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In Shallow Water

A psycho sub commander, a plot to level New York, a beach awash in the blood of American sailors ... How close did the Nazis come to attacking the East Coast?

Part I: Day Of The Sea Wolf

April 23, 1945; 12:13 P.M.; Aboard The USS Eagle 56; Three Miles Off Cape Elizabeth, Maine

In the foaming swells of Casco Bay, the 200-foot American submarine chaser bobs underneath a noontime cloud cover, screeching gulls swarming overhead. These are the waning days of the war, and 62 exhausted sailors are doing their best to maintain routine. They’ve spent the morning towing a "pickle,” a target used to train fighter pilots. Planes from the mainland came barnstorming out of the sky trying to nail the bull’s-eye with bags of flour, which threw clouds of mock smoke up from the ocean surface. But it’s noon—gruel time. The Eagle 56 is drifting.

In his quarters below in the stern, machinist’s mate John Breeze, a 22-year-old from Seattle, is standing with his drinking buddy Oscar Davis. Just in from his morning shift in the engine room, Breeze’s sweaty body sticks to his jeans and white T-shirt. A black leather jacket hangs off his shoulders.

Davis points at a crossword puzzle he’s holding. "I need a four-letter word to describe the food we’re about to eat,” he jokes. A cackle ricochets off the steel walls. Throughout the room a dozen sailors are sleeping, reading, sipping coffee. In the familiar waters of Casco Bay, violence is a world away. Maine’s rocky coastline wraps around them like a mother’s arms.

In a flash—like a bolt of lightning surging from below—an explosion rips through the starboard side of the ship. The blast snaps the steel boat in two; a geyser of smoke and water shoots 300 feet into the sky. In the engine room where it hits, bodies are ripped open, the flesh scorched. Water rushes in, lifts corpses from the decks, and carries them out to sea.

In his quarters John Breeze lands on the floor in an awkward heap. He looks up and sees Oscar Davis and the others strewn about like bags of trash. Pillows, books, and newspapers litter the place. He staggers to his feet. Suddenly the world begins to turn on its side. The reality slaps Breeze in the face: The ship’s hull is filling with water. The Eagle is going down.

In the final days of World War II, the USS Eagle 56 sank to the ocean floor. It was the deadliest U.S. disaster in New England waters in the entire war. The Navy would classify the blast an accident due to a boiler explosion, a ruling that would stand for more than 50 years. But survivors and Navy brass knew better. The blast was actually the opening salvo in one of the strangest and most brutal sea battles of the war. One whose story has never fully been told. Until now.

There were compelling reasons why officials were not eager to publicize the events of April and May 1945: Not since the War of 1812 had a foreign force assaulted the continental U.S. so close to our own shores. It would not happen again until September 11.

Using piles of recently declassified top-secret documents and exhaustive interviews with surviving American sailors who took part in the battle, World War II German submariners, and hard-hat divers, Maxim has reconstructed the complete story for the first time.

12:17 P.M.; USS Eagle 56; Main Mess Hall

In the ship’s bowels, the electricity had failed. Men were panicking in darkness. Harold Petersen, a 23-year-old engineer from New York, sprinted into the mess hall and found the cook, Robert Coleman, standing at the base of the ladder that led up top. "I can’t swim!” Coleman screamed. Petersen looked at him in shock. "We’re in the Navy! We had to pass a test!” They headed up. No one would ever see Coleman again.

John Breeze and Oscar Davis hustled up behind them. When they reached the deck, the water was already ankle deep. Cordite burned their nostrils. Sailors without life vests were hurling themselves into the ocean, the surface littered with dead fish and human body parts.

Breeze looked down and saw Norris Jones in the water. Jones worked in the fire room. He was facedown, his snapped spine bulging nearly out of his skin. Breeze pushed the corpse away, but it floated back. "Look!” Davis screamed. "A sub!” Breeze turned and saw it 500 yards away. The conning tower had busted the surface, painted black with a stark emblem on it—a red horse trotting on a yellow shield. My God, he thought. A Nazi sub—right into Casco Bay!

