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Portsmouth NH

The Deadly October Gale of 1841

So many Cape Cod fishermen perished in the Great October Gale of 1841 that the peninsula’s young women refused to court men who went to sea.

The storm wrecked at least 190 vessels. Sidney Perley, describing the Great October Gale in Historic Storms of New England, wrote,

The ocean roared as though with an unbridled madness, and its waves ran mountain high, throwing their spray far into the sky, and forming a majestic yet fearful sight.

October Gale

The wind kicked up on Saturday, October 2, and by midnight it blew a gale, with rain in Massachusetts and snow in New Hampshire. The sun rose to a clear sky on Sunday morning, but immediately disappeared behind black clouds. The sky took on a wild look. By 11 a.m., heavy seas were throwing vessels onto rocks and beaches.

The gale reached its fiercest at 2 a.m. Monday, October 4, and continued to blow hard until that afternoon.

The Green Mountains of Vermont and the White Mountains of New Hampshire were covered with snow the next day. A foot and a half of snow fell in Middletown, Conn. The trees, in full leaf, ‘broke the forest and shade trees in an extraordinary manner.’ The oldest residents of the town couldn’t remember seeing any snow so early and so destructive.

A vessel named Maine broke loose of her moorings in Portsmouth, N.H., and wrecked on Scituate Beach, killing the captain, his daughter, five passengers and one crewman.

On the North Shore of Massachusetts, as many as 40 vessels, mostly fishing schooners, were lost in the October gale. Only two of the 16 fishing vessels in Rockport, Mass., survived the storm. The wreck of the Forest, in which the entire crew perished, left 31 children fatherless in Gloucester, Mass.

Cape Cod

The October gale flooded Nantucket streets, demolished its ropewalks and threw its barns into the sea.

Cape Cod suffered the most. The beach from Chatham to the highlands was strewn with the parts of 50 wrecks. In one day after the October gale, 100 bodies were taken up and buried. The Truro Insurance Company failed for a lack of men to take charge of its vessels.

The Town of Dennis lost 26 men, 18 of which had been schoolmates. Eighteen vessels from West Harwich were destroyed.

Wreck of The Garnet

19th century fishing schooner

On Saturday night, October 2, most of the Truro fishing fleet on the Georges Banks left off fishing and made for home. Only two of the nine ships that set out made it.

Capt. Joshua Knowles in the Garnet and Matthias Rich in Water Witch just barely survived the storm.

Knowles left a detailed record of the perilous voyage. The Garnet sailed out of Provincetown Harbor on October 2 and headed out to Georges Bank under full sail. As the wind grew stronger, Knowles took in sail until morning, when only the foresail was set. The wind blew the foresail to ribbons by nightfall, and Knowles set the mainsail. Soon the wind shredded that too, leaving only the jib.

Titanic waves pushed the vessel toward deadly shoals. Joshua Knowles ordered all crew members below deck except for his brother Zack.

Joshua lashed himself to the helm, and the brother tried to bring the Garnet about. But a huge wave struck the vessel, putting her on her beam ends and washing Zack overboard. He managed to hang on to the mainsheet and survived.

The foremast broke, the mainmast came down. As the storm raged, the brothers chopped furiously at the rigging while the crew moved the ballast to the windward side to right the vessel.

They survived. The storm finally abated, and they jury-rigged a mast. They then found some potatoes floating around, which they cooked for their first meal in two days. At dusk, a Liverpool packet called the Roscius picked them up. The ship captain turned out to be from Truro.

Truro’s Worst Tragedy

First Congregational Parish of Truro

The 57 men and boys in the seven other fishing vessels out of Truro were not so lucky. All died at sea, and only a few of their bodies recovered.

All 57 lived within two miles of each other. They were related to nearly everyone in town. Eight were Snows and eight were Paines. And three were boys not yet 13 years old.

During one of his trips to Cape Cod, Henry David Thoreau recalled asking a man in Truro, “Who lives in that house?” The man then replied: “Three widows.”

The town, with a population around 2,000, had 105 widows. Young women became reluctant to marry fishermen.

