BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC: Too Close for Comfort

For the first time the baffling, purposeful osmosis of the German U-boat campaign sent its seepage into the life streams of the North American Continent. Already the beaches of the Atlantic were stained with the brown blood of ships that could not be spared. Now oily hemorrhages spread on the flats of two great rivers. One of them was the St. Lawrence. Between its wildly beautiful banks, in the midriff of stubbornly isolationist Quebec, the German crept and waited. He nailed two ships in inland waters, and Quebec began searching its soul as it had never searched before.

The other American river was the Mississippi. The German was already in the Gulf of Mexico. He slipped through the Navy's surface and aerial screen, rose to periscope depth in the murky waters the Mississippi dumps into the Gulf 114 miles below New Orleans.

He was sure to find a target sitting there, for that is where seaborne ships pick up their pilots for the trip upriver. His first target was a big U.S. ship. He sent three torpedoes crashing into her. She burst into flames so explosively that a good half of her crew were trapped below. The rest, seared and oil-blackened, went overside, were carried out into the Gulf, there picked up by a Coast Guard cutter. Only 14 of her 41 lived to tell how they were attacked, only a mile and a half off the mouth of the country's greatest inland waterway. The U.S. Navy, faced with a greater-challenge than it had met in domestic waters since 1812, knew that it could never stop the filtering of the U-boats through its line until it had destroyed them one by one.