The events prior to the sudden disappearance of Socony Mobil’s tanker Astral led with connected clarity up to a certain point and, beyond that point, nothing. A curtain fell, as if in the theater, following a provocative first act. For 22 years, the audience waited for it to rise again and reveal the denouement of the drama.
It was known that the Astral had departed Aruba, Dutch West Indies, at 0210, 20 November 1941, with a cargo of gasoline. There were 37 men on board, including Captain Chris Alsager. The ship was bound for Lisbon with a due date of 4 December.
The Astral was a three-masted, flush-decked, engine-and-stack-aft steamer of 11,900 gross tons, uniquely built to carry both loose and packaged oil to the Far East at a time when some “oil for the lamps of China” still had to be shipped in five-gallon cans, two cans to a case, for further retail trekkage inland by man, cart, and camel. For this “cased” oil—and back-haul general cargoes —the Astral had ’tween-deck stowage space with topside hatches and the necessary booms. Her bulk-oil tanks were the compartmented holds below the second deck, with a sizable capacity of about 82,000 barrels.
During 25 years of service, she had outlived the trade for which she had been designed, and her ’tween-decks went unused. None of her dry-cargo handling facilities were removed, however, and by the time she was being readied for what was to be her last voyage, the Astral’s profile was almost unique.
When the estimated time of the Astral’s arrival had passed and no report was received from Lisbon, her owners’ fears mounted. No one had supposed her to be immune from the hazards then prevailing in the North Atlantic—even with the U. S. flag emblazoned on both sides beneath her navigating bridge. For, although the United States was not yet at war with Germany, American vessels seemed to be considered fair game by the German high seas fleet. Two U. S. destroyers, the USS Greer (DD-145) and the USS Kearny (DD-432), and one fleet oiler, the USS Salinas (AO-19), had been attacked and damaged by U-boats; and one escort destroyer, the USS Reuben James (DD-245), had been sunk with high loss of life. Four U. S.-flag merchant ships—MV City of Rayville, SS Robin Moor, SS Steel Seafarer, and SS Lehigh—had been lost or damaged through enemy action. It was considered not at all unlikely that the very next “incident” would be the last.
All the uneasy foreboding ended with Pearl Harbor, which came so soon on the heels of the Astral’s overdue date that the first assumption was that the Nazis, knowing in advance of the Japanese plans, had jumped the gun. There were many detailed hypotheses, but none had any substance until a story in The New York Times on 26 December told of the 30-hour chase and sinking of a “Nazi” tanker off the north coast of Spain by British aircraft. German dispatches promptly identified the sunken craft as the Benno, and the Germans took the occasion to feign outrage over this violation of Spanish neutrality.
The Benno? No such tanker by that name was listed anywhere. Could she have been the captured Astral, manned by a prize crew, being taken to occupied France?
If this educated guess were true, the ship and its cargo were indeed lost; but, by the same token, it would seem that there might have been survivors. The International Red Cross was immediately asked to make inquiries. Days and then weeks of German silence passed, broken only by the detonation of torpedo warheads as they sank U. S. ships almost within sight of their East Coast ports.
It was not until June 1942 that the Red Cross reported from Geneva that authorities in both Berlin and Rome disclaimed any knowledge whatever of the Astral and her crew. In the meantime, a ship by her name, carrying oil for the Axis countries in the Mediterranean, had turned out to be the Norwegian MV Aslrell. A few scraps of lifeboat wreckage washed up on the rocks at Ponta Delgado, Azores, had been identified as possibly belonging to the Astral, although there were doubts.
In due time, the War Shipping Administration had to reach some conclusions, and these necessarily were based on the assumption that the Astral had been destroyed by an enemy vessel whose action was such that no avenue of escape was left open to her crew. Further, it was presumed that the enemy vessel itself had been destroyed, also without survivors, before she could report the sinking to its naval authorities. Immediately following the Astral's disappearance, six German U-boats had been sunk in an eight-day running battle with Convoy HG 76, and it was not at all far-fetched to presume that one of these might have carried down with her the sole account of the Astral's end.
The ship, then, was declared presumed lost through enemy action, her 37 men certified as presumptively dead, and the long involved legal process of settling the estate of a vanished ship and her crew begun.
