Our War Offshore

As usual, when the summer thunder rumbles and a war of lightning flashes nearby, we have always huddled together and listened to stories from Marco and her past.

Throughout the years, the Marco Beach Boys and Girls have always learned from the elders that came before our time. One of the stories that has always captivated any audience came from an elder who is no longer with us.

 “We were worried,” Chuck W explained. “Everybody was worried. The year was 1942, I was a teenager, and when the Nazi submarines were sinking ships offshore of Marco, Naples, and Key Largo, the communities got together because we knew we had to guard our shores and beaches. Every night, two of us would walk Marco Beach with shotguns. We were looking for Germans that might be coming ashore. We believed they might need food or fresh water. We knew they were just offshore, and we didn’t know what they were up to.

After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and America declared war on Japan, a state of war also existed between the United States and Germany. With America focused on a big war against the Japanese empire in the Pacific, the eastern United States was largely undefended and suddenly under attack by a fleet of German submarines known as U-boats.

The German ocean-going U-boat was a near perfect engine of war. The 250-foot diesel-electric submarines could easily cross the Atlantic Ocean and torpedo American and English shipping off the American coastline. After much success with sinking ships from the Canadian maritime to Jacksonville Beach and then the Bahamas, the German U-boats cruised into the Gulf of Mexico. 

The German U-boats that once prowled the Gulf of Mexico have left a legacy of mystery, tragedy, and intrigue, and 56 sunken ships that still rest on the sandy seafloor today. Two of the ships sank during the war were torpedoed less than one hundred miles from Marco Island, and the story that follows illustrates both sides of the conflict from above and below the water.

On June 10, 1942, Kapitanleutnant Horst Uphoff and his crew of 50 German submariners cast off the lines of the U-84 under the heavily fortified submarine pens in Brest France. The U-boat commander and his veteran crew were on their sixth patrol bound for the Atlantic Ocean and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico. After participating in a successful “wolf pack attack” - a coordinated assault with several other German submarines against an allied convoy - Uphoff and the crew of the U-84 cruised unchallenged into the Old Bahama Channel.

Knowing that the Gulf of Mexico and the waters between Florida and Cuba were heavily traveled shipping routes for the enemies of Germany, Uphoff ordered his Type 7-B submarine with the long-range fuel tanks to prowl north along the Southwest Florida coast just to the west of Everglades City.

July 19, 1942, was the last day afloat for the British-Honduran registered Baja California. The steam-powered freighter was a Norwegian ship built in 1914, and her master and commander was Aage Christensen. There were 32 crew and five armed guards aboard when she sailed from New Orleans. With the summer weather balmy and the gulf peaceful, she parted the waters off the southwest Florida coast as she steamed for Key West and ultimately Guatemala.

Shortly after dawn on July 19, 1942, Kapitanleutnant Uphoff and the submerged U-84 torpedoed the Baja California steaming alone on a southerly heading and brought World War II to within 55 miles of Marco Island. Captain Christensen’s Baja California and her cargo of Willis jeeps, glassware, and war materials, now rest in 115 feet of water west of the beach on Marco.

The first torpedo slammed into the old freighter’s port bow and the second exploded near the chief engineers’ quarters. The ship instantly began to list as Captain Christensen ordered abandon ship. Within ten minutes, the surviving crew rallied to lower lifeboats and watched in shock as the Baja California slipped beneath the warm Gulf waters. Three of the ship’s company were killed when the torpedoes exploded, and ten others injured. The survivors abandoned ship in one lifeboat and two rafts and were rescued the following day under a broiling summer sun by a Cuban fishing schooner bound for Havana.

Horst Uphoff and the crew of the U-84 surfaced and watched from a distance as the traumatized crew scrambled aboard their lifeboats and the Baja California slipped beneath the surface. There was no further hostile action taken toward Captain Christensen and the stranded survivors of the Baja California.

On an unseasonably cool April 3, 1943, the USS Gulfstate was steaming south at approximately 89 miles off the coast of Marco Island. Her forty-year-old Captain James Harrell had given orders to navigate his 438-foot vessel in the relative shallow waters north of Key West; north and shallow because of reports and rumors placing a German submarine operating in the Old Bahama Channel. Although this report placed the U-boat well away from the Southwest Florida coast, the skipper of the USS Gulfstate was taking no chances. He was in command of a fuel tanker displacing 7,216 tons and knew that the Germans considered his precious cargo of crude oil as valuable as an entire division of men. Harrell also knew that an oceangoing submarine needed at least 60 feet of water to place her periscopes under the waves and no submarine commander worth his salt would dare to maneuver in the near coastal shallow water.

This was an unfortunate mistake because Korvettenkapatain Adolf Cornelius Piening was wearing his Knight’s Cross decoration as he was watching from the surfaced conning tower of his U-155. Piening knew that he was a wolf among the sheep and that many of the choice lambs would be cruising through the shallows with a confidence they should not feel. Piening was no beginner in shallow water attacks and the only portion of his submarine underwater was the vented decks creaming white as his partially surfaced U-boat stalked her prey. The eastern sky was just beginning to lighten as Piening observed the silhouette of the USS Gulfstate. With an urgency for speed and stealth, the U-boat commander ordered his officers and crew to make ready for a torpedo attack.

Captain James Harrell, Master of the USS Gulfstate, lost his life on that cool April morning, along with forty of his shipmates. The Gulfstate sank in four minutes as two of the U-155’s torpedoes detonated amidships. With a full cargo of crude oil, the Gulfstate was instantly ignited with flames reaching over one hundred feet into the air. With most of the ship on fire, and quickly sinking, flaming oil spread rapidly over the water. The surviving crew was forced to jump overboard and swim through about six hundred feet of burning oil floating on the water. Only 15 of the tanker crew survived.

There were 56 ships sunk in the Gulf of Mexico in 1942, with the loss of only one U-boat. The U-166 was attacked by depth charges 30 miles from the entrance to the Mississippi river. The whereabouts of the U-166 was unknown until was found in 2003 by an underwater robotic camera and a ship laying fiber optic cable.

Today the Baja California and a legacy of war offshore stills rest on the seafloor west of Marco. In no other body of water did the German U-boats have more short-term success than in the Gulf of Mexico.

Tom Williams is a Marco Islander. He is the author of two books: Lost and Found and Surrounded by Thunder - the Story of Darrell Loan and the Rocket Men. Both books are available on Kindle and Nook.