Carteret Co. adds to its ‘WW II Heritage’ site credentials

Continuing to count the reasons why Carteret County deserves to be designated as a “World War II Heritage Community,” a formal resolution is taking shape to detail talking points, such as:

Whereas No. 6: Denard Davis of Davis Shore to the rescue. The Army men were in a scrape. They couldn’t figure out in 1942 how to move heavy guns to the concrete gun placements at Cape Lookout. 

The weight of the guns was too much for their heavy equipment; Caterpillar tractors and bulldozers were mired in the sand.

Some of the local workmen told the Army officers that Denard Davis could move those guns, “and if he couldn’t, they may as well give up.”

Denard Davis was the guy to call if you needed your house or other structure moved in Down East Carteret County throughout much of the early- to mid-1900s. Historian Chuck Lewis said Denard Davis agreed to lend a hand. He showed up one day with his 10-man crew, and his old brown and white horse named Nell. (Maybe she was a mule.)

“He only required a few simple tools,” Lewis said. “He would bring a deadman anchor, some block and tackle, four house jacks, a few rollers, blocks and board and a homemade capstan ‘that looked as if it would fall apart.’”

“Of course, you can imagine how some of those smarty pants soldiers acted when they saw him. Despite the laughing and ridicule, Denard Davis and his crew went to work.” The locals warned the Army brass: “He takes his time. Inch by inch. If you try to rush him, he’ll pack up and say, ‘You finish her.’ And it was hard to get him to come back!”

“In two weeks, the Army’s guns were in place and ready to protect our coast and its ships from the Germans,” Lewis said. “Needless to say, the Army became very fond of Mr. Davis.”

 

Later, Denard Davis placed guns around Fort Macon, and the Coast Guard hired him to move an old Coast Guard station from Bogue Banks by barge to Cedar Point.”

Whereas No. 7: The Army established a super-secret U.S. Army Radar Site, known as Davis Shore Army Camp in 1941 to provide early warning of enemy aircraft and ships approaching the North Carolina coast.

Ed Pond of Davis was 6 years old when the camp was built. He remembered the guard dogs as being “big, loud and mean.” A 150-foot steel tower with a “a box car size metal framework at its top rotated slowly around and around.”

Pond wrote about seeing machine gun nests at each corner of the camp property. “Thick, impenetrable barbed wire entanglements completely surrounded (even out into Core Sound) the perimeter of the Army camp.”

“While the first soldiers coming to set up the Army Camp were supposed to live in their tents, the Davis Shore families would not let that happen,” Pond said, “especially in the spring and summer of 1942, when the salt marsh mosquitoes were the worst ever recalled.”

“Many Davis Shore families adopted a soldier or even two and invited those soldier boys to actually come and live in their houses and eat at their family tables, and the women did the laundry for their live-in soldiers.”

Whereas No. 8: Atlantic in Down East Carteret County became a “military town” in 1942 when Marine Corps Outlying Field Atlantic was established, occupying a 1,469-acre facility within the community. Operated by personnel from Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, it remains a useful training field.

 

Carteret Co. states its case as ‘WW II Heritage Community’

Continuing to build our case for Carteret County, N.C., to be designated as a “World War II Heritage Community,” the yet-to-be-written formal resolution should address these noteworthy deeds:

Whereas No. 3: Marine Corps Auxiliary Landing Field Bogue on the southern shore of Bogue Sound, in the community of Bogue, opened in 1942 as a training site for pilots from Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point at Havelock in nearby Craven County.

Facilities were also constructed to support two squadrons with a combined total of 45 aircraft and accommodations for 1,050 personnel.

 

During World War II, Bogue Field was used almost exclusively for dive-bomber squadron training. Dive-bombing circle targets were constructed on nearby islands in Bogue Sound, and vertical targets were built for low-level bombing practice.

Whereas No. 4: The woman who was reverently known as the “Queen of Bogue Banks” – Alice Green Hoffman – was suspected of being a German spy during World War II. (She is shown below.) The intrigue was compounded because Hoffman’s niece, Eleanor Roosevelt, was married to President Theodore Roosevelt’s eldest son.

