Germans Boarded This US Destroyer Escort — Americans Fought Back With Coffee Mugs

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[00:00:00]May 6, 1944, 2:30 in the morning, the central Atlantic Ocean, roughly 390 miles west of the Cape Verde Islands.

[00:00:09]A United States Navy destroyer escort is running at full speed through calm moonlit water toward a contact its aircraft just spotted on the surface.

[00:00:18]The commanding officer is 28 years old today. It is his birthday. His ship is 306 ft long, weighs 1,700 tons fully loaded, and is named after a man who died at Pearl Harbor. In a few minutes, he will give an order that has not been heard on an American warship in well over a century. Stand by to ram. What happens next is documented in an official United States Navy action report, serial number 008, signed by Lieutenant Commander Brent Maxwell Abel on May 8, 1944, and forwarded directly to Admiral Ernest King, Commander-in-Chief of the United States Fleet. The report describes torpedoes, gunfire, hand grenades, and a ramming.

[00:01:01]Then, almost as an afterthought, it records something that no naval officer before or since has ever been required to note in an official war-fighting document. The word count is small. The meaning is enormous. It reads, and this is a direct quote from the action report itself, "Ammunition expended at this time included several general mess coffee cups, which were on hand at ready gun station. Two of the enemy were hit in the head with these." That is not fiction. That is the official record.

[00:01:30]And the story behind those coffee cups is one of the most extraordinary engagements in the entire history of American naval warfare. If you want to know what happened out there, stay with me. The Battle of the Atlantic began on September 3, 1939, the same day Britain declared war on Germany, and it would not end until May 8, 1945.

[00:01:51]It was the longest continuous military campaign of the entire Second World War.

[00:01:56]Winston Churchill, who had led Britain through the Blitz without flinching, called it the only thing that truly frightened him.

[00:02:03]He coined the phrase Battle of the Atlantic on March 6, 1941, deliberately echoing the Battle of Britain because he wanted people to understand the stakes.

[00:02:12]Britain needed supplies to survive.

[00:02:15]Germany needed to cut those supplies off. The Atlantic was the highway, and the German submarine arm, the Kriegsmarine's U-boat force, was the toll collector.

[00:02:24]German Admiral Karl Dönitz believed that if his U-boats could sink enough Allied tonnage each month, Britain would be strangled before America could bring its industrial weight to bear. For a time in 1942, he came dangerously close to being right. The U-boats sank millions of tons of shipping.

[00:02:41]Merchant sailors signed on knowing their odds of surviving the war were among the worst of any branch of service on either side. But the Allies adapted. They cracked German naval codes. They developed centimetric radar that could detect a submarine's conning tower in darkness on an open sea.

[00:02:58]They built escort carriers and paired them with destroyer escorts into hunter-killer groups that were free to pursue submarines anywhere in the ocean, rather than staying tied to convoy routes.

[00:03:09]They developed the Fido acoustic homing torpedo, dropped from aircraft that could chase a diving submarine underwater.

[00:03:16]Every time Germany found an advantage, the Allies found an answer. By the time it was over, the Allies had lost more than 2,700 merchant ships. Over 100,000 sailors and merchant seamen had died in those waters.

[00:03:30]On the German side, the Kriegsmarine lost 783 submarines and nearly 30,000 U-boat crewmen.

[00:03:37]That is a casualty rate of roughly 75%.

[00:03:41]For every four men who went to sea in a U-boat, three never came home. In the spring of 1944, that reality was becoming undeniable to everyone in the Kriegsmarine. One of the submarines still fighting in those waters was designated U-66. It was a Type 9C boat, a long-range ocean-going submarine built at the AG Weser shipyard in Bremen, laid down on March 20, 1940, launched on October 10, 1940, and commissioned on January 2, 1941.

[00:04:11]It was 76 m long and carried a crew of around 60 men. In terms of ships destroyed, it was one of the most lethal submarines Germany ever put to sea. U-66 went on patrol under three commanders over the course of the war.

[00:04:25]The first was Kapitänleutnant Richard Zapp, a Knight's Cross recipient, who took her out of Kiel on May 13, 1941, on her first patrol. Zapp was skilled and aggressive, and U-66 reflected that from the very beginning.

[00:04:40]Over his five patrols in command, she hunted Allied shipping across the North Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the American East Coast. Her fourth patrol was Operation Drumbeat, Germany's late 1941 campaign against the unprepared American coastline.

[00:04:56]U-66 sailed from Lorient on December 24, 1941, and by mid-January 1942, she had taken station off the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

[00:05:06]What followed was carnage.

