Operation Drumbeat

During World War II, my father, Olan L. Jones, served in the Coast Guard on Petit Bois Island off the Mississippi Gulf Coast. One of his duties was going out on mounted beach patrols to guard against German submarines landing spies and saboteurs on the beach. He always remembered the old Civil War-era McClellan saddles they used, and the flotsam on the beach that probably came from ships the U-boats had sunk.

Pop’s patrols were necessary because just weeks after Adolph Hitler declared war on the U.S. in December 1941, Nazi submarines headed to American waters in what was called Operation Drumbeat. There were no blackout orders at the time, so U-boat commanders easily located merchant ships backlit by the lights of large coastal cities. To make matters worse, the Navy had not yet implemented the convoy system. So, vessels sailed alone with no protection

The Germans found the hunting so easy along the Atlantic seaboard and in the Gulf of Mexico that they dubbed the first half of 1942 as the “American Shooting Season.” More than one hundred Allied vessels were sunk during the first three months of Operation Drumbeat. Many sank within sight of land, but most Americans were unaware of the U-boat slaughter because military censors buried the news to avoid panic.

While most of the German submarines operated along the Atlantic coast, twenty-three headed into the Gulf of Mexico and sank fifty-six Allied vessels there. 

Sometimes, the U-boats put men ashore. Saboteur teams were captured in New York and Florida, and rumors swirled in Alabama of German submariners coming ashore at night to visit American women. It was my father’s job to prevent such landings.

One of the Gulf’s U-boat victims was the Alcoa Puritan, a freighter heading from Trinidad to Mobile with fifty-four passengers and crew aboard. On the morning of May 6, 1942, disaster struck when it was just fifteen miles from the mouth of the Mississippi River.

The U-506 suddenly surfaced and opened fire with its deck gun. The Alcoa Puritan was badly damaged and there was no hope of escape, so the captain gave the order to abandon ship. Seven of the passengers must have had a feeling of déjà vu because five weeks earlier they had been crewmen on another ship that had been sunk by a U-boat.

Once the freighter was abandoned, the U-boat sank it with one torpedo. Instead of disappearing beneath the waves, however, the German commander approached the lifeboats and distributed water, bread and cigarettes to the survivors. Then, as he departed, he waved and cried out in English, “Sorry we can’t help you, hope you get ashore!”

The submarine disappeared, only to sink the merchant ship Ontario a few hours later. It was the U-506’s fifth victim in ten days.

Fortunately for the people onboard the Alcoa Puritan, a patrolling plane spotted debris from the sunken ship and notified a Coast Guard cutter that rescued them. None of the passengers and crew were lost.

Two months later, the crew of the tanker Benjamin Brewster was not so lucky. A U-boat sank it just two and a half miles from Grand Isle, Louisiana, and twenty-five crewmen were killed. Some of the others survived by rowing their lifeboats to the Grand Isle beach.

Of the twenty-three U-boats operating in the Gulf, only one was lost, and its sinking remained a mystery for fifty-nine years.

In July 1942, Lt. Cmdr. Herbert G. Claudius, commander of the sub chaser PC-566, was ordered to escort the freighter Robert E. Lee even though he and his crew had not yet been trained in anti-submarine warfare. 

On July 30, when the Robert E. Lee was fifty miles southeast east of New Orleans, the U-166 fired one torpedo into the side of the freighter and it sank within fifteen minutes. Fifteen of the 283 people onboard were killed.

Claudius saw the submarine’s periscope before it submerged and immediately attacked with depth charges. When a large sheen of fuel oil broke the surface, Claudius counted it as a kill and disengaged to pick up the Robert E. Lee’s survivors.

Instead of congratulating Claudius, however, a naval investigative board rejected his claim of victory and credited an airplane for later sinking the submarine 130 miles away. The Navy even reprimanded Claudius for using poor tactics by having his depth charges set too deep, relieved him of command and sent him to an anti-submarine warfare school.

There the matter lay until 2001 when a crew surveying for an underwater pipeline found the wrecks of the Robert E. Lee and U-166 lying just one mile apart in 5,000 feet of water. The surveying crew’s discovery conclusively proved that Commander Claudius and his crew did, indeed, sink the U-166.

In 2014, the Navy recognized its error and posthumously awarded Claudius the Legion of Merit with Combat V.

Dr. Terry L. Jones is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. For an autographed copy of “Louisiana Pastimes,” a collection of the author’s stories, send $25 to Terry L. Jones, P.O Box 1581, West Monroe, LA 71294.