(Editor’s Note: This week’s blog is the speech that I gave in 2013 at the annual Memorial Day observance in Hatteras village, which is sponsored by the island’s U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary.)
Good morning. And thank you for this opportunity to speak on a day that we remember those who have given their lives in service to our county.
When I first came to Hatteras Island in the summer of 1975 with my two young children, I had no idea that one of the major naval battles of World War II was fought within sight of the seashore?s lovely and wild beaches.
I had no idea how many people died in what we now call The Battle of the Atlantic, which raged off the North Carolina coast from January, 1942, into the summer of that year.
Nor did I realize that my own father, then a recent graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, had participated in that battle.
Indeed, back then, few people knew of the war waged within sight of our shores.
You knew if you grew up on Hatteras or Ocracoke because you either lived through that time or heard the stories of your parents or grandparents ? stories of anxiety, fear, blackouts, explosions that shook windows, fires that raged just offshore and the plumes of black smoke that rose from them, the beaches being coated with oil, and the grisly discoveries of bodies washed up on the islands.
Today, more folks know those stories, largely because they have received more attention from historians and authors and local newspapers. The once small annual ceremony at the British cemetery on Ocracoke has drawn more people each year, largely through the efforts of the Ocracoke Preservation Society, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum. Along the way, the ceremony was expanded to include another small graveyard near the Old Coast Guard Station in Buxton.
A major contributor to helping us learn more about the war fought off our coast is my good friend and colleague, Kevin Duffus, a historian, author, and filmmaker who has produced a two-part documentary and a book, entitled ?War Zone: World War II off the North Carolina Coast.?
If you haven?t read it, I can highly recommend it.
Kevin lives in Raleigh but has spent much time on the Outer Banks and elsewhere collecting material and doing research for his documentary and book. He?s interviewed many Outer Bankers who generously shared their memories with him.
Since I moved here in 1991, I?ve also interviewed many of them as editor of a Hatteras monthly newspaper and now The Island Free Press.
The late Charles Stowe of Hatteras village told Duffus about the day he almost came face to face with the enemy.
Stowe was commercial fishing with his father and they were headed to the M/V Australia, which had been sunk off the coast in 1942.
Stowe was steering the boat when his father got up on the bow and noted that there was ?some boat up ahead.? He said he didn?t have any idea who it was. He told his son to keep on going, intending to ignore the strange vessel.
Stowe noted at this point that his father?s eyesight wasn?t all that good in those days.
Finally, Stowe shouted to his father, ?Daddy, that boat there is pretty good size.? His father told him to keep on going.
As the father and son got closer, Stowe realized what they were looking at. He said, ?My land, it?s a submarine.?
His father looked right at it and said, ?No, it ain?t.? But his father also added, ?hard right and turn around, we?re heading home.?
Stowe said it wasn?t until they were well on their way back that his father acknowledged that it was probably a German U-boat.
?He said it sure was, a German submarine that had surfaced, probably to recharge its batteries between here and the M/V Australia, and that would have been only five or six miles off the beach.?
Sisters Ormond Fuller and Carol Dillon of Buxton have shared their memories with Duffus and with me.
Dillon was a youngster during the war years and was the girl upon which Nell Wise Wechter based her lead character in the beloved children?s book, ?Taffy of Torpedo Junction.? Taffy lived with her grandfather in a shack on the beach, rode her pony around Buxton, and helped round up a ring of German spies.
Dillon had a pony and was the daughter of postmistress Maude White, who had her own suspicions about some of the mail arriving on the island. Dillon remembers the windows rattling and the frequent explosions and raging fires offshore.
Her old sister Ormond remembers being yelled at by a commander of the Cape Hatteras Coast Guard Station for a forbidden late night visit to the lighthouse ? even as armed coastguardsmen patrolled the beach.
Gibb Gray of Avon told Duffus of his family being awakened by an explosion on a cold night when he was a youngster and his entire family pressing their faces against the cold window panes to watch a fire raging at sea.