[00:05:09]The American coastal defenses in early 1942 were not remotely ready. No convoy system had been organized. No mandatory blackout existed along the shore.

[00:05:20]Merchant ships sailed alone, silhouetted at night against the glow of resort towns and city lights, easy targets on a bright background. German submarine commanders called the period the second happy time. They operated freely within sight of the American coast, sometimes close enough to hear radio broadcasts from shore. Dönitz had sent only five Type 9 boats for the initial Drumbeat assault, but those five submarines sank ships at a rate that shocked even the Germans themselves. U-66 found them and killed them.

[00:05:51]The Alan Jackson, an American steam tanker, went down on January 18, 1942, 60 mi northeast of Cape Hatteras.

[00:06:00]Three days later, on January 19, she found the RMS Lady Hawkins, a Canadian passenger liner of nearly 8,000 gross register tons, carrying civilians, crew, and Royal Navy personnel homeward bound.

[00:06:14]Zapp put two torpedoes into her. 251 people died. The Lady Hawkins broke apart quickly. There were multiple lifeboats.

[00:06:23]Only one was ever found 5 days later with 71 survivors. The others were never located. That is what U-66 was before she ever met the Buckley, before Seehausen, before the last desperate patrol, she had been an instrument of that scale of killing.

[00:06:39]After Zapp's fifth patrol, he was transferred to command the third U-boat flotilla.

[00:06:44]Kapitänleutnant Friedrich Markworth took over and continued U-66's campaign through the Caribbean and South Atlantic. But by the summer of 1943, the war was changing around them.

[00:06:56]On August 3, 1943, U-66 was caught on the surface in the mid-Atlantic by aircraft from the United States escort carrier USS Card. A Wildcat fighter flown by Ensign S.

[00:07:10]Paulson strafed the boat. An Avenger torpedo bomber flown by Lieutenant Junior Grade Richard Cormier attacked immediately after. Markworth was severely wounded in the exchange. Enough of the crew were hurt that 4 days later, when the damaged submarine rendezvoused with the supply submarine U-117 on August 7, a watch officer named Freks had to come aboard from U-117 and take temporary command of U-66 just to get her home.

[00:07:37]U-117 itself was sunk that same day by more aircraft from Card while U-66 was still alongside. U-66 escaped and limped back to Lorient. She spent weeks in repair.

[00:07:49]When Seehausen finally took her out on her ninth war patrol in January 1944, he did so in a boat that had already been through more than most submarines survive, and crewed by men who had been through even more. By September 1943, she had a new commander, Oberleutnant zur See Gerhard Seehausen was 26 years old when he took command on September 2, 1943.

[00:08:13]He had served as a watch officer on the battle cruiser Gneisenau early in the war, trained at the torpedo school, and served as first watch officer on another U-boat before taking U-66.

[00:08:25]He had earned the Iron Cross Second Class and the Iron Cross First Class. He was experienced and capable. He was also, by any measure, badly timed. He took command of one of Germany's most battle-tested submarines at the precise moment when Germany was losing the Battle of the Atlantic. Seehausen took U-66 out on her ninth war patrol on January 16, 1944, departing Lorient for an operating area between West Africa and Brazil. Over the next 2 months, the boat had modest success.

[00:08:55]On February 26, 1944, she sank the British cargo ship Silver Maple from a convoy, 5,313 tons, with a single torpedo. Four days later, off the coast of Ghana, she found the French vessel Saint-Louis, 5,202 tons, and put two torpedoes into her.

[00:09:16]The Saint-Louis broke into three sections and went under in less than 50 seconds.

[00:09:20]Four days after that, on March 5, she torpedoed the British freighter John Holt, 4,964 tons.

[00:09:29]After the sinking, Seehausen brought two survivors aboard as prisoners. The John Holt's master, Cecil Gordon Heime, and a passenger named Elliott, an agent of the shipping company.

[00:09:40]Both men would ultimately be lost with the submarine. About 16 days later, the boat sank the British tanker Matadian, 4,257 tons. Those four ships were U-66's last kills. They brought her total over the entire war to 33 Allied merchant ships sunk, 200,021 gross register tons of shipping sent to the bottom. That made her the seventh most successful U-boat of the Second World War. The men who crewed her were not amateurs.

[00:10:12]They were seasoned, disciplined, and had survived conditions that would have broken lesser crews. When USS Buckley found U-66 on the morning of May 6, 1944, she was not hunting a damaged beginner.

