War off our shores

The story of the Empire Mica and her fiery destruction off Cape San Blas is widely known, but a new translation and a visitor from across the big pond have shed some light on the human face of a tragedy that took place 69 years ago next Wednesday.

In Sept. 2010, Roderick “Rod” McIlraith Jr., came to Florida looking for traces of his father, Chief Officer Roderick McIlraith who died on the Empire Mica.

For most of his life, Rod believed his father died somewhere off the coast of Argentina.

In 2009, at age 59, he married for the first time. His bride Denise was a computer buff. One afternoon, Rod brought home a friend who wanted to learn about the Internet.

Denise typed Rod’s name into Google, an online search engine, and what popped up on the monitor surprised them all. The very first hit was a list of the crew members who served on the Empire Mica, on an excellent Webpage created by Gordon Steele at http://homepage.eircom.net/~gordonsteele/.

A year later, Rod and Denise set off on their first trip to the states in search of the Empire Mica, accompanied by three friends David and Annachristina Smith, and Barbara Croydon, three friends who visit the U.S. every year.

Prowling U-boat has success off Key West

The S.S. Empire Mica was a British merchant oil tanker on lease to the Anglo-American Oil Company.

The ship, 463.5 feet long with a 61 long beam, was small by supertanker standards, but large for the 1940s.The crew loved her. She was just 11 months old and featured an early form of air conditioning, a luxury few seamen had experienced.

Armed with a half-dozen deck guns, she was traveling from Baytown, TX to Key West carrying about 11,200 tons of kerosene. Although the U.S. government downplayed the possibility of German U-boats in the Gulf, sailors knew they were there and dangerous.

Capt. Hugh Bentley’s orders were to run during the day and hide at night, staying in shallow water to avoid trouble. U-boats required 60’ of water to maneuver and, more important, to submerge. Without sufficient depth, they were vulnerable to attack by deck-mounted guns and airplanes.

Bentley, 70, a retired seaman called back into service, intended to dock in either St Andrews or St. Joseph’s Bay on the evening of June 28, but the draft of the Mica was too deep to enter either safe haven.

So Bentley was forced to make a run for it, crossing the open Gulf.

Three days earlier, U-Boat 67, nicknamed “Raider,” under the command of 27-year-old Kapitanleutenant Gunter Mueller-Stockheim began patrolling the coast of Gulf and Franklin counties.

Raider was a Type IXC, the largest of three designs among the 25 German U-boats that operated in the Gulf during 1942 and 1943. She was 250 feet long, 22 feet wide, weighed 1,120 tons and carried 22 torpedoes and 52 men.

Her size gave her the capacity to hold more fuel and supplies than most submarines of the era, so she could operate for months at a time without returning to a base for refueling.

Although American leaders suppressed the fact to avoid panic, there were as many as 20 U-boats operating at any given time in the Gulf during the first half of World War II.

The U-boats’ job was to cut the flow of oil carried by tankers from ports in Texas and Louisiana and prevent military hardware and supplies from reaching Europe. The U-boats prowling the Gulf effectively cut off the U.S. oil and gas supplies to Europe for the first half of the war, sending 56 vessels to the bottom of the Gulf.

Raider sailed out of Lorient in Nazi-occupied France in May 1942, and after crossing the Atlantic, sank the Nicaraguan ship Managua off Key West on June 16. Mueller then headed for the northern Gulf. This was his fifth war patrol and was to be his most successful. In all, he would attack and damage or sink eight merchant marine vessels carrying a total of almost 45,000 tons of cargo.

‘Cat and mouse games have no purpose’

A comprehensive website dealing with U-boats, created by retired U.S. Navy Capt. Jerry Mason, http://uboatarchive.net displays Mueller’s log including a detailed account of the Mica’s destruction.

Mason has translated this and a number of other documents from the original German.

On June 20, Raider attacked but failed to sink the Norwegian vessel Nortind near New Orleans. He fled when the ship signaled to shore with floodlights.

Mueller then worked his way east following what the Germans correctly believed was a shipping route. His intended destination was Cape San Blas where he planned to lie in wait for cargo vessels.

The trip was dogged with difficulty. Raider’s communication equipment failed. There was often fog and rain and other times he remained submerged because, as the log reads, “nights bright as day and a dead calm sea” left Raider vulnerable to aircraft. The signal from the sounding equipment was so distorted it was all but useless. Few ships were spotted during the passage.

“The fact that we have found nothing the last two nights I ascribe to the bad visibility,” wrote Mueller. “The traffic must be there! Nothing is to be seen, as far as the eye can see. Since nothing was met during the advance to the east, it is logical to assume that if traffic is in fact evading to the east, it moves to the north just offshore.”

On June 25, Raider was spotted by an aircraft that attempted to bomb the U-boat. “I am angry that I was seen after all. Will remain submerged until darkness,” Mueller wrote.