An obelisk in the Congregational Church yard commemorates the 57 October gale victims:

Then shall the dust return to the
earth as it was and the spirit shall
return unto God who gave it.

Man goeth to his long home and the
mourners go about the street.

Image: First Congregational Parish of Truro By Judy Moehle – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35518277.

This story about the Great October Gale was updated in 2022.

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The Mysterious Death of Tobias Lear

Tobias Lear meticulously recorded the details of George Washington’s death, but was strangely silent about the events leading to his own.

Tobias Lear in the 1780s

As Washington’s personal secretary and confidante, Lear scrupulously chronicled the events of his own remarkable life, and yet he left some things unexplained.

Perhaps there are clues to his strange death in the story of his life. He knew four presidents, failed at land speculation, lived well in Algiers, wrote the first history of Washington, D.C., took a honeymoon aboard the USS Constitution and paid tribute to pirates. He married two of Martha Washington’s nieces.

George Washington liked, trusted and respected him, and we owe much of what we know about his personal life to Tobias Lear.

Tobias Lear, Secretary

Tobias Lear was born in Portsmouth, N.H., on Sept. 19, 1762, the son of a shipmaster turned farmer (the farm was located at the present site of Wentworth By The Sea).

Tobias Lear House in Portsmouth, N.H., built by Tobias Lear, Sr., around 1750.

He graduated from Harvard in 1783 as the American Revolution ended. He traveled in Europe and throughout the British colonies. In 1784, a family friend of the Lears and the Washingtons, Gen. Benjamin Lincoln, recommended Tobias Lear as tutor to Martha’s grandchildren and secretary to George. Washington offered this job description:

Mr. Lear…will sit at my table, will live as I live, will mix with the company who resort to the house, will be treated in every respect with civility and proper attention. He will have his washing done in the family, and may have his stockings darned by the maids…

Site of Tobias Lear’s family farm

It was a big job. He had to catch up on Mount Vernon’s accounts, neglected after Washington spent a decade at war, and reply to a flood of correspondence.

After arriving in Virginia in 1786, Lear soon became Washington’s friend and right-hand man. When Washington was elected president in 1789, Lear moved with the family to New York, then to Philadelphia when the capital moved.

Lear married Mary Long in 1793. They had one child, Benjamin Lincoln Lear, and Washington acted as godfather. Mary died three years after their marriage.

Tobias Lear then married Frances Bassett Washington, George’s niece, in August 1795. Washington gave them a house and 360 acres of his Mount Vernon estate. The marriage lasted seven months, as Frances died of tuberculosis in March 1796. Lear was devastated.

Business Ventures

George Washington

He rejoined the Washington household, serving as the president’s secretary throughout his first term and submitting his expense reports to Congress. At the beginning of Washington’s second term, Lear left to start his own company and to work with Washington’s Potowmack Company to build a canal around the waterfalls in the Potomac River (now Great Falls Park). Lear lost money on the venture.

As his finances worsened he continued to work for Washington. He once collected rent from one of Washington’s tenants and kept the money himself. Washington was furious with Lear when he found out, but forgave him.

Lear also kept funds from a business partner for months and feigned illness to avoid repaying him. He eventually confessed, apologized and agreed to pay him back.

In late 1799, Lear visited Washington when the former president died. He recorded his famous diary entry:

About ten o’clock, Saturday December 14, 1799, Washington made several attempts to speak to me before he could effect it, at length he said,—”I am just going. Have me decently buried; and do not let my body be put into the Vault in less than two days after I am dead.” I bowed assent. He then looked at me again and said, “Do you understand me?” I replied “Yes.” “Tis well” said he.

Those were his last words. Lear followed Washington’s wishes to a T, even measuring his body at 6 feet 3.5 inches long and 1 foot 9 inches across the shoulders.

Washington left Tobias Lear a lifetime interest in Walnut Tree Farm. He spent the next year sorting through Washington’s papers, some of which went missing. Lear was accused of destroying the papers, including letters that could have damaged Thomas Jefferson.

To Africa and Back

Old Ironsides

Despite his bequest from Washington, Lear was still struggling financially. Jefferson did him a favor and appointed him to two potentially lucrative posts: American commercial agent in Haiti in 1802 and consul general to North Africa in 1804.