Alice Green was a wealthy socialite who shuttled between New York City and Paris, France, dabbling in real estate development. She married New Yorker John Ellis Hoffman in 1905. Their marriage dissolved in 1910, but she retained the Hoffman surname, giving rise to speculation during World War II that she had “German connections.”

 

“Before the outbreak of World War II, Alice Green Hoffman had lost or disposed of all her real estate interests in New York City and Paris,” commented Walt Zaenker, a Pine Knoll Shores historian. By 1941, at age 79, she chose to reside permanently at her “Shore House” on Bogue Banks, satisfied to maintain a reclusive lifestyle.

 

Rumors began circulating that Alice was a spy, radioing freighter locations to German U-boats and allowing German mini-submarines to resupply at her dock. The FBI and U.S. Army were tracking her activities, Zaenker said.

“All rumors proved to be untrue, baseless and lacking in any link to reality. The truth was just the opposite,” he wrote.

Gabrielle Brard, who was Alice’s housekeeper, was later interviewed in 1973 by a reporter from the Carteret County News-Times. Brard said: “During the war, Mrs. Hoffman’s house was the scene of frequent parties for the American soldiers stationed in the area. Beside the parties, soldiers were welcomed as overnight guests and at mealtimes.”

“During this time, war rationing was in effect. Local fishermen would bring in the catch; the soldiers would help prepare the meal, and ‘we shared what we had with them.’”

Whereas No. 5: The Down East section of Carteret County was also well-fortified and heavily involved in the World War II effort.

Cape Lookout Bight was designated in 1942 as a “safe harbor” for the anchorage of convoys of Navy warships and merchant marine vessels that were traveling between Charleston, S.C., and the Chesapeake Bay.

The anchor marks the entrance to Cape Lookout Bight in the cradle of  “the hook.”

Nets were placed across the entrance to the bight “to keep the U-boats from slipping in at night to torpedo the anchored ships.”

Near the entrance to Cape Lookout Bight, a small Army base was set up onshore to provide additional protection.

Carteret County historian Chuck Lewis said that “concrete ammunition storage rooms and gun emplacements were built. But, when it came time to install the guns, the Army could not move the guns from the barges to the gun placements.”

The guns were so heavy, they kept sinking into the sand. Caterpillar tractors and bulldozers failed to move the guns. “The Army men sweated, cursed and swore,” Lewis wrote. 

Carteret County, N.C., deserves ‘WW II heritage’ status

The Atlantic Ocean waters off Carteret County, N.C., near Cape Lookout and extending northeast toward Cape Hatteras, formed a hot spot of activity during World War II.

The first six months of 1942, especially, were “disastrous for an unprepared America,” wrote a curator at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort.

The German U-boats found coastal North Carolina to be a prime and happy hunting ground in which to attack Allied Forces’ vessels traveling near shore along the Outer Banks in early 1942.

During a six-month period in 1942, German U-boats destroyed nearly 400 ships off the coast of North Carolina, mostly merchant marine vessels.

 

The territory was referred to as “Torpedo Alley” or “Torpedo Junction.”

 Clearly, World War II came within just a few miles of Carteret County.

Eventually, the tide turned in favor of the Allies, due in no small part to the contributions from people in Carteret County toward the war effort.

Hence, we state our case: Carteret County deserves to be designated as an “American World War II Heritage Community,” on par with Wilmington, N.C.

 

There are at least 17 good “war stories” that can be summarized into a formal resolution:

Whereas No. 1: Fort Macon, a Confederate garrison captured by the Union Army during the Civil War and later abandoned, was reactivated on Dec. 21, 1941.

 

World War II reenactors at Fort Macon (above) 

and an exhibit featuring World War II uniforms (below).

Retired Fort Macon State Park ranger Paul Branch said the soldiers sent to Fort Macon were members of the New York National Guard, fellows from the boroughs of New York City who “talked funny.”