When Raider reached Cape San Blas, her loneliness came to an end.

The ship lay submerged off the cape during the day, watching through a periscope, and surfaced at night. Surfacing was necessary to renew the ship’s supply of air and recharge the batteries. When on the bottom, the engines were shut down to conserve fuel. Mueller found that below 150’, the temperature was comfortable.

The silent stalker watched the fishing fleet and sailboats come and go and, on one occasion, saw a tug boat towing a tanker.

Mueller sized her up for an attack but spared her.

“I let them go, because, for a torpedo, the case is hopeless, and I do not want to disturb the apparently favorable area for me with artillery,” he wrote.

On June 28, Mueller saw what he believed was another U-boat surface near his lair. He speculated it could be Korvettenkapitan Wolf Henne in U-boat 157, not knowing Henne’s boat had been sunk two weeks earlier in the Keys and Henne was dead.

Problems with the radio kept Mueller from contacting the other ship directly. He came closer to investigate.

In his log he wrote, “Now it is recognized as a U-boat, resembling a German type IX boat. Can not be recognized with certainty however, therefore, to clarify and, if necessary, attack dived. Cat and mouse games have no purpose.”

‘Two hits after 67 seconds’

At 5:53 a.m. on the morning of June 29, Raider surfaced again. A brilliant full moon hung in a cloudless sky. Mueller noted there was summer lightning.

At 6:25, Mueller spotted the Empire Mica and at 6:50, he fired on her.

“A shadow, initially assessed as two small [vessels], is an approaching tanker with prominent bridge and rear superstructure,” he wrote in his log. “From the type and size estimate like ‘British Unity’ 8,407 GRT (gross register tonnage), armed. Enemy (tanker) zigzags with long legs.

“It (the night) is very bright, but I hope, he does not recognize too much, bow wave is already evident. Initiated the shot. Target (is so close) it barely fits in the optic. Two hits after 67 seconds, center and aft 20 meters. High flash, tanker burns immediately over entire length. Sags in the middle bow and stern lift,” Mueller wrote.

Aboard the Empire Mica, all hell broke loose. Most of the 48 crew members were asleep below decks in air conditioned comfort. It is believed all the survivors were either on deck or on their way up when the torpedoes struck.

Survivors recounted the fire damaged the rigging for the lifeboats, which could not be lowered normally. Bentley ordered McIlraith and Ronald Mowatt to board a lifeboat and free it. With both men in the boat, the ropes holding the lifeboat burned through and she was cast adrift. McIlraith was thrown into a fiery sea, and disappeared. Mowatt, who could not swim, clung to the seat of the lifeboat.

Mowatt managed to get the lifeboat forward in order to rescue three or four men huddled against the break of the forecastle head with flames all round them.

The lifeboat was rowed towards the stern of the ship. Although they could see their shipmates struggling, the fire was so intense they were unable to rescue them. Only 14 men, including the captain, were saved. One man later died of burns.

‘Has the morning paper got here yet?’

Willie Fred and Rebecca Randolph and Louise Pendleton had been fishing offshore on the 41’ Sea Dream and drinking beer. They were heading back in with Pendleton sleeping on deck when the explosion awoke her. She came below to ask the others if they had heard it. They told her it must be some kind of military test.

When they reached the Apalachicola dock, two girls drove up and shouted that a ship had been torpedoed. The women came ashore and Randolph went for help, intending to head back out.

The attack quickly caught the city’s attention. Elgin Wefing, the Coast Guard commander of port, commandeered the Countess, a pleasure craft belonging to Dick Heyser because his own boat, the Sinbad, was in dry dock.

Wefing and Coast Guardsman Will “Mac” McCormick headed for the blaze, with Belton Tarantino and Heyser aboard. The heat was so intense it was hours before they could approach the tanker. They circled the inferno looking for survivors as Mueller watched, submerged nearby.

According to his log, a second U-boat was also submerged on the scene. The identity of this boat is uncertain, but it may have been one spotted by a Mr. Thigpen earlier in the month during an uneventful excursion to St. George Island aboard the pleasure boat Sadie J. Other members of the party scoffed at Thigpen’s story but he insisted he saw the submarine surface in the Gulf and ducked behind the dunes for fear of being shot.

The Sea Dream joined the Countess near the Mica. Randolph steered while John Hathcock searched.

The Countess located the single lifeboat to escape the flaming Mica.

Wefing asked the passengers “Are you alright?”

One replied, “We’re alright. Has the morning paper got here yet?”

Wefing took the men aboard and headed back to Apalachicola while the Sea Dream continued to search. Finding nothing, she then headed for home and found the Countess taking on water, so the survivors were transferred to the Sea Dream.

Randolph brewed coffee for the men as they headed for port.

