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U-boat Victims of World War II: New England’s Secret Rescues

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Late in the afternoon of June 5, 1942, a Coast Guard lookout spotted a wooden motorboat puttering up Nauset Inlet with 20 windburned, exhausted men aboard. He’d expected them — U-boat victims. They had radioed for help to navigate to Cape Cod from the spot where their freighter sank 200 miles off Nantucket.

The lookout notified the Nauset Coast Guard Station, which sent three trucks carrying blankets, medical supplies and a surfboat to the survivors. By dinnertime they reached the station, where they had hot coffee and sandwiches. Four local doctors examined them. One survivor suffered from exposure after three days in an open boat and one had a broken eardrum, hit by a boom in the torpedo explosion. The other U-boat victims were fine. They took showers and slept, unbothered by curious civilians or prying reporters. The Coast Guard posted guards around the station, and the Red Cross volunteers kept their mouths shut.

First Encounter Beach in Eastham

The 20 men belonged to the hundreds of traumatized U-boat victims rescued along the New England coast during World War II. The U.S. government did its best to keep their existence secret.  It had to because it didn’t want the public to know about the Battle of the Atlantic off the U.S. East Coast.  Over and over, the government and the military lied about the casualties inflicted by German U-boats sometimes just a few miles offshore.

U-boat Victims

Eight days earlier in New York City, the men in the lifeboat had boarded the Mattawin, a British freighter carrying 8.6 tons of military trucks, airplanes, guns and ammunition. The vessel had instructions to deliver the materiel to Alexandria, Egypt, for the Allied invasion of Africa.

Delayed a day by engine trouble, the Mattawin left Long Island Sound on May 31 with 71 souls aboard. Twelve passengers belonged to the American Field Service, a volunteer ambulance corps. Three gunners from the British military guarded the freighter with machine guns and a four-inch anti-aircraft gun.

At night the Mattawin  passengers and crew slept in their clothes because of the German U-boats prowling the Atlantic. In the first five months of 1942, U-boats sank nearly 500 ships, three a day.  They had left the sea littered with lifeboats, debris, loose cargo and oil slicks.

Attack

The Mattawin passed Nantucket Shoal Lightship at 6 a.m. on June 1, then headed  east-southeast toward Capetown. When night fell, eight men aboard the ship stood watch, the three gunners at the ready, according to Capt. Charles Sweeny.  They couldn’t see much, though, because clouds obscured the full moon.

U-505 captured off the coast of West Africa in 1944.

AFS volunteer Nicholas Madeira stood watch in the gun turret. “I’m pretty sure I saw the wake of the torpedo just before it hit,” he later wrote, according to historian Eric Wiberg in his book, U-boats in New England.

At 1:19 a.m., a torpedo exploded in the Mattawin’s hull, sending up a huge column of water from one of the hatches, Sweeny recalled.

Sweeny realized the Mattawin would sink fast. He ordered an SOS signal sent, the engines shut off and the lifeboats launched. The radioman then threw secret codes overboard. AFS volunteer Harry Blackwell pointed out a submarine 200 yards off the starboard side of the ship. “No time to look at the sub much,”  wrote another volunteer, Marshall Phelps.

Phelps, Blackwell, the other AFS volunteers and most of the crew quickly filed into four lifeboats without confusion. Three lifeboats pushed off. Minutes later, another torpedo struck. Captain Sweeny, still on board the sinking vessel, yelled to the others, “Every man for himself.” The last lifeboat remained in the davits, and Sweeny and four others hopped in. The Mattewin sank almost immediately, a mere 11 minutes after the first torpedo struck. Everyone had gotten off safely.

U-boats

Typically, the U-boat, U-553, waited for the crew and passengers to get into the lifeboats before firing the second torpedo. The Germans wanted to sink ships, not kill civilians. It wasn’t unusual for a U-boat to surface next to survivors in a lifeboat just after it had torpedoed their ship. The Germans would ask for the ship’s name, tonnage and destination. They’d then offer their victims water, cigarettes, bread and directions to the nearest land.