[00:10:26]She was hunting one of the most dangerous submarines Germany had ever sent to sea. After the Matadian sinking, British patrol craft drove U-66 into shallow water. Seehausen bottomed out the boat in the mud and waited, silent, until the threat passed.

[00:10:42]When he surfaced, he pointed his bow toward the rendezvous point where a supply submarine, the Type 14 Milch Cow U-488, was supposed to be waiting to refuel him and restock his crew.

[00:10:54]U-488 was not there. She had been sunk by American destroyer escorts on April 26, 1944, with all 64 men aboard. There would be no resupply. U-66 was on her own. By early May, the situation aboard was desperate. The crew had been at sea for over 100 days. Fresh water had run out 10 days earlier. The lemons issued against scurvy were gone. Cigarettes had been exhausted for weeks. The boat needed to surface regularly to recharge her batteries, and every time she surfaced, she risked destruction by the hunter-killer aircraft that were always overhead. Every hour she stayed down, the batteries crept closer to failure.

[00:11:35]Then the American hunter-killer group found her. Task Group 21.11 was built around the escort carrier USS Block Island.

[00:11:43]The carrier operated composite squadron 55, a mix of Grumman Avenger torpedo bombers and Grumman Wildcat fighters.

[00:11:51]Four destroyer escorts screened her, USS Ahrens, USS Barr, USS Eugene E. Elmore, and USS Buckley. Beginning May 1, 1944, the group began hunting U-66 in earnest.

[00:12:04]Aircraft dropped three Fido acoustic homing torpedoes near the boat in a single day. She evaded. Aircraft drove her under again and again over the days that followed, preventing her from surfacing long enough to recharge. By the night of May 5th, Seehausen had reached the absolute limit of his submerged endurance. Shortly after 9:00 in the evening on May 5, U-66 broached to the surface.

[00:12:28]Seehausen fired off a radio message to Admiral Dönitz in Germany, reporting that conditions had made refueling impossible and describing them as worse than the Bay of Biscay.

[00:12:38]Block Island's high-frequency radio direction finding equipment picked up that transmission. Her radar detected the submarine at almost the same moment.

[00:12:46]The carrier turned away immediately and vectored the nearest destroyer escort onto the bearing. USS Buckley came to flank speed.

[00:12:54]The Buckley had been commissioned on April 30, 1943. She was launched on January 9, 1943 at the Bethlehem Hingham Shipyard in Hingham, Massachusetts. And her launch was sponsored by Mrs. James Buckley, mother of the ship's namesake. She was named for Aviation Ordnanceman Third Class John Daniel Buckley, born on July 28, 1920 in North Providence, Rhode Island.

[00:13:19]He was 21 years old when he was killed at Naval Air Station Kaneohe Bay in Hawaii on December 7, 1941. The Buckley class destroyer escort was the workhorse of American convoy protection. 306 ft long, capable of about 23 to 24 knots, armed with three 3-in guns, 20-mm cannons, 40-mm anti-aircraft weapons, torpedo tubes, a Hedgehog forward throwing anti-submarine mortar, depth charge racks, and K gun projectors. She was not a fleet destroyer. She was not glamorous.

[00:13:55]She was purpose-built to hunt submarines, fast enough to run one down, and rugged enough to take punishment. A total of 154 Buckley class ships were ordered. 46 went to the Royal Navy under Lend-Lease. They were the ships that made the Battle of the Atlantic survivable.

[00:14:11]Her commanding officer was Lieutenant Commander Brent Maxwell Abel of the United States Naval Reserve.

[00:14:17]Abel had been born in Washington, District of Columbia, and raised in Scarsdale, New York.

[00:14:23]He graduated from Harvard College in 1937 with a degree in French, and went on to Harvard Law School, graduating in 1940. He moved to San Francisco, where he practiced estate planning and tax law until the war called him to active duty.

[00:14:38]He commanded a submarine chaser running tanker convoy escorts in the Caribbean before being given command of Buckley in 1943.

[00:14:46]He turned 28 on the morning of May 6th, 1944, the same morning his ship found U-66.

[00:14:53]One of Abel's Harvard classmates was a writer named E. J. Kahn.

[00:14:57]They had graduated together in the class of 1937 and kept in touch across the decades. 43 years after the battle, Kahn would be the one to write it down for the world, but that is getting ahead of the story.

[00:15:10]There is a detail worth pausing on. In the summer of 1942, while commanding patrol craft PC-490 out of Curaçao, Abel had been sent to chase a German submarine that had just mined the harbor at Saint Lucia.

