 Thank you. Everybody hear me? Okay. I I'm particularly glad to be here today since it's just two days after we once again honored the memories of those who fell at Pearl Harbor 73 years ago but I've always a kind of a little bewildered that We seem to ignore in terms of national memory a much far greater Pearl Harbor that took place Which is the subject today the Pearl Harbor in the Atlantic? And I want to before I talk about the two main people I wrote about the 29-year-old German U-boat commander and the 23-year-old Army Air Corps bomber pilot who had a fateful encounter in July of 42 before I get to my main story I'd like to just share with you What to me was in a 35 year journalism career the most explosive Mind-blowing discovery that I ever tripped upon and as one of the gentlemen said earlier I give that credit to Michael Gannon because he is the gentleman who found it And we'll get to that right now as we know as we know as We know the clicker's not working on December 7th 41 everybody knows the basics six Japanese aircraft carriers achieved total tactical surprise launched aircraft that sank Six battleships of which two were completely destroyed another half dozen warships and auxiliaries killed 2,400 Americans most of whom were in the uniform and destroyed more than two-thirds of the aircraft on a Wahoo and Nobody knew they were coming Roosevelt didn't know Betty Stark didn't know Frank Knox didn't know Husband Kimmel and Walter Short didn't know The Japanese had achieved perfect tactical surprise by the simple virtue of Maintaining total radio silence as they crossed the North Pacific yet these two poor guys got relieved of command on grounds of dereliction of duty their careers were over they Toil through the war in practical anonymity and their names are forever linked to this disaster Well, I want to ask a thesis question For 73 years a lot of journalists and historians have been scouring the archives looking for the conspiracy smoking gun And that is Roosevelt and his military commanders One of the Japanese to attack first wanted us to be ambushed So we the American people would rise up and wrath rally ran the flag and get on with the the mission of defeating Japan Now ask yourself the question What do you think would have happened to husband Kimmel and Walter short if they had found a memo that read like this? top secret date December 5th 1941 from Sinkus Ernie King actually back up from Stark 5 December Imperial Japanese estimate Information receive indicates large concentration of surface forces at 47 degrees north 173 west course 135 approximately 3000 nautical miles southeast of adak projected course track places their warships With the 250 nautical miles of Pearl Harbor by six zero six hundred seven December evaluation Japanese naval task forces enroute to attack Pacific Fleet and US Army Air Force's bases Now I'm not a Expert in military law, but my thesis is if this memorandum had come out Those two guys who have been hanging from the closest lamp posts on on Pearl Harbor But I have good news. I made this up I have bad news this is what I made it up from This is a message that Michael Gannon discovered in 1996 in the National Archives. It is from Cominch Admiral bit This time it's Admiral Ernie King. He'd just taken over and it's addressed to every major Atlantic command from Greenland Halifax commanders all Units land convoy escorts west land all naval coastal frontiers, and here's what it read 12 January 1942 sub estimate Information indicates large concentration of U-boats Proceeding to already arrived on station of Canadian and Northeast US coasts three or four boats And then it lists literally their latitude and longitude positions as of 12 January 1942 this is the day before operation drumbeat the the German U-boat offensive began This message was sent out to every major Atlantic fleet command from Key West to Canada and Iceland I got out of a Navigation program that I've used in my research, and this is what they knew. This is what Ernie King Vice Admiral Adolphus Andrews at Naval seafront here and the entire Atlantic fleet knew On 12 January 1942 between 24 and 36 hours before they started torpedoing ships off the US East Coast They knew the position the course and their intention They'd gotten this from the British The operational intelligence center in London Citadel was the recipient of all the ultra enigma code-breaking and Even though these guys tried to keep their mouth shut they did enough Transmitting in encrypted high-frequency that the tracking stations in the United Kingdom Gibraltar And I believe I said we're able to pinpoint their locations and track them as they went across The Atlantic and they sent that message which was then turned around and forwarded to everyone and Essentially, it's like here come the Germans you might want to do something about it Well, I regret to tell you that they didn't do anything about it and what's even more mysterious to me Ernie King in his second week as comm inch and Adolphus Andrews who had taken