It was winter as the men settled into the fort, and early on, a group of soldiers built a fire in the fireplace of one of the casements, Branch reported. 

“Someone found two old Civil War cannonballs, which had been recovered around the fort, and unthinkingly placed them in the fireplace to serve as andirons,” he added. “One of the cannonballs was a live shell, which exploded in the fire. By some miracle, no one was killed.”

Pvt. Henry Chait suffered injuries that required hospitalization.

“The entire incident was later mentioned in Ripley’s Believe It or Not newspaper as the ‘last shot of the Civil War,’ because all the Army soldiers injured by an old Confederate cannonball were ‘Yankees.’” 

Soon, Fort Macon was buzzing with military activity to monitor and deter the German U-boats. Soldiers patrolled the beach day and night.

Whereas No. 2: Also on Dec. 21, 1941, Virginia National Guard artillery units from Camp Pendleton at Virginia Beach arrived to shore up the defense of the Beaufort Inlet and began to extend artillery batteries westward on Bogue Banks toward Salter Path. Towers were built in the sand dunes and equipped with searchlights.

 

Carteret County storyteller Rodney Kemp (shown below) said a communication center was established at the end of the road in Salter Path. “Because of the nature of their communications via Morse code, the locals referred to them as ‘dit-dots’…people who came ‘from Off.’”

“That’s how dit-dots came to be a popular term in our local dialect,” Kemp explained.

Walt Zaenker, a Pine Knoll Shores historian, commented: “At the peak of the war, there were about 1,000 troops on the island and maybe twice that many stationed on the nearby mainland.

The Navy took over operation of the Morehead City Port. Camp Glenn near Morehead City was reactivated as an Army base, and a Navy section base was established adjacent to the camp.

“The Navy section base quickly became the most important reception and processing center on the North Carolina coast for the survivors of sunken or damaged merchant ships,” Zaenker said.

“Personnel aided in minesweeping and in maintaining a submarine net across the entrance to the ship channel in Beaufort Inlet,” he said.

More to come.

‘WW II Heritage City’ program needs to be modified

Wilmington, N.C., was selected in 2020 as America’s first “World War II Heritage City,” and that’s all well and good.

 

The Wilmington-based North Carolina Shipbuilding Company was the state’s largest employer during World War II, employing up to 23,000 people and constructing 243 cargo vessels to provide goods and equipment to the military.

Battleship North Carolina (shown above) saw duty in World War II. The vessel is now a primary tourism attraction in Wilmington.

 

There’s a problem, though, with the way the federal bill was written by U.S. Rep. David Rouzer of Wilmington, North Carolina U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis and others. 

The law specifies that each U.S. state can only have only one official “World War II Heritage City.” That seems totally unfair.

Perhaps U.S. Rep. Greg Murphy of Greenville (show below), whose district includes Carteret County as well as major Marine Corps installations – Camp Lejeune at Jacksonville and Air Station Cherry Point and Fleet Readiness Center East at Havelock – can help fix “this oversight.”

 

Since succeeding the late Walter B. Jones Jr. in Congress in 2019, Rep. Murphy has demonstrated an intense interest in supporting the military services, including the U.S. Coast Guard.

After high school, Greg Murphy declined an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md., in order to attend Davidson College and then go on to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to earn his medical degree.

 

Rep. Murphy was the keynote speaker at the July 27, 2024, Coast Guard Appreciation Dinner in Morehead Citym, N.C. He joked that the Coast Guardsmen at Station Emerald Isle recognize his 19-foot recreational boat and have dubbed him as “Capt. Runaground.”

Given his sense of humor and talents as a communicator, Rep. Murphy may be the perfect advocate to convince his colleagues to revisit the “World War II Heritage City” rules.

The program “lives” within the U.S. Department of the Interior and is being administered by the National Park Service (NPS). So far, 30 states have been awarded “World War II Heritage City” designations.

The NPS advises: “Once a designation has been made, the state…is removed from the eligibility list.”