To win the war, Germany knew it had to delay the buildup of America’s war machine and interrupt supply lines to the Allies in Europe and Africa.  Germany sent its fleet of U-boats — 159 at peak strength — to sink merchants ships and oil tankers. The goal was to starve the Allies of industrial as well as military supplies.

U-Boat Victims on Lifeboats

The four Mattawin lifeboats had pemmican, cigarettes, chocolate, salted peanuts, 36 gallons of water and red sails. In the first boat, Sweeny had a sextant and chronometer. The fourth had a motor and a radio. For four hours they stuck together, rowing toward Cape Cod in the dark.  Sweeny figured they’d reach Cape Cod in seven days.

A crowded World War II-era lifeboat

At dawn they raised their sails. AFS volunteer Edward Fenton, Amherst Class of ’37,  wrote he’d never forget how beautiful it was — “the great red sail unfurling, and the sun upon it, and the men in their yellow suits against it. We sailed on all day, the other three boats following. We had an extremely good time in our boat, laughing, telling jokes; and the British engineers taught us a number of songs to which we have words.” Fenton would survive the war and write children’s books.

The four boats kept together until 2 p.m., when the third boat disappeared from sight. Sweeny told the motor launch to go ahead and find a rescue ship.

That night it rained,  making for uncomfortable slumber. As June 3 dawned, the third lifeboat remained out of sight.

Early that morning the launch spotted a Norwegian freighter, the Torvanger, which paused to let it come aside.  Capt. Leif Danielsen offered to take them aboard. When the men learned she was bound for Capetown, they said they’d prefer to try for Cape Cod.  Danielsen gave them some fuel. He then looked for the other lifeboats and steered toward them. They both declined to come aboard and continued sailing.

A motorized World War II-era lifeboat

Fenton, in the second lifeboat, recalled they had gone half an hour when they noticed the Torvanger was steaming toward them.

The Torvanger Turns Back

What happened aboard the Torvanger was this:

Rescues at sea, which sometimes took a long time, exposed the rescuer to U-boat attacks.  The Torvanger had risked U-boat attacks at least seven times in the past 48 hours. When she stopped for the Mattawin victims, she had already rescued two sets of U-boat victims. Some of them had been torpedoed on two consecutive vessels in the space of a week.

After she left the last Mattawin lifeboat, the Torvanger’s crew confronted Captain Danielsen. They were fed up risking torpedo strikes. After all,  three lifeboats full of shipwreck survivors told them they’d rather spend a week eating salted peanuts in an open boat than board a 7,000-ton freighter sailing unescorted across the Atlantic.

They demanded an armed escort before heading to Africa.

The Torvanger turned around and found two of the Mattawin lifeboats again. Captain Danielsen told the survivors  he’d decided to head back, and they agreed to come on board . But fog had drifted in and they couldn’t spot the other two Mattawin boats.

Survivors brought aboard a cutter

On board the Torvanger, Fenton recalled coffee and cheese in the salon, and a general reunion. “For the first time since the torpedoing, I found myself trembling,” he wrote. “The coffee slopped all over from my shaking hand.” That night Fenton bunked with the crew, along with another AFS volunteer, Richard Edwards,  nephew of future U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.

The next day, June 4, the Torvanger encountered a convoy bound for Halifax, which welcomed the vessel to join them. By that evening they landed in Canada.

Halifax

Just as the U.S. Coast Guard did on Cape Cod, the Canadians kept the U-boat survivors under wraps.  After they landed in Halifax, Fenton wrote, “We were rushed in a bus to the Allied Seaman’s Institute, where tables had been roped off, with signs on them that read “Reserved – For Survivors Only.”

When the Mattawin’s launch landed in Eastham, the Coast Guard refused access to curious civilians, friends and newspaper reporters. The U-boat victims were whisked to an undisclosed location and interviewed by the U.S. Navy.