Time was running out. They had to swim clear or they’d get sucked down with the ship. Breeze paused. He had checked the water temperature hours earlier—38 degrees, cold enough to kill a man if help wasn’t on the way. He surveyed the horizon and saw nothing but the vast sea and sky. Then he jumped.

Later That Day; F-21 — The Top-Secret Sub Tracking Room; Main Navy Building; Washington D.C.

At Navy headquarters, a converted munitions warehouse in the nation’s capital, Commander Kenneth Knowles sat at his desk studying the latest top-secret report from the wire. "Eagle 56 exploded and sunk from unknown cause,” it said. He read the last part over and over: "Possibly by U-boat.”

A 41-year-old workaholic, Knowles’ job was to track enemy subs so American ships could navigate the Atlantic. Victory depended on the delivery of supplies to Europe. Around him the war unfolded. Walls covered with maps, pins marking enemy positions, bits of string estimating course…Knowles wasn’t in the eye of the storm: He was the eye of the storm.

The commander looked at his map of the Atlantic seaboard, then back at the distress report. The map told a striking story. The coordinates of the Eagle 56 explosion were inside Casco Bay, mere miles from Portland—a city with 750,000 civilians. What the hell’s going on? he wondered. Everyone knew that the German surrender was imminent. So what was a Nazi U-boat doing three miles from American shores? Somebody had better have some answers. Knowles picked up the phone and started dialing.

12:21 P.M.; Treading Water In Casco Bay

Shivering and choking on oil, John Breeze held on to a four-by-four, but he felt his hands cramping. He was losing his grip. Next to him other survivors had gathered—machinist’s mate Oscar Davis, seaman Johnny Luttrell, machinist Harold Petersen, and engineering officer John Scagnelli. Scagnelli had a huge circular gash carved into his skull like a bloody halo.

Around the group lone heads pierced the surface. One by one they disappeared. I’m going to die, Breeze thought. He began to pray for the first time in his life. "Hey, look!” shouted Oscar Davis, pointing in the distance. "A ship! One of ours!” Breeze turned and saw a black plume rising into the sky. "You’re right!” he screamed. "It’s a tin can!”

Slowly, not one but two ships grew on the horizon. Just 16 minutes after the blast, the USS Selfridge and the USS Nantucket arrived. (Sailors aboard these ships saw the explosion from miles away.) Ropes came raining down. Breeze, Davis, Scagnelli, and Petersen were pulled up—members of the "Lucky 13” survivors. Forty-nine others weren’t so lucky.

Minutes later, at 12:48 P.M., as crewmen on deck were dumping whiskey down the survivors’ throats, the sonar operator aboard the Selfridge reported by intercom to the captain, Lieutenant Commander J.A. Boyd. "Sharp echo,” he announced, "1,125 yards to the northeast.” There was something down there. Something big made of metal. Jesus, Boyd thought. They might be staring down the barrel of a gun that fired two-ton bullets. Boyd ordered the attack. Sailors readied antisubmarine bombs for launch. The Selfridge steamed for the target.

12:48 P.M.; Aboard The German Sub U-853; Three Miles Off Cape Elizabeth, Maine

In the depths, concealed inside the ocean’s yolk, a 252-foot fuselage splintered the sea like a 747 without wings. It was a Type IXC/40 Nazi sub, caked in barnacles and mended bullet holes, the bow hot from the launch of a 24-foot torpedo. Spread throughout, 55 Germans manned their battle stations. Many were teenagers. All were volunteers in service to the Third Reich. In the control room, Commander Helmut Frömsdorf’s lanky body nearly scraped the ceiling. A blond 24-year-old from Breslau on his first command, Frömsdorf’s bearded face radiated the thrill of the kill. Beside him engineers twitched, crammed into the bathroom-size steel box.

