Island History: Memories of Ocracoke residents from 1942, preserved for all time

The kindly, great-grandfather of 17 children smiled uncomfortably as he sat in front of a large TV camera, with lights glaring, a microphone clipped to his blue, black, and gray flannel shirt, and strangers about to ask him to relive one of the most horrific, heart-rending moments of his life.

His name was Ulysses Levi “Mac” Womac, a 20-year veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard and an employee of the National Park Service for another 17 years. Just 18 years old in January 1942, the native Tennesseean, unfamiliar with boats and the sea, was assigned to the Coast Guard station at Ocracoke, seemingly far from the carnage of the Second World War.

In the background, a fish tank pump gurgled softly as his family stood out of view in a corner of the room. No one in the room moved or made a sound. The old timer’s eyes seemed to focus beyond the walls, beyond the veil of time, as he transported those listening back through the years, to 1942. The night he remembered was Friday, the 23rd of January – only his third week on the island, the night the British tanker Empire Gem was torpedoed by a German U-boat about 25 miles due east of Ocracoke Inlet.

Mr. Womac took a deep breath and sighed and then he began to speak: “Whenever we got called out, we knew we were going out to a ship that had been torpedoed. The guy in charge of the boat knew more about it than we did. He never said more than ‘We gotta go, and you all’s the ones that are picked so let’s haul buggy.’ And we did, and it seemed like it took us forever to get there because, like I said, the boat was slow.”

The torpedoed British vessel, Empire Gem, loaded with more than 10,000 tons of refined gasoline, had erupted in an immense firestorm, ejecting wreckage and vast quantities of burning petroleum that spread across the black surface of the sea. The great orange glow and towering mushroom cloud could be seen dozens of miles away.

The scene Mr. Womac described after their six-hour journey when he and his three would-be lifesavers aboard their 36-foot motor lifeboat finally reached the burning ship at 3 a.m. was spellbinding yet nightmarish. When they arrived on the hellish scene, the sea was ablaze with expanding pools of raging fires. Clouds of choking, thick black smoke swirled about them. The ocean was littered with the tossing flotsam of ship and human remains.

The four men from Ocracoke Station couldn’t maneuver their lifeboat near the massive hull of the stricken ship. Along the tanker’s rail high above, some British sailors, their clothing apparently on fire, could still be seen leaping from the deck to the burning sea below. High seas and scorching heat from the fires made the rescuers’ gruesome task nearly impossible.

The men from Silver Lake felt helpless. “All we could do is go around and around, hoping to pick up somebody that was alive,” Womac said with a sad expression, his eyes beginning to glisten. “And it’s, it’s a terrible feeling, especially when you see them jump overboard with flames on to ’em and know that they was going into the fire just as quick as they hit.”

Meanwhile, a motor lifeboat from Hatteras Inlet Station had been off in the distance searching the dark, pre-dawn waters for boats or life rafts that may have been launched from the British ship. None were found, only bodies. Of the 57 British merchant officers and sailors aboard the Empire Gem prior to the attack by the U-66, only Captain Francis Reginald Broad and radio assistant Thomas Orrell could be rescued by the Ocracoke crew. For Mac Womac and his mates, their lives were irrevocably changed.

The interview with Mr. Womac was just one of more than a dozen I conducted for a three-hour documentary I produced in 2000 titled, “War Zone—World War II Off North Carolina’s Outer Banks.” The memories of the men and women that I interviewed, all in their 70s and 80s and now deceased—Mr. Womac sadly died just three months after our interview—were instrumental in telling a story that far too few American citizens know about. In fact, after presenting a lecture on the topic at a retired military officers’ event a few years ago, I was told by a U.S. Navy captain who was an instructor at the Naval Academy that the subject is not taught to midshipmen at all.

The neglect and oversight of such an important chapter of American history is astonishing and regrettable. Three hundred ninety-seven ships were sunk or damaged by enemy U-boats in just half a year in American waters. Nearly 5,000 people, including many civilians, were burned to death, crushed, drowned, or vanished into the sea. The greatest concentration of these attacks occurred in the waters between Cape Henry and Cape Lookout with the epicenter, if you will, at Cape Hatteras, a place long notorious as the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

Off the North Carolina coast, 1,716 people perished, including some women and children. Untold numbers of victims of U-boat attacks—wounded, sunburned, and covered in oil—floated for days or weeks in lifeboats, life rafts, or on wreckage in frigid seas, suffering excruciating hunger, fending off sharks, deliriously resisting the urge to drink seawater. Oil from sunken tankers washed ashore in quantities that rank among the worst environmental disasters in American history. Corpses drifted offshore and washed up on the beaches, sometimes to be found by terrified island children. Adults spread stories of encounters with German sympathizers, spies, and saboteurs.

For the first time in memory, families at Ocracoke began locking their doors at night. Blanche Styron’s brother, Calvin, remembered that his sister would often check on the family at the end of the day: “My sister would come around here after dark, and the first thing she’d do is go and make sure that Momma had fastened the back door. And Momma would say, ‘Blanche, why did you do that?’ And Blanche would say, ‘You don’t know when those Germans are coming ashore!’ So, we always had a sense of uneasiness. … We lost our innocence then.”

On Friday, May 10, at 7 p.m., on behalf of Ocracoke Preservation Society and in conjunction with the annual British War Graves Memorial on the island, I will present a special program at Ocracoke’s Community Center that will feature the voices and memories of the men and women who lived on the island in 1942 and had no choice but to watch as war was waged on their doorsteps.

Kevin Duffus is a noted North Carolina author, documentary filmmaker, and research historian who, for more than 50 years, has successfully unraveled dozens of longstanding maritime mysteries. He is the author of seven books: The 1768 Charleston Lighthouse—Finding the Light in the Fog of History; Shipwrecks of the Outer Banks—An Illustrated Guide; War Zone—World War Two Off the North Carolina Coast; The Last Days of Black Beard the Pirate; The Story of Cape Fear and Bald Head Island; Into the Burning Sea—The 1918 Mirlo Rescue; and The Lost Light—A Civil War Mystery.