USCGC General Greene

On June 8, the third lifeboat was picked up by the Coast Guard cutter General Greene and taken to Nantucket. The island that month had taken in nearly 100  U-boat victims from four separate sinkings. Again, the Red Cross and the Coast Guard kept them sequestered. The survivors were taken to the Bennett Theater, where they slept on cots. Townspeople who brought clothes and bedding couldn’t get past the door. The General Greene then took the survivors to Newport for questioning by the Navy.

Throughout New England, 649 survivors of Uboats landed in a dozen ports, according to Wiberg. Some got counted twice, like the Mattawin survivors who landed at Nantucket and then Newport.

Nearly 300 landed in Boston and 160 in Newport. Nantucket hosted 133, Provincetown 62, and New Bedford 36. Portland, Maine, saw 50 U-boat victims. Other ports included New London, Conn., Falmouth, Mass., Eastham, Mass., Point Judith, R.I., Gloucester, Mass., Southwest Harbor, Maine, Rockland, Maine, and Brighton, Mass.

Southwest Harbor

The Navy had a harder time keeping a lid on the news that U-boats had attacked fishing vessels.  The Germans targeted fishermen because the Navy used them as observers. They had radio transmitters and “confidential fishermen observer kits.” They even got carrier pigeons to carry messages to shore.

On the same day the Torvanger picked up two U-boat victims from the Mattawin, U-432 shelled two Gloucester fishing vessels. The Ben and Josephine and the Aeolus were fishing southeast of Thacher Island. The Germans let the captains and crew escape in dories before delivering the coup de grace.

Mount Desert Rock, off Mount Desert Island

The survivors rowed for 14 hours, finally landing on Mount Desert Rock. They were interviewed at the Coast Guard station, then taken to the high school gym in Southwest Harbor, Maine. Local residents brought cots and bedding, baskets of food, fish chowder, hot coffee and dessert. The survivors then took a bus home, and their story appeared in the Gloucester Daily Times.

“When the full news became known, enthusiasm for the offshore fisheries declined sharply,” wrote Charles Dana Gibson, a relative of the Ben and  Josephine’s captain, Guiseppe Ciaramitaro.

The Lark

Just before dawn on June 13, 1944, U-107 fired two torpedoes and missed the 148-ton fishing vessel Lark, sailing off Cape Sable. The U-boat then fired a warning shot, and 25 of the 27 men aboard jumped into lifeboats. The U-107 then strafed the rigging, the pilot house and the hulls, damaging the boat and destroying two sails.  When dawn broke, U-107 slipped away. The captain, who’d stayed with the vessel, started the engine, picked up the men and made it back to his home port of Boston. There it tied up at a public pier on the morning of June 15.

The Navy decided to use the U-boat attacks as a publicity stunt, inviting the press to cover the story. The Navy pointed out it was the first time in two years anyone had seen enemy U-boats on the northeast fishing banks. That was a lie.

Why Lie?

Few today know that more than 5,000 people died in the Battle of the Atlantic — more than twice as many as at Pearl Harbor. The government did its best to cover it up. The Navy blamed torpedo attacks on boiler explosions or simply issued cryptic statements that a boat sank. During the early part of the battle, the Navy falsely claimed it had sunk far more U-boats than it actually did.

The news media also agreed to government censorship, which helped to hide the military’s incompetence in protecting shipping and the lives of merchant seamen.

Not until the spring of 1943 did the United States build enough oceangoing military strength to destroy U-boats faster than the Germans could build them.

Thanks to Eric Wiberg, author of U-Boats in New England, and uboat.net, on both of which this story relied heavily. 

Images: First Encounter Beach By ToddC4176 at the English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16093177. Mount Desert light-station, looking N. Maine, 1894. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2005688368/. Lifeboat, survivors rescued and General Greene, The Coast Guard at War: Assistance XIV, prepared in Public Relations Division Historical Section, Oct. 30, 1944.