In the sonar room, Erich Schaadt, 28—his ears covered by headphones—heard ships churning the brine above. "Propellers!” he yelled into the control room. Frömsdorf grabbed the intercom telephone. "Dive!” Men sprinted down the two-foot-wide pathway into forward compartments to make the bow heavier for the descent. Mates spun wheels, filling the ballast tanks. Seamen hit the electric engines. Within 35 seconds, the sub was hurtling into the abyss.

Through his headphones Schaadt heard depth charges splashing into the ocean 150 feet above. Seconds later the first bomb exploded in the distance. The hull quaked. Sailors’ legs buckled. Four blasts followed at five-second intervals. Then, silence.

Cramped in the tiny compartments, the submariners eyed one another as if to confirm that they were still alive. Vital minutes passed as they waited for word from Frömsdorf. They had no idea where their commander would lead them. Eight weeks from their last shower, their lungs ached from diesel fumes, their nerves frayed to the point of breaking. They knew their chances of returning home alive were slim.

Even before they’d left port in Nazi-occupied Norway two months earlier, rumors had spread about their mission. It was whispered that there was something strange—perhaps suicidal—about their assignment. In his last letter to his parents, Frömsdorf himself indicated he was on a mission from which he would not return. "I am lucky in these difficult days of my fatherland to have the honor of commanding this submarine,” he wrote. "I’m not very good at last words ...” In the control room, the commander ordered his navigators to change course. They would head for New York City.

Trail of a Rogue Sub Tracking the German U-boat U-853’s suicidal attack mission on the coast of America in 1945. April 23: The USS Eagle 56 mysteriously explodes in Casco Bay. Survivors spot a surfaced U-boat. April 24: The USS Muskegon makes sonar contact and attacks an enemy sub. Results: negative. April 29: An F6F pilot on a training mission reports "a surfaced submarine 10 miles…from Wellfleet, Mass.” May 5: The USS Black Point is torpedoed in the Rhode Island Sound. Twelve merchant sailors die. May 6: After American ships fire 15 tons of explosives into the sea, the Nazi sub is pronounced dead on bottom.

Part II: The Hunt

May 5, 1945; 9 A.M.; F-21 — Sub Tracking Room; Washington D.C

As he did every morning at 9 A.M. sharp in his Washington office, Commander Kenneth Knowles began a 15-minute briefing on the action at sea. His audience: the Navy brass, the half-dozen admirals who called the shots. "One U-boat off Reykjavik,” Knowles explained, "one estimated homebound from Hatteras…” He paused. "And one alternatively may be in the Gulf of Maine.”

The truth was, Knowles had a good fix on the dozen enemy subs out there. But this one boat off New England had him stumped. As the brass filed out, he pulled the wire-rims off his face and rubbed his fists into his eyes. Outside his office, the world was rejoicing. Hitler was dead. The Germans were ready to surrender at any moment. The papers were full of it. But he had a situation on his hands.

Since the Eagle 56 sinking two weeks earlier, Knowles’ staff had been tracking a U-boat heading south near shore. The day after the blast, the USS Muskegon chased it for four hours in the Gulf of Maine. Since then reports of sightings had been arriving by the boatload. None could be verified. There were no radio intercepts. Whatever was out there was operating alone.

There was a bigger issue at hand, Knowles knew. The Nazis, intelligence had learned, had been developing technology to launch "robot” bombs, deadly 46-foot missiles, from a U-boat. Their target: New York. The story had made the front page of The New York Times: ROBOT BOMB ATTACKS HERE HELD ‘PROBABLE’ BY ADMIRAL. Casualties, the Navy claimed, would come from fire and falling buildings.

