‘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.

‘Garden Party’ emerged from a humiliating stage experience

What if…the booing heard during Ricky Nelson’s performance at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on Oct. 15, 1971, was not being directed at him?

 

Suppose the crowd was booing police action to haul off one of the concert patrons who was inebriated and causing a scene?

Some music historians maintain that the audience was merely reacting to law enforcement, and the incident randomly occurred while Nelson was performing his version of the song “Honky Tonk Women.”

At the time, however, Nelson interpreted the crowd response as negative feedback that was being expressed toward his artistic delivery. He abruptly left the stage without completing the song.

Had concert organizers explained the situation at the time to Ricky Nelson, his hurt feelings might have been assuaged. 

But if so, maybe one of the classic rock’n’roll songs of all time – “Garden Party” – would never have been written or released in 1972.

I went to a garden party

To reminisce with my old friends

A chance to share old memories

And play our songs again.

 

When I got to the garden party

They all knew my name

But no one recognized me,

I didn’t look the same.

 

But it’s all right now

I learned my lesson well.

You see, you can’t please everyone

So you got to please yourself.

 

Nelson contrasted his appearance with that of Chuck Berry, when he wrote:

 Someone opened up a closet door

And out stepped Johnny B. Goode

Playing guitar like a ringing a bell

And lookin’ like he should.

 

Nelson also paid tribute to two members of The Beatles, John Lennon and George Harrison, both friends of his, who reportedly were in the concert audience:

 People came from miles around,

Everyone was there.

Yoko brought her walrus

There was magic in the air.

 And over in the corner

Much to my surprise

Mr. Hughes hid in Dylan’s shoes

Wearing his disguise.

As explanation, Lennon was responsible for The Beatles’ song “I Am the Walrus.” When Harrison traveled, he preferred to be incognito, and he often used the alias of Mr. Hughes. Harrison and Nelson had planned to release an album in which they would cover hit songs from Bob Dylan. Unfortunately, they never got around to recording it.

 

George Harrison

Nelson gave listeners of “Garden Party” a taste of his personality:

 If you gotta play at garden parties

I wish you a lotta luck.

But if memories were all I sang

I’d rather drive a truck.

 

Ricky Nelson, along with Elvis Presley, are the only rock’n’roll stars from the late 1950s-early 1960s era who Dick Clark (shown below) didn’t reel in to sing on his “American Bandstand” television show.

 

Both singers died too young and tragically. They battled the demons of substance abuse. Presley, whose health had deteriorated significantly, suffered a massive heart attack at his home Graceland in Memphis, Tenn. He died on Aug. 16, 1977, at age 42.

 

Nelson was 45 when he and six others died in a horrible airplane crash on Dec. 31, 1985, near De Kalb, Texas, about 35 miles west of Texarkana.

 

The cause of the crash may have been an onboard fire that was attributed to a faulty gas heater in the rear cabin. Only the pilot and co-pilot survived. Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band were enroute to Dallas to play at a New Year’s Eve celebration.