Meanwhile, Joe Barber, up early, was headed to Ten Foot Hole when he encountered his friend, Carol McLeod, in Battery Park. McLeod was racing to his boat, the Trouble, to aid the Sea Dream, which had run out of fuel.

Barber joined him and the two were able to tow the bigger boat ashore.

By the time the survivors reached the Apalachicola pier, townsfolk had put out blankets and mattresses on the pier for the men. They were then taken to the Coombs Armory.

The survivors were later taken to Panama City where they remained until they could be returned to Great Britain.

Barber said what struck him most was the age of the British sailors, some of whom appeared to be in their early teens. The ship’s roster lists a number of sailors who were 16 and 17 years old.

‘We must save the children’

An article published in the St. Joe Star, two weeks after the attack, praised Apalachicola for its readiness in the face of the disaster.

The British government sent letters of condolence to the families of the men lost on the Mica. With so many men were lost in World War II; thousands of British families were left to survive without a father.

Roderick McIlraith was born three months after his father’s death. His mother, Isabella, received a small widow’s pension but was forced to reenter the work force with two small children.

She never remarried.

“I never thought much about not having a father,” he said. “About half of my friends had none.”

Isabella McIlraith worked as a housemother at the Arcadia Bellows Children’s Home, one of two houses purchased by the British American Bellows Society (BABS), a charity founded to provide a refuge for children whose homes had been destroyed in the Blitz.

They were called “Bellows” because the first house purchased contained an old blacksmith’s forge. Organizers of the retreat created a ceremony using the old bellows to welcome new children to the fold.

Frank Whittaker, of Bristol, Somerset, whose own children were evacuated to the United States, conceived of the project and secured the houses with the aid of his children’s American foster parents and several Bristol businessmen. The society’s motto: “We must save the children.”

The Bellows homes were heavily supported by both American and British soldiers, and became a symbol of Anglo-American co-operation during the dark days of the war.

A mysterious stranger in Berlin

Before her husband’s death, Isabella and Roderick worked as volunteers with BABS, the pair known to the youngsters as Uncle and Auntie Mac. On June 29, 1943, one year to the day after the sinking of the Mica, Isabella took a position as senior hostess at Arcadia Bellows, where she continued to work until 1947.

Roderick, aged 31 at his death, received the King's Commendation for Brave Conduct posthumously for his actions on the Empire Mica.

Korvettenkapitan Mueller died July 16, 1943 at the age of 29 when Raider was bombed in the Sargasso Sea. The surviving crew members, all in their early 20s, said Mueller, nicknamed “Alligator,” was an excellent officer, friendly, good humored, with the interests of the crew at heart. Raider’s crew listened to radio broadcasts of music on Tuesday and Friday evenings. There was a collection of records on board. On Sundays a "concert" lasting several hours was held, with the crew choosing records to play. Music was broadcast over the loudspeaker system. On Saturday nights or on Sundays, the men were given beer, also served whenever a crewmember had a birthday.

After 1943, the practice of merchant ships traveling in armed convoys and the availability of very long range reconnaissance bombers released the German stranglehold on the Gulf and the Atlantic as well.

After the war, Harry Buzzett, a member of the West Point Class of ’44 newly commissioned as a second lieutenant, was stationed in occupied Berlin.

One day, seeking directions, he encountered a German who spoke excellent English, who said he learned the language while a prisoner of war in the United States.

Even more amazing, he claimed to be familiar with Apalachicola.

Buzzett didn’t believe him until he pointed the town out on a bookstore globe and described various features visible from West Pass including water towers and the bridge. He claimed to have watched the coast through binoculars.

The German claimed to be the captain of U-boat 67 which seems impossible.

The man Buzzett spoke to may well have been executive officer of U-67 Lieutenant Walter Otto, one of three survivors of the sinking of the submarine. He spent several years in Norfolk as a prisoner of war and as first officer would have taken over as captain after Mueller died.

When Rod McIlraith Jr. visited Apalachicola last fall, he hoped to see the Sea Dream and was disappointed to find she was gone. She fell into disrepair and was destroyed around 2000. Rod and his friends did see the sink and anchor from the old boat at the Tin Shed, and a lifeboat reputed to be from the Empire Mica at another downtown business.

They went to Carrabelle to meet Joe Barber who told them about the night the Mica sank.  “(The survivors) did not want for anything once they got to Apalachicola,” he told McIlraith,

Barber gave McIlraith an 18^th century ceramic ginger beer bottle he found on the banks of the Apalachicola River.

“This came over from England as ballast,” he told McIlraith. “Now you can take it back. If you come from a small town, this might make a good newspaper story.”

The issues of the Apalachicola Times published January through October, 1942 cannot be located. If you have copies of any of these papers, please contact the Times at 653-8688.