Later he remembers coming across a lifeboat on the beach.
?Me and a friend of mine saw nine men, dead, laying on the floor with their lifejackets still on and their eyes filled with sand ? that?s a terrifying sight for two 15-year-old boys to see.?
Duffus says that 1,710 lives were lost in the Battle of the Atlantic off our coast. Only six of them have a memorial on the islands.
They were all sailors serving in the British Royal Navy.
Two are from the British tanker San Delfino, which was torpedoed and sunk on April 9, 1942, east of Rodanthe. Their bodies washed up on the beach at the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.
Four are from the Royal Navy?s armed trawler, HMT Bedfordshire, torpedoed and sunk 12 miles south of Cape Lookout on May 11, 1942.
The connection between those two tragedies is one of the more interesting tales that Kevin Duffus tells in both his documentary and his book.
That connection is Aycock Brown, an Outer Banks native whom many remember for his photographs that promoted tourism on the Outer Banks after the war ? especially his photos of pretty young women in bathing suits.
However, during the war Brown was a civilian agent for U.S. Navy Intelligence. His responsibilities included examining and identifying corpses and wreckage that had washed ashore with the purpose of learning the names of ships that had been destroyed before a distress signal could be sent.
In April of 1942, he was called on to identify the body that had washed ashore near the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. Brown identified the corpse as that of Michael Cairns, the fourth engineering officer on the San Delfino.
Plans were made to bury his body in a small plot near the Cape Hatteras Coast Guard Station — now the Ranger Station on the Park Service Road in Buxton — and Brown wanted the British sailor buried with full military honors. However, he had no British honor guard or bugler, so Brown figured the best he could do was to find a British flag to drape the coffin.
Brown?s search took him to the docks in Morehead City where he found the Bedfordshire taking on fuel and supplies for its next anti-submarine patrol. He was directed to the ship’s officer of the deck, a 28-year old sub-lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. Thomas Cunningham was a handsome and affable man, and he and Brown immediately made a connection.
According to a 1955 article that Brown wrote, he and the British sailor shared some grog and conversation. Cunningham said he couldn?t spare any British seamen, but he did give Brown four British flags, two more than he had requested.
Two were used to drape the casket of Michael Cairns and another body that washed up that was unidentified but presumed to be from the San Delfino.
The next month, Brown was summoned to Ocracoke to identify two bodies that had washed up there. A shocked and shaken Brown was immediately able to identify one of the bodies at that of Sub-Lieutenant Thomas Cunningham. The other was later identified as ordinary telegraphist Stanley Craig.
The two men were buried on Ocracoke in a plot donated by the Williams family. Their caskets were draped with the last two Union Jacks that Cunningham had given Brown. Later two more unidentified bodies, presumed to be from the Bedfordshire, washed up on the Ocracoke beach and were buried alongside Cunningham and Craig.
And here I want to digress to insert just a bit of my own family history that also involved the Battle of the Atlantic.
When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, my father, Raymond Jerome Clare Jr. was a midshipman at Annapolis, a member of the Class of 1943. Jerry, as he was called, and his classmates were graduated early in 1942 so they could fight in the war.
My father was assigned to a brand-new destroyer of the Bristol class that was commissioned on April 29, 1942. From that day until July 12, the USS Lansdowne operated under various commands along the Atlantic seaboard engaged in fitting out, shakedown, anti-submarine and rescue work, and escorting.
Much of that was out of Norfolk, Va., and off the coast of North Carolina.
In his history of the Lansdowne during the war, my father wrote:
?On the third of July while cruising off Cape Hatteras in a search for survivors of the ships sunk in the area, she made her first contact with the enemy ? a German submarine. After several depth-charge attacks, oil and debris floated to the surface. After all evidence had been assembled, this attack was evaluated by a special board as a ?probably? sunk.?
Though I had read his story of the war on the Lansdowne when I was younger, it was not until many years later that I made the connection between my father?s service and the Battle of the Atlantic.