In those uncertain days, however, men reported dead sometimes showed up later very much alive. Ten months after nothing whatsoever had been heard of the Stanvac Calcutta, for example, a member of her “dead” crew was discovered to be in a POW camp in occupied France. Partly as a result of the information that this prisoner was able to slip past the censors and partly as a result of official inquiries, the U. S. government was eventually able to announce that 27 other crew members of the Stanvac Calcutta were alive in Japanese prison camps. How they happened to end up there after their ship had been sunk by the German raider Stier was not fully known at the time, but news of their survival raised parallel hopes for the crew of the Astral.
Then, too, in the 28 August 1944 issue of Newsweek appeared a short article entitled “Hidden Prisoners”:
It has not been discussed much, but there’s reason to believe that the Germans have several POW camps to which the International Red Cross and other relief agencies do not have access. Supposedly they are filled with Allied prisoners who were captured during U-boat operations and brought to the Reich by subs. Allied officials are convinced of the existence of these camps and have tried in vain to learn the names of those detained. The only possible reason for keeping them incommunicado is that they may have secret information on the operations of the U-boats which the Germans wish to guard zealously.
The world knows now that these secret camps were concentration camps and the hidden prisoners were Jews awaiting extermination, but at the time, the Newsweek story’s plausible supposition helped keep up the hopes that somewhere Captain Chris Alsager and his men were alive and would eventually be heard from. These hopes, however forlorn, persisted throughout the war and even after it was over. For, in the stream of homecoming POWs or in the ranks of surrendered U-boat personnel, it was thought there might be someone who would know what had happened. But either no one knew or witnesses, if any, had reason not to tell. Even the captured documents, carefully scrutinized, revealed nothing.
Finally, the Navy Department was asked to recheck the identity of the so-called Benno, for the hunch had doggedly remained that this was actually a renamed captured ship.
On 11 September 1945 came this reply:
According to the Navy Department’s records the vessel sunk off northern Spain on 24th December 1941 could not have been the S/S Astral. It has been officially identified in reports from the British Admiralty as the German M/T Benno. The Benno was originally a Norwegian ship and was different from the Astral both in type and tonnage. Other than this, the Navy Department has no information bearing on the disappearance of the Astral.
In the long, unbroken silence that followed this terse official reply, the Astral took her place on the roster of unexplained mysteries of the sea.
Almost 20 years to the day after the Astral’s disappearance, a break came, by chance, in the Comment and Discussion columns of the October 1961 issue of the U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings. Mr. L. L. von Münching, The Hague, Netherlands, had seen the Astral’s loss mentioned in a pictorial* some months previously and had written to say— quite calmly, as if he were merely correcting an oversight—that this ship had, in fact, been torpedoed southwest of the Azores. He gave the date as 2 February 1941 and, although this detail was in error, the statement itself created an understandable sensation at Socony Mobil. Could it be possible that at this late date there was really someone who knew what had happened to Chris Alsager and his men?
The steps taken to contact L. L. von Münching and to track down the sources of his information led eventually to the war diaries of a U-boat wolf pack which had been operating south of the Azores on about the latitude of Gibraltar on 1 and 2 December 1941. Captured copies of these diaries were located in the archives of the Naval History Division, U. S. Navy Department, and from them came the details of the Astral’s last day at sea.
As no man is an island unto himself, so no day is an island unto itself; it is connected to the mainland of all days. Thus, what happened on 2 December 1941 had its roots in the accumulating events of the preceding months. A British offensive was underway in North Africa, and reports were reaching the Nazis that a seaborne landing was imminent. To combat this, and to cut the supply line to British forces already in the Mediterranean, almost the entire U-boat fleet had been concentrated in closely organized groups astride Gibraltar.
One wolf pack, positioned south of the Azores, consisted of Heydemann in the U-575, Lueth in the U-43, Schewe in the U-105, and Heyda in the U-434. The system under which they operated provided for air and sea search over a wide area linked with “situation rooms” at shore headquarters where all contacts were plotted and orders issued for the nearest U-boats to move in on the target. U-boat command at that time was at Kerneval, near Lorient, in northwestern France. Smooth control of the boats at sea depended in part upon a grid system of coded geographical positions and the keeping of an arbitrary “fleet standard time” to which all clocks were set and log entries made. In the longitude of the Azores this was four hours ahead of local mean time; moonset on the morning of 2 December 1941, for example, was logged at fleet time 0924, whereas it occurred, by Nautical Almanac calculations, at 0524 mean time.
