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.