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6/9/10 9:47 AM
FayObserver.com - Military History: The oil-soaked beaches
Published: 12:00 AM, Sun Jun 06, 2010
Military History: The oil-soaked beaches
Roy Parker Jr.
You see them practically every day. A cute TV talking head stuffs her long blond hair under a baseball cap and stands on the Gulf beach with sandy goo in her hands.
She is doing what talking heads love to do, demonstrating the news of the day with a striking "visual."
She is showing us what it looks like on a beach battered by crude oil.
It takes me back 68 years, when you could do the same on the Atlantic Ocean beaches at Nags Head. Or Hatteras. Or Ocracoke.
Or, yes, on the Gulf Coast.
Our family spent the summer of 1942 on Roanoke Island, and we visited the Outer Banks to see the miles of oil-fringed beach.
I have pictures. And the remains of a little blue pocket prayer book, still sandy, that washed ashore from one of the dozens of ill-fated tankers and freighters torpedoed by German submarines in that deadly carnival of death and destruction during the first months after the United States entered World War II following Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
It began Sunday, Jan. 18, 1942, when the tanker Allen Jackson was torpedoed off Hatteras with the loss of 22 of its crew. By July, more than a score of vessels, mostly tankers, went down within a few miles off Ocracoke or Hatteras beaches that 68 years later sparkle under a peacetime sun.
Others were victims in the ocean off Wrightsville Beach or Morehead City to the south.
The oil spilled from tankers rivaled that from oil rigs of the Gulf. A single tanker carried a cargo of between three and four million gallons of crude oil.
The U-boats often acted with deadly boldness.
On that same Sunday afternoon in January, 1942, the U-123 surfaced to shell the tanker Malay off Oregon Inlet north of Hatteras. Four crewmen were killed by shell fire even as the crippled ship was towed toward Norfolk.
By summer of 1942, the toll from the submarine blitz provoked reaction at the highest levels.
Scores of sailors drowned or were killed in torpedo explosions as dozens of helpless merchant ships went down under the relentless attacks.
In these shallow sea lanes where Cape Hatteras already was long been know as the Graveyard of the Atlantic, sinking vessels could be seen from the shore.
Residents of isolated Outer Banks villages like Ocracoke and Hatteras were eye- witnesses to some of the earliest carnage of U.S. World War II history.
Soon unarmed merchant ships on the coastal lanes were being gathered in makeshift convoys
In the jerrybuilt fleet of guardian vessels were so-called "q boats," merchant ships armed with hidden guns meant to decoy surfaced submarines into firing range.
The defense system paid off first along the North Carolina coast on May 9, 1942, when the plucky Coast Guard cutter Icarus dropped depth charges that killed the U-352 off Cape Lookout near Morehead City.
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