On patrol, the grid position was logged every four hours and at any special occurrence. Hence, it is quite possible now, with this information known, to reconstruct the movements of this particular pack of submarines. The war diary of Lieutenant Commander Guenther Heydemann, in the U-575, shows that in mid-afternoon, 1 December, he was surfaced about 60 miles south of the Azores, following a pack sortie against a reported convoy that had not materialized. He was free to maneuver as he pleased until midnight, when he was due to resume his position in the scheduled patrol pattern.
Earlier in the day, rain had been falling, but now the sky was exceptionally clear and bright. In fact, Heydemann’s first view of the unescorted Astral as she showed up on his port quarter, at 1701 fleet time, consisted merely of smoke and the “points” of her masts, which indicates that there was almost perfect visibility that day as far as the razor-edged horizon and even beyond.
Convoy stragglers were not uncommon in those days, but this was not because of poor shiphandling. (The British Admiralty publication “The Battle of the Atlantic” describes a November 1941 convoy of 43 ships from which there were no fewer than 26 stragglers!) No, the straggling resulted when hopelessly antiquated ships were, in desperation, called upon to do more than they were able. There is little doubt as to the almost automatic interpretation a U-boat commander would place on a lone tanker in that place at that particular moment, and Heydemann had no doubts that this was a legitimate target. He was already ahead of her, well out of her sight. Two hours later, he submerged for the final leg of his approach. At 2012 he was “in firing position.”
“The steam vessel,” he wrote in his log, “has come up to 1,000 meters.” He got a good look at her, bathed in the last-half-hour glow of a setting sun and the first-half-hour sheen of a rising moon. “Flush deck with three masts,” Heydemann continued, “six lifeboats, a chimney astern, bridge between the two foremost masts. Is unarmed, and has the United States flag painted on its side. . . .”
Heydemann had a decision to make, or perhaps, upon recognition of the U. S. flag, his decision was made for him. He may have shared the German Admiralty’s view that Hitler was hamstringing the U-boats by insisting, as he did over Admiral Raeder’s and Admiral Doenitz’s protests, upon a strict avoidance of any incident with the United States, but at the moment those were Heydemann’s orders.
“Thus,” he wrote, “we have to let her go with a heavy heart.”
His next entry, an hour and 28 minutes later, showed him on the surface and headed toward his obligated patrol sector for the night. His encounter with this ship establishes the presence of a U. S.-flag tanker in approximately 35°25' N, 26°30′ W at 2012, fleet time, on 1 December 1941. He does not identify this tanker as the Astral, but his description fits, and the encounter took place along the track the Astral would most likely have taken on a voyage from Aruba to Lisbon, and at a point on that track which the Astral could have reached by that time at her average speed of nine knots. These considerations, while neat, do not establish identity; they merely permit the tentative conclusion that the tanker Heydemann let go could have been the Astral. That it was the Astral beyond reasonable doubt had to await further research.
Study of the war diary of Lieutenant Commander Wolfgang Lueth in command of the U-43 showed that by December 1941, he had already had two full years’ experience in undersea warfare. He had been good at it, and his name and deeds were acquiring heroic glamor throughout Germany. In fact, he was eventually to become the German Navy’s top inspirational figure, and one of the two men in it to hold the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross with oak leaves, swords, and brilliants. By 1943, when he became Commandant of the Naval School at Flensburg, a key moralebuilding assignment, he had completed 14 patrols in four different U-boats, had been at sea a total of 609 days, and had sunk one destroyer, one submarine, and no less than 44 merchant ships.
Lueth, too, on the morning of this December day, had seen distant smoke and had moved in for a look. Heading southeasterly, aware that the U-575 was somewhere near, but apparently not aware of how close, Lueth overhauled the lone tanker; and at 2012, when Heydemann was eyeing the tanker from a submerged position on her starboard side, Lueth was running hull down, conning tower up, on her port side, still maneuvering for an attack position. The tanker, with the sun astern, the moon ahead, and a submarine on each side, was at that moment in the center of a rare symmetrical formation.
