he and his crewmen received the Distinguished Flying Cross. Kane had acquired something even more precious during his unit’s time at Cherry Point. Just four days after arriving in North Carolina, Kane and a squadron mate, Lieutenant Ed Goray, had decided to hitch a ride to Atlantic Beach a dozen miles from the base. After a half day at the beach, they caught a bus up to Morehead City. As they strolled down the main street, a woman approached and introduced herself as the mother of a USAAF flier. It turned out that Kane and her son had served together on the West Coast. “She said, ‘Well, you two boys, I’d like you to meet some young girls here in town,’” Kane recalled later. “And she said, ‘I know quite well one of them is having a house party.’” As he entered the summerhouse of Mr. and Mrs. Walter D. LaRoque, Kane eyed a young woman walking down the stairs. She was Marguerite LaRoque, their daughter. Kane turned to his friend and said, “That’s the girl I’m going to marry.”

Kane did not allow his continuing wartime responsibilities to get in the way of his romance. In the spring of 1943, Kane and the rest of “A Flight” of the 396th transferred to Alaska, where as a newly promoted captain, he flew maritime patrols along the Aleutians for the next year. In mid-1944, Kane transferred to a USAAF flying school in Oklahoma, finishing out his war service as an instructor pilot. By then, Harry and Marguerite had been wed.
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H
ORST
D
EGEN AND THE OTHER SIX
survivors of U-701 were also on the move in the fall of 1942. When their formal interrogations ended that September, they were transferred to several
temporary POW camps. Degen spent two years at Camp Blanding, about thirty miles southwest of Jacksonville, Florida, before he and other POWs were transferred to Camp Papago Park in eastern Phoenix, Arizona. At the time of their rescue, only thirty-three other U-boat crewmen were in captivity, all of them survivors of U-352, which had been sunk on May 9. Nevertheless, the prisoner population at Papago Park would grow to its capacity of 2,500 as the war progressed and as more and more German army POWs from Western Europe were transferred to American soil. Indeed, Papago Park was among the first of what would become a network of 175 POW camps that ultimately held 425,000 German prisoners of war, mostly from the German army.

Arriving at Camp Blanding in late 1942, Degen and his fellow survivors from U-701 found conditions at the camp luxurious compared with day-to-day life on a U-boat. The conditions were the same in Arizona. Inmates were not required to work, the camp had a theater where the guards showed movies twice a week, a camp choir practiced, and the prisoners were allowed to publish a camp newspaper. At Papago Park, Degen’s knowledge of English led US Army officials to appoint him as a trustee who worked in the camp’s administrative office. An army officer would later praise Degen as “one of our most trusted and helpful prisoners of war.” Degen was able to make contact with the San Diego family whose dinner guest he had been as a naval cadet in 1934. Writing Hamilton and Elsa Marston shortly after his transfer to the Arizona camp in August 1944, Degen explained that while life as a POW was “not so very pleasant,” he had come to accept his situation and looked forward to returning to Germany when the war ended. He did not mention one cause
for dismay that haunted him throughout his four years as a POW: because American policy was to segregate officers and enlisted men, Degen never saw the other six U-701 survivors until after their repatriation to Germany in the summer of 1946.
⁵