over the seafront here in 41 Not only didn't do anything about it But they had the tools to do something about it Because at the time this message came out and it's in the archive. It's easy to find There was a task force in Staten Island, New York Consisting of the USS Texas battleship USS Wasp carrier three cruisers and 18 front-line Atlantic fleet destroyers They were fueled armed and ready to go But where they were going was to take a convoy of four troops ships to Iceland and Northern Ireland At the time this whole shebang was getting ready to blow Winston Churchill and his aides were meeting in the Washington with Roosevelt and his commanders and what is known as the Arcadia Conference and one of their top priorities had been to have a public show of resolve of Americans soldiers leaving the United States on their way to Europe To show everyone particularly Joseph Stalin that the United States was getting ready to take an active part in the war Now as I say, I don't have any pretension of being a master strategist But I just sort of wondered What would have been the harm in just saying maybe we'll wait a week or two to send that convoy and meanwhile Let's go out and kick the devil out of these you boats who we know are coming and all I can tell you is that the evidence is totally unequivocal but the memoirs and the official histories From comments from King from Andrews from all of them are completely silent on this There was an Atlantic Pearl Harbor, but they knew it was about to happen And they did nothing about it and what that did was set the stage for what? Not just myself, but other historians have said was a defeat in the Atlantic during that six-month period of 1942 that was an order of magnitude worse than Pearl Harbor Silly and it was also Set that the battlefield for the encounter that would come between the two men. I was fortunate enough to write about in the burning shore Here's the enemy 29 year old Capitan leighton a horse dragon flew in English an admirer of England in America He was a member of the class of 1933 at the German Naval Academy. In fact, he Went there the week after Adolf Hitler Came into power. He spent five years as a destroyer Division officer before he volunteered for the U-boat force As we all know the word volunteer lost every ounce of semantic meaning in Nazi Germany He was on his first war patrol At the very outset of the offensive against East Coast shipping when Reinhardt Hardigan blew up the Nornees and the Cyclops Just offshore here. In fact a destroyer from Newport the USS Ellison was on Post commissioning trials and actually they they raced out and picked up the survivors in one of those ships So his first two missions were pretty straightforward the first one was off Newfoundland the weather was horrible and he only managed to sink one ship and the second time around in in April 42 he and along with about a dozen other U-boats were diverted up towards Iceland because Hitler was afraid That Churchill's again trying to reinvade Norway was just one of his many fantasies And there's you 701 one of the mainstay Workhorse type 7 C U-boats The Germans built 760 or eight 693 of them during the war and about a third Fewer 192 of the larger type 9 boats Displaced about 770 tons Had an unrefueled range of about 8,500 nautical miles which would enable them to get from Europe to the East Coast and They have a week or two for us the fuel level would force them to go back home and Here's his one of his spectacular feats what Dagen did in his third deployment was to me one of the most daring tactical successes of the U-boat force doing it's had been Urging all of his U-boat guys to shoot as many sink as many ally merchant ships as possible and after about four months the Defenses were finally becoming effective enough that the Germans are having trouble doing that Or as Winston Churchill said you can always trust the Americans to do the right thing after they've tried everything else By June of 1942 they had scraped together enough escort ships to put in a coastal convoy system up and down from Key West of New York That that made it much more difficult for any U-boat commander to To get in and sink ships plus the army air forces finally got in its act together and had a pretty effective series of air patrols So what doin't it's instructed horse Dagen to do this is in May Mid-May of 42 was to load his U-boat with 15 powerful anti-shipping Mines that would go up by magnetic impulse And it left him with only about nine or ten torpedoes instead of the normal loadout and he came across the Atlantic kind of tiptoeing across on one engine to save fuel and He essentially was charged to close all the ports in the Chesapeake Bay Baltimore Norfolk Portsmouth Newport News the whole lot and He did it brilliantly, but he had some help in the fact that the Whoever's in charge of the Lighthouse has never turned them off and so he and his navigator were sitting in their little wardrobe on the boat Is there a toodling across the North Atlantic and they they