Torpedo Junction

Note: This is not the book of similar title originally written by Homer H. Hickam, Jr.

TORPEDO JUNCTION The U-Boat War off North Carolina's Coast
By Robin Crumpler, a former U.S. Navy Submarine Hunter

In the first six months of 1942, German U-boats turned the shipping lanes off North Carolina into one of the deadliest stretches of water in the Atlantic — a slaughter that often unfolded in plain sight of American beaches.

While American boys trained for D-Day in distant camps, German U-boats prowled the shipping lanes between Cape Hatteras and Cape Lookout, sinking nearly four hundred Allied merchant ships in plain sight of Outer Banks fishermen. Tankers burned within view of summer cottages. Bodies washed ashore at Nags Head, Ocracoke, and Topsail. Roughly five thousand Allied sailors died within sight of American sand. The U.S. Navy hid the scale of the disaster from the public for months. Most Americans never knew.

Torpedo Junction recovers the story they hid.
Drawing on declassified Office of Naval Intelligence interrogations, U.S. Navy and Coast Guard action reports, German Kriegstagebücher, and NOAA's underwater archaeology of the wrecks themselves, this book reconstructs the campaign that ran from January's City of Atlanta to July's running gun battle of Convoy KS-520. You will meet Reinhard Hardegen of U-123, who opened Operation Drumbeat off Hatteras. Lt. Cmdr. Hamilton Howe of USS Roper, who scored the first American kill of a German submarine in U.S. waters. Lt. Cmdr. Maurice Jester of USCGC Icarus, the Coast Guard skipper who took the first German naval prisoners of the war. The fishermen of Sneads Ferry and Hatteras who hauled survivors from burning oil. And the men who never came home, named and remembered.

This is also the story of how the war ended off the Carolina coast. Convoys. Fire-control towers at Fort Fisher. Cherry Point patrol bombers. The WASPs at Camp Davis. The shipyard at Wilmington that built 243 Liberty ships. The campaign that began as a slaughter ended, by August 1942, with the U-boats driven away. How that reversal happened — who saw it coming, who refused to act, and who finally did the work — is the heart of this book.

For readers of Michael Gannon and Erik Larson.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robin Crumpler grew up on coastal North Carolina, where the older fishermen still told stories of the burning tankers and the bodies that came ashore in the spring of 1942. Years later, he flew as the sensor operator in the S-3B Viking with VS-32, the "World Famous Maulers," as a U.S. Navy submarine hunter — working the same Atlantic waters where the U-boats once hunted American shipping and he went fishing as a kid with his father, a retired Navy Sailor. After his Navy service he served as a U.S. Army infantry officer spending nearly four years in Afghanistan and earned a degree in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Torpedo Junction is the first volume in his Hidden Histories of the Tar Heel State series — a project to recover the parts of his home state's past that have been overlooked, hidden, or actively forgotten.