[00:15:24]He searched for hours.

[00:15:26]He found nothing. He returned to port.

[00:15:28]The submarine he had failed to catch that day was U-66, then under Friedrich Markworth. He did not know this. He would not know it for 43 years. Buckley had been searching without result for U-66 for several hours when, at 2:16 in the morning on May 6th, a call came through on the radio from an Avenger aircraft flying a night patrol. The pilot was Lieutenant Junior Grade Jimmy J. Sellers.

[00:15:53]His aircraft, designated Night Owl T-21, had picked up U-66 on radar while the submarine was running on the surface about 20 miles due north of Buckley.

[00:16:05]Sellers began circling the contact and relaying course changes to Buckley by voice radio, talking the ship directly onto the target. Here is the detail that makes Sellers's role remarkable. His Avenger was unarmed. The Night Owl patrol aircraft had been stripped of torpedoes and depth charges to extend its range and endurance for reconnaissance work. The only weapon Sellers had aboard was his personal sidearm. If U-66 had turned and come after him, he had nothing to fight with.

[00:16:32]He stayed anyway, circling in the dark above a submarine that could have shot him down, relaying positions to Buckley, and waiting for what he knew was coming.

[00:16:42]Below Sellers, U-66 was running slowly on the surface, her diesels charging the batteries, her lookouts watching for the supply submarine that Seehausen still desperately hoped would appear.

[00:16:53]He was aware of the aircraft above him.

[00:16:55]Based on past experience, he calculated that a lone Avenger would wait until the submarine was in the act of diving before attacking. He believed staying on the surface to finish charging his batteries was the rational choice.

[00:17:08]It was a reasonable calculation. It was also the last miscalculation Gerhard Seehausen would ever make.

[00:17:14]At 02:45, Buckley's radar picked up U-66 at 14,000 yd, roughly 7 mi.

[00:17:22]Able sounded general quarters at 02:46.

[00:17:26]He ordered the Foxer acoustic decoy streamed to confuse any acoustic torpedoes Seehausen might fire, retracted the sonar dome to prevent metallic noise reaching German ears, and kept his guns loaded but silent. He aimed the ship to put U-66 silhouetted against the full moon.

[00:17:43]He was closing at 23 and 1/2 kn across a calm, flat sea.

[00:17:47]At 03:08, U-66 fired three red flares. It was a recognition signal. Seehausen believed Buckley was the supply submarine he had been waiting for. Able did not respond.

[00:18:00]He kept coming.

[00:18:01]At 4,000 yd, the U-boat's crew saw their mistake. The approaching vessel was not German. It was a warship. Seehausen fired a torpedo.

[00:18:10]Able turned hard left, putting the submarine dead ahead, and the torpedo wake slid down Buckley's starboard side.

[00:18:17]German machine guns opened fire. Able gave the order to commence firing at 03:20, range 2,100 yd.

[00:18:25]The very first salvo from Buckley's 3-in guns scored a direct hit on U-66's forecastle, just forward of the deck gun, putting it temporarily out of action.

[00:18:36]20-mm Oerlikons, 40-mm Bofors, and the 3-in batteries all opened up together.

[00:18:42]For 2 minutes, Buckley rained fire down the length of the submarine.

[00:18:47]U-66's deck gun came back into action and scored a hit on Buckley's smokestack. Several shells landed within 25 yd of the ship. The German aim was running high. Buckley's was not.

[00:18:59]U-66 tried to open the distance. She turned and ran at roughly 19 kn. A second torpedo, a stern shot, appeared in the water. Able put the helm over hard, and the torpedo crossed ahead of the bow. He came back on course. He kept closing. By 03:28, the two ships were 20 yd apart on parallel courses, Buckley raking the submarine from bow to stern with everything she had. Abel ordered hard right rudder. At 03:29, Buckley drove her bow directly into U-66's forward deck. The destroyer escort's hull rode up over the submarine's forecastle, and the two vessels locked together in a grinding tangle of steel. The combined weight and of this collision produced a chaos that neither crew had trained for and no one in a modern navy had experienced in living memory. German sailors poured out of the conning tower and the forward hatch. Some dove into the water. Some manned weapons. Some grabbed whatever they could find, knives, wrenches, and tools.

