The sinking of U-85

Shortly after midnight on 14 April 1942 the American destroyer USS Roper detected by radar, and sank, the German submarine U-85 off the coast of North Carolina, east of Nags Head. The U-boat’s entire crew of 46 were killed. After three months of Operation Drumbeat (Paukenschlag), during which German submarines had sunk dozens of ships off the East Coast of the United States, it was the US Navy’s first clear success in its own waters. Four days later, on 18 April, the military authorities at last ordered a dim-out of lights on the coast, whose glow had until then made the U-boats’ hunting easier.

It is often written that Roper was “the first American ship to sink a U-boat”. That is true, but it needs qualifying: she was the first US Navy warship to sink a German submarine. The first U-boats destroyed by American forces, however, had been sunk earlier by aircraft: Lockheed Hudson patrol aircraft of the American squadron VP-82, operating from Newfoundland, sent U-656 to the bottom south of Cape Race on 1 March 1942 and U-503 south-east of Newfoundland on 15 March. U-85, for its part, was the first U-boat destroyed in the coastal waters of the United States itself.

The destroyer and the submarine

Roper was an old Wickes-class destroyer, commissioned in 1919 – one of the so-called four-stackers, the same type as the fifty ships handed over to Britain in 1940 under the destroyers-for-bases deal. She was commanded by Lieutenant Commander Hamilton W. Howe. The ship had, however, something that many of the vessels then patrolling the coast lacked: radar and working sonar equipment.

U-85 was a Type VIIB (PL) boat, in service since June 1941. She had been commanded from the start by Oberleutnant zur See Eberhard Greger. The boat was not among the most successful: in four patrols she sank three ships of some 15,000 GRT in all, including the British Thistleglen from convoy SC-42 in September 1941. She set out on her fourth patrol to the American coast as part of the next wave of boats that Karl Dönitz was sending into American waters. On 10 April she sank the Norwegian freighter Chr. Knudsen.

A night chase off the Outer Banks

On the night of 13–14 April Roper was steaming south along the Outer Banks, in an area that since January had been called “Torpedo Alley”. According to the war diary of the Eastern Sea Frontier, at 12.06 a.m. the radar picked up a target at a range of about 2,700 yards (just under 2.5 kilometres), and almost simultaneously the sonar operator heard fast-turning propellers. The destroyer gave chase, increasing speed and keeping off the quarter of the boat she was pursuing so as not to expose herself to a shot from the stern torpedo tube.

U-85 tried to escape on the surface towards deeper water. At about 12.30 a.m., when the range had closed to a few hundred metres, she fired a torpedo from her stern tube; it passed alongside the destroyer. At about 12.45, from some 300 yards, Roper illuminated the target with a searchlight: the beam picked out a large submarine, still on the surface. Men running out on to the U-boat’s deck to man the gun were swept away by machine-gun fire, and a shell from the 76-millimetre gun hit the conning tower. Greger most likely then gave the order to abandon and scuttle the boat. U-85 began to sink, and her crew jumped into the water.

Depth charges over the survivors

This moment remains the most controversial to this day. According to Roper’s officers, between 35 and about 40 Germans were in the water. The destroyer did not stop to pick them up. She passed over the spot where the boat had gone down and dropped a pattern of eleven depth charges. The explosions killed all the survivors. Howe later explained that his sonar operator had reported a contact that might mean a second submarine, and that he could not risk his destroyer by stopping her in the dark among men in the water; the charges were also meant to make sure that U-85 really had gone to the bottom. The navy accepted this explanation, and Howe and his executive officer, Stanley C. Norton, were awarded the Navy Cross.

Later historians have judged the decision in different ways. Some recall that in those months U-boats were sinking ship after ship off the American coast, and that a destroyer lying stopped over a wreck at night would have been an easy target. Others point out that there was no second submarine anywhere near, and that dropping depth charges right beside defenceless men in the water condemned them to certain death. Roper waited until dawn and the arrival of aircraft before attempting any rescue; she dropped two more charges on a suspected contact. In the morning her crew recovered 29 bodies from the water. Several of the dead were wearing escape apparatus for leaving a sunken submarine.