The U-43 had planned a later strike than the U-575. At sunset, 34 minutes after Heydemann had let the tanker go, Lueth was just submerging for the final close-in. Engine trouble interfered, and twilight was practically at an end before he was again at the keyhole. By then the moon was 35 degrees high, with the tanker a dark silhouette crossing a silvery sea.
He logged the incident as follows:
Time: 2159
Position: CE 9822 (35°30′ N, 26°10′ W)
Remarks: Fired tube 4 at the tanker:
Distance 3,000 m. Position 80° Speed 9 n.m.
A miss! It can only be explained because of underestimating the distance through the periscope in the full moon. The tanker was only found again later in the periscope because it had zigzagged away from the boat. Subsequently it returned to its old course and in doing so it had increased the distance from the boat.
After ten minutes a torpedo detonation could be heard. We assume a detonation after completion of the run.
The tanker’s heading away as she took the only evasive action open to her was probably the watch officer’s first reaction to the sight of the oncoming torpedo. The captain’s later and probably more reasoned decision was obviously against continuing zigzag tactics. His ship was in no way equipped nor his crew trained to outwit, outrun, or outfight the U-boat, and a visible attempt to do so would have worked against any chance at all of her actual unarmed neutrality being recognized in time to inhibit any further passes. Just to have broken radio silence to call for help, under the then existing “agreements,” would have been considered aggressively hostile. It is idle now, and belittling to the temper of merchant seamen, to suggest with cynical hindsight that the tanker could have been stopped, all her deck lights turned on, and a big point made of her identity—or, worse, that she could have been stopped and abandoned by her crew in panic.
At that moment the tanker’s relationship to the U-43 was that of a helpless victim in the clutches of a determined assailant wielding a knife, and there is nothing in the book that suggests a sure way to avert the impending slash. In the last analysis, the tanker could do no more nor less than continue her voyage as she had pursued it until then, with all hope for survival still vested in the emblem beneath her bridge.
As for Lueth, when he surfaced after the miss, he continued to operate as though he regarded the tanker capable of doing him harm. He swung far to the north to overhaul her, as if his safety and the success of what he next intended to do depended upon his remaining undetected. Had he thought otherwise he could have closed at any time and opened fire with his deck gun. There is reason to believe that he had on board a copy of Talbot-Booth’s Merchant Ships, 1940, and by consulting it had reached the conclusion that his target was Figure 322, a British-flag tanker belonging to the Eagle Oil Company. He calculated the moon to set at 0924, U-boat time, with the first light of dawn coming almost immediately thereafter; and during the few intervening minutes of comparative darkness he planned to make his second strike, this time from the surface, to avoid any chance of another miss.
His calculations were precise, judging from the log entries quoted below:
Time: 0924
Position: CE 7588 (35°40′ N, 24°00′ W)
Remarks: The moon is setting.
Double shot from the stern tube with 2 G7e. Distance 1000 m. Position 70°. Speed 9.5 n.m. Point of aim leading by 40 meters, trailing 40 m.
Description of the tanker: Type “San Melito” 12,300 GRT. The half-high middle mast was as the 3rd mast, just as high as the other two. A fairly even distance between the masts which, however, was a little bit greater between the middle and front mast. And that is where the bridge is. An oblique long chimney.
A normal stern.
Double hit—after 72 seconds, 1080 m, amid-ship and astern in the engine. The tanker burns and sinks in a few minutes. For another hour the surface of the water is still a sea of flames. The black cloud of heavy smoke covered 6/10 of the sky.
Lueth then left the scene toward the west, and later rendezvoused with the U-575. This rendezvous took place between 1500 and 1600 that day, and is recorded in both diaries.
Taking each war diary separately, it would appear that in the same general locality within the same period of time, the U-575 had encountered an American tanker and had let her go; and that the U-43 had met a British tanker of the San Melito-type and had sunk her. When a plot is made of the combined movements of both U-boats, however, with the target maintaining a steady course and speed across the plot, it becomes unmistakably clear that the U. S.-flag tanker spared by Heydemann at 2012, 1 December was the same ship destroyed by Lueth at 0946 the following morning.