[00:20:00]A group of them scrambled directly onto Buckley's forecastle, led by first watch officer Klaus Herbig, U-66's executive officer, in what was apparently a deliberate diversion to draw American attention while the engineers below tried to work the submarine free from underneath Buckley's bow. The order went out, "Repel boarders." In that moment, two navies worth of technology and doctrine compressed themselves into something that belonged to a different century entirely. Men who had signed on to operate radar and fire depth charges found themselves in a brawl on a pitching deck in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean at 3:30 in the morning.

[00:20:38]Buckley's crew did not hesitate. The boatswain's mate in charge of the forward ammunition party drew his.45 caliber pistol and shot a German sailor who was climbing over the rail. The man fell back into the sea. The chief fire control man on the bridge wing opened up with a Thompson submachine gun, which the action report noted produced excellent results. The midship's repair party lined the rails with rifles and began firing at men on on submarine's deck below. The crew of 3-in gun number two could not depress their weapon far enough to bear on men who were now directly alongside at zero elevation.

[00:21:14]They grabbed the only thing at their feet, brass shell casings, each one solid and heavy, left over from the minutes of gunfire before the ramming. They threw them. Germans went down. At the ready gun station on the forecastle, the sailors had another option, coffee mugs.

[00:21:31]The general mess coffee service had been sitting exactly where it was left during the night watch, ready for the men standing the early hours. They picked them up and threw them at the men trying to board.

[00:21:41]Two German sailors were struck in the head with coffee cups. This is documented in the official action report, signed by the commanding officer, and forwarded to Admiral King.

[00:21:51]It happened exactly as written. The action report does not editorialize.

[00:21:56]It notes, in the same flat tone as the gun round counts, that the coffee cups were on hand at the ready gun station, and that two of the enemy were hit in the head with these.

[00:22:06]Inside the ship, a German sailor had made it as far as the wardroom, the officers' meeting and dining room on an American warship.

[00:22:14]A steward's mate drove him back out with a coffee pot.

[00:22:17]A sailor named Snyder struck a boarder with his medical kit. Chapman and O'Keefe cornered a German with a hammer.

[00:22:24]Finch marched five surrendered prisoners aft at Hammer Point.

[00:22:28]Castle and Springer, the shell casing throwers at gun number two, knocked a man over the side. A sailor named Hyatt knocked an armed German overboard with his bare fist. His bruised fist was the only American casualty of the entire engagement. Able made his next decision.

[00:22:45]He reversed engines. Buckley backed away from U-66.

[00:22:49]The five prisoners who had surrendered on deck were taken below.

[00:22:53]The rest of the boarders were dead or in the water. As Buckley pulled clear, the guns came back to bear and opened fire again, but U-66 was not finished.

[00:23:03]Enough German sailors remained at their posts below to get the submarine moving again at reduced speed. Abel brought Buckley to flank speed and went after her, preparing to fire shallow-set depth charges under the submarine's bow.

[00:23:16]He was closing when U-66 lurched hard to port, turning directly toward Buckley.

[00:23:22]Whether Seehausen ordered the maneuver as a final ramming attack or whether the damaged boat was simply out of control is not established with certainty.

[00:23:30]Either way, at 03:35, the submarine's bow drove under Buckley's stern, striking her on the starboard side at the after engine room. The collision tore open a hole in Buckley's hull above the waterline and sheared the starboard propeller shaft clean off outside the hull. From the deck, American sailors could look directly down into U-66's conning tower as the submarine scraped along the ship's side.

[00:23:54]What they saw inside that conning tower, in the action report's precise and unsentimental language, was a flaming shambles. One of the torpedo men leaned over and dropped a hand grenade through the open conning tower hatch before it exploded. Abel's own battle notes, written 2 days after the fight, credit a sailor named Nesmith with throwing a grenade that killed a man on the boat.

[00:24:16]3-in gun number 3 scored three more direct hits on the conning tower. U-66 came clear and moved away at roughly 15 knots, hatch open, fire burning inside, diesel running, and apparently no one left to steer her. She was moving away from Buckley.

[00:24:32]She was not coming back. At 03:39, a deep underwater explosion rolled through the hull of the Buckley, then smaller ones, then silence.

[00:24:42]U-66 had disappeared below the surface at 03:36.

[00:24:47]The deep explosion 3 minutes later confirmed her loss. She went down with 24 men, including Oberleutnant zur See Gerhard Seehausen, who was 26 years old.

[00:24:57]The two British prisoners of war, merchant captain Cecil Gordon Heim and the passenger Elliott, went down with her.

[00:25:04]They had survived being taken at sea by a German submarine only to die when it sank beneath them.

