Six weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a steamship named City of Atlanta charted a course from New York City to Savannah. As a precautionary measure to avoid the perilous periscopes of enemy U-boats that had already claimed other Atlantic vessels, the ship’s lights were dimmed and the vessel clung close to the shoreline.
Unfortunately for the seamen aboard the City of Atlanta, this was not enough to keep U-boat U-123 away. The submarine stalked the Atlanta for hours before launching a torpedo in the dead of night of January 19, 1942. The torpedo collided with the ship’s port side, generating an explosion so powerful that it awoke residents of the Outer Banks several miles away.
The ship quickly listed to its side and plunged into the briny deep below, taking all but three of its sailors with it.
So began a months-long period of anxiety for residents of North Carolina’s eastern shores. Not only did they fear for their sons abroad in Europe or the Pacific, but also for their own hometowns as terrifying beasts of metal lurked under the surface and could attack at any moment.
Over the next few months, however, the terror was especially present. During the spring of 1942, so many American vessels were in the waters off the Outer Banks that the region was given the name “Torpedo Junction.” Citizens could watch from the shoreline as ships burnt and sank, and observed gasoline, debris and corpses washing up on the shores.
Explosions from torpedoed vessels were not only visible to eastern North Carolinians, but also fierce enough to cause damage to homes. On the morning of March 26, three torpedoes slammed into the oil tanker Dixie Arrow, creating a massive inferno that shook the residents of Cape Hatteras as they went about their morning routines.
To keep U-boats from using the shoreline to detect ships, many Outer Banks residents blacked out their windows even before a government-mandated blackout began in August 1942.
By April 1942, U-85 had been skirting America’s shores for three months. The submarine had helped harass Allied convoys up and down the coast before it found itself off the coast of Bodie Island, North Carolina, on the evening of April 13, 1942. As it lay in wait ready to prey upon an unsuspecting merchant vessel, the nearby U.S.S. Roper detected U-85 and approached it.
In response, U-85 launched a torpedo that barely missed the Roper. As U-85 fled, the Roper’s guns tore it apart, and its commander ordered the submarine be abandoned.