figured out it was a simple actually effortless problem to solve He he aimed his boat at the Virginia Beach boardwalk Around midnight on June 12th, and he just he just came in sure until he was about 30 or 40 seconds away from running right up on the beach and His lookouts were watching the Cape Henry and the Cape Charles Lighthouses Converged in the second they converged that told him to turn right and just keep keep keep going along the coast He got to the mouth of the bay the water was so shallow he couldn't submerge So he put a running light on the torpedo on them. Sorry on the periscope. I just came Plotting up the channel dropping mines every 15 20 seconds turned around did the same and got the heck out and two days later the Robert C. Tuttle and about 10 other oil tankers are coming in from Key West and they tripped over this minefield in front of 50,000 tourists So it was a very exciting day to be visiting Virginia Beach He sank two ships the total in another big oil tanker was seriously damaged, but actually they were later recovered and fixed Now right as this was happening The army had been rotating patrol squadrons Down along the east coast as part of their effort to thwart the Yuba in menace And this little squadron from Sacramento, California the 396th was flying essentially what we know as the Lockheed Hudson Which is an updated and militarized version of the plane that Amelia Earhart had used in her attempt to circumnavigate Carried a crew of five three depth charges And everybody hated it. It was apparently a real devil of a plane to fly and the pilot that we write about is Harry Joseph Kane It's from Brooklyn, New York He did what every patriotic Army Air Force's pilot did during or to he looked at this world headlines. He looked at his own situation He says I don't think I want to be in the infantry so He went out he was from an actual prosperous family and he actually went out and got his private pilot license in 1940 So he just breezed right on through He and his crew were out on patrol Cherry Point at the time This story happens You think of it today's is huge, you know Marine Corps Air Station, but essentially the only thing they've been built was the runway Runways they were still trying to build Infrastructure and hangers and stuff and his squadron just came in landed I think some of them lived in tents others had to get housing in town, you know rooming houses and they did this this Three times a day a pair of planes would take off Like 20 miles off the coast one would split up and head towards Norfolk the other To the south towards Charleston in the hopes of fighting you bet And none of them ever thought they really would because they were so small to see and Commanders were so incredibly quick to submerge whenever they they saw an airplane Well, he was flying back from Charleston up towards Cape Hatteras when He noticed that there was this cloud layer up at about 1200 feet and His squadron's doctrine was kind of stupid. It was like we want you to fly 150 feet over the water So surprise in the U-boat you find But literally you've got a trip over the thing to surprise it So he decided to climb up above that cloud layer In hopes that the U-boat wouldn't notice him as he came along and after about an hour of this Kate looked out and he actually saw about eight miles away this tiny little line on the water And he nudged his navigator and and talked to his crew and he said this may be you but let's go find out so they Turned climbed up a little higher cut back on the engines out Came to skulking and and sure enough you 701 had come up to ventilate the boat Because in July in the Gulf Stream the temperatures inside of you, but we're over 120 degrees There was very little cooling from the ocean Outside so he had come up for 15 minutes just to turn on the diesel's vent the boat and get back down again Right as Harry Kane and his plane came along and The third element that led to this the successful attack in sinking was that horse Deggan's Lookout was daydreaming He was looking through his binoculars and thinking of his girlfriend and then he Heard them the message time to go. Let's go take her down He dropped his glasses and he's just a 29 coming right at him So they did a crash dive. He straddled it with three depth charges rip the hull apart the U-butt fell to a hundred feet depth But the crew who were very well trained all but a handful of successfully got out and popped up to the surface And at that point the story gets a little hallmark card like Harry Kane's flying in a tight circle at a hundred feet over the The of the spot of ocean and he suddenly sees these guys popping to the surface and He notices that most of them have no flotation gear. They didn't have time to grab their little talk-retter Breathing devices and so he orders his five his four crewmen and himself to throw their life jackets out to the Germans his his thought he said a You know interview many years later that they were no longer the enemy as far as I was concerned They're just a