[00:25:10]For 3 hours after the sinking, Buckley moved slowly through the debris.

[00:25:14]36 German sailors were pulled out of the water. Most were wounded, some severely.

[00:25:20]All were filthy, bearded, and gaunt from more than 100 days at sea.

[00:25:25]They were brought aboard, given dry clothes and medical attention, and fed from the same galley whose coffee mugs had been thrown at them less than an hour before. Abel later said he wished he could have saved more.

[00:25:36]The 36 prisoners were transferred to Block Island, which ferried them to Casablanca.

[00:25:41]From there, they went into American prisoner of war custody for the remainder of the war.

[00:25:46]23 days later, on May 29, 1944, Block Island was struck by torpedoes fired by U-549 west-northwest of the Canary Islands and sank. She was the only United States aircraft carrier lost in the Atlantic during the entire war.

[00:26:03]Six of her crew were killed.

[00:26:06]951 others were rescued by her escorting destroyer escorts, which then turned and sank U-549.

[00:26:14]The U-66 prisoners were already in Casablanca. They survived the war.

[00:26:19]Buckley turned for home badly damaged.

[00:26:22]Her bow bent to port from the ramming, a hole in her after engine room plugged with mattresses and heavy shoring by her damage control party, and her starboard shaft gone. She made 12 knots across the Atlantic on her port screw alone. She reached New York, then proceeded to Boston Navy Yard for repairs completed by June 14, 1944.

[00:26:42]In 16 minutes of fighting, she had expended 105 3-in shells, 2,700 rounds of 20-mm ammunition, 418 rounds of 40-mm shells, 300 rounds of 45 caliber, 60 rounds of 30 caliber, 30 rounds of double aught buckshot, and two hand grenades, and several general mess coffee cups.

[00:27:06]The action was reviewed at the highest levels of the United States Navy. Senior officers who examined the record called it the most exciting anti-submarine kill in the entire Battle of the Atlantic.

[00:27:18]The Navy Cross citation, signed for Abel on July 17, 1944, described his performance in terms that even formal military language could not entirely flatten: "Extraordinary heroism and distinguished service in the line of his profession."

[00:27:32]It described how he had made an undetected high-speed approach in bright moonlight to a surfaced German U-boat, silenced its guns within 4 minutes, narrowly escaped two torpedoes, rammed the enemy vessel, and repelled boarders using every means available. In his own action report, Abel's description of his crew had no individual glory in it at all. He wrote, "The commanding officer is proud of the fighting spirit, coolness in action, and thoroughgoing teamwork by all hands.

[00:28:02]It was these characteristics, more than the individual brilliance or heroism of any one officer or man, which concluded the action successfully." The Navy Cross was presented to Abel at Boston Navy Yard on August 31, 1944, by Captain George L. Menocal.

[00:28:19]Lieutenant junior grade Boris Kramer received the Bronze Star at the same ceremony. The entire crew received the Navy Unit Commendation. Abel was promoted to commander. Within months, he was assigned shore duty in Minneapolis, Minnesota, teaching Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps students.

[00:28:35]He retired from active duty in January 1946 as a captain. He returned to San Francisco, rejoined his law firm, and spent the next several decades practicing estate and tax law. Most of his colleagues had no idea what he had done. He did not talk about it much.

[00:28:52]The crew dispersed as all wartime crews do. The ship went on. On April 19, 1945, Buckley and USS Reuben James sank U-548 southeast of Halifax.

[00:29:04]She was decommissioned on July 3, 1946, placed in reserve at Green Cove Springs, Florida, and ultimately sold for scrapping in July 1969 after 23 years in mothballs. No museum preserved her. She was cut up for metal.

[00:29:20]The names of the men who fought on her deck that morning lived on only in Abel's personal notes written two days after the battle, later shared with his Harvard classmate E. J.

[00:29:30]Kahn for a piece published in The New Yorker on February the 8th of 1988 and reprinted that summer in Naval History Magazine.

[00:29:38]Kahn had known Abel since their undergraduate days and had no idea until Abel finally told him in detail after the Frankfurt reunion what his old friend had done in 1944.

[00:29:50]Abel had simply never brought it up.

[00:29:52]Kahn spent months on the piece, interviewing Abel, reading the action report, and tracking down survivors on both sides.

[00:30:00]The result was one of the few published accounts to treat the German sailors as human beings rather than statistics and to record their names alongside the American ones.

[00:30:09]Some surnames survived in the record: Zilmer, Chapman, O'Keefe, Finch, Castle, Springer, Snyder, Hyatt, Pinkham, Nesmith, Brundage. No first names, no hometowns.