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Underwood Deviled Ham – Six Devilicious Facts About the Boston Pantry Staple

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That little can of Underwood Deviled Ham on your grocer’s shelf has a long history that goes back to feeding the Union Army, building the biggest sardine factory on the Maine coast and starting the profession of food science.

The William Underwood Company sold quality canned foods to working-class city dwellers and westward-bound pioneers from its Boston factory since 1822. You can still buy Underwood Deviled Ham, which has been around since 1868. Like so many processed food companies, though, Underwood now belongs to a multinational food conglomerate.

But throughout its independent existence, the William Underwood Company made food history. Here are six fun facts about  the company and its famous Underwood Deviled Ham.

1. The Mass. Board of Health Endorsed Underwood Deviled Ham

In 1906, the Massachusetts Board of Health prohibited the sale of deviled meats in Massachusetts, except for Underwood Deviled Ham. William Lyman Underwood, the founder’s grandson, had taken an interest in food safety. Specifically, he wanted to figure out how to stop canned clams from exploding.

In 1895, he began working with an MIT biologist, Samuel Cate Prescott, on a solution. Underwood and Prescott spent a year on the problem, but it was worth it. They figured out a way to kill heat-resistant bacterial spores. They then conducted similar research into other canned food, dicovering, for example, how to prevent canned peas and asparagus from going sour.

Their work at MIT led to food science becoming a profession. The Underwood company collaborated with MIT for many years. In 1969, Underwood president George Seybolt donated $600,000 to MIT to create the Underwood Professorship, held today by Steven Tannenbaum.

2. Napoleon Jumpstarted the Canning Business

Underwood Deviled Ham owes its existence in part to Napoleon Bonaparte, who inspired the practice of canning food. His ar my needed food that could travel long distances (to Moscow, for example), and so he offered a 12,000 franc award to anyone who could figure out how to do it. The prize went to a confectioner named Nicolas Appert in 1810.

Who knew? The father of canned food.

Appert filled thick, wide-mouthed glass bottles with foodstuffs — meat, eggs, chicken — and then corked it with a vise, leaving air at the top of the bottle. He then wrapped the bottle in canvas and dunked it in boiling water.

Soon the British caught on to what their enemy was up to. The story goes that a Frenchman named Philippe de Girard used Appert’s methods to preserve food in tin canisters. He found a British merchant, Peter Durand, who patented his process in England in 1810. He then sold the patent to a British company that became Crosse & Blackwell.

European canning companies thrived selling canned goods to the military during the continent’s many 19th century wars.

A young Englishman named William Underwood learned canning techniques as an apprentice at Crosse & Blackwell. Then he immigrated to the United States in 1817, landing in New Orleans. Underwood decided to walk around the new country, checking out all 20 states before settling in Boston.

3. Deviled Ham and Sardines Made “Devildine” Sandwiches. Yum!

Underwood Deviled Ham became a pantry staple, adaptable as a sandwich spread, an hors d’oeuvre, a dip or a salad. In 1928, Florence A. Cowles published a cookbook, Seven Hundred Sandwiches, with a “devildine sandwich” recipe that demonstrates deviled ham’s versatility.

“Remove bones and tails from a medium-sized can of sardines and thin to a pates with lemon juice. Add a small can of deviled ham (not potted ham), one hard-boiled egg, chopped fine, a chopped olive and a tablespoon of mayonnaise. Trim slices of white bread, butter, lay on a lettuce leaf and spread with devildine.” (Sounds disgusing, but who knows?)

How does Little Red Devil Recipe No. 52 sound — Macaroni Ham Timbale?

In 1911, the company had offered its own book of deviled ham recipes for picnics and “partynics” — “all Good Fun times.” Underwood Deviled Ham was the “party taste de luxe with mouth-watering ham taste of salt and sugar and hickory smoke.” read a magazine ad that year.

