Dead Men Tell a Tale

Seamen, dead and alive, in lifeboats adrift from Bermuda to Halifax, told the U.S. last week that all was not well off the North American coastline. Near Bermuda a U.S. patrol plane pancaked on the ocean, rescued nine Britons whose tanker was sunk by a German U-boat off New York. A South American steamer spotted a lifeboat half-filled with water and dead sailors, but had to leave them when a periscope broke water near by. Off Nova Scotia, 20 men of the 48-man crew of a torpedoed tanker were picked up. Three semiconscious survivors of the Standard Oil tanker W. L. Steed were safe in an Atlantic port, but 35 other crew members were missing.

The stories the rescued men had to tell, of grim courage and almost intolerable hardships, were not pretty. Neither was the fact that the W. L. Steed was the 16th merchant ship (including nine oil tankers) sunk off the U.S. east coast since the U.S. went to war.

In World War I, during the all-out sub campaign from spring into the fall of 1918, 91 ships were destroyed by U-boats in North American waters, with 368 lives. The gross tonnage was 197,761 tons, including that of eleven ships lost through collisions or other mishaps.*

Since the World War II sub campaign began, 15 ships, besides the 16 sunk in U.S. waters and the three off Aruba, have gone down off Canada. The total showed plainly that, in a week already black enough for the Allies, the Axis was smashing at the U.S. as dangerously on the Atlantic seaboard as in the Pacific. U-boats have accounted (by unofficial reckoning) for at least as much offshore tonnage as was lost during World War I. Approximately twice as many seamen have been killed or listed as missing; and the subs have done it in only one month.

* Totals vary, including that of Our Navy at War by Josephus Daniels, which reports 100 vessels of all nationalities sunk in U.S. waters.

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