Before leaving for North Africa, Lear married Martha Washington’s niece, Francis Dandridge Henley. To the end of his life, he doted on Fanny.

While they sailed to Algiers on the USS Constitution, pirates seized another ship, the Philadelphia, and nearly 300 souls aboard. Lear negotiated their release in exchange for a substantial sum in the Treaty of Tripoli.

He was vilified for mishandling the negotiations.

The Lears spent nine profitable years in Algiers. Then Tobias fell out of favor with the dey, who had a habit of beheading people he didn’t like. Just as the War of 1812 broke out, the Lears fled to America.

James Madison

President James Madison gave Tobias a job as a secretary to the War Department, and he leased a house in Georgetown. He lived there with his beloved Fanny and his son Benjamin, now a lawyer.

He was apparently wealthy, happily married and well employed.

Or was he?

Lear suffered from headaches and depression. He was dogged by accusations about Washington’s papers and the Treaty of Tripoli. He had only reluctantly accepted his job as chief accountant for the U.S. War Department, having hoped for a Cabinet post.

On Oct. 11, 1816, Tobias Lear shot himself in the head with a pistol. His son Benjamin found him in his Georgetown home, the bloodied gun still in his hand. No note was found, nor did Lear leave an official will.

The mystery of his death remains to this day.

This story was updated in 2022.

Image: Tobias Lear House By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15203288.

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The Scandalous Wedding of N.H. Gov. John Wentworth

John Wentworth followed his uncle Benning by serving as royal governor of New Hampshire – and by taking a bride in a scandalous manner.

As governor, Benning Wentworth lined his pockets selling land grants in what is now Vermont. He scandalized Portsmouth’s elite in 1760 when he surprised his dinner guests by marrying his maid, Martha Hilton, then and there in his dining room.

John Wentworth, by John Singleton Copley.

Gov. John Wentworth

John Wentworth was born Aug. 9, 1737, in Portsmouth, four years before Uncle Benning became governor. He earned a B.A. in 1755 and an M.A. in 1758 at Harvard, where he developed a close friendship with John Adams.

John Wentworth’s beautiful young cousin, Frances Deering, had fallen in love with him, and he returned her feelings. But John had his career to pursue, and in 1763 he went to London to look after his family’s business interests. There he mingled with England’s high society. He may even have persuaded his friend the Marquess of Rockingham, then prime minister, to lead the repeal of the Stamp Act.

While John Wentworth was in London, Theodore Atkinson wooed and won Frances Deering, then only 16. They married on May 13, 1762. Atkinson, a mild, obliging man in his mid-20s, suffered from ill health.

Five years after their marriage, Wentworth returned to Portsmouth amidst pomp and ceremony as governor of New Hampshire. His home on Pleasant Street had an unobstructed view of the Atkinson home. Rumor had it that Frances informed John about her husband’s declining health by hanging a handkerchief out her window.

Frances

Theodore Atkinson died on Oct. 28, 1769. Harriet Spofford, in New-England legends, described what happened next:

On one day Theodore breathed his last. His burial took place on the following Wednesday; by the Governor’s order all the bells in town were toiled, flags were hung at half-mast, and minute-guns were fired from the fort and from the ships-of-war in the harbor.

Then on Sunday the weeping widow, clad in crape, listened in church to the funeral eulogies, wrote Spofford. The next day, ‘her affliction was mitigated.’ And on Tuesday, ‘all the fingers of the seamstresses of the country roundabout were flying.’

On the next Sunday, less than three weeks after her husband died, Frances Atkinson walked up the aisle as the wife of John Wentworth.

Lady Frances Wentworth by John Singleton Copley

Gov. John Wentworth, besotted with his wife, named two New Hampshire towns after her: Deering and Francestown.

The Wentworths had to flee Portsmouth on June 13, 1775, when revolutionaries pointed a cannon at their front door. They sailed to England and, later, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where John Wentworth was eventually named lieutenant governor.