First and foremost, the term “Heritage City” needs to be critiqued and tweaked. In Carteret County, for example, there is no central city. We are a collection of towns. This collection forms a necklace of jewels, each a gem that adds sparkle and luster to the Crystal Coast.

A model for the World War II heritage recognition program could be the Coast Guard. Its Coast Guard Cities program now allows for counties to be honored as Coast Guard Communities as well.

Carteret County applied in 2014 to become a Coast Guard Community, blending our love for the Coasties from Fort Macon to Emerald Isle and incorporating the Life-Saving Stations that were opened at Cape Lookout and on Core Banks in the 1880s. The life-saving crews are such a vital part of the Down East culture and heritage.

The Coast Guard Commandant’s resolution to officially designate Carteret County as a “Coast Guard Community” was signed July 7, 2015, enabling us to join Wilmington and Elizabeth City as “honorees.” So, there are three Coast Guard cities/communities in North Carolina. How about that?

 

Carteret County can…and will…build a very strong case why it should also be a “World War II Heritage Community.”

Few places can match Carteret County’s impressive contributions to the war effort during World War II. We intend to give Rep. Murphy the fodder he needs to present a bill that will relax the rules.

One would think the goal of the program should be to honor as many communities as possible…not apply restrictive bureaucratic reins…while those remaining World War II veterans can fully appreciate the effort.

Q-ships sought to surprise German U-boats in wartime battles

Q-ships took their name from Queenstown, a seaport on the south coast of County Cork, Ireland.

The Haulbowline Dockyard in Cork Harbour at Queenstown was responsible for the conversion of many mercantile steamers into armed decoy ships.

 

The boats were used by the British Royal Navy to combat German submarines (U-boats) that were “strangling travel in the sea lanes of the North Atlantic Ocean” during World War I.

Each Q-ship was disguised to appear as an ordinary cargo vessel, but each Q-ship contained hidden armaments.

When encountering the decoy vessels, U-boat captains often chose to conserve their supply of torpedoes. Rather, the U-boat captains would surface and use their deck guns to finish off “easy or already weakened targets,” military historians explained.

The plan was: When a U-boat surfaced, the Q-ship would drop its panels and immediately open fire on the exposed warship.

Sometimes, the ruse worked. In the final analysis, though, the British Q-ships had only marginal success in World War I.

During World War II, a new generation of German U-boats approached the U.S. coastline in 1942, hoping to “blitz” coastal shipping between New York Harbor and North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt believed a small fleet of U.S. Navy Q-ships could provide an effective deterrent. 

Five merchant ships were selected to be secretly transformed into Q-ships at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard on Seavey’s Island in Kittery, Maine.

 

Two were Evelyn and Carolyn, identical cargo vessels that were 30 years old. As Q-ships, they were renamed Asterion and Atik, respectively, taking their names from stars in the northern sky.

 

Within three days of leaving the Portsmouth shipyard on March 23, 1942, the Atik was spotted all alone at sea about 300 miles east of Norfolk, Va., by the menacing U-123.

Under the command of Navy Lt. Cmdr. Harry Lynnwood Hicks of Rome, Ga. (shown below), the Atik played coy, teasing U-123 to come closer.

 

U-123 didn’t follow the script, however. On March 27, 1942, at a distance of 700 yards, U-123 fired a torpedo that struck the Atik on the port side under the bridge. The ship started to burn.

As the U-boat surfaced to observe the demise of the Atik, the U.S. ship dropped its concealment, commencing a barrage of gunfire from its batteries. One German seaman who was stationed on the submarine’s bridge was killed.

Caught off guard, U-123 made a hasty retreat to escape beyond range of the Atik’s weaponry.

U-123 would dive and fire a second torpedo to finish off the Atik. All 141 Atik crew members died at sea, including Coast Guardsman Jesse Daniel Thompson of Otway in Carteret County.

Afterward, U-123 captain Reinhard Hardegen (shown below) cursed himself for falling into Atik’s trap like a “callow beginner.” He recorded in his log: “We were incredibly lucky.”