With the war to end at any moment, this rogue sub had Knowles on edge. The Navy had better keep this thing quiet. Reports came in over the wire for the rest of the day. Then, at 3:14 P.M., the news Knowles had been waiting for arrived. Surveillance had intercepted a dispatch from German High Command. "All U-boats, attention all U-boats, cease fire immediately, stop all hostile action against Allied shipping.” Knowles broke into a broad smile. The Battle of the Atlantic—the deadliest sea war the Earth had ever seen—was over. Or so it seemed.

5:30 P.M.; Aboard The German U-Boat U-853; 3 1/2 Miles Off Point Judith, Rhode Island

In a thick fog the sub cruised into the Rhode Island Sound at periscope depth. After torpedoing the Eagle 56, the crew had spent 12 days outrunning subchasers. Ten weeks without sun. No bath. No schnapps. They had followed their commander’s orders, and he had led them here, into 85 feet of water.

In the tower Frömsdorf hunched over the periscope, gazing through its maze of mirrors at the coast of America. He moved the periscope’s eye using hydraulic foot pedals. Through the lifting fog he saw a tug pulling three barges, a freighter, and a 368-foot collier heading northeast at eight knots. He zeroed in on this last ship. He could see the gunner’s shack on the stern, an American flag waving above it. He grabbed the intercom telephone. "Open torpedo shutters.”

In the torpedo room, the doors to the silos had names on them—SONYA on one, HANNELORE on another. A torpedoman yanked the levers that opened the tubes. A gurgle followed—the sound of seawater filling the silos. Inside each: a two-ton Type V missile with enough TNT to tear a ship in two faster than a German submariner could rip open a piece of kommisbrot, the rock-hard bread they ate with their canned meat each night. The crew braced themselves. Men were about to die. It was just a matter of who.

5:39 P.M.; Aboard The USS Black Point; 3 1/2 Miles Off Point Judith, Rhode Island

When the 24-foot torpedo rammed the merchant vessel Black Point, striking the hull at 30 mph, the 46 men aboard had no idea what hit them. After a moment of shock—a moment that seemed to stretch forever—they found themselves in hell. For the dozen sailors in their quarters in the stern, where the warhead severed 40 feet of steel from the ship, the end came instantly. Those who survived the blast were pressed up against bulkheads by the onrush of water and drowned.

When the torpedo hit, Captain Charles Prior was about to light a cigarette on the bridge as he navigated the 5,353-ton collier to Boston. There’d been rumors about "activity” off the coast, so he had orders to take the inland route through the sound. Odd, he had thought, considering the war was all but over. The shock wave ripped up his legs and spine. Windows and glass gauges shattered, shards spilling onto the floor. Instruments flew everywhere. "Jesus!” he yelled at third mate Homer Small. "We must’ve hit a mine!” Small was frozen, his fingers clutching the Black Point’s oak wheel.

Behind them black smoke was mushrooming out of the ship’s gut. The mainmast had fallen over the port side. A chunk of the gunner’s shack had blown nearly 300 feet from the stern onto the bow. The gunner inside was nowhere to be found. Men were sprinting in all directions. One was lying facedown midship, bleeding profusely onto the deck.

Below, where most of the crew had been dining on franks and beans, the struggle for survival pitched at full steam. Men hunted for a way out, blinded by smoke. Meanwhile, on deck sailors worked frantically to lower the lifeboats. Twenty minutes after the explosion, the crew managed to get two boats and a raft into the water. Some climbed down a net, while others hurled themselves 50 feet into the water. Prior and Chief Engineer Frank Kelley were the last men on board. Prior looked at Kelley. "You know who the hell’s going to be the last one off this wagon,” he said. They raced down. As they cast themselves off, the skipper started a head count. More than a quarter of his crew was missing.

6:50 P.M.; Aboard The USS Atherton; Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts

Thirty miles to the east, a 306-foot American destroyer—the USS Atherton—was steaming for port in Boston. It was party time. Some of the crew’s wives were waiting on the wharf. Captain Lewis Iselin had just sat down to dinner in the mess hall when a gunnery officer charged in. "What’ve we got?” Iselin asked. "SOS,” the officer replied. A ship had been torpedoed three and a half miles off Point Judith. The SOS came from witnesses aboard another ship, who reported seeing a U-boat surface after the explosion.