This ship, as previously mentioned circumstances infer, could have been the Astral. The question now remains, was she? Lueth’s description, like Heydemann’s, not only fits her profile better than it does the San Melito’s, but, at the time of making it, Lueth was well aware of certain disparities which he thought important enough to mention but for some reason chose to ignore. Whether the truth was known to him and Heydemann as they compared notes at the time of their rendezvous and discussed the possible consequences, is not known. If an error had been made, and a U. S. ship had been sunk, due to a case of mistaken identity, it was too late then to correct it. From that moment on, the politics of war and the niceties of service loyalty may well have prompted the keeping of this guilty secret.
Again, was this tanker the Astral? She was not the only unarmed U. S.-flag tanker sailing the seas at the time, but, as the Naval History Division so cogently pointed out in its carefully researched letter to Socony Mobil analyzing the affair, the Astral was the only such tanker “posted missing in late 1941 in the North Atlantic, whose loss has not been accounted for since that time.” Also, from a study of all available information, she was the only tanker “likely to have been operating in the area of U-43's attack” at or about the time of its occurrence. The final conclusion has to rest on the premise that the U-43's victim was indeed the Astral, because, based on all the circumstantial evidence, she could have been none other. With probabilities amounting to a logical certainty, she was sunk by the U-43 on 2 December 1941 in about Latitude 35°40' N, Longitude 24°00' W.
If there are to be further speculations about the Astral's fate they must be of an entirely different nature. Did Lueth see the U. S. flag on the Astral's side and wilfully ignore it? Or was his an honest mistake based on visibility factors, much as was the sinking of the Awa Maru in the Pacific by the USS Queenfish? Did Lueth believe himself to be sinking the San Melito, or at least a British-flag sister ship, even though he noted the disparity in the height of the middle mast and in the distances between the masts? Or was he using her profile merely as a rough sketch upon which to overlay his observed differences?
It is not likely that these speculations will ever be answered. The U-43, as might be expected, did not survive the Battle of the Atlantic. She was sunk by U. S. naval aircraft (VC-29) operating from the escort carrier USS Santee (CVE-29) in mid-Atlantic, 34°57′ N, 35°11′ W, on Friday, 30 July 1943.
Lueth was not on board at the time. He was then in the U-181, returning from the longest single patrol of World War II, 203 days to the Indian Ocean and return, a “hero” whose presence ashore was needed to bolster the then failing morale of U-boat trainees. On VE-Day he was Commandant of the Naval School at Flensburg, which was then also the location of U-boat Command; and when Admiral Doenitz ordered the U-boat fleet to cease hostilities and return to base (4 May 1945), it assembled there for its last expected maneuver, Rainbow—the scuttling of the fleet. Doenitz, then head of the nation, forbade it; younger hotbloods at first protested, then took matters into their own hands, and 221 boats were scuttled within hours of Germany’s unconditional surrender. With the arrival of the Allied Control Commission at Flensburg a few days later, tension mounted and, to maintain discipline within his own area of command, Lueth gave strict orders for his sentries to shoot anyone who failed to halt when challenged.
On 14 May, he was crossing the drill field shortly after sunset, in the gloom of approaching night. He was challenged, but for some reason failed to halt or to identify himself. The sentry opened fire forthwith, and Lueth fell dead.
For those who read symbolic meanings into human events—an activity not entirely restricted to dramatists—it will seem significant that both Lueth and the Astral met their ends in strangely parallel ways. Each was crossing an expanse, one of earth, the other of sea. Each was stopped suddenly by a deadly shot which would later be discovered as an error. Each death occurred between the hours of darkness and light within the framework of impending events so stupendous as to overshadow its tragic impact.
On his side Lueth was eulogized as “a shining example of a German naval officer, a humane man, kind and ever thoughtful of those under him . . .” On the Astral's side, Captain Chris Alsager and his crew of 36 were awarded posthumously the Mariner’s Medal by the War Shipping Administration, and no present revelation of their long-unknown fate could end better than with the closing words of the accompanying citation:
They have gone, but they have gone in honor, and in the goodly company of patriots.
*See Edward F. Oliver, “Overdue—Persumed Lost,” U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings, March 1961, p. 98.