A burial at Hampton

The bodies were taken to the base at Norfolk, where naval intelligence examined them. Among the dead men’s belongings were two diaries kept by crew members, even though this was forbidden on U-boats. On the evening of 15 April the 29 sailors from U-85 were buried in the national cemetery at Hampton, Virginia. The burial took place at night and in secret, but with military honours: the graves were dug by prisoners from nearby Fort Monroe, soldiers of the army carried the coffins, a Catholic and a Protestant chaplain prayed, three volleys were fired and Taps was sounded. For several weeks the navy did not announce the sinking of U-85 at all, and it reported the burial only in July, without giving the boat’s number or the names of the dead.

From 16 April navy divers, working first from the British trawler HMT Bedfordshire and then from the salvage ship Falcon, tried to get into the wreck, which lay at a depth of about 30 metres, and even to raise it. They hoped to recover an Enigma cipher machine and documents. Only some of the equipment was brought up, including an anti-aircraft gun and instruments from the bridge. The hull, damaged by the depth charges and opened up by the crew themselves, could not be sealed, and on 4 May the work was abandoned. The Enigma from U-85 was recovered only at the beginning of the 21st century, by private divers; it is on display in a museum at Hatteras. The wreck, about 18 miles east of Nags Head, is today a German war grave.

18 April: the coast dims

The second event linked with mid-April is the dimming of the coast. For the first three months of the campaign the East Coast of the United States had been lit up as in peacetime. In December 1941 the authorities had merely appealed to seaside towns to consider reducing their lighting, and the resorts, from Atlantic City to Miami, did not want to lose their holidaymakers. For U-boat commanders the glow of the towns was an ally: ships stood out sharply in silhouette against it, while a submarine surfaced on the seaward side remained invisible in the darkness. The US Navy’s official historian, Samuel Eliot Morison, later judged the failure to dim the lights one of the most reprehensible omissions of the period.

It is often stated that on 18 April the Eastern Sea Frontier imposed a blackout on the coast. In fact the decision was taken jointly by the commander of the Eastern Sea Frontier, Rear Admiral Adolphus Andrews, and the commander of the army’s Eastern Defense Command, Lieutenant General Hugh Drum, since the army was responsible for the defence of the land and the control of lighting. Nor was it a full blackout, but a dim-out: lights visible from the sea within a coastal strip were to be extinguished or screened, and the glow over seaside towns reduced. The regulations were clarified and tightened over the following weeks, and compliance long left much to be desired.

The relief this brought, however, was small. The dim-out deprived the U-boats of the background against which it was easiest to attack at night, but in April the nights were growing shorter, and German commanders increasingly attacked by day, submerged, using the periscope. The real change came only with the escort of shipping, first in the makeshift Bucket Brigade system introduced on 1 April, and then in regular convoys.

Place in the war

The sinking of U-85 did not alter the balance of the campaign: in April alone 24 ships were sunk in the waters of the Eastern Sea Frontier. It did show, however, that the U-boats off the American coast could not act with impunity, and that even an old destroyer with radar could hunt them down at night. Further successes followed in the weeks ahead: on 9 May the Coast Guard cutter Icarus sank U-352 off Cape Lookout, and in July an army aircraft destroyed U-701 off Hatteras. On 14 May the first American coastal convoy sailed from Hampton Roads, and losses off the East Coast quickly fell. Dönitz shifted the weight of his attacks to the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, and in July withdrew the last boats from the coast of the United States.

In the history of the Battle of the Atlantic the night of 13–14 April 1942 is remembered as the moment when the US Navy began to make good the losses of the first months of the war. The graves of the U-85 sailors at Hampton and the wreck off Nags Head are at the same time a reminder of the harshness of a war in which survivors on both sides often had no chance of rescue.