 

Only a few weeks after the attack on the Atik, Hardegen secured his placed in infamy on April 11, 1942, when U-123 torpedoed the tanker Gulfamerica just off the beach at Jacksonville, Fla., in plain view of locals and tourists who were enjoying a night on the town.

To showboat, he maneuvered U-123 around the flaming wreck and surfaced between the Gulfamerica and the beach. This time, he sank the ship with U-123’s deck gun.

 

Hardegen later wrote in his log: “All the vacationers had seen an impressive special performance. A burning tanker, artillery fire, the silhouette of a U-boat – how often had that been seen in America?”

 

Hardegen, one of the premier German U-boat aces, sank 25 Allied Forces ships during World War II.

Roll call of Carteret’s ‘fallen heroes’ from late 1941 forward:

Carteret County’s listing of “fallen heroes,” those individuals who died while serving in the military in the 1940s, is headlined by Edwin Bonner McCabe, 25, of the Wildwood community.

U.S. Navy Petty Officer First Class McCabe was among more than 2,400 service members who perished during the Japanese attack on Dec. 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbor near Honolulu on the island of Oahu in Hawaii.

 

Sources at the History Museum of Carteret County in Morehead City said they believe McCabe was the only Carteret County resident to die during the bombings at Pearl Harbor, as reported by the Carteret County News-Times in 2011.

McCabe was assigned to the USS Oklahoma and was aboard the battleship when it was destroyed and sank after suffering at least eight direct hits from torpedoes fired from Japanese aircraft on Dec. 7, 1941. The death toll aboard the Oklahoma (shown below) that day was 429.

 

Edwin McCabe was the son of William Zadock McCabe, a member of the Carteret County Board of Commissioners, and Annie Virginia Teasley McCabe. Edwin McCabe had joined the Navy in 1933, shortly after his graduation from Newport High School, so he had amassed more than eight years of Navy service when he died.

On Dec. 8, 1941 (the day after the assault on Pearl Harbor), U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Congress declared war on Japan. On Dec. 11, 1941, the United States declared war on Germany, marking America’s official involvement in World War II, aligning with the Allied Forces.

 

As previously reported in the Aug. 21, 2024, edition of the News-Times, the first Carteret County man to die during the World War II conflict was Livington Ward Brooks of Harkers Island, who was serving aboard the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Alexander Hamilton (shown below).

 

The vessel was torpedoed by Germany’s U-132 on Jan. 29, 1942, about 28 miles off the coast of Iceland while on “convoy duty.”

Brooks and 31 other Coast Guard crew members were killed, but 81 men from the ship were rescued and survived, including five who hailed from Down East Carteret County. Previously recognized were Dennis Pittman, Hugh Salter and Nathan Robinson.

History museum volunteers have since identified two other local Coast Guardsmen who were among the Alexander Hamilton survivors – Frank Grantham and Clifton Willis. Interestingly, six of the entire crew of 113 were from Carteret County – more than 5%.

This illustrates how Carteret County men were drawn to service in the Coast Guard, a tradition that began with local men enlisting in the old U.S. Life-Saving Service as early as the 1880s.

 

The second Carteret County World War II fatality occurred on March 27, 1942. Coast Guardsman Jesse Daniel Thompson of Otway was one of 141 hands who died aboard the Navy’s Q-ship named the Atik (for a principal star in the constellation Perseus).

The Atik was torpedoed by Germany’s U-123 about 300 miles east of Norfolk, Va., and exploded. There were no survivors.

Thompson was memorialized in 1992, when the North Carolina Department of Transportation authorized a resolution naming the bridge on N.C. Route 101 over Core Creek in Carteret County as the Jesse Daniel Thompson Memorial Bridge.

The Q-ships program was a bold and daring military strategy authorized by President Roosevelt during the early years of World War II.

 
Built in 1912, the Atik began service as Carolyn (shown above), an ordinary merchant ship that carried freight and passengers between the West Indies and ports on the eastern seaboard of the United States. She was not built as a ship of war but accepted her role with valor.