bunch of helpless guys in the water so They did that and then circled for several hours trying to to get either ships or airplanes to come out and rescue these guys But for one reason or another nobody nobody came and he finally had to fly back to Cherry Point as you run out of gas They resumed the search in the morning, but it took 49 hours to find Those poor devils in the water because they'd swept out to sea on the Gulf Stream And by that time only seven were still alive including horse Deggan so their second encounter Was poignant two days after the whole event Harry Kane and his crew were ordered to fly up to Norfolk, Virginia. They were brought into the Naval Hospital and Surrounded by armed guards in this one empty ward was this gaunt sunburn oil stain wretch of a POW and But some translator went up and mumbled in his ear So this is the guy that sank him and he stood painfully up salutes sharply in English said Congratulations go to tack so that was the end of end of their encounter the Winds of war swept these two guys far apart. He ended up back in the elution campaign and then spent the last Yes, year and a half of the war as a flight instructor in the Midwest Deggan ended up in Tucson, Arizona at the Papago Park Pea Devicamp got home in 1946 So I'll just end This little chat and take your questions if you have any Describing that their third encounter, which is my favorite in 1980 Both men had retired Harry Kane Start wondering who don't ever happen to that guy. I think and so he started writing letters to newspapers and organizations in Germany Actually, they made contact and started exchanging letters It kind of reminds me of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson who ended their active careers bitter enemies but in their old age actually started to become friends again they extended correspondence for about three years and Finally Harry Kane and his wife flew to Germany He had married had three children and when he met him instead of saying Congratulations good attack horse Deggan said. Thank you Harry for saving my life So on that I'll stop and take your questions Well at the time I Think it was about April or May I can't remember the exact date join it set up a new submarine called the type 14, which is a big fat unarmed They called the milk cow And they deployed these to the mid-Atlantic to extend The range of the set type 7s and type 9s by you know, serving as a floating gas station And it worked successfully it was very successful in terms of extending their range But one of the things I discovered was that it didn't really impact The killings of allied merchant ships because by that time the convoys and the air patrols are still so And we're getting better and better by the day that the the hunting actually was falling off in fact it was a Week after you 701s destruction Another you but was sunk very close by the one they just found a couple weeks ago by the way that you 576 And when doing it realized that It just wasn't profitable anymore to be off the coast he redeployed his horse back out into the north atlantic During the war the French had a big submarine named the Terps I believe and she worked out of course with New Hampshire and she would go out on patrol Assum and eventually I was in the Navy with a follow-up who was Submarine they followed the Terps out and they were using so much fuel they became suspicious And from what he told me the Terps was laying to with this German submarine on either side So they fired a spread of torpedoes. They went through the first It sounds like you've got a book to write I Heard vaguely about that sort of thing, but I know the the Refueling you boats the type 14s had very short exciting lives because by the time they were being used in 1942 And even in 43 the British and the Americans are getting much better at locating them and sending Task forces out to hunt and kill them. So they didn't have any guns or torpedoes either. They were just essentially carrying fuel and food Yes, sir It's in my bookshelf Submarine Well the example I like to use there was to me a strategic and logistical Castle and the example I use is the destroyer escort in 1940 one of the many good things that he did Ernie King Was on the general board and one of his task forces strongly urged the the crash Construction of a fleet of destroyer escorts because the the main DD's were too multi-mission and too badly needed elsewhere But Roosevelt said no He says you can get by with patrol boats and they had other priorities and the army wanted aluminum for airplanes And and everybody was just in this five-sided tug of war that kind of reminds me of what DC's like today They didn't get the first destroyer escort actually out into the Atlantic until after the allies that actually turned the tide And then they flooded it, you know, it's like a surge But the the logistical answer is it just took too long to get an army built and trained and get the Navy equipped with the right The right equipment especially ships without which had to be built