Frances Wentworth hated Nova Scotia, and while John was away she began an affair with visiting Prince William, a hard-drinking womanizer 20 years her junior. John found out about the affair but didn’t raise a fuss; she wrote he was the ‘most diffident of men.’ He did, however, tell William’s father, King George III, of his displeasure, and the King recalled William to England.

This story was updated in 2023.

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Baron von Steuben Shows the Army a Bayonet Is Not a Grilling Tool

An impoverished Prussian nobleman named Baron Friedrich von Steuben showed up in Valley Forge on Feb. 23, 1778, and taught the Continental Army to use bayonets for killing, not cooking.

Baron von Steuben drilling the troops at Valley Forge, by E.A. Abbey.

Nearly two years into the American Revolution, most patriot soldiers didn’t know how to use a bayonet. They didn’t trust the deadly weapon. They often left it behind and relied instead on the musket. British regulars, on the other hand, knew how to attack with bayonets once their artillery and musket fire broke holes in the enemy’s ranks.

During the Battle of Bunker Hill, British bayonets broke the colonial militias’ resistance after the regulars overcame their fortifications.

Von Steuben understood the importance of bayonets in 18^th century warfare. Flintlock muskets were complicated and clumsy to use. It took 15 separate actions to load a musket and two more to fire. And they hit a target about one out of five times.

However, a soldier could count on a lethal bayonet. They weren’t sharp, so they tore the flesh rather than cut it, and often caused infection.

Baron von Steuben

Baron von Steuben, by Ralph Earl

Steuben had fought with the Prussian Army in the Seven Years’ War and may also have fought in the War of the Austrian Succession. By the end of the Seven Years’ War he earned a promotion to captain and became aide-de-camp for Frederick the Great.

After the war ended he served in various European courts. He was made a baron in 1771.

By 1777 he was out of a job, heavily in debt and plagued by rumors he was gay. He solicited Silas Deane and Benjamin Franklin in Paris for a job with the Continental Army. Von Steuben got the job, partly because he offered to serve without pay and partly because Franklin exaggerated his credentials, calling him a lieutenant general in the Prussian Army.

He sailed to America on a frigate carrying munitions, arriving in Portsmouth, N.H., on Sept. 26, 1777. He went to York, Pa., where the Continental Congress agreed to pay him at the end of the war based on his performance.

Valley Forge

When George Washington went into the winter camp in 1777, the Continental Army was something more than an ill-equipped mob – and something less than a well-trained army. Washington’s troops had won victories at Harlem Heights, Trenton and Princeton, but they had also disintegrated into chaos at Germantown.

Von Steuben showed up four months after the defeat at Germantown. He made quite an appearance: 47 years old, big, flamboyant, splendidly dressed — and he spoke no English.

He soon found each of the army’s regiments trained and drilled differently, according to the regiment commander’s preferences. Or, as he put it, “Each colonel exercised his regiment according to his own ideas, or those of any military author that might have fallen into his hands,” and, “march and maneuvering step was as varied as the color of our uniforms.”

Drill, Drill, Drill

British Brown Bess musket with bayonet

He learned the soldiers lost thousands of muskets and bayonets. “The American soldier, never having used this arm, had no faith in it, and never used it but to roast his beefsteak, and indeed often left it at home,” he wrote.

Von Steuben went to work. He reorganized the army, insisting that the soldiers polish their arms. He made officers check that their troops had what they needed and visited the sick and wounded.

And he drilled, drilled and drilled some more, furiously swearing at the men in German, then French, then asking his interpreters to swear in English. Brandishing a silver-headed swagger stick, he trained infantrymen to array in line and advance together as a group with the bayonet.

He created the first manual for the U.S. Army: Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States, Part I, The manual included specific instructions on the proper way to use a bayonet. (Click here to read the manual’s instructions on the five motions used in fixing and charging a bayonet.) The army used the manual, known as the Blue Book, until 1814, 20 years after von Steuben died.

Battle of Stony Point

On July 16, 1779, the Continental Army engaged in ‘one of the most spirited bayonet charges in history.’

The British had seized an important fort at Stony Point, 30 miles north of New York City on the Hudson River. They had anchored a fleet at New Haven and were rampaging along the coast, burning farms and terrifying civilians.

