Military history buffs can connect with Ocracoke Island sites

You might say that memories of World War II are engrained in Ocracoke Island’s DNA.

On Oct. 23, 2009, community members unveiled a memorial marker at a site known as “Loop Shack Hill” to pay tribute to the “Beach Jumpers,” a special classification of sailors who were trained at the U.S. Navy’s top-secret amphibious training base on Ocracoke Island in Hyde County, N.C., from December 1943 to January 1946.

The inscription on the marker noted that sailors “were trained in both classroom and live exercises of seaborne deception.”

 

Specially equipped boats capable of high speeds carried “time-delayed explosives, amplifiers, recorders (sound effects), smoke pots, radar, radios, rocket launchers and two sets of twin 50-caliber machine guns. They also used radio and radar counter measures to deceive the enemy…making them believe an invasion was taking place along the beach.”

The Ocracoke base trained members of Beach Jumper Units 6 through 9 who were deployed to the Pacific Theatre. In all, the Navy distributed 11 Beach Jumper units around the globe during World War II.

Navy Lt. Douglas E. Fairbanks Jr., the Hollywood actor-turned U.S. naval officer during World War II, was acclaimed as the “Father of the Beach Jumpers.” 

Although he did not personally visit Ocracoke to instruct the Navy trainees, he had general oversight responsibilities from his post in Virginia Beach, Va.

Beach Jumper units were deactivated in 1946 after the war, and Ocracoke’s Navy training facility was basically abandoned. None of the original structures have been preserved.

(Fairbanks remained attached to the Naval Reserve after World War II. He retired as a captain in 1954. He would receive medals of honor for meritorious service from the United States, Great Britain, Italy and Brazil.)

Beach Jumper units were temporarily reinstated between 1951-72, assigned to the Naval Information Warfare Training Group and springing into action during the Korean and Vietnam wars.

A national Association of Beach Jumpers was formed in 2002, and it helped promote the dedication of the Ocracoke marker in 2009.

More than a dozen of the World War II Beach Jumpers attended that ceremony. Douglas Fairbanks Jr.’s widow – Vera Lee Shelton Fairbanks, who was a merchandiser with the QVC Network – also participated in the festivities.

A Beach Jumpers reunion was held in Ocracoke on Sept. 1, 2019, to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the memorial marker.

Ocracoke community members and dignitaries gather each year in early May for a memorial service to pay tribute to four seamen who perished off North Carolina’s coast when the British trawler HMS Bedfordshire was torpedoed during World War II by a German U-boat.

None of the 37 men aboard the Bedfordshire survived the May 11, 1942, attack, which occurred off Cape Lookout.

 

Four bodies from the Bedfordshire washed ashore on Ocracoke Island. Townspeople gave them a proper burial on a small plot of land in the heart of the village. It is simply named as the “British Cemetery.” The property was donated by Alice Wahab Williams, widow of Capt. David Williams.

 

The memorial service in Ocracoke is coupled with one that occurs about 33 miles away at an even smaller British cemetery at Buxton on Hatteras Island. Two bodies of seamen who had served on the San Delfino washed ashore near Buxton are buried here.

 

The San Delfino was an armed British tanker that was destroyed by German U-boat torpedoes on April 10, 1942, off Cape Hatteras, killing 28 men. The remaining 22 crew members were rescued at sea.

 

The Ocracoke and Buxton British cemeteries are administered by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, based in Maidenhead, Berkshire, England.