WWI at the Doorstep
2 JUNE 1918
WORLD WAR I AT OUR DOORSTEP
The bright sun and calm seas off Delaware’s coast this morning belied the sinister intent with which U-151 cruised the surface. Germany and the US had been at war for a year, and U-151 had entered US waters with orders to lay mines in major American roadsteads. On May 22nd she had surfaced in the Chesapeake Bay and laid over 50 floating mines at its entrance. While working on deck to do so, her crewmen had watched the lights of Virginia Beach and had listened to weather forecasts, sports news, and stock quotes from an Arlington radio station. She then coursed north to the Delaware Bay, destroying the freighters SS Hattie Dunn, Hauppage, and Edna along the way. More mines were laid inside Cape May, after which U-151 then shaped a course for New York City. There the sub had dragged a cutting bar back and forth across the entrance to the harbor, severing two transatlantic telephone cables.
This day found U-151 prowling for unwary freighters off our coast. Commercial ships of sail still operated in 1918, and a sail on the horizon turned out to be the merchant schooner Isabel B. Wiley, outbound from Philadelphia. A shot across her bows halted the surprised schooner, but as her crew was coming to grips with a German submarine in US waters, another form appeared on the horizon. U-151’s skipper, Korvettenkapitän Henrich von Nostitz und Jänckendorf, instructed Wiley to heave to and sped off after the steamer Winneconne. The unarmed steamer’s crew had heard rumors of a U-boat in the area and once halted, accepted a prize crew. Winneconne was conned back to Wiley, who had, curiously, stood by dutifully into the wind. Both ships were destroyed with TNT.
U-151 left US waters in July having avoided the US Navy. Her first such contact occurred on her return to Germany when she spotted a familiar silhouette, the former Norddeutsche Lloyd liner Kronprinz Wilhelm, then serving the US Navy as the troop transport USS VON STEUBEN (SP-3017). A torpedo attack missed.
None of the seven German U-boats that operated off the American coast from May through October 1918 were originally built to be combatants. Rather they were designed as submersible blockade runners, a novel innovation of the German Merchant Marine. They smuggled sorely needed supplies from America to Germany past the British blockade. U-151 had started her career as the merchant sub SS Oldendorf. But after the US entered WWI and the Kaiser’s ships were no longer welcome in US ports, the German Merchant Marine converted the “U-cruisers” for military use. The seven are credited with sinking 44 American freighters totaling 110,000 tons. And a mine, probably sown by U-156, sank the only US Navy capital ship to be lost in WWI, the armored cruiser USS SAN DIEGO (ACR-6).
Watch for more “Today in Naval History” 6 JUN 25
CAPT James Bloom, Ret.
Harding, Stephen. Great Liners at War. Osceola, WI: Motorbooks International, 1997, p. 45.
Scheck, William. “Under the British Blockade: The Cruise of the Deutschland,” Sea Classics, Vol 28 (9), September 1995, pp. 58-63, 67-69.
Tarrant, V.E. The U-Boat Offensive 1914-1945. Annapolis, MD: USNI Press, 1989, pp. 70-71.
Thomas, Lowell. Raiders of the Deep. New York, NY: Award Books, 1964, pp. 254-93.
van der Vat, Dan. Stealth at Sea: The History of the Submarine. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1994, pp. 105-06, 119.
ADDITIONAL NOTES: The story of Germany’s unarmed merchant subs is an interesting twist of naval history. WWI occurred at the dawn of the age of submarines, and this was only one of several novel German experiments into methods of U-boat deployment. The most famous of these merchant subs was SS Deutschland, who made two successful cargo voyages between the US and Germany in 1916-17. When sailing as unarmed merchantmen these “U-cruisers” were not commissioned into the Kaiser’s Imperial Navy and of course flew the German Tricolor (black, white and red vertical bars) rather than the Kaiser’s Eagle war ensign.
The fact that the Germans used submarines to mine the Chesapeake, Delaware, and New York waterways in both WWI and WWII was not widely publicized. The fact that several American ships were destroyed by these mines continues to be poorly appreciated today.
