AUXILIARY WW2 RESCUES

Potrero del Llano 

Empire Mica

By Vinny Del Giudice

During World War Two, U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary patrols - augmenting cutters and shoreside lifesaving stations - rescued crews of merchant vessels torpedoed by U-boats off the Atlantic Coast.

In two notable responses, auxiliarists saved 22 crewmembers of the burning Mexican tanker Potrero del Llano off Port Everglades on May 14, 1942, according to the official report "U.S. Coast Guard at War, Volume XIX.".

Weeks later, on June 29, 1942, auxiliary vessels rescued 13 members of the sunken British tanker SS Empire Mica in a lifeboat off Florida.

During the first half of 1942, U-boats sank 240 Allied freighters, tankers and escorts off U.S. shores – a loss of 1.25 million gross registered tons, according to the Navy Times - and many merchant mariners died.

The coastal region from Canada to Jacksonville, Florida, out to 200 miles, was officially known as the Eastern Sea Frontier. The Gulf Sea Frontier included the Florida coast and Gulf of Mexico.

The treacherous waters off the Carolinas were informally dubbed "Torpedo Alley." U-boats sank 400 of ships there during the entire war, claiming 5,000 lives, according to Wikipedia.

The then remote coast off the lighthouse at Cape Canaveral, Florida, was a favorite Nazi hunting ground, and there was U-boat activity in the Gulf of Mexico, with the sinking of a passenger liner off Louisiana.

Ships silhouetted by coastal city lights made easy targets and military demands for blackouts met local resistance, especially in resort cities.     

According to the research paper "Bravo Zero: The Guard Auxiliary in World War II" by C. Kay Larson, what's believed to be the largest wartime rescue by the Coast Guard Auxiliary and Coast Guard Reserve occurred on July 8, 1942. The American tanker J. A. Moffett Jr. was torpedoed eight miles off the Florida Keys and 30 or more mariners were brought to shore in a crammed and overloaded boat.

The "Bravo Zero" research paper also notes that during a two-week period in the spring of 1942, the auxiliary rescued 151 survivors of U-boat attacks.

An auxiliary boat was also credited with saving the sole survivor of the sinking of the steam tanker W.D. Anderson. The crewman dove overboard from the burning ship's fantail near Jupiter Light, Florida, on Feb. 23, 1942.

To say U-boats were swarming the Atlantic coast was no exaggeration in the early days of the war. On the evening of Jan. 14, 1942, the commander of U-123 observed Manhattan’s illuminated skyline from an entrance to New York Harbor called the Lower Bay.

“I cannot describe the feeling with words, but it was unbelievably beautiful and great,” Captain Reinhard Hardegen wrote in a memoir. “I would have given away a kingdom for this moment if I had one. We were the first to be here, and for the first time in this war a German soldier looked upon the coast of the U.S.A.”

It was Hardegan who claimed the first pray of the German offensive against North America when on Jan. 11, 1942 U-123 sank the British freighter SS Cyclops south of Nova Scotia with the loss of more than 80 lives.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the U-boats "rattlesnakes of the sea."

To counter the U-boats, the U.S. Navy established the Tenth Fleet to gather intelligence and coordinate anti-submarine forces. The Tenth Fleet had no ships of its own - just desks, telephones and files at the old Navy Department building on Constitution Avenue in Washington, DC. And it was a success.

Of the 1,162 U-boats constructed for World War Two, 785 were destroyed and the remainder surrendered or scuttled, according to britannica.com. An estimated 28,000 U-boat crewmembers died. 

The U.S. Merchant Marine lost 8,651 men during the war, with one in 26 merchant mariners dying vs one in 114 members of combined U.S. naval forces, including the Coast Guard, according to Wikipedia.

W.D. Anderson crewman rescued by U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary boat in 1942.