[00:30:23]No photographs from the fight itself. No one had a camera. These are not invented names. They are real sailors documented in Abel's contemporaneous notes, each one attached to a specific action during a specific minute of a real fight in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

[00:30:40]Zilmer with the.45 caliber pistol at the forward ammunition post, Castle and Springer throwing shell casings at 3:30 in the morning, Hyatt with the bruised fist, Brundage with the coffee pot. They did what they did. Their names deserve to be said.

[00:30:55]U-66 herself was not forgotten, at least not by the 36 men who had survived her sinking and spent the remainder of the war in American captivity. They went home to a Germany that had been destroyed. They rebuilt their lives.

[00:31:09]They thought often about the morning of May 6, 1944, and about the ship that had rammed them, fought them off with coffee cups, and then spent 3 hours pulling them out of the ocean. Among them was Klaus Herbig, U-66's first watch officer, the man who had led the boarding party onto Buckley's forecastle. Herbig survived the prisoner of war camps and went home to Germany.

[00:31:31]For decades, he carried the memory of the captain of that ship and what he had done. In 1986, the Destroyer Escort Sailors Association held a reunion that Abel attended. He wrote letters to nine U-66 survivors whose addresses he had obtained. None could attend that year, but contact had been made.

[00:31:50]Herbig wrote back to Abel and proposed a reunion in Germany.

[00:31:54]September 29, 1987, a Tuesday. Herbig chose Höchst, a suburb of Frankfurt am Main, and arranged a dinner on a floating restaurant on the Main River.

[00:32:05]Eight survivors of U-66 sat down with Brent Abel and two of his former Buckley shipmates. There were speeches. There was beer. There was the particular gravity of men who had tried to kill each other and were now, 43 years later, sitting at the same table on a floating restaurant on a river in the city that both their nations had bombed and had been bombed by in a peace that had held long enough for old men to share a meal and call each other by name.

[00:32:32]One of the German men who had written to Abel in the years between the battle and the reunion was Werner Frohlich.

[00:32:39]He held the rank of Stabs Obersteuermann, which the German Navy translated as Chief Warrant Quartermaster.

[00:32:46]He was U-66's helmsman, the man at the wheel on the morning of May 6, 1944.

[00:32:52]He was also one of the men who had been struck in the head by a coffee mug thrown from Buckley's forecastle.

[00:32:58]He had been pulled from the Atlantic Ocean by the same ship that hit him.

[00:33:02]He had spent the rest of the war as an American prisoner. He had gone home to Germany. He had rebuilt his life. And at some point in the years between the battle and the reunion, he had written a letter to Brent Abel about the coffee cup.

[00:33:15]Frohlich wrote, "It didn't injure my head, but the coffee cup was bent thereby. Heads were hard in those days."

[00:33:21]That sentence, written in a letter from a German sailor to the American officer who had helped sink his submarine, may be the most compressed description ever written of what happened on the morning of May 6, 1944.

[00:33:34]It contains no bitterness. It contains no grievance.

[00:33:38]It contains something much harder to manufacture, the dry humor of a man who had survived something improbable and had the distance of decades to find it almost funny. Another survivor sent a letter that was shared at the dinner.

[00:33:51]It read in part, "All of us survivors of the U-66 have always had the desire to get to know our wartime adversaries in the war on the sea. And if the opportunity presented itself, to say thank you for the fair treatment on board the Buckley and for saving our lives."

[00:34:07]Abel, 71 years old that evening, gave a short speech. He said the accomplishment he was most proud of in his entire life was what his crew had done on May 6, 1944. He said he wished he could have saved more.

[00:34:20]Later in the evening, someone produced the wartime logbook of U-66.

[00:34:25]Abel began reading through it.

[00:34:27]He reached an entry from August 1942 and stopped.

[00:34:31]In the summer of 1942, U-66 had mined the harbor at Saint Lucia.

[00:34:36]The mines, laid on the night of July 20, 1942, had damaged two British patrol boats.

[00:34:44]After the mining, a young American officer in command of patrol craft PC-490 had been sent from Curacao to chase her.

[00:34:51]He had searched for hours and found nothing. He had gone back to port empty-handed.

[00:34:56]At the time, he had no idea which submarine had laid those mines. No idea how close he had come. No idea that the boat he had failed to catch would go on killing for another two years before he got a second chance. The officer in command of PC-490 had been Brent Abel.