It may be of interest to you that the Lansdowne went on to the South Pacific, where it was involved in just about every major battle. The ship had many close calls, but no casualties and became known as the ?Lucky L.?
One of its first encounters in the South Pacific was while cruising south of Guadalcanal, covering the Marines on that island, when lookouts reported ?smoke on the carrier.? The USS Wasp had been hit by torpedoes.
My father recounts:
As the ship was turned to head for the carrier, a torpedo passed directly under the bow of the Lansdowne and almost down her entire length. Life seemed to come to a standstill until the wake was seen on the port quarter, the torpedo still going and headed for open water. The Wasp, in the meanwhile, was burning fiercely amidships, the fire spreading rapidly forward with great clouds of black smoke rising in the air and exploding ammunition and debris flying in all directions.?
The Lansdowne put two boats in the water, which ?was now covered with burning oil and gasoline? and began rescue operations. Men on the ship threw heaving lines to survivors in life rafts. From the bridge, an officer fired at sharks in the water. Survivors, 445 in all, were hauled aboard covered in oil and badly burned. The wardroom was used as a first aid station. The doctor, two pharmacist?s mates, and other volunteers gave blood plasma and morphine injections to the casualties.
Then my father adds:
?As the other ships of the force left the area, the Lansdowne stood by the twisted and still burning hulk of the carrier and at sunset fired five torpedoes at the carrier, rendering the final ?coup de grace.??
After its very active role in the war, the Lansdowne headed toward Japan in August of 1945, where it was involved in the rescue of prisoners of war. On Sept. 1, the ship entered Yokohama Harbor. Early the next morning, it carried the Japanese surrender party to the USS Missouri to sign the formal surrender.
In early December of 1945, the ?Lucky L? entered New York harbor, where the journey had begun almost four years before. My father left the ship and called his girl, Jean Rodriguez, and by the end of the month the two were married.
I?m a baby boomer, born nine months later. I grew up in the Navy. And I?m proud of it.
My grandparents sent off not one, but three sons to war. My father had twin brothers who also served in World War II ? one in the U.S. Army and one in the U.S. Air Force. All three returned safely. Uncle Paul decided to leave the service after the war, but Uncle David became a career officer in the Air Force.
Fewer than 10 years after the war ended, Air Force Captain David Clare was killed when the B-52 bomber he was piloting crashed during a training exercise in Riverside, Calif. I was only about 8 or 9 at the time, but I still have memories of that call to my father.
Before I close, I want to make a suggestion to the fine organizations that support this memorial service and to all of you.
I said earlier that 1, 710 people ? servicemen, merchant mariners, and civilians ? died in the Battle of the Atlantic. Here on Hatteras and Ocracoke, only six of those are remembered ? the six Royal Navy sailors buried in Ocracoke and Buxton.
I think it would be appropriate for there to be a memorial somewhere on the islands to memorialize the others ? the 1,704 who perished but have no marked graves here.
What better place to remember all of them than Hatteras and Ocracoke, where the battle was fought so close to our shores.
This is not an original idea. It has actually been advocated by my friend Kevin Duffus.
But it?s a terrific idea and one that someone or some organization should carry forward.
I want to end with this poem. It?s entitled ?To the WWII Merchant Navies
of all Nations: Thank You.? The author is not known.
On all the oceans
White caps flow
You do not see crosses
Row on Row
But those who sleep
Beneath the sea
Rest in Peace,
For your country is free.
| Hatteras Memorial Day observance planned for May 25
This year’s Memorial Day observance, hosted by the Hatteras Island’s Coast Guard Auxiliary, will be on Monday, May 25, at 10 a.m. at the Hatteras United Methodist Church in Hatteras village. An ensemble from the Cape Hatteras Secondary School band will play patriotic music, and the keynote speaker will be Hatteras historian Charlie Klein. After the events in the church, the Coast Guard will present colors and students from the school will play “Taps.” Refreshments will be served after the observance. All residents and visitors, especially veterans, are invited. To reserve seating for a veteran, call Kal Gancsos at 252-986-1401. |