and trained Or Ernie King's mantra in 42 was do the best you can with what you've got because that's the way it is and And you know, I cannot rewrite that history, but I'm still astounded at the fact that he knew they were coming Within 36 hours that they were going to be attacking and he didn't even send a solitary destroyer to just harass them much less attack and sink them so that that's You know where I just take aspirin and keep going Yes, sir The 846 right is that the u8-46. Yeah, that guy was an idiot At the bottom of the ocean with that said though, can you speak intelligently as to that engagement? Quite honestly, no, I've read about it but the focus of my first book on the battle was was strictly around the 12-week period in the spring of 43 when At the beginning of that interval the allies were actually afraid they were about to lose the battle and then 12 weeks later doing it so in the towel and pulled out of the North Atlantic convoy route So that was kind of the focus of of of my first book and then I I had researched and written about you 701 You guys can handle this 32 years ago. I was So my children came but I was working in Norfolk The old ledger store newspaper and I kept hearing about this Crack about you bud guy that came right up to the Cape Henry Lighthouse and blew up, you know a convoy But there was very little in the archives available at that time To explain what had happened and my editor got interested in it And he caught me loose to go trying and find out if there was any documentation of this because the wartime censorship was So incredibly tight. I want in fact I want to interrupt myself and read you something that just made me laugh This is an official Navy communicate that Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox released to the New York Times and the Associated Press in February of 1942 And this is his words there are many rumors and unofficial reports about the capture or destruction of enemy submarines Some of the recent visitors to our territorial waters will never enjoy the return portion of their voyage Furthermore the percentage of one-way traffic is increasing while that of two-way traffic is satisfactorily on the decline But there will be no information given out about the fate of the enemy Submarine excursionists who don't get home until that information is no longer of aid and comfort to the enemy This is a phase of the game of war secrecy into which every American should enter enthusiastically The press in the radio. I've made a great patriotic contribution by voluntarily Disciplining themselves in the matter of reporting such incidents as may have come to their attention All the people can make the same contribution Even if you have seen a submarine captured or destroyed Keep it to yourself Let the enemy guess what happened by this connect every American can make his contribution to the Navy's worldwide ever to Well, there are two things that are nice about that at the time he issued this we'd get to sing a single you bet First show up to have a history and the second thing is that Don't it's always new when his submarines Were lost because they stopped reporting back to him And so he would within 36 hours of no longer hearing from his you voted cross it off the list So anyway Yes, sir During the war years particularly from ladder 42 German you both had a much more successful right Sinking ships than the Americans did the Germans tended to be much more Honest risk averse I think I think risk averse is a little strong. I mean I are the report I mean I have read as a reader Clay Blair's book about the American you but you've had some American submarines in the Pacific I Don't remember thinking of it as risk averse as much as first they were plagued by lousy torpedoes For the first months of the war maybe the first year even and The Germans were not all the daredevil's there was this one poor guy Got put up against the wall and shot for cowardice because they thought he was being too risk averse So I think you have a population there were there were a handful of German aces It's sunk over 50 to 100 ships and then I go through the archives and there's you but after you but where the guy never Sank a single boat either because he couldn't do it or just didn't ever have the look so Can't help you Anything else? Yes, sir The first say 42 Well, there were two overlapping campaigns the along these coasts it was about 225 ships And then another 230 or 40 down in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico So it's just under 500 ships total in those two semi-simultaneous campaigns I'm doing this in memory, but if I recall correctly Roughly half of those were American or Panamanian US company flag and the other half were mostly British or Or the foreign flag vessels that were serving with the British merchant fleet like Norway and Yugoslavia The British inherited several thousand merchant ships Immediately after each country was conquered they put out a radio sign to all Norwegian ships to see for example saying if