Killing Shore: The True Story of Hitler’s U-Boats Off the New Jersey Coast
395 pages
Captain Andrew Welch FNI Royal Navy Retired
This book covers a brief part of the Second World War that I have never seen emphasised as an important part of the Battle of the Atlantic, and I feel, should be much better known. The 130 miles of New Jersey coast (New York south to Chesapeake Bay) saw some of the most concentrated shipping losses of the war as a result of sinking by German submarines.[1] The author, a USMC veteran and wreck diver, has conducted extensive research in British and American archives, but also in the log books of individual U-boats and Dӧnitz’s HQ staff. The end result, based around the individual stories of 10 merchant ships, mainly tankers, and one warship, the USS Jacob Jones, is a well-woven mix of the personal, the tactical and the strategic.
The first U-boat was off the brightly lit American coast on 14th Jan 1942 – just 37 days after Pearl Harbor. So began the U-boats’ second ‘Happy Time’ when 609 Allied ships, totalling 3.1 million tons, were sunk for the loss of only 22 U-boats.[2] As an example, in April 1942, 75% of the tankers leaving ports in Texas and Louisiana were being sunk before they joined the trans-Atlantic convoys. There were several reasons for this, well-rehearsed by the author. The two major ones being the political unwillingness to institute a blackout on shore, meaning that the U-boats’ targets were well silhouetted and the USN’s unpreparedness for war, but more specifically the anti-submarine war. However, even when blackouts started and more, better trained escorts were available, COMINCH, Admiral Ernest King’s deeply rooted dislike of the British meant that the, by then, well-proven convoy defence tactics advised by the RN were disregarded. Adm. King had been seconded to the Grand Fleet in WWI and he had, undoubtedly, been patronised as a ‘colonial non-combatant.’[3] He was known to hold a grudge fiercely and many US and Allied merchant seamen had to die because of it.
I thought that this was going to another of those books puffing up the American side of WWII. It most certainly isn’t. K A Nelson tells an interesting story, illuminating a theatre of the North Atlantic campaign that has been comparatively neglected and he tells it well. Recommended.
[1] And, perhaps surprisingly, further south, in the Caribbean, by Italian submarines, who sank 16 ships in March 1942 alone.
[2] The U-boats’ first ‘Happy Time’ having been the period from July-October 1940, after the Fall of France, when the Allies were, very much, on the back foot and the U-boats had much easier access to the Atlantic.
[3] This was before the USA entered WWI.
