The Bucket Brigade

On 1 April 1942 the command of the Eastern Sea Frontier, responsible for protecting shipping off the Atlantic coast of the United States, introduced a makeshift system for safeguarding merchant ships which the sailors called the Bucket Brigade. The name recalled a line of people passing buckets from hand to hand to put out a fire: ships no longer sailed alone along the whole length of the coast, but covered short stretches by day, under whatever escort could be scraped together, and sheltered for the night in protected anchorages.

It was a solution born of necessity. Since the middle of January, when Operation Drumbeat (Paukenschlag) began, German submarines had been sinking ships off the east coast of America almost unhindered, and the US Navy had nothing with which to organise proper convoys.

A coast without escorts

The Eastern Sea Frontier, created on 6 February 1942 out of the former North Atlantic Naval Coastal Frontier, was commanded by Rear Admiral Adolphus Andrews, who was also commandant of the Third Naval District in New York. In the spring of 1942 he had mostly small craft at his disposal: Coast Guard cutters, armed yachts, submarine chasers, and a few old gunboats and minesweepers. He was given few destroyers, and only for short periods, because the fleets needed them to cover transatlantic convoys, troop transports and the carrier task forces in the Pacific.

This shortage is often linked to the destroyers-for-bases deal of September 1940. The connection needs to be qualified, however. The fifty ships handed over to Britain at that time were old First World War destroyers taken out of reserve, and their absence was indeed felt. But the main causes lay elsewhere: before the war the United States had built almost no small escort vessels, because the navy was preparing above all for a great fleet war against Japan, and after Pearl Harbor every modern destroyer was needed in two oceans at once. Moreover, sister ships of the “transferred” vessels that had remained in American service were in the spring of 1942 serving precisely off the east coast.

Overall responsibility lay with the Commander-in-Chief, United States Fleet, Admiral Ernest King. For the first few months he rejected the idea of coastal convoys, believing that a convoy without a strong escort merely gathered targets in one place and that scarce forces were better spread out to patrol the shipping lanes. The British, who had learnt in 1939–1941 that even a weakly protected convoy was safer than ships sailing alone, tried to persuade him otherwise. To help their ally, in February and March the Admiralty lent the Americans 24 anti-submarine trawlers with British crews, and also handed several corvettes over to the US Navy. By the beginning of April the trawlers were already operating off Virginia and North Carolina.

How the “bucket brigade” worked

The essence of the system was that ships stopped sailing at night, when the U-boats – which by day lay on the bottom or lurked submerged well out from the shore – surfaced and attacked against the lights of the coastal towns. By day the ships moved in groups from one place of refuge to the next, keeping to the shallow inshore waters, under the cover of whatever patrol vessels and aircraft were available. Before dusk they put into anchorages such as Chesapeake Bay or the bight behind Cape Lookout in North Carolina, and set off again in the morning. The most dangerous stretch, around Cape Hatteras, they tried to pass in a single day.

Many accounts speak of anchorages “protected by nets”. That was the intention, but in April 1942 the plan was only just coming into effect. The Eastern Sea Frontier war diary for that month mentions a project for six anchorages along the coast, from the Straits of Florida to New York, protected by minefields and anti-torpedo nets, so that a ship would have somewhere to shelter for every night of its voyage. The minefields required some 14,000 mines, and arrangements over them were still being worked out throughout April. Until they were laid, the anchorages at Lookout and in the Chesapeake were guarded by vessels with hydrophones, depth charges and guns. Priority was given to Hatteras and Cape Fear, and the mine and net defences were put in place over the following weeks.

It was thus a makeshift system, a “half-convoy”, rather than a true convoy escorted along the whole route. At the same time preparations went ahead for a proper convoy system: on 3 April King ordered that it should begin on 15 May. From its meagre forces – according to the war diary, nine destroyers, five corvettes, nine submarine chasers, two gunboats and ten trawlers – the Eastern Sea Frontier command put together five escort groups, keeping a dozen or so smaller vessels in reserve.

April on the coast

The first weeks brought no breakthrough. According to the Eastern Sea Frontier war diary, 24 ships totalling more than 138,000 gross register tons were sunk in its waters in April – almost as many as in March. The loss of tankers was particularly severe: the Petroleum Industry War Council warned that if sinkings continued at this rate, a large part of the American tanker fleet would be lost, and on 16 April the sailing of tankers to east coast ports was suspended for a time.

In the second half of the month, however, the situation began to change. On 14 April the destroyer USS Roper sank the submarine U-85 off the Outer Banks, the first U-boat destroyed by an American warship in US coastal waters, and from 18 April a dim-out was ordered along the coast, which until then had been lit up as in peacetime. Ships keeping to the shallows by day, with an escort and aircraft overhead, were becoming a harder target, and U-boat commanders reported ever stronger defences.

Dönitz moves his boats south

The commander of the German U-boat arm, Karl Dönitz, an admiral since March 1942, had no intention of testing the effectiveness of the new American measures. He followed the principle of the “tonnage war”: what mattered was to sink as many ships as possible at the lowest possible risk, wherever that might be. As soon as the defences in one area grew stronger, he moved his boats to where they were weaker. His submarines had been operating in the Caribbean since February, and from April the Type XIV supply submarines, the so-called “milch cows”, allowed smaller boats to remain longer in distant waters.

Within a few weeks the weight of the campaign therefore shifted from the east coast to the area of the Gulf Sea Frontier, which covered the Straits of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico, and to the Caribbean Sea. At the beginning of May U-507 and U-506 entered the Gulf of Mexico. The approaches to the mouths of the Mississippi proved especially dangerous, as the routes of tankers from Texas and Louisiana and of ships bound for New Orleans converged there. On 12 May U-507 sank the large tanker Virginia there, and between 10 and 20 May U-506 sent several ships to the bottom, mostly tankers, in the waters west of the delta.

Some sources state that more ships were sunk in the Gulf of Mexico in May than along the entire east coast. This matches the picture given in the American official history by Samuel Eliot Morison, according to which May 1942 was the worst month of the whole war in the Gulf, while losses in the waters of the Eastern Sea Frontier fell markedly. The exact numbers of ships sunk differ from one study to another. Broader tallies speak of more than a hundred ships sunk in May 1942 in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean combined. The figures depend on how the authors draw the boundaries of the areas, but the direction of change is beyond doubt: the U-boats had not been defeated, they had simply moved to where the defences were weakest.

Place in the war

The Bucket Brigade was an intermediate step between the helplessness of the first months and a proper convoy system. On 14 May 1942 the first American coastal convoy left Hampton Roads for Key West, and in the summer the convoy system was extended to the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, forming a network of interlocking routes. As escorts, patrol aircraft and experience accumulated, losses fell in one area after another, and each time Dönitz moved his boats further on. In July he withdrew the last U-boats from the east coast of the United States and turned his attention once again to the convoys in mid-ocean.

The spring of 1942 was the darkest period of the Battle of the Atlantic for American shipping. Makeshift measures such as the “bucket brigade”, the dim-out of the coast and patrols by civilian aircraft made it possible to hold on until the United States Navy had built an escort fleet and taken to heart the lesson the British had already learnt in 1939–1941: that the most effective defence against submarines is the convoy.