you want to continue to serve you can Serve under the British merchant Navy and the protection of the Royal Navy and most Norwegians didn't want to go home and dock and have to report to the SS so most of them did that So in this campaign it was 50-50. There's a famous famous encounter Ernie King had this deputy and Richard Edwards believe he was a vice admiral and the British sent their submarine Analyst Roger Wynn who ran the The OIC that sent that message that I showed you To Washington to encourage the US Navy to to form a submarine fusion center tracking room Really get going on on coordinating and getting the tactics, right? And I know and at first Edwards kind of blew him up saying, you know, we're gonna we're gonna teach ourselves We'll learn how to do it ourselves and and Roger Wynn who was a Semi-paralyzed attorney in civilian life who was a brilliant tactician Jumped to his feet and said the problem that was half the bloody ships that are going down our hours And you know that kind of broke the ice and the actually did start to make more cooperation Yes, sir when I first went to sea in 1950 tankers the crews consisted of many survivors and Some of them have been torpedoed three times They always slept in their clothes Anything they wanted they were prepared to jump overboard at the moments known. I had the the good fortune I never met the gentleman because he had passed away before I came upon his memoir But he was a British teenager named Richard Wynn And he kept a very detailed Diary and later actually wrote his little private account of what had happened to him and he claimed He saw the work coming and he said okay, I'm gonna be smart I'm gonna join the British merchant fleets. It became a essentially a merchant mariner Well as it turned out he was three more times likely to die than if he joined the Royal Marines in terms of And he went into the ocean once or twice We have this point use any of the British experience especially with their home fleet to guard our own waters for the first four months January through like late April They were trying everything and nothing worked and then finally they set up what they called the bucket brigade Which was a series of anchorages like off point look out? Cape Hatteras ochre coke. I think there was one or two down near, Georgia And and and the ships would race from anchorage to anchorage during daylight hours and lock the door And they'd have patrol boats right off the anchorages and that was kind of a halfway towards the convoy and that worked a little bit but Essentially everybody knew that what he had to do was convoy. There was no other Solution that would work on the US Air Force Army Air Force is Bitterly hated convoy escort they wanted to race out into the ocean You know their scarves and go hunting for you boats And but the easiest way to hunt for a you about is probably ships in a convoy because you I has to come There if he's gonna get anything done So it finally sank in it took took about four months and about Three or four hundred of the five hundred ships who went down before they finally you know as I say did the right thing Know that Ernie King tried it with two of them the first one the Carol and Caroline Went out and had an encounter with Reinerd Hardigan and you 123 Hardigan torpedo did it you know start smoking, but it was still floating He came in closer. They opened up the machine guns and killed a midshipman on board the U-boat And so he got a little worked in with you and emptied his torpedo tubes into the thing And the entire crew was lost. So it was The British use Q ships in World War one But even that record was kind of I think they lost three Q ships for every U-boat They successfully attacked if I remember Yes, sir Gunther bookheim who wrote dust boot had it best. He said 40,000 German submarine Submarine crewmen went to see in World War two 30,000 of them did not come back I believe it was 74 percent fatality rate overall for you you boats themselves Which is the hull because crewmen would would transfer off I mean there was that there was this fluctuating personnel things that it can get a little squishy But they had the highest mortality rate of any military branch in the world during that conflict They used to have a submarine base in the behalf of France. They used to run in there Mm-hmm, and I went through it. It's quite an interesting place The that's a small one, but some of the submarines they are came here Yeah, I'm digging his boat was first at Santa's air and then impressed and My wife Karen and I actually went to Santa's air two years ago And those bunkers are still there the French thought about knocking them down after the war and then they gave up There's just not enough dynamite around to to do it. So they they rent them out There was a disco and a hydroponic farm in the Chamber of Commerce Oh, it was fascinating they they I can't tell you that they preserved it I think they would have loved to have blown it up, but it's just impossible Anyone else? Well, thank you very much