Nazis in the Rhode Island Sound? Iselin thought. It sounded as likely as a UFO sighting. Minutes later the stark order came from Navy brass. Take out the sub. As the ship steamed for the sound, 186 men worked to prep antisubmarine weapons that, hours earlier, they’d deactivated for storage.

When the Atherton cruised into the sound half an hour later, the wreckage of the Black Point lay aglow in daylight’s final moments. From the bridge Iselin could see the survivors stacked in lifeboats. They were someone else’s problem. Flanked by two ships to the east, the destroyer Amick and the Coast Guard frigate Moberly, Iselin began a sonar sweep around the wreck, bouncing sound waves off the bottom. His boat covered the most likely escape route because he had the best sonar crew, headed by a trombone player with perfect pitch. An hour passed. Darkness fell on the coast. At 8:23 P.M., the sonarman reported over the intercom: "a solid metallic echo” 1,760 yards off. Probably a wreck, Iselin thought. But it was moving, the sonarman said, 75 feet beneath the surface—right across the Atherton’s path.

8:28 P.M.; Aboard The U-853

In the sub’s control room, Frömsdorf stood stone-faced, surrounded by engineers. He had followed procedure—go in the opposite direction the hunters would predict, and hide. In the shallows, he had one option: wait out the night near the bottom. It was a crapshoot. If they stayed submerged, they would run out of air in 24 hours.

The first man to clue in to the terror that lay ahead was sonarman Erich Schaadt. Through his headphones he heard ships approaching. When sonar pings followed, reverberating in the hull, the crew knew they’d been found. When the first bomb hit, the lights went out. Gauges shattered. Bodies were hurled like stones, bounced off bulkheads. Pipes and eardrums burst. In the dark compartments, water began to trickle in.

Escape from New York! Terrorists had their beady eyes on the Big Apple long before September 11. How close did Hitler come to blowing New York off the map? May 1942: Under the guidance of Dr. Wernher von Braun, the Nazis begin research on a new technology, later code-named Prüfstrand XII, that could be used to launch missiles from a submerged submarine. June 1942: In a test run Von Braun’s team launches rockets from the U-511 from 40 feet below the surface in the Baltic Sea. October 1944: American intelligence receives reports from agents in Sweden about a suspected U-boat missile attack on New York. January 1945: Nazi chief of war production Albert Speer boasts in a Berlin radio broadcast that V-1 and V-2 missiles "would fall on New York by February 1, 1945.” January 1945: A Navy spokesman declares on the front page of The New York Times that a missile attack on Gotham City is not only "possible but probable…The next alert you get is likely to be the McCoy.” March 1945: Through intercepted "Enigma” radio transmissions, the United States learns that 10 German subs (one being the U-853) have departed Nazi-occupied Norway, headed for the East Coast. May 1945: Hitler commits suicide. Admiral Karl Donitz orders the German Navy to surrender. May 1945: While ransacking Nazi headquarters, intelligence officers find blueprints for the plot to bomb New York. The bull’s-eye (marked "Zielpunkt”): the Lower East Side, with shock waves expected to rip through Brooklyn and Central Park. — Paul Lawton

8:43 P.M.; Aboard The USS Atherton

On the surface Captain Iselin navigated the Atherton around for a second attack run, launching 24 Hedgehog missiles at the bottom. Twelve seconds later the sea erupted. From Iselin’s log: 11:41 P.M.: "All projectiles exploded ... Oil, pieces of broken wood, etc., rose to the surface.”