4. Americans Were Slow To Embrace Canned Foods

Young William Underwood’s business started slowly, in part because he couldn’t give away canned foods to the suspicious U.S. consumer in 1820. He began selling fruit and berries — damsons, quinces, currants and cranberries – to foreign markets. He shipped his product, hermetically sealed in glass jars, to the East and West Indias, Hong Kong, India, Gibralter, South America and the Philippines.

William Underwood

Underwood then expanded to pickles, mustard, ketchup, milk, cranberries and tomatoes – the latter a risky move because many people considered tomatoes poisonous back then. (Even now, Tom Brady won’t eat them.)

Boston glassmakers couldn’t keep up with the company’s insatiable demand for bottles. Underwood also found that tin canisters were a lot cheaper. So in 1839 he began substituting tin canisters for glass bottles. His bookkeepers got tired of writing “tin canisters,” so they shortened the phrase to “can.” They are credited with popularizing the change.

Settlers heading west during the 1840s and 1850s stocked up on Underwood canned food. The company also sold canned roast beef and other meat to Union soldiers during the Civil War.

Underwood’s experience with condiments and meat combined to create Underwood Deviled Ham in 1868. Today, its ingredients include mustard, spices and turmeric.

5. Not Exactly Kosher — Shellfish, Too

In 1844, Underwood built a lobster canning factory, one of the first, in Harpswell, Maine. Underwood workers started off boiling lobsters in an iron pot on a tripod on the beach.

Six years later, Underwood built an oyster canning plant in Boston, then the hub of the East Coast oyster industry.

The company added salmon in 1851. According to lore, the first gold sent back from the Gold Rush of 1849 arrived in an Underwood salmon can.

Sardine Factory, Oil on canvas by Leslie Landrigan

In the early 1850s, William Underwood built another lobster canning factory on Steamboat Wharf in Southwest Harbor. But then summer tourists began arriving on Mount Desert Island and brought with them complaints about the noise and smell of the canning factory. Eventually, Underwood moved the factory to nearby Tremont.

In 1880, Underwood built what was then called the largest sardine cannery in Jonesport. The company built another in Bass Harbor in 1889. Eventually every coastal Maine town would have a canning factory. Today, none are left.

6. Oldest Food Trademark in the U.S.

Underwood registered a trademark for its devilish logo on Nov. 29, 1870 with the new U.S. Patent Office. The trademark identified “meat entremets” intended for “Sandwiches, Luncheons, and Traveler’s Repasts.”

Hmm. how does

Note the “W” at the end of the devil’s tail – which stands for “William,” as in “William Underwood.” Over time, the “W” disappeared and the devil acquired a pitchfork and a friendly smile.

It was the 82nd trademark registerred, and not the first one for food. That honor belongs to J.B. Baldy & Co. Railroad Brand Mustard.

It is, however, the oldest food trademark still in use in the United States.

The New England Historical Society’s book, Historic Thanksgiving Foods, is an Amazon #1 New Release in Thanksgiving Cooking. Buy it now in paperback or as an ebook. 

 

 

 

Image: William Underwood By Cfpyne – I scanned an old family photoPreviously published: Ancestry.com, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79826182. This story updated in 2023.

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Steamboat City of Rockland – The Cursed Ship of The Tourist Trade

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Construction started on the City of Rockland at East Boston’s McKie Shipbuilding Company in 1900. By 1901 she sailed regular runs up the coast of Maine carrying summer visitors and freight back and forth to Boston.

She stopped in Rockland, Camden, Belfast, Bangor, Northwest Harbor, Southeast Harbor, Seal Harbor and Bar Harbor. The Eastern Steamship Company advertised the vessel as travelling “the picturesque route with connections to all northern Maine sporting resorts.”

City of Rockland Run Aground in 1904

City of Rockland Run Aground in 1904

They might well have added, “provided you ever arrive.”