[00:35:11]He had chased U-66 in 1942 and failed to catch her. He caught her 21 months later with a ramming bow and a crew that threw coffee cups. He read the logbook in a floating restaurant in Frankfurt, 43 years after it happened, and understood something about the shape of his own life that he had never known before.

[00:35:30]The submarine he had hunted that night in the Caribbean, the one that had slipped away from him in the darkness, was the same submarine that had surfaced on his birthday and fired three red flares thinking he was a friend. He was not a friend. He was the man who had been looking for her for two years without knowing it.

[00:35:47]And on the morning of his 28th birthday, on a flat, moonlit sea in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, he finally found her.

[00:35:55]Abel retired from law and lived in San Rafael, California. He died on December 26, 2005.

[00:36:03]He was 89 years old. There is a 1957 film called The Enemy Below, starring Robert Mitchum and Curt Jurgens, about a destroyer escort captain and a U-boat commander locked in a duel across the Atlantic. Near the end, the American ship grinds up over the deck of the German submarine in a sequence drawn directly from what happened on May 6, 1944.

[00:36:26]The filmmakers used a different ship, the USS Whitehurst. They did not name the Buckley. They did not name Abel or Seehausen. But the image they put on screen came from a real morning and real men.

[00:36:39]The Buckley herself is gone. She was scrapped in 1969 after 23 years in reserve.

[00:36:45]The coordinates where she sank U-66, 17° 17' N 32° 29' W exist only in the action report. There is no marker. There is only the water.

[00:37:00]What that 16-minute fight contained was this: an unarmed aircraft pilot circling above a submarine in the dark talking a warship onto the target with nothing but a voice radio and a personal sidearm. A commanding officer who turned 28 that morning, who had trained for years and closed the distance at full speed on a moonlit sea against a submarine that had already fired one torpedo at him and would fire another. Enlisted men who had signed on to work machinery and stand watches, who found themselves in a boarding fight at 3:30 in the morning and grabbed whatever was nearest: coffee cups, shell casings, hammers, their own fists.

[00:37:37]One man bruised his fist. That was the total American casualty count. 36 men who had been enemies were pulled from the water after the fight, fed, clothed, kept alive.

[00:37:49]Not because regulations required it, but because the crew of Buckley, having just finished the most violent 16 minutes of their lives, immediately turned to the task of saving the men they had been trying to kill. That is also in the action report. There is a question worth sitting with, not a rhetorical one, an actual one. What does it take to do what those sailors did, not just in the fight itself, but in the hours that followed?

[00:38:14]To go from throwing coffee cups at a man's head to pulling him out of the ocean and giving him dry clothes and a meal? The answer the Buckley's crew gave, without anyone ordering it, and without it appearing in any citation, is that those are not two different acts.

[00:38:28]The fight and the rescue are the same act. You fight to protect something.

[00:38:32]When the fighting is over, that thing you were protecting still applies.

[00:38:37]Abel understood this.

[00:38:38]His action report said the victory came from fighting spirit, coolness, and teamwork, not from the heroism of any single man.

[00:38:46]His speech at the Frankfurt reunion 43 years later said he wished he could have saved more of the men he had spent 43 years being known for defeating. Both things were true at the same time, and he held them both without contradiction.

[00:39:00]The action report is the document. The ship is gone. The men are almost all gone now. But the record exists, and the record is what keeps the story from disappearing entirely.

[00:39:10]Serial number 008, May 8, 1944, signed by Lieutenant Commander Brent Maxwell Abel. It is in the National Archives. Anyone can find it. Anyone can read it. And anyone who reads it will find, buried in the ammunition count between the.45 caliber pistol rounds and the hand grenades, a line that does not belong in any other military document ever filed. Several general mess coffee cups. Two of the enemy were hit in the head with these.

[00:39:39]That is the story of the Buckley, and now you know it. Most people do not.

[00:39:44]Most people have never heard the name Brent Abel, or Gerhard Sihausen, or Werner Fröhlich, the man who took a coffee cup to the head and thought it worth mentioning 43 years later in a letter, and whose words say more about what kind of fight that was, and what kind of men fought it, than any summary ever could. Hit that like button right now. Not for the channel, for the Buckley's crew. Every like sends this story to someone who has never heard it, and they deserve to hear it. Subscribe and turn on notifications.

[00:40:14]We go through archives, through official records, through action reports and citation files, and reunion letters to find stories exactly like this one.

[00:40:23]Stories that are this strange and this true and this forgotten. Every week there is another one.

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