Joined by the Moberly and the destroyer Ericsson, the ships tag-teamed the target as other boats arrived. By midnight ten warships had cut off all possible escape routes. The bombs proved so loud, astonished crowds gathered on the nearby coast to listen to the fireworks. From Iselin’s log: 12:32 A.M.: "Continuous oil and air bubbles [rising]. Passed over submarine and Fathometer reading dropped from 110 ft. to 67 ft., indicating sub was lying on bottom.” Sitting ducks. Iselin moved in for another strafing run.

2 A.M.; Aboard The U-853

Below the surface, the bombs cracked open the sub’s stern first. A frenzy followed. According to clues culled by hard-hat divers who later penetrated the hull to investigate, a panicked stampede erupted among the crew—every man for himself. As the stern flooded, men scrambled to forward compartments. Sailors locked airtight doors behind them and, with nowhere to go, were forced to listen to their comrades on the other side scratching frantically as they drowned. Trapped, the explosions zapped what was left of the survivors’ sanity. At least one man put a pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

Sometime during the final hours, six submariners crawled into the tower, intending to swim 90 feet to the surface. It was their last chance of survival. They donned escape lungs—face masks attached to canisters that offered a few minutes of oxygen—and shimmied into the tower. Before they could open the hatch, a wave of explosives blasted the ship. They died there, squeezed into the tower like fish in a can, blood trickling from their ears.

6:40 A.M.; Aboard The USS Atherton

At dawn on the surface, the sun revealed an oil slick that spread two miles. Iselin made another run—dropping a lethal combination of Hedgehogs and depth charges, all exploding on cue. (The captain would later tell a reporter, "I don’t think there’s a hull that took a bigger beating during the war.”) Sailors inspecting surface debris found a life raft, cigars, pillowcases, and Commander Frömsdorf’s hat. Down below, the Atherton’s radioman tapped out a message to headquarters in Washington: 9:18 A.M.: "Close scrutiny of debris indicating submarine U-853.”

During the final attack runs, two Navy blimps arrived from New Jersey to take photos, shoot missiles at the bottom, and drop sonobuoys so sonar experts could listen in on the terror. From above they heard "rhythmic hammering on a metal surface that was interrupted periodically.” A "long, shrill shriek” followed. And then they heard nothing.

Maxim

Aftermath

Nine hours after the U-853 was officially sunk, the Nazis surrendered. The war in Europe was over. Weeks later the U.S. Navy held an inquiry into the Eagle 56 sinking off Maine. The court, which didn’t have access to the top-secret files in Kenneth Knowles’ sub tracking room, ruled that the ship had sunk due to a boiler explosion.

In the years that followed, the rotting Nazi sub in the shallows off Rhode Island became the subject of fevered speculation. What was the U-853 doing here? Did its captain receive the order from German High Command to surrender? Some believe that Frömsdorf wanted to earn a name for himself, to return to Berlin a hero. Others believe he had more ambitious motives.

According to newspaper accounts, a German named Hans Bergerdans testified at Nuremberg that he was paid to weld wads of traveler’s checks into shell casings aboard the U-853. Treasure hunters began to speculate that Frömsdorf was trying to land the loot on American soil (safe from the pillaging in Europe), but caved in when he spotted the Black Point.

Two operations foraged for the wreck, in 1953 and ’61, but all the divers found were worm-gnawed skeletons. Today the U-853 sits on that same shoal, the bleached bones of the crew still inside. Live depth charges surround it, as if protecting the iron coffin from grave robbers.

This past January, John Scagnelli, the Eagle 56’s lone surviving officer, received a package in the mail from the Navy. A letter informed him that, upon investigating declassified documents recently made public, the Navy had changed its record: the Eagle 56 was torpedoed by a Nazi sub. Scagnelli (along with survivor Harold Petersen and all the casualties) received a Purple Heart. "This puts an end to all the questions,” says the 80-year-old, now retired in New Jersey. "In those days we didn’t know if we were coming home or not. The men who didn’t—they are the heroes.”

Albert Baime. Research assistance by Paul Lawton. In Shallow Water. Maxim. May 2002.

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