City of Rockland

The City of Rockland ranked as one of the most troubled steamers ever to carry the summer tourist trade north for a break from the city heat. In those days $5 would get you from Boston to Camden or Rockland and back. For just a little more, $6.50 would take you to Bangor. For the tonier destinations of Northeast and Seal Harbors and Bar Harbor, $7.50 and $8 would take you there.

In July of 1904, the 274-foot side-wheeler struck a ledge in the Muscle Ridge Channel off Thomaston, Maine, in the fog. News accounts of the day cheerily reported the divers’ assessment.

“After an examination lasting an hour they reported that the City of Rockland was resting on a huge boulder forward and an old sunken wreck aft. They could not find that the steamer was badly strained, nor were they able to locate the leak in the bow.

“Newton’s wharf is tonight piled high with freight and baggage from the wrecked steamer. Among the articles rescued today was a trunk containing imported lace valued at $15,000. The lace is ruined.”

City of Rockland sunk at her pier in 1921 (Leslie Jones photo, Boston Public Library)

City of Rockland sunk at her pier in 1921 (Leslie Jones photo, Boston Public Library)

“A large wrecking fleet still surrounds the stranded vessel and not the least interesting incidents at the scene today were the numerous fights among fishermen in their endeavor to secure valuable wreckage.”

The company sent its officers to search the surf for lost bags and belongings, including a grand piano. Passengers threatened to sue to invalidate the language on their tickets. It declared the shipping line only had liability for lost luggage up to $100.

Refloated

On August 1, with a gale bearing down on the Northeast, the City of Rockland floated again. Onlookers gave her a standing ovation. Then a towboat took her to back to land, precariously. There she was beached for patching and transport back to McKie for a full repair.

A new fog bell was erected on Otter Island. Channel markers, pulled from their proper location by winter ice, went back to their rightful locations.

City of Rockland after collision with the H.P. Havens (Leslie Jones photo, Boston Public Library)

City of Rockland after collision with the H.P. Havens (Leslie Jones photo, Boston Public Library)

Again

In June of 1906, the City of Rockland again came to grief. With only the whole ocean to navigate in, the City of Rockland managed to collide with her sister ship, the City of Bangor, 20 miles off Portland. The City of Bangor suffered only minor damage. The City of Rockland, meanwhile, had railings torn from her three decks and five staterooms on her main deck smashed in.

In July of 1912, the City of Rockland managed to collide with a coal ship near Boone Island, 20 miles from York, Maine. The coal ship suffered no damage, naturally, while the Rockland partially sank. Two hundred summer tourists returning to Boston had to transfer to the coal ship, Chisolm, to finish their journey. The City of Rockland once more took a tow to shore and made ready for repairs.

In 1913, towboats once again brought the City of Rockland into Boston, this time with a gaping hole in her bow inflicted by a crash with the schooner H.P. Havens.

1921 found the City of Rockland again sunk – this time while still tied to her pier in East Boston.

The Final Curtain

The final bow for the City of Rockland came September 2, 1923. The ship this time headed from Bath, Maine, toward Bangor when the ship ran up on a reef near Popham Beach. Repeated blasts from the horn drew rescuers. Passengers leapt from the lower deck,  caught by Coast Guardsmen and deposited on the beach. There they gathered around a huge bonfire and ate food brought from the ship.

In his book Storms and Shipwrecks of New England, Edward Snow described the good-natured castaways. “[They] made the best of it. The children, while sliding down the sloping sides of the steamer into the boats, enlivened the proceedings by their songs.” They sang at the top of their voices the era’s favorite songs, ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas Today,’ or ‘Barney Google.’

In October the ship was scuttled at an aptly named location – Misery Island in Salem, Mass. There she was burned for her fittings. For a century her ribs would appear on the beach at low tide.

But for all her misfortune, no one ever died in any of the accidents, and very few suffered injuries.

This story was updated in 2022.

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