Washington desperately wanted a victory. He ordered an attack on Stony Point, and put Maj. Gen. Anthony Wayne in charge.

Wayne’s men had trained under von Steuben, and Wayne believed in the bayonet. Washington planned a surprise attack during the dead of night, and ordered the men to carry unloaded muskets to prevent an errant discharge from alerting the British. The attack was to be carried out by bayonet.

Companies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Maryland troops made the assault, scaling the steep rocky cliffs quickly. So quickly that, once they were discovered, British artillery couldn’t adjust and fired over their heads. The fight ended in 25 minutes, and the Americans took 553 British prisoners in a huge morale booster.

Washington and von Steuben visited the garrison the next day. The men enthusiastically greeted the baron and promised they would take care of their bayonets and use them for purposes other than digging trenches or roasting meat. Von Steuben requested, and got, an order that in the future all bayonets should be continually fixed to the musket.

Aftermath

Baron von Steuben was one of three commanders at Yorktow.n He also helped Washington demobilize the army after the Revolutionary War ended. He became an American citizen, moved to New York City and ran up more debt. Congress awarded him a pension of $2,500 and the State of New Jersey gave him an estate, which he sold to pay off his debts. He moved to upstate New York and died in 1794.

This story was updated in 2023.

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Dancer’s Image, the NH Horse that Won and Lost the Kentucky Derby

The New Hampshire thoroughbred Dancer’s Image won, then lost, the Kentucky Derby in 1968 because his owner made a kind gesture to the widow of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Peter Fuller, the horse’s owner, believed that to the day he died. He was convinced resentful white southerners stripped him of his prize because he was a New Englander who supported the civil rights movement.

The 1973 Kentucky Derby

Bigger, Tougher, Stronger

Peter Fuller was the son of car dealer and former Massachusetts governor Alvan Fuller and Viola Davenport Fuller. He was born on March 22, 1923 in Boston with an intestinal disease that stunted his growth and kept him out of school until he was 10.

Fuller spent the next 15 years compensating. He told the New York Times he spent every waking hour making himself bigger, tougher and stronger.

Fuller graduated from Harvard, where he wrestled and boxed, and served in the Marines during World War II. He managed the boxing career of Tom McNeeley and turned down an offer to manage Rocky Marciano. His father’s car business made him rich, and he bought his first thoroughbred in 1951. He kept his horses at Runnymede Farm in North Hampton, N.H., where he lived.

Fuller bought Noor’s Image in 1958 and bred her to Native Dancer, a celebrated stallion. He named the horse after his father but then changed his name to Dancer’s Image when he decided to sell him. His wife Joan begged him to keep the beautiful horse and he bought him back at auction.

Dancer’s Image

Native Dancer

The Kentucky Derby, the most exciting two minutes in sports, has a fast pace set by more than a dozen unpredictable three-year-old colts.

The day before the 1968 Kentucky Derby, Peter Fuller had such confidence in Dancer’s Image that he practiced the walk from his box to the winner’s circle at Churchill Downs in Louisville. He even composed an acceptance speech. He demanded 50 tickets rather than the usual four allotted to owners.

Dancer’s Image wove through 13 rivals from last place to win the Kentucky Derby by a length and a half. Three days later, Churchill Downs ruled Fuller had to return the $122,600 winner’s purse. Track officials discovered the painkiller phenylbutazone, also known as bute, in the horse’s system.

Dancer’s Image had sore ankles and a veterinarian had given him the drug, commonly used to relieve inflammation of the joints. It was legal at many U.S. racetracks, but not at Churchill Downs. Why the drug appeared on Dancer’s Image’s test results remains a mystery.

Bute

Bute disappears from a horse’s system six days after it’s administered. It had been given to Dancer’s Image more than six days before the Kentucky Derby. After the race, Churchill Downs followed its usual practice of testing the winner and one horse chosen at random. That’s when the test results showed bute in Dancer’s Image’s system. The second place finisher, Forward Pass, was declared the winner, though he was not tested.

Peter Fuller believed he was set up. Either someone sneaked into the stall and gave Dancer’s Image the drug or someone altered the test results.

Fuller thought he was targeted because of his support for Martin Luther King, Jr. Two days after the civil rights leader’s assassination in Memphis that year, Fuller gave a purse of $62,000 won by Dancer’s Image to King’s widow, Coretta Scott King.

Churchill Downs had special reason for animus toward King and his supporters.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The year before, civil rights protesters held a sit-in on the stretch run in the middle of a race at the racetrack. They had protested for months, demanding an end to housing discrimination. Tensions grew as the 1967 Kentucky Derby approached, and the protesters’ leader, A.D. King, asked his brother Martin for help. Martin Luther King, Jr., came to Louisville and led a downtown rally in downtown on the day of the Derby. He feared a demonstration at the racetrack would lead to bloodshed.

King was murdered on April 4, 1968. Fuller didn’t announce his gift to Coretta Scott King, but it made the news in Louisville in the run-up to the Derby. Fuller feared reprisal. He received death threats, one of his stables was set on fire and Dancer’s Image was given a racial slur as a nickname. Fuller asked Churchill Downs for extra security. He didn’t get it.

He described the guard at his barn as “an old fella sitting in a chair and asleep.”

Sports Story of the Year

The controversy filled the news. Sports Illustrated called it the sports story of the year.

Peter Fuller fought for years to have Dancer’s Image declared the rightful winner of the Kentucky Derby. He appealed the racetrack’s ruling to the Kentucky State Racing Commission, which sided with Churchill Downs. He took his case to court and, in 1970, won. But then he lost on appeal.

Runnymede Farm, Dancer’s Image home

He later said he didn’t regret the publicity about the gift. In 1998 he told the Boston Herald, “It was just my way of saying, ‘Hell, this was a hell of a guy,’ and I’d say that to any redneck in the world.”

Dancer’s Image came in third behind Forward Pass in the Preakness Stakes, the second leg of the Triple Crown. He was disqualified again for bumping another horse. Fuller decided to retire him after that race because of his sore ankles. He was sent to stud and died in Japan at age 27 on December 26, 1992.

Kentucky lifted its ban on bute in 1974. It was so commonly used that by 1986 13 of the 16 horses entered in the Kentucky Derby were running on it.

Peter Fuller said he wouldn’t take another horse to the Kentucky Derby unless he thought it could win. He never found that horse, but if he had he had a name for it: ‘Dancer’s Revenge.’

He died at age 89 on May 14, 2012 in Portsmouth, N.H. To this day, a weathered billboard at Runnymede Farm proclaims Dancer’s Image the winner of the 1968 Kentucky Derby.

This story was updated in 2022.

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The Sensational Surrender of Four Nazi U-boats at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard

On May 15, 1945, onlookers tried to glimpse the first of four Nazi U-boats towed up the Piscataqua River to surrender at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. The news media then went into a feeding frenzy.

U-234 surrendering to the USS Sutton.

Germany had surrendered to the Allies on May 7, 1945, bringing World War II closer to an end.

The excitement over the tangible evidence of U.S. victory increased as three more Nazi U-boats followed over the next five days. The shipyard then studied the technologically advanced Nazi subs and their cargo.

The Nazi U-boats

The U-boats, sophisticated and much-feared maritime predators, traveled together in wolf packs to sink their targets. They attacked commercial shipping in order to starve the Allies of supplies. At first they had remarkable success, sinking about 3,000 vessels, mostly merchant ships. They also killed more than 5,000 seamen and passengers.

More people died in attacks by Nazi U-boats than at Pearl Harbor.

“The only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril,” wrote British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Eventually the U-boat menace subsided by 1942 when the U.S. entered the war and developed effective anti-submarine measures. But their fearful reputation persisted, contributing to the drama on the Piscataqua River in May 1945.

One of the feared Nazi U-boats by Ferrer Dalmau

Fangs Yanked Out

The 245-foot U-805 was the first to arrive. She had surrendered in the North Atlantic and was towed into Portsmouth Harbor. Green dye marked the spot for the rendezvous with a tugboat carrying Navy officials and news reporters.

Three ‘surly, expressionless’ German officers appeared on board. They officially surrendered at 4:25 p.m. at the mouth of the harbor. The submarine was then taken to the shipyard for publicity photos. One caption read, “Its fangs yanked out, this prize U-boat will prey no more upon Allied shipping in the Atlantic.”

A bus took the prisoners to Portsmouth Naval Prison, commonly known as The Castle, where Office of Naval Intelligence interpreters interrogated them. They wanted technical details about jet aircraft, ballistic missile, guided bomb and nuclear weapons technology.

WHEB-AM reporter Charlie Gray scored an interview with a captain of one of the U-boats. He described Lt. Albert Finster as a ‘typical dyed-in-the-wool Nazi.’ Finster’s interview caused a stir because he blamed England for the war. He also said Allied bombing ruined his native town of Hamburg.

Two more Nazi U-boats arrived the next day: At 2 pm, U-873 was towed into the harbor, followed by U-1228. That night, a wire service report added to the excitement. The USS Sutton captured a U-boat near Newfoundland with three high-ranking German officials and two dead Japanese scientists aboard.

The Biggest Prize

Portsmouth Naval Prison, where prisoners from Nazi U-boats were first taken

On Friday, May 18, the public eagerly awaited the arrival of the fourth and last of the Nazi U-boats. Rumors circulated about its cargo. The submarine was headed to Japan, which was still in the war. Supposedly it carried personnel and materiel to help the Japanese war effort.

U-234 arrived in Portsmouth at 7:30 am on Saturday, May 19, greeted by swarms of journalists. The biggest prize of all the Nazi U-boats, the high-ranking officers aboard made it a major news story.

The submarine carried a disassembled Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter, prototypes, technical descriptions of new weapons and several senior weapons technicians. The two Japanese scientists were not on board. They had committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills, and the Germans buried them at sea.

The U.S. government kept the secret about part of U-234’s cargo: 1,232 lbs. of uranium oxide. Scientists later used it in the Manhattan Project for the Little Boy atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

German General Ulrich Kessler, assigned as the Luftwaffe liaison in Tokyo, made an impression as the stereotypical Nazi general. Tall and formal, he wore white gloves, a long leather greatcoat, polished leather boots and an Iron Cross around his neck. He seemed to enjoy the publicity, noted WHEB’s Gray.

Kessler spoke in fluent English with a British accent. When asked how he felt about surrendering, he said, “I was in the last World War. I’ve been through it before. I’ll probably go through it again.”

The Dark Side of the Story

The Germans complained of their treatment. A subsequent investigation by the U.S. Navy confirmed their abuse. Navy prize crews seized the possessions of the Nazi U-boat crews and saved them as souvenirs. They also distributed them to local boys in small boats as the Nazi U-boats made their way up the Piscataqua. Or they stockpiled them at the prison, where corrections officers looted and sold them.

Among those items taken: pep pills, revolvers, canned goods, parts of German uniforms and decorations. Under the Geneva Convention, the U.S. should have returned the prisoners’ property.

After the crewmen of U-873 were interrogated in Portsmouth, they were then taken to the Charles Street Jail in Boston. There, they awaited transfer to a prisoner-of-war camp in Mississippi. As military officers marched them through the streets in handcuffs, crowds pelted them with garbage and insults.

Their commanding officer, Friedrich Steinhoff, returned to his cell with his face bloody and swollen. An ONI interrogator had ordered a big, strong Marine to beat him. Steinhoff bled to death in his cell, possibly from slashing his wrists with his broken glasses.

Ironically, he had a brother, Ernst Steinhoff, a rocket scientist. Ernst Steinhoff also surrendered and helped the United States with its rocketry program.

Fate of the Nazi U-boats

The U.S. Navy then took U-805 on several ‘Victory Visits’ to ports on the U.S. East Coast before sinking her.

U-1228 was then sunk in 1946, and U-234 was torpedoed off the Cape Cod coast in 1947.

Finally, in 1948, U-873 was scrapped.

With thanks to SeacoastNH.com. This story about the surrender